Big plea to other developers.

Don't worry about it, I'm sure it's only developers that read them anyway.

Most just go with the overall score which is actually the best thing to do to weed out the idiot posts.

 

how do you know its a competing developer?

if you have any proove just sue them and be done with this.

i recall you had this problem before (or still) where you had some review battles with someone else..

then of course i wonder whats the point if posting this here?

touch arcade a gaming focussed ios website is surely not the place your fake review writers frequent often?

 

hmm, i dont think you can assume that everyone will like the same things equally. different strokes and all that. just because someone gave you a 1 star doesnt mean its a developer that's out to get you. there are many kids out there who would 1 star something for many ridiculous reasons.

 

I agree completely, I think there's some paranoia here.

Our games have 4.6 average, almost exclusively 5 or 4 stars. Yet there's still a few hundred one stars, most of which sound like they're talking about a different game.

It would be easy to discount that as hate from other developers, but I think there's a number of explanations:

1) Some just don't like the game type and mark it down as one star despite it's obvious not-one-star quality. This isn't really fair but it's a fact of life and we just have to suck it down. I think this is going to be the largest proportion by far.

2) Some people just can't resist ignoring the massive amount of content and presentation and design and etc and find one thing they don't like, but can only see 5 or 1 so choose the 1.

3) Net hate. Some kids just get off on giving one stars and bad reviews just to feel big and clever.

4) Some percieved slight. For example, we've had "the developers don't respond" comments when in fact we spend a lot of time doing exactly that to everyone. Your mail got spam filtered? Use proper punctuation, grammar and capitalisation with no net speak and you'll get heard!

5) A tiny percentage might even be from underhanded competition. But if the product is any good these should get drowned out in short order.

Remember, the wording isn't right. These are not "reviews" they are almost always one line comments based on personal opinion. Still valuable, but you will not get a fair hearing if someone has decided they don't like your product for even a tiny reason.

 

This sounds bad, but tbh if a one star user review has that bad an affect on your app sales, I think the problem's either with your app or your marketing tbh.

As I said above, we get "this app is wank" frequently. Still selling though.

 

We've had this before, in particular with the developer of Kick Flick Soccer, Kevin Ng, writing 1 star reviews against Flick Kick Football multiple times.

Pretty easy to tell when the "reviewers" in question have a 1 star scathing reviews of our game recommending his game and 5 star glowing reviews of both his games only. He could at least have gone to the trouble of reviewing some random games to mix it up a little more.

I got halfway through writing him an email before I decided it wasn't worth our time.

 

I agree. I've looked through the Mac app store and it is loaded with junk. Same stuff you see on iOS - little single-function apps, wallpaper programs, alarm clocks, coffee break reminders, pencil sharpening reminders. Things that may be fine for a phone, but not really for a computer (in my opinion). Who wants a hundred little crap apps and icons scattered about their computer?

It's obvious that many developers are pushing out quick sell items one after the other - key word being 'obvious'. In fact, in another thread I remember you (Syndicated) saying that you had to release two apps a week to make any money, and that you had over 60 apps there already. I think that's part of the problem. Everyone's looking for a quick buck, which makes the Mac store less attractive to consumers.

As far as fake reviews go, I can see how a one-star review could hurt you when you only have 3 or 4 reviews in total. The Mac app store doesn't sound like a good place to be, and I feel like I've stepped into a ghost town the few times I've checked it out.

 

well the biggest problem of the mac appstore is indeed that its mostly junk..

to distance yourself from your competitors you need to step up the game of keep selling 1$ app no one really needs.

then of course if you get into that junk category of quick throw away app developement where quantity is the driving fore and not actual usability & quality then thats a difficult turf..

like a catfight between two streetseller who feel their turf violated since the other guy is also sellig the same or similar fake designer sunglasses.

i think releasing 2 apps a week is hurting the market more than bad reviews who punish thoose.

not sure why people buy such shovelware anyway.. sadly apple does not impose some sort of quality standards in their app stores.. like amazon on android does.. or steam on pc.. this would actually help the market because you would at least throw half of the stuff thats on there..

forcing devs for a bit of quality offerings would be good..

 

I could not agree better with you up to this point:

I don't know whether you are involved in iOS or Mac app development, but Apple does impose strict quality standards.
Besides, bringing the Android app market as an example for quality apps is at least controversial. Google does not even have an app review process in place yet...

 

apple does not impose quality standards, they dont care if you release a product that is complete and utter rubbish.. their guidelines are mostly technical, so i dont see your point.

you can create the wors looking , worst playing game ever.. as long as its technically clean apple does not care about quality at all..

since when do they reject because of actualy product qualities?

as for android.. yes i think some quality checks are important.. not to mention that google play is full of aps with spyware, malware and dubious way to empty your credit cards..

i still think some quality standards would help.. both sides..customers and developers..

customers because they are more unlikely to pay money for utter rubbish

and developers to step up their game to a certain quality standard..


of course this would be a huge task for apple and the size of the appstore would be much smaller but it would be of higher quality.. but then of course apple does not really care.. because every junk app makes the store bigger and the number they can PR with becomes bigger..

i still think a more stricter review process would benefit the market..

tiny wings would still come through.. but kiddos fifth image slider puzzle would not ( but apple already is a bit stricter about too similar apps)

its not like apple would not have the ressources for that.. but there would be no benefit for them.. since they earn the same percent from junk as from quality offerings..

*shrug*


edit: as a sidenote i find it funny that the op moans about fake bad reviews when pretty much all of his offerings are full of fake positive reviews.. or thoose handfull of people are diehard fans of the dev and like to buy all their apps and rate them good.. funny.. what a weird coincidence.. *cough*