Do you trust fans to make your games better?

[ShinNessTen]

I had the thinking that fans sometimes do a better job at keeping a game(series) alive than the actual developers.


Now i ask you, out of curiosity: If you ever become a popular dev. with a great Videogame (series), would you let your fans get in on some of it's development?


I know some fans can come up with some really great ideas sometimes... also bad ones, but you can just ignore those. 


Will you let others decide what path you choose? Or will you actually decide to go alone and make your own vision true?


This might be a dumb question but it's bothering me so much lately.


I, for one, think my fans (if i ever get any) deserve to play a role in my games somewhere as well. At that point it will not only be My game... but ours.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

There are a number of things that can complicate whether something should be implemented or not. The obvious one would the limitations of budget and labor. Doesn't matter how amazing the idea is if you don't have the means to create it and be within budget. But, subjects of feature bloat and the interactions between features are commonly an issue for games. If the suggested feature doesn't really enrich the game or support the core themes presented by the game, then it could be distracting or even disadvantageous to the literacy of the game to include them. 


I think there's also a big difference between additive/subtractive suggestions, and suggestions pertaining to what is already there. Players are pretty quick to identify if something feels clunky, slow, too difficult, not difficult enough, unclear, confusing, etc. I think these types of feedbacks should be taken very seriously when editing a game or making the next entry. To me, it's more understandable why developers may not add a ton of new features, but if a large number of players have difficulty with the core of the original game; they may not come back for the next one without improvements.


Whether you can trust the fans; I think you can for a number of things. But, the developers should still use their own judgments when reviewing feedback and making considerations. As you say, some ideas are good and others are bad. 

 

[SimProse]

This is so true....sometimes. There are occasions when fans are injecting ideas to make the game what they want, rather than what it actually is, and this can cause really bad feature creep, which is deadly for many projects. You as the developer should have a solid idea of the scope and depth of your game, rather than letting fans purely dictate the direction.

 

[mlogan]

Only if it's hot.


Bad joke aside, I picked no, but I don't feel you have enough options. While I would certainly listen to feedback and ideas of fans, it's not an automatic that I would implement, for all the reasons that have already been stated.

 

[Vox Novus]

This is tough, you need to listen to criticisms about the game; mechanics functioning well or them being interesting for example. Its good to listen to feedback for other aspects like story direction and what not to a point; some of the plot and direction in some games start to border on the ridiculous (compare the three Final Fantasy XIII games for example). At the same time I feel a developer needs to stand on their own and that they can be easily over-consumed with what fans want, making matters worse is that different segments of fans want different things and you won't make all the individual groups of them happy. Ultimately, I'm going to choose "no" here because I feel a work in progress shouldn't be heavily altered to conform to opinions but feedback should be taken into account for future works.


@mlogan just a suggestion, seems like this could potentially go under game development-general discussion. 

 

[mlogan]

Man, I thought you were tagging me for my awesome joke.


But yeah, you're right. I often browse "New Content" so I miss where things are actually posted sometimes. Thanks for the heads up.


Moving to General Discussion.

 

[bgillisp]

I said no. I've Seen too many cases where the fans don't even know what they really want, especially in this day of reboots. "Make it different...wait how dare you make it different?" I've just seen that too often to put a lot of stock in fan opinions.

 

[Vox Novus]

@mlogan actually the joke must have "blown" over my head, was paying too much attention to the topic; just got it though. Superb.


Going back to the topic its worth bringing up mass effect 3 here (haven't played the series myself but heard about the game's fan related issues) where fan appeal caused the developer's to add on to their original vision with a dlc expanded ending. 

 

[gRaViJa]

Gameplay-wise: I would definitely listen and adjust gameplay elements accordingly. It's a form of usability i think.


Story-wise and character-wise: Pretty much no, the stories is something i envision. I would listen to technical stuff of course (spelling etc), but otherwise its something too personal for me.

 

[Leon Kennedy]

Some games like skyrim or COD4 are almost completely ran by mods at this point and that's just examples. I understand mods aren't directly remakes but for remakes made on the same engine all the added features are just mods. So in that case I'd say usually modded/remade games on same engine are usually only made with improvements so I trust people to make a game better that way.


If you are talking about fan remakes on rm or a different engine than original a lot of fan games I see are usually just trying to add more to the story that's already there or just has same main characters in a different story. So obviously the people that spend tons of time and effort into this will probably do well. Others that quickly slap together a ball of lameness with rtp origins obvious 100% throughout the game will usually fail. Some people are such big fans of some games they don't want to see it any other way so it just depends who you are really. Also some people wouldn't mind remakes of some games but don't want people to touch others.

 

[Kes]

I haven't voted because the options don't include what I think.


First, I have so far only made individual games, none of them are in a series, so fans cannot influence how a specific game is made, because it's already done and finished before they see it, and I do not intend to remake them.  To that extent, the options are irrelevant to my situation.


I certainly listen to feedback, positive and negative, and try to learn from it, but that's very different from saying that fans will "get in on the development."


The only way that external voices can be incorporated into the development plan is if preliminary drafts of the game (I wouldn't call them demos for this purpose) were made available in some way and people were invited to comment on it.  Some people may work that way, but I don't.  I'm continually reworking things and any draft I put out for public view would be superseded very soon anyway.  So people would be commenting on a draft which no longer existed - unless I were to stop everything and wait for comments to arrive, if they ever do, before moving on.


As others have said, it is almost certain that you will get directly opposed/mutually exclusive suggestions, so you have to make the decision anyway, and in doing so, you will end up with some fans saying that the consultation process was a sham, and a gimmick, because you didn't happen to prefer their idea.  So rather than enhancing fan involvement, you risk alienating some of them.

 

[TheGamedawg]

When you say "make your games better" I'm assuming you mean stuff like user-created content or fangames.  In that respect, I would say yes.


No one knows what the fans want more than the fans themselves.  So if fans are working on something cool you think will help your universe get more notoriety and respect, let them!

 

[Pierman Walter]

This is most likely because I don't have a real fan base yet, but I generally ignore most suggestions from other people. Although I sometimes get legitimately good advice, most of it is along the lines of, "You are a lazy thief because Undertale has a character named Everyman and your game is called Everyman RPG.", "I think this 9-year-old girl NPC would be a lot better if she showed more cleavage.", and "Can you put my Feudal Japanese demonic kitsune ninja princess OC into your realistic hard science fiction game?"

 

[Kyuukon]

Nah, but I'm always happy to hear what they have to say about it

 

[Milennin]

Lol, none of my games are popular enough to have fans, but I'll always listen to what people think about my games, even if I don't always agree with their points. I give every point of criticism a thought. But it also largely depend on the kind of criticism it is. Sometimes, people will suggest (or demand, lol) that you alter the core of your game to fit their ideas, and that, obviously, is not going to happen. Not only because it is way too much work to change or remove a core aspect of the game, but also because I've already decided it's part of my vision of the game. But if it's about smaller things, like changes to a character's skill set, or the difficulty of a boss fight, or a step in a quest line that doesn't make sense, I gladly listen.

 

[SeagullKing]

I have had the story for my game in mind for 8+ years.  There are parts of it that I wouldn't change for anything no matter what anybody says.


That's not to say that fans can't come up with good ideas.  I think there's definitely a place where the creator should draw the line when it comes to fan suggestions/demands.

 

[Dr. Delibird]

As an artist, I don't trust anybody to finish or polish or enhance my artwork. Video games are a medium for me to produce art in more than just the traditional sense and so I do not trust anybody but me to work on my game in any way shape or form.

Feedback is a whole other ball game. If the fans notice something is clunky or whatever the case may be, I will listen and I will internally beta test the game with the adjustments suggested by the fans. However these are not full blown new mechanics types of suggestions or anything, this sort of feedback is the "this is not working right" or "is it suppose to do that" that isn't limited to bugs (which some people think it is).

If the fans all en-mass ask for a PvP system to be implemented, I will not do so in THAT game. If I have the budget and resources to do it then I will in a different project that is related to the one the fans originally wanted it for.