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Worth it to respond to every player review? (Google Play)
99% of the time players leave awesome, thoughtful reviews, ideas, and suggestions. But some days they leave such inane comments that I can't bring myself to respond.
Recent Example: "OMG i luv this. best gaaaame but i want to see the score go down." 1/5 stars.
Between this and the inevitable "I'm giving you one star until you change 'x' ", I find myself responding to comments less and less. As a one man team, I've stopped replying all together on my most popular game (I still respond to bugs, emails, or Facebook messages) and haven't seen a major impact on either score or downloads (I've dropped from 4.1 stars to 3.8, but downloads are up).
In the thousands of responses I've sent, only four or five player have ever actually changed their review.
I understand it takes a lot of time and effort to keep up with customers enough to stay over 4 stars on the Play store, but what do you think? Is it worth the effort?
I say yes... for the first few weeks, but after you've established a decent score, forget about it until you can either outsource or hire a customer service rep. You have bugs to fix and other programs to write.




I think if it's as really inane and/or poorly written comment that seems like no thought was put into it, it's probably best to just ignore it. The reviewer will most likely have moved on and will never even think about your game again, so any attempts to engage them is wasted time.
It's hard to know as review scores to drive some users to buy/download. We're trying the contacting of people, when we think we've fixed an issue at moment. I know other devs who've done this quite well, but it is a lot of work!