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“The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

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Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#121

Post by ativzzz »

ArrayBoundCheck wrote: post #109
bob1029 wrote: post #34

I feel even in gaming, the customer is always right at the end of the day. Unless we are talking about making games just for the sake of it & then throwing them away, but I suspect not. That said, most of the time it is better to not interact with the customer until you are certain it is the right time. Transparency seems like more of a liability than anything here. I strongly prefer the stealth mode development patt…

If you don't own a copy are you a customer?

With free to play being a huge gaming business model, not only do you not own games because they are more of a SaaS product, but most people don't even pay to be a "customer"

I haven't "owned" a game in like 10 years since I stopped buying CDs/physical media. All my games are digital, and I don't think you can really "own" software.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#122

Post by giraffe_lady »

BrainVirus wrote: post #106
chomp wrote: post #14

Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. It's astounding. Someone wants to create something, and there's just so much hate and negativity on something that people didn't even pay for. I've seen it on HN also. Someone creates a thing, and then people pour out of the woodwork to lump horrible criticism. No one is asking for blind praise for what they create, but surely there's a middle ground between…

>Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. Replace "gamers" with "book readers" and it should become obvious why this is not an insightful comment, but rather an expression of some kind of existential angst mixed with outdated stereotypes. Gamers ceased being a distinct consumer group when the medium of games went mainstream and ceased to heave anything resembling a coherent subculture.

"People who consume games" and "Gamers" are not necessarily the same group though? Just as the two groups of "people who have read a book" and "people who consider themselves A Reader of Books" both exist. The fact that there is a broader category doesn't make the narrower one useless.

From my personal experiences absolutely there is a group of people you could reasonably call "Gamers" and performing dramatic consumer entitlement is definitely part of their culture!

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#123

Post by detritus »

rvieira wrote: post #50
izacus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixel art like which of the originals? Monkey Island 3 and 4 had nothing remotely resembling pixel art and were still beautiful.

I was talking about "Secret" and "LeChuck's Revenge". When "Curse" came out I was "too cool" for computer games. Now I'm back at being "lame" :)

Entirely off-topic, but this resonates so much for me - I think I went entirely off computer games for about three years, peaking around the age of 18. I left the world of the Amiga and then later got a PC for Uni and slipped into an entirely different gaming world, running at 5x the clockspeed. On school holidays I'd come back to an ever-failing disk collection, to the point I only had a shareware game called Galaxy Wars (I think?) and an install of SimAnt (on a 20Mb HD, lol), by which point it was clear that the Amiga was truly dead in the water!

If there's one thing I'm looking forward to with this new MI, it's the updated theme tune, which sounds glorious. It WILL be my ringtone again!

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#124

Post by Tarsul »

generalk wrote: post #15
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #2

I feel bad for him, but really the problem is he’s made a directorial mistake and it looks like the only point it’s gonna click is when the sales numbers hit. Will he realize his mistaken then or will he continue to blame the customer?

"continue to blame the customer?" He's never said that folks were wrong, or blamed anyone for anything. Seems to me like he just wanted folks to not be shitty. Take, for example, this comment by someone calling themselves _Proud Retro Fascist_: > Nice attempt at silencing critics. The game will fail because it is > objectively hideous and you will only have yourself to blame. > > Inthe end all you will have achieved…

Yeah, that's a very harsh comment. Nonetheless, there is something to be learnt here:

If anything, the comments of the fans show that this artstyle alienates many of the fans. So, if for example the artstyle would've been showed at the very start of the development, then the developers could've listened to the fans and changed it. But everyone's in a tough spot now because development is nearly finished (game is planned for this year) and it would be too late to change course.

As such, Ron Gilbert can only do one thing: Buckle up, release the game and let it be played by those who are not alienated by the artstyle. Maybe it will charm new fans even more; maybe not. Who knows. However, it certainly is an artstyle that is not "universal". E.g. AAA developers usually refine their main character so much that he appeals more or less universally, they want someone who is liked by everyone. They don't want a main character that is only liked by 50% of the target audience. BUT! This comes with the caveat that these games might be overoptimized for the mainstream and thus being somehow boring. That's why I love what the artists and Ron Gilbert did, even though I am torn on the style myself.

Btw. I myself was even more alienated by the artstyle of Broken Age (so much that I never played it) and that was a game where I even invested money in. However, I never could've thrown words at Tim Schafer. And neither on Ron Gilbert, for that matter.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#125

Post by david422 »

There are a few things I've learned - or not learned - from releasing software.

  1. People like to VENT. Some people are going to post nasty stuff even though they would normally act different in person.
  2. Can you turn the nasty things into something positive? People vent because they are annoyed, or angry, or confused about something. Can that be fixed? Can that be improved? There may be a legitimate issue that could be improved even though they are not expressing themselves positively.
  3. People vent because they care. They are invested enough in your software that they would like to see change. 
  4. For every person venting, there are probably 10x that are happy but just aren't commenting. Sometimes it seems that everybody is just unhappy, but really it's just the vocal minority.
  5. Some people just need to be ignored.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#126

Post by prvc »

I think a lot of the comments in this (HN) thread are falsely assuming that he is reacting to the tone of the comments, rather than the fact that they don't seem to like what he has shared. Having read only a small sample of the linked comments, they seem to be overall civil but negative, which is probably even worse news for an approval-hungry creator than a rude response. There is a ready-made narrative about the badness of user-posted internet commentary that a subset of internet commentators love to post about, but in this case it doesn't seem to fit. This is said as someone who has absolutely no investment in the trailer's particular art-style or whatever their issue is.

In any communication, regardless of the medium of transmission, a positive reaction on the part of the recipient of the message is not guaranteed.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#127

Post by munificent »

chomp wrote: post #14

Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. It's astounding. Someone wants to create something, and there's just so much hate and negativity on something that people didn't even pay for. I've seen it on HN also. Someone creates a thing, and then people pour out of the woodwork to lump horrible criticism. No one is asking for blind praise for what they create, but surely there's a middle ground between…

This is one of the main reasons I was happy to leave the game industry after eight years of doing it.

Working incredibly hard to build a product served to a group of people that are often hurtful emotionally stunted man-children is just a deeply demoralizing experience.

Obviously, many gamers aren't like that. But a fucking whole lot of them are, and they are extremely vocal, and it doesn't take many of them to suck the joy out of the job.

Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there?

Unfortunately, I think games themselves often encourage this mentality. Most games are about making the player feel empowered inside a virtual universe that exists purely for their own exploitation and satisfaction. The whole point of playing games is to get an escape from the consequences of our actions.

People that are strongly drawn to that or spend too much time in that mindset are basically training themselves for a toxic mindset when it comes to interacting with actual humans.

I think a lot about this talk by Max Kreminski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlZinAvpwg

In there, if I remember right, he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#128

Post by munificent »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #47
chomp wrote: post #14

Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. It's astounding. Someone wants to create something, and there's just so much hate and negativity on something that people didn't even pay for. I've seen it on HN also. Someone creates a thing, and then people pour out of the woodwork to lump horrible criticism. No one is asking for blind praise for what they create, but surely there's a middle ground between…

Counterpoint: I used to feel the same way about the entitlement. Then I stopped and thought about how many "hours worked" the average game costs for a person on minimum wage. While the minimum wage has risen dramatically in my area, to at least $12/hr, with games costing upwards of $80 now, that's still almost 2 full days, after taxes. It's easy to forget when people on this board are probably all making at least low…

I don't think economics have anything measurable to do with this.

I've seen entitled rants from gamers yelling at the developer while also publicly admitting that they pirated the game.

People pay money for clothes and food too and you don't see them posting thirty-minute screeds on YouTube about how they don't like the pattern of this shirt they just got.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#129

Post by the_only_law »

acheron wrote: post #78
the_only_law wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's even an exclusively nostalgia thing. Over the past few years I've seen a lot of complaining around art style changes. Notably the Civ V -> Civ VI art style change pissed a lot of people off. Personally I loved the game, but a lot of series veterans didn't even bother to try it.

I don’t think that’s true about Civ 6. A lot of people who only ever played Civ 5 might have been “pissed” and didn’t bother to try it, because they didn’t realize that the Civ games change every time, but any actual “series veteran” was fine with it.

Yah that last sentence was a bit of hyperbole and poor word choice. What I meant is that many people who had got into Civ 4 and Civ 5, etc. we're critical of the graphics.

It wasn't as much about change as it was what exactly changed. There seems to be a trend in many games where certain design aspects suck as choosing brighter colors, or a more cartoons style will bring people comparing your game to a mobile game (also happened to a lesser extent with CK3 and certain total war games). While technically Civ6 runs on mobile, it's very much an outlier as far as mobile games go, I wish more mobile ames we're that good.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#130

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #66

It's not just gamers. The Internet has spawned a culture of "no consequences for letting your Id come out to play." If I walk up to Big Bad John, and call him a rude name, he will knock my teeth out. That's called "immediate negative feedback." Consequence immediately follows action. On the Internet (although this kind of thing predates the Internet. The Internet just commoditized it), this negative feedback loop is…

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