I released my second android game two weeks ago, and it went a lot better than my first one. The game is more stable than the first
one and I could use the first game to promote the second, so I’m climbing well in the new adventure games ladder. I’m porting all the games from Windows Phone and this allows me to do releases quite fast, which I think is key to self-promotion (releasing the next game when the last one is in the apex of the number of users)
I hope to release my third one soon, probably in 2-3 weeks, depending on me being available to finish the port and depending too on downloads of the second game.
However I have a big problem with ratings. All two games have had the same behaviour. They started very well, receiving lots of 5 star ratings (I purchased some ratings for the first game, but none for the second one. I am obviously discounting the purchased ratings of the first), but as time passes, ratings start to dip.
While comments are 15 to 1 in 5-stars versus 1-star (Excluding 1 star ratings that make no sense, like “i’m downloading it, I hope it good”-> 1 star), is just 4:1 in ratings.
Is this a common behaviour for ratings?
Is there any kind of metric I can use in order to avoid those low ratings from hitting me? (in example, I tried to detect the country which is giving me lower ratings to try to exclude it on next releases, but I can’t get the number of ratings on google play dashboard, just the ratio, and that means almost nothing without the number of ratings)
Have you tried blocking countries in order to get better ratings? In example, both of my games seem to work very bad on France, all two below 3. I wouldn’t mind removing France from my next game list but without knowing the exact number of ratings is hard to say it’s just an statistical coincidence or if it’s really hurting my ratings.)
I have the same issue. It starts all fine, but than the one star ratings come in, and they draw the mean rating to the gutter. My problem is, that those ratings are from children that do not have any clue about the meaning of the app. They seem to think that it are games or something. I think a 12-year old is still a child, but they behave like ‘adults’ with their phones. As I look them up on Google Plus, some of them have rated a lot of apps exclusively one or two stars. Also the opposite, a boy who very generously rewarded almost a hundred apps with five stars. But children can be monsters (Read ‘Lord of the Flies’ by William Golding for example). I do not mind to get a low rating that is motivated. To the contrary, I like feedback, also the critical, so I can improve things. But those low ratings are seldom motivated, and if there is some kind of text it is like: “This app is stupid, I hate it.”
The apps I made seem to be best understood in English speaking countries. I already excluded Brazil (low ratings), India, and Indonesia. I have also a paid full version, and the strange thing is that I had buyers from these countries, which made me wonder if I would need the free version at all. I heard that translation can do a lot for acceptance. May be people get annoyed because they do not understand what the app is about. I ‘translated’ the most essential explanation with Google Translate, as I do not have the money for a real translation.
I just looked at the rankings and Brazil seems to be the worst scoring country. Also the country I have more users in, so definitively not an option to remove it
I think that translating the game to Portuguese may have an impact, but honestly I don’t think I can afford it right now.
What’s worse? Non localized app or bad-localized app? (using automatic translation like google translate)
Maybe just translate the description? On fiverr people will translate your description for $5 (and maybe even part of the app too - depending how many words you have, $5 normally buys you translation of 300-400 words).
Sincerely, I don’t believe translation (be it good or bad) will revert this kind of rating (“i’m downloading it, I hope it good”-> 1 star).
Why?
If you were right and children were doing this kind of rating, what’s description good for? For nothing. In my experience, I see that children don’t pay attention to text. They pay more attention to images.
But I don’t think children are rating app. From my experience, they don’t care to this. So what do we have? Jerks. And Jerks always will be jerks, no matter in which language you write description and no matter what is written in description.
Google should prevent anyone to rate an app prior the game had being played at least once.
In case you want to try a text translated to Brazilian Portuguese, I can do this for you (I’m trading translations). Just PM me.
Those without comment, yes. I have recently received 1 star ratings with comments that look like competition or some idiot. I’m going with idiot though.
I see your point, the translation really wouldn’t help with random/missclick/jerk users One good experiment would be to translate the game just to see if ratings improve (as soon as I have the multiple language code I’ll try to contact you, Plicatibu)
I found one interesting stat which could help me with my ratings. In the google play stats I selected “cumulative average rating” and then “devices”. I’m being crushed by the S3 Mini with a 2.14 rating, and I just saw a user complaining about the game not running with his s3 mini. Most other devices are over 4. Time to invest in my second android…
There is a natural trending of any app to score less as the number of downloads rise. The first users are the ones who picked your app when it was “nothing”, they usually were looking for some app like that and found yours. The more your app goes to the mainstream, more “casual” users starts to download it. They were not looking exactly for that, they just saw it on the top rankings and decided to give it a try. In this position their rating tends to be lower, because their need for the app is also lower.
Just try playing League of Legends.