Hi everyone, Jan from Amanita here.
I am seeking help with Machinarium visibility problem on FireTV devices.
Could somebody from the US please confirm that you also can’t see Machinarium visibly listed on FireTV ? However we can find our game via search (the magnifying glass icon), the problem is that the game is absent from the category menus. I have inquired about this via a support ticket already, but I am unsure about the answers.
Thank you in advance for any observations or ideas.
Jan
Hi Jan,
Thanks for your question and welcome to the Appstore community space!
You choose your app’s category during Step 1: Upload Your App of the app submission process:
It looks like you chose Games - Adventure for your app and I do see your app listed in that category on my Fire TV stick here in the US. Are you not seeing it there on your device?
You get there on your device by going to Appstore > Games > Games Categories > Adventure.
Best,
Moses
Hi Moses, thank you very much for your observations.
It looks like a good news that you can see our game in the US FireTV Appstore, however we still can’t see the game here on our FireTV 4K MAX.
I’ve myself just double checked with my account and another “tester” account and I can’t find the game inside the AppStore’s menus…
You have correctly identified that our game has the category set to “adventure” that is in our “manifest” file and therefore we expect it to populate the AppStore category Games/Categories/Adventure, thanks for this confirmation.
I will try to look at those “regional” settings today if that might be the issue somewhere.
Just to rule out situations like this: I purchased the game and therefore I no longer have it offered via Appstore. I can rule this out because I also tried a “Tester” account with the same results. Also when I try to look at for example “Crossy road” at Games/Categories/Arcade that I’ve downloaded I will find it in the AppStore regardless of the fact that I own it already.
Another observation is that in the Appstore search (the magnifying glass icon), if I search for text “Machinarium” no quick suggestions will came up after Machina*, that is telling me that the Amazon Appstore for some reason does not know and does not index Machinarium the same way as other games.
I can also make a video documenting the AppStore experience from here.
Any further ideas are welcome please.
Thank you,
Jan
Hi Jan,
Without know the details of your account and device, I won’t be able to see why the game isn’t showing up on your specific device. Since your customer ID and device serial number are sensitive information, and shouldn’t be shared in the community space, it would be best to follow up via your Contact Us case with these details, so our support associates can look into it.
As for the title of the game not auto-filling during search, this is an automated process based on frequent customer searches. As people search for and download an app, this will automatically be updated.
Best,
Moses
Hi Moses,
Thanks a lot for your help.
I’ve sent the OS and hardware IDs to your support crew by utilizing the Contact Us form already.
Still no luck with the visibility in the FireTV menus, I tried a few things including parental restrictions.
There have been some major updates in the game recently, for example moving from the APK format to APP-Bundle as that is the trend on Android these days, but I doubt that would make any difference.
Machinarium is unlike our other games, it has internal support for FireTV and the Amazon controllers (both gamepad+TV remote). The game was optimized for the original gray FireTV Development Kit that Amazon sent us back in 2014, being one of the first games to land on your platform. Back in the old days the former build even supported Game Circle. The later updated game builds and the one from this year is a bit different, the package uses the modern Android “Bundle” format, but we still support FireTV controllers and there is the hand drawn “Controls” image from Jakub in the menus that feature the classic Amazon FireTV gamepad - so it is not a simple repackaged Android app, the game has dedicated features made for FireTV and also different compiled binaries and resources tailored for this Amazon release.
I’ll be back looking at this next week.
Thank you,
Jan