It’s really hard to not feel defensive about any bad review, for me, as both a writer and editor of games, but…yeah. You’re supposed to replay them. Shrug.
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Only if you you care for what happens to your “friend”, turned out I didn’t give a F… so the choice was very easy.
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That’s an idea. I suppose having the blurb provide a word count along with an estimated play-through length would give the reader a good idea of the length/replayability ratio. 
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I disagree with this, the majority of the gamers don’t replay any games, only a minority do that.
And for me replaying a game is very different then a normal person would replay their games. Normally they replay to see other routes, to make another choice, etc. To me I replay the same way I played the first, because I don’t see the point on making a different choice if I know it will send me to a route that I will not like as much as the one I played the first time, so when I have a “canon” playtrough, I will always do the same thing over and over.
So if a game is short, I don’t see the point of trying another route, I just move on.
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Depends on the review really. One negative review that I got pointed out a mistake that I’d made that I must’ve read over 100 times and never noticed. I face-palmed. Couldn’t really argue with it. 
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You can disagree to the extent that you and others don’t replay our games, but they are literally written to be replayable. They are meant to be replayed.
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Yeah, I generally like to replay games to see what happens if I take different paths. (Also to get the achievements.)
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II try not to be defensive when it comes to negative reviews everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I just find it frustrating when someone leaves a 1-star review but don’t elaborate on why they didn’t like it. As I can’t improve if I don’t know what you didn’t like about it.
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Hey, just because many people do not replay does not mean replay isn’t a vital part of the story. If a majority do not even finish one playthrough, does that mean you do not have to worry about writing an ending?
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For me the big factors in replayability are firstly the ro’s (is there more than one I really like?) and secondly different origin stories for the mc. If there is only one RO I really like, or no romance element at all and no differentiated origin stories or backgrounds for the mc then I tend to have just one playthrough like @Urban.
@Avery_Moore while you did complain about it being six times the work to write content for the different mc origins that is exactly the sort of thing, including possibly having more than one ro I really like that is going to make sure I replay your game a couple of times. Even if I do always have a favourite (ex-slave mc in your game) or “canon” playthrough for most games
@RenaB 's WIP also has at least two ro’s and possibly a third I really like and that practically guarantees replays.
And just to make a reference to one of the grandaddy’s of projects over here the old Vendetta WIP by @Vendetta also had an intriguing system where you could build your criminal and legitimate business ventures that was structured so it would be impossible to acquire them all in one playthrough (some business opportunities even being tied to the ro’s you romance), so expect me to have replayed that one a couple of times too just to figure out how to built his fledgling empire the “best” way.
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Games with rushed endings are the worst. It’s like there’s all this buildup and backstory only to lead you to: “then you won. the end” Even tho I enjoy replaying, rushed endings don’t make me want anymore. I don’t feel like there’s a point when it all leads to the same unsatisfying end.
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Ideally, what would you want to see in an ending–what elements have to be there for you not to feel as if it were rushed?
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I like to see the results of my actions. For example, I got the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3DS as a gift when it came out. Never had any interest in 3DS or the Zelda series, but I tried it out and ended up really enjoying the game. Finally you get to the boss and save the world- hooray! You see a cutscene of all the happy characters while the credits roll. Then it’s over! I don’t get to go back to celebrate, see the aftermath or anything. That always bothered me! After all that, I just get a little cutscene?
So, for me, at the very least I like to see the result of my work or even summaries about how things ended. I liked the way Zombie Exodus did just that, went into how the characters lived on. But sometimes it just ends, even when not setting up for a sequel.
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My main gripe with the word count is that most authors include code in it when IMO they shouldn’t. Why? Because I feel like I’m being cheated into believing your game is bigger than it actually is. Code is only important to the person who makes the game or seeks to exploit it, it is of no importance whatsoever for everyone else. A 30k word game, if it includes code, is extremely short and as I have said in another thread people like to get the most bang for their buck.
The majority of previous CoG games used to be 150k+ words long. If you bought one of their products you knew you were going to be busy for a few hours, now, with the latest releases, we’ll be lucky if we even get 1 hour worth of reading. The worst part is that the price hasn’t been affected much so you’re getting LESS reading material while paying practically as much as you did for the older, more meaty titles. That is unfair.
Also IMO 100k words ins’t that much. I’ve heard people say that is as much as a book but it honestly doesn’t feel like it. It may be that I’m just a faster reader but when every page is filled with huge walls of text the game tends to feel shorter for some reason. If you put the same 100k words on a visual novel, because they tend to display less text at once, it tends to feel like they’re longer.
Then comes the brunt of the complains about how the game ins’t actually free but those are par for the course at this point.
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The code is what makes the game possible. It should be important to anyone who actually wants to play through the game, instead of seeing the text for every single choice and variable all at once. Sure, the average player won’t read it, but they’ll certainly notice its absence.
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@ParrotWatcher
I don’t mean it that way - the code is important yes, but its more of a “behind the scenes”, a technicality, that doesn’t really concern the reader, thus why it shouldn’t be accounted for when saying the game has X amount of words.
Sorry I’m a little confused and seeking clarification - when authors write their word count are they including the code in that count or are they not?
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Yes they do.
/12 chars.
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I agree from a player’s perspective of wanting to know how long a book actually is, however there’s no good way to separate the code from the text. Hand counting over 100,000 words isn’t something that anyone wants to do, but it’s a fair point. There’s also coding efficiency (amount of code, repeated lines etc) that plays a part in the word count, but that’s hard to measure as well.
Can’t find it for some reason (maybe someone else knows where it is) but there was a discussion on minimum playthrough lengths and poor reviews for ones that were under 20,000 per play through (not total word count). I wrote a widely branching, often short playthrough length story once and I wont do it again due to the reviews. One of the things I got from it from asking around, is often people will only play through a choice game once or twice (which was surprising to me), so you need to make the playthroughs long enough to satisfy readers who choose to do that. Also people will often leave a review after the first read through. Even if they go back and discover that it’s got multiple paths, not everyone will remember to go back and change their review on the stores.
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Thank you! I should have been reading more carefully.
ETA: I usually don’t notice how long the games feel in comparison to reading a book because I need so much more time to consider game-play strategies but that is a good point regarding the word count with and without the code. I can’t imagine how I’d go about separating the story text from the code text when they’re so intertwined though (that sounds like so much work).
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