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Xbox Live Indie Games Rating Manipulation
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft seems to be turning a blind eye to the Xbox Live Indie game area. Certain indie developers have found a way to abuse the independent game ranking system in order to down-vote popular indie titles while up-voting their own. Due to this, games are falling out of the valuable top 20 slot and the value of the ranking system is jeopardized."
Clearly the cheaters did not read that book and do not understand that short-term gain done in such a way will ultimately lead to long-term failure. Is it wrong to cheat? No. Is it wrong to cheat in this manner? Not at all. Would they have benefited even more by cheating another way or producing a game worthy of being in the top 20? Absolutely.
When money is on the line, people are self-serving. Color me surprised.
First they rebranded the XNA website as App Hub to help push Windows Phone 7, then they had XBLIG displayed after avatar clothing They did at least attempt to help support independent developers somewhat recently, so they have shown some sign of caring.
Unless you were one of the first games to launch on the platform or you had massive brand recognition, its effectively impossible to climb the "Top Sellers" or "Top Rated" charts which is pretty much the only way to market the game post-release.
Its not just Xbox Live Indie games either, Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network games all suffer from the same problem. Castle Crashers was one of the first Xbox Live Arcade games and its proven to be nigh impossible to dethrone both on the "Best Selling" and "Top Rated" charts. Final Fantasy VII-IX skyrocketed to the top of PSN despite the age of the games and the age of PSN and hasn't budged since.
Notice that in the last big dashboard update, they got rid of the ability to rate full games? If you bought a game, stuck it in, played it and hated it, you could rate it out of five stars and it would display an average score on any game you looked at through the dashboard.
They conveniently removed that and I've never heard it discussed in the months, since.
You can hardly say that Microsoft is turning a blind eye to this only 3½ working days after announcing that they are looking into it. It will take time to process the logs to find the trends and then make some changes so this cannot happen again. The blogger from TFA has had longer to come up with some figures and still only says that he has a "personal hunch" that the figures have been manipulated based on what he thinks the games should be rated.
If you look at the first blog mentioning this they single out the fans of College Lacrosse 2011 to be the bad guys and yet the graphs shown a week later have the lacrosse game dropping in the ratings. With any rating system, I assume that there must be some attempts to fudge the figures, so it seems quite plausible that the blogger may end up being correct. But my point is that it takes time to find out what is really happening. They have to be more sure than just saying that something looks fishy before they take action.
MS should scrap the web front end for submitting game ratings.
Instead, it should only be possible to submit a game rating from the XBox itself, using an account that's unlocked at least one achievement from the game.
Since the XBLIG games are only accessible to people with an internet-enabled XBox and a Live account, that shouldn't disenfranchise anyone who's actually got a relevant opinion.
It's been what, twenty years of top downloaded/most votes lists, and we still can't make a fair system? Shiiit. Android market, the appstore, now this, they all suffer from the same flaws and drawbacks. Why can't some interface/social-schmocial people figure out a way to get this right?!
Just to be clear: the developers of CL2011 asked their fans to vote up CL2011; they didn't ask them to vote down other games and have since put up a note on Facebook asking their fans to play nicely. So this appears to be down to overzealous loony fan-boys, rather than anything else.
(however, it has been suggested that several other developers have gone down the fake-account-vote route to try and boost their initial ranking. There's certainly been a number of recent games rated at 4+, which I'd personally rate at 2 or 3. Though to be fair, I am a bitter and jaded gamer...)
In any case, Microsoft need to fix this sharpish, as the problem isn't restricted to XBLIG, but also applies to XBLA and the rest of Microsoft's DLC empire - it's just more visible on XBLIG as the average number of votes/game is low. In fact, the odds are good that there's at least one marketing company ready and willing to drop a votebomb, inbetween spamming social networks with tales of how great basic_bejewelled_clone_5 is...
Here! Here!
Arthur! Arthur!
Brahma! Brahma!
Who cares?
There is only something like 75 games...
it's not 10000, you can try them all before buying!
It's not like people who produce for the App Store don't buy their own apps...
no %#!%s were given?
I'd say their larger problem with Indie Games is the lack of quality control.
I'm happy to play a small game. But there are many games on there that are pretty much "I figured out how to draw a sprite, time to publish!", or worthless variants on other trivial games.
More content is fine - the problem is that these little turds take up spaces in the new release list (a valuable source of advertising) - and the problem feeds on itself. I think a lot of gamers have given up looking through the new Indie games - and that makes developers less likely to have a go at the platform.
I know if I was developing an XBox Live game, I'd try to find out how to get listed as a "real" arcade game and do what it takes to get there.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
They really don't care about the indies. They have not even gone through the trouble of making them available over here. I'd have bought a few if I could.