Paying for Positive Ratings...

A gaming site in the UK, Pocket Gamer, wrote a quick blurb about our 'Joy of Giving' policy that rewards players for giving us a 5-Star rating in the AppStore. We've actually heard a few players comment about this as well, so I took a moment to address 'why' we do it as a comment on the Pocket Gamer site.

Here's the Post:
http://is.gd/41rAx

Here's my comment:

Thanks for the write up & we're glad you like it! As for the 5-Star review, here's the rationale:

When we first created gpsAssassin, we got a few positive reviews from our friends & family. Our rating was perfect at 5 stars. When we advertised it to our local community, the ratings were still good (since people knew us) - but we got a few random one stars.

We were really confused... how could so many people like the game and then someone hated it with a one star.

As we expanded our marketing & the availability, the negative ratings continued and this was VERY confusing given how popular the game was among the active players.

Well, we finally figured out what was happening. In the ENTIRE APP OWNERSHIP process, you're only prompted to rate an application when you DELETE it from your iPhone. Think about the mentality behind that - you're literally asking the WORST person to rate your app. If they're deleting it, they obviously didn't like it.

Once we figured this out (plus the fact that our latest release didn't work on an iPod Touch 2.2.1), we scrambled to counterbalance the negative bias. Our only recourse: Give an incentive to rate the app.

Ironically, we have 21,000 players and we've had less than 2000 ratings. Moreover, I'm pretty positive that a vast majority of our 1-stars come from the app crashing on 2.2.1 (just read the reviews). Regardless, our incentives have at least boosted our rating to 2.5 stars. If we didn't have that, we would definitely be rated a 1 star.

Happy Hunting!

-gpsA