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Tips on bad (Android) game ratings?

A topic by GuldorGames created Feb 13, 2021 Views: 250 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 3

Hey! 

I just launched my first android game and already received my first unfair bad review. I know this is a thing with the internet just as trolling. But is there anything you can do about this kind of stuff? One is not so bad, but in the end it does hurt the games ratings.

its not the worst comment and other users already did down votes on it. But what is a good tactic to handle it or  is it a good idea to get rid of it (if possible)? For now i respond to this kind of stuff super nicely and helpfull in the hope they feel back about it. Can imagine this is a issue for many people on all platforms. Just one error and there you have your 1 star rating, seems unfair...

And in my case how on earth am I suppose to translate my game into every language with 0 money or language skills ;)


Love to hear what people think about dealing with unfair bad ratings!

Cheers, Marc

Moderator(+1)

Is this for the play store? The only thing you can do is flag any reviews and hope for the best.

Unfair reviews will happen from time to time, but there’s not much else you can do about it, apart from informing the platform where it appeared.

(+2)

I don't deploy apps on Google Play, anymore (itch.io is my only Android app store!) but on Apple's App Store I try to reply to most reviews. For a long time they had no reply feature, but I like to think that if users see that you reply to reviews they're less likely to say crap. In particular, I like to reward nice reviews with nice responses, and I do contest some negative reviews (recently someone in Canada complained that my dim sum app didn't have enough dishes, and I asked they're over 300, how many is enough? And by the way, I've found that stereotype about Canadians being nice doesn't apply to app reviews) But I try not to be a jerk about it (I've written negative reviews, too, and in one case the author went on a personal attack against me). How you reply is part of your marketing, you want users to support you.

For foreign reviews, I can google translate a "thank you" response or something else short (in fact, before I left Google Play I managed to google translate "visit itch.io" when someone gave me a low rating for having ads and he thanked me and increased my rating). So there have been some cases where they've changed ratings or even when from negative to positive after I responded (one person changed from one-star to five-star after I explained it's just me, not a corporation doing this).

But I also don't worry as much about foreign reviews, as App Store users in the US will only see US reviews (I don't remember how it works on Google Play) and the average of US ratings. I have one app that shows as four stars, but if I go into my developer dashboard I can see the wordwide average is more like two stars.

(+1)

Thank you so much for this response! It was very help full and written well I must say :) and what a great idea to reward the positive reviews too, never thought about that! And noted i will not release the game in Canada ;)