THE FUSS SO FAR
The much-loved & App Store Top-10 hogging iPhone game is no more. Stoneloops! of Jurassica has been officially removed from the App Store. By Apple. Thanks to MumboJumbo.

WHO THE F*CK IS MUMBOJUMBO?
If you don’t know Mumbo Jumbo, this is the company that creates Luxor marble popping games. In fact Luxor is one of the  biggest marble popper franchises in the entire casual games market. When StoneLoops! was released on the PC and MAC it was over 3 years after the first Luxor game and the marble popping genre was almost dead. In result StoneLoops! never reached any serious top-tens and has stayed in the shadow of the giants – Luxor and Zuma. But on the iPhone it was the other way round. Luxor fared badly & drops out of the Top 100 spot as well.

MUMBOJUMBO GETS RID OF COMPETITION VIA APPLE
Among all the MumboJumbo claims there was a single one which had some merit. The users were able to input “Luxor” in the iTunes search field and StoneLoops! was one of the returned results. Of course Luxor was still the first result. This was because the game description featured several excerpts from game reviews. The one which caused the “problem” was a citation from GameZebo – “more than worthy match for even more established industry goliaths like Zuma and Luxor…”. Our response was that we are willing to remove this part from the game description if Apple decides that this common practice is not appropriate in this situation.

BOYCOTT LUXOR, FOR PLAYING DIRTY…
Several weeks have passed since our response and we started thinking that Apple has ruled in favor of our explanations. Unfortunately to our great surprise today we have learned that StoneLoops! had been removed from the AppStore. It was also quite a shock to learn that the final decision was actually made by MumboJumbo as apparently Apple asked them if our response was satisfactory.

Of course MumboJumbo replied that they still want StoneLoops! removed. After all if you were to decide whether your direct competition will be allowed to sell products or not, would you allow them? Talk about unfair competition – Luxor is selling, StoneLoops! is not. I wonder what happens when Zuma launches in the AppStore. Will PopCap request to remove Luxor with similar claims? Such case would be identical.

And is Mumbo Jumbo gonna sue Appulo.us for hosting a free copy of Luxor?

DANGEROUS PRECEDENCE HAS BEEN SET IN MOTION
In fact if Apple stands by its decision this will create a dangerous precedence. If you are a developer and have an application in the AppStore you should quickly request Apple to remove the apps of your competition, before someone else requests to remove you! I don’t believe this can get any more absurd, but this is exactly where this reasoning is getting us.

WHERE IS THE LOVE?
Another funny thing is that MumboJumbo was one of the publishers considered when releasing StoneLoops! They’ve been shown the game before it was launched and never expressed any serious interest in it or any doubts about copyright. This of course changed when our game performed considerably better on the iPhone.

[via CodeMinion's Blog]