The same thing has been happening for me, where the Hosted Games list on Google Play just shows ten of them in an infinite loop and disregards the other 100+. That’s pretty fucked up.
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Geez. iOS is already FUBAR thanks to the omnibus, Google just screwed searches and effectively deleted most titles. And Steam only allows a certain number of releases, so most don’t go on it.
Amazon, ball’s in your court. What can you do to crap in our collective Cheerios?
I’m not sure if anyone has asked this yet but did anyone has taken any steps into filing a complaint about this issue to Google?
And this makes me very concerned for the future works that the authors may be releasing such as myself because I prefer to see all of the games that a company has released at this point instead of this crappy mess where you see 6-10 games on a endless loop.
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What happens when you search for “Choice of Games LLC” or “Hosted Games LLC”
You are basically given a list of the 6-10 games that seems to be “trending” or has been popular. And that’s it. To find a game you’d want, you’d have to type in the title of the game.
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Did you put the search itself in quotes, does that help any? Like instead of typing in Hosted Games you would type in the quotes as well "Hosted Games" or is it the same result?
No I haven’t done it but I am sure it’s going to end up in the same result anyway.
Wait, I don’t reproduce that search problem on my Android device. When I open the Play Store app and type “choice of games” (without quotes) I can see dozens of our games there.
It’s just the “Similar Apps” section on each game that contains a bunch of unrelated apps.
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I get the same results as Micheal. A long list of repeating games with many missing. I also get this when I go to a CoG game and hit the ‘more’ button next to the company name at the bottom. As is, I can’t find a single way to list all CoG games on my Android phone.
I could provide screenshots if it’s necessary.
Sure! But be sure to provide screenshots of how you’re starting/typing the search, not just the search results. (I do also reproduce the problem with the “more” link.)
I find the ‘more’ loop too be the most worrying, honestly, because that’s how a lot of people find games. Not many people other than hardcore fans are going to search for “choice of games”.
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Oh, I’m worried, for sure.
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Where would you like me to post these screenshots? On this thread or through a PM? I have several of them. The ones that you asked for and the issue that I’m having.
The worst thing is that they say this is working as they intended. So clearly it was a deliberate move to put companies like EA completely over the smaller devs, not just an accidental byproduct of algorithm tweaking that might be walked back.
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And on twitter they are not responding AT ALL
Send me a PM, please. (Thanks for your help on this.)
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Does updates or patches affect the showing at all? One theory I saw was that those apps updated constantly are given higher visibility.
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Google wants to make as much money as possible. If this algorithm doesn’t make them money, they’ll change it. If it does, it will remain as is. (h/t @jasonstevanhill, per a discussion we had about this earlier today.)
This isn’t the first time a platform has changed their algorithm. I’m not sure we know as much about discoverability on Steam, but they have changed a number of things over the past two years, and we’ve certainly seen some impacts there.
We can be bitter and upset, or we can move forward and try to find solutions. Certainly the loop thing is really crummy, but we may not be able to do anything about it.
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