Mobile sites accused of charging developers for reviews

Destructoid:

iOS developer Andrew Smith has accused several mobile sites of demanding money in exchange for timely reviews. A number of outlets are allegedly demanding anywhere between $5 and $150 for the privilege of their summaries.

[PockyKing]

Wooow. That's laughable.

[darkride66]

Is this news to people? Almost all mobile review sites charge for reviews, or offer some sort of expedited review service for a price. The more popular the site, the more money they ask for. Yeah, it sucks, but what can you do other than pay them or not be reviewed? It's not like they give good reviews to people that pay them and bad reviews to people that don't.

They just don't review people who don't pay them. That's been my experience as a mobile game developer. I think we only had two reviews for our first game that weren't paid for out of the hundreds of review requests we sent out. Lots of places got back to us saying that they'd try to review, but no guarantee unless you pay. There's even sites like "Review Roster" that list what everyone is charging for reviews and you can go through their service with PayPal to pay the reviews all from one place.

[killerhog]

What annoys me is they give perfect reviews to games that don't even work *at all* aka crashing continuously. I stupidly downloaded apps that we're pure garbage because these app sites trough perfect scores at said games. I learned my lesson though.

[3-4-5]

That is what happens when you let sleezy business types into the gaming market to make a quick buck off of the new hot causal games market.

They will squeeze every penny they can and be gone before it falls apart.

I'm glad somebody is outing them.