Amber Night

You're gonna cry cry cry 

GameDaily BIZ has a piece on what game developers hate about game reviewers .  In related news, Guantanamo detainees discuss what they hate about U.S. torture techniques, but I don't have access to that piece yet, so we'll go with this one.

Let me be the first to say that there are a lot of suck-ass game reviewers and reviews out there.  Many of them have agendas and are sluts to the corporate machine.  Others just suck because they suck.  But according to "Mr. Media Coverage" (which is an even worse nom de plume than naming yourself after a line of mattresses), these are the top developer complaints about game reviewers:

Developers hate game reviewers that only play their games for a few hours

Developers spend months and even years creating games, and nothing quite makes them angrier than realizing a reviewer only played their game for a couple hours before dismissing it. Online reviewers, according to developers I know, are the prime culprits here.

Let me just throw this out there and see if it swims: If your game isn't fun within the first 2 hours of game play, it deserves to be criticized.  And yes, I include MMOs.  Games like World of Warcraft and City of Heroes have shown that there's no reason that learning the basic mechanics and interface need to take longer than an hour or less.  A console or non-MMO PC game should take considerably less time to get used to.  So Amber says, Wah.  Suck it up big boy and make games that are fun from the beginning.

Developers hate game reviewers because they don't understand games that are targeted for a specific audience

"Game reviewers want every game to be Zelda."

That's what one developer told me. He said that the reality of game development is that most developers make games for a very specific target audience and the developers do their best to find and meet the needs of those specific gamers.

This whine has a little more validity, but it makes the assumption that gamers are stupid.  If I am a wargame enthusiast (which I'm not) and I read an article about the latest and greatest wargame written by someone who clearly doesn't know about wargames, it's going to show.  When the reviewer complains about the lack of mushrooms and coins, or the fact that there is no crafting in Napoleanic Crusades IX: The Crusadening, well then most gamers are going to look elsewhere for a decent review.  (I, however, am supremely pissed off that they didn't include crafting in NPIX:TC.  Fuckers.)

Developers hate game reviewers who review games in proxy for an entire genre.

Here's a nightmare scenario for a game developer. You've just finished a two-year project and you're exceptionally proud of the many obsessive details that you've poured into your Civil War turn-based strategy. You've revolutionized the genre, you've created something that the fans have been begging for and you're excited about the response.

Then an enthusiast press publication hands your review to their FPS specialist.

She uses 600 words explaining how Civil War games can never be as exciting as shooting alien zombies and gives you a "C". You go home and kick your goldfish.

While I absolutely love the thought of John Romero kicking his supercore (a word I have vowed to include in at least one conversation per day from now until Romero's MMO is released) prize-winning fighting ninja goldfish, once again I think the hyper-sensitive game developer places too little faith in the gamer base.  Anyone interested in your game's genre is going to spot a sweeping slam for what it is.  The mouth-breathers who are unable to see it are not the kind of player you want bogging down your customer service anyway.

Developers hate game reviewers who have no idea what it takes to make a game.

This developer compliant reveals itself in wild requests or odd complaints that show up in reviews. Game reviewers, according to developers, love to think of themselves as armchair programmers. It's as if they expect, by mere creative flash, that developers can overcome technical, time and economic restraints.

Game reviewers don't understand the obstacles, the expectations and the limits faced by developers. Therefore, when Konami invests 30 million dollars and hundreds of programmers on a single blockbuster title, reviewers all of a sudden expect the same depth and production value from a small boutique developer. If they only understood, perhaps they'd give games a more fair assessment.

This is a somewhat legitimate complaint, although it's really a nature of the biz that's simply not going to go away.  When EQ2 was released, every other MMO's graphics engine was compared to it, many times unfairly.  When City of Heroes was released, every other MMO's character creation system was compared to it.  That's just how it goes, and quite frankly players (and reviewers) don't give a fuck what the size of your budget was, how many game designers you had on staff, or how long it took you to realize your vision.  Most of us care little about the limitations of DirectX you had to work around, or whatever other technical hurdles you had to overcome.  Kudos to you for the hard work, but it better be fun. Players want what they want.  Again, hypothetical low-budget developer, suck it up.  Make a game that people want to play, and they will forgive you for not including crafting, even though Panzer Decimation Force Strike Vier: The Panzening has the most kick-ass crafting system ever.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 7:09 am and is filed under Game Design, Game Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.