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Some additional thoughts towards the "Nickgravelyn" situation
Glog78 Jul 5, 2015
Hello all,

i don't want to spread it that much but i want to talk about expectations / cultural differences and customers.

As you are all aware some people said very straight that they expect a basic knowledge of someone if he does something in the this article https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/brushfire-games-on-their-linux-sales-for-shipwreck-their-thoughts-on-linux.5615 .

To be honest here i can understand this , but i'm not willing to defend it. So lets start from the beginning.

I'm from germany and so is my social / cultural background. In germany in contrast to the united states is, you are nothing without a certificate which proof that you have learned something. That of cause lead's to a different view if a dev tells he has issues with setting up a development enviroment (basic knowledge you have as a profesional developer) on linux, cause from a german point of view he wouldn't be a profesional than. That should already be enough explination why someone might stumble.

In many other countries around the world the idea of someone's skills counting more than the certificate's is very common. In a way germany tries to addapt to this for years now but it kinda only works in the startup scene.

Since we are talking about indie dev's we need to take a look behind this group of people. These person's are mostly known for doing what they like and learning everything on the fly. Quiet a few never visited a course or a seperate training for what they are doing. (Basic definition of indie dev's before indie games became mainstream)

Today when we talk about indie productions there is a problem. The defintion gets more and more stretched. We still mean this people i meantioned above, but also we talk about profesionals leaving AAA development and even AAA Publisher abusing the term indie for products they don't want to spend a AAA budget on.

What we need to know is basically that Nick belongs to the first group. What we need to ask ourself is what can / should we expect from them? I can give the answer i found for myself:
1st) I realy love to support those guys in any way possible
2nd) I don't mind them asking questions and answering them , cause it show's dedication of them towards the platform i use
3rd) I'm willing to accept they aren't professionals. That useally shows in the way they handle PR , work with their customers and to some degree also in the products (eg: Gameidea > Presentation)

Now back to the issue: "Two souls alas! are dwelling in my breast."
* From a customer point of view i buy a product i pay for and i in a way expect the company/person who makes the product know what he is doing (german background).
* From someone who follow's many indie dev's i know i can't expect this and many other countries doesn't work this way.

In the end everyone needs to decide what he is more connected to.

I'm in a way not ok with makeing the person who expressed his concern's (neither in a good wording or in a bad wording) to be the bad guy here. Again i do understand his sentiment.

Lets imagine the following. You have exactly 5 bucks to spend for a game, cause your financial situation is very bad. Do you put it into someone who knows what he is doing or someone who shows that he needs to learn much more ?

So why this post? I suggest that GOL maybe gives a little more background informations on the dev's / companies (as long as they want) behind the games tested. Also some in deep interviews about how they got to make games and so on would be nice. Sometimes this happens out of itself (like for example the last article about Limit Theory) but often the tests focus only on the product. I hope that builds a better understanding how realistic our expectations on a product are. Example: I wouldn't expect a 1 man dev to fix a bug in a 1% marketshare in 2h while basically his 9x% marketshare product is broken too.

@EDIT: fixed some bad gramar
Speedster Jul 6, 2015
Brushfire Games are selling their game for $3, clear acknowledgement that it's not an ambitious highly-polished offering. That should be sufficient to set expectations, in my opinion. Can't gamers with high expectations just filter by price, and not go around demoralizing young developers who may currently be gaining the expertise needed to work on games of Obsidian or Double Fine levels of quality in the future?

I wouldn't usually be interested in a small game like this myself, but am thinking about getting it for encouragement for these developers to continue to support Linux as they grow in ability to make more ambitious games...
Glog78 Jul 7, 2015
Quoting: SpeedsterBrushfire Games are selling their game for $3, clear acknowledgement that it's not an ambitious highly-polished offering. That should be sufficient to set expectations, in my opinion. Can't gamers with high expectations just filter by price, and not go around demoralizing young developers who may currently be gaining the expertise needed to work on games of Obsidian or Double Fine levels of quality in the future?

I wouldn't usually be interested in a small game like this myself, but am thinking about getting it for encouragement for these developers to continue to support Linux as they grow in ability to make more ambitious games...

I realy hope i didn't made it sound like i want to attack brushfire games. Just you know -> https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/29y1x3/cant_we_do_better/.

But and this was the point of the above post i can understand people who expect games on steam to be made by trained people. Sidenote exactly the price isn't a good pinpoint for me to decide if a game was made by professionals and they are ? lazy ? (example TW2 release) or by a indie dev which just learns.
Speedster Jul 8, 2015
Quoting: Glog78I realy hope i didn't made it sound like i want to attack brushfire games.

No not directly, just sympathetic to those who are tempted to complain when devs are willing to provide Linux builds without wanting to become Linux experts. I think it should be seen rather as a great opportunity, such that by being welcoming as a community some of these devs will end up enjoying working with Linux (though not necessarily as their primary OS).

Quoting: Glog78But and this was the point of the above post i can understand people who expect games on steam to be made by trained people. Sidenote exactly the price isn't a good pinpoint for me to decide if a game was made by professionals and they are ? lazy ? (example TW2 release) or by a indie dev which just learns.

Unless you're buying the game mostly to support someone learning (which I do upon occasion) that shouldn't matter, what matters is if the game is likely to be enjoyable/meaningful to you. For most people the vast majority of games put out by 'professionals' are not worth playing, just like the vast majority of games put out by 'hobbiests' such as free software teams. (Theoretically there are some gaming addicts out there who will play almost anything, but I've never known one). As long as Steam keeps the reviews pretty fair (not astroturfed into worthlessness) the combination of trailers and reviews provides much better insight into whether a game is likely meet your personal standards than whether devs took any particular training course. I'm fully behind Liam on this point.

Also keep in mind the new policy on refunds -- when looking a new release or a niche game and there are not enough (any?) Linux-user reviews, you can give it a shot and just get a refund if the game plays badly on Linux.
Glog78 Jul 8, 2015
I like and hate refunds. I like them cause it will lead to a change in QA for PC Gaming again. This is so needed. But i for myself only want to refund games where there is a real reason for refunding. It's hard to make the decission for a refund.

Lets take a current example. Legend of Grimrock ... The dev's deserve every cent for their game, cause it's awesome. Would i had been calm enough to wait up until now if i don't know they only have 1 dev? Not sure about this.

" As long as Steam keeps the reviews pretty fair (not astroturfed into worthlessness) the combination of trailers and reviews provides much better insight into whether a game is likely meet your personal standards than whether devs took any particular training course. I'm fully behind Liam on this point."

Sorry to disagree here. I don't trust a trailer or the reviews. Probably one reason is that i'm just to old and have been screwed once to many by such informations (in a good and in a bad way). However i believe you don't need a training course to make great software, but again and this is what i stated above from my german background it feels like a gamble (btw thats what i meant with cultural background). You might get proper support and might be treated very very well. Some of those dev's are just awesome. On the other hand i have also seen dev's giving up and leaving a unoptimised game and using excuses like oh the marketshare is too small to leave me as a buyer with an "unfinished" product.

I give an example for both. First the not so awesome example (even not the worst by far i experienced):
I'm loveing city builders. I realy want to play City Skylines. Up to today the performance is horrible if the city is larger and you zoom in (framedrops < 20 with a 970 and a 6 core 1090T). It's common for unity 3D (version 4.x) on AMD CPU's (my is certainly not the most current but also still not a lowend cpu) and the basically not existing multi threading on linux. But yeah it sucks and i'm testing every update .. :(

Lets end this with some positiv thoughts :)
GhostControl Inc.
This game isn't very well known but if you check the linux threads in their community you basically get always a respond from the dev's. You notice they try their best to support the platform but also notice that it's not easy for them. Still they don't give up or put it behind the support for other platforms. Thats just awesome and how i expect it.

So if you call this sympathic i might be sympathic. I would rather call it i understand the people being more carefully where to put money and knowing a dev is unskilled can lead to a decission to buy or not to buy a product. To avoid this having an impact on the linux gaming platform i suggested to build up trust by more informations about the dev's and the development situation towards linux (example: even liam was suprised by getting to know almost human is that small).
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