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macfan881

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Feb 22, 2006
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Via Kotaku The agency that handles PR for Harmonix, 505 Games and other developers will settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission that its employees posed as ordinary consumers to post positive game reviews on the iTunes App store.

Reverb Communications, whose clients also include MTV Games, CDV Software Entertainment and Emergent Game Technologies, must remove from the iTunes Store all reviews that misrepresent the author as an ordinary consumer. The rest of the settlement is an agreement that Reverb and its owner, Tracie Snitker, won't post reviews without disclosing the relevant connections they have with the seller of the product or service concerned.

http://kotaku.com/5623224/rock-bands-pr-agency-slapped-by-federal-trade-commission
 
it's not harmonix dude. it's the PR firm that handles them. while reviews might be related directly to a harmonix product, this isn't something that they did to make their game look better, it was the firm.

Harmonix is a company that doesn't need fake reviews to make their product sell.
 
Seems stupid. The game has 13K rating overall and 2,000 written ones. I don't tend to care about reviews unless they give a specific reason an app is good or bad. I don't care about a stranger's opinion because they might not have the same taste as me.

I get put off when a smaller app has way too glowing reviews, it is usually easy to smell something fishy when it is not such a big name developer.
 
A PR firm hired by a company doesn't act on their own and that any strategic move (like this) would have to be signed off on or approved by the company. So whatever companies/developers approved it are guilty if the allegations are true. It sounds from the article that it was smaller developers and not the big fish though. It's still not "fun" when you're a client and the PR company that reps you is in the media like this...
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

Dang good deal!

I wonder if this was the same PR firm that contacted Rob Walch (of the "Today in iOS" podcast)

He has discussed a couple of different instances where a PR firm offered to post "independent reviews" for a fee. :(
 
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