You might recall us telling you about a title that explores the civil war in Syria just last month. Due to App Store guidelines that restrict games from “solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity”, Auroch Digital found out that Apple had rejected Endgame: Syria due to its focus on the Syrian civil war. Endgame: Syria designer, Tomas Rawlings, commented:

“This decision is a shame really as it makes it hard to talk about the real world. We had hoped that Apple would be more nuanced in how they applied this rule but we got a bit worried when it had been in submission for around two weeks without a decision – we then figured that because of the controversy of using the gaming medium to cover an ongoing war meant passing the game had become an issue for them.”

“Our aim is to use games as a format to bring news to a new audience and submission processes such as this do make it a lot harder for us. I get that Apple want to make sure really offensive titles don’t pass into their store, but ours is far from that. In fact the response to the game has been broadly positive with much of the mainstream media picking up on the story. We’ll be making changes to the game and re-submitting it but it does mean we’ll have to strip some of the meaning and context from it to pass Apple’s submission process and that is not ideal.”

If you haven’t played the title and want to, you can still play it on Android devices and on your PC here. Not to mention, that technically you could still play it on your iOS device as it is a HTML5 game. You just wouldn’t be able to install it.

[Source: Auroch Digital]