Indie Devs Still Suffering from Abused Microsoft Ratings

Greg Tito

PR for Dungeons & Dragons
Sep 29, 2005
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Indie Devs Still Suffering from Abused Microsoft Ratings



Despite Microsoft's fixes to the ratings system going forward, indie developers are still seeing less sales due to the abuse.

A month ago, Robert Boyd - developer of Xbox Live Indie game Cthulhu Saves The World - noticed that his previously high-rated title was inexplicably dropping in popularity. Not content to believe that people suddenly started hating his game, he dug a little deeper and found that some people had been downvoting Cthulhu in order to promote College Lacrosse. Boyd made announcing a change to the ratings system yesterday [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108875-Xbox-Live-Indie-Devs-Accuse-College-Lacrosse-Fans-of-Down-Voting]. You now must have an Xbox Live Gold membership to rate games through the xbox.com website, a big step up from just creating a free account. Boyd is generally happy with the change, but he's still upset that the suspicious votes were not able to be overturned.

"Microsoft doing nothing to fix the fake ratings that have already been given is highly disappointing," Boyd said.

Boyd believes that the ratings abuse has affected sales by games that were previously highly visible suddenly getting less exposure through the fake ratings. He told Edge that Cthulhu has dropped to rank 33 after being in the top ten for months, and that another game by Boyd Breath Of Death was pushed out of the top five through the manipulation.

"Sales for both titles have definitely dropped beyond the normal drop we would expect with the simple passage of time, no doubt due to the decreased exposure from being lower on the Top Rated lists," he said. "Some other developers have been hit even harder than we have - for example, Xona Games had a couple of quality shoot-'em-ups high up in the top rated lists that are completely buried now."

It sucks that developers like Zeboyd Games and Xona Games were hit so hard by what should have been an easy policy to design. Public ratings systems are already susceptible to manipulation - Amazon I'm looking at you - but being able to create dummy accounts so easily without even owning an Xbox is pretty silly. With the data available to Microsoft, the company should consider further limiting the ability to rate games that the customer has actually purchased.

Otherwise, I could just log into my Xbox Live account and give Cthulhu Saves The World five stars for shits and giggles. Hmm, I might just do that anyway.

Source: Edge [http://www.next-gen.biz/news/failure-to-fix-fake-xbox-indie-ratings-is-%E2%80%9Chighly-disappointing%E2%80%9D]

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TheRealCJ

New member
Mar 28, 2009
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It's the same idiots who hang around /v/ and dedicate themselves to down raking every game on Metacritic.

That's why I try to ignore top ten lists, or only use them as a very basic starting point.
 

Nimzar

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Nov 30, 2009
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How about this. Let anyone rate or post a user review of the game. But only use data from users who have purchased the game. So the average score is the only the result of people who have purchased the game but the secondary ratings are still tracked. (I don't know how XBL thing works exactly (don't own an XBOX)--but if for instance under the detailed page for the game it tracked how many 1, 2, 3, etc.. star votes a game had have those reflect the rating from all users. But in terms of ranking only use the rating from users who have the game.

Just my 2¢
 

beema

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Aug 19, 2009
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Wait, you mean their completely nonsensical knee-jerk solution of only giving rating power to gold subscribers DIDN'T WORK!?!
I'm floored!
 

thenumberthirteen

Unlucky for some
Dec 19, 2007
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This is why we can't have nice things. It's a real shame that someone comes along and basically ruins things. While user reviews is generally a flawed concept (large selection bias, most people give either 5 or 1 star) the industry sort of expects them.
 
Apr 28, 2008
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Why the hell does Microsoft let people who haven't even bought the game rate how good it is?
 

night_chrono

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Mar 13, 2008
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Not one to go "sue happy" but can't these devs sue Microsoft for lost revenue? If there is a distinct correlation between the abusive ratings and lost sales thats grounds enough for me.

It's probably against the TOS for having a game distributed but hey maybe it isn't.
 

Mister Benoit

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Sep 19, 2008
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Irridium said:
Why the hell does Microsoft let people who haven't even bought the game rate how good it is?
Same thing I was wondering.

Regardless I loved the writing in Cthulhu saves the world. Just didn't get very far into it due to life and all.
 

danhere

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Apr 5, 2010
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A good solution is to only be able to rate games that are tied to your Xbox Live account. I doubt that douchebags would appreciate the thought of having to pay money to their competitors just to lower their ratings.
 

hightide

Kittenkiller
Jun 17, 2009
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beema said:
Wait, you mean their completely nonsensical knee-jerk solution of only giving rating power to gold subscribers DIDN'T WORK!?!
I'm floored!
ummm... thats not what it said at all, infact Boyd is happy with that change.
 

harvz

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Jun 20, 2010
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i think i may give it a go and rate it on its own merit...oh wait, i live in australia and am not allowed to play indie games, only to submit games.