Git off discord tho for game development, it ends up causing only the types of people who are really active on discord to interact and give feedback and I have seen that really send some games off the rails as the rest of the playerbase begins to get the vibe the game is being developed for a small sliver of the game’s fans (the ones on discord and really active).
Speaking from experience giving the loudest users real time access to your sanity isn’t great either. Better to corral them into a slower mode of communication, such as an old fashion forum or use githubs “discussions” feature. Then you can spend your weekend on unwinding without a bunch of kids screeching that they’ve been ignored because you missed some message that was checks notes 200 paragraphs of back scrolling.
p.s. its 1000x worse when you inherit this kind of “community” from someone before you who let the monkeys do whatever. All I can say is thank god discord has that slow-mode feature now.
Seriously. Definitely gives the loudest a place to control how games should work. And when they don’t get their way, they get loud in other places and make drama.
One of the biggest mistakes I keep seeing devs make is listening to the no-lifers who live on social media. Especially the content whiners: fuck content, make the game work right first.
Any dev worth their salt knows to balance and weigh the feedback across all channels. Discord is easy for quick troubleshooting and frequently asked questions. I see devs have some issues with Steam forums because of the toxicity, but most still take feedback from there too.
Usually Discord is just a funnel to redirect feedback to an internal backlog though. Together with all the other channels, including in-game reporting tools.
Any dev worth their salt knows to balance and weigh the feedback across all channels. Discord is easy for quick troubleshooting and frequently asked questions.
I am sure most devs who primarily interact with their game’s community through discord believe they are listening to feedback from a variety of sources, but it is clear to me in every case I know of where a game has “join our discord!” plastered all over the store page that functionally the only place where your feedback will actually be taken seriously and get to the devs is discord.
That might just be the instant chat nature of Discord and how it’s easier to get a reply on there. I’m sure if you went the classic route of sending email it would be acknowledged as well, generally speaking.
Honestly if it’s a game where the difficulty is structured around teaching you a skill then the the devs response is actually kinda on point (while also funny). It’s like someone submitting a complaint that the piano is too difficult and the skill bar should be lowered so that they shouldn’t have to just practice and learn to play like everybody else. But I could be wrong (I usually am)
Regarding the griftmaybe the developer just made this for fun and published for others to enjoy? It doesn’t seem like this needs any new features or much maintenance, that would also explain the response on discord: the dev doesn’t care if people like the game or not, it is what it is
As they should. Sometimes indie games should just be art.
My games (really shitty demos), I’m personally not interested in building a audience or getting mass attention. I just wanna make the game in my head and if it kicks ass for others, sweet.
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