How to filter ratings below 5 stars so they don't go to Google Play

Dungeon Keeper Android’s rating system filters out “1-4 star” reviews • News • Android • Eurogamer.net

Hahaha… now we need to do that in our games :slight_smile:

They just got many 1star by using this

and how this is compliant with Google’s policy? :confused: Overall the idea is great

If a small developer did this for sure it would be severely punished.

Let’s see how Google will treat EA.

I had this idea a long time ago and I’ve been thinking of implementing it and always thought it might be risky.

EA has the best lawyers money can buy. Obviously they would have read the policy before implementing this so lets do the same thing:

“Developers must not attempt to change the placement of any Product in the Store, or manipulate any product ratings or reviews by unauthorized means such as fraudulent installs, paid or fake reviews or ratings, or by offering incentives to rate products.”

These aren’t fraudulent installs, they aren’t paid or fake ratings, and they’re not offering any incentives. It might be considered attempting to change the product placement, but if EA can do it why can’t we? I think it’s an awesome idea, users would probably prefer getting an email response anyways

I do something similar in my game , basically ask the user if they are enjoying the game, with a negative answer asks if they would like to send me an email while a positive response asks if they want to rate the app. I did this after reading a blog where they had tested this approach, unfortunately I cannot find the link anymore (it was quite a while ago). What was really interesting from the test they performed was that the overall rating did not really change, however they did receive an increase in number of ratings (their theory was once the user answered the up-front question the user probably felt committed to complete). Unfortunately I have not been able to test this as my game gets very few downloads :frowning:

Overall you are not promising the users anything in return, in some way it’s similar to saying “if you like the game please rate it”

Well this idea has been mentioned on this forum before - as well as earlier blog posts about it.

The idea is that you firstly not ask users to rate it immediately - because not all early users of your app will be positive necessarily towards your app. So you present the ratings reminder to the user on say their 5th use of your app. This by itself ensures that only users who have a reasonably higher probability of being positive towards your app (after all they are using your app 5th time) are REMINDED to rate. Thus this gives you a “more serious about your app” crowd.

THEN you also give a choice between “It’s great” or “It needs work” etc. - the ones who say “It’s great” you send to Google Play store to rate. And the others you send to an E-mail app (using intents).

This may help ratings - however the recent Google move to ask users to rate all the apps on their phone with those reminders in Google Play front page - that is a much larger impact on your ratings.

Here is a blog post mentioning this technique:

Get more positive ratings for your app in Google Play - TechRepublic
Get more positive ratings for your app in Google Play
By William J. Francis
March 29, 2012, 1:44 PM PDT