Santa Live Dead

by Eric March on December 6, 2008 at 5:33 pm

This is the story of an epic fail.

Those of you who have been following releases in the App Store may remember the arrival of a little app called Santa Live around mid-November.  It was the brainchild of Adam Majewski, CEO of Casual Game Network, based out of north Texas, and it was designed to be a kind of rendered 3D advent calendar in which, each day, an animated 3D santa would go about one daily chore or another, from wrapping gifts and feeding his reindeer to getting his E-Mail.  Each short video was only a few minutes in length, but it was a kind of cool idea for kids to get them into the holiday spirit, and all their parents had to do was shell out $1.99 for the app.

However, as if to prove that he was all about the money and didn’t really give a damn about the joy he purported to bring to children all over the world, he opened up a HIT (“Human Intelligence Task”) on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that literally paid MTurk users to buy Santa Live in order to give it a 5-star review.  He offered $4 per HIT, which would give those who accepted the HIT $2 profit plus the app for free.  He even gave MTurk users a code to use in their reviews — 5 periods at the end of their review — to show that they performed their task so that he could reward them.

This glowing mound of douchiness earned him no small storm of controversy, which included not only negative posts flying about the blogosphere, but also plenty of nasty hate mail, most of which wasn’t entirely undeserved.  The very idea of paid positive reviews cheapens the entire review process and makes it wholly unreliable.  Fortunately, there were plenty of people who weren’t on Majewski’s payroll who ended up giving it lower ratings anyway, so despite his bribes to shills, Santa Live didn’t get its overall 5-star rating like he’d hoped.  For his part, Adam wouldn’t give a straight answer about his marketing tactics, saying, “I can’t speak to the marketing efforts being done.  There’s numerous being done by people in my organization, and I do’nt know the day-to-day aspect…”  This despite the fact that his own name was on his MTurk HIT.

The controversy eventually died down and Santa Live started showing new videos, one per day, beginning on December 1st, right on schedule. Now, Adam is at the center of a brand new controversy.  His December 5th Santa Live video included the venerable parody tune “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” as a backing track.  Parents began to complain loudly as children, hearing the track, began asking questions about why Santa’s flying beasts had killed granny.  All of that began to fly back into Adam’s face very quickly.  As a result, Adam, who is still $12,000 in the hole for this project, has pulled the app completely from the App Store in spite of the fact that he still can’t quite figure out why his app failed.

Point to Adam: It was a pretty good idea, even if it was cheaply produced, and the kids seemed to love the concept, so he got that part right.

Point against Adam: He bribed people for 5-star reviews.  In public, though only to MTurk surfers.  That branded him a douchenozzle.  Then he backed one of the videos with a parody song not intended for children.  That branded him a douchenozzly idiot.

Boot to the Head: He has children of his own.

Bottom line: At least Adam and his family will keep warm this winter.  He’s going to have a pretty nice stockpile of coal.

Just to rub it in, here’s a video of Adam being interviewed on NBC, pre-controversy:

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Posted in App Store Removal, Application Related