I think some of it has to do with cog’s have come to have a certain expectation of quality, not saying the game is bad, but not on the same level as some others. I also think the people here on the forums are much less likely to be harsh on a game because alot of us know the amount of work that go into these games. Another thing that hurts most of all the cog’s are the nitwits who the day of release post reviews like " total bait and switch, says it’s free but then makes me buy the rest of the game, 1 star", or “why don’t you guys make anything free? 1 star”. There’s this expectation nowadays especially with the prevalence of the free to play model where people act like you just asked for their first born when expected to pay for something digital.
The only advice I can give is don’t. Get. Discouraged. Because just because one game wasn’t stellar does mean you aren’t capable of stellar work. Also I think alot of games benefit from being betas here on the forums. You get alot of advice and constructive criticism on your story, and maybe some people think it may hurt their sales a bit and maybe a few people here on the forums wouldn’t but it had it not been in beta but I think the benefits to quality it would receive would much outweigh the few people who wouldn’t end up buying it. That’s just my 2 cents though.
@MrPockets Thanks for the feedback (and for going to the effort of typing all that on your phone!)
I actually did have this game beta tested by a number of people from the forums here and the feedback they gave was very useful in improving a lot of things about it (so it was actually beta tested here, I’m not worried about decreased sales from that sort of thing at all. Also I can usually take constructive crit fairly well, it’s the wall of unhelpful negativity in the reviews that was doing my head in). Unfortunately beta testers can’t write the story for me so there’s obviously stuff I need to improve some more myself. Interestingly the comments seem mostly less nasty and harsh over at amazon, not sure if that’s just coincidence of if they’re more used to the “book sample” then buy idea. (Not saying that’s the only thing wrong with my book at all, but it’s definitely a factor in many COG/Hosted Games one star reviews).
@Vladimir_M Sorry haven’t forgotten, I will get those walkthroughs to you. I seem to have misplaced my map of the book to make the walk throughs from and I’ve been really sick with the flu for the last week so haven’t had much of a chance to go hunting for it or make a new one. Will try to get some made up soon, hopefully over the next week for you.
(BTW just as a general follow up, it’s now tracking at the third lowest of the hosted games on google play (and showing every sign of continuing to drop further) so have decided that I am at fault from writing something that was probably not good enough to be hosted. Thank you to everyone in this thread that has given me some constructive crit to try and fix some things though. I think I need a bit of a break from writing cyoa’s for a little while then will probably come back to it and try again and see if I can improve enough to warrant having something else to finish).
)