Sunday 2 November 2014

Indie Dev Drama Llama: The Slaughtering Grounds

We were so close to the end of 2014 without another indie dev melting down about criticism. SO CLOSE! But don't worry, this one is at least hilarious, which kind of makes up for how annoying it is that yet another dev doesn't realise that reacting poorly to negative criticism really doesn't help their game do well.

The game in question is an FPS called The Slaughtering Grounds, developed by ImminentUprising and published by Digital Homicide Studios LLC. A little bit of research reveals that they only have one other game, currently in early access called Forsaken Uprising. Both games have received largely negative reviews by users on Steam, citing bugs and sloppy design as the main reasons to avoid them.

Jim Sterling made a video about The Slaughtering Grounds as part of his Squirty Plays series where he records himself playing a game for the first time and making comments about said game. In fact here's the video:

Soon after this video was released, this post appeared on the Steam page for The Slaughtering Grounds. It appears that the developer (because I'm assuming its one person who made this crap) has gotten their panties in a little bunch and decided to "review the reviewer" resulting in one of the most hilarious dev responses I've ever seen. I'm not going to link to the video, because that would make it too easy, but I'm sure another link that I've provided will take you there. Jim, in his usual way, had a laugh about this, and posted this video, having said laugh about the developers hilariously inept "review of the reviewer".

So again I find myself saying: Indie Devs out there, please don't react like this to critics. It makes a bad situation worse for you, because now no one is going to play your game. Yes, it's hard to get told something you worked on is bad, and your initial reaction will probably be to do something like ImminentUprising has done, but please don't. Take the criticism and use it to drive you to make better games and you might not get judged so harshly next time.

As always folks,

GAME ON!

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