People's Choice Voting?

[DavidGil]

I'm not excusing this by any means, but how often do games/stories etc. sell because someone is well known while (possibly) better produced works go unnoticed because there is no fan base and the author/developer is unknown? Probably without the resources to market. It's the world we live in unfortunately and it does irk me, but there's nothing that can be done about it. Or well, maybe there is in this instance, but there normally isn't anything that can be done except cross your fingers and hope lady luck smiles your way for once when it comes to getting noticed.

I know that I've been exposed to people attempting to rig things as well, by clamouring for votes. One thing i would say to those asking for people to vote, though I'm going to assume it's going to fall on deaf ears, is to always make sure you stress 'only vote if you think our work deserves it and not because you like us'. At least that way, you can say you tried to discourage everyone from voting and such. At least that's how I've handled review requesting in the past for my stories. Always asked for honesty.

Not only is it fair to other developers and such, but it's also fair to potential players as they get a true indication of your game's worth. Or well, a truer indication anyway as everything's subjective.

Of course, there's a saying that you get nowhere being nice and fair. But I'd prefer not winning something if I didn't deserve it. I wouldn't have stepped on anyone else either.

 

[nhubi]

Well this is the first time this has run so there are going to be teething problems, but at least the mods are looking at it. Perhaps next year (assuming this happens again) the voting could be registered only and be locked to only games you've downloaded, after all you can hardly vote for a game if you haven't played it and you can't play it if you haven't downloaded it. It wont stop some of the 'dodgy' votes but any that are getting votes via a paid for votes system will have more of a problem since people won't have an issue registering and voting for something for a few cents,  but very few would actually download something for that price,it would have to be much higher and given the prize is 2K the ROI clocks out pretty quickly.

Still, I don't have a game in the competition, I'm a player and it does annoy me that games I've played and enjoyed that have interesting storyline, and/or graphics, and/or a high fun factor aren't getting a better deal.

 

[Kryzon]

I'd like to quote user "Bishop Myers," from the Disqus comments on the contest website:

I'm also not a fan of how the People's Choice awards are set up, personally. From the outset, the winner was going to either be a cheater or someone with an established fanbase (like we do with Ars Harmonia). That's just the way things go. I think the ideal way for it to have gone is the Ludum Dare model where only people who submitted entries could vote.


If you've never participated in Ludum Dare, the way it works is that each time you play and rate someone else's game, your entry goes up in the buzzing list, so the best way for people to find out about your game is for you to play other people's games. That combined with the fact that you have to have submitted to vote makes it so that it's more or less a level playing field.


I'm not going to apologize that we're doing so well since we didn't do anything shady or unethical - our last major game to come out got a half million downloads in its first week, so anything we release, especially a sequel to one of our IP, is bound to make waves.


That being said, what mattered more to our success than our established fanbase is that we sat down and planned out our PR strategy more than a week before voting started and figured out who would be trying to spread the word about the game, how they would do it, on what key dates we would make certain announcements, etc. PR is a key part of development just like programming and art-making and it's something most indie developers don't plan for (heck, we're still learning it ourselves).


Once we're not crunching for the Unity contest this month, I plan to do a detailed write-up on how we prepared for the contest, developed our game to scope, and managed our PR post-deadline to be as successful as possible, so that others can learn from our successes and failures.

 

[Cinnamon]

^

Their entry is like Valve taking part of the contest. 

 

[EternalShadow]

Personally, I'd rather an already-established person took the PC prize than a cheater. Both are inherently 'unfair' but a totally different structure is needed to remedy both issues at once. Maybe next contest.

 

[felicitousArtisan]

^

Their entry is like Valve taking part of the contest. 

Ummm, Valve? I'm not sure if I should take that as a compliment or an insult. :/

Like... we're hardly some big corporate company here. Our entry was made by two people with a third helping out in the last week or two to get the engine working, and we just worked our bums off! We had a budget of absolutely nothing; the buildings in the city are from google sketchup, every drawn asset was drawn by me, the backgrounds were composited by me, the voices were edited and levelled by me (and yeah that's why the levelling isn't great, sorry!), I organised the VAs too, who are all amateurs or do very occasional odd pro work at most, I just grabbed whoever was available one night about a week from the deadline, from my voice acting group, the CoLab, who have a good sized fan following which helps things somewhat. Bishop did all the writing and just about all the programming with Julia coming in to help out near the end. We had our voice actors helping beta test! ...Pff, can you imagine Valve going "hey, Ellen McLain, you've done a great job voicing GlaDos, can you run our game and see if it crashes on your computer? We're short on people..."

We've had a lot of downloads on our free games, but we're hardly big league here. We have only one commercial game out, Encarmine, and it's far from a big hit....To the point that Bishop and I have Encarmine as a running personal joke because I think the profits on it over the past few years have been less than $200 split between the three people who made it. It paid out a hefty sum of.... £14 each. Comparing us to a multinational corporation with a huge number of fulltime staff and billions of dollars is ridiculous! If we were a huge company like Valve, do you really think we'd be really working this hard to win a measley $2000? Or do you think maybe the reason I'd like to get a third of $2000 is because I'd like to make games with better equipment than a bamboo fun medium tablet that's over five years old and a second hand blue snowball mic? I personally am in agreement with Bishop, the people's choice is not a good idea. It's too easy to exploit or cheat, for the first week or so it was really hard to see anything that wasn't in the top ten, and the whole system is designed to make people reach outside the site to get people in to vote because it's massive free advertising for RPGmaker, but they never explained that to the newer, less savvy people in the community, who feel guilty for plugging their game everywhere and bitter towards those who did.

I'd really prefer if people's choice wasn't a thing, or was arranged in a way that celebrated the community instead of pitting us against each other, and it is really hurtful to see that people are accusing us of cheating, but at the same time... I worked really hard on this game, and I'm not rich enough to not do my absolute best to try to win that $2000. I can assure you, promise you, that if I had more money and even a single moderately big commercial game title out, there is no way I'd enter a competition like this; the money would be a negligible amount to me and it would be tacky to do so! I'm flattered I guess that some people think we're some big deal because of our production values, but we're really not, we're a fledgeling indie team just like any other and we will happily go over how we did things if people want to know!

 

[EternalShadow]

Ummm, Valve? I'm not sure if I should take that as a compliment or an insult. :/

Compliment - big company. Basically, the level of competition an indie dev has when competing vs Valve publishing something. Whilst you may not be 'valve' in the sense of a 'large company', it's the difference between you and us at this level they are trying to point out.

Honestly, I personally don't mind you winning or anything, I don't think you're cheaters.

 

[Cinnamon]

^

It's a compliment.