My goodness. Say goodbye to the good ol’ days when your game can lean on different metrics for a positive spin–
1) Ratings
2) Reviews
3) Download #’s
4) Revenue
What am I talking about?
With the flurry of articles regarding the bot farms that employ users with iOS devices and itunes accounts to download an app, it’s only a matter of time before Apple doesn’t something completely arbitrary to reverse this activity. This is basically an evolved, B2B form of Gold farming; made ever so prevalent by this gentlemen it’ll be a race for rich developers to cover up their tracks. Unfortunately for small, poor developers like us who would never be able to afford even the $5k cost to attain farmed download #’s, I fear we will get the butt end of this fiasco.
The Apple Way
I suspect Apple will react in the following way:
1) Put out a formal warning Done!
2) Devise a ratio that balances Downloads to Ratings/Reviews, only showing the stats when the numbers are balanced
3) Apply this ratio to balance Ratings/Reviews to Downloads (otherwise bot farms will turn into review/rating farms)
4) Kill the App Store as we know it today
Industry Reactions
If my suspicions prove true, this already fast paced industry will react overnight.
1) Deny any involvement in bot farms
2) Try to make an example out of a smaller developer who may have used Bot Farms
3) Find another way to exploit the App Store using millions of dollars
4) Continue copying games
Evil! Bad! /slaps wrist
digitalharmonygames 