Wings Over Scotland

As regular readers will know, we've always been keen admirers of Bruce Everiss's almost-unparallelled videogames-industry knowledge and expertise. So we've been thrilled to recently see him storming back to the cutting-edge as chief of marketing for David Darling's new company Kwalee, which has hit on the genius idea of making it big in the ultra-competitive App Store market by employing a vast team of staff to come up with two-player-only knockoffs of ancient board games.

The well-documented problem with the App Store, of course, is visibility. To have a chance of getting your game noticed you need it to get lots of great reviews, and when your games are extremely mediocre and competing against hundreds and hundreds of existing clones of the same thing which DO offer single-player play as well as online, the chances of that happening are slim.

Unless you cut out the middleman and write the reviews yourself, of course.

Kwalee's most recent release, a Reversi ripoff labouring under the name "Pussy Flip", has already picked up a clutch of four- and five-star reviews. Some are just a single word long, and others read, funnily enough, a lot like something a marketing man whose friends are mostly spambots purchased from companies who sell worthless Twitter "followers" would have written:

"I like flipping and I love the pussies, so I'm having big fun flipping these kitties. I thought revers-eye might be boring but these pussies take it to the next level!"

Because THAT'S how the kids talk, right?

Just for fun, we decided to see which other games these "reviewers" liked. The results were surprising, by which we mean "possibly the least surprising thing we've ever seen". To help understand why, let's fill in a tiny bit of crucial background information:

Bruce, if you didn't know, used to work for David Darling at Codemasters. So bearing the content of the above tweet in mind, let's check out the work of these honest-to-goodness Pussy Flip fans. Click any of the pics to enlarge.

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"plw222" has reviewed just nine apps out of the 500,000 or so available on the App Store, two of which are versions of the same thing. Three are either Kwalee apps or those by other ex-Codemasters developers named in Bruce's tweet of September 3rd, and five of the other six are from the "AppyNation" stable inhabited by Fluid Football.

(With impressive irony/chutzpah, AppyNation recently published an article entitled "Hall Of Infamy", attacking the shady practice of paid-for review sites.)

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"Peter Jessen", meanwhile, has also reviewed just nine apps, including not just both of Kwalee's games but also their podcast. He's keen. The reason why might just be revealed in one of his other reviews:

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See if you can spot it.

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"Stufar" has offered his views entirely at random on seven App Store products, including two Kwalee games and the ex-Codemasters-developers title Fluid Football.

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"Nobber the face", on the other hand, has scoured the half-million games available to iOS users and decided to single out just one for praise – Pussy Flip, natch.

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As has the admirably concise "Justin Gorka", who devotes 50% of his review to writing his own name, a characteristic followers of Bruce's extraordinary, Alan Partridge-esque new blog (and particularly its fantastic picture captions) will find oddly familiar.

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And finally, "Tom Aherne" has broken a five-month silence to double his tally of reviews by telling us how fun Pussy Flip is. But wait, who's this on the Kwalee staff page?

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There's a name for pimping your own products with self-penned reviews purporting to be from members of the public – "astroturfing". It's so named because it's a fake form of "grass roots" publicity, and it's against the terms and conditions of most review sites (including the App Store) and gaming forums. It's sometimes even against the law.

We have, of course, no idea if Kwalee have been systematically indulging in such underhanded, tacky and dishonest behaviour – except of course for the bit where their CEO openly admits that he has, albeit under an assumed name. We merely present the evidence for readers to form their own opinion on.

We trust Apple will investigate the matter and take any action they deem appropriate, and that any other reviews of the (free) game which may subsequently appear can be relied on to be honest and independent appraisals by real gamers.