hi folks, I have a little question. perhaps someone here is able to answer this for me: our game Companions will be finished soon and we decided to integrate a plea to vote for the game within the story of the game. if the player chooses to vote, we will drop some useful items and stuff, if not, well, then not. could it be a problem with apple, regarding some laws we don't know about? all the best, smuttlegiaco
By "vote" I'm assuming you mean "submit user review?" Keep in mind that you can't truly do what you're proposing. The best you can do is offer the user the option of going to a "review this app" URL. You won't be able to tell if they actually submitted a review, or what the review was. Would Apple care? I doubt their testers will play your game long enough to discover you're doing this, so it's probably moot. But you never know. There are lots of apps that encourage users to submit user reviews, but I've never seen one offering to reward users with in-game items for doing so. Phil
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. You can't use it to force 5* ratings or positive reviews so it's not like you're bribing the customer.
@stroffolino: yes, sure, we know about that. but we guessed that at least some users would rate/review the game. @ midiangtx: it's more like: i scratch your back and you scratch mine. ireally hope there's no special rule disallowing it. as stroffolino said: you never know... thx for your feedback smuttlegiaco
Even though this is true, there would be some users that don't know this and believe the dropped items came as a result of them voting.
I think its fine. This is the only thing i've seen relating to 'trying to get users to do stuff'. But its forcing downloads: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20055382-248.html?tag=mncol
hm, ok. so I guess it's ok what we're doing. we will see if my assumption turns out to be right... thx for the link!
Great Little War Game does exactly this. You get a grenadier unit for rating the app. Apple've no said anything and it works a treat. I think it's fine with their new conditions because as mentioned I have no control over the reviews. Which should be quite apparent by the fact that with over 2000 reviews the avg is about 4.9/5 and yet the three on the preview landing page are all shite.
I would suggest going over Apple's rules with a fine tooth comb, but I can't remember seeing anything that blocks it. There might be issues in other ways; for example, OpenFeint won't let you assign an achievement for these things.
@rubicon: sounds good. I hope it works equally well for us (except the bad reviews on the landing page of course ) @Promit:we have no achievement set for this one, so the only real problem that could arise would be from apples side.
