HASVERS'S PROFILE

The Judges have spoken.

Okay so we're all finished now!

Question: who would want to have feedback in private, rather than having our opinions on their game posted in public?

(in any case we will announce the podium here and on the contest page, but with or without scores and comments depending on what the gamemakers want)

Woo hoo! Can I get the linux version? (Maybe that won't help with your testing, though)

author=Max McGee
1) Leaving a scathingly negative review to a well paid and even famous professional is a completely different kettle of fish than doing so to an amateur dev who's grinding this shit out in his free time for no pay. I don't feel bad for Peter Molyneux if people are mean to him and his shitty games because he can cry himself to sleep on top of his heaping pile of money and groupies.

Sure. But amateur communities are always caught in a tension between trying to act like pros (including a lot of their promotion maneuvers) and wanting to remain hobbyists. Some people manage to represent the best of both worlds, other people the worst.

author=Max McGee
2) This is a more important point than the first. To be honest, I don't give nearly as much of a shit about whether I will find the mean words in a negative review discouraging. That's...whatever. To me, the larger issue is, whether or not I read it, whether or not I engage with it, a negative review, especially if it's the only review (or almost the only review) will discourage OTHER PEOPLE from trying the game.

It can. But so far I don't think I've ever seen a good game ending up with a single scathing review and fading into oblivion. Plus, if you lose only players who can be turned away by a blatantly biased or nitpicking reviewer, basically you're just losing the fleeting attention of people who don't give a damn. If you were trying to make money off them, you might care about that, but you aren't.

People who can truly appreciate a quality game will read the review and judge for themselves whether the criticisms are sensible, and very often will try the game for themselves if they feel it might have something for them.

Negative buzz happens only if there's an actual trend, if a number of people try and all feel compelled to give negative reviews, and then maybe that means that you are not advertising it to the right people, or that your tastes do not overlap with those of a majority.

(And let's be honest; as RPGMaker Amateur Devs, our "Broadest Possible Audience" is already a bit on the anemic side.)

It's very possible that your actual audience is only a fraction of that. I don't expect that more than one person in ten or fifty on this site will be interested in what I have to offer. I cannot blame them for liking and wanting things that I don't care about. Perhaps the only reasonable way to go about it is to remark that if one thousand people play your game, you have the same audience size as the very best medieval authors in their time. If your cumulative downloads reach in the tens of thousands (and they do), your audience is that of Pericles or Bach over their lifetimes. That's not exactly bad.

But to get back on the topic of promotion, I think the bottom line of what I'm saying is that finding the right targets for your promotion is really the hardest part of the job, not convincing them (or saving them from being scared away by trolls).

Also five games in, I should be done by the end of the week-end!
PS: If you're wondering where we judges are, we're keeping out of the discussion a bit to avoid being influenced until we're finished ;)

No problem matthewac95 and outcry, if you're quick I guess we'll be lenient and add you to the official entries (if my fellow judges agree), else you'll be added to the latecomers on the forum thread. In any case, real life comes first indeed!

Speaking of which, the thread is up!

Follow-up conversation forum topic.

Edit: likewise, Louis, if you want to add a document, I'll gladly add a link on the forum thread.