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Every game developer / production has "been there" before; the product is done and it's time to market for generating sales.
In today's arena, part of the marketing strategy is to pound away at your SEO in order to boost awareness in the search engines about your game / product. Whether you start going through social media networks on Twitter / Facebook, hitting review blogs and even asking friends and neighbours to just write about your game...the more general content mentioning your game, the more chances you'll drive up visits to the website.
In the "hit driven" markets like Flash gaming portals or the Apple iPhone AppStore, it's a basic free-for-all to get your game noticed over the thousands of others. As such, these areas rely almost completely on ratings to help customers / players sort through the best from the mediocre / worst.
I’m surprised this actually took THIS long to materialize,
given the amount of money flowing through the Apple iPhone app store. A
company called Reverb Communications uses a farm of interns who trawl
the internet posting reviews and comments on applications by their
clients.
It’s a brilliant strategy honestly, driven because of the “hit
chart” mentality that the App Store has devolved into and fosters. The
only way your app is going to be noticed among the other hundreds /
thousands out there is to get it bubbled up through the ratings system.
Obviously, I don’t condone outright lying about products to generate SEO
traffic, but if it’s a good app that you’re trying to market and sell,
then is it any different from asking all your friends /
coworkers to generate “noise” on the internet for you?
Even the MMO gold farmers need something to do before Cataclysm.
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yea it will be interesting if apple will address the issue.. i suppose they don't really need to do anything though as apps are being bought no matter what so it's not in their interest to change anything. they get 30% of every app that sells who cares which ones.
Maybe Apple is almost intentionally creating these scenerios (eg. rejecting the google app to the AppStore, etc.) just as an attempt to drive up internet "noise" about the AppStore to keep a bit of focus on them while Android stuff gets going.
I wonder if they'll even go as far as putting in some legal verbage to retain exclusivity to Apple. If you publish on the Android store, your app won't be allowed for submission to the iStore (and vice-versa).
Ugh.