Bad Game Developers? Corrupt / Unethical Game Developers?

[Vas]

Now I've been around a long time, and I know it takes a lot to develop a game having spoken with a few developers, some I even have talked to directly via skype or steam but when you start banning people who rate your game bad and deleting their ratings and claiming everyone's out to get you, its time for you to stop being a developer and leave the gaming industry.

It seems to me that he developer of Gratuitous Space Battles 2 turned into an unethical and bad developer after he made a great game the first time.  He started banning people for asking him to fix a bug that crashes the game 50% of the time.

Mind you, this wasn't me, because I don't own the game, and I refuse to buy the game now that I've seen the large amount of bad reviews, and the blog post of the developer admitting to abandoning the game.

I haven't even heard of the damn thing and I own the entire first one with all the DLC and everything and was even a modder of it.  This indicates that the developer has done very badly at marketing the game.  If even the people who own the first one didn't hear of it, he didn't market it correctly.  I just now heard of it when it went on sale and at its 80% off sale, I say its not worth it because it crashes 50% of the time according to everyone who owns it that I've asked.

There is another developer as well, one who made Star Drive, and Star Drive 2.  He appears to have stolen some of the same "ideas" from other games and made his game in pretty much the same way as other popular space games, and refuses to fix issues or bugs with his game.  He bans anyone who even mentions a bug in the game from his forum and somehow pays people to rate his game good just before a sale which is what caused me to buy his piece of shit of a game, because the reviews looked great till legitimate reviews started gaining popularity again.

I wish Valve would ban developers from steam who do things like this.  Valve needs to put something in to protect users better.  The game refund thing is currently bullshit.  2 hours of gameplay and then you can't return the game anymore?  How are you supposed to tell if its unfinishable?  Some games 2 hours is fine, but, they should really be looking into the reviews of a game, and then prohibit more sales should the reviews be bad enough and demand the developer fix it before sales happen again, or something.

In an example, Planet Explorers while a great game, has a bug in one of the missions currently that prevents you from getting past and continuing the story.  The game can not be completed, and it takes at least 3 hours to get to that point if you are working fast.  I take my time and prepare of course.  That game is still good so, don't go thinking I'm ranting on it, they are good developers from what I've seen thus far.  I was just using an example of a game you can't find out how good it is within 2 hours.

[GuesUserNameGUN]

Another good example would be the castle story devs. but you should make a petition to get steam to start banning these guys. you would get a lot of signatures, just post the link in the description of these games.

[Vas]

Neh, I know that the gratuitous dev was good up to a point.  Its possible he had life related issues and made some mistakes.  I don't want his first game to be removed from steam, because it is actually good.  Star Drive is a scam though.  I don't know much about Castle Story, I wanted the game though.

[GuesUserNameGUN]

i wanted castle story aswell, but the devs used the fans money to pay a guy to delete any bad comments on the game on their forums and also to create fake steam accounts and forum accounts to like it. they havent fixed any of the bugs, and made the ui even worse than it was originally. it was a great idea for a game, shame the devs are so bad tho

[Coenmcj]

That's one of the reasons I like steam...

I had it at one point (last march?), couldn't get it working and had a refund before I hit the 2 H gameplay mark.
I loved the first one, but the second one just refused to work. (More than likely due to this error) Was gonna wait around for a few months to check back and see if I could get it to work then.
Hell, I even follow Cliffski on twitter, never seen any evidence of this kind of stuff happening. That's awful, definitely gonna make me think twice about purchasing that in the future. :/

[Vas]

I have games I want to refund but they won't let me because I played too much, the refund system is rather stupid and they only just introduced it so everyone who was scammed into buying games from bad developers is fucked if they bought it more than 2 weeks prior to the release of refund system.  Even if you only have 0.1 hours gameplay on it.

I have a few games on my account I wish were gone because they are just that bad.  It really does suck Valve can't put aside profits and kick out bad developers.  But they make money for every game sold even if its a broken game by a dev that abandon it and scammed everyone.

[Coenmcj]

Legends of Pegasus is a good example actually; I bought that game early 2013, it barely worked from day one, crashed every 10 minutes and half the gameplay features didn't work.

Never got patched, never got fixed and I was seeing physical copies of it in stores up until early 2015,thankfully though, they eventually stopped selling it on steam.

These days I'm super paranoid about buying or supporting indie devs (There are alot of dodgy titles out there, Garry's incident for instance), the Gems glittering in the darkness like Tynan and a handful of others make it a terrible shame that so many others screw up the system for these kinds of people.

[mumblemumble]

Rimworld was the last early access title i got,  and I'm not at all disappointed for kickstarting it.

That said its extremely hard to tell now...

I don't buy any games now without extensive research..

Ace of spades was a huge,  huge disappointment for me,  a really neat game idea that was bought up / slaughtered by jagex, and faced the same sort of issues. Deep shame because ace of spades was an amazing game idea,  and the old beta (on the right servers)  was nice and extremely unique,  but its current form is absolute garbage,  where building is an almost non factor in combat,  since you can blow up,  jump over,  fly past,  or circumvent pretty much anything built.

That and jagex wouldn't know game balance if it took a sledge hammer to their face.

[FyrnSkulblaka]

I got unreasonably angry when I read your title, not gonna lie. I thought you were talking about Rimworld :')

[Vas]

It wouldn't be in off topic, if it was about Rimworld.

The recent issues in the game development world have hurt game developers as a whole.  Now these asshats that go around starting early access and then abandoning their projects or scamming users or other unethical corrupt things, are making it so no one trusts indie game devs anymore.

Can you imagine if Tynan had started his game development now instead of when he did?  He'd have a lot less people interested in his game, because of the way things have been going in the indie game world where all these games crash and burn.  Promising intensely impossible things and not being able to deliver, or showing amazing snapshots and videos of cool cool things, and then you get the game to find out it was all a bullshit scam and the dev had abandon the project already after boosting the ratings with fake reviews.

[ItchyFlea]

Haven't read the whole thing, but it's not strictly 2 hours then no refund.
The first game I got a refund on I had played it for 3 hours.

[ChJees]

Shit games and shit developers. Always gonna be. I tend to wait for "reviews" from a very honest YouTuber if a game i am uncertain of would be fun. Saved dosh while i was at it.
Should watch out for sketchy video game "journalists" too these days because they are very likely to promote a game which falls either in it matches their agenda or they are very friendly with the dev(s). May get a shit game you regret purchasing that way as well if you do not check alternative source as well. YouTube is great for that .

In short treat every game purchase as if you only could play this game for the entire year and nothing else. Bet you will do a lot of research before getting a game then.

[tomerbarkan]

I couldn't agree more. I'm getting so angry seeing developers take players money and not give a crap anymore.
And as was said, it harms all the other developers out there, specially unknown devs with their first game, like us.

But not everyone is like that. We, for example, didn't launch Early Access until we knew for sure that we were able to fund the development all the way through. So even if the Early Access is a total flop and we barely make any income, we will still be able to finish the game for those few who trusted us to buy our game before it was done.

That's the kind of integrity that I expect from all developers, but unfortunately that is not always the case. I've been burned on more than one Early Access game myself.

Shit games and shit developers. Always gonna be. I tend to wait for "reviews" from a very honest YouTuber if a game i am uncertain of would be fun.

Unfortunately those YouTubers are very busy with tons of games coming out, and just getting them to cover a game is no easy task. I sent him a key myself, and didn't get a reply. Not sure if he'll cover the game or not.