What do you think of paid ratings and reviews

It's illegal!!! Apple may ban your game from App Store forever!!!

But what if someone wants to ruin your game and get it banned? He could just spend a small amount of bucks on those paid ratings and stupid fake reviews. And I know many people wirte vicious reviews on purpose. They have cheap black cards.

 

Simply because something is common, doesn't mean it's right. Tell me, how is stacking the deck with favorable reviews any better than the morons who leave 1 star reviews? For myself, if I knew a publisher was using paid reviews I wouldn't d/l their apps whether free or not.

 

how about this:

We've established that paying for biased ratings or reviews is wrong, as it misleads the consumer. What if, however, a developer was to pay someone to write an honest review. This isn't a new concept (priority reviews), but it's interesting when considered within the App Store comment system.

Would it be wrong for me to post on the "Services for Trade" with a paid job for people to honestly review my app? Payment is at minimum a free gifted app (no promo codes).

 

I have hard time getting my head around this one. Whenever people "offer" a paid service, the natural instinct is to expect a favourable outcome/review. What happens if you give out an unfavourable review and the person in question doesn't agree with it. You leave yourself wide open to people saying "this service isn't worth it" simply because they didn't get the review they wanted. You could end up wiping out the service before it even starts. You then may subconsciously write a better review in order to drum up trade, defeating the objectivity you're trying to create in the first place.

You'd need a substantial following and lots of industry credibility to be able to write an honest review each time and for it to carry any sort of weight. If you are only offering 1 review as well per app, you might as well just start you're own review website instead. Then again, lots of other people try this as well.

Personally as I said before, they should get rid of the star rating and just let people leave comments.

 

The idea is to gift people free copies of my app in exchange for an honest, unbiased App Store review. They're credibility wouldn't matter. I made a post for this in the services for trade section but a mod has taken it down. Why?

 

I know of a couple of websites that offer reviews if you pay them. It would be an honest review and you'd get some advertising. It pretty much guarantees that the app will be reviewed, whereas free sites that get hundreds of requests a day turns into a crap shoot for your app.

For app store ratings and reviews, if I had a marketing guy (right now its just me) I would send him to get 100 people to rate the game and possibly review it if they have time. The more eyes I get on my app the better the sales will be.

 

I think they're talking about paid App Store reviews, not web sites.

 

well, I know of one german review site with lots of german speaking readers which offers a review for 200€. I was tempted to do so when we released Companions, but I didn't. For several reasons: 1. 200€ is a lot of money. 2. It's bad style.

I just looked at the site again and they removed the 200€ offer. Instead you have to write them a mail now, so I cannot say if it's still the same (but I guess so).

I paid for one review on a polish site though. The 30$ I paid for this one was coupled with a banner ad for one week. the review was an honest one too, mentioned negative points etc. (my girlfriend is from poland, so she translated me what they wrote). we saw no rise in sales afterwards, but I'd do it again, just to support those guys.

 

Forget about app review sites.

What is your opinion on me gifting someone a free copy of my app, in exchange for an honest, unbiased review in the App Store.

Hopefully this would raise my apps overall rating which is currently brought down by negative reviews.

 

Not to put a spanner in the works, a fly in the ointment but haven't a lot of people just put a pop-up in their program to ask periodically for a review and take them to the review page?

Not sure how effective your idea would be as I've never tried it. If you have a good game and their's a chance to get it for nothing then I think their's a chance. As you rightly say, you've got to motivate them into writing a review.

 

Yes, your right. That method definitely works.

In this case though I would just be wanting to get feedback/reviews from fellow TA users. Free gifted app, in exchange for a review. There could be a whole new sub forum for this (similar to a promo code for an honest review).

 

How about knock out an update and push for ratings slightly more often? At the end of the day it's all about timing, or better still: going modeless. I'm a victim of the odd 1 star baloney (average is now down to 3 - though I don't have a single 3* but hey). For a while I did react, but I've moved on from that battle with bigger plans in mind, along with refining exactly how much promo-work the app does!

If someone has rated unfairly then you do deserve for someone else to point out that (for example) the app does actually work! 1 for 1 in that case can help but another ignorant comes along sooner or later. The skin thickens, luckily.

Asking for a rating in-app (at least after 1 current session) is fair enough. The developers who ask in a 'modeless' way seem to be doing it right, to elaborate: a message/scroller/button is in your face but can also blend in while not interfering with the rest of the menu GUI.

It's really up to you, as mentioned by someone already, just how you feel/react. But I say use that energy in your work...developing! You can go vigilante and be a marketer as much as you see fit, or you can make an iPhone do anything you imagine - that's the real power we have.

 

Can't argue with that. I've seen the rating in so many products, but for some reason been resisting. It'll be in 1.3.2.

 

Generally the number of ratings by friends is pretty low, you can guarantee most games get this.

However the number of paid reviews/ratings is ~100. Quite different really, and yes Apple certainly frowns upon this. It's in your contract that you will not do this, so if you get caught say bye bye to your game.

As others have mentioned having a popup to rate the game is pretty common and works quite well. I'd give this a go rather than breaching your contract.

 

I think you guys may be looking at this wrong.
Whether you like it or not, any 1 star review reflects a valid opinion from a customer. Rather than focusing on trying to burry them under solicited 5 star reviews, figure put why you are getting them.
If a user complains about a missing feature that your game has, make that feature more obvious. If a user says the game "doesn't work" consider that they may be telling the truth and make an effort to track down the possible bug.

I will also offer this: simply adding please review popups aren't all that effective. They work only if the user has a strong opinion about your game, or if you use the review button to unlock a cool feature.

 

In my case, I've got only 4 reviews averaging out at 3 stars. With that rating i'm having too few sales to generate any more reviews, resulting in a terrible catch-22 situation. The 1 star reviews are not completely relevant but your right about simply taking their criticism into consideration.

Anyways, a few pages back in the thread I suggested an alternative to the original subject (paying for false 5 star reviews). I wanted to gift willing reviewers a copy of my app (which is their payment) and have them write unbiased, fair reviews onto the App Store. If some people hate it, so be it, but ultimately this would populate my app's rating and hopefully increase it.

I made a post in the "services for trade" forum calling anyone who wanted to make an honest review - however the post was taken down with no warning from a mod.

there isn't anything morally wrong about this honest requested review concept within the forums, so why was it removed?


edit:
The idea seems a bit foreign to most so alternatively, I'll just post a thread offering limited free codes, and if they are so inclined they can leave a review.

 

i think, that stinks!

paid reviews, paid ratings, paid fans; that reminds me at the rotten music industrie.

sure, we all want to earn money with our work, but if that`s the only reason, you better should search for a job in the industrie.

the main reason for making iphoneapps as a independent dev should be to make a good app and have fun.
if the people like it, you maybe will earn money with it.
if they don`t like it, never mind. paid reviews won`t change here anything.

oh, if here`s someone from bremen/germany, i will gladly pay him/her a beer, if he/she buy or game and rate it.

ps. i saw a funny example for paid reviews at the store. somebody reviewed a lot of games in germany and wrote this review: "das spiel ist gesund."
that`s quit funny, because it means, that the game is healthy!
i think, that he used a translationtool and the original english sentence is "the game is well".

so, do you really want to pay for that kind of reviews?

pss.: regarding ratings and reviews. i`m a little bit surpriced about how less people rate an app they got.
scream`n`run have roundabout 35 reviews and 60 ratings worldwide. we set the app for one day free and had roundabout 19.000 dl…

 

Part of the problem with 1/2 star reviews is the user is obviously not happy, but isn't always able to contact the developers easily. If as a dev you give them a way to contact you through your app you can reduce the likelihood of poor ratings, and get free bug reports in one

 

I have 'hate mail' live in my app's review area, the guy was never going to like my app. Is that a valid user opinion? If an app is not my cup of tea, then I won't pretend that it deserves 1 star. On the same hand I won't defend, my own brother offered to write a review and I asked him not to. But still the damage is done, and does effect my livelihood.