November 10th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | 8 Comments »
Ever wanted to know how Glu acquires such high averages with their mobile game reviews? We have received a shocking e-mail conversation between a territory manager and a reviewer.
To protect the names of the employees involved, we deleted all references in the e-mail that they sent to a review site that requested a mobile game from them;
Ahoj xxxx,
I'm territory manager for XXX at Glu Mobile and YYY is Marketing Manager for the same region. We will be happy to support you with Race Driver Grid and all other hits we have, however I need to admit we need to accept any reviews you made. I mean we will not review every word or give you any advise what to write, but we will not allow publishing these reviews with low points given to our titles (for example less than 8/10).
Hope you are fine with this only one restriction and can understand it. Anyway just let us know which materials you need exactly and we will provide you with it (phone model for testing games, screens, promo text?).
Many greetings,
XXX
territory manager XXX
glu mobile
mob: XXX
http://www.glu.com
get glu'd to mobile entertainment
As you can imagine, the average scores of their mobile games are highly important for Glu when communicating with press and investors. We would love to know if any of the big quality channels like PocketGamer, IGN and AirGamer gave in to Glu’s demand.
UPDATE: Glu commented to this issue here.
As if Glu was the only 1… GL owns the biggest review-site in french, and they have a team of ppl browsing the web for bad publicity, so plz don’t act like if this is something oh – so – special.
Whatever the secret way is or was, it seems to have no affect on the ever falling share price. It hit a 52 week low today of 31 cents. What interests me is that they can get de-listed from the Nasdaq if the price per share stays under $1.00 for too long. However I believe there is an extension against the de-list rules until January 2009, so Glu will escape this.
Nasdaq’s Continued Listing Requirements
Nasdaq rules require, among other things, that a company’s listed securities maintain a $1 per share minimum closing bid price. If the company’s securities fail to meet that threshold for a period of 30 consecutive business days, the company will be granted a 180-day grace period to regain compliance with Nasdaq rules. Capital Market companies and Global Select and Global Market companies that transfer to the Capital Market are granted a second 180-day grace period to regain compliance with the rules. A company that is unable to satisfy Nasdaq requirements during these grace periods is subject to delisting.
October 20, 2008
On October 16, 2008, Nasdaq filed a rule change with the SEC to suspend temporarily Nasdaq’s continued listing requirements relating to bid price and market value of publicly held shares through January 16, 2009. The rule change is effective immediately.
EA and GL is doing the same – if you do not write good reviews or give just a bad review for Fifa2009 you get at once a strange mail and the information that the next marketing budget is not going to you.
Most of the big sites are owned by the big ones. Just check out who pay the bills of the reviewer so thats just fair isnt it? Thats why such magazines loose the consumer. Airgamer just publish erotic news – is this really what the consumer want to see I doubt that. Perhaps Airgamer wants to attract erotic advertizers soon.
Its time to make money also for the magazines so if GL, EA or GLU is paying the bills for good reviews lets be it. This industry is sick – so please Arjan stay independent and be one source of good news.
Hey why bombard on Good Arjan,
If this is how the industry is then… hmmm… its very skeptical as to who are supporting these reviews.
Hey Arjan,
You’re right to ask, but I have one very quick response to whether Pocket Gamer engages in this:
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/Mobile/Quantum+of+Solace:+The+Game/review.asp?c=9919
But to make it clear, Glu games have received all kinds of scores on Pocket Gamer – 5s, 6s, 7s, 8s, 9s…
So we’ve never had a request from Glu like the one in your story, and we’d never grant it to any publisher.
We syndicate our reviews out to people like Vodafone and Samsung, and as part of those agreements, we commit to reviewing every game that’s available. So if a publisher did ever say ‘we won’t send you our games unless you guarantee a good mark’, we’d just go out and buy the games.
Hope this makes our stance clear!
Hi Stuart,
I am happy that PG is not giving in to such requests. Thanks!
Hi Stuart,
Something that is puzzling me btw, slightly off the subject… games receiving low reviews on operator portals, actually displayed under the game. Any idea why a carrier would permit this? ie we can see some games launched and receiving scores of 4 or 5 out of 10… makes you wonder why the game was launched in the first place and this is of course a personal opinion of the review team. My point being, how can a carrier justify the resources/costs involved in launching a game (quite high these days), only to demean the product once it’s live?
I can’t really talk for the operators ;o)
But obviously, deals to launch games are signed between operators and publishers months before our reviews are published, so there’s not a link between the two in that sense.
As a gamer, it feels healthy that operators are willing to publish poor scores next to games on their portal, rather than, say, removing any marks below 6 so that consumers get no warning that a game may be sub-par.
I daresay you might get a different view from some publishers – but that’s something for discussion between them and the operators.
What I would say is that while it’s great to have PG review scores on-portal, in time they’ll become just one element alongside, say, user ratings and the marketing text from the publisher.
On the question of why operators actively promote games that they know are poor or underwhelming… well, that’s a different kettle of fish…