On Grants Tweets

"logion;c-17006032" wrote:
What have helped me understand a bit more of the attitude from game developers and their responses are the blog askagamedev, it is a blog from an anonymous developer who talks about game development.

Some interesting things from that blog:

Developers are very limited by time and budget, they have to make do with the resources they have, if there is a feature they want to add within that budget, that often means something else has to be removed. I am sure the developer are very aware of this. You have 200 developers working on different things and are in different stages of completion so they have to choose what to prioritize. And game development takes a long time. I am sure they have streamlined a lot of things now but I would not be surprised if it takes more than a year to make an Expansion Pack.

Game development studios collects usage data from thousands and thousands of players to get the greater picture of what was successful or not. I am not sure how many copies sims4 has sold, I googled it and got "10 million copies in 2018". So when someone says "no one likes this feature in the game" on twitter on the forums, that is the response from one user. And the developer has usage data from 10 million people.

80, 20, 5. 80% of players will never engage with anything beyond the game itself. 20% will actually bother to go online and read something about the game, and a mere 5% will be engaged so much as to actually bother to post and communicate with other players. So forum posters, twitter messages, youtube comments are only 5% of the people who buy and play the game and they will have to take this into consideration.

So if a user for example says "No one liked this game pack" to a developer and the developer has sales numbers that says that it sold better than their other Game Packs, usage data that they played it more than other packs and feedback from their team that the development went very well the developer will probably not be sure how to handle this feedback from the user.

If you play the game developer career in the sims4 there is actually something similar happening where a bunch of vocal users want a feature changed for a new release and you can choose to change it, or look at the sales predictions.

Usage data trying to prove what Simmers like is a flawed system. They used it to determine if they should include toddlers in TS4 before release. Rachel stated they went by telemetry of no one was playing toddlers in TS3 that much. How'd that work out? It was the number one reason players would not buy TS4, (those who were even interested at all) and or why they would not buy any more packs for a few years until toddlers were added. Usage data can't tell them what players like, maybe players didn't like toddlers in TS3 as much as TS2 and didn't play them as often but that didn't mean they didn't want them in the next game like TS4. Rachel said it was the best decision she had made about TS4 not to include them all because of their telemetry of TS3. I would say they were totally wrong about that.

Vodo doll in TS4> telemetry showed them no one was playing with it that much in TS4...reasons? Telemetry couldn't tell them why. But the why was because it was lame, it was all happy, happy. People had expected there to be some evilness about it, and there was none. It shouldn't mean they just add it to other activities, but to fix it to work as it's intended like a dark object with more evil consequences.

Woohoo, sure there was a lot of woohoo because of that contest, but they should't use that to determine if players want more woohoo, most hate it in TS4 because of the high fives and the silliness of it instead of the romance. It showed a lot of woohoo but only because they were promised a free reward,DLC they wanted.

You can use telemetry to say anything you want and prove any number they want, but it will never replace just asking the gamers.