Ah, a little light humour for you today: turns out that these clowns called Reverb Communications got caught with their hands in the cookie jar offering their army of sock puppet reviewers up for open bidding.
Reverb employs a small team of interns who are focused on managing online message boards, writing influential game reviews, and keeping a gauge on the online communities. … Reverb will use these interns on Developer Y products to post game reviews (written by Reverb staff members) ensuring the majority of the reviews will have the key messaging and talking points developed by the Reverb PR/marketing team.
Heh, heh. And they figured that nobody would have enough of a sense of ethics to blow the lid off that? Well, apparently it took a surprisingly long time for anyone with some honor to come out of the woodwork:
Aside from representing Pangea Software, one of the more successful App developers for the iPhone (they made Enigmo, which was featured during the Apple WWDC Keynote 2008), they also represent Harmonix (the Guitar Hero and Rock Band guys), MTV Games, and a host of iPhone game developers.
Not that it’s a given that the above or their other clients were aware of this, I suppose … but a hefty dose of suspicion is warranted, yes?
Of course, it’s not as if it’s terribly surprising that any public review forum is gamed — Penny Arcade noted years ago this is even common practice in the webcomics world, for crying out loud — but it’s a good example of how lack of moral compass will destroy the value of trust-based resources. We won’t bother following up that line of thought further or anything, except to observe that if your trust in the App Store review process is not already destroyed … now would be a good time to work on that.
In the meantime, hey; if you’re not overly burdened with morality and/or community responsibility, now you know where to get effective PR for 75ยข/paid download!
h/t: Slashdot!
