Here’s something you should be aware of if you’re planning to add any chat room type feature to your application — it forces you into a mature rating on the app store! This email arrived from those OpenFeint people who do a social networking platform for iPhone games that we mentioned before:
Developer community members contacted OpenFeint to let us know that Apple is actively flagging new updates/submissions as “mature user generated content” when chat rooms are included in their games. OpenFeint actively monitors and bans users for inappropriate content, however, some developers have not updated to the latest OpenFeint release limiting our ability to ban inappropriate users permanently. We are actively contacting these developers to accelerate the update process which will allow us to better monitor our community. As of August 14th we will be disabling access to OpenFeint applications using versions earlier than 2.0.
What are your choices?:
1. Disable the chatroom feature in your game – this is recommended for developers needing the lowest application rating in the apple store. Documentation for this can be found here:
http://help.openfeint.com/faqs/guides-2/disabling-chat
2. Submit to apple with a “Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes” – this is recommended for any games that do not fall into choice #1 above.
Not really too fond of either of those options? Yeah, neither are we. Seems that this iPhone thing being, you know, a phone with the real internet and all, restricting access to a game chatroom is a bit on the silly side, as it’s not as if other communication avenues are lacking exactly. But hey, if that’s what we have to deal with that’s what we have to deal with, forewarned is forearmed, and all that!
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