NTC3'S PROFILE

author=Sailerius
If you're planning to go commercial with this, it's probably a good idea to not have the title be the name of the setting of Dragon Age II.

Well, given that it apparently already managed to sell nearly a 100k copies, I would say it didn't cause too many problems. Though, I do wonder why the game isn't marked as "Complete", then.

And Jude itself is a derivative of Judea! Though, yeah, while I doubt that many people would remember what Judecca means, the whole thing shouldn't matter when put into these comparative terms.

So, Corfaisus left as well? Spent a while just now going through his last posts and trying to reconstruct WTF happened. I kinda sympathised with him when he claimed one needed to see the ending(s) before judging.... but then, I'm 99% sure he not only reviewed games without finishing them, but actually hacked one to give his characters maximum stats because he got bored of combat as it was intended, so no sympathy here.

author=StarSkipp
It was formally called Cover Your Eyes as of this morning. I changed it because of paranoia that when (if?) the game was released, negative reviews would make funny puns out of it. Plus the name sounds very similar to this game... Gotta avoid that confusion :<

OK, then, because I was really surprised to find I was subscribed to this when going through my notices and first saw the new title. Not sure about this new one, but you're right that the old name sounded way too similar to an already well-established game.

Well, technically you do have a view counter written in small font right next to the date, though it obviously doesn't tell you how many people have actually read it to the end.

Otherwise, I certainly get what you're saying. I've been subscribed to Jim Sterling's YouTube channel for exactly a year now, and it's certainly opened my eyes to how big of a problem this is. Well, this, and using Steamspy for about 1.5 years, and seeing how unpredictable game sales can be. I like to think that I got the basic rules predicting success or failure sorted, but often, you'll never know.

On the bright side of things, I do think that there are some positive changes happening, though not as fast as one might like. Valve did make some changes to the review system, for one, though it doesn't seem like it affected much. Then, it appears people have gotten used to refunds since they were introduced last year, and will use them when they think they paid for rubbish: if you were to go through Jim's playlist for the year, and look up how well the various generic, slapped-together, horrible games he played have done on Steamspy since, you'll see that nearly all are stuck at ~1000 sales or so, regardless of how much time had passed since their release.

Of course, plenty of games that are technically competent, but simply appear too similar/inferior to established games and/or too expensive relative to said competition will often suffer the same fate, and it seems like this can now happen regardless of your genre (games in more niche genres like isometric CRPG's had it easier for a while due the lack of competitors, but it's hardly the case now.) I suppose the best you can do now is to get in touch with the YouTubers great and small alike, as well as the more open-minded gaming publications (Hardcore Gamer and RockPaperShotgun are two examples where I think you might have a good chance.)

Other than that, good luck, and I hope you'll succeed at what you're planning!