Slashdot Mirror
Gaming the App Store
space_in_your_face writes "Want to boost the popularity of your latest iPhone app? Ask Reverb Communications! 'When it comes to winning in the App Store, this PR firm has discovered a dynamite strategy: throw ethics out the window. Reverb Communications, a PR firm that represents dozens of game publishers and developers, has managed to find astounding success on Apple's App Store for its clients. Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client's applications. ... Reverb claims that their clients have sold over $2 billion of product under their watch.'"
When in doubt, lie, cheat, and steal. Strong ethics and morales will get you nowhere in this world kids.
This will last.
We all know how Apple likes to have others in any sort of control over the App Store.
Companies have been doing this at other places, like Amazon.com, for years. Buyers beware.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
seriously, what the hell?
They "worked on" rockband... I wondered why it had so many good reviews.
Personally, I find the 0 - 3 star ratings more telling about an app than the 4 or 5 star (fanboy) ratings. In general, when I want to find out about a product, I like to read the negative to moderate reviews because they seem to be more honest about potential problems. What do you guys think/do?
Carl P. Corliss
"Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client's applications."
Just so we're all clear, this is already illegal. If they are engaging in this kind of activity, then it's just a law enforcement issue.
How is this new? This has been going on long before computers. The snake oil salesman used to do it all the time, they would have somone in the crowd claim fantastic results to sell something that was worthless. What you mean I can't believe every review posted about a product or application? Critical thinking.... what is that? Idiocracy is happening already, humankind is doomed!
Why not use the method L. Ron Hubbard's Bridge Communications used to keep Dianetics on the bestseller lists, and simply buy millions of copies of your own product?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
At least they're not apping the game store. I'm still paying off my legal bills.
Obviously one of their interns is also a /. sumitter.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
It's interesting that the idea of shills hasn't been better represented in the Internet business model. The psychology behind shills and mob motivation and mob behaviour is advanced compared to Barnum's dictum that "there's a sucker born every minute" and the barkers and shills who worked his midway freak shows. The ideas contained in the submission are child's play compared to the opportunities for exploitation the Internet offers. Corporations are legal entities that play hide and seek with morality, ethics and the law by Wizard of Oz advertising pyrotechnics and repeatedly playing off the tribal sentiments of group think individuals who turn a blind eye, (and lose an I), to the wrong doings of a hierarchically higher class entities. There's an anthropological idea about tribal guilt that manifests itself in victims found with inordinate numbers of wounds thought to have been inflected by multiple perpetrators with the idea of spreading the guilt of the crime over the tribe. Something similar functions in mobs and fanboi, product idolation. We hide in the tribe. We're secure in the tribe and we protect the image of the tribe to ensure our own protection. If you can speak for the tribe, or pretend to, and thus motivate the tribe groupthink then you're a winner, or, your product is.
ideopath @ play
Apple takes 30% so for someone to make $1.2m they need to sell $1.56m in games. For $1 apps that's one and a half million but for a $10 game that's only 150K - which is barely into 'hit' territory for box shelf games.
If you have a game that's good and garners decent amounts of attention then you'll make millions on the iPhone. Thus the PR firm - to make sure your product gets noticed.
Full disclosure I work for a game studio that's doing iPhone games. No we don't use a PR firm as our products are good enough we don't need to.
and it's an old hat with pretty much every professional marketing company. Either employees are asked to post things, or they hire some external people, like in this example.
I have seen it, I have even been asked to do it*, and from what I know, it's pretty much an expected standard.
Music, games, books, websites, other products, you name it...
The only difference is, that real professional companies have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy about it, and the only person asking is your direct boss, in private.
___
* and lied about actually doing it, like most people in the company at that time, because half the staff just got fired because of management incompetence
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
So what is the value of a dollar? A beer? Nope. A newspaper? Not the New York Times. A pack of gum? Not the fancy "winter-blast" chiclet kind. A comic book? Not in years. Paperback book? Sure, if you can get seven more dollars. Let's see... that leaves us with a can of Coke (but not a bottle), or maybe a candy bar (but not the king sized kind).
But let's raise the stakes a little bit... what's the value of a dollar when you're stuck in an airport? Anyone? Anyone..? So if you can kill a four hour layover in an airport by spending $1 to download a "trivial airport game," I'd say that sounds like a marker for market success, not failure.
Breakfast served all day!
One thing I've noticed at the App Store is that a lot of perfectly fine apps get a lot of 1 star reviews for ridiculous reasons. For instance, a review might state that the app does what it claimed to do flawlessly, that it is useful, and the best app in the category--but the reviewer also wish it had feature X (which no other app has), and the reviewer then gives it just 1 star, apparently for this "missing" feature.
This doesn't appear to be an isolated problem. Nearly every very good app I've downloaded has had a lot of these kind of negative reviews.
I wonder if anyone is purposefully trying to game the store by posting negative reviews on competitors, too?
Reverb would like to clarify a few items regarding the MobileCrunch story about our agency that ran this weekend. The article âoeCheating the App Storeâ is unfortunately full of emotion, logical holes and for the most part untrue. Here are the facts:
1. The writer forgot that Reverb Communications is not just a public relations agency, but is also a sales and marketing agency. Reverbâ(TM)s marketing department has interns that do social viral marketing.
2. Our interns do not post reviews on iTunes. Our employees donâ(TM)t post fake reviews. Itâ(TM)s common for Reverb team members to purchase the games and write a review in iTunes using their personal accounts AFTER they have played the game. In many cases Reverb has provided technical feedback and gameplay guidance to the app developer, long before these games hit the App Store, so we know these games extremely well. We also like these games or we wouldnâ(TM)t take them on as clients. The entire list of iTunes accounts in your story are from staff members who have played the games.
3. 1 person=1 iTunes account=1 credit card. We do not have hundreds of accounts to âoetrawlâ through iTunes â" itâ(TM)s simply untrue. We have 10 staff members who choose to post on the games when and if they have played the game. We have to buy and play the game in order to have an opinion.
4. This same writer contacted several of our app store developers wanting negative comments from them regarding Reverb. They all gave positive feedback, but the writer left this aspect out of the story.
Reverb claims that their clients have sold over $2 billion of product under their watch.
I flatly don't believe them.
Why would anybody hire them? Why would you believe and have dealings with a company whose product is explicitly stated as lying and deception?
That's not really going to stop an unscrupulous publisher or author. Let's say you want to astroturf Amazon a hundred times... so you buy your book a hundred times. That costs what... $1000-$2000? That's dirt cheap advertising. And if you get your royalties on the book sale and you get a copy of the book, which you can then sell back through Amazon again.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people who have bought your book, and would like to write about how much it stinks, can't. Because they bought it at a normal book store.
Computer did not feed my kitten.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
For every thousand people who read this and say "that's just wrong", there's one or two who says "Hmmm, interesting." And for every few dozen of those, there's an app developer that's saying "Maybe I should find out how much this costs."
On the other hand, if I find a game for the blackberry that I like, and that provides me hours of mindless escape -- surely that has value to me. And if I can reward the developer of this game with something as insignificant as a dollar in order to continue playing the game, how is that in any way a bad thing?
I'd further argue that this does not cause the companies to be overvalued. Unlike the recent trend of relying on advertising (literally becoming the middleman in a sale of the attention of other people), here you have a company that is producing something of value that cost actual time and effort. Assuming that they can do so in the future, the same question -- how is this a bad thing?