The post says 15 developers, their website 65+. The reviews are written in the same broken English as their website.
Their flagship game, “Tonk”, is nowhere to be found in the Apple App Store, but there are two other games with a very similar logo, published by other India-based companies. The same on Play store, where a bunch of identical looking games, with different publisher names, share similar logos [1].
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tonk.board.car...
Well, it is probably more what do they have to lose? Plenty of internet hate mobs have formed backing a cause that later came out to be misleading, if not outright fraudulent. Even assuming they are scammers, it is quite possible they think they are in the right (there are cultures that have... different views about business ethics), but they could also just be rolling the dice.
We're not scammers. Whom we're scamming google? Users? How we're scamming?
It's my fault i should have added the background info of ours in the medium post. But i've never written any post of anything so i was inexperienced,
But let me clear something about us,
We're india based gaming company. All our games are just simulations it is not real gambling. If it was real gambling then google wouldn't have allowed us to publish it on play store for 2 years.
now this will arise some more questions in your mind,
>>Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle? 1. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a latter to the given address to get in touch with us!
>> Where can i find your games incase i want to see them? You can find it on apk pure. let me provide you links - https://m.apkpure.com/developer/6Ace%20Games
First of all, You may find my english broken but it is not my first language. We're india based startup.
Thanks reading our story. Let me answer some of your doubts. the numbers are not right on website. We've team of only 15 devs.
Our games are not on app store because it is developed for android only in java.
You may find identical games with similar logos because of copy cats. Once they know that your games are doing good they'll start copying.
Tonk is a traditional card game popular in united states , we just made it more fun bringing it in mobile phones. So other devs also can make tonk games. It is not our pattern or anything like that.
this will arise a new question in you mind:
>>Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle? 1. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a later to the given address to get in touch with us!
>> Where can i find your games incase i want to see them? You can find it on apk pure. let me provide you links - https://m.apkpure.com/developer/6Ace%20Games
They say they are a team of developers working on this for 3 years and having millions of users.
And then they have exactly two Twitter followers?
No address or company type in their contact section? An Alexa rank of over 3 million? A website that is not in the wayback machine?
This is still a fundamental problem with having only two global centralized app stores.
If you make games you are proud of, why would you hide your identity?
I know I would do the same if I was in his position.
We're saying they trip tons of shady heuristics, and we're skeptical there wasn't a solid reason. Particularly when the majority of games were free -- there's tons of very shady monetization strategies out there, particularly for games involving gambling.
Plus, for example, a twitter account that either started May 9, or was scrubbed. For a company with claimed millions of users.
Bundle ids against a domain -- sixace.com -- which they don't appear to own.
No company information that I can find on the internet or LinkedIn.
Fake testimonials on their website with stolen images from the internet.
No company information in the UK company database for either 6ace or sixace, despite a claimed address of "61,hallwicks road,Luton,Bedfordshire,London-LU2 9BG".
etc etc. All this screams sketchy.
To be fair it is common for a UK company to have a generic name and for various activities run under it to trade under different names.
Usually however when the company is legitimate the footer of the website will say "Brand Name is a trading name for Actual Company Name Limited" where the company name will be registered at Companies House.
Not the case here, cannot see any info on the actual company, couldn't actually find a mention of that address anywhere on the site either where did you get it from?
That's a residential address for a random house in Luton. Not uncommon for a small company to be registered to a residential property, but the address doesn't seem to be in Companies House records.
Anyway I do agree this is sending off all sorts of red flags for me too, I think the post is telling a very one sided story and Google in this specific case has legitimate reason to ban that dodgy developer account.
I think we both agree that this whole thing is shady af.
First of all sorry for my bad emglish. It is not my first language so.
It's my bad i should have mentioned more stuff to our medium post so that it won't leave users with any confusions. Please pardon me as this was my first post. I've never had written anything before.
You might got some questions like
Q: Who are we? A: We are simply a india based gaming startup. We had 8-10 games published on our playstore account.
Q:Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle? A:. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a latter to the given address to get in touch with us!
Q: Where can i find your games incase i want to see them? A: You can find it on apk pure. let me provide you links - https://m.apkpure.com/developer/6Ace%20Games
Q:How me monetized our games? A: Through admob and in-app products. Nothing shady!
Q:Our games was providing gambling? A: No, It's just simulations. You can't win money or bet money, Not at all!
Q: what about your domain 6acegames.com? A: Yes, our domain 6acegames.com is new. The reason behind it is very silly you may find it funny but still let me tell you!, at first we have bought domain sixacegames.com(you can check reg. details) thinking it will help in seo and all because we didn't want to include a number "6" in our domain. But later after our games got popular user started searching for 6Acegames that's why we bought this domain as well in may 2021 just to build the presence on google search.
Q:Why no presence on linkedin? A: Try searching "Whyphy Infotech". 6Acegames is just business name we use!
Q: What about social media? A:we are not very active in social media. As you can see in our tweeter handle we have 0 followers. The reason is simple we never promoted it to our users. Although we have some followers on our instagram handle, but they follow us because we provide free perks occestionally to our audience.
Put the company name on the website, terms and conditions page, play storage page, etc. Put the CEO's name on medium posts.
As it stands, it sure looks like you've gone to lengths to make it nearly impossible to figure out who you are. Which does not scream trustworthy.
First of all sorry for my bad english. It is not my first language so.
It's my bad i should have mentioned more stuff to our medium post so that it won't leave users with any confusions. Please pardon me as this was my first post. I've never had written anything before.
You might got some questions like
Q: Who are we? A: We are simply a india based gaming startup. We had 8-10 games published on our playstore account.
Q:Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle? A:. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a latter to the given address to get in touch with us!
Q: Where can i find your games incase i want to see them? A: You can find it on apk pure. let me provide you links - https://m.apkpure.com/developer/6Ace%20Games
Q: what about your domain 6acegames.com? A: Yes, our domain 6acegames.com is new. The reason behind it is very silly you may find it funny but still let me tell you!, at first we have bought domain sixacegames.com(you can check reg. details) thinking it will help in seo and all because we didn't want to include a number "6" in our domain. But later after our games got popular user started searching for 6Acegames that's why we bought this domain as well in may 2021 just to build the presence on google search.
Q: What about social media? A:we are not very active in social media. As you can see in our tweeter handle we have 0 followers. The reason is simple we never promoted it to our users. Although we have some followers on our Instagram handle, but they follow us because we provide free perks occasionally to our audience.
I don't know anything about this company, but the other comments are giving the vibe that this company is similar in social status to a spam bot and Google's customer support is correct to cut them off with no explanation.
Also OP: has no https on the web site
Anyway, the story gives strange vibes.
Yeah usually I am the first to grab my pitchforks against tech giants like Google but the devs are only telling a one sided story here and their business looks far from legit, and that team of amazing devs doesn't seem very competent either if they keep installing trojans.
Regarding https, looks like the parent comment linked to the "www" version of their site. Their non-www version does have https:
Not defending the author's cleanliness or shadiness, just pointing out the facts.
Decided to run SSL Labs on the site out of curiosity[1] and they still have TLS 1.0 activated as well. That's just poor SSL config. A software company supposedly made up of talented coders should know way better.
[1] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=6acegames.com
Their Youtube is from August 2018, 2.5 years ago just like they claim in the post. Maybe they just got a new marketing person in May instead of it being a "smoking gun" of some conspiracy
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWD2aHKFeC_rxDv3d49GOKA/abo...
They do seem to exaggerate on their website about total downloads (1M Vs 10M), Employee size etc.
Then, you post this contact form, which is not protected by https.
So, google is not dev-friendly. We know that. We have seen legitimate horror stories.
However, at what point should google step in and protect their customer base from folks who do not care about their safety?
This will arise a new question in you mind:
>>Why do we mention the address of the UK on our twitter handle? 1. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our UK address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other issues like GDPR and different other policies.
>>All our games are gambling games?
- No. This is not true. In our games you can't bet any type of real money or anything like that. It's just a simulation like other games. Yes you can buy various perks through in app purchases but it is not the gambling. If we've provided any type of gambling related stuff in our games then google wouldn't have let you survive for 3 years either!
>>Email and Social media registered in May 2021 Yes, our domain 6acegames.com is new. The reason behind it is silly. You may find it funny but still let me tell you!At first we bought domain sixacegames.com(you can check reg. details) thinking it will help in seo and all because we didn't want to include a number "6" in our domain. But later after our games got popular users started searching for 6Acegames that's why we bought this domain as well in may just to build the presence on google search.
>>And about social media, we are not very active in social media. As you can see in our twitter handle we have 0 followers. The reason is simple: we never promoted it to our users. Although we have some followers on our instagram handle, they follow us because we provide free perks occasionally to our audience.
>>Lack of information. I'm very unfamiliar with stuff like blogging and all, This is the first post I've ever written. If i forget mentioning something please let me know i'll include all the information to the post it self
0: https://apptweak-blog.imgix.net/images/2019/08/18/total%20do... (from https://www.apptweak.com/en/aso-blog/infographic-countries-w... )