{"id":12802,"date":"2018-02-13T22:41:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T22:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/314640"},"modified":"2018-02-13T22:41:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T22:41:00","slug":"google-removes-77-percent-of-game-dev-tycoons-positive-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/02\/13\/google-removes-77-percent-of-game-dev-tycoons-positive-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Google removes 77 percent of Game Dev Tycoon’s positive reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a blog post<\/a> published today, Game Dev Tycoon<\/em> developer Patrick Klug\u00a0pointed out how Google removed 77 percent of positive reviews written by Android players from the\u00a0Google Play store.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is notable for other independent devs planning on\u00a0releasing\u00a0their title to\u00a0Android devices, as Klug\u00a0notes<\/a>\u00a0that this problem isn’t an isolated incident. He\u00a0traces it to some research<\/a> that puts the blame on Google’s algorithm for preventing fake reviews.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Six days after releasing Game Dev Tycoon<\/em>, Klug\u00a0reports over two thousand players had rated the game with a 5.0 score. An hour later, 25 percent of those positive 5 star reviews were gone. Since then,\u00a077 percent of positive reviews have been permanently removed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“We are not engaging in any dubious practices regarding reviews,” writes<\/a> Klug.\u00a0“We don\u2019t incentivize reviews, we don\u2019t buy reviews, we don\u2019t review the game ourselves and we don\u2019t even tell our friends to review it.” The question of “why” remained.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Klug reached out to Google, who explained that Game Dev Tycoon’s<\/em>\u00a0ratings were purposefully removed to align with the company’s\u00a0Comments and Ratings policy<\/a>. The policies page provided by Google is split into two parts. One\u00a0section deals with preventing abuse, and the other acts as a guideline for writing a review (such as “try to include both positives and drawbacks.”).<\/p>\n

After reaching out to players and reading their deleted reviews, Klug came to the conclusion that Google must be using the same algorithm\u00a0to identify\u00a0fake reviews on both free-to-play games and premium games.<\/p>\n

“Google probably invented and tuned the algorithm to remove these kind of fake reviews from free-to-play titles,” he writes. “But for a premium title, where everyone pays 5$ to even be allowed to write a review,\u00a0this just doesn\u2019t make any sense.”\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

He laments how\u00a0the\u00a0removal of positive reviews is disrespectful <i>Game Dev Tycoon<\/i> players. He goes on to criticize\u00a0Google for being content to remove\u00a0thousands of reviews, but lacks any\u00a0safe-guards to pirate sites if one were to search “download Game Dev Tycoon<\/em> APK for free”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Be sure to read the entire blog post here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a blog post published today, Game Dev Tycoon developer Patrick Klug\u00a0pointed out how Google removed 77 percent of positive reviews written by Android players from the\u00a0Google Play store.\u00a0 This is notable for other independent devs planning on\u00a0releasing\u00a0their title to\u00a0Android devices, as Klug\u00a0notes\u00a0that this problem isn’t an isolated incident. He\u00a0traces it to some research that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}