Anyone noticing a trend in fake reviews for the top apps?

The Effective Way to Ask for an App Review

Isn't there something truly sad in seeing devs trying to gather reviews at a rate of a dozen reviews a day or a bit more?
Just as a reminder of the more realistic quantity of reviews successful apps from smaller studios tend to gather.
We may tend to forget what it meant to get reviews. The simile game 2048 has like ten times more reviews on the same store.

Besides, according to a few posters in this thread, it also appears there can be as much as ten times more reviews on Android than iOS, mainly because of the cumbersome way reviews are posted on the App Store, plus some filter that seems to prevent, for some unexplained reason, the publishing of certain reviews.
Obviously, the reviews you see on the App Store are those that were validated, which is just be the tip of the iceberg regarding the real amount of reviews submitted for an iOS app.

PS: that Glint app looks pretty.

 

so still pointing fingers?

lets try a different perspective. Its you. You hired one of the many "marketing" companies out there, spend some thousand dollars on a smear camapaign to let your competition look like they ordered fakes reviews which you made look especialy phooney.. like gta. This way they look bad , unprofessional , without ehtics and can get into trouble with apple and even their hole developer account banned. After this you release a clone shortly and snag their top position from them.

Its you! You are doing this! its youuu.....! Evil Loon!



See my point of pointless finger pointing?


fake reviews and download pushs are nothing new.. back inthe day producers bought thousands of their own music cds to manipulate sales numbers.

its up to apple and only to apple to fix loopholes, make swifter advancements to their manipulation prevention etc... if they are interested.

No one knows how the chart system really is aggregates so guessing is like predicting the next lottery numbers.

this discussion is not really productive? except you want to show you can discredit your competition with a few dollars. oooppss


make a good product and it will be seen. dont hide it but make your developement as public as possible. apple is looking what is being developed and if you have an interesting app its not even unlikely that they will contact you.

and to answere the topics question. no there is no new trend. this is happening for a long long time.



cheers

 

People like to write dumb reviews that don't make sense because it's FUNNY. This similar to the way that reviews drove sales of Flappy Bird. People thought it was funny to give the game great reviews. (And in a way, it actually is a great game. Kind of a so-bad-it's-good that crosses over into actually good.)

 

That's a complete myth, made up to pad a void people feel uncomfortable with because they still don't get what happened, they don't understand the creation of this. It's near religious.
In reality, only a few bored people would even bother with that activity. On top of that, if writing stupid reviews for Flappy Bird had reached the levels you claim and became a fun sport shared by many, there would be a huge trace of that on Internet, something that would easily be tracked on social networks, forums, commentary sections and irl. People would talk about it and there would be much more than two or three shy hints about this trend-in-a-trend in random articles.
So let's just call BS on that, shall we?

 

I don't recall the faking of downloads and reviews being that detrimental to devs though. It existed before, sure, but things have gotten worse.
Even one year ago it didn't seem absurd or fruitless to count on a good yet small marketing campaign and work hard to get people interested in your game.
But now, it seems to hardly matter. Good reviews don't give the same boost they used to. Having a couple thousand people following your app was somewhat good some years ago. Today? Meh.
Too many apps, too much irregular promotions. Some devs, in order to leverage about $200 a day, must spam like one or two dozens apps as fast as possible. Which precisely contributes to the very problem they fight against.

As for buying your own apps, beside being totally cumbersome as it is today, did you consider the amount of money needed in order to reach a decent spot in the charts?
We're talking about achieving at the very least 50~100 K paid downloads, and just as many dollars if priced at $0.99. What kind of indie can shell out that much money? And who would be spending all that money on buying his own apps when it can be spent on real marketing and youtubers?
Artists who used to buy their CDs had the means to do it, by large. This is totally irrelevant here.

Then you say: Make a good product and it will be seen.
Paint me the sky pink, please. That's totally delusional. I never thought I'd read something so naive here.
Do you know how many good products there are down in the sublevels of the App Store, where the damned sun never shines?

The point is that the scamming is so important and huge that normal marketing can't even keep up with it anymore. One dollar bill used in white marketing has less value than one spent on fake revs/dls.
It is not uncommon to read about developpers who dearly think that stellar reviews don't weigh much against that flood.
No matter how much you push with your limited resources, you'll be completely stampeded by the artificially boosted apps.
What can't even fight to go up and at least stay afloat, can only go down.

Finally, we may not know the entire truth about the algorithm that's behind the ranking, but between what is said on internet and what the company bought by Apple was doing, it is not hard to get a good idea of how things work, more or less. Amongst things, social networking plays a part in all of it. More than before. It's also agreed that downloads, revenue, number AND length of reviews do as well.
The idea that length matters is most certainly confirmed by now.
The more elements incorporated into the calculation which can be manipulated outside of Apple's control, the harder it is for honest companies to reach higher.

To this day, one of the safest paths is to try to come up with a quality app that's worth a couple months of production at the very least, and try to find a recognized editor (Chillingo?), and share the fruits from there.
Once you're big enough, you fly on your own.
Otherwise you try to be lucky, but you'll be aiming for a small percentage of the already only meagre 20% who actually succeed to a certain degree.

PS (small correction): App store is very useful to Apple (10 billion dollars for 2013) to promore their service.

 

Maybe you are blaming the wrong people? Apparently you did not get my example.

If Apple find out you are cheating they will close your developer account.

They will freeze all outstanding payments you've earned with your app from them.

So why run an way too ovious scam with reviews comparing a stepping game with grand theft auto?

you point at the unicorn on the street because its obvious, but you don't care how and why it got there.

maybe this is a popular japanese game and a japanese competitor wants to box them out of the ring completly.

And why should it bother me? Do you have a app that somewhere around that chart position and got bumped down because of it?

its like crying about bank robbers who are now millionairs and you arent. While not even waiting for the apple police todo their work.

And as you know justice takes some time.. and if the developers are cheating the system, they will be gone soon, like many before and many in the future.



heresy? innocent until proven guilty? Whats "obvious" to you doesn not mean its the truth.

as for "crap" apps with god awfull graphics , i could point fingers too, to other products. But frankly in the free market gfx does not count.
Load up your Android device or check out what your friends friends play on them.

Most if not all Android Users play free junk i would not even consider downloading and they love thoose games. Maybe because thoose are absolute casual gamers who don't compare everything to halo 6 and super polished game Y.

they play on 50-100$ android smartphones games who are tons better than they played on their nokias before.

again if there is foul play, its up to apple to check it out.

 

you might want to show me some of thoose good products you speak of down in the sublevels of the app store.

indie does not mean homebrew to me. The time of homebrew games is long over. Occasional hits like flappy birds is just random chance, like playing the lottery.

well for marketing you need money and an indie needs to either have some funds , which they should have except they are the "hey lets do a game" type.
or try to partner up with somebody who has the marketing means.
then of course marketing on mobile is something else than renting banners on touch arcade.

i would not agree on the stapeded part.. artifically booste apps by what means are not your competition. they are competing with supercell, ea, and whoever is up the food chain.
Point is it makes no difference to the general indie developer if app x or y is in the top 10 rankings because thats an unrealistic goal he probably will never reach.
But then you don't need to be in the top10 to earn money.

yes having a publisher(you meant publisher right?) dedicated to your product and helping with marketing and maybe developement is something i would always suggest as one of the possibilities. Finding a good one is no easy too.

if you have a quality game show it to some of the "smaller" publishers like Crescent Moon/Forest Moon and see what they have to say about it.

imho fake reviews or not, it does not matter to you. if chinese cheater game x would not be in spot 1, 2 5 whatever, someone else would be and chances are high its not "yours" (speaking in general).

perception of quality is questionable at best from most homebrew indies.
the quality bar has been raised alot and alot of products just don't cut it
if you don't base your business plan on pure luck.

cheers guys

 

Recently we have been approached by one of those firms that gurantee their promotions will help developers get on top of the App Store charts.

This company offers a variety of promotional services, including positive independent reviews, and they are looking for a translations provider to translate their fake reviews.

DYS Translations politely declined for several reasons, but I'm sure they'll find a partner soon.

In 2010 we have translated about 60 different comments (apparently App Store reviews) in five different languages for a medium-sized publisher.

I will copy-paste some of them:

"Superb game its a must buy."

"Wicked Game !"

"Great game it's the best racing game I've seen... worth every penny. I don't think your gonna get a better game then this one so what are you waiting for download it now !!!"

"Good stuff"

"You can upload your race time. Great game !"

"Fabulous"

"If you love you're ipod you'll love it even more. This game just amazes you with its graphics of the beautiful landscapes."

"Very good game!!
Great graphics, easy to play. Price is ok."

Back then we had no idea what was happening.
We thought they needed these reviews translated for their website; they would pick some of them for their game site, to be placed on the front page.

Of course not: a few days later our translations magically appeared on each local App Store between many 1-star, 2-stars reviews.

Since then, this trend just got bigger and many important publishers/developers use this method.


Anna Yoshida

 

My game is a perfect example of this. First time developer with a quality product and no forced in-game advertising and no cross-promotion. Just shy of 7,000 purely organic installs, one month after the release and almost all 5-star reviews (of which there are only 28). I devoted months to marketing. After the initial marketing push, "sales" are at about 50 units a day. It is almost impossible to get traction on a zero dollar budget.

Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel

For more fun reading, this article sums up this entire thread:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/02/pay-to-rank-gaming-the-app-store-in-the-age-of-flappy-bird/

 

Wow! I'm so downloading that right now

I haven't been on TA for a while so I'm sure you made a thread about it when it was released. 50 units a day is pretty good. When my first game came out, it was .99 but when I made it free for a while, I had over 500 downloads a day then back to the original price, 2 downloads a day

 

Mr. Ugly, I beg to differ about your opinion on pretiness (Ha. Ha. Ha.)
Nice graphics count a lot and this starts from the use of a very nice icon, especially on iOS, since Apple primarily sells hardware and anything that makes their products look nice is a massive plus.
Besides, consumers often get attracted to nice visuals, it's an age old rule that's being going on for... oh boy, do we need to count that now?
It doesn't take a genius to know that with two identical games, the one that has nice graphics will be picked over the ugly one. That's about true for almost anything in life.
Now, it is also true that you see loads of crap on Android. That place is very lax and counts on volume, the entry rules are different. Android itself was solely built for Google to have a presence on the growing and web-superceeding mobile market. Still, even there, relatively decent graphics still have their effects.
But that's because people have lower expectations for shovelware. Same with a restaurant. Would you fancy your $60 meal to look like some typcial McDonalds sweaty burger that looks like it's spent the last six hours in the slit of the cashier's buttocks? Not really. Still, billions of these damn ugly burgers are sold every year.
Yes, people download a ton of junk on their phones. But do you really believe that the same people who don't care much about the intrinsic quality of the product they download are still going to bother posting flowery reviews about the very junk they consumed and which they'll just easily forget?
Genuine reviews are either given by people who stick to your product, or people who are massively pissed off for some reason. The fastapp consumers, on the other hand, they're entirely out of this loop.
Again, to pick the restaurant analogy, we have websites and guides to rate good places or warn against bad ones. But how many times do you see people waxing lyrical about KFC or same rate fastfood chains, really?
Here, we're not talking about making shovelware. If anything, the problem is about said shovelware performing way better than aspiring quality apps in some odd ways, notably by displaying a puzzling and near absurd quantity of reviews, to say nothing of what these reviews contain.

PS: please, could we do without the silly pictures?

 

so you are choosing glint (not that i meant you in my writing)
ok lets go off topic ;D


anyway let me take a closer look. i tested it on an ipad mini 2 with latest ios installed.

first thing i noticed in the appstore of course that your game has the problem of being a one scene puzzler without much to show in screenshots.
so they all look much alike, a problem well known with such games, tricky.

then of course it looks shiny but very flat, kinda "cold" in design and just misses character. tricky.

then of course at least to me the screenshots hardly tell me what kind of game this is..i see balls some exploding balls such what is it about? i don't know. tricky.

ok i downloaded (which i would not have) and.. ermm.. what.. where is the game i just downloaded.. looking back and forth , since ios has the habit to put it on the first page there is space.. since my ipad is a bit cluttered and the pages have different "fill" states.. i did not find it.. checked the appstore again , yes installed it shows pressed on open, it worked.. weird..

found the problem afterwards. you use a different icon in the appstore description as you bundle with you app. tricky

anyway started the game.. main menu.. ok glint logo is there is looks ok, still the cold design which tends to look pretty generic, anway.. (no tricky)

everything looks a bit fuzzy which is odd as half of the textures are low res hmm anyway that was something i really saw later.. but tricky

ok lets press start , lets go . it zoomes in with a nice animation, the dots start to fill the screen, bamm game over... WTF!

ok i just lost because apparently its like a tetris game where if you reach the
end of the screen its game over. But this is not communicated anyway.
It filled so fast it looked like a nice "fill the board" animation.

so the first game played is a failure if you don't know what is happening.
very very bad design imho, not even tricky.

at this point you might have lost a few customers.

then of course the balls look fuzzy again.. and i wonder what the heck is going on.. after some plays (yes i retried) i checked the options menu which usualy holds simple stuff like game center login , sound music stuff nothing most people really care about.. but there is a quality slider?!

never seen this on a puzzler? especially not with such basic gfx assets.
it was on the very left side which probably meant low quality. slide it to the right side started a game and behold, the balls are less fuzzy but still have pixelated border. very odd. not even tricky. why does this game need a quality slider?
and them sometimes the slide won't even react till i found out that its not a real slide with the ball the handle but something like a scroll view where you can scroll anywhere within the scale bar but touching the ball usualy does not get registered because on the end of the scale half of the optical indikator (the ball) is outside of your touch area which shrinks your optical button by 1/2.. very tricky..

in the end the trailers looked better than the actual game (good work on the trailer)

bottom line for me that it maybe looks on first glance interesting but once you interact with it its not a quality product after spending a little time with it. At least not in the grand scope of the raising bar.

As a first entry into the mobile its more than solid and if one looks closely you see that it was crafted with love and you put some nice details in here and there, but still thats not enough nowerdays.

as for your installs thoose are 7k free ones and you get 50more a day? how is your conversion rate on your iap show?

if you want we can continue talking glint in private messages and don't derail this lovely thread

 

The intention here was not to receive a detailed review on the slider quality in Glint, but I do appreciate the feedback. It is certainly insightful reading what goes into your unboxing practice of a new app, but I wont respond to your details here as it isn't the place.

Games are subjective - there is no denying that. Had everyone felt the way you did, we should expect to see a bunch of negative reviews, not 5-star reviews.

Correct, marketing dollars and sleazy App Store gaming practices would be a start. Maybe then you would feel as though the bar has been raised to the likes of Flappy Bird, Don't Step White Tile, or even the 'cold' feeling game, Smash Hit.

 

hehe.. yes of course being pretty helps.. but its not essential on the free charts because its free. As long as the style is coherent even basic designs can look nice.. like thoose sticky men war games or so..

gfx quality and polish does matter, but its surely not the driving force in a free game. if its paid its a different story. But if you can have the ugly and the hot chick, since they are free you can download both. And if they are standing next to each other you might even do it. Then of course taste differs and one like it different than the other. So its all in the eye of the beholder.

as for apple. its a consumer product with a brag status attached. How many of thoose devices are gifted and not earned. How many really need an smartphone anyway that cost so much or an ipad or whatever. The daughter of my neighbours just got a macbook because she sooo needed one. Reason is her friends had one and she was left alone with a generic phone and an old acer laptop.. braaaa.. no she has a iphone and a macbook and her life is so much better, which she still has no clue how to properly operate the macbook.. the world can be shallow.. let continue hehe

well again i talk about the free category. if you need to pay outrageous 99cents for a game of course you study which has the better gfx, the better sounding engine name and probably the longer feature list. But as said above if its free you just hit download as fast as delete if you don't like what you get.

since its fake download and fake reviews of course not.. no one is home.

but i never stated this anyway. My point is that this fakery does not change anything for the basic indie developer out there. Most of them can't compete anyway against EA,Supercell , Rovio etc. and it makes no difference if there is a chinese game cheating its way up the ladder or not. It makes no difference for your product.
Except your holding #2 now on the free charts because the cheaters knocked you down.

on ios for sure, i agree since we have a crappy review system in place. the android apis are alot better and allow for easier (and sneakier) review process.

what it took me some time to find the english version of this to post.. mann if you just watch dubbed simpsons its not so easy to find the english variants of their jokes ;D


again it seem you believe or assume that i don't tink there are fake reviews.
there are.
People are faking the hell out of it. But again i don't think it matters for you and me, at least not from a business perspective, assuming you don't want to try the same thing, cheating.. hehe then this should be part of your business plan hehe

sometimes a bush is on fire (which hopefully does not speal to you) but that does not mean forrest if completly on fire and since most of are are not even on the same continent as the wood and the burning bush.

so what?

cheers guys

 

The app store needs a steam greenlight method or newgrounds method were the community can decide whether the app should be on the app store if it's free.

 

as for the rating, no if i don't like a game in general i just delete it. like most do. you need to be pretty vocal to write a bad review, maybe you write it if you feel scammed or so, but on a free game. Delete and gone.
Back in the days deleting an app triggered a review request asking for start rating. Which of course is clever at this point .. "i want to delete this app, lets guess what i rate it". Bad ratings where alot more common then.


if i paid a dollar (god forbid) , one real dollar! and the game is bad!! youre in for ragefull zero star review and plenty of hate mails targeted at the pesky developer who robbed me of my dollar! ;D hehe


i don't get your "smash hit" analogy? you don't like it? you smash things. breaking stuff is always fun. in germany its #27 in free but only 177 in grossing.

it would be pretty empty. who would take the time to greenlight avalanche of free apps? most steam users don't even green light the paid stuff on steam.

something like touch arcade and the forums are your "greenlight" for apps.. but in the big picture this won't work.
steam has over 3000 products in their store. The Appstore has 1 million. Is more better? Probably not for the developers. But bigger numbers are petter for the pr team

 

I was subtly pointing out that Smash Hit, while successful, is a "cold" feeling game, something you pointed out as being a negative, or more accurately, "tricky".