Should developers with repeated abysmal reviews be banned?
I was doing my usual perusal of the Windows Phone Marketplace and and I saw a new game called Ultimate Trap Free and the poor ratings caught my eye. Then I recognized the developer. Choulet has over 140 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace. They range from free to $1.29 but they all share something in common – horrible reviews, if any. Even simple novelty apps like a Plasma Ball has a single review of ‘awful’. Zombies Fighter Free has 12 reviews that range from “Worst thing I’ve ever played even toddler games are better than this garbage” to “This is garbage.” Yet the ants keep marching and more apps keep appearing from this developer. And they all have good enough screen shots and descriptions that they could lure the innocent in.
Now moving away from choulet and moving to the generic, do you think that developers with a history of negative reviews should be banned from marketplace? Personally, I’m a quality over quantity person and I don’t want to take away from anyone’s hard work, but the app markets need to stay clean to be usable and if anything is let it it hurts the users. I know the thresholds need to be established to make sure they are crap apps, but if someone really is throwing garbage into the Marketplace they should act on it. What do you think?
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Banned? Why? That doesn’t even make sense. If they are trying to make good apps and they payed their fee, who has the right to tell them that they can’t make apps because they don’t meet someone else’s standards? Besides, practice makes perfect and eventually they’ll (hopefully) start kicking out a good app/game here and there. Not everyone can be a genius from the first app onward.
Unless otherwise it is not a paid app I don’t have any issue.
Ok, maybe not a ban. But any paid app, without a fully functional trial, needs to have a remorse period, of maybe 6 hours. No idea how to implement this, and with Marketplace going offline occasionally it would be a nightmare. But there must be some method to test an app without turning over a buck or two to someone who never had any intention of making something worthy of your money.