ACCEPTED: Kick-Ass (despite missing art and “fake” screenshots)
Sometimes … sometimes, it’s not so great to sneak one past Apple’s review team. In this case, the tie-in for the movie Kick Ass was accidentally published on the App Store. That’s not so bad, you may think, except … the game was a long way from finished, with the artwork “missing”, and the gameplay, well … :
“The graphics sucks, the gameplay sucks, the music has got to be the most annoying awful crap i’ve ever heard and overall this game is just a horrible nightmare. DO NOT BUY IT! nothing about this game is good. I want my money back.”
…
“images of the game in the iTunes Store, not the version iphone / Ipod touch, are trying to fool consumers, liars liars!”
Two things of note:
- The developer, Frozen Codebase, has some problems with their in-house processes – they manually uploaded a version of the game that they knew wasn’t working and wasn’t ready. It’s hard to see a reason why you’d do this deliberately – it wasn’t so much a small mistake as a big FAIL.
- Apple approved it despite an (alleged) huge disparity between the screenshots for the game, and the game itself. Did they not run the game (very very unlikely), or did they not look at the screenshots (unlikely)?
This is interesting; we’ve seen plenty of examples of apps being denied because the screenshots were fake, but this time Apple didn’t notice. I had assumed that with Apple’s new (probably automated) process, they were checking screenshots etc more closely. The lesson appears to be that they aren’t – if you can get your app into the “fast-approval” bucket (i.e. there’s nothing unusual in your app that needs extra review – e.g. there’s no GPS location tracking), then you can sneak past a lot of things you’d normally be rejected for immediately.
I can’t see the screens (it’s been pulled from the store), but I suspect they weren’t “fake” – the final build that goes live in a few weeks will be faithful to those screens – it’s just that the build itself was an in-house test build lacking the correct textures/art/etc. This is normal – for performance reasons, when writing a 3d game, you use low-quality art while testing it internally, and only periodically check it with the “full” art.
