How to deal with negativity

This year I observe a behavior I have that isn't good at all.

Do you know this feeling?
Feeling confident about your game and then you get some negative comments or vibes and start to doubt yourself? And I do not talk about critic what to fo better I mean just negative or mean comments.
I know that there will be always people not liking my stuff! And even knowing it, it pulls down my mood way to much!

How can i overcome this feeling? What do you do in such situations?

 

Yes, ALL TOO WELL! I recently put out a demo of my first game after a VERY Long time of keeping it away from criticism, and the lack of excitement from people who tried it hit me like a truck. I thought the demo was great, but it wasn't.

When we work alone and want success so badly, things can play tricks on our mind, we NEED feedback to realistically gauge our games. I used to do game testing and our team found it funny how much developers would think their games were great when they were actually unworking, buggy messes, so in a way this is Karma for me. We all think we're above the lies we tell ourselves, but it's very common to be overly enamored with your own project like a parent with their child.

YOU HAVE to get feedback, do it until your view of your project aligns with your users' view of your project. (not overly negative feedback of course, median feedback)

I think this is the most important step to being a true gamedev. Being able to see your project for what it is and not the potential in your head.

People are not criticising to hurt you, but it can be very hard to take. Most don't realize how hard gamedev is, or that saying "This isn't that fun" can be so devastating as it kinda cuts into your abilities, and it invalidates months of your work, as well as forces you to realize you were wrong about your "baby".

You overcome it by taking the feedback and facing it. Then you work towards making the game better, and as your game becomes better you will become proud of it again.

It's just like working out. You don't get gains doing easy tasks, you build when you have pushed yourself to the limit and keep going further. When you are burned out and tired of a system, that is when you are putting in the final 10% that will make your game worthwhile.

It's not easy but it's the only way.

 

I figure out what practical element there is to the comment, if any, and then feed that back into my dev cycle just as I would any other constructive criticism. It's all useful, regardless of the spirit in which it was delivered.

But also, be ok with not being perfect. Nobody is, and even big budget titles made by huge teams of veterans still have their flaws. As long as your game is good enough then be proud.

 

I know it's easier said than done, but just take it and learn from it and use the information to the enrichment of your game. But like I said it can be easier said than done, so just take it and do what you can with it..... If someone says "This game is total garbage, do not buy, it's just trash not even worth 99 cents", it's hard to gauge why they said this, if you have multiple reviews that are bad there certainly has to be one that you can work with to make your game better. Unless you're Fallout 76, then you are doomed lol.

But really, I know it's hard but the worst thing you can do is do nothing after the bad reviews, definitely if most of them are bad, if most are bad do not stop the development - find out why all these reviews are so bad by reading them and start to fix away the issues, because if you just stop development then the internet trolls have won, because trust me - some people will buy a game just to leave a bad review because your player moves 0.001 meters per second to slow.

 

There are negative people everywhere, even on this forum there are individuals that will never amount to anything and they know it and try to drag others with them. Just ignore them.

Its important to learn to distinct between real critism which is important to listen to, and just negativity. For example I almost never listen to negative feedback on steam, there is just S*** posting, the real good constructive critism I find in the positive reviews.

 

I don’t have time to expand now, maybe tomorrow, but I just wanted to chime in and say I 100% disagree with the quote here, especially if your game dev goals also include things other than making money.

 

Consumers don't know what they want, give them what they want not what they say they want.

 

Yeah, context is pretty important there.

Still... understanding my audience's reaction is pretty important to me. Even if I'm making something purely for the sake of expression, I don't know how it's being interpreted by others until I put it in front of them, and that's pretty important to me at least.

 

I suppose it depends on whether you're creating for yourself or to reach people. If you want to reach people, you need feedback. If you're creating for yourself, why release a game at all?

 

With 7.5 billion people on the planet, regardless of what you do, there are people who will like it as is.

For example, why would someone write a book? To maximize marketing reach, in hopes to get fame, money, or in hopes of seeing this adapted as a movie, for example. Or just in order to get paid for ghostwriting. However, there are situations where you simply have a story that wants to be told. That's the same things as creating a game for yourself and releasing it.

Because you have an idea that wants to be born.

The purpose of gathering feedback, by the way, is maximizing number of positive responses. If you're dealing with an "idea that wnats to be born" scenario, however, then you have no obligation to react to feedback at all. You can release the game as is and see what happens.

 

I don't have time to explain, but I 100% disagree with you. Maybe i'll explain later.

Not a very constructive reply. And to simply state "if you aren't only concerned with money" implies that making a profit somehow invalidates your game. Monetary gain is a solid benchmark of how good it is, possibly one of the best benchmarks.

Working in a bubble is dangerous. You need to expose your product to sunlight to clean it of the overgrowth of delusions if you are beginner developer trying to have a realistic view of your project.

 

Consider my post a user review of your post and please adjust your post views with my feedback until they are aligned.

You’re also putting words in my mouth.

Feedback is a conversation. You can disagree, agree and a million other outcomes, including others being assholes that you don’t need to talk to. Decoding feedback into something useful is often also very hard and often not worth it, especially if you let the negative stuff get to you -> which by the way is what the OP asked help with but the thread instantly got off topic. (Although here the advice is often to “somehow” get thicker skin, which is less than useful)

 

I don't agree with @AcidArrow on a lot of things, but it happens that I agree with him on this.
First of all, "if you aren't only concerned with money" does not imply what you see into it. It basically says if you see your game as an art or expression, so your concerns aren't only get your investment back or make a profit. And I agree with him.
He didn't state that having monetary stakes would invalidate your game or anything like that.
But your "do it until your view of your project aligns with your users' view of your project." statement here implies that you have to have user input and you need to adjust to the users' point of view. Which is good, if you want a popular, good selling product. But bad, if you have your own vision.
Sometimes these two are aligned, which is good, your artistic expression is highly marketable for your target audience.
But sometimes they are so much different that you need to choose between them. So your initial statement is not true. You don't have to align your view of your game with your audience's. Only if you want to serve your audience.

And I think AcidArrow thought something similar. (Although obviously I don't read his mind by any means)

 

This is a very different statement from what was initially quoted.

And not just "adjust it," but adjust it until it fits the users' view. There's a big difference between the two.

 

Putting words in your mouth? You didn't say anything.

Feedback is what you take back from putting your game out there. Often the greatest feedback we get is silence, indifference. You seem to be hyper focusing on negative, harsh words, implying that's what I was saying is of value. You're putting words in my mouth.

I almost took the low road and gave you some "feedback" of my own, but i'm going to cool my jets in the spirit of positivity that this thread initially was in need of.

All I was trying to say is it's important to get your game out there to properly grow as a developer. Encouraging others to develop is a cave can be dangerous to budding developers. But I'm open to the idea of others having other end goals with their product than what is generally considered success.

@EternalAmbiguity In what way was that different? In my initial post I stressed the need to put your game out there to calibrate your view of your project and develop a realistic view of where it stands.

Edit: This was a thread about overcoming negative feelings. If you feel like talking S***, PM me. I wont respond any more to negative posts here.

 

Silence is not indifference. It is a lack of information.

The player could be upset with the game, but not upset enough to write you about it. Or they could really like the game, but not see a point of posting their opinion somewhere.

 

See Lurking-Ninja's post and my edit. Your statement implies that a dev needs to adjust their game until it fits a user's expectations. Not until it fits the dev's expectations, not until it fits the dev's expectations along with corrections made from feedback, but until it fits the user's expectations.

Same idea as the people insisting Final Fantasy needs ATB and Sakaguchi, or Assassin's Creed needs canned animations and rooftops. At some point some users just aren't interested in what you're trying to do, and that's okay.

Just want to clarify: the point of disagreement was with that statement, not necessarily the rest of your post.

 

Fair point, I could have been more clear about what I meant by feedback. We as developers want people to be interested in our game.

If you put your game out there and no one cares, if it's just a dud. That means you have to recalibrate your view of your game, it's not as great as you thought it was. THIS is the sort of feedback I was referring to. And once you see that your game isn't what you envisioned, you can then work to improve it. Before you can see the flaws of your game and attack them, you must first see your game as fallible.

I was trying to frame the negative feelings from negative feedback as a sort of bitter sweet concept rather than purely negative.

I do not at all condone the idea of listening to random voices on the internet or incorporating their feedback into a project willy nilly.

 

@IllTemperedTunas @EternalAmbiguity @AcidArrow
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding with "view" and "vision" of the project? I understood view like for example I think my controls are easy but the players don't have the same view and I should adjust then the controls. But that doesn't mean I have to adjust my whole project vision to the users.

And @AcidArrow is right:
I asked how to deal with the negative feeling when I read bad comments rather than how to use the feedback in the comments.

 

As in, psychologically deal with negative feeling from reading bad comments?

 

Yes!

 

BTW, there are couple of techniques, you can employ:
- if you aren't a solo developer, you always want to share the feedback-processing with your fellow developers, you know, distributing the influence
- if you are a solo and you have a friend, who can help you out and they know about your project enough, they can help you filtering the feedback a little bit (however it may be dangerous if they don't know enough about your goals and/or your project)
- you try to mix up a little, after a couple of negative feedback you try to read some positive as well, just to adjust your brain, reading only negative feedback may tricks your brain thinking that you aren't worthy enough and all that
- make it a ritual, prepare yourself, not just head on in reading feedback, but tell your brain that you will read other people's opinion on your game, it makes it a bit easier (and always leave the negativity out of your notes, try to write down only the objective, well, what you think is objective, feedback)

And of course, always seek help if you feel it's overwhelming, don't overflow your brain with them, take a break and talk to people who support your work a little.

 

(-_-)

There isn't a perfect advice, as this comes from practice, however I think I could throw few pointers.

The rest is my opinion and I think it might sound a bit cynical.

It might sound harsh, but the main principle while dealing is to mentally "discredit" the one submitting the feedback in your mind, moving them from the position of "authority" you might be placing them by default in your mind. Basically, the goal is to come to agreement with part of your brain that reacts emotionally, and convince it or rather fool it into thinking this is not a situation worth emotional response. To do so, you need to strip weight from the opinion so it will no longer trigger emotions, and then you can calmly analyze it in logical fashion.

In general, if you're getting upset while reading it is likely to happen because you feel like they're challenging your core beliefs (oatmeal posted a decent comic about it), because you might think they're addressing you directly, and because you place them into situation where their opinion has some... authority/value behind it. Additionally, there's high likelyhood that you're emotionally attached to your project at least some degree, and having it criticized produces same effect as challenging your core beliefs, and you'll feel the need to defend your work. All of this is perfectly normal.

Realizing or convincing yourself(as it doesn't have to be true) that the person might not be in the right state of mind (too angry), might be nuts(or insane), has insincere intentions (trying to spread their beliefs or make you upset), is too young, too inexperienced and so on... this might be sufficient to mentally "discredit" them, move them away from position of "authority" where you might care to their words emotionally (meanign their words might hurt). Once they're stripped their "authority" privilege, you should be able to filter out emotionally charged content and seek out grains of information related to your product.

Possible scenarios of encountering hostility and hopefully examples.

* Furious and angry response. This is an emotional reaction. Someone or something pissed off the poster, that was not necessarily you or your game, and they're lashing out. In this scenario, they're venting their anger, and the words and sentences they're using have no deep meaning, they're ammunition and don't matter much, they're angry first, and pick the reason later. However, down there there might be a hint of a seed that caused them to explode, so try to glance thorugh the parts where they're venting (would be most of the text) and seek out keywords which may indicate that there's something wrong with your product. To avoid emotional backlash, you could imagine them screaming at a wall, or screaming at their computer while writing a review. They are not necessarily angry at your or your product, just angry in general.

* Insanity and conspiracy theories. It is possible to get a mood ruined by a deranged individual trying to bring forth some sort of "truth" to the world. For example: "we're all secretly controlled by frogs, and this game is how they do it". OR. "Another fake article writen by globe believers". OR. "This game is a prime example of racism and sexism being spread out in our disgusting capitalist society". In this case they don't care about your product and are using your comments as a soapbox to spread their word. You would likely get upset due to clash with core beliefs, however.
In this scenario, you need to realize that you're dealing with a "prophet" who is not your customer, but seeks a podium to spread their beliefs. The individual in question is likely mentally sick to at least some degree. Realizing that they might be nuts (or convincing yourself of this) moves them away from "position of authority" and the feedback will stop being hurtful.

* Targeted hostility. In this scenario you'll have an individual intentionally trying to get under your skin. A good example is a scenario where developer is being sent death threats due to going Epic Game Store exclusive (happens with Ooblets). This is more likely to come from younger crowd/teens as they go through a phase where they try to assert yourself, and they can try asserting themselves by trying to insult you (thus convincing themselves that you're their inferior), or by defending their "tribe" ("cult" of steam/Gaben in case of Ooblets death threats). Realizing that they're likely to be acting out of need to self-actualized, once again will strip authority and that might be sufficient for you to stop caring about the review emotionally. Don't forget to involve police in case of death threats, though.

That's the rough idea of it.

In general, the way I see it, if someone's words hurt, you're placing them at spot where you emotionally care about what they say. Removing them from that spot will be sufficient to deal with emotional backlash you experience, and past that point you can tear their review to pieces and see if there's a grain of useful info in it or not. To remove them from spot of authority you can either recognize them as some of the insincere scenarios from above, or, just imagine review being written by a funnily sounded cartoon characters or someone whom you do not deeply respect. The point of doing that is to shut down emotional response to the post, which is the reason of you feeling upset.

That's the rough idea of it.

 

lots of great advice, i didn't read all of it.

i try to say it as simple as I can:

you didn't make the game for yourself, you made it for an audience. only way to know if the audience likes it is to have them play it.

And it's like when you have people over for dinner. You worry if the food was good. Most people are polite and say it's great. That means nothing. The question is, did they get seconds? That's how you know.

In same way for you game, the question is "will they spend money?" That's all you need to concern yourself with really. Feedback is invaluable but you can only trust a persons mouth so far.

 

This is some great advice. I like the idea of a friend filtering the negative. And the ritual is also very great idea! When I think about it , I was hurt most when I wasn't prepared! Thank you!

 

Wow, I am speechless...
That is what I call an epic answer! It is really the best answer I got this year from any forum and topics. Thank you for taking your time writing it!

I tried it on one comment to take away the authority position and I didn't believe it first but it really works! I am really happy, this technique is awesome. You saved my day ... I still can't believe I got such an good and working answer from a forum...
Are you a psychologist???

 

I totally agree with you! But still the negative comments bother me sometimes...

 

be bothered. thats fine. sometimes humans get bothered. you wont make that go away. and if you give undo attention to trying to make it go away, that's just like feeding a troll.

just don't stop your work and everything will be fine.

 

No, I'm not.

This whole thing is based on my experience of dealing with people online, observations, occasional unusual tidbits and pieces of information I came across and bunch of "aha" moments.

Glad to hear it is helpful.

 

ignore, there are too many people today that wil lsay your work sucks just because it makes them feel important, pick on other people that actualy trying is very popular today, ignore useles people because they will do everything to bring you to their level of productivity.

 

Take negative feedback as an opportunity to improve, take it as a sign you should change course, or ignore it. Don't take it personally.

 

You should be really content with your achievement! My friend is same and she is always getting knocked back by many opinion on art and graphics. I saw you game and it looks very quirky and fun. Am sure it will do well friend.

 

I 100% agree. This is why i always start with basic prototype and get feedback. You can totally loose track of what is important, content is king. Well said.

 

Go on Steam. Grab any top selling game. Scroll down and read the negative comments. Then you'll realize the trolls are everywhere, and that you can take their criticism with a grain of salt. And while your their also read the constructive thumbs down comments. This will help you realize that not all negative reviews and comments are trolling, even if they are not that nice in tone. Many are legitimate and a valuable source of feedback. Every successful artist in the world has their detractors. You just need to figure out who to listen to.

If you really want to have fun, go dig up some historical trolling of someone like Notch. People were ruthless during the early days of Minecraft. Same goes with Tynan Sylvestor and Rimworld. ConcernedApe with Stardew Valley. You name it. I'm sure those guys hated to the criticism as much as anybody, but they also took what they could from it and soldiered on.

 

Yes it happens to all of us. Try to train yourself not to think about it in a personal way.

Don't listen to feedback that isn't constructive.

Try to ignore all feedback, good and bad, that isn't somewhat constructive. Reviews on the app store like "Awesome Game!" help me as much as "Totally not worth downloading." Both offer no insight into why my game is good or bad, just a subjective view of one individual.

I've also found that the human brain (mine) is very good at filtering out feedback it hears all the time and focuses a lot on feedback it hears very little. For example my game gets about 50 "Awesome Game" reviews per "Totally not worth downloading." review, yet somehow I use to get more affected by the single bad review than the 50 good ones. This I assume is normal as we have evolved to pay more attention to bad things that happen to us in life, to try understand them and make sure they don't happen again. But in the case of the internet that's impossible. So we need to train ourselves differently.

That's my opinion.

 

Some negative comments may have a random nugget of useful information in them. Sometimes it can be useful to just keep yourself calm and try to read through a negative comment to see if there is any helpful insight in there.

But there are also negative comments sometimes that are just purely negative and offer no value to the developer. It is important to remember that some people post nasty comments online. It is who they are. It is not the game developer's fault. Sometimes some angry people just need to vent somewhere. Some nasty comments say more about the person typing the comment than they do about the game being reviewed.

Other times, some people might hate a game purely based preferences rather than quality. They might decide to hate a game simply because they wanted to play a completely different game. You need to always expect at least some negative comments to fall into this group, since it is not practical to make a creative work that appeals to literally everybody.

From time to time, look through the reviews of really popular games on Steam. There are games that have sold millions of copies, and those games have a lot of nasty comments in the reviews. For example, if you look through the Steam reviews for PUBG, you will find lots of nasty reviews by people who have played PUBG for hundreds or even thousands of hours. If you only read the nasty reviews, you would think the game developers were career criminals bent on a path of limitless destruction. The game was still enjoyable enough for those people to put a lot of hours into playing PUBG while apparently also hating the game. Top review for PUBG right now is by a person with 3400 hours played in PUBG that hates PUBG. That person got their money's worth out of the game by now. PUBG admittedly has bugs, cheaters, and some weird game design choices. But it is also fun enough to play for a lot of hours despite the imperfections.

After reading some nasty reviews for a really popular game, click on each reviewer to see what other games they have reviewed. Some people only post negative reviews. Other people post both negative and positive reviews. When a person posts mostly positive reviews, then I tend to take their other comments more seriously and I will write those down as feature requests and/or bug fix requests. If a person only posts negative reviews, I usually assume that person might be the negative type.

 

The problem with this question is that you already frame the answer as a separate issue.

Any comment, negative or otherwise, that has useful feedback is a good thing. Any comment that has no useful feedback can be discarded (negative or positive, since someone who genuinely compliments you on something is usually clear about why).

I personally can't imagine being upset by a comment on the internet that has no useful context, because if it does not describe me in some way how can it possibly apply to me?

I prefer constructive negative feedback any day of the week, because it is free advice on how to get better. I wish I knew who I could pay to give me high quality negative feedback on a daily basis, since most people are afraid to give that kind of advice to others, or provide low quality feedback for their own sake.

 

My practical robot self completely agrees. But as has been clarified, they're not asking about what to do with the feedback so much as about the feelings that come with it.

My personal take on that is that it stopped sticking at some point. I don't much care if any individual doesn't like my stuff. What I care about is that some audience does like it, and as long as I know that audience exists and I can get my game to them then it doesn't really matter if other people also exist who don't like it. I'll do my thing, and they can do theirs, right?

In particular, if it's people being jerks about your skill or about what you chose to make... they're just jerks. I only care about someone's opinion as much as it is able to practically impact me (eg: early negative reviews are bad...) or as much as I respect its content. And if someone is enough of a jerk to try to make me feel bad about a thing I made then I have zero respect for them, and therefore won't be effected by their opinion in and of itself.

Of course, all of that is easy to say. There certainly was a time when people would say something bad about my work and I'd feel terrible as a result. I think that the transition away from that probably came with just... doing a lot of projects. In the early days I identified really closely with every piece of my work, as if each was a representation of me. So if it was "attacked" then so was I. As I did more and more projects they all just became... projects. I realised that I was not my work, and my work was not me, and if someone didn't like it... that's fine

It certainly helped that I was getting paid for it. Even when I wasn't creatively into a particular thing it was still generating income, . I imagine that the separation of identity and output might be a bit harder when you're coming from a purely creative perspective.

My work doesn't have to be for everyone. Neither does yours.

 

Thank you a lot. I try to be confident but sometimes it is hard when I read negative and mean stuff. But nice words like yours help a lot!

 

@ChazBass @angrypenguin @ShilohGames @Antony-Blackett @Rasly2 @BIGTIMEMASTER @Joe-Censored
Thank you for your advices with dealing with the negative feeling!

 

Only time I get affected by negative review are reviews like these, its a positive review tagged as a negative. Could might as well been posted as a positive

 

That's the most annoying thing in the world! "Awesome Game!" 1 star.... Gah!

 

That really is hard. I do not know of you can change reviews on Steam. The person really enjoyed the game so it probably was by accident. Maybe you can contact them and ask for changing it to thumbs up.

 

Nope, just deal with it and carry on.

 

Most of our negative reviews are around low player count, which I guess is sort of valid negative review. But, its counter productive. Negative reviews will not bring more players to play with

 

I know it's off topic, but I think it's potentially useful in its own right, so I can't help myself but respond to this.

There's an important difference between aligning your view of your project and aligning your project itself.

I find it incredibly valuable to understand what my audience sees, and to see my work from as close to their perspective as I can. I don't have to agree with it, I just want to understand how they percieve it. Whether I'm working for profit or creativity, it allows me to better craft what I'm doing to achieve the reactions I want from my audience. Without it I'm just guessing.

That doesn't mean I'm going to just do what they tell me they want. What they want might not be what I'm going for, or it just might not work, or various other reasons. If it's my game then I'll make the call because it's my creative choice. But I want that to be an informed choice, and that's where understanding audience perceptions is important.

 

I didn't say anything about what to do with the feedback. I simply pointed out that focusing on the feedback aspect (or lack thereof) provides a way to translate a mere negative message into something that is either positive or meaningless.

Negative feelings associated with a message are a product of your own perception of the message. If you remove the feedback aspect, you are left simply with negative and positive emotion, the value of which cannot be judged because it has no context. Losing track of context is how people become depressed and lose emotional control, because a puddle of negativity can just as easily turn into a bottomless ocean when you cannot calculate the value of the thing that caused it.

I don't know if the OP simply wants to be made to feel better right now, but the goal of this perspective I am talking about is preventing negative feelings in the long term.

 

Yeah, there are lots of reviews like that on Steam. A player really likes the game, but then selects a negative response because not enough other people already play the game. And by selecting negative in that review, that player is lowering the review score which leads even fewer people to play the game. It is one of the issues when trying to develop a multiplayer game as a small indie.

 

Developers can reply to user reviews on Steam but not directly change them. User can actually change their own reviews at any time. So if a developer thinks a user's review was accidentally tagged as negative, the developer should reply to the user's feedback and ask them if they will consider changing it to a positive score.

I have actually done that during early access on Steam. For example, if a user generally liked one of my games but was frustrated by a specific bug or lack of a feature, then I will thank the user for their feedback and reach out to them after I make the improvements. Some users have changed their reviews to positives after that.

 

I agree that is counter productive, but it is very common. Indie multiplayer games often suffer from low player counts. Submitting a negative review based solely on low player counts can actually lead to even lower player counts.