Lemma Soft Forums

So in this past week there have been some major ups and downs for me and one of my games. After about two months it has finally hit 1000 downloads on Google Play, but it also went from having a 5 star rating (just two reviews) and being the first app for my keyword to having 3 star ratings (there was one 1 star and one two star rating in the space of about 2 days). Very disappointing and it definitely seems too harsh. There are no reviews as of yet, just ratings. Are these ratings coming from actual users, are they fake ratings from competing apps? I guess there is an element of denial there too, but it the ratings seem to harsh to be genuine, at least from my extremely biased perspective. I can't see the user names of the people who have given any of the ratings so that doesn't help me guess the source of the issue.

How common is this type of experience? Has it happened to you? Any tips? I guess it comes with the territory. I guess it will be a matter of further testing the app and figuring out what it was about the app that might have brought about the negative reviews and if it can be fixed. Busy with my job right now, but once this busy period is over I had been planning to go back to work on another game that is based of this one and is 99% done.

Bottom line up front. Don't be overly concerned about ratings.

I think it's happened to just about everyone who has received ratings on a game. When I first received ratings I was very upset about how low they were (1 and two stars out of five).
Ratings by themselves are pretty much worthless to a game maker, unless the rater posts a review.
Someone rated one of my games 1/2 a star out of five, saying 'It was not my thing"
Another person rated a different game 1 star out of five, but gave a justification that was useful for making improvements.
If you received 1000 downloads and only received two low ratings you must be doing something right.

Mmm I wouldn’t say ratings are “useless”, I mean if you had a lot of raters with all of them giving you 1star, then that must mean something.

However, I wouldn’t put too much credence to them. Like yelp reviewers, I’ve found ppl tend to give things either 5stars (cause they loved it enough to leave a rating) or 1star (cause they hated it enough to bother leaving a rating). It’ll usually balance you out eventually at 3stars if you have enough ratings.

Also remember that certain communities rate things very differently. Generally I’ve found the itch.io raters more easy going, then let’s say the raters on vndb.