Ask HN: Would you use a service to review your Android game? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you use a service to review your Android game?

1 pointArunB4 comments

Hi, We are considering building a service that lets developers upload Android games to get subjective reviews/feedback from a community of reviewers. This is to help developers get the critical feedback they need to make an impression out of the gate. We still have not figured out how to build the reviewer community. Our first thoughts are to incentivize them using points/rewards/bragging rights. Granted, that is going to be really tough but we would like to gauge the interest level of developers in such a service. If you are wondering how is it different from the reviews developers get in Android Market, we encourage reviewers to give detailed feedback on a questionnaire set that is not annoying but still useful.

The real question to you is, if you are an Android game developer, would you use such a service? How much are you willing to pay per game? Does $100 sound too much?

How does this compare with elusivestars.com? They're trying to do a similar thing, allowing developers to upload Android apps and pay reviewers to provide feedback. The goal is also to provide better reviews than the Android Market.

Personally, I'd be more interested in paying a small amount (say $10 per review) to a number of people and getting feedback from a few different perspectives, rather than putting all my eggs in one basket. $100 per review would only be worth it if the review would be published in a prominent place where it could provide some publicity for my app as well.

Thanks for pointing that out. I did not know such a service existed. Having said that, we are planning to concentrate on a smaller segment, most probably games. This will help with the number of reviewers we can attract, retain and the amount of time they spend with the app/game.

You also bring up an excellent point of providing free publicity - we hadn't given that serious thought. We could profile each app that is submitted on our site and quote user reviews, but the challenge would be to make the site/blog an attractive destination for real Android market users.

IGN and others do not pay to review the games they review do they?

Why do you want to seek to get paid first?

Review everything, then post the review and build your traffic organically based on your reviews.

If people are paying you for the review, I see conflict of interest and would not trust your review.

Actually, we are planning to have the game distributed to a bunch of reviewers and have them review the game to provide feedback to the developers. Sort of like the reviews you see in the Android Market but a little more comprehensive.

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