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Seeing the App Store for the first time could be a bit overwhelming. Literally thousands of games will be jumping for the chance to entice you. Knowing the competition if fierce, developers have to get creative and even downright nefarious in order to grab your attention. It wasn't always like that, though. There was a time when the App Store seemed like a perfectly safe place to explore and find new experiences. Lately, however, the waters have changed. Everyone wants a piece of the pie and the only way to get it must be to deceive you or risk loosing their investments.

 

I first noticed this change when a game I was looking forward to finally hit the App Store. It was supposed to be the showcase for the store, a game that truly demonstrates the graphical power of this new device. I do not want to announce any specific names here, but know that it was a highly touted release. Reading the description for the game only got me more excited with sentences and promises even a console game would blush at. The pictures following the description put any PSP game to shame, and I don't think a single person on the planet could have hit the "Buy Now" button faster than I did. It must have been some kind of record.

 

Then I launched the game, and I was curious what I was looking at. It was a good looking game for sure, but not what those pictures in the front looked like. Is something wrong with my iPod Touch? Did I do something wrong? No, I had done nothing wrong. I was lied to. I was duped, manipulated, cheated. Those pictures were Photoshopped and tweaked. I was pushed into a purchase for the game not because of the amazing job the developers did, but because of the great job their Photoshop guy did.

 

One by one, more games started using this tactic. Big name developers jumped into the App Store head first, and quicker than you could say "I'm not paying $1.99 for this game!!" the store had turned into a battlefield. No longer could you trust the pictures in the descriptions, or even the descriptions themselves. I have read some really winners in my time. Games telling you of their amazing graphics, addictive gameplay, and fantastic replay value assured you of their quality. However, actually buying and playing the game revealed how far the truth had been stretched. Developers began launching games with the first line of their description reading "On sale Now!! Half Off Until Monday!!!". However, Monday came and went and the sales was still on. That is when you realize you had been duped into this purchase for fear of missing this "Sale", when it wasn't a sale at all.

 

All of these tactics have become commonplace inside the App Store. A new adopter can easily be fooled and eventually give up on it. Developers must understand that lying to us is not how you are going to guarantee our continued business. You may fool us once, but we will remember. What has happened here should be a lesson to all the other up and coming digital game stores. Do not allow the developers who put their games on your service to stretch the truth. Nothing good can come of it, and lying to your customers is a really bad way to kick off a business.