One person, two store pages, a kitchen table.
This page exists so you know exactly how much weight the record can carry, and where it stops being able to carry any.
The receipt that did not match the product
March 2024. I bought a puzzle game I had played to death on an old Nexus 5, installed it on a borrowed iPhone 12, and got a black screen with the menu music still playing underneath. Nothing on the App Store page suggested anything was wrong. The same game's Google Play page had been updated eleven weeks earlier and worked perfectly on a five-year-old Android.
That is not a bug report. It is two products with one name, and the store pages give you no warning at all. The only signal available to a buyer is a date printed in small grey type below the description, and almost nobody reads it, because until it bites you there is no reason to.
I started writing the dates down in a notebook. Then a spreadsheet. Now this.
Who I am, and what that is worth
Dana Fournier. Kingston, Ontario, on Barrie Street, up the hill from the lake. I work in a public library and I am not in the games industry, have never worked at a studio, and have no relationship with anyone whose work appears in the record.
Kingston is a student town, and student towns run on old hardware. Half the people I know are deliberately keeping a phone alive for a fifth year and buying finished, cheap, offline-friendly games because those are the ones that do not want a subscription. Those are precisely the people who get caught by a frozen listing, because they are the ones still on iOS 15 or a 2019 Android, right at the edge of what a stale build still supports.
What that is worth: I read store listings carefully and I have been doing it for over two years. What it is not worth: I cannot read source code, I do not have a test lab, and I own two phones. If a game needs a specific chipset to fail, I will never see it.
What the record will not do
- It will not score games. Upkeep is a maintenance reading with four states and no number attached, deliberately, so it cannot be mistaken for a review. Abandoned games in this record are described as excellent when they are excellent.
- It will not print rumours. If a claim cannot be traced to a store listing, an official page or a named public source, it goes in as not confirmed or it does not go in. There are entries here where the interesting part is precisely what could not be verified.
- It will not invent numbers. Google Play does not publish app size on its web listing, so every size on this site is labelled iOS. Ratings always carry the store name and the sample size, because a 4.77 from 145 Canadian ratings and a 4.6 from 92,000 reviews are not comparable quantities.
- It will not quote reader mail. Other sites in this corner of the web run letters pages. I have no way to prove a letter is real, so there are none here.
- It will not link anything but official store pages. No APK sites, no mirrors, no modified builds, no matter how convenient. There is a game in the record whose Android version is legitimately sold by its own developer outside Google Play, and it still does not get a button.
Games that do not get in
The record skips anything whose store listing carries a simulated gambling or loot box advisory, anything built on randomized purchases, and anything rated 18+. This costs real entries. Stardew Valley has an update history most studios could not match and would have been one of the strongest cases on this site; it carries a simulated gambling advisory, so it is not here. That is a rule I would rather lose good material to than bend.
Corrections
Every date on the site is stamped with the day it was read, because store pages change silently and a page that does not say when it was read is a page that is quietly lying to you. If you find a figure that no longer matches the listing, write to [email protected]. Corrections get made and the read date gets moved. I do not delete errors without saying what changed.