It's that time of year again! Players are able to nominate their favorite games on Steam. theHunter: Classic is nominated for the ''Labor of Love Award''.
Have you nominated theHunter: Classic already? If not, you are able to do so by following these steps.
1. Open Steam.
2. Click on Store.
3. Scroll down until you see the ''The Steam Awards Banner''.
4. Scroll down until you see a banner called ''Labor of Love Award''.
5. Search ''theHunter: Classic'' and click on nominate.
I might get some dislikes for this. But i want to share some opinions and maybe to get some in return.
I nominated Factorio for this particular award...
Thing is, I do understand that the game is getting the needed attention from the devs since it is getting harder and harder to work on, not to mention if I had to guess it is probably the least profitable from the whole theHunter franchise. But thing is, because of all this it also feels like it is more on a 'life support' if you may. With all due respect and deep love for this game (been playing since 2009 and fell in love ever since with it) I just dont feel like it really deserves this award...
Well maybe after I explain why I voted for Factorio you will understand where I'm going with this.
So why did I choose Factorio over theHunter. The creators are a rather small group (well now after their release of the biggest and only expansion dlc I guess not so small after all) that are putting their life into this game. Each and everyone of them plays their own game just as much as everyone else. They do extensive testing and communicating with their player base. They worked on their DLC for the last 4 or 5 years. When the DLC was roughly a year from beeing released they gave us updates every Friday from smallest of details to the biggest reveals. They made a huge LAN party (roughly 200 people) a month prior to release to find as much bugs as possible. They fixed all of those bugs, some streamers after the lan party even said that bugs were beeing fixed while they were all on a lunch break. Most importantly they listen to their players, they made some adjustments after the lan party when they reviewed each and every persons review. Best part? After release they made numerous quick patch fixes to solve any missed bugs and the game is basically flawless, I dont regret spending a dime on it and so most of other people that bought it. For me it was smooth before the dlc, during the patch fixes straight after the dlc and it is as smooth as a butter a month into playing the new dlc.
Thing is I dont want you all to think that I am bragging about or praising this game and I do understand that I am talking about two completely different games and their business models but its not about the game itself or its business model, what I want to tell is the amount of really hard work and communication they've put into it. I would LOVE to see at least a fraction of this communication from theHunter team.
Give us a status update every once in a while, tell us what are the plans, open your cards just a little bit to us. Let us know at least a tiny bit of whats is going on behind the development of the game. Maybe you have something big planned, give us a tiny sneak peak. No big updates? No problem, let us know how are things going with fixing stuff around. As for an example, we are now waiting for the Whiterime Halloween event and all we know is that there is a problem with it and thats all we know, maybe a teeny weeny bit of extra information would give us a better understanding of what to expect, maybe there is a problem with the behavior of some animals, maybe it is a problem with registering something or maybe it is even a huge gamecrashing problem that you dont know a way around. It doesn't matter how bad or good it is, people would feel much better if they were more informed about it. After this Halloween event the Christmas event should start shortly I suppose, maybe we could get a nice little status update about it, maybe an estimate on when to even expect that or how long will it run for. Maybe it wont even happen knowing how hard it is to work on the game for the crew. Information is key. People love beeing informed. We then can plan our things accordingly, maybe someone is planning to have more free time during certain events and is willing to spend some cash on this game, but because that person lives in uncertainty he would better not do that?
I dont want to cause any misunderstanding here, understand that I love and adore this game, but I would love it even more if we knew just a little bit more of what is going on behind the doors.
