{"id":95486,"date":"2019-06-21T19:43:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T19:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/345270"},"modified":"2019-06-21T19:43:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T19:43:00","slug":"project-babel-dev-colopl-says-employees-inflated-sales-to-boost-app-rankings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/06\/21\/project-babel-dev-colopl-says-employees-inflated-sales-to-boost-app-rankings\/","title":{"rendered":"Project Babel dev Colopl says employees inflated sales to boost app rankings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Project Babel <\/em>developer Colopl says that a pair of employees poured roughly $79,000 into the recently launched mobile game with the goal of artificially raising the game\u2019s ranking on top grossing app lists.<\/p>\n<p>Colopl published a press release about the incident earlier today but, as industry analyst Dr. Serkan Toto points out on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/serkantoto\/status\/1142088340654755840\">Twitter<\/a>, the news emerged after the market had already closed meaning the discovery has yet to be reflected in Colopl\u2019s stock value.<\/p>\n<p>A translation of that press release says that Colopl became aware that two employees spent roughly \u00a58.5 million (~$79,000) in&nbsp;<em>Project Babel<\/em>&nbsp;with the explicit purpose of increasing the game\u2019s perceived income to&nbsp;boosting its sales ranking.<\/p>\n<p>Colopl notes that it is carrying out an investigation into the matter, but has yet to confirm that similar incidents have occurred in the past.<\/p>\n<p>In his tweets on the subject, Dr. Toto points out that grossing rankings are typically used by Japanese investors as a way to measure the success of an app. <em>Project Babel <\/em>launched last month for iOS and Android in Japan.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-conversation=\"none\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Colopl is a publicly traded company.<\/p>\n<p>The news came out after market close on Friday in Japan, so the hammer should come down on the stock on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>This kind of manipulation is not uncommon &#8211; but getting caught is.<\/p>\n<p> \u2014 Dr. Serkan Toto (@serkantoto) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/serkantoto\/status\/1142088342177243138?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">June 21, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Project Babel developer Colopl says that a pair of employees poured roughly $79,000 into the recently launched mobile game with the goal of artificially raising the game\u2019s ranking on top grossing app lists. Colopl published a press release about the incident earlier today but, as industry analyst Dr. Serkan Toto points out on Twitter, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95487,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95486","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\/95486","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=95486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}