Since posting the article about ratings manipulation on XBLIG, things haven’t gotten any better. Cthulhu Saves the World has dropped an additional NINE ranks in about a week. It’s currently #20 in the US Top Rated. Considering it had been hovering around the #6 spot for a month or two prior to this whole mess, it’s very obvious that it’s a targetted attack. Plus, you can just do the math – given the number of ratings that we had before (around 1400 I believe) and the number of ratings we have now (1700+), pretty much the only way that we could be dropping so quickly is if the vast majority of new ratings are 1-star.
It’s highly annoying, but to be honest, we’re still in good shape. The PC port of Cthulhu Saves the World is almost done. Even if the PC version only sold a fraction of the XBLIG version, we’d have plenty of money for the rest of the year. And there’s a good chance that the PC version will sell drastically better than the XBLIG version since the PC is a much bigger marketplace and $3 is not the kiss of death that it is on XBLIG. And beyond that, I have very high expectations for our third game (for reasons that will become obvious once it’s officially announced) – I wouldn’t be surprised if our third game ended up covering expenses for a year or two of future development after it’s released.
If you enjoyed our games and haven’t voted on them, feel free to do so, but please don’t create fake accounts to upvote our games. The last thing I want is for good meaning people to get in trouble with Microsoft or to start a ratings war. We’ll manage with or without user ratings.
On a more positive note, there’s a new dashboard promotion on the UK dashboard with a video that reviews some XBLIGs including Cthulhu Saves the World. Should be fun to see if there’s an increase in UK sales over the next few days. Oh and Trails in the Sky comes out on the PSP today – that’s another thing to be grateful for.
On the bright side of the whole mess, there’s like 175k Lacrosse fans on that sight. And apparently only about 200-300 of them were voting down other games, max. So at least most of them aren’t complete jerks, right?
Looks like Xbox finally started listening.
https://twitter.com/#!/XNACommunity/status/52852501090807808
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/microsoft-investigating-indie-ratings-manipulation
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/30/xbox-live-indie-games-ratings-are-being-manipulated-devs-say/
The official word from the lacrosse page is, “Please don’t down vote other games. Just give College Lacrosse 2011 FIVE stars :)”
https://www.facebook.com/collegelacrosse/posts/121832974558558
Oh and we’d like to port BoDVII over as well, but I don’t know when we’ll get around to doing that.
I’m really hoping that we’ll have it out in April.
As for Steam, we’ve talked to them, but nothing definite yet. Cross your fingers.
Don’t worry about the Xbox live crowd. I have a feeling your PC releases will be far more lucrative. Please port Breath of Death VII, as well. Please, please, please!
Also, could you give us a more specific release date than “Spring 2011”? Spring has already sprung, my friend.
Speaking of the PC release, will it be on Steam?
I hope that MS’s investigation will give results rapidly to avoid such a thing happening again. These top-rated list are the beat way for you to advertise your game and the “misuse of the rating system” (MS’s euphemism) means you are looking sales – and other developers too. This seems to be happening only in the US though, as here in the Canada market, you still appear at the 3rd rank, and Lacross lags somewhere behind the 17 th position. We are launching soon, needless to say we hope the issue is resolved before that…
I did a little math in case you’re interested. Lets assume this all started at 1482 as noted in the gamemarx article. The 289 votes succeeding that averages out to around 1.44. Assuming that everyone who didn’t vote 1 voted a 5: 31 people voted 5 while 258 people voted 1.
Anyway, I seriously hope MS listens and this gets resolved. I’ll be checking out the PC version too.
I still think this abuse of the system should be reported, if it hasn’t already been. Chances are nobody from the Xbox team is reading this blog (although they should be!).
Good luck with the PC release!