Criticism and Developers

 

Being a creative can be tough, I think this is one of those things that everyone knows regardless of how creative you are personally.  Coming up with those ideas, putting those ideas together and then having the confidence in that idea to put it out into the world is quite an amazing feat.  But when you go through that process you are obviously going to come up against criticism for the thing you made in one form or another.  Sometimes it'll be constructive and sometimes your stuff will miss the mark with someone so hard that you'll get a petty and probably dishearening insult towards your work but this is just something you have to deal with as a creative.  Read it, take from it what you can to improve and move on to the next thing.  Some developers, or groups of developers, do not deal particularly well with criticism and the resulting events and both kind of funny and kind of sad.

The reason for this post stems from the recent release of a game called Super Lone Survivor, a re-release of the 2012 game Lone Survivor.  I just want to start by saying that I played the original version of this game and it was actually pretty good.  The atmosphere was heavy and despite the low resolution visual style the visuals were nice and creepy.  The gameplay felt sort of stiff but nothing that you couldn't adapt to and overall I had a good time with it.  One user who bought this game, a guy known in online spaces for playing and speedrunning horror games, bought it as a big fan of the original after being told about the games additional content.  He plays through it about 2 times, encounters basically none of the new stuff and then proceeds to give it a negative Steam review saying that he was expecting a bit more considering the 20 GPB price of entry.  

This then causes Jasper Byrne, the developer of the game, to throw a strop basically blaming him for sales slowing down, rants about him on twitter and causes video game shit-rag Destructoid to make an article on him.  Fast foward one day and the Destructoid article is taken down and Jasper proceeds to claim that he has issued an apology to the writer for the escalation but he did it the "apology" on his personal twitter page with his account locked so no one could see it.  Complete shit show

Lone Survivor has 23 reviews at time of writing and 22 of them are positive.  It's kind of silly to argue that a single bad review would be solely responsible for the slow sales of the game.  Maybe the game is just niche as fuck with the re-release being bought only by fans and a couple of curious new adopters and after that initial rush sales just slowed down naturally.  The worst part is, that despite Jasper's little outburst regarding the review, the store page has been changed to reflect that Super is probably not for people who already own the original and the new content is "hard to find", it's sort of sad.

Let's not single out just Jasper though because this is not the first time that indie devs salty about not being showered with constant praise has led to some embarassing bullshit and this one is arguably way worse.  Summer of 58 by EMIKA_GAMES is an under 2 hour, poorly written, unscary walking simulator with shit game play.  One thing you have to understand is that on steam, if you play a game for less than 2 hours you can actually get a refund on it.  It's not a feature I've ever used, not even for this piece of garbage, but apparently with just a few clicks you can have a full refund for a title as long as the play time is under the 2 hour mark.  

So people bought this game, played it, beat it and then refunded it.  There may have been SOME users who were refunding it just because they could but I would be willing to bet both of my kidneys that most people refunded it mainly because it's just not a good game.  This of course leads to the developer throwing a twitter sook, claiming that he's quitting development entirely because of the high number of refunds.  This of course leads people to start buying the game because they feel sorry for the guy which is actually pretty clever because instead of taking that feedback and improving, he took that pity sale money and instead developed another shitty thing that he released in October of this year.  So much for quitting, huh? 

But these are indie devs, so if we want to be charitable we can at least argue that they are probably a bit more emotionally attatched to the game that they made than something from a AAA company and a huge team.  But even developers of generic AAA dross like Horizon Forbidden West aren't immune to petulant complaining due to bad press or, in this case, a lack of interest in their game.  Horizon, an open world game about killing robotic dinosaurs or something, has had a bit of bad luck when it comes to release timing.  The first game released roughly at the same time as Breath of the Wild and was completely overshadowed as a result and when the sequel Forbidden West came out it was again completely overshadowed by the release of Elden Ring.  

This led to a number of Horizon developers making some extremely petty comments about the game probably just out of jealousy for From Softwares success over their own.  The tweets that got the most traction online out of these were a number of comments from one developer regarding Elden Ring's UI, which is really funny because Forbidden West has that semi-cluttered generic ass open world UI that people having been ragging on for years.  

This case is even worse that the previous two indies because its not even a case of direct criticism really, at least not intially.  It's just being mad another companies game being more successful which makes the petulant whining about Elden Ring and its team even more embarassing.

If you're in a creative field, harsh and/or constructive criticism is something that you just have to face and deal with.  The best approach is to read it, take from it any lessons than you can and then move on.  Trying to rally against "the haters" is just sad and at least indicates to me than you probably have your head up your ass a fair bit.

Less whinging, more creatin' please? Thank you