Civilization Revolution 2 delisted from the Google play store

[The_J]

Firaxis has announced on Twitter that CivRev2 is not anymore listed in the Google play store.
This means you cannot newly buy the game, but as long as it is installed you can still play it.

Curiously this does not apply to the iOS app store, where it is still available.

 

[lt22677]

Firaxis has announced on Twitter that CivRev2 is not anymore listed in the Google play store.
This means you cannot newly buy the game, but as long as it is installed you can still play it.

Curiously this does not apply to the iOS app store, where it is still available.

Question: if someone has bought it and needs to redownload it, can they do it or not?

 

[CritterCipher]

Question: if someone has bought it and needs to redownload it, can they do it or not?

Generally, for de-listed apps, the answer is no. If the app isn't hosted on Google Play's servers anymore, what would be your source for downloading it? Maybe you could do a file transfer from a device that has it to a device that doesn't, but it wouldn't happen through the Google Play store.

Also, I'm just going off hearsay for this, but the de-listing of CivRev2 from Google Play seems to be part of a larger trend in the mobile game industry. In recent years, the Google Play store's software requirements have undergone updates on a very frequent basis, ostensibly to ensure that apps meet the latest security and hardware compatibility needs. Because of that, a lot of mobile game developers have been forced to move away from Google Play: it isn't cost-effective for them to keep updating their old games continuously to meet the latest standards. With policies like that in place, developers can't just walk away from an old mobile game and leave it sitting on the shelf to collect income passively. (On Google's part, there could be a motive about keeping old games that aren't receiving content updates off the Play store. New games that get regular content updates could be better for "user engagement" and getting revenue for Google, so it'd be in their interest to weed out games that don't fall into that category, but that's just speculation on my part.)

From what I've heard, the Apple app store's requirements are looser or not updated as frequently, and that would explain why CivRev2 is still available for iOS.

 

[Quintillus]

Would be curious to hear more about this. I've published an app on both iOS and Android in the past year, and it's definitely more difficult to get published on the Google Play Store nowadays than it is for the iOS App Store. The treadmill in terms of requirements to be able to publish updates moves faster on the Play Store as well. Maybe that treadmill applies for already-published applications as well? I'd thought it was just for updates/publishing going forward, but I don't have an application that's been out there for years already, so maybe there was some requirement Firaxis would have had to do to remain available and it wasn't justified from a business sense (especially given the likelihood that all hands are on deck for VII).

Generally, for de-listed apps, the answer is no. If the app isn't hosted on Google Play's servers anymore, what would be your source for downloading it?

Is that the official policy on Android? My gaming platform is Steam, where I know the opposite is true - if you bought the game, you can still download it, even if it's no longer available for purchase. Steam doesn't clear out the game from their servers, so existing customers don't have the rug pulled out from under them.

It may be different on Android, but without platform specific information I wouldn't say that it's safe to assume that de-listed implies not being on Google's servers anymore.

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Update: This How-To Geek Article shows how you can downloaded Android applications that you've previously downloaded, but which are no longer in the store (section "How to Download Apps That Are No Longer in Google Play"). Subject to confirmation from someone who owns Civ Rev 2 on Android and has a phone that it is not currently installed on, but to me it sounds like it will remain re-downloadable, so long as you know the right steps to do so.