[2012] TotalBiscuit Interview with PA Devs [2012]

77% or so steam reviews are positive actually. Plus the sales have been quite nice, we hit 4000 players on at on time when release first came out, but then it went back to that stable player count that it normally stays at.

And how many of those games had phases of being #1 on that steam sales rank multiple times that resulted in new developers posting in the forums "hey I have been hired because the sales were good and they can pay me now".
How many of those precedent cases were games made by using kickstarter as a financial starting point?
How invested were the investors into those precedent games? Were they willing to reinvest everything to build a long sustaining game? Just trying to make some quick money because they were publishers? How many of those games were made by companies that moved to a bigger office shortly before running out of money?

Random question at the end: PA was #1 on the steam sales at some point at a price of 90$. Does anybody know how those ranks are calculated? Does it sort by sold units or by gross income?

Here I'm saddened by what I'm reading today about Starbound. On Steamchart it methodically loses players.
http://www.steamcharts.com/app/211820#1y

And on the store page it's getting harsh customers' reviews.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/211820/

Why I write about it in here? The issues Starbound is having aren't rare among Early Access titles. Unfortunately PA isn't unaffected either. As example I report a negative review on Starbound, which more or less sums all it up.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/sweetjbro/recommended/211820/

More and more negative reviews are been posted, and it is really a shame things have to end up that way.

If Uber will not follow up shortly with updates and patches, PA may risk the same domino disastrous effect.

ps. Starbound has been on the front page on Steam for a year straight. Every single day. PA never got even close to Starbound's number of players. If Starbound fails, it's really a bad precedent.

ps2. Starbound apparently had raised nearly 20 million USD during Early Access. It was sold at ~15 USD flat all the time (no changes or sales or special editions, like Uber did continuously for PA).

They have 93% positive reviews. The only issue I see is that the negative people are the most vocal by far, as usual.
I guess the question is: how can one prevent 7% negative minded very vocal people from dragging down everyone else.

Did you see the Steamchart relative to Starbound? The player base dropped from 88k to 1,5k in few months.

Yes, very few negative reviews basically killed one of the biggest title for the 2014.

How to prevent that to happen? You keep working 'cos you've been paid for until you deliver what you promised, meanwhile trying not to f*ck it up with the meaning of development phases like alpha, beta, and release.

Too much to ask?

No.

They are still updating, in fact, you can use their experimental builds which update weekly I think. Or even do their even more experimental builds, where the devs release an update literally like every day as they work.

Assuming the development company is directly financing their own product it doesn't actually matter what some people say if they still have money. Judging by the 20M you stated they probably do have money. So they keep working, but obviously they really don't feel like reading all the stuff some people write about their game in some forums.

Alpha, beta and release are words designed around the idea of a games that cannot be bought or played before release. Their definition is very questionable for early access and kickstarter games.

What are you both smoking?

There will be none. All the games Uber has developed they never give dates. The updates just appear and sometimes quite regularly and everything about it is communicated once it set free to the wild for everyone to download and update to. That info is everywhere. Steam, the forums, in game and the Uber Launcher.

Yeah, the bad reviews are why me, and probably others, have stopped playing the game.

I can see the sarcasm, but what exactly is causing less players?

ignoring them and making yourself a honest positiv review/impressions article ...
devwise? not bothering, just continue to work on the game focusing on the general issues of the game ... and not
caring on the seven people that want their golden cookie like crybabies ...

if you focus on the negative people, you won´t make yourself happy ... AT ALL ... in that case it is more likely that you just say "eff it" and abbandon development of the game ...

On the topic of TB revisiting PA: he's said before that he doesn't do recommendations/impressions for games he has promoted. This is likely the case with PA.

However, he DID discuss PA on his podcast recently. I think it was around halfway through podcast 50, not sure. Pretty sure the consensus on the podcast was 'meh, needs more content'.

where did he ever promote it?
he did a alpha preview and interview ... non of those say anything about the final product yet
and he promoted smite a hundred times and still did a "wtf is ..." impressions video on it ....

I saw that podcast. TB said he needs to play more to judge the game, so I kinda expected a video sbout PA. Doesn't seem to likely, though, considering the amount of currently released games and that PA is released since almost a month.

it may or may not come ... that´s all i can say ...

Speaking of the devil, namely TB over his twitter:

Also, look at his ungodly hate for the game:

Sorry, couldn't resists.

discussion solved ... looking forward to what he has to say ...