Re: Future of GoldGun: Production discontinued
First of all I feel really sorry about that. I hate it that it had to come this far. You most definitely deserve better.
I nevertheless want to come back to the criticism part. I think there are two lessons to be learned here.
First lesson:
Criticism in the gaming community is almost never constructive and helpful. Partly because many gamers are really young in age, partly because it is such an anonymous medium.
Game developers need to build up a way to deal with that and evaluate feedback they get wether its immature shit storm or sincere feedback.
However I really think that some of us with the latter - me included - crossed the line to shit storm in their tone. So we as a community can learn something from this as well.
Second lesson:
You are developing your games for a specific target group. If you want them to buy your product they need to like it enough.
Thats the bittersweet part of capitalism. No matter what your intentions are or what your artistic ethos demands. If it doesn't fit the needs of your customers you can't earn money with it.
So a big part in planning a project should be how it can appeal to enough people to get some returns for invested time and money.
The target group here mostly was the visually impaired community. They tend to be quite audiophile and sometimes a bit thin-skinned about the blindness topic.
In retrospect its easy to come to this kind of conclusions, I know. But hopefully it helps to reflect what has gone wrong here for future projects.
I really hope that you guys are not to discouraged to continue your development as a whole. To end on a positive note here:
I think this whole GoldGun shit storm had one big upside. It raised awareness to your company. It wasn't the best advertisement for GoldGun itself but I firmly believe that you are one of the better known companies for audio games out there now.
I personally believe it might be a good idea to discontinue GoldGun, at least for now. You have my sincere respect for this difficult decision. But you can build up on your prominency and the learning experience you had with this project.
I for my part will remain supporting you as good as possible.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
