I suppose the correct name is below... But dude, shut up. Should we not talk about these issues because bigger ones exist in other, broader things? HECK NO. It's a valid argument I think to talk about whether we should have to pay two dollars for extra content or not. I personally think that you should, but people could argue the other way.
Canadian AppStore: Since the update; 6 - 1 star reviews. 2 - 2 star reviews. 31 - 5 star reviews. 2 - 4star reviews. Reviews, not ratings. 127 ratings in total. 41 reviews. Current average rating, 4.5 stars. The fact that this has become a divisive issue has generated more reviews, both positive and negative than most updates ever will. I'm glad people went out of their way to update positive reviews. If they hadn't, MV would be sitting at 2.5 stars probably. I won't "attack" the 1 star reviewers. I will point out that their behaviour has been mocked. Going to general gaming sites you'll see a lot of comments from PC and console gamers welcoming ustwo to come develop on different platforms and going out of their way to say they'd gladly pay for the DLC. Seems a common thought that things like this backlash are the reason mobile gaming is in the state it is. As in, filled to the brim with freemium trash. Not that all f2p is bad, whole different argument though. The idea that a $4 game is "premium" pricing, and all future content should be free is laughed at. Even Android gamers are jumping all over this. Just to give a little perspective of how this makes iOS gamers look. I'm not surprised that Eli intervened and created this "garbage dump" thread. I think it was a great idea. I am surprised to see members here defending the 1 star campaign. "this is why we can't have nice things".
As an olive branch for my poor attempt to break the tension with some absurd humor in the middle of the night, let me leave something more thoughtful before I pick up sticks and move on from this thread for keepsies. I don't think anyone, at any point of this whole thing, was acting out of malice or ill-will. Not the one-star reviews, not the developer expressing concern on Twitter, not Eli's editorial, not the people expressing disgust or shock at the one star ratings, and not the people who stood up for those ratings. It's obviously a contentious issue that lots of people feel strongly about, and it's unfortunate that in situations like that, people sometimes lose their cool and attack people instead of ideas. From where I'm sitting, the whole thing has had a mostly positive outcome. It made people aware of a game and/or update they might have otherwise missed, it made it even more clear exactly what kind of game MV is (since its brevity certainly came up a lot in explaining those one-star reviews), and I feel that in the end, games selling better, even if they're not your type of game, is a better situation than games selling worse, for the health of the entire hobby on the whole. That's not to say there weren't negative outcomes: some people got too hot-headed and weren't very kind or respectful to others, some people who had an axe to grind about the nature of the mobile market got to sharpen it a bit, and some people (whose opinions I might not necessarily agree with) had their opinions drowned out and are probably left feeling unheard, assuming they're aware of the situation. Everyone has a right to have and express their opinions. That doesn't mean their opinions are free from criticism, and that goes for everyone, myself included. But some opinions are either more well-thought out or better articulated than others, and as such, I'm not sure how much merit they automatically deserve aside from the basic respect of being heard. I don't think people head to the App Store in a pique of anger and write out carefully planned words, generally speaking, so they're probably not showing their best faces, but just going by what was written, it was hard to grasp the validity of their complaints. In seeing a couple of people here explain things out further, it's clear it's not the matter of the price, but the principle. Sadly, I've found in life that the lower the price is that's associated with that principle, the less receptive people will be in general. The whole discussion around this got pretty emotionally charged on both sides, and as a result, I think we can safely say just about all of us could have done better each step of the way, but it is what it is. Let's all try to do better next time. That said, I still think that one dude is coo-coo-bananas for saying there weren't any old-school games that only lasted for an hour.
That'd an odd choice of an adjective there, "campaign". You're implying that a group of people puporsely got together and worked together in giving this game a load of 1-star reviews. That more than likely didn't happen. It would have been a bunch of people who didn't approve of the paid levels and voice their opinion through the App Store reviews. They could have told others who disapproved of paid DLC to also write 1-star reviews through their reviews for example, but I haven't seen any evidence supporting that. I haven't seen any evidence supporting some form of campaign against ustwo. However, once ustwo tweeted about the 1-star reviews, you'd see a number of people saying they went onto the App Store and gave the game a 5-star rating and then called for other people to also give 5-star reviews. That sounds more like a campaign towards me. That sounds like more of a campaign towards the actual definition of the word in the Oxford Dictionary (or at least my interpretation of it).
As I see it people are taking into account the fact that the original game was so short and I think that criticism has merit. Nobody (very few people) are really complaining because they have to pay for IAP, they're really upset because they have to pay IAP for a game they feel was incomplete in the first place. The loud mouthed defenders can scream "support the devs!" all they want but the very legit criticism is not going to go away. There is a decent section of people who will pay for games they think is worth it and they're absolutely entitled to speak up about the fact that this doesn't sit well with them.
Campaign might not have been the best choice of words. I don't think the semantics overly matter. If that is the point you choose to rally against from my post, I can only assume you fully agree with the rest of it. Glad to know you've come over to the dark and greedy side of the debate... j/k. I feel like this whole debate really de values iOS gaming and will inevitably push potential developers away and justify the move to f2p others have made though. Shaun you're 100% right about that guy. Can't remember if you brought up the streets of rage series or final fight. A couple of the first 1 hour or under games that I remember paying $20 - $50 for.
Ante script, or ninja edit, or whatever it would be. I thought out this post before seeing Shaun's latest post above which I think is also a good conclusion but I still want to post this. I'm pretty bored of this subject so I hope can make this my last post on the issue (but you know how it goes when you see something you just have to respond to). Compare the difference in quality between the Gamasutra comments and the TouchArcade comments on this subject. The Gamasutra comments are polite, see the issue from multiple angles, talk of market value, user's perceived value, developer's actual value, and most importantly people agree to disagree. But in the TouchArcade comments we basically only see mob anger. Any attempts to dissent are met with responses like the clichéd coffee fallacy or ad hominem attacks about children with no job or money. Attempts to direct the debate in the TouchArcade forum to something like the Gamasutra comments are called "misanthropic curmudgeon" and even a writer for TouchArcade tried to derail the conversation but later apologised. Even those that do reply politely rarely do so without letting slip some level of insult towards the stupid one starrers. Personally I think that mobs of hundreds of angry gamers are a worse problem than tens of cheapskates. Hardcore PC gamers have long had a reputation of being an angry mob that swarms from one thing to the next, sometimes rightfully and sometimes wrongfully. They too will blame casuals and kids for all kinds of problems based on little proof. Isn't mobile gaming meant to be the most inclusive type of gaming and here we are using the same old insults but pretending that we're better than the CoD kids? If the mob is TouchArcade's target audience then so be it, but don't complain if one day they're not on your side.
I know I said I was finished, but I just want to address two of those points. First, there is a definite difference between comments at Gamasutra and TA. I think that reflects the difference between a site aimed at and primarily used by verified members of the development community with their real names attached, and a site aimed at and primarily used by the end-users, typically in an anonymous fashion. That's not an excuse and we should all try to be better, but I think even in the best of cases, you should expect a pretty different reaction to almost anything sausage-related between the sausage-makers and the sausage-buyers. Second, I just want to say that I wasn't trying to derail. I'm one of those irritating people that, when he sees two people having a serious argument, will generally try to do something stupid so that the negative emotions come down a bit. I recognize that is not helpful to a discussion and that's why I apologized, but there was no attempt to do anything nefarious there, I promise. I just have a dumb sense of humor, which I hope comes through in my writing for regular readers. In my defense, I'm a school teacher *and* a dad. We have humor issues. Aside from that, I agree about angry mobs, even those who have good intentions. Maybe especially those. I think everyone in the hobby's had quite enough of those over the years, but we still keep falling into it. Try to live a better tomorrow and be excellent to each other, I guess.
So...many...fallacies...don't...know...where...to...begin Really, you should look into how logic works before posting drivel like this
So you're actually arguing MV has the same amount of gameplay as SMB1? You can't be serious. I never said you couldn't complete a SNES game in minutes, we all know that's possible. I did say i find it hard to believe that you completed any SNES in a short amount of time the very first time you tried the game I don't know. Maybe you are the most gifted Zelda player in the world but i don't know anyone who didn't have to go through trial and error in the vast majority of games they tried but even if i'm wrong, the amount of work it took to create something like SMB1 or Zelda back then, with the tools available compared to today, was so much more than what it takes to make a game today At the risk of borderline appeal to authority here i can say this for certain having coded since the early Commodore 64 days That being said i appreciate and agree with your sentiments in your last 2 posts here - It did turn out positive for the most part and very few people in this debate can say they didn't make mistakes
Oh, that's you. No, I never said that even once. Our discussion was about the length of the games, I think. Monument Valley definitely does *not* have the same amount of gameplay as SMB1. It is, however, of similar length. Yes, even the first time. SMB1 is one of my favorite games of all-time. I give it 8 stars out of 5. About the stuff you edited in: Zelda 1 really did only run me about 5 hours, and I don't think that was atypical. I didn't figure everything out by myself, of course, since, as kids tended to do pre-internet, there was sort of a circle of intelligence that kept anyone from getting stuck. That one kid with NP subscriptions, man. He was the King of the schoolyard. I can't speak to the complexity of development, so I'll defer to you here. My coding experience is pretty minimal and 20 years out of date by now, so yeah, I'm about as useful on that topic as I am on open heart surgery. To the last thing: Yeah, that's my feeling all-around. I don't think anyone at any level expected things to escalate the way they did. I'm sure we all said a few things we regret. I know I do, and I was trying to be respectful, as I always do with our valued readers. In conclusion: Even if we don't agree on everything, I'm glad to have a discussion with you, and I hope our disagreement doesn't stop you from reading, cuz it takes all kinds of people to make a community work. I hope to enjoy more discussions with you in the future, perhaps even about things we agree on.
Then you're certainly a far better SMB player than me because i had to use lots of trial and error on the harder stages and speed runs were only possible once you knew all the secrets and the patterns of the enemies but at any rate, what i was trying to say with those examples is that you can't compare SNES era games with games today. The amount of tools and high level languages/engines available today makes it far easier to create games than back then. Even if you code a proprietary engine in C++ just for that one game it doesn't begin to compare to what you had to go through back in the days of assembly code, no image or sound editors, lackluster debuggers etc. It's even less meaningful than the moronic cop of coffee fallacy that people like to use to much around here
Oh i always appreciate a level headed debate (even if i am guilty of getting emotional myself) so i wont stop reading and honestly i don't feel like you crossed any lines. A poke here and a bit of sarcasm there is allowed So yea, thanks for the debate and for keeping your cool. I think this subject is important because just as with freemium games and timers the community response will shape the future of mobile gaming, something that's important to us all
Wow. Someone is defensive. I never said, "Don't talk about it." I said, "Thank God that's the worst of our concerns."
Why don't people code in assembler anymore? Now that was some tight coding. Oh, and the heart surgery thing Shaun - I can help you out there if you ever need it - I slept in a Holiday Inn Express last night.
So the people who complain when a games too short for a few dollars, do they then offer a dev more money when they have a game for a dollar or two which gives them a lot of gameplay? Yeah course not !
If you have seen a particularly good movie do you donate some extra dollars on your way out of the theater? lol
No but I don't moan if I spend my money on a 'film which is quite short'. Specially if that film is just $2 and people also said to me 'that films quite short you know'
At any rate we were debating the community reaction to the star ratings. I guess it's kinda confusing since it used to be 2 threads that got merged
