Opinion: Gaming the Store

This opinion piece from Liquid Advertising media director Kevin Joyce first appeared in Game Informer issue 228. Joyce is a advertising expert whose company has handled dozens of video game clients on different platforms.

Given the relative lack of exposure and limited marketing budgets to raise awareness about apps, rankings play an incredibly outsized role in obtaining visibility. A top spot in the rankings can make or break your game. The dynamic is self-perpetuating: Once you’re there, more people see your app while browsing the store, which leads to more sales. If you’re not in the top 25, it’s incredibly difficult to crack it.

Most people perusing the app rankings assume that they are as fair a reflection of a game’s popularity as weekly movie box office numbers. But with the stakes of getting to the top of the app store so high, game publishers would be foolish not to consider any and all possible tactics to get there.

As it turns out, Apple does not have a transparent set of criteria, in the absence of which publishers must speculate on the rules based on the results they see in the marketplace. Whereas Android’s app rankings seem to factor in downloads, frequency of app usage, and length of time it stays installed on a user’s device, Apple’s appears to be (almost) entirely driven by installs. Publishers can manipulate the rankings in several ways, and they’re practiced routinely. To this point, Apple’s responses have seemed uncharacteristically delayed, often leaving publishers and marketers scratching their heads wondering when the Apple hammer will drop. 

The Power of the Price Drop

The most common way to skew the rankings is to temporarily discount the price. This spikes downloads from deal seekers, driving the game up the rankings. Within days, the app returns to full price while sitting in a highly visible spot near the top of the app store. Users presume that the app is well worth the full price, considering the ranking spot. At no point is this practiced more than immediately prior to Christmas, when Apple freezes the rankings. The sales come fast and furious in the days immediately prior to Apple’s freeze, as publishers jockey for a top spot through the all-important holidays, when folks get iPhones, iPods, iPads, and iTunes gift cards. 

This tactic is hardly limited to only the scrappiest, small publishers. Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto III on the App store on Dec. 15 at $4.99, and instantly was top of the charts. Five days later, the natural decline started, and they found themselves at #8 overall on Dec. 21, on a trajectory to be well out of the top 10, and possibly out of the top 25, during the Apple freeze.  So, on Dec. 22 – just one week after launch – Rockstar dropped the price to $2.99. They shot back up to #4, and were locked in at that prime spot until the freeze ended on the 28th. Great for them. Not so great for the folks who paid full price during the first week.

Interestingly, the music industry has responded to a very similar discounting trend. The likes of Lady Gaga and many others benefited massively from one-day promotions that sell albums at a heavily discounted price (as low as $.99). In response, Nielsen Soundscan – the sales authority behind the Billboard rankings – has ruled that it will not count sales priced below $3.49. It will be interesting to see if Apple ever announces a plan to factor in these deep discounts to how heavily each install counts toward the rankings.

The Appayola Store

With free games, you can’t drop the price – so theoretically you might think the rankings are more transparent. However, were all those downloads legitimate? Or were they spurred by the latest iteration of the old payola scheme when record companies bribed DJs to play certain songs in heavy rotation to get to the top of the charts?

Services have cropped up that offer publishers a guaranteed spot in the top 25 for $5,000-10,000. (Depending on the deal, this could be Top 25 overall, or Top 25 within a category like Simulation, Adventure, etc.) These services claim to have sophisticated marketing techniques but by all accounts seem to use bots to generate roughly 50,000 downloads – just enough to crack the top 25.  Because of these bots you’ll see games skyrocket out of nowhere or suddenly chart in new categories (like an educational game appear in the arcade category weeks after release) and then disappear just as suddenly – but not before garnering enough legitimate downloads from their brief exposure at the higher ranking. As an advertising professional, I can tell you that this is only possible in two ways – big, expensive, advertising campaigns or bots, which are are a heck of a lot cheaper.

Read on for Apple's response to these kinds of tactics – such as it has been.

Apple’s Response

On February 7, Apple responded to this practice, warning developers, “Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.” Still, with the rewards so high, the risk for many will still be worth it.

The same week that Apple addressed bots, another wart sprouted on the App Store. How does a game published by Hoolai Game Ltd. that is entirely in Chinese climb to #3 on the U.S. Top Grossing Chart? Is it a breakthrough hit with addictive gameplay that transcends microtransactions? It appears not. Instead, it’s the latest example of hackers at work. More nefarious than bots, these hackers allegedly steal massive batches of user account information to initiate downloads and expensive (as high as $99) in-app purchases. Given how immediately these scams rouse the attention of chart-watching publishers, developers, and consumers, you would expect swift action from Apple – at the very least flagging the app and keeping it out of the official rankings while they review the situation. But at the time of this writing, there has been no official response.

Apple has previously shown the ability to belatedly crack down on another tactic – incentivized downloads. Until last year, it was possible for users to be in an app, want more in-app currency, and then get it from an offer wall, often in exchange for installing another different free app. Those installs, fueled in part by users’ interest in something completely different (another game’s currency), were massively influential, changing the face of the rankings and therefore the entire app landscape. Apple’s warnings that such practices would no longer be tolerated have marginalized this tactic, resulting in less influential variations. This is a good step, but not so effective that it could be considered a perfect model for rooting out the other forms of manipulation infesting the App Store.

In the short term, gamers benefit from getting games at low prices, allowing them to explore the marketplace more than they otherwise could. But in the long term, publishers, marketers, and gamers alike would benefit from clear guidelines to a rankings policy that would prevent the possibility of gaming the store.