Up in Smoke: Apple Pulls Popular Marijuana-Themed Game from App Store
Another victory for The Man.
Apple has eliminated Weed Firm, a game that allowed players to grow and sell (virtual) pot, and build a marijuana-growing empire (also virtual), from the App Store. The free iOS app held the No. 1 spot in the United States’ free app category for two days, until Apple put its foot down and removed it from its library without comment.
“It’s clear why Apple wouldn’t want a game like this at the top of its App Store charts, but its rejection is also somewhat confusing since it looks like the game was singled out for the sole crime of becoming universally popular.”
Indeed, this Grand Theft Auto-esque game is by no means family friendly. (Unless you happen to be in the Botwin family.) But it’s also not the first time drugs have been the central theme of an iOS app. A quick search of the App Store produces a bountiful list of drug-focused options: apps to teach you about different types of marijuana, a Weed Firm copycat called Weed Farmer, a weed name reference book — the list goes on.
Weed Firm’s greatest crime was not necessarily its explicit content. Keep in mind that marijuana is now legal in Colorado and Washington, and legal with a prescription in many other states. And when it comes to the actual construction of the app, its average 4.5 out of 5 rating over 5,000 reviews indicates that people enjoyed playing it.
I suspect, as Weed Firm creator Manitoba Games suggests in a recent blog post, that Weed Firm’s fatal flaw was becoming popular enough for Apple to notice it.
“This was entirely Apple’s decision, not ours,” reads a post on the Manitoba Games site. “We guess the problem was that the game was just too good and got to number one in All Categories, since there are certainly a great number of weed based apps still available, as well as games promoting other so-called ‘illegal activities’ such as shooting people, crashing cars and throwing birds at buildings.”
Though that statement might be a little flippant, there’s some truth to what Manitoba is saying. What Apple deems permissible seems based mostly on a moral code that varies according to negative media attention, customer backlash, and whether it’d prefer to protect itself as a provider.
For instance, after a string of teen stabbings in the UK, Apple banned an app called Slasher that allowed gamers to play Russian roulette with their iPhones, only to bring it back to life once the controversy had passed. It approved a tasteless Baby Shaker app, which really needs no explanation, and then backpedaled and banned it. It’s very careful about political parodies, for fear of defamation charges. And of course there are the many apps deemed too sexually explicit for its main audience, the most recent of which was HappyPlayTime, an app that aimed to destigmatize female masturbation.
Drug-themed apps are no exception. In 2009 it rejected a game called Dope Wars, a remake of an old DOS game that allows you to sell a number of different narcotics to different cities.
It’s rumored that Apple uses a short section of its App Store Review Guidelines to enforce these narrowly focused rejections. Section 16.1 says that “apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected.”
In other words, as long as Apple is the gatekeeper, it can choose what’s appropriate and can also change its mind after the fact. In this case, it looks like Weed Firm was simply a victim of its own success.
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