I am working on my own game (heh heh... we all are right?)...
So I am constantly playing other DEVs games, to help me think outside the box and improve my own craft....
That being said, I usually look through the "Latest Updates" thread to see what is out there.... but I either just download and play the games that have 4/5 star ratings OR the ones that are brand new and not rated. I generally skip over the stuff with 3 or less stars.... but I might peek at the game page and read the reviews if the teaser art was good enough.
So it got me thinking.... these games that have been out "for a while" and have 10 or more "Reviews" but are rated 3 or less.... It makes me cringe to think that they are doing the same things over and over again, update after update, but just not hitting a groove with players. At some point I'd think you'd have to look at the reviews and make some adjustments to how you are doing things... right?
If you have a game... Version 4.3, that has been out for a while, has 2 stars with 18 reviewers and every other comment is dinging you for poor grammar/sentence structure, you'd think that that game developer would have a help wanted ad up in the Recruitment & Services thread.
Maybe the story is good, but after 8 updates players are making negative comments on the art work, maybe, just maybe, its time to find a decent 3d/2d artist to help out...
No?
I understand there are outliers, you know, you got the only game for folks with a toilet brush fetish so they might be willing to overlook a lot cause' its literally the only game in town, but sheesh....
It's not about the rating. There are many examples of badly rated games that make more money than most games. It would be more relevant to look at games that don't make money and wonder why.
If you get a lot of heat for your bad spelling and grammar, you should consider fixing it no matter what your rating is.
Most developers don't have accounts on here so they don't read reviews.
And most negative reviews aren't reviews more than they are rants about something, whether it be grind, bugs or the writing. Just like most positive reviews are very shallow, most negative ones aren't very constructive. Those mentioned issues can be fixed, but finding someone to help fix them is easier said than done.
So I think it's ok to have a poorly rated game, you use that game to learn how to do stuff and apply those new skills to your next game.
So it got me thinking.... these games that have been out "for a while" and have 10 or more "Reviews" but are rated 3 or less.... It makes me cringe to think that they are doing the same things over and over again, update after update, but just not hitting a groove with players. At some point I'd think you'd have to look at the reviews and make some adjustments to how you are doing things... right?
I'm curious to see how you'll react when your own game will be out.
There's only three flaws that can effectively be fixed, the dialogs, the writing, and the pace. Add the character building and game mechanism, that can be slightly corrected, and it's all the author can do without having to restart his game from scratch.
You can't change a character personality mid game. You forget a story line and pick another one out of nowhere. You can't change the CGs like that. And obviously you can't change the game mechanism just like that.
At least you can't if you don't want to suddenly see the rating decrease because your total lack of concern regarding constancy turned your game into a big mess.
And obviously there's the author that don't care this much. They know they are at their limits, and just don't have the money to hire someone ; because, well, for 90% of them, making a game is something that costs more than it pays. So they continue, because there's some people who like what they are doing, and those persons deserve to see the end of the story.
1) If its making money, its ok, regardless of whether it has bad reviews or not. But if it isn't making money, figure out why (but don't look at reviews because they don't matter?)
2) Players, at least at this site, post negative reviews for reasons like " grind, bugs or the writing ", but those are dismissive arguments?, Just keep going, continuing to make a bad game because... "experience".
3) Developers make their game for themselves, not players (not sure how that ties in to 1 above, but ok)
4) If things can't be changed easily... then don't change them?
I dunno...
Kind of a mixed bag of advice from folks (Developers) who have games that average 4-5 star ratings.
I'll restate the question a bit differently.
If you have a game with a 1 star rating average of 20 reviewers, I'd feel pretty confident to say that game is a shit-show. To answer Anne's " I'm curious to see how you'll react when your own game will be out. "....
I don't know what the download/play vs take time to Review ratio for F95 is, but I am guessing that if 18 people take time to write a review, than a shit-ton have probably played it.
If, after releasing my game, several versions of updates, said game garners 20 reviews and they average 1 star, I'll tell you right now what I'd do, I would read every review and weigh the complaints for their merit. If the game is indeed a soup sandwhich, I would tear it down and build it back up or add it to the pile of abandoned games.
Personally, I think there is a big difference between a review that says, "Oh fuck, another incest game with a dude that has a 14" cock and a mom with 54 KK tits", and one that says, "This Developer's story is all over the place and doesn't make sense... ".
Ratings are not everything. They usually don't tell the whole story and tend to be biased.
Based on how many people download a game and how many reviews are on that page, there is huge difference.
Normally i would look how many donors a game has. This tells usually a more precise story about a game.
1) If its making money, its ok, regardless of whether it has bad reviews or not. But if it isn't making money, figure out why (but don't look at reviews because they don't matter?)
2) Players, at least at this site, post negative reviews for reasons like " grind, bugs or the writing ", but those are dismissive arguments?, Just keep going, continuing to make a bad game because... "experience".
3) Developers make their game for themselves, not players (not sure how that ties in to 1 above, but ok)
4) If things can't be changed easily... then don't change them?
I dunno...
Kind of a mixed bag of advice from folks (Developers) who have games that average 4-5 star ratings.
I'll restate the question a bit differently.
If you have a game with a 1 star rating average of 20 reviewers, I'd feel pretty confident to say that game is a shit-show. To answer Anne's " I'm curious to see how you'll react when your own game will be out. "....
I don't know what the download/play vs take time to Review ratio for F95 is, but I am guessing that if 18 people take time to write a review, than a shit-ton have probably played it.
If, after releasing my game, several versions of updates, said game garners 20 reviews and they average 1 star, I'll tell you right now what I'd do, I would read every review and weigh the complaints for their merit. If the game is indeed a soup sandwhich, I would tear it down and build it back up or add it to the pile of abandoned games.
Personally, I think there is a big difference between a review that says, "Oh fuck, another incest game with a dude that has a 14" cock and a mom with 54 KK tits", and one that says, "This Developer's story is all over the place and doesn't make sense... ".
I was trying to suggest that making an "objectively" good game (even though one could argue that there is no such thing), a profitable game, and a game that the developer simply wants to make for whatever reason (like the legitimate goal might be to try to achieve 20 reviews with 1 star, I am not aware of any game that would manage that, you need to attract and engage enough players to consistently hate your game to a maximum degree).
The point is, that various devs might have other motivations than just pleasing players.
1) If its making money, its ok, regardless of whether it has bad reviews or not. But if it isn't making money, figure out why (but don't look at reviews because they don't matter?)
No. He told you that money is often a better indicator than reviews. Because if a game is making money, it means that people like it enough to pay for it, whereas making a review is cheap and is not an engagement in in of itself. There are plenty of reasons for a review to be biaised. There are not as many reasons for someone to support a game they hate.
Money speaks much louder than many other things because in business, it is pretty much the ultimate form of endorsment.
It's not everything, but it is a very good indicator of whether or not people like your game. (Although your game being not known can mean you dont make as much as you should, for exemple.)
2) Players, at least at this site, post negative reviews for reasons like " grind, bugs or the writing ", but those are dismissive arguments?, Just keep going, continuing to make a bad game because... "experience".
No. He told you that the majority of reviews are not constructive. If I tell you your game 'is horribly written', how do you go about fixing that? There is nothing in that review that tells you how you go about fixing the issue. That is why the person is telling you that those reviews are shallow, because they just tell you the opinion of the reviewer, without adding anything of substance that could be acted upon.
No. He told you that various developers make a game for various reasons. Some do it purely for money, some do it to make the game they want, some do it because they want more games with a specific fetish, etc.
So just because someone reviewed a game doesn't mean a dev will act upon it, because it might just be that the dev does not want to do so. For exemple, if you make a game with NTR in it and you want to keep that fetish in, and reviews tell you to remove it, you might just tell them 'no', no matter how badly they rate your game for it.
No. What Anne told you is that sometimes there are things that a dev is told to change that they don't really have the resources to change. Not if they want to keep developing their current game, anyway. And believe it or not, but a dev might not be willing to scrap his entire game just because someone rated it 1 star.
Personally, I think there is a big difference between a review that says, "Oh fuck, another incest game with a dude that has a 14" cock and a mom with 54 KK tits", and one that says, "This Developer's story is all over the place and doesn't make sense... ".
Neither comment is useful. Usually, useful reviews will point out how to fix the perceived flaws. Neither of the two reviews you put would help you to find a way to fix the issues.
Like, what if an incest game with a 14 inch cock MC and a 54 KK tits is what people actually want? What if there is actually a population that is ready to pay for it? That's an exemple of a review that contradicts the intent of the developer. They know they are playing with a well used theme, but if it pays, then they will keep doing it.
As for the 'this story is all over the place and doesn't make sense', how is it all over the place? What doesn't make sense? Without something like that being mentionned, a review like that is 100% useless.
And, believe it or not, those are the kind of reviews that devs get all the time.
I had a review on a strip minesweeper game I made that read 'It's exactly what it says it is, but I would have expected it to have more to it', and it was a 2 star review. I since had a very lenghty review by a friend of mine who likes games like that and who gave me several pointers of where the game failed, where it could be improved, etc. So I know that the guy who gave me 2 stars probably could have told me a lot of interesting things, but since he only bothered to tell me 'yeah your game is just what it says it is, 2 stars' and never answered any personal communication I tried to have with him, there was nothing I could do about his review, no matter how much I would want to.
1) If its making money, its ok, regardless of whether it has bad reviews or not. But if it isn't making money, figure out why (but don't look at reviews because they don't matter?)
Reviews are biased, it's a year long problem. Two third of them are wrote by either a fanboy or a hater, therefore, yes, they don't matter much. And also yes, since more than half adult creators on Patreon are earning less than US$ 200/month, how much you'll earn is a way better indicator than those reviews.
2) Players, at least at this site, post negative reviews for reasons like " grind, bugs or the writing ", but those are dismissive arguments?, Just keep going, continuing to make a bad game because... "experience".
Of course they are dismissive arguments. Not liking grinding is a question of personal taste. Bugs are to expect since around 80% of the creators are purely amateurs ; what matter is not that they exist, but that they are fixed. As for the writing, while it's less subjective, it still partly rely on a question of personal taste.
And also yes, again because most creators are doing this for the first time, continuing their project, whatever how bad can be the reviews, is an important source of experience.
It's a guess, but for probably half of them, yes, they give it a try for themselves. It doesn't mean that they don't care about the players, but it's not the reason why they started, nor the reason why they continue.
And obviously there's the fact that they are making the game "that way" because it's how they want it to be. People will complain because there's grinding, sandbox, mini-games ? Why the author should care ? It just mean that it's not a game for them, period.
A game need to be coherent and rely on constancy. It's not that you can't easily change "things", it's that most of them can't be changed at all. It's not because most of them are released in updates that the game shouldn't be considered as a single and unique entity. Any serious creator know this, even amateur ones ; reason why so many games on the scene have one reboot/restart.
If, after releasing my game, several versions of updates, said game garners 20 reviews and they average 1 star, I'll tell you right now what I'd do, I would read every review and weigh the complaints for their merit. If the game is indeed a soup sandwhich, I would tear it down and build it back up or add it to the pile of abandoned games.
And you would prove GrumpyGranny right, you're making the game for yourself more than for the public. How explain otherwise that you would stop everything, depriving the players from the suit of your story, just because a bunch of angry guys used your game as punching ball ?
You really need to understand that rating mean absolutely nothing.
Take a game like LOK: Rebirth by example. The game is two years old, still in progress. It have the low rating of 1.5, yet the thread have 127 pages. 16 peoples wrote a review, most to say how bad the game is, yet 1,855 people thought that the game is good enough and are pledging for it on Patreon.
Of course, it's a game that have a history and talk to anyone a bit old on the scene. But it's not because you feel some nostalgia that you'll pledge for a pile of shit.
Personally, I think there is a big difference between a review that says, "Oh fuck, another incest game with a dude that has a 14" cock and a mom with 54 KK tits", and one that says, "This Developer's story is all over the place and doesn't make sense... ".
Yes there's a difference. The first one is explicitly subjective, while the second one is as subjective, but this time implicitly.
In the first example, the author don't hide that he base all his review on his own personal taste. But the second example isn't less subjective, everything rely on the reviewer ability to understand the story and its possible subtlety. The story can effectively goes all over the place, or the reviewer can have missed the common thread between each part of it. And once again this can perfectly be due to his lack of smartness, instead of being a flaw coming from the author.
1) Seriously? I am really surprised you put the effort in on that one.
You basically just re-stated, what I paraphrased. - If its making money, its ok, regardless of whether it has bad reviews or not. -
2)
Ambir, you are painting with an awfully broad brush regarding reviews, and then build your own straw man. I've seen reviews that provide constructive criticism and I'd like to think that I have given them. While nobody likes to be told they have an ugly baby, if there is a theme told over and over again by multiple reviewers, I'd recommend getting some help in that area*
Here is a Real Review of a Game... you tell me if it is shallow and unhelpful
Another addition (that is not mutually exclusive) would be the addition of various items or bonuses to be accrued in the game by reaching progression levels with the girls. Similarly this would help to characterize the girls as well as stop some of the more frustrating aspects of minesweeper. For instance a once per game item to see if a single tile is a mine that gives you no other info about it as a power of oracle from one of the witch characters
Now a developer could say, "fuck off mr know-it-all-reviewer", but to me, that seems like some good stuff that a developer should at least consider. What is your take?
If somebody says in a review (or in a thread for that matter) that your game has a bug, eg. "When you click on the dildo on top of the dryer, you get a rollback error", It probably means you should check out that part of the game... right? So if there is something of substance there (in the review) it should probably be acted on...no? IF so, then they really are NOT dismissive arguments.
3) Sigh.... again, I'll use your word, "comprehension"
I said, paraphrasing again, - Developers make their game for themselves, not players
So just because someone reviewed a game doesn't mean a dev will act upon it, because it might just be that the dev does not want to do so. For exemple, if you make a game with NTR in it and you want to keep that fetish in, and reviews tell you to remove it, you might just tell them 'no', no matter how badly they rate your game for it.
What Anne told you is that sometimes there are things that a dev is told to change that they don't really have the resources to change. Not if they want to keep developing their current game, anyway. And believe it or not, but a dev might not be willing to scrap his entire game just because someone rated it 1 star
And there are roughly 12,284-ish games available.
2970-ish of those games have no review at all....
There are around 500 with ratings between at least 1 and slightly less than 2 stars
What I want to say next is, the really good games and the really bad games seem to get the most reviews. But I can't say that because I am basing what I am considering good/bad on the positive or negative reviews (aka "stars" that a game has).
I know you are going to tell me that is wrong...
But these are the top 5 "weighted Review 5 star games"
Pale Carnations (300 reviews), Eternum (442 reviews), Being a Dick (1203 reviews), Once in a Lifetime (688 reviews), and Artemis (260 reviews)
The reviews are either legit or they are not. Now I know that you can't please everybody with a single game, but do I REALLY HAVE TO FOLLOW THE LINK TO THEIR PATREON TO SEE HOW MANY SUBSCRIBERS THEY HAVE? What is the Rubric for Patreon?
What is the measure of a good game then?
On the other hand, Who's the Father? might be in the running for game with the most reviews and lowest score. The game page itself has had 9.5M Views, and 89 folks have combined to give that game a 1.2 star rating. But hey, it just might be the best game ever... IF I really want to see if I should play it or not... fuck those reviews, just head on over to the
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to see how many subscribers there are which automatically tells me if it is any good... right?
But I do need help here. I don't know how to read that page to tell if it is good as I can't see the numbers of Patrons dispersed between the 14 levels of sponsorship... Ambir, you are good with comprehension right? Care to help out a friend?
So getting back to the starting question, I'll ask it differently, as I am earnest is my quest for knowledge (though my question seemed to be dismissed out of hand by some) as I prepare to launch my own game...
And humor me, because I AM NOT GOING TO USE PATREON, due to its restrictions on artistic freedom....
How does a Developer know when their game is struggling and might need help?
(and please, if you miss your high school debate team days and are just looking to try and score cheap points - unironically like a bad reviewer, please just skip this thread)
*which was the point of the question I asked in the first place
What I want to say next is, the really good games and the really bad games seem to get the most reviews.
.... Who's the Father? might be in the running for game with the most reviews and lowest score.
Not really, but the weighted rating make it seem like good and bad games get the most reviews. Sure, the very best and successful games will naturally get many reviews, because so many people play them, but they still benefit from the weighted rating, pushing them higher on the weighted rating list than games with fewer reviews (but with higher rating score). Same with the lowest rated games (the ones showing last of the weighted rating list), but the other way. They aren't actually the lowest rated, but the lowest WEIGHTED rated games. Who's the Father is the worst weighted rated game precisely because it has so many reviews AND a really sucky score (1.5), but there are many games with less score than 1.5.
Btw, here you can see the only public data on Who's the father's Patreon stats, which is just the patron count until he hid that too.
So getting back to the starting question, I'll ask it differently, as I am earnest is my quest for knowledge (though my question seemed to be dismissed out of hand by some) as I prepare to launch my own game...
And humor me, because I AM NOT GOING TO USE PATREON, due to its restrictions on artistic freedom....
How does a Developer know when their game is struggling and might need help?
That is a really complex question that has multiple factors. (TLDR at the bottom)
I would say, first you need to pay attention to what people are saying. So, reviews, what's being said in your thread, what people say on discord, on twitter, etc.
It can be hard, because there tends to be a lot of negativity sometimes, but I believe it's still worth it if you have the mental fortitude to do it. If you don't, that's fine, there are other ways.
So, if you do check reviews, comments, etc, the most important point, and I cannot stress this out enough, is to remember that those are wishes that people tell you about. So, those answers you get, they are what people consciously think.
Now, in marketing, they teach you a very important lesson, and it is that people do not evaluate products with their brains (rational thinking), but they evaluate them through the lens of their needs (emotions/wants/desires). So, whenever you get feedback, it is not necessarily what the user wants. It is what they think they want. You need to always remember that.
As one of the commenters stated before, you can probably always trust feedback you get that points out a bug or a typo.
It's when people start commenting about the story, gameplay, etc. that things become more complicated.
Now, here's where we have a bit of an issue, you and me. So, I read this book, which is called
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. It is, in my humble opinion, a really really good book. What it puts forward is a strategy to make startups succesful through making market experiments. Basically, the goal is to actually try to sell a product that only has the minimum features to be viable for the market. Because if you can do that, then you know that you have a good product. And conversely, if you can't make any sales with your minimum features proposition, then your product is most likely doomed to fail, because no matter how much pretty glitter you put on it, shit is still shit.
In the book, the author suggests that money is a really good indicator to know if people want your product, whereas if you ask for an opinion or for reviews, people will not be as objective. They might villify your product, or on the contrary praise it undeservedly, which would lead to a faulty analysis on your part if you use that data. If they buy your product, however, then you'll know they really wanted the value you offered in your product.
The author was of the opinion that you should experiment in a way that if you are going to fail, you will fail quickly, and you will learn from your failure, so that you can then change things for the better in a subsequent iteration (So, a good exemple would be, if you want to make a game with a RPG system, implement it in v0.1 and make it so that the player has to interact with it as much as possible. You will get a lot of feedback, and you'll quickly be able to know if it sucks, what sucks in it, and then you can make one of 3 decisions, either continue like you are, make changes as required to your project, or just scrap the project entirely and start on something new.)
This is all business theory, however I believe it translates almost perfectly to video games, because if you can show a game prototype that get people hooked, they will want more and will come back for it.
Now, can you determine if your game is struggling without selling it? I believe you probably can, albeit with a lower success rate (Lower, so it doesn't mean that it will be a bad success rate, just that it's, in my opinion, less reliable). I'd say, good indicators are if you get a lot of negative comments, reviews, not too many reactions/engagement with the posts you are making, etc.
I think you can use this much the same way as you could the amount of money you are earning, however you always need to be aware of the biais that exists in these means of getting feedback, that of users not being fully aware of what they want.
Imo, an important factor would probably be what isn't there. So, if you get no interaction with your game, no downloads, no people who buy it, then you probably have a problem somewhere. Maybe your banner is bad, maybe your game is not looking attractive, or maybe the game is just bad and people are telling each other about it, leading to people avoiding your game.
Here's a TLDR/conclusion:
1. If you get even a single bad review, comment or feedback of any kind that is intelligently written and criticize a part of your game that you are not sure about wanting to change, I would consider asking for second opinions.
2. If you don't get any interaction on your game, then you are probably doing something wrong.
3. Overwhelmingly negative feedback is probably a sign that something is going wrong.
4. Not getting a lot of money for your game also signals that something might be wrong.
It's hard to tell you what might be wrong, so once you identify that you might have an issue, I would advise you to ask for feedback, maybe make polls marketed towards people who enjoy your game, maybe ask for fellow developers, etc.
Maybe you could also get yourself some dedicated testers to help you out with improving the user experience, or you could play your game as if you were someone who knew nothing about it and try to see what might frustrate players.
You need to diagnosis what the issue is so that you have a clear idea of what you need to work on. Then, you can establish a solution that is in line with what you want to do with your game.
In general, I'd say, establish a clear vision of what you want your game to be, be open to criticism and try to read deeper into what people say to get the essence of their criticism/advice/feedback. Then try to implement solutions that are aimed at what you believe people desire.
You're probably going to go wrong here and there. However, as long as you keep an open and honest communication with your players, then you should get there eventually.
(and please, if you miss your high school debate team days and are just looking to try and score cheap points - unironically like a bad reviewer, please just skip this thread)
*which was the point of the question I asked in the first place
I do genuinely want to help you, so I focused this post on your last question. Still, I wanted to give you an answer on the other things you said, because I believe it is important. Here it is:
Are you this dense that you don't understand that, in an argumentation, "patreon" is the short way to say "whatever platform or service you'll use to monetize your creation" ?
One will not be more popular because he use subscribestar, a tipjar, or whatever, in place of Patreon. He will struggle in the same way, and would be ranked at the same place whatever the platform/service he'll use.
I would say, first you need to pay attention to what people are saying. So, reviews, what's being said in your thread, what people say on discord, on twitter, etc.
Is this really telling someone that a game is struggling ?
If people talk about it, it mean that people tried it. And when you look at threads for some "hated" games, you'll see half the complaining guys coming to complain after each updates ; proof that, despite what they said, they are still playing.
In our time of communication, I think that the sole effective proof that a creation is struggling, it's when no one talk about it. The creation feel so irrelevant, that you can't find something to say, not even something purely neutral. Therefore, the only way to know that the game is struggling is by seeing that it isn't "popular".
Really few people talk about it. Most people who are writing in the game thread do it to complain or to warn about a bug, and there's near to no activity between each updates.
But there's no real way to know that a game is good, or that a game could be better. There's marvelous games that don't have the success they deserve, and average games that are a total hit. Anyway, what "struggling" mean ?
A game like Drawing My Life wasn't the best creation that can be found, still it have its public, with a 3.5 rating, and forefinger past three years working on it, not abandonning. Same rating for Family Affair, that attract a bigger fan base. And its author have 158 patrons, what place it on the top 1,000 (over more than 5,000).
For both games there's tons of place for improvements, since they both are clearly bellow the average. Yet they aren't struggling.
I think that it's all about the form.
There's those who will argues, and those who will arguments. The more time people will pass on expressing their thought, the more you can expect them to hide some truth ; they don't just say what they found bad in the game, they also explain why they are thinking it's bad.
After, it's up to the creator to decide what to do with those information. Did they effectively point to flaws in his creation process, or are they pointing flaws due to the creative choices he made ? In the first case, he should try to fix them if it's possible, in the other case he can just discard them.
Now, here's where we have a bit of an issue, you and me. So, I read this book, which is called
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. [...] if you can't make any sales with your minimum features proposition, then your product is most likely doomed to fail, because no matter how much pretty glitter you put on it, shit is still shit.
Not really sure that it can apply to a market that is purely lead by emotions and over saturated.
How many gems are hidden because they were released at the wrong time (WVM had an update the same day by example) ? While it's known that the core base of the community will wait few updates before trying a game, if you miss your launch, you're generally doomed forever. People will pass through your game threads, see that there's not much pages, then looks at the thread opening with an already bad opinion.
Excepted few particular cases (mostly a kink that you really like), half of the time we decide to try a game because it feel less bad than the others. Therefore, if we believe that it's probably not a good game, because there's so few interaction in the thread, we will probably pass. It's not like there isn't a hundred other games that we can try at this instant.
In the book, the author suggests that money is a really good indicator to know if people want your product, whereas if you ask for an opinion or for reviews, people will not be as objective. They might villify your product, or on the contrary praise it undeservedly, which would lead to a faulty analysis on your part if you use that data. If they buy your product, however, then you'll know they really wanted the value you offered in your product.
This, yes.
It's already known that among those who give only 1 star to a game, there's people who play each updates. And I guess that among those who give 5 stars, there's many who still don't give buck to the author. But giving money is an engagement.
Finally, isn't the number of people at the different tiers the real indicator ?
It's the difference between Summertime Saga and Wild Life, between DarkCookie 71,573/month for 26,650 patrons, and Adeptus Steve 117,792/month for 12,335 patrons. Their tiers are different, 1, 4.5 and 9 for DarkCookie, 1, 9 and 22 for Adeptus Steve, yet DarkCookie only have an average pledge of 2.41, while Adeptus Steve have an average of 9.55. Therefore, despite it costing more, people are more prone to take the middle or higher tiers for Adeptus Steve, than they are for DarkCookie. What isn't this surprising since, despite its undeniable qualities, Summertime Saga is more generic and average than Wild Life.
This is all business theory, however I believe it translates almost perfectly to video games, because if you can show a game prototype that get people hooked, they will want more and will come back for it.
Imo, an important factor would probably be what isn't there. So, if you get no interaction with your game, no downloads, no people who buy it, then you probably have a problem somewhere.
Once again the problem with the definition of "struggling".
It's not because you'll be successful, having tons of interaction on the game threads, tons of download and earning tons of money, that your game is not below average like WVM is (at least when I write, the rewrite will perhaps change this).
You can know that your game is really bad because you've none of this, but having all of this doesn't mean that the game is good.
Reviews are a single source of feedback information. Once there is a sufficient number of reviews, I believe there is a correlation between "quality" of the game and average review score.
But review systems on f95 are also open to all sorts of bias, just like all other crowdsourced platforms:
- astroturf reviews: it's very obvious that there is an organised group of friends working together when some new game drops and it suddenly gets half a dozen high rating reviews in the first day.
- "clickbait" content in the banner/preview image/tag/description: there's a fine line between smart advertising and clickbait, but there are some themes (cough rule 7) that get insane upvotes despite the underlying game being pretty poor.
- non-objective reviews : I'm particularly sad about the non-objective reviews - some selfish numpty swings by and leaves a one star review because they don't like "fetish x" on a game which CLEARLY states it has "fetish x" in the previews. It's like going to "Tenshien Chinese Takeout" and then writing a 1 star review because you got asian food - just beyond stupid, and unnecessarily damaging to the provider
Ambir
I haven't read any of the other comments since yours above because I really wanted to THANK you for the time and effort your put in to that response. Very thoughtful and will probably take me several days to digest it all.
Lots of goodies for me to pour over... I was a Biology/Chemistry guy in college and have had careers that allowed me to avoid business/marketing stuff, so there really was no "snark" intended in my original question.... so if it came across that way, my apologies!
Reviews are a single source of feedback information. Once there is a sufficient number of reviews, I believe there is a correlation between "quality" of the game and average review score.
But review systems on f95 are also open to all sorts of bias, just like all other crowdsourced platforms:
- astroturf reviews: it's very obvious that there is an organised group of friends working together when some new game drops and it suddenly gets half a dozen high rating reviews in the first day.
- "clickbait" content in the banner/preview image/tag/description: there's a fine line between smart advertising and clickbait, but there are some themes (cough rule 7) that get insane upvotes despite the underlying game being pretty poor.
- non-objective reviews : I'm particularly sad about the non-objective reviews - some selfish numpty swings by and leaves a one star review because they don't like "fetish x" on a game which CLEARLY states it has "fetish x" in the previews. It's like going to "Tenshien Chinese Takeout" and then writing a 1 star review because you got asian food - just beyond stupid, and unnecessarily damaging to the provider
I struggle with reviews myself.
Because i know i am biased and it's really hard to be fair.
Though i usually left always 4 stars because the game was technically good. It just wasn't for me.
But at the same time reviews do help.
Just on a technical level i learned a lot and it help's to appreciate the time that went into a game. Even if it's not for you.
Though i wonder, are we getting manipulated by reviews as you pointed out with astroturf.
Yes we are, all of us.
Even if we know that they are biased we can't prevent the cognitive bias that will happen when our eyes will see the rating, even if it's just for an instant. It doesn't mean that we never download a game with a low rating, or avoid a game with a high one, but our own view over the game is influenced by this rating.
The best way to limit the impact of a negative rating is to not play the game right after we downloaded it. If you wait one day, by example, you're most likely to have forgot about the rating, and will try the game with in mind the fact that is should worth it, since you downloaded it.
I just realized that just this forum with the development threads shows what's hot and what's not.
Some don't even get a reply other do get a lot and especially views (in K meaning there are a lot of people that were already curious at least about the game).
So this is already a quasi Darwinian selection for the games.
I just never seen it that way or wasn't interested in it. Should a developer when posting here, already draw consequences about releasing it officially?
Which makes me wonder, what make a game really stick out, really a game that draws a crowd. It can't be just the renders. Perhaps the story? Or is word of mouth?
