MMO gold farming business model translates to your iPhone "friend"

Every game developer / production has "been there" before; the product is done and it's time to market for generating sales.

In today's arena, part of the marketing strategy is to pound away at your SEO in order to boost awareness in the search engines about your game / product. Whether you start going through social media networks on Twitter / Facebook, hitting review blogs and even asking friends and neighbours to just write about your game...the more general content mentioning your game, the more chances you'll drive up visits to the website.

In the "hit driven" markets like Flash gaming portals or the Apple iPhone AppStore, it's a basic free-for-all to get your game noticed over the thousands of others. As such, these areas rely almost completely on ratings to help customers / players sort through the best from the mediocre / worst.

I’m surprised this actually took THIS long to materialize, given the amount of money flowing through the Apple iPhone app store. A company called Reverb Communications uses a farm of interns who trawl the internet posting reviews and comments on applications by their clients.

It’s a brilliant strategy honestly, driven because of the “hit chart” mentality that the App Store has devolved into and fosters. The only way your app is going to be noticed among the other hundreds / thousands out there is to get it bubbled up through the ratings system.

Obviously, I don’t condone outright lying about products to generate SEO traffic, but if it’s a good app that you’re trying to market and sell, then is it any different from asking all your friends / coworkers to generate “noise” on the internet for you?

Even the MMO gold farmers need something to do before Cataclysm.