I recently put a game on Steam Greenlight. And had to deal with some harsh criticism. The edge was taken off it somewhat by the fact that none of the people could spell. e.g.
“Yor game iz rubish. It iz nt az gd as Skiirimm. You r a loozer.”
Now obviously I can’t criticise the public as those are the people that buy the games. And it is entirely my fault for putting a substandard game onto Greenlight which was designed for the mobile instead of PC market. Although on the mobile market it got 5 star ratings. But the people who play games like Flappy Bird (or Tappy Chicken!) and people who play Steam games are completely different.
Recently Fish of Fez fame quit the business because he couldn’t take the personal criticism. Minecraft was always criticised by a lot of people yet is a very popular game.
But this is something you have to deal with if you are going to open up your art to public scrutiny. Particularly to people who don’t understand how difficult it actually is to make a game.
Do you take criticism well? Does it maker you stronger? Or does it get to you?
I think overall my Steam experience will be a positive one as all the criticism is actually quite useful and will make me up my game. Even if I stick to mobile games from now on!
try to look from the perspective of the person giving the criticism and see what may have caused them to lash out, this can be used to improve your game
now if its just the typical “this game sucks and you sucks, etc” just ignore it and focus on the people who give good feedback, you gotta show that you have tough skin!
In those types of cases, it’s probably better to look at the good responses and see what people like and work on improving the things that people aren’t liking. Ideally, people would be able to tell you when something isn’t good but also do it in a way that can give you reasons why it’s not.
If you’re getting overwhelmingly bad responses, maybe there’s something there, it’s not always a case of people just not appreciating a certain art piece.
After I added some new features to one of my games, I sometimes feel like I did everything perfectly and there is nothing to improve anymore.
Then somebody says “Why did you do this in that way? Wouldn’t it be better to…” - I feel a bit sad then.
At the end I think about his opinion and say to myself “Well… actually he’s right.”
Such scenarios often helped to improve my games.
You have to be confident in your work and in what you do, this is very important.
Statements like “I don’t like the fact that…” or “Why don’t you try to…” can be very helpful for you.
You should ignore those random “This game is **** !!! You r so bad!!! **** this game!!!” posts because such commentaries
are not objective and obviously useless.
Criticism is the best for a game designer (**as long as it is constructive **^^) and it’s a key attribute of a game developer. Yep, I can take it very well and I also learn pretty much from it -> when people tell me that something is perfect/really good I always ask them a 2nd time -> havent you found anything that could I do better/you dont like?
I think, when dealing with any art form, you must be open to criticism. You need to take the positive with the negative and embrace it. In the end, if you take it all in, you’ll end up creating better work because of it.
When you create something you can become blind-sighted by things that don’t translate well in the eyes of others. Having someone look at your work, may bring such things to light. Of course, you don’t have to follow their advice - it’s your work. Though, taking a step back and actually considering what they’ve said? There’s some value in that.
However, when it comes to the comparisons between your project/work (in this case, a game) and another of similar stature, I’d say ignore it. If someone is disappointed because your game isn’t the next Skyrim, that’s their problem. If they’re looking for a Skyrim-like experience…they can just play Skyrim.
In the end though, you should create an experience that you like / want. The same goes for your art. Create what you see. If you like it, the chances of someone else liking it as well are pretty decent.
No matter what you decide to do for work, whether it be a Grocery Store Clerk to a Lawyer, you are always going to receive criticism. People nowadays love to point out when you do a great job or you do something wrong, but it is how you use criticism that will be your uprising, or your downfall. I have had trouble in the past receiving criticism. I realized, with age, that you have to use criticism to your advantage. With having ran QA tests on games before, you always want to hear the bad things. How an the game be better? What can done done with the level? This will only make your project that much better.
It is the nature of the Internet that there is an element out there that their game is to toll you just to get a response and they are just one person. My response is to toll them back with out getting emotional.
In all it’s more to do with a frame of mind of it is what it is and even if someone is responding in a negative manner it’s better than if no one responds at all.
Yes Fish got picked on a lot but at the same time each time he got picked on Fez managed to once again make it into the current news cycle and he probably sold a few more games by having a hissy fit.
Constructive criticism on the other hand is a good thing, and easy to identify, and is why you would post work in progress in the first place. The thing to remember here is those who play your game are experts in the things they like or don’t like.
As to numbers. By far those who think they have an issue will be the first to complain as compared to those who are content with how things are going and simply push the like button so the more people complain with out valid and constructive criticism the better as you “must” be doing something right to at least get noticed.
Last bit of advice. Keep a sense of humor as some of the stuff the “fans” come up with is funny as hell from time to time.
Listen to everyone here zooby, this is all excellent advice.
I currently have a game on Steam GreenLight also. Some people like it, some people don’t. Its just the way it is. I think sometimes people actively look for things wrong to point them out. However, don’t discredit them, they may have a valid point.
And I like the bit of advice said, “Keep a sense of humor as some of the stuff the “fans” come up with is funny as hell from time to time.”
The experience is much more enjoyable then. Laugh at the imperfections, then see if you can make them better.
If you can’t take criticism, you shouldn’t be making anything that’ll go public. Maybe it’s because my friends and I will instantly call each other out when you’re making the stupidest mistakes and harass each other until we get our point across but it’s still a valid thing to say. I’ve yet to see anything on the internet not be completely destroyed and yelled at by people.
Yep sometimes its hard. I where in charge of finishing the game Scourge: Outbreak (Lead Programmer, my job was to bring the game though console cert which where extremely hard). Before we launched the game last year on XBox 360 we had a lot of focus group testing, closed beta testing, press testing and so on. The feedback seamed to be pretty good, many people liked while others don’t but we where pleased with it. Then after the release we had some very hard reviews (the worst one even before the release…) which in turn started a war upon us from many large game sies. Many of the critics where very constructive and we started directly to work on a patch and improve the game itself, while others where completely harsh and just used to insult us. And as you said, they compare you with blockbuster games, in our case we where compared to Gears, Fuse (our first installment was in 2010 so quite before Fuse hehe) and many others which had lot more resources than we had to finish the game, but that is not an excuse. The final average consumer does not know what it takes to complete a game, you realize that when they try to hire you to build a game for 30k $ or when you see some backers on Kickstarter belief that you can finish a full commercial project for less than what a professional programmer earns.
The thing I learned from that experience is that even 1 good feedback (even constructive criticism) is better then 100 insults. Then if you check the steam user reviews of our PC version they are completely different with being mainly good (even the “burned” 360 version has an acceptable user score :D)!
So at the end you just need to take the valuable feedback, and ditch all that nonsense of insults. It will make your life easier because you will always have to deal with it.
If they don’t actually say anything useful to improving the game, I just ignore it and move on. Anything that helps improve the game is good, if sometimes painful.
That said, I generally think most gamers don’t have a deep grasp of game design issues, so I take most of that sort of thing with a huge grain of salt. If their feedback basically amounts to “add/change my pet feature” and isn’t something I agree with or think would take too many resources, or even just not work well, I’m not going to do it.
criticism from people who can’t do the same or better as you do are of little value, you just don’t listen to them even when they are trying to make it constructive they just don’t know what they are talking.
its like a patient trying to tell his surgeon where, and how to cut.
Hideo Kojima said on his last interview that he had a very hard time making the first metal gear because no one understood why he was making MG, everybody wanted him to change it to something else telling him would be better if different, but you gotta make your own thing if people don’t like they don’t need play it, its not like you are making the game for everybody you are making it for people like you or just because you have a certain vision, in Kojima case he always tell people he really wanted to make a movie, but he was never able to so he made his game like a movie thats why his cinematics are long and he cares so much about certain gameplay aspects.
just look at hollywood a lot of producers try to make the movie for “everybody” and as a result we get really bad movies.
the only time criticism has value is when your team or someone you trust have some feedback.
of course I also think places like UE forums are great because people understand what you are trying to make, but even them you don’t need take all the criticism, you just pick and choose the ones that make sense for your project and limitations.
When someone gives me his opinion i do my best to understand what he means and would like to have.
But i use sense of humor and large laugh against haters who don’t stop when you “only” ignore them. When they realize that you don’t care and even, you have fun, they disappear and only fair opinions stay.
And if for some pro reason or other you can’t say things like : hater : your game is sh.t ! You : oh you mean it’ll be great in a paper 2d version ? Thanks for feedback !, you may can only think it, laugh and come back to the important : doing what you like ^^
A fellow indie dev gave me some advice at a conference the other day that I’m going to try to follow.
Try to find out if the criticism comes from a person who likes the type of games you are making or not.
If they enjoy similar games to yours, but not your game, you are probably in trouble.
If they spent all their time playing completely different games, just ignore them.
I believe that this is particularly relevant to negative Greenlight comments.
Greenlight is designed so poorly (unless Valve wanted that?) that you will get lots of comments from people who would never, ever enjoy playing your game because they have different interests.
So naturally ignore those and try to figure out who is really interested in your game, but still gives you criticism.
Then embrace that criticism and try to implement as much as you can without compromising your vision or budget!
In general I think that I can deal with criticism from players quite well and that that’s an important skill for game developers/designers.
The only hate that really gets to me is when someone says something like I could’ve made that in Unity in a week.
I’ve read lots of variations of that, not just on my projects of course, it even upsets me on projects from fellow indie devs.
This is completely irrational since you would really hurt your finger if you made the minimum required mouseclicks to finish the project within a week.
However this still gets to me on some days, probably because it makes me feel insecure about how much more efficiently others could have made that game.
This is a good point. I mean if you made that popular Kim Kardishian game and put it on Steam a lot of people are going to hate it. But then again it is one of the most popular apps on the iTunes store. Then again if you put Skyrim on iTunes all the Kim Kardashian fans would be like WTF is this?
But it can also be useful because if someone hates your game they are more likely to point out the mistakes than to forgive them so you get some useful feedback too.
