Haters gonna hate - my first week on steam
So, I've been dealing with (and probably badly dealing with) quite a few haters on Steam in the week my old game's been up on steam and just wanted to share an article with you all that I found.
https://medium.com/adventures-in-game-development/how-to-handle-haters-as-an-indie-game-developer-2ca22a4ef241
I was somewhat surprised at the pure vehemence and anger of some people, and it can be incredibly difficult to not take reviews like this personally (slightly paraphrased for length) : "I only bought this game in order to write a negative review" -- no gameplay on record.
I found myself, the last half of this week, trapped in a cycle of attempting to appease the haters, one or two in particular that caused issues, arguments and fights amongst the community as a whole.
At the end of this first week, I see 43 reviews of which most are great (Steam says "Mostly Positive") even though this is, and never pretended not to be, a 10 year old open source game we're hoping to revitalize and update through steam.
Anyway, read the linked article if you're planning to go on Steam. Don't let the haters deter you from your plans, just ignore them and focus on the fans that are in fact happy and enjoying your game.
https://medium.com/adventures-in-game-development/how-to-handle-haters-as-an-indie-game-developer-2ca22a4ef241
I was somewhat surprised at the pure vehemence and anger of some people, and it can be incredibly difficult to not take reviews like this personally (slightly paraphrased for length) : "I only bought this game in order to write a negative review" -- no gameplay on record.
I found myself, the last half of this week, trapped in a cycle of attempting to appease the haters, one or two in particular that caused issues, arguments and fights amongst the community as a whole.
At the end of this first week, I see 43 reviews of which most are great (Steam says "Mostly Positive") even though this is, and never pretended not to be, a 10 year old open source game we're hoping to revitalize and update through steam.
Anyway, read the linked article if you're planning to go on Steam. Don't let the haters deter you from your plans, just ignore them and focus on the fans that are in fact happy and enjoying your game.
Comments
We haven't had anything too venomous on our Steam pages, except for one guy who called the game "Sloppy, broken, terrible"
So I asked him to submit a bug report about the "broken" aspect of his complaint. A page later he was still just slinging insults with seemingly no engagement with anything I was asking/saying - hence, a straight up troll.
Someone else pointed out that this guy actually was part of a group of people who actively went to GL to downvote games. Troll reported this comment for "harassment". Not sure what idiot at Valve read the comment, but they removed it. (!?)
He didn't even own the game on Steam and got very aggressive about the fact that we'd not (yet) submitted an update to Desura, claiming to own a copy there. So, I reprioritised updates and did Desura first, only for him then to complain I'd "lied about update times". At that point I lost it and banned him. He then bought the game on steam and wrote this novel-like review, finding anything anyone had ever complained about in the forums (valid or not) and pasted it all together. Shortly after that he went through the forums and deleted all his abusive and troll messages and then posted as a comment in his review that he was banned unfairly "go see what I wrote" (with none of his really bad messages remaining).
... It's beyond me, frankly, I don't get it. He's not the first. Valve already deleted another abusive review which we tagged for review which was filled with outright rubbish. In fact, one local game dev I happen to know, saw this and without mentioning to me commented that the review was rubbish, resulting in a flame war on twitter after the reviewer tracked him there and starting flinging abuse outside of steam.
Chances are you can turn whatever people are saying around and use it positively instead: Oh, they thought this was a waste - what other games do they have in their libraries? Cool, if other people with similar libraries dominated by FPS and western RPG things don't like the game, then I have a better understanding of who not to market to for better results.
Zen. Relentless, powerful, constantly-thinking-about-the-bigger-picture, Zen.
Because, to be brutally honest, the idea that your time and hard work has any worth to someone else beyond what they experience as a result of it is only going to make you an angry flamer yourself.
I always find it weird that, among my friends (even those who aren't developers) we use emotive language and personal reward to explain why we enjoyed a specific game or how another game might be good for someone else, based on what they've just said they enjoyed and why. But when I talk to self-professed "hardcores", they only seem to care about weird marketing copy, like polygons per second, framerates, resolutions, hours of gameplay or which specific DRM system a game uses... It feels like the hardcore players don't actually know anything about the games they're talking about and are just spouting bullet points from ads. Sometimes the points are from ads for different consoles (which is where the resolution thing comes from, I think) but it's so strange that people THINK in terms invented to sell, instead of in terms that describe experiences.
Personally, I tend to compare with movie ticket prices : "2 hours of entertainment is worth X", it's far from accurate since games are interactive experiences, however it's how I "justify" buying games for myself, at "R/$ per hour" ;) If a game bores me before it's allotted estimate of entertainment hours - I put it down as a bad purchase and vice versa.