SUGGESTION: Make a play tester area on the forums

Don't be dramatic anders. Nobody is untouchable. Smart people just know when the mods are sleeping so post at the right time to maximize thread life before getting moved.

Also, if you make habit of stirring up S*** with a person, of course they gonna be extra nitpicky on you. Humans are not computers, they are slightly more complex. Doesn't mean they can't be predicted though, and trouble children getting an extra watchful eye is kind of thing that's highly predictable.

 

On topic, seems like it wouldn't make sense to do the same thing as feedback Friday only larger if feedback Friday itself is only getting small traffic. More people should just explode FF until there is clear.demand for dedicated feedback subforum.

 

Good for you that there is a great place to get feedback that is NOT on the General forum.

 

True...but the nice thing about FF is there is a person who checks in to make sure the thread is not going off topic, and that people are giving constructive criticism, and to actually help out the developer who is trying to get feedback.

A general area would no doubt turn into a huge mess. FF last four days and then get locked, you can still read them though. But not a 500 post thread where people get lost as the forums fill and scroll up.

Would be nice though if folks WOULD fill-up the FF threads.

 

Also, @AndersMalmgren , silence is a form of feedback.

 

I am looking at it each week but have been busy with work lately. I try to always play any demos.in there. I also want to get my own in there but probably won't get to playable demonuntil.next year.

Anyway, I am big fan of FF, even if not often contributing.

 

I always read all of FF but I would never show my project in there, mostly because its commercial and from talks with publishers etc sharing on certain places would actually hurt my chances of aquiring a publisher and/or funding, and unity forums was one of the places I naturally discussed at length.

While we all know amazing games are made with unity, the unity brand is very very much not seen as a good thing to have as a label on your game according to those I have discussed it with, and staying away from the forums posting about it is a good idea if you are unsure about the financial stability / future of your game. Ofcourse if your already fully funded or are in a team that has funding beyond the current project , go for it!

Also note nothing I said above is fact, I am just regurgitating what I have been told, exceptions are always out there!

I 100% believe the direction unity is going in will stop the brand being seen as a stamp of low quality from gamers perspective, but it also appears we are not there yet.

 

What then does silence mean? How do you interpret it?

If people aren't getting hyped on my game, I view as personal responsibility to make it more attractive.

 

To be honest WIP forum is bit dead. You can post there and hope that some developer will find your game interesting.

Problem is - most of us do not have actual time to play yet another casual S***fest.

Is it worth checking WIP forum like once a month? Yes. Is it worth checking it every day?
No way.

Also, there's like a million ways to make your game noticeable.
Posting on WIP subforum is probably on the bottom of that list.

On the topic's subject - I'm all on to free playtesters. Too bad its never free.

 

Don't get me wrong, it's good to post in WIP, but that's promoting to dev's, never ever only promote to dev's. They are not your core audience

 

Curious as to who told you that. According to every talk I have seen at major conventions, Unity dev day in NYC, and on GDC, etc., they say TEST early and often. Getting feedback with a prototype and/or slice of your game is a lot different than releasing a full game to the public.

If I release anything on FF, it would be a slice, something in the game that I am not sure about and need feedback to tell me if this is fun, is it easy to use, does it confuse you?

Not only that but when you are more open about your game, you are more protected if someone tries to steal it. You establish your ownership of the game. Hiding your game away until you publish might work...but if someone gets it and shares it, you have no proof unless your game is public somewhere...even if just a website or a trailer, that the game is yours.

Even if you do not post it on Unity's forums, get playtesters somehow, and early. Much easier to fix stuff early than deep into development.

Not saying your advice was wrong, I would just like to know the source of it. So much misinformation out there and so many new developers worry more than they should about losing control of their game. In my experience, most devs lose their game due to adding unknown people to their team and having their code and even their money taken from them.

So far, I have never met a developer who has lost their game due to someone stealing it off a forum or a Discord channel. But I have heard about people getting it stolen off of publisher sites like Google or even Steam. Anyone can decompile your game and steal it. There is no such thing as 100% secure. But..it is much harder to steal a game that is already being talked about than one that stays hidden in the shadows.

 

Why making yourself harder.
You are on forum anyway right?
Your forum of interest is not only General right?
I just click New Posts, or Watched, and if I see WIP of my interest, then I consider to look into. I don't need to specific forum section. Simply scanning quickly new posts of a day.

Is too many forum sections, to look into each individually.

If you miss today post, you may see later or tomorrow, if thread is active.

 

Did you mean to imply you have the best game on the forum, or was that a joke that flew over my head?

I think we are already halfway through that change and my impression is that the average gamer now thinks every engine is bad, every developer is incompetent *), and every big publisher is greedy and unethical. Not sure where we are going from there, but I'm seeing UE4 and cryengine get the same kind of flack that Unity used to get.

*) except those gamer darlings like CD Project Red that understand marketing better than the big players and build their empires on massive exploitation of their workforce and operating from lower income countries.

There's no point in stealing something that hasn't proven itself in the market yet imho.


My main concern with posting anything here would be getting doxxed down the line.

 

Is Polish company, and they employ in major Polish employees.
Like Witcher is based on Slavic culture, to make story full sense.
Who can now culture better?

I just hope, it won't turn eventually in to dark side, like other AAA companies, once upon time great.

We know Andrew has hard sens of humor (interpret as you like)

 

Yep, after you release that is more likely to happen. You have to decide on your risk level.

 

Removed off topic nonsense.

Regarding forum structure, if you want people to test your game, you may ask so in your WIP or MWU thread. There is no logical reason to have a seperate forum for. In fact the the plan is to attempt to reduce the number of subforums, not increase them. If you want targeted, thoughtful input about the design, use the Friday Feedback thread.

Also remember that with the exception of the very specific areas dedicated to it, this forum isn't for self promotion under the guise of "feedback". Which is unfortunately would be exactly the case if there were a separate forum. (like the devlog thread, which was 99% spam). Realistically If you NEED testers, hire them. Getting feedback from other developers is very useful in context. But getting actionable user feedback is not something best achieved (quality wise) by asking random people on the internet for free.

 

Which devlog was spam?

 

The devlog thread that was closed a few weeks ago.

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/user-blogs.63338/

 

Indeed, and likely the twitter one is going that way as well. it is full of unmaintained feeds, people have only have a post or two and fairly regular spam removal. Not really useful to anyone.

 

Unstructured links like that has no value to anyone.

 

So I agree. But my reasoning is different.

When I google a game, these are the results I expect to come up:

• A steam or app store page to buy it
• The game or developers webpage
• A wiki with a bunch of game concepts (at the very least a generic wikipedia entry)
• Some sort of community page for the game
• YouTube videos of play throughs
• Reviews of the game

Finding a Unity forum post isn't explicitly bad. I just means that I haven't found any of the other stuff I should find. And if I click through to a Unity post, I'm likely to find a whole bunch of threads asking about relatively simple stuff. This gives the impression of a small low-funded amateur.

 

Very much this. This forum is a place for users of unity to get support and discuss, it isn't a store front, social media platform or promotional site. If a search for your game turns up a Unity dev forum thread on the first page, you are failing to do the most basic promotion.

 

Not sure if it's google's personalization stuff, but I got the impression that the pagerank for this forum is so high, that it'll be quite the challenge to actually beat it in the search result placement with legit content. I've so often searched for things only to find my own thread here where I already asked about the same thing among the first search results.

 

You need to run google in a Incognito tab. Otherwise it will be too user specific.
edit: That metric is just bullshit btw

 

Curious, do things like post mortems belong here?

I used to think they very much did, but maybe I'm wrong. Is this a space to talk about making games using unity, or do you really want to cut down on anything that doesnt directly revolve around the editor, ut tech rollout and support products?

 

I think so. It's definitely game dev related, and any decent post mortem will at least touch on your tools, workflows and so on - all related to Unity if that's what you worked in. Plus, many projects will use Unity's value-add services, like Unity Ads, Collaborate, Analytics and so on.

Plus, the non-technical side of game development definitely impacts Unity users in general.

 

What about stuff like sales data, user info, etc, I imagine that Is that more borderline, since its less directly related to UT? But is that kind of thing kinda frowned upon these days?

 

Yes, it is likely a good place, assuming it is actually a post-mortem and not something else like promotion disguised as such.

And yes, 'making games' topics are perfectly acceptable and what General Discussion is for. Excluding of course where the topic is in the wrong place (self promotion or support in general discussion), repetitive pointless threads (engine wars), trolling, or pointlessly vague/impractical/tangential, and they should be "general" in nature, (I.E. not "let's talk about my game".) This should be fairly obvious stuff.

 

if it is about your specific sales data ("your" meaning whoever posted it, not you specifically), it goes in your WIP/MWU thread. If it is about how to track, acquire, read, affect etc... that is general. The key difference is "general" WIP/MWU is specifically there to talk about your game.

 

If in doubt, I say post it. Worst case you'll get corrected if it's in the wrong place or not appropriate here, and a mod can move it to the right place, then everything's groovy.

In the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal if that means you get it wrong once or twice. Plus, nobody's going to even notice examples like those in the context of the support threads et. al. which keep popping up in here.

This is just from my personal perspective. I'd prefer that people give something a go and make msitakes than do nothing for fear of making a mistake.

 

I'm a bit surprised this thread ventured off into promotion/marketing instead of getting frank developer to developer feedback (which is what I thought the OP's purpose was).

I disagree, because Unity's "stamp of low quality" was never about the quality of the engine itself. The lowest effort games, or games by novices, almost exclusively use Unity Personal instead of Plus/Pro. Plus/Pro users disable the Unity splash screen while Personal users cannot. So when gamers are exposed to a terrible game, the likelyhood of minutes before seeing the Unity splash screen is high. No matter what Unity does to improve the engine, they can't do anything to improve low effort or broken games.

The best thing Unity could do to solve this problem is add the feature to disable the splash screen to Unity Personal licenses. Though I do think the Unity "stamp of low quality" is an overblown issue. More a vocal minority of gamers than a widespread dominant opinion.

 

I agree with the idea of this, I think that when you are in a relatively high-risk and chaotic situation such as trying to sell a game, the best thing to do is to sell the game on its merits, and have a lot of substantial and impressive things to say about it, rather than worrying too much about small strategic choices. It's like trying to read the stock market. You can try to predict small things with mixed success but in the end, a product that clearly and strongly satisfies a well-defined need is a million times more of an indicator than anything else you can come up with.

I found a good article the other day about how steam users look at new games there, and I think it's telling that most of the indicators suggest they begin by looking for a high-quality example of something they are already familiar with and understand. People who behave like this are going to be most swayed by evidence that the devs know what they are doing and by the availability of clear, substantial information. I wouldn't want to bet that they would behave differently regardless of where on the internet they found the information about the game, and in what context.

Frankly if a game cannot sell reasonably well on its own merit (and I don't mean lack of marketing, quite the contrary - I mean the marketing should focus on what the game has to offer) then imo it's either not a good game, or the market is not worth pursuing.

And since cold marketing is largely about getting a foothold, achieving reasonable success at the beginning is probably going to guarantee most of the potential that the game has anyway.

 

As far as having a new play testing area, I think it's better to figure out why the FF and WIP are not blowing up before putting another horse in the race. It's not a question at all of who is moderating or not, or who wins the personality contest, if nobody is posting games then it won't work out. If people are motivated to post about their games, and they receive useful feedback they can use, they will be happy and it will succeed.

 

Indeed, there is no point in further fractionation unless there is a clear demand. If there were a non-stop stream of people requesting testers, then it may worth considering. That, ultimately, just is not the case.

The simple (and sad?) truth is that this just isn't what happens most of the time. The reality is that genuine developers are rare, or at least vocally rare. There is a group here and they participate (in places like FF and such). Most are either overzealous first timers who want talk excitedly about their awesome version of roll-a-ball the dumped on the play store, or cloners who see this site as nothing more than a way to spam to try to get downloads. And of course the deviant art type folks who do don't really want actual feedback, they want a bunch of people to go "Cool, you are the best!"

And then you get the other side where serious developers just don't have the time to go through the sheer amount WIP posts and give feedback. And part of that same case is that they may not want or care about feedback from a bulk those willing to respond. Just from personal experience, I assume that folks here have others who they respect their opinions and are willing to take the time to help those same folks. While there may not be a ton of public feedback/testing, I believe that a lot of it happens in smaller circles here.

Everything is in place to get and give feedback, the fact that it may not appear to be happening isn't anything that is solved or changed by forum structure or rules.

 

Great points. Personally, every time I have summoned the community for feedback, it's given me more than I could ask for.

 

Also, @Billy4184 , about first quote, if I could put it more simply, the idea is that until I am top dog in a niche, the goal is always "make better game". The clever market strategies come into play when I know that I can consistently make titles that sell themselves, and thus then the game becomes more about strategy and less about product.

Just my mindset, maybe not best but it keeps me motivated to do my best work.

 

I think the main problem is that it's not clear to people why feedback on here is useful. They often consider this place to be simply competition, that there are other devs just waiting here to steal some great idea (and somehow execute it properly in a short space of time) and that the feedback itself is probably going to be the quora-style answers that often appear on general discussion.

What's needed is concrete information that is meaningful. For example I think the most useful thread on general discussion is 'how much money are you making from your games'. It's a different feeling when you get the real deal with no fluff, and kudos to people who have done that, especially @BIGTIMEMASTER and @frosted who have given people insight into a stage of game dev they probably haven't (and may never) reach.

I hope FF changes that, but it's missing something, I don't really know yet. Maybe the first post could offer something substantial (for example I linked to a GDC talk on subnautica's feedback system in the latest FF).

I think the forums just have to get more real for people to take it seriously. I don't mean positive or negative perspectives as such, just less opinionated and more content-based. I haven't been here much for a few weeks and frankly most of it hasn't appealed to me even after a break.

 

That is not the problem of Unity, or any other Game Engine.
People always been secretive about they programming work.
When we starting, we think we write unique super cool and complex code and no one else done it. We not sharing, because someone could steel it. That is also probably one of the reasons, people don't post their code, when describing problem. Or past screenshots at best. Besides other matters. While we realizing later, when gaining some experience, we could do things in much fewer lines and solutions are available all over the place online, for over decade.

I would say, that is general programmer / developers mind set.

 

If somebody with big credentials is offering feedback then the sheep will flock.

People don't want to evaluate information on their own. They want sermon from somebody with titles. I think this is main thing.

 

Im not sure how useful the money thread is eitjer. Realltly it is a dick measuring bulletin board.

It couldn't be more than that because even the most thorough post there are way too data scarce to be useful. So it's all conclusions drawn from scant data. People don't really know or want to do actual science, they just want to speculate and play pretend.

I appreciate you mentioning subnautica in recent FF. There is a team that did the actual work of science. And the results show it.

 

Well the way I see it, the 'final fontier' of marketing is a big and involved community around a brand. You need to get people excited and then provide avenues for them to publicize their excitement to other people.

Of course, I do think that community building does involve its own sort of design, it's not just about opening a forum and waiting for something to happen.

In the end though a business operating with average-quality indie games as a product is just not going to be efficient even if every avenue of marketing is exploited.

Subnautica to me is a very interesting case study, it's one of the most successful games ever and almost died from lack of interest at the start. The key thing is that they then decided to focus on what people wanted (by integrating a very detailed feedback and analytics system) and that seems to be what propelled them to success - besides developing a community. It wasn't about a publisher or facebook ads or some other marketing tactic that wasn't related to making a good game and getting players to communicate what game they wanted.

As far as I'm concerned, the 80-20 rule is in favor of getting feedback and community building, and I'm not planning to worry about a lot else.

 

Sure, but it's still a problem that can be responded to specifically. Maybe game devs in general don't think marketing and feedback is all that useful. I'm sure some concrete examples from successful devs (even moderately so) would go a long way to changing that.

 

Yeah I think with subnautica it is that but also hitting good niche as well. So double whammy sort of.

But yeah, they did the real work of data gathering, not just halfass looking at a few numbers and coming up with conclusions way too soon.

 

I don't think it's exactly this. It's not a random public forum where nothing differentiates people except opinion. To everyone making a game they are the king and everyone else is a worshipper of the awesome thing they are about to spring on the world. Anyone who is genuinely helpful to them will probably be responded to positively. I haven't seen credentials go too far on this forum except for inside specific circles.

 

Every niche is a good niche or it wouldn't be a niche. The game still almost died at the start, they couldn't get enough money from it. Finding the game that people wanted through feedback and analytics is the only clear change of course that I can see.

 

That's the thing. Nobody really knows who anybody is and most regulars keep their work private.

But if somebody with a big name shows up and starts dropping nuggets and everybody can easily see who they are, then the sheep will.flock.( which I don't think would be good. I value intimacy and info over politics)

Doesn't matter what the info is. I can say same thing a famous artist would.say, but nobody gonna consider it like they would the other. There is big.difference between front people put on and how they really think and feel.

 

About subnautica, what I mean is they were in a niche. Not another fps. So lots more room to grow.

A compounding effect upon the good analytics they did.

 

Well, I think the problem is not what you say, but what you can back it up with in terms of providing a clear and coherent picture of your own experience. My favourite blogs for example are not so much about how big the name is, but how frank and honest the person is willing to be and how much of the story they are willing to tell.

 

Yeah I think you are saying same or similar thing to me though.

I say, two and two is four. People say, are you a mathematician? Let's see some peer reviewed articles.

Person with cred says same thing, no question. People say, my god it's a genius!

In either case, nobody is carefully evaluating data for themselves.

Now I am not saying you don't put trust in others and their experience. What I am saying is there is not enough trust within community, which is probably good part of reason people aren't opening up and using each other more.

Personally, do I trust opinion of everybody here? Nope. But do I trust myself more? Nope. Lol. Even somebody who is a general doofus is guaranteed to know more about something than me. So if they offer me a nugget, happily I accept it. I can decide if it's useful or not, and the only judgement need made is appreciation that this person is intending to help.