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Actually, Apple decided to remove it altogether, even if the game held the No. 1 spot in the United States’ free app category for two days. The game was rated 4.5 stars out of five and had about 5000 reviews, almost all of them positive, so the question is… why?
We can talk about ethics and morals, but truth be told, marijuana is legal in Washington and Colorado, medical marijuana is alright in the book of many states and many other countries outside the U.S., so the question is legit: why would Apple have this game eliminated from its store?
It is about the drugs, isn’t it? It is about the fact that Apple doesn’t want to associate its name with any type of illegal practices, be them virtual. But wait! According to Alyssa Bereznak from Yahoo Tech, the App Store crawls with apps and games which are drug – related. Some of them actually teach people how to differentiate among various types of marijuana.
If we are to listen to the game creators, the only fault of the Weed Firm was its raising popularity. In an official post on the Manitoba Games website, the game creators stateed that
As you might have noticed the game is no longer available on the Apple App Store. This was entirely Apple’s decision, not ours. 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.
Now that is frustrated language to display in public, to say the least, but we are not here to judge. Apple is known for having issues with some so – called objectionable content before, but it also has a history of changing its mind once the storm has passed. For now, Weed Firm got out of the App Store but don’t fret: it’s going to come back some day. The game creators promised they would not let this one slip, would find a new publisher and would prevail, because they didn’t dig hypocrisy and censorship. If you are in the mood for some colorful language and want to see people virtually lashing out back at Apple, read the entire post before it gets censored too!
