Piracy & Technical failure after launching my game.

[Envieous]

@I Create Art!;684660

Technical Failure:
A lot of people really liked the story and graphics but everyone had the same conclusion, that the game was a technical failure in terms of gameplay. It was a bit disheartening at first as the sales came down to a near zero per day having barely got past $2000, but I decided to view it as a stepping stone for better projects in the future, one of the main reasons I especially want to try and concentrate more on my favourite side of game development, the art side.

I haven’t played the game, and just looking at the screenshots and videos that sell it as mediocre at best, I never would, but I’m just going to point out here, from just skimming the reviews, what did you expect exactly? The reviews cite poor pacing, terrible optimization and loading times, and other glaring issues that for the most part should be easy to detect on your own, and generally represent a massive failure on your part if they made it into the final game.

@I Create Art!;684660

I’ve never been much of a technical person.

either become one, or go do art on the project of someone who is technically competent.

@I Create Art!;684660

But its encouraging to see how some steam users have clocked many hours of play even though main game itself is just over 2.5hrs some players have over 30hrs on record.

Wait wait wait, you’re charging 17$ cad, for a game that lasts 2 and a half hours, looks visually mediocre, is mechanically indistinguishable from every other 3rd person shooter I’ve ever looked at, and to top it off, you did this at a time where the market has been absolutely flooded with loads of 3rd person shooters?

Comparatively, Amnesia The Dark Descent cost 20$ at launch iirc, did EVERYTHING extremely well, had a good 10 hours of playtime, and was one of very few horror games at the time.

@I Create Art!;684660

Piracy:
The thing that really bothers me is piracy, my youtube channel exploded with around 80,000 views the past 5 days, I initially thought that this was because of the steam launch and that people were curious to know more about the game but after checking my analytics data, it turns out almost all the traffic sources were from piracy websites that were hosting free cracked downloads of the game, these websites were also filled with reviews, conversations and ratings of the game. Normally so much attention and youtube traffic would have made me happy but I feel that I’m just losing out a lot and not gaining anything at all because this, not to say that my game would sell any better if there was no pirated versions online but I feel that hard work is going to waste.

Piracy is going to happen. It’s an inevitability of this industry, and in your case even had no one pirated the game, if your reviews are any indication, it would have just gotten mass refunds instead if the reviews are accurate to the issues plaguing your game. It’s wasted time to complain about it, especially considering that the coverage you got from it probably well exceeded what you got on steam, so instead spend that time improving your work so you can make something better next time.