How HyperHug got back in touch with 50,000 players and lifted Oxide installs by 34%
Reviews automation + ASO consulting — iOS textual update
HyperHug used AppFollow to work through two separate problems for Oxide: Survival Island. A reactivation campaign reached 50,000 legacy players and got 1,100 of them to update their ratings. A metadata update recovered a lost keyword and pushed search downloads up 34% in two weeks.
Challenges
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Around 50,000 legacy reviews from August 2021 through August 2025, all from users who played before HyperHug's improvements
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None of those reviews had ever received a reply, so players who left dissatisfied had no way of knowing the game had changed
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The 'NDA keyword' had dropped out of meaningful rankings, and related keywords followed
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Search visibility had plateaued, which was putting a ceiling on organic installs
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The survival game category has a lot of competition (Last Day on Earth, Raft, ARK, Last Island of Survival), so getting rankings back meant fixing the metadata, not adding UA spend
Numbers reached with AppFollow
50K
replies sent to legacy reviews
1,100
users changed their rating
+1.461⭐
average reply effect (rating improvement)
2.2%
conversion rate (replies → rating changes)
+34%
Search downloads
+11%
Search impressions
+152
Net new ranked keywords
+1.26%
Search conversion rate lift
Key satisfaction
Reviews
HyperHug sent personalized reactivation replies to around 50,000 reviews rated 1 to 4 stars that had never received a response, using AppFollow's enterprise automation. The campaign covered reviews from August 2021 through August 2025, inviting users to return and try the improved version of the game. 1,100 of those users came back and raised their rating by an average of 1.461 stars, a 2.2% conversion rate on outreach to players who hadn't heard from the team before.
The backlog of unanswered legacy reviews is cleared. Players who felt ignored got a reply (and some of them apparently liked what they found when they came back).
HyperHug tends to take player feedback seriously, working through reports and resolving issues quickly so players feel supported when they run into problems in-game.
ASO
The 'NDA keyword' came back, along with the associated word cloud the team had flagged as the main driver of installs. Search conversion rate went from 6.08% to 7.34%, so the traffic increase wasn't just volume. It came from a single textual metadata update, no paid spend, no creative changes, no app version dependency.
Metadata doesn't always get prioritized in mobile game marketing, which is understandable. But search rankings shift, competitors get more aggressive, and keyword positions that used to bring in solid traffic can erode slowly enough that nobody notices until the numbers drop. Running a keyword check every quarter or so makes it easier to catch that before it becomes a bigger problem.
