I liked Braid, but I liked his other games since then a lot more. Put out Witness 2 and I'm all over it.

OTOH, put out a graphical upgrade and a couple new puzzles for Witness and try to charge full price again, and I wouldn't bother.

Edit: Wait, Braid Anniversary didn't even include new levels? No wonder it didn't sell! All it has is a documentary track and some visuals.

I think it's mainly trolls that post "dead game" on games that are essentially (or wholly) single player. If you've got a live service game that people are saying "dead game", then you should worry. Otherwise, ignore the trolls.

Intent does matter.

But the vast majority of complaints about a game being "woke" are just the inclusion of a character this a minority in some way. The complaint isn't about how they're included, just that they are, usually as a main or highly visible character.

And "100 developers working on it" doesn't mean much when they're unpaid and there's no lower limit on how much they have to actually contribute.

That was highly specific language. There was no miscommunication. They were inappropriate. They were not misleading. They said exactly what they meant.

Also, "All terms will go live only when both parties have discussed and have agreed.” ? Hah. The vast majority agreed last time! It was only a vocal few who didn't agree, and there will always be some who don't agree. That's such a nothing statement that I can't even believe they said it.

I don't think politely asking people to change their review so that it reflects reality is a "karen" move.

I was reading about that interview, and it amazes me that he could say all that. I think he started to realize the hole he was digging, because he eventually started talking about just how few underage programmers they actually have.

IMO, you just can't mix for-profit with child labor. I don't care how much some of the children get out of it.

But then to find out they only pay out like 30% of the earnings? Outrageous. There's no way you can say that isn't exploitative, IMO. People are already railing against Steam/Google/Apple/etc for only taking 30%, and Roblox is over twice as bad for adults. Doing it to kids is just so incredibly wrong.

I was already a premium subscriber to get rid of ads, and one day it asked me if I wanted to try this feature. I did, and I played (IIRC) an online version of Angry Birds 2 days in a row, and then promptly forgot about it and never looked back.

The games are pretty bad at the moment, and given Google's history with gaming (Stadia, I'm looking at your grave) I don't expect them to ever improve. And if they start to, I expect it to be shut down the week after, screwing over every dev that dared to hope they could monetize with that system.

People are so used to being lied to that they get angry when you tell them the truth instead, even though they already knew the truth.

I'm half joking, though. Part of what makes society work is all the things we do to put a nice facade on things that are ugly. If we all went around telling the hard truth all the time, everyone would be angry at everyone.

All that said... Basically saying "I underpriced the product of my hard work and I'm correcting that" shouldn't be that shocking. Especially when tempered with "Go pirate it if you want".

Even if you release multiple times every day, refusing to release on Friday still makes sense. It's not about expecting bugs, it's about guaranteeing that your devs' time is their own. If you aren't okay with paying your devs for time they spend dealing with their own problems at home (without charging them their PTO time for it!) then you shouldn't be okay with making them work on weekends, no matter how rare it is.

Steam has rules intended to curb this behavior.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/discounts

Specific Discounting Rules

You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 30 days.
It is not possible to discount your product for 30 days following a price increase in any currency.
Discounts cannot be run within 30 days of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events.
Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 30 days of releasing your title, within 30 days from when your launch discount ends, or within 30 days of a price increase in any currency.
You may not change your price while a promotion is currently live or scheduled for the future.
It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.
it is not possible to create new discounts for a product that would result in the price in any currency falling below Steam's minimum possible transaction price. See details.
Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.

As if you can't schedule your announcements to fall just after the scheduled stock sales... Or just before them, if you want.