Play to your Strengths

After last week and coming away from green light with a terrible taste I began to scour the  internet for articles to see what the professional industry has to say about this whole green light debacle. And I was surprised to see that they reacted in the same way we, as developers did, they thought that the system only helped to promote a negative feedback loop.

The Green light repository of games has become a giant hay stack. Users have to slog through literally hundreds of games to find a gem. "Discovery is non-existent", Gamasutra posted, and that is completely true. The best way to get traffic to your game is through external marketing, having people who have already played the game or are already invested, otherwise your going to get those angry people who post horrible comments.

I now understand why developers hate game forums. The internet is too easy to hide behind and you feel gross when you pull yourself out.

Another good point that one of the articles pointed out was that the average steam user did recognize that this service for to help promote independent developers. They wanted their triple-A games, which for whatever reason weren’t on steam, to become available. We felt retaliation because our game “appeared” to be an iOS product, one of the few platforms which indie’s actually have been foot hold in. The steam uses who posted didn’t want to pay for a “crappy PC port”

So what do we do? Crawl back to Apple because they at least accepted our game on their market place?

Well, sadly the answer is yes. We won’t take the green light submission down, no need to throw in the preverbal towel. I for one am just not going to look at it anymore, it just a cesspool of negative energy that ruined my weekend.

We can at least stand by the fact that our game plays well with touch controls and hope that over the course of the next week, we generate enough small interest that we make a few sales on the iPad.

Out of all of the professional articles written, gamasutra, as always, had the best. You can go ahead and read it here if your are interested. But Kotaku also wrote a convincing article pointing out the major flaws of greenlight.