Jim, seriously, you're just opening your mouth for the sake of argument or something.  It's quite obvious that this is not ideal for ANY game, not even if (AND THAT'S AN EXTREMELY BIG IF) the Doucettes are actually still making the same sales after all this.


Obviously if their game drops off the TOP RATED list or farther down it, it's less visible and therefore less likely to garner downloads/sales.  No one here should be so dense as to not realize that.

Let's say that Mr. and...Mr. Doucette happen to be making great or even decent sales on their way-past-released games, despite the whole ratings BS. What does that mean? That little needs to be said about this, if at all.

However, with the way things are going now, dragging sales would be a no-brainer to predict. I haven't seen sales data that proves either, unfortunately.

But I'm going with the Xona Games' lack of sales because of the ratings drop on this one.

Zeboyd Games:

I doubt even James leaving in protest would do anything. Don't get me wrong, he makes great games and he's probably pulling in great figures for a small studio, but it's still small stuff in the big picture.

Everyone I've ever talked to who works at Microsoft has been very kind and friendly, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft is a company worth billions of dollars. They're not that interested in potential - if your products aren't already bringing in millions, you're scarcely even a blip on their radar. And to be fair, they don't need to pay attention to the small guys - if they ignore an XBLIG developer who goes on to have a mega hit elsewhere, who cares? They've got plenty of mega hits already.

I'm surprised to hear you say that and I would agree with your assessment.  That said,  I thought Xona was making the jump to XBLA.  It might make sense to go Unity since it gives you PC, MAC, iOS, Android, Xbox 360 (XBLA), and so on.  Pretty much everything except WP7 and XBLIG.

The only explanation is XBLIG is not paying for itself. If it was, we'd be looked after. Simple as that.

All this ratings stuff, let me add my weight into it.

Murudai:

...the position on the Top Rated list does actually make a big difference.

I'm surprised it's still under discussion that position on the lists == sales, but now that we have charts on XboxIndies.com, it's easy to see.  Take a look at Decimation X3 stats for Japan (click to turn off the other countries): http://www.xboxindies.com/game/decimation-x3/stats

You can see a clear influx of new votes move the game down the top rated list, and at the same time you can see the Best Selling daily position went from being pretty constant to lower and more random.

Charles Cox:

We have also investigated rolling back suspect votes, however, we determined it will not be possible to do this.

Get real low ratings always effect sales, especially when the rating is clearly shown on the page were you agree to buy or download the game.  I am glad the change to only Gold members being able to rate was put into place.  It would be even better if only those that bought or downloaded the game could rate it.  I wish this was in place when I release ZenHak years ago.

Decimation X3's rating manipulation in the U.S. as an example of the damage done:

JasonD:

Please do not tell us it is impossible to fix.   Of course it can be fixed.

[Moved 'fun with numbers' thread here http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/86762.aspx as I think its going to be a good discussion but will end up dragging this one off topic and ratings gaming needs to stay the focus here]

Hmm, Solar 2 was sitting around 40th for the last 2 weeks, now in the last 24 hours it's dropped from 40th to 100th. I notice a few other new games have dropped as well. Bit sad to see this still going on.

Murudai:

Hmm, Solar 2 was sitting around 40th for the last 2 weeks, now in the last 24 hours it's dropped from 40th to 100th. I notice a few other new games have dropped as well. Bit sad to see this still going on.

The rating manipulation exists since day 1 of the xblig (or community games ...) life.
I've seen all my games reach the top spots (or at least a confortable 4+ stars) and as soon as they reach that level they're targetted by a little rain of 1 star ratings. Is this a conspiracy against me? No, I don't think. It's human! A good percentage of manipulation is done by our Xblig fellows; every devs loves or hates some other devs. Sum this with the fact that some devs have a little (or large) community and that every dev wants to reach its place under the sun and you'll have a down voting / up voting effect.

Running Pixel, not to downplay your comment as it's a great point, especially for developers who fear they were targeted when they were not. The type of rating manipulation you speak of happens to all top games, including ours.

Matthew Doucette:

Running Pixel, not to downplay your comment as it's a great point, especially for developers who fear they were targeted when they were not. The type of rating manipulation you speak of happens to all top games, including ours.

To not derail the importance of this thread, we are discussing something different, which is an "inhuman" targeted rating manipulations. Once my top 30 games were off the top 50, they still were blasted down to 200. This is not "human". It should be unacceptable to everyone involved in XBLIG, including Microsoft, developers, and gamers.

There was a misunderstanding; I agree with you, it's obvious that someone has been targetted more than others. I'm just pointing out that the problem isn't new at all, I heard about voting bot and rating manipulation more than two years ago and noticed strange votes (up and down) since the very first days and after 3 years Microsoft reacted only when was clear that the rating manipulation could affect XBLA as well.

Running Pixel, sorry for insinuating you weren't on page with us. I wouldn't doubt for a moment this didn't take place years ago, especially on the rating-deprived low-marketed XBLIG platform, where top-rating lists became our only continual source of traffic.

Running Pixel:

Matthew Doucette:

Running Pixel, not to downplay your comment as it's a great point, especially for developers who fear they were targeted when they were not. The type of rating manipulation you speak of happens to all top games, including ours.

To not derail the importance of this thread, we are discussing something different, which is an "inhuman" targeted rating manipulations. Once my top 30 games were off the top 50, they still were blasted down to 200. This is not "human". It should be unacceptable to everyone involved in XBLIG, including Microsoft, developers, and gamers.

... after 3 years Microsoft reacted only when was clear that the rating manipulation could affect XBLA as well.

I dont have a game on the service worth worrying about ratings yet, but I'm working hard on one and want to throw my support in. Unfortunately, I think Running Pixel has hit the nail on the head..

Has Avatar Legends been under attack?

Greenstone Games:

Has Avatar Legends been under attack?

If I'm not mistaken, it's lost about a third of a star in the last few days. Completely against it's trend of the first 5 - 6 weeks.

Greenstone Games:

Has Avatar Legends been under attack?

If I'm not mistaken, it's lost about a third of a star in the last few days. Completely against it's trend of the first 5 - 6 weeks.

The game went from 4.5 to 4.25, which due to 1/4 point rounding could be a single 4 star vote.  Since the game is still sitting at the #4 top rated spot I'd say there isn't any down voting going on.  The Top rated list is affected quicker by vote changes than the rating.

We released our game and we've noticed we've been getting a weird mixture of ratings. Then again, this is our first game so we're not sure what to expect.

Seems to be either 1 stars or 4/5 star ratings from people. Some people have been nice enough to contact us and let us know they're voting us 5 stars so at least we know we're getting proper votes here and there but right at the start we were hit with quite a few 1 star votes (our rating was 1.8 stars in the first day). We also noticed other games ratings dropped at the same time.

Not sure if that was people just saying "didn't like cover art / trial game / star alignment" or getting caught up in the 1 star voting. Given that we were seeing other games ratings go down and our number of votes increase by the same number as other games had at exactly the same time I'd say the rating abuse is still going on.

**Edit**

I should say WAS going on just a couple of hours ago, it seems to have stopped now.