Chris Plante for Polygon:
It’s typical for an app to ask the player to submit a review after it’s been played for a few hours. A prompt appears, pointing to the app store, where the player can select 1 through 5 stars and leave a blurb of text.
In Dungeon Keeper, if the player selects the “1 – 4 Stars” option, they’re directed to a private feedback submission page. Only if the player selects the “5 Stars” option will they be taken to the Google Play page, where they can leave any rating they wish along with a blurb. The system is designed to make good feedback public and visible, and to allow EA to keep negative feeback hidden so it can be dealt with privately, or ignored entirely.
While people can still leave whatever feedback they want to on the actual Google Play page, I’d wager that most of the people giving the app lower than 5 stars won’t take the extra time to do that step. What EA is doing here smells awful fishy by any stretch, despite being a logical action for a company trying to maximize it’s public star-rating from a corporate marketing standpoint. It’s just a symptom of what affects a lot of companies who look at their customers as, well, customers rather than people.
via Dungeon Keeper stacks deck in EA’s favor when it comes to Android feedback | Polygon.
