Rough games deserve our love and respect

TLDR:  Rough games deserve nothing more than to be ignored, forgotten, and thrown to the bottom of the trash pile with the rest of the substandard trash.  I stand by this statement despite all the salty indie devs disliking my posts because I speak the harsh truth that these devs have always known after wasting months/years of their life on fruitless and unprofitable endeavors.

You present a reasonable point and I respect that.  I don’t agree with your point but I am glad you present it in an amenable fashion.

I grew up on NES games so ‘diamond in the rough’ among piles of trash is what I’m already used to.  Shatterhand is one of those.  Can’t tell by the generic 80s cyber-guy cover that it was possibly a knockoff of Bionic Commando or something but it was REALLY good, like AMAZINGLY good.  So I’m absolutely familiar with that concept.

But my point is that the market is FLOODED and there is ZERO ROOM for ‘trying out’ substandard games.  The standards of average gamers should rise and anything not meeting those standards should not even be considered worthy of the time to click on it.  Forget it and move on.  

It is nearly-impossible to make the time (and money) to try out every subpar game or every quirky indie title.  There are not enough hours in the day or years in the average human lifespan.  Even those who literally play games for a living can’t keep up with it and they experience burnout eventually (unless of course they’re making $120k+ a year doing a once a week edited video sprinkled with a bunch of half-assed low-effort ‘impressions’ videos in between).

I would love for there to be more tightly-curated storefronts available like GoG that weed out the trash and only allow the treasures to rise to the top.  The best of the best.  Not EVERY game on GoG is worthy of their listed price but they do sales and promotions quite often.  I enjoy it and I gladly throw money at them for doing so.

My favorite site has to be the Humble Store.  They only take a 10% cut and do similar things to both GoG and Steam while also giving generously to charity.  I love that and I gladly support it.  So many indie devs I’ve talked to have not bothered to consider putting their games on GoG, Humble Store, itch.io, Indiegala, or other sites.  Instead, they’d rather throw tens of thousands of keys into these scummy grey-market botter & card-farmer lesser-known sites for ‘exposure’ for their game by letting those bastards buy it for pennies to the dollar.  Rarely do they end up with the exposure that they want/need.

The fundamental fact is that it is a consumer-first market.  Every indie dev thinks their game is worthy of X amount of money and the majority of the time they are completely wrong.  Their bias ends up coloring their perception and they don’t want to admit that they wasted their time making games when they should’ve just done a regular non-gaming job (or even just software development) and gotten a steadier paycheck.

Gaming is for everyone but (commercial) Game DEVELOPMENT is NOT for everyone.  Neither is coding despite all the ‘STEM’ money-sinks that taxpayer money has been wasted upon.  If people want their kids to be interested in STEM stuff then that has to come from the parents first and foremost.

William Faulkner said it best:  “Kill your darlings” and that includes your precious game you’ve worked X months/years on if it is subpar trash.  Source is here: http://www.writerslife.org/what-it-means-to-kill-your-darlings/