Well, the way it works, you get an initial boom for your buck, and you get more eyes on your product during your launch week, which is your critical time to make an impression. If your game or app is shit and no one ever uses it again, that money spent on cheating is an immediate ROI, and drops off as soon as you stop promoting the app.

However, if your app is awesome, that initial burst of cheating allowed your game to push through the crowds of 50,000 other apps to get the eyeballs it needs. If it's a great app, those initial users who were suckered in by cheating the system, are now happy, satisfied customers telling their friends about your app. You don't need to game the system anymore: you've broken through the brick wall that is the first 10,000 or so sales. After that, you can rely on the quality of your game to win people over, but when you're naked, alone and review-less, the app store can be a terrifying and unfriendly place.

Interesting, how much does a successful app usually have to spend on fake reviews to have a shot?

The way you are describing it basically makes it sound like a hidden listing cost to be on the app store.

Eventually though people are simply going to stop believing reviews at which point Apple/Google will have to start taking some action against this.

Initial ad spend to get in top rankings of an app store with a game is about 75k. A generally considered successful tactic is to do that spend, get in the top, then grow organically from there if you can.

I played 10 levels of this game on the web site, though, and it never even encouraged me to brag to anyone else about how quick I solved a puzzle, and had no replay value, e.g. I can't solve a puzzle better or worse really. The game has nothing to get each user to draw in more users, so it would be a waste to do the ad spend at all...

That wouldn't work at all. Did you even think about writing this comment?

A crap game doesn't get good reviews, so boosting the app rating by buying fake reviews is just throwing good money after bad.

Ok, maybe "crap" is a bit of exaggeration. The point was that you really wouldn't need to really struggle to make a great game, as people would download it just because they saw good (fake) reviews. As long as it doesn't really suck, there won't be negative reviews to counter this.

Anyway, I wonder how long will it take before this tactic becomes too widespread so that only huge players will have enough cash to game the system like this.

Fair enough, I think the amount of reviews (and buys) influences your position too so just the absence of negative reviews isn't enough.

I don't want to sound cynical, but why do you think it hasn't already spread so wide that only huge players can game the system enough to gain the top spots? There was an article on HN this month about how book publishers even game the NYT book rankings.

i'm guessing because you can't buy the removal of bad reviews.