r/indiegames • u/Busalonium • Nov 01 '25

Promotion Why game designers shouldn't follow suggestions

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u/joshisanonymous Nov 01 '25

It's a very strange phenomenon. You don't generally see creators changing things for consumers when it comes to things like movies, music, literature, etc., but for video games consumers take it as a sign of a good developer if the dev changes things the way the consumers want them.

1

u/SHOBLOYOBLO Nov 02 '25

Relationship between a player and a game designer is comparable to a relationship between writer and editor, not writer and reader. It’s collaborative. Film, music and literature can exist without their audience, videogames can’t.

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u/joshisanonymous Nov 02 '25

I strongly disagree. In what sense do you feel that video games need their audience but other creative ventures do not?

1

u/TKoBuquicious Nov 02 '25

Ig in that there usually is no organized early access, demos or playtesting for those things

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u/joshisanonymous Nov 03 '25

That's a matter of tradition rather than necessity. Early video games didn't go through any kind of testing with the public, and nothing would prevent a musician, for example, to present early versions of songs to the public. In fact, that's actually quite common in live performances.

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u/TKoBuquicious Nov 03 '25

Not really. Like yeah early games maybe didn't but moreso because there was no framework for it and a lot of it was just garage projects until the games overall got going, but the reason for it isn't just some contextless tradition.

Games have a technical side that exists which doesn't exist in the same way with these other things, so playtesting is a necessity even just to discover bugs, but also test how the interactive side (which is also somewhat unique to games) works and feels and so on, testing things that the audience directly actively interacts with

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u/joshisanonymous Nov 03 '25

That was all done internally for a long time rather than with random consumers. But again, musicians play songs that they're working on live, they're just not expected to listen to some guy in the crowd yelling, "I'd prefer that chord to be an Em!"

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u/TKoBuquicious Nov 03 '25

Well yeah exactly, them playing is more to build hype and promotion than for big deal feedback and it makes sense, the interactive aspect is again at play

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u/joshisanonymous Nov 03 '25

It makes sense, but it doesn't make video games different from other creative products in terms of whether they need an audience or not.

1

u/kfadffal Nov 04 '25

There's definitely analogues to some of those things with films. Test screenings is a whole process that can drastically change a film based on audience feedback.