This is a topic I both love and hate. It both boils my blood and forces me to laugh at myself. How/why/when has addiction to something become a valid and accepted marketing tool? I can talk about this for ages and have on various occasions in the interwebs, so nothing of the sort here. I'm just interested in the opinions of consumers in the iOS market - do you think marketing a product (game) as addictive is a valid "strategy"? Does it work? Should it be allowed? What are your thoughts in general on the subject?
I think a game should not be marketed as addictive until a few weeks/months after release. When people market their game as a 'Brand New Addictive Game' with nothing to back that up i usually turn my back on it. You can't claim that your game is good until you gotten the numbers and ranks to prove it.... That's my Can of Worms on this....
As a more general statement, any game description telling me the game is [insert quality here] when it's really something that the player should decide is an instant cue for me to skip to the next one. Your game is "addicting"? How do you know I would find it addicting? Oh wait, you mean some people find it addicting? What a useless piece of information. Even some terrible games have a non-zero number of people who would describe it as such. Hodapp's use of the word "fluff" is the perfect way to summarize 90+% of iOS games' descriptions.
I also dislike the idea of the word 'addictive' being used in a positive light for marketing games. I studied game design at Uni and one of my fellow students would argue with me about how being seen to create 'addictive' games was the best praise you could ever get. But then he also argued that all app games should be $0.99 in order to create sales, regardless of what the game actually was >_> I won't be going into business with him anyway
That was an interesting read I hadn't come across before, thank you! Well your fellow student has a slight point - if after players get their grubby little hands on your game and reviews start flooding in with 5 star ratings and words like "addicting" thrown in, that's cool. It's different from the developer themselves saying "Hey, we made this addictive thing, knock yourselves out." Personally, even if that was the case, I still wouldn't use the word "addictive" anywhere near the description. That said, for the majority of players, do you think describing a game as addictive works? I mean, look at Doodle Jump - even it's title is the worst offender ever, and it did pretty well.
