This article has made it very clear to me why indie developers are having minimal success on the appstore these days. The companies with big pockets are buying all the top spots on the appstore killing our chance of decent appstore placement. http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/App+Store/feature.asp?c=15137 If the average appstore users knew about this then maybe they'd do more research about games before buying them based on false appstore rankings.
During my initial launch of iNsane I submitted the game for review at well over a dozen app review sites and more than a couple responded with paid offers for favorable reviews. Even going so far as staff picks placement for a period. I would rather not sell a single copy than resort to that type of tactics to win. It's unfortunate that the market has devolved to such a cutthroat state. I enjoy coding in my spare time and was tired of tinkering around on the windows side of things so I decided to toy around with mobile dev and a few friends purchased iPhones. I figured it might be fun to see what the App Store is all about and maybe make a little supplemental income on the side but I'm not so interested in "hitting it big" to sell my soul for it.
Indeed, you need to out such sites. Sites that sell favourable reviews have zero credibility and should be ousted as frauds and cheats because their reviews are utterly unreliable and they are misleading readers into thinking they're honestly good games, when the truth may be very different. If you have proof of such underhanded practices (if you kept the E-Mails), then even better.
I need to know so I can check them off my honorable list. NOTE: this is not a real list, this is a metaphorical list,
I do have the original emails. Just went back and checked them but the emails contained links to their advertising pricing packages. It was these pages that contained the offers for placement on staff picks and review placement and have since been changed. Kinda wish I'd saved the pages back then But atleast it seems they were getting enough negative feedback to clean up their offers a bit. When I first saw them I simply shook my head and dismissed them as garbage then moved onto the next.
Indeed, and if any of those sites are on this list then we will have a good composite of which sites are truly respectable and which sites have whored themselves into irrelevancy to developers who want to avoid any perceived association with such dishonest sites.
I wish I could remember for sure which ones they were but I'd rather not call out an innocent site and end up trashing their name for no good reason. When I went back to the emails from a few months ago I was hoping to find what I saw earlier this year but I found nothing I remember thinking what a terrible market I was getting into if that was the way things were run but thankfully since then I haven't seen much to complain about.. well other than apple's own review process
I too am extremely interested to know which sites I should not bother to EVER read another review by them again. We as a community should know just to help ourselves make the most educated decisions on sites and the reviews they contain...
Pity, though I quite understand not wanting to make false accusations. But if any developer does encounter such practices I would hope they'd expose the site to the world. In making such an offer, those sites immediately and irrevocably lose all credibility for both developers and users and they should be exposed as publicly as possible. That sort of bad business can ruin markets for the little guys, and the App Store has been the one market where the little guy has a fighting chance. Any site that works against that ought to be shut down and its owner actively shunned from the community on a permanent basis.