Apple's crackdown on images of guns has been a 'huge' inconvenience for Overkill 3 dev
You could say it's... overkill
If you watch the trailer for third-person sci-fi shooter Overkill 3 above, you'll see something unusual.
See it? No one is holding any guns when shooting enemies. The sounds are still there but the gun models have been removed.
You can probably take a good guess as to why this is. Surely, Apple's recent crackdown on images of guns and people being shot on the App Store is to blame. (Everything must adhere to a 4+ rating now.)
"This trailer is based on the Appstore preview video that follows the guidelines from Apple," Craneballs's marketing manager Daniel Maslovsky told me.
"Specifically, we were told there should be no guns pointing at others and no characters holding guns."
That explains the video, then. And yep, it's as suspected: Apple's stringent enforcing of its policies.
Craneballs has been back-and-forth with Apple to ensure that Overkill 3 will be accepted on to the App Store when it comes out on February 26th.
Maslovsky confirmed as much to me when I asked him about the images that will be displayed on Overkill 3's App Store page.
"The current, soft-launched, version has one gun depicted, but no shooting. We had some back and forth conversation with Apple, and so far it looks like stand-alone guns are OK," he said.
So, you can display guns on the App Store as long as they're depicted by themselves. There can be no one holding them so as to give the idea that they intend to use them, it seems.
I also asked Maslovsky how much of an inconvenience this has been for Craneballs.
"We focus on militant shooters that revolve around guns. So the inconvenience was huge," he said.
"We thought about pixelization, adding orange-caps to mark the guns as toys, and a few more, but once we were able to have stand-alone guns, it was OK. The video works surprisingly well even without guns."
His understanding of Apple's recent move to rid the App Store of guns is that it's looking after its customers. And so he says "if this is what the customers want, there's not much space left to argue about."
