Recently, our game, Starfall: Ronin has hit the App Store. While I expected the spam to come rolling in, I didn’t think anyone would be quite this blatant.
I received an email from someone offering “App Rating Services”. Some of this I could see possibly being legit. For instance, they offer to help write your App Store description for best search visibility. They also offer to post on dozens of forums for you when you release updates and such, as well as translation/localization services.
However, they then also offer to “rate” your app and give it hundreds of reviews (for a modest price, of course). Now to be fair, maybe they are offering to just buy the game and guarantee that they will provide honest feedback and ratings, but at the low low price of $2500 for 300 reviews of a $0.99 game, I doubt it.
Personally, I have confidence in my game, and if I had $3k to kick around, I’d buy some serious ad space. I do think, however, that this says a lot about the games you’ll find in the AppStore with 5 star ratings that have no business being at the top.
welcome to the real world
these guys are making money of the countless indies that believe thes tactics works on a mediocre game.
Feel proud you got considered worthy to being screwed
Yes, not only are they actually offering you app store reviews, but some of those services are just scams that will not ever do anything but take credit for any reviews you get.
Other things to expect in your inbox:
Chinese contacts offering regional publishing.
Websites with next to no web-traffic offering “expedited” reviews for a fee.
$8.33 dollars an hour is a bit more than minimum wage in the US and a lot of money in places elsewhere.
Some people in foreign countries have the delusion we are all JR Ewing in the US but that’ll quickly change with these kind of offers constantly and rightly rebuffed. Someone making $8 an hour in the US is very poor indeed and hopefully they don’t live in one of those expensive areas of the country.
Apple has been cracking down on these types of companies for the last few years.
That said, this is a very real problem that still exists.
A few years ago I worked for a client who was subcontracting for another company. The big one had a ‘score room’ where they had many iOS devices linked to iTunes accounts with various screen names. Each one was attached to a pre-paid credit card under names that were variations on employee (and their relatives’) names. It was a little surreal.
?!