Real shame about your game. I just missed it, but I'll definitely play it when you put it up again.
As for your suspension, I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that Google doesn't really have much choice but to sanction mentioning other high-profile games in the descriptions. Due to the volume of app submissions and their business model, they can't vet apps to confirm that they are indeed inspired by whatever game their mention in the description. And if they are similar, would that be less or more of a problem? If they allowed apps to mention other big-name titles, some pregnant pony simulator clone would also have Diablo in the description and whatever else their authors thought could bring them more views.
Or Google could simply disregard the words in the descriptions from search results, but then your game would have to be called Exiled Kingdoms 2D Isometric RPG with Quests and Exploration.
And they suspended your package name permanently as a punitive measure, even though you could have changed that description in 10 seconds.
Google does drop the ball in several places:
- they apparently can't be arsed to have their search algorithm simply disregard problematic terms from the search results;
- they police their rules arbitrarily and belatedly instead of putting the hammer down when you submit the app;
- they tolerate all kinds of borderline fraudulent behavior (search for Super Mario on Google Play and see what results you get), just as long as you obey the letter instead of the spirit of their rules;
but the longer you develop for Android, the more of Google's incompetence you notice, so this shouldn't come as a surprise.
So yeah, in your case the suspension is unfair, but the fault is with tens of thousands of scumbag devs who ruin it for everyone else, and with Google's hands-off attitude towards Play Store submissions.
My own experience:
My RPG game is inspired mostly by Darklands and this is reflected in the
tag cloud of reviews I got, but I didn't mention Darklands in the description precisely to avoid what happened to you, never mind that Microprose (publisher of Darklands) has been out of business for like 15 years.
Last year I also made a game called Asteroid Defense Turret and within 2 weeks (after like 25 downloads) I got a letter from lawyers claiming to represent Atari (owners of Microprose IP by the way) demanding that I remove the word 'asteroid' from the title of my game or they would have my Google account banned. The game was
not a rip off of Asteroids , but that's lawyers for you. Instead, just to be safe (and also because it was a failure) I simply unpublished it.
As for Apple's App Store, they at least vet the apps beforehand, but it can still result in delays. In one of my apps on the help screen there was a paragraph on how the app is also available for Android, and this resulted in my app being rejected. I was told (by a human reviewer) I can't refer to any competing platforms in my iOS apps. I had to go through the approval process again and it took another 9 days for them to approve it (total 20 days), so beware of mentioning that your game is also on Android.
PS: are we two the only "Bloodnets" in this place?
I knew Ghostdog's avatar is the default Ransom Stark, but it bothered me I couldn't place your avatar even though I played Bloodnet a lot.