I got an email from someone who was impressed by geoDefense when he saw it on a friend's iPhone.  His friend, apparently, was playing a pirated version of the game and he was writing to say he wanted to buy geoDefense rather than pirate it.

Problem?

He couldn't.  It wasn't available on the South African iTunes store.  Of course GD is set for world wide sales.  I checked just to make sure.

So then I checked the South African iTunes store and, sure enough, it wasn't there.  Neither was GD Lite.  More curious, however, was the fact that there was no games category at all!  Here is what you see for categories in the South African iTunes store:

Entertainment, but no games.  A lot of games are also in the entertainment category, so South Africans do have access to some games that have set their categories properly.  I checked and I had recently changed my secondary category on GD to entertainment, but that didn't seem to help any as far as this was concerned.  The lite version did not, so I fixed that.

But still... the larger question remains?  Why would games not be a category in South Africa?  My first thought was it was some sort of over-sight.  I mean I can't think of any political reason, other than some games might violate certain local standards and they just blocked the whole lot?  But that makes no sense either since a game can show up in the entertainent category anyway.

I sent am email to the iTunes Connect folks asking about this.  Not sure if I'll hear anything back, but in case there is a technical problem with the games category not showing... I imagine this would be a significant chunk of revenue to Apple that's being left on the table... and to developers in aggregate.

Anyone else know why this category might not be showing for them?  Do other iTunes stores also have similar situations?