Developer fans please help us! Today we have stumbled upon a mystery we, as reviewers, don’t quite understand. We recently attended a webinar stating that ASO (App Store Optimization) is dead. Whether ASO is dead or not we have no idea, but we do know that there are 2 mysterious games that just won’t go away!
Quick Experiment
On your, (or your friend’s) iPhone, try searching the names of this month’s popular new game releases. Papery Planes, Charming Keep, Evil Factory, Chroma Rush, or Fire Emblem Heros.
…do you see it? …The second search result for all of these searches?
Looking a little deeper
Taking a look at the name of this “mystery game” will pretty much instantly explain what’s going on. Fire Charming Emblem : Evil Factory Heros Keep (a.k.a. Cash Me Outside) is a very long game to give to your new release. That’s for sure!
…What does “Fire Charming Emblem” even mean?
So the moral of the story is:
If you’d like your game to rank in popular search results just give it an extremely optimized name that sounds a little like that of a few new popular releases and you should be good to go? Well… no…😕
Because the mystery gets crazier!
Scrolling a little further down (i.e. the 3rd search result) you will find a game that looks surprisingly similar to “Fire Charming Emblem : Evil Factory Heros Keep” that is published by an entirely different developer!
Downloading the two games you’ll notice that they both look and feel surprisingly similar.
In fact, besides one having a slightly darker theme than the other, they are essentially the exact same game!
Although both games have extremely spammy titles “Fire Charming Emblem : Evil Factory Heros Keep” the game itself is surprisingly high quality and enjoyable!
Making this mystery all the more puzzling…
Unfortunately, this is as far as our investigation gets. Checking out the developer websites for the two games leaves no clues as to who made them and for what purpose?
We have no idea…
If you’re interested in continuing where our investigation left off, please feel free to fill us in with what you discover.
Why are there 2 identical games published by 2 different developers that appear in almost every popular search result? It is quite a mystery…
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