the rating system is very sketchy, and I will go on the record as saying it is "busted" However, I prefer they have it there rather than not, as ultimately it will do more good than harm. Help draw people to all-around good, polished apps, and help turn people away from the rest of the stuff. Obviously this is going to very negatively affect anything that is particularly niche that it put out there, but then, those guys have such a small chance of mainstream acceptance anyway. Ultimately, people making particularly niche stuff on iPhone are in some ways putting their product on the wrong marketplace, as the majority of the consumers are going to be people looking for a casual experience anyway (and I am not saying they shouldn't embrace the scene and release their stuff anyway! Just don't expect acceptance and success unless you have what casuals want, or some big guns behind you!! Do the math) As for the Free App stuff, I hope to get featured myself because after a month of straggling, our game (aimed at casuals as well as hardcores) is doing well with the word-of-mouth crowd, but that will only get you so far these days without some nice spark behind it, the likes of which "free for a day" blasted all over a few iPhone news sites will get you a little closer to.. wish me luck..!
Which is exactly the same as justifying a 5 star review with, he was a nice guy when he posted on TA and he put lot's of work into the game. Both are stupid to me, one is nicer, but neither should be praised or held above the other. I agree you should weigh in programming and content issues, but I always give weight to how fun a game is. So even a game like Solomon's keep, which was quite short and had a lot of bugs on release 5 stars from me, with a note that it was buggy but would be fixed in updates. I disagree, you should give your personal take on the game, and the system will average out the stars and give a proper representation as more reviews are collected. If you artificially raise your score to what you think other people will enjoy you are still breaking the system and skewing the numbers.
It wouldn't be artificial. Giving props for quality is not artificially boosting the score, its a legit criteria -- I happen to agree that people should ideally rate with more though then simply "sucks or awesome." I give a few extra stars to a game I think is well made -- one that I think other people could like -- even if I didn't enjoy it all that much. Can you imagine a gaming website giving totally bias, personal reviews without stopping to think whether their audience would enjoy the game or not? Its especially annoying when people rate you poorly for things that you clearly articulate in your game's description or even in the game itself... like they are penalizing you for not reading a thing about the game before hand.
I am not against giving praise to quality. I am against putting so much weight on it, that you overlook how un-fun a game is simply because you sympathise with the effort put into the game by the Dev. And I don't think any gaming website would give a high score to any game they didn't find fun. No matter how polished. In fact I have never seen it. Not to mention gaming websites scores aren't based on averages collected from hundreds of mini-reviews, and they are written by generally pretty well played gamers who know gamingy history and enjoy probably the majority of types of games. I think if this is a big problem, like a game is getting 10 plus reviews like this, it is probably actually the devs problem. Making a game simple and intuitive isn't easy, but it's half the work. Relying on FAQ's or complicated tutorials to fend off low star reviews is a bad design decision. But I agree, sometimes reviews truly are retarted, but I have the same problem with them.
I never said you should reward a game with a high rating if you don't enjoy it but can still see it is a quality product. I said you shouldn't punish it with a 1-star rating just because it's not your cup of tea. In fact I specifically said I would give it an average rating because I can recognise the quality of the product and that it could be fun for others, just not me
It has nothing to do with sympathy, or with how long it took a dev to make a game. I don't care if the game was made in a week or a 100 years. If the game has polish and other good elements, I don't think it deserves a 1-star review, even if you thought it was un-fun. And review websites base their reviews off of several criteria to try to get as objective (even if that is impossible) review as possible... you rate graphics, sound, replayability, etc... just because you don't think the game is fun doesn't mean you can't acknowledge there are other aspects of quality and polish that makes it better then a 1-star game. And as PixelthisMike said, I don't think anyone is advocating giving out charity for polished games... we're just saying a highly polished, quality game that isn't that fun is average... just as much as a fun game with crappy graphics and presentation is going to be pretty average. But again, if you think your personal fun factor should be the sole criteria for a game's rating, then I'll just have to respectfully disagree
hey calm down dude. what I mean are reviews like that * carbage * dont load, its crap * bahamba is better, as this * blah blah blah if you leave such reviews, you know what I'm thinking BUT if someone really has complains and can argue with more that 4 word sentences its OK - totally OK!
Ratings and reviews matter much less than you think anyway. In the week after being on FAAD Ground Effect had more one star ratings than anything else. This was presumably because a fraction of 1% of the free downloaders deleted after not getting the game and pressed the one star button when asked. Since then the five and three star bars have overtaken it but for several weeks, my rating was through the floor. During those weeks the game was, thanks to the exposure of half a million people potentially showing the game to friends, selling over three times as many copies as before the FAAD promo despite the low ratings. Thankfully I only have a handful of bad reviews. The vast majority of those who bothered to write seem to be the people who really liked it.
For those few games that have come out of a free promotion doing better than they did before the promotion, what is the main factor? I've heard people guessing that it's people who got the game for free showing it to their friends, but is there any evidence of that being the main factor? It's also true that the sheer number of user reviews (anonymous or otherwise) you can pick up after going free will help push your app up in search results. It's been pointed out that the extra visibility on a free app calender itself may be a large factor. It would seem easy enough to prove this one way or another - was there a drop in Ground Effect's sales when the next month rolled around and your app was no longer displayed on FAAD's main page?
It is of course impossible to say exactly what effected the sales but now, 12 weeks on, they are down to where they were before. Looking at the page, it tracks six weeks which is about where sales dropped at their fastest so maybe being on the page is even more significant than I thought it was. I don't know how numbers of ratings and reviews (as opposed to scores) could really effect sales. As you say, it's hard to know if word of mouth is really significant but one thing I did observe: We went from 4000 to over 140,000 Openfeint users. Before FAAD only 19 people (1 in 210) had finished the game, since then 1266 out of 148185 (1 in 117) have. This implies to me that people are almost twice as likely to finish the game as before. Maybe this is because they are a hell of a lot more likely to know someone else who is playing. Who knows? if that is the case than it says something for increased word of mouth though I guess it could just be that the've had longer to complete it but even if that's true it's kind of interesting because few people will play any game for any length of time. I'm sure being on FAAD helped get Ground Effect into the hands of a lot of people who would never otherwise have seen it and ended up being the most enthusiastic players.
Hey Glenn, Remember That Apple is bringing us ~15M new customers every 3 months right? And what it means is by now ~15M never heard about your app so you should......
The "number of ratings" is one of the factors that Apple uses when ordering search result rankings. It helped with Pocket Boxing, much to my surprise. Before I'd gone free for a day, the game was burried on the 5th page of search results for "boxing" (which happens to be pretty much the only way the typical user will ever stumble across the game). After going free with a boost from freeAppCalender, and shooting to the top of the Sports category, I got the usual flood of 1-2% anonymous deletes, which predictably destroyed the average user rating for the game, bringing it from 4 stars down to barely 2 stars. But interestingly enough, those anonymous reviews, good and bad alike, caused the app to slowly climb in search results. The game now shows up on the first page in the first 5 results of a search for "Boxing" and the 1.4 update has salvaged my average user review for the current version, both by resetting the ratings, and by adding a new easy circuit, to ease new players into the game rather than presenting them with an arcade style challenge right off the bad. The game is now selling ~10 copies a day. Still not much, and it's got a ways to go before it'll cover development costs, but neverthelesss ~10 buys a day is certainly better than ~2. Off topic, but one thing that mystifies me is why some of the iPad appstore mechanics are different. The iPad apparently never show "average reviews for this version" but rather only "average reviews for all versions." Similarly, the iPad's ordering of user reviews is sorted by "most helpful" by default, while on the iPod/iPhone user reviews are sorted by "most recent" by default.
Maybe that has something to do with it. There was another thing, a thread in this forum a few months ago where apps were ranked according to visibility on the "customers also bought" lists at the bottom of each app page. Basically, they had rated each app on how likely people were to be looking at the apps that referred to it. I think this 'likelihood' was measured by chart position and maybe other factors. They then went on to produce a list of apps ranked by this measure. Weirdly, Ground Effect was number 2 in this chart just after it was on FAAD but who knows how important "also bought" visibility is? I mention it because it's the only other variable I can think of.
Yeah, FAAD found me over half a million of these people. They in turn found me thousands of other people who were prepared to pay when the price went up. That's the whole point... The way I see it is: Imagine you'd written a book and you were to print and distribute millions of copies to be displayed displayed prominently with a 'please take one' in every book store in the world, wouldn't that get your book noticed? Now imagine that the printing and distribution are free and these are magic books where the untaken copies evaporate after a few days and people can't pass on the copy they picked up to a friend. As an author, the real question would be "why wouldn't you do it?" Sure, you could feel bitter about the fact that 90%+ of the people who read your book never paid but you'd be ignoring the fact that the free publicity from some of them caused far more people to actually pay up for a copy than otherwise would have. And remember, these are magic books. Sure, most of them may well have evaporated when those freeloaders threw them in the trash unread but a few hundred thousand of them are sitting on bookshelves and a few months later they remind people they exist when the words 'update available' start glowing on the spine...
How much does it cost? Is it a fixed fee price or percentage? I think this promotion is not bad if they don't take huge money.
