Not a gamedev, but could really use some feedback from gamedevs

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5 comments, last by Rick Leunisse 11 years, 1 month ago

My name is Rick Leunisse and I'm the founder of http://www.gamersuggestions.com. My goal for Gamersuggestions is to bridge the gap between gamers and game developers. I want to create a platform where gamers can easily provide feedback on games and developers.

At the moment gamers can post suggestions for games and the community will rank them using a like/dislike system. This way developers can see in the blink of an eye which changes gamers want. I'm also working on changing our review system to an after sales review system. Gamers can rate several aspects post release, for example the current online experience, quality of patches/updates/dlc and how good the developer communicates.

Although I have gained some traction among gamers it is hard for me to get in contact with developers. I really hope you guys would like to take a look at my website and provide some feedback. Do you like the general idea? What kind of info/data would you like to get if you use my website? Do you have any ideas on how to get the interest of developers? Thank you in advance!

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You must reach a critical mass before companies will notice, or even know about your web site. I know I've never heard about it.

Consider that most major games have online discussion forums where the users can do exactly that --- they can get in touch with the development team and often get feedback directly from the game team's community managers and QA folk.

If you have enough comments about a specific game, you would be best to contact the members of the development team directly and point them to your site. They'll likely just direct you back to their own forums, but some community managers will take the time to look in to your own forums.

To add to what frob said: you should start now on attending game conferences and trade shows. And not just in small ways, either. A booth would be pretty essential to making your site known to the industry.

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

I'm skeptical of the benefit of your site versus a game's own forums (or public gaming forums that already have critical mass).

The reason I say this is that fans of a game are already going to the game's forums to make suggestions, complaints, and discuss your game. These fans ARE the community for the game, not some generic community that is interested in ranking game suggestions and may or not be interested (or have a vested interest) in actually improving the game in question.

Also, after working in the industry for a lot of years and experiencing tons of what I guess would be called focus tests (and surfing forums for years and years), in general the average gamers' ideas for improving games are 99% of the time absolute garbage. There are very few gamers out there who actually have good ideas that are well thought through and realistic.

With that said, smaller companies that can't afford to hire community managers or host their own sites might find the service useful. But if your site doesn't have a large number of gamers interested in their game, how useful is the service?

Since this is not a Breaking In topic, I'm moving it to Business.

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

I have to agree with skepticism of guys above. Since fans of certain games just write on certain games forums, the only strength you could have on the market if your site had some kind of organised general feedback for each genre. A site that would answer the question "what do RPG players want?" in just one or two clicks, without the need to browse through all the posts and ideas in the forums. That would unfortunately mean a serious site redesign. Also, you have to keep in mind, that ideas that gamers have are often very abstract and implementing them usually means more work than it's worth.

Thank you guys for your honest feedback. The main difference between online forums is that our feedback is way more structured. Especially the forums with a lot of fans have become really chaotic with thousands of topics. It is hard for a communtiy manager to see which suggestions really have the support of the community (a big topic could also mean there is a lot of disagreement).

The real value for a developer is in showing that they listen and interact with the community. Developers earn points for interaction (also for rejecting suggestions). For gamers it is really important that a developer listens to a community and at our site developers can show that and even compare that to other developers.

I'm also working on filters/categories to make it easier to find suggestions on certain topics.

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