India-based 6Ace Games gaming startup that creates multiplayer card games has alleged that Google has “destroyed” it by taking down their Play developer account “for either prior violations in this account or any other associated accounts”.
“After a continuous struggle of 2.5 years, 2 of our multiplayer games have received tremendous amounts of love from users. Almost all of our games were rated 4.5+ stars. And downloaded a million times combined!,” the Medium post stated, highlighting the success the company had achieved before Google suspended their account.
According to the post, the gaming start-up invested eight years to learn the platform in order to develop games. 6Ace Games has developed card games spanning various geographies like the US, the UK, Europe, India, etc.
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The gaming startup was initially clueless why Google suddenly suspended their account. They suspect that it had something to do with the supposed association with banned accounts.
“We invested three years of hard work, blood, and sweat to produce 10 games and four of them are multiplayer games. Two of our multiplayer games were very popular in the US and European locations. We made investments of our hard-earned money for marketing purposes to make our games reach the right audiences,” the post read.
Unable to understand the charge of violations, they also took it up on Twitter where Google replied and refused to reinstate the account.
The startup suspects there could be three reasons why Google assumed that they have multiple banned accounts.
These may be “unhealthy competition practices”, series of suspicious login activities that happened in its Google Account several times last month, and shifting the office to a new location because “we were affected by covid situations”.
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“After our analysis, we came to know that there are some malicious practices used to get competitor developer accounts banned. One reason for wrongly found association can be any competitor/unauthorized user decoded our games or used our publisher code In their app-ads.txt or putting our ad ids in their policy in-compliant apps knowingly,” the startup elaborated.
Because of serious violations, Google blocks/terminates their account and it misleads to our account as well. This can be a case as well,” it added.
“I don’t know why Google suddenly thinks that we’re associated with multiple banned accounts. I have personally attended so many GDG conferences they organize in my city. I opposed the spamming in many of those conferences and this is the reward I’m getting for being so honest! Our entire startup is at stake. We invested 8 years of our lives to learn this platform of google, to develop something unique and fun. Everything is gone!” they shared.