If You Want To Make Games, Don't Make This Mistake

Okay, so if you're like me, you want to make games, right? You want to make games who who knows, full-time, or maybe you just want to release an indie game on Steam. And the key point is you want to make a good game. Like, you want it to be actually good. Sure, it's great to make a lot of money, but wouldn't it be great to make a game that has, I don't know, very positive scores on Steam, like me, like Thomas Brush. Maybe you want to make a game. Maybe I I'm being sarcastic because I'm I'm very terrified about my next game, my third commercial release, which is called Twisted Tower. By the way, you can wishlist it below. Uh it's kind of bioshocky. So, there's already expectations there. And we're going to talk all about expectations and why they matter for good Steam reviews. But hey, you want to make good game, you want to get good Steam reviews. How exactly do you make a good solid game that good gets good Steam reviews? It's way more complicated than you think. Actually, no. The answer is not what you think. That's really what I'm trying to

say. The answer is not what you think. In fact, I asked a bunch of devs on Twitter, successful devs on Twitter, and also Discord, and I think you're going to be very, very surprised by what the number one reason, the core reason for why a game gets bad reviews on Steam. And you're I think it'll probably comfort you because it's not what you think. It's not It's not some hyperpolished game that you need to make. Well, kind of is. And by the way, one of the tricks to getting good reviews is just having really good polished content your game. We're going to talk all about this in this video. And that does bring me to this video sponsor, Fab. Fab is quickly becoming one of the best new resources for Unity developers and artists. It's a growing marketplace filled with highquality Unity assets. Things like environments, props, shaders, characters, and tools. This is all ready to drop straight into your project. So, what's great is that you don't need to convert your Unity content or make any weird complicated changes to use Fab.

Everything just works right out of the box for Unity. Fab also makes the process of selling really straightforward. You can upload your own Unity assets, set the price, and start earning right away. And you're also going to connect with other creators doing the same thing. But if you're just looking to level up your next game, there's thousands of Unity assets on the Fab Store right now with new content being added all the time. It's honestly one of the easiest ways to find exactly what you need to speed up your workflow and make your project really, really shine. So, if you're a Unity developer, I definitely recommend checking it out. Head on over to fab.com and browse the huge library of Unity assets or hey, start uploading your own and sell today. That's fab.com, a new home for Unity creators to build, share, and grow together. Thanks, Fab, for supporting the channel and also supporting Twisted Tellers development just by supporting the channel. Yay. All right, so the first step, the first step to figuring out how to make a good game on Steam that gets good reviews is to first figure out the problem. What is the big problem?

Well, let's study some games to figure out what the problem is. Okay, why are some of these games here? Why are these getting mixed reviews? Okay, Mighty Number Nine. Okay, do you guys remember this game? I remember this game and I was shocked. I was shocked that it got mixed reviews. Um, if we open it up on Steam here, by the way, I'm using Grock um to sort of put together a nice little chart of some games that have mixed reviews. Um, so this is 57% of almost 2,000 reviews. So, yeah, the game made some money. It probably made like half a million dollars minimum. But yeah, still mixed reviews. Mixed reviews. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the the overall consensus of a lot of these negative reviews is that it's just not meeting the expectations of what it was marketed as, especially on Kickstarter where it made like $4 million. It was supposed to be the spirit spiritual successor to Mega

Man. Um, and so people just felt like this is not a spiritual successor to Mega Man. So it really was about expectations here, right? The Swords of Ditto, Mormo's Curse. Let's take a look at this. Okay. 62% of almost 2,000 reviews. What does Gro say? Rogike action RPG was criticized for repetitive gameplay and grindy progression. Well, you can't have this if you want to have a nice interesting roglike action RPG. So, it's a mismatch of expectations versus reality. Okay, let's take a look at another one. Uh, Biom Mutant. While this game made probably made well over a million bucks, I I think that's obvious, but maybe I'm wrong. Point being, you could get mixed reviews or mostly positive reviews and still make decent money or great money. So, yeah, let's take a look at some of these reviews. Let's take a look at the negative ones. What do we got here? Um,

has pro This is so sort of poignant, this review, because it's kind of proving my point. Has promise, but it's dragged down by bloat and RPG nonsense. What does that mean to have promise? Well, it means that it made a promise just by the way it looked and and by the by the trailer and and by the um the summary, the description, the Steam page promised one thing and those expectations weren't matched. Okay, so those are some examples of some games that got mixed reviews. So, let's sort of dig into more about the problem and let's ask actual successful indie game developers and let's get a nice sort of average of what all these game developers that all of us aspire to be like and see what they have to say. Um, but let's start with Puppet Combo. Okay. What did Puppet com Well, yeah. What did

Puppet Combo have to That's hard to say. Puppet Combo have to say about what what makes a bad game? What makes bad reviews on Steam? Okay, let's see what kind of profound answer we've got here. Not enough. Okay, noted. Thank you, puppet combo, for your profound reasoning. What about Jeff Vogle? One of my favorite favorite friends is Jeff Vogle, a brilliant industry veteran. I think the oldest indie dev on planet Earth. And that's a compliment. And Jeff knows that bad game. That's what causes that's what causes bad reviews on Steam is a bad game. So, okay, that's true. But what what is a bad game? That's the real question. What exactly is a bad game?

So, I kind of talked to um Thomas Mer about this. I sent him a Discord message. Okay. What's What's a bad game? and he said, 'Well, it's simply a game that's not fun. And this is a guy who knows how to make fun games. He made AI and he's making this game called No Rest for the Wicked, which looks freaking amazing. Um, and he actually went from mixed reviews to very positive reviews. I'm going to talk about that, but he knows a thing or two about making a fun game. And so he said, "Yeah, a game that gets bad reviews is just not fun." And I thought, okay, what is that? What does that mean? It's funny. The the more uh the more of a veteran you are, um like Jeff Vogle and and Thomas Mer, the more curt you are. Um so I said, devil's advocate. This was on Twitter or Discord. I said, "Okay, devil's advocate. What if a game is fun, but it's not the kind of fun that a player expected?" And I think that's that's

where Thomas Mer was willing to to dive more into what he meant. He said that's what we ran into as well with his game No Rest for the Wicked. Again, I I mentioned earlier he got mixed reviews for this game um when it first launched or it's early access, so it's it's still in production, but it was originally mixed reviews. And that's what he's he's saying here. That's what we ran into as well when we launched. We marketed No Rest for the Wicked as an ARPG. And to a lot of people, that meant like Diablo, but when you played it, it was a lot more like Souls than Diablo. Bingo. Okay. Are Souls games fun for everybody? No. I hate Souls games if I'm being completely honest. Are all players thinking that Diablo games are fun? No. Not everybody. So fun is subjective. And so when you present your

game as a Diablo game and players come in and they don't get Diablo, they're not going to think it's fun. So again, mismatched expectations. Mismatched expectations. Do you see the theme here? Okay. What about Adam Ununice? Adam is aka Indie Tales. He's been working on a game for like 10 years. Um, Adam said something very profound here. If you fail at making strong promises, you get disinterest. Sorry, I'm doing a British accent cuz it's very This is very like philosophical. If you succeed at making strong promises, you fail to keep but fail to keep them, you get dissatisfaction. I was like, what? What are you talking about? But what he's saying is you you need to make strong promises. If you're going to market your game, you got to make strong promises. The problem is you also have to succeed at keeping those promises. And that's the big problem is this mismatch. It's marketing and production.

Okay? Marketing is making promises, telling players what your game is, and doing it well in an enticing, interesting way, aka a clickbaity thumbnail like maybe this one for this video. The content of this video matters, too. The algorithm looks at both the thumbnail and title and also the content, aka retention. Are people watching this video? Steam looks at the same thing. Yeah, it's cool to have a Steam page where that gets a ton of wish lists, but if those wish lists don't convert or there's a big refund rate or there's bad reviews or the the people aren't playing the game for a long amount of time, then your promises are not being met. So, Adam is correct here. Absolutely, 100%. Good job, Adam. Uh, Toby Toby's making a game called Outbound. This guy's got 1 million wish lists. When player expectations don't align with actual gameplay experience, that's the reason why games get bad reviews.

This is usually not the player's fault. It's not trolls. It's not mean people on Steam. Yes, there are people who are mean on Steam, but that's not really the reason why. Okay, Tuck said, and I love you, Tuck Tuck's, he always shows up in my on my Twitter and and also in my live stream. So, I love you, Tuck, but I disagree with you, Tuck, I don't agree with this point. He says, "The number one reason is whiny, difficult people. They're stinky gamer." They're stinky gamers. you give them exactly what they want and they'll still find something to complain about. I won't continue reading this because I disagree with this. I I I completely disagree with that and and so does Toby. Toby saying, "Look, it's not the player's fault." Usually, it often stems from store pages or trailers that fail to accurately represent the game. As a result,

players, they feel misled and disappointed. There's nothing worse than giving your money, aka your time and your hard work, giving your paycheck to somebody and they're like, "Thank you very much. Now, here's a pile of crap. I promised you delicious spaghetti, but you're going to get delicious poop. There's It's so frustrating. It's infuriating. And it drives people to go downvote bad review." They feel like you stole money from them. All right, the last one. This is this is my favorite one. Jonas Tyroller is gonna explain to us why games get bad reviews. Jonas made a game called Islanders. Okay, Islanders got uh overwhelmingly positive. He he he made this um he partnered with some other devs, but um he's one of the developers for Islanders. Overwhelmingly positive reviews. Amazing. Great work, Jonas. He made William Snail Solo. Okay. Um, this

game overwhelmingly positive reviews. Get out of there. Check that out. Look at that. Thronefall, his latest game that he made with Grizzly Games. Goodness me. Overwhelmingly positive. Look how beautiful. So, this guy has some credibility, wouldn't you say, Jonas? I love you. I've learned so much from Jonas. So, here is what Jonas summed it up as. This is what makes a a bad review. Okay. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it comes down to expectations for Jonas. Players expect more play time for the price point. Okay. There's just not enough. They thought it was going to have enough because of the price. Say it was $20 or $30 and then they got it and it was not a 20 or $30 game. They expected a different game entirely, aka the genre was there's a genre mismatch. the trailer uh or the Steam page is

presenting the game as one thing and it's not that thing. Aka the player's lied to whether it's intentionally or not. They're lied to by the developer or they expected a less frustrating experience, aka they expected the game to work or to play well or to go through more vigorous testing, right? So, it's just it just doesn't have quality. So, it really comes down to, according to Mr. Jonas, it comes down to expectations. Actually, according to all of these devs, Jonas, Toby, Adam, Thomas Mer, expectations. Expectations. I came up with this really cool um I came with this really cool metaphor while I was in the bathroom. I was thinking about cheeseburgers. I was thinking, "Wow, I love cheeseburgers. I could I could I could get a cheeseburger. And then I thought, what if I got the greatest cheeseburger in

the whole wide world? What if it was the best cheeseburger? And everybody knew it was the best cheeseburger. It was made by the greatest chef in the world with all the top ingredients, almost as good as a McDouble. And I get this burger or I see this burger and it's priced at a million dollars. And I'm like, "Okay, let's do it." So I take all of my life savings from now until I'm dead. I take all that life. I go in debt for a million dollars and I get this burger. Is that a good burger? Is that burger going to get good reviews? It's a million dollars. No, it will never get good reviews ever. Ever. It really does come down to price, price, price. Price is like the ultimate anchor that creates expectations. No cheeseburger is worth a million dollars. Okay. So, it really does come down to price. Look, people give you money based on what you've advertised. So, what you say the game is is what you're going to people are going to give you money for.

They will then write a review based on whether or not they got what they paid for. Okay, that's really it. So, price is super duper important. So, let's talk about the solution. Okay. What is the solution to getting bad reviews? How do we avoid this? Is it possible for you to do all the work on the back end before you launch a game so that you don't create mismatched expectations? Yes, it is possible. And it is something called marketing. Okay? It's something called marketing. The best marketers know how to tell the truth. They know how to not have tricks, little sneaky little tricks that they put into their Steam pages. And they know how to tell us the tr the real value to ask for the right dollar amount. In fact, Team Cherry kind of they I mean obviously they did an amazing job with

their price because it probably just resulted in more sales, but I think they kind of undervalued their product. But what you don't want to do is overvalue the product. And again, price, price, price, price, price. Price is this huge, huge um it's like this giant loudspeaker telling people what your game is. If you list your game at $30, but it's really worth $15. You're screaming that the value is here. This game is basically double A. That's what you're screaming. When in reality, it's here. So price is that giant megaphone that tells people what your game uh what your game's value is. Obviously that's what price is. So again with marketing, you want to tell the truth in your trailer. Tell the truth in your Steam description. Tell the truth in your Steam capsule. But Thomas, I want to make sure everybody knows what's amazing about my game. Well, if your game isn't amazing, don't say it's amazing. If your game doesn't

have 20 hours of gameplay, don't trick people into thinking it does. Just tell the truth. No tricks, no gimmicks. One of the things I'm trying to do, so this is sort of a case study or a practical application. One of the things I'm trying to do with Twisted Tower, uh, is yes, this game is inspired by Ken Lavine's Bioshock. It's a it it is an homage. It is a celebration of Bioshock but but I cannot tell people that it is in the same quality level uh as Bioshock. I cannot do that. So how do I tell people that this game is not of AAA quality in 2006 or whenever Bioshock was released? Price. It's price. Price. Price is everything. So that's why you go, okay, I'm going to

make a game that's an homage to Bioshock, but it's 10 bucks. Hopefully people can see. Fingers crossed. And this one, we'll talk about this in a sec. All about why testing is so important. Um, I'm hopeful that testers will say will confirm, yes, that does clarify what this game is. And let me know in the comments what you guys think about that strategy. But price is so freaking important. Okay, some lowhanging fruit. Lowhanging fruit things you can do right now on the production side, not the marketing side, the production side that you can do right now to set expectations properly. Okay? Or I'm sorry to to um you set expectations with marketing. You fulfill those promises. You fulfill those expectations. This is some lowhanging fruit to fulfill those expectations. settings and options menu where you can change anything, you know, key rebinds, uh, max cap out the frame rate, turn VSYNC on and off, toggle toggle crouch,

toggle sprint, uh, full screen, um, windowed resolution. All these things matter so much. Why? Because you don't want this percentage of players, let's say this is 100%. You don't want this percentage of players to be pissed off and knock off 10 points from reviews because the game didn't run on their ultrawide monitor. So, you have to kind of make the game work for everybody. It sucks. It takes a ton of time. Well, guess what? Do you want to make money? Do you want to get good reviews? I do. So, suffer a little bit. You could print that out and put it on a a bumper sticker or something. Optimization. Make sure it runs well. Fix the freaking bugs. Don't do what AAA does and launch games with a ton of bugs. Teaching. This one's so important. Teaching. If Jason Smith told me this, he he's the creator of Cultic and he just released

Chapter 2 and he said that a lot of the negative reviews, even though it did well, but some of the negative reviews were about difficulty. And he was like he was telling me he was like it's not that the game was difficult, it's that they didn't know that they could use certain things. So as as long as they're using dash correctly or like strafe correctly, I think it was strafing that was the problem. The game's not hard. Or as long as they know that the magnum is very very powerful, they know that they can use it on certain enemies. That's not the player's fault. And Jason admitted this. That's Jason's fault for not teaching it well. So that's why you patch things and upload new tutorials, new little tips and um prompts on screen that tell you, hey, you can dash, you can strafe, the Magnum is valuable for this, or you you teach them even with the sound of the Magnum. If the Magnum is, they're not going to use it for big enemies. But if it's

they're going to use it on big enemies, that's teaching. It's communicating how to play the game. So, it's really not a difficult issue. It's a difficulty issue. It's a teaching thing. Now, even if you've taught as best as you can and players are still suffering and they shouldn't suffer and it's not like a Souls game, then it's a difficulty issue. Content. This is another uh lowhanging fruit. Make sure you have enough content in your game. And this sort of sort of is linked to price. If your game is 30 bucks, but your content is like an hour, you're going to get destroyed. If your game is $10 and you've got a two-hour game, you're probably good. So content, the length of game play, the replayability, how much you want to grind in this game, and how long you can upgrade your characters or whatever, that's content. Finally, don't make a multiplayer game. All right, let's move on. I'm just kidding. Well, not really. Uh, this is what Thomas Morer told me today. He

said, uh, by the way, don't make a multiplayer game. He was just saying, "It's so tough. Obviously, you're dealing with the technical aspects. There's a whole issue with the technical side of making multiplayer games because you have to store variables essentially on a in the cloud or on a server and you're always pushing and pulling these variables. That's totally different than making just a standard game for single player because those variables are all local. Um, it's a whole technical monstrosity, but there's an expectation issue with multiplayer games because is it co-op? Is it co-op and single player? Is it is it multiplayer? How many people can play? Are there servers? If there are no servers, the game sucks. I want to play single player. I go to play single player. The single player is actually sucky. So, it just the whole thing becomes this massive confusion of expectations. So, multiplayer games are risky. Uh, and also there's an issue with price. If you launch a game that's priced too high and it's a multiplayer game, if somebody spends $25 on a

multiplayer game and they buy it at the very beginning of the launch, there's no servers. There's no servers. Nobody can play. They leave a bad review. Nobody shows up to buy the game. Dead. So, my theory is multiplayer games are better free or really, really cheap. and then you monetize elsewhere. I'm so sorry to say it. I just don't know how else to say it. DLC's, cosmetics, this kind of stuff helps multiplayer developers make cheaper games or sell their games for cheaper so people can show up and actually fill the servers for you or just have a really good single player experience. Moving on. So, we've got our low hanging fruit. We've got our marketing. Marketing is the expectation side of things. How do you set expectations? And then this is fulfilling expectations. So then the question is, how do you know what kind of promises to make? And how do you know if you're fulfilling your promises? Testing. That's the whole

thing I wanted to get to here. Testing. Find the right players. Okay, that's the first step. Find the right players. People who actually like your genre of game. Don't find players who don't like your genre and have them play the game. And anonymous is kind of the key word here. Now, obviously, you want to play with advisers or close friends first. And like I have this giant notepad. I have like six of these in my cabinet over there that I just write down notes as people play my game in my office, but and I'm actually in this phase right now, but eventually you want to send out keys to a private or a private public audience that's anonymous and they don't know you and you don't know them so that they can be honest with you. They'll play the game and fill out the form and they're going to answer questions like, "Hey, how long did the game take to beat? Is there enough content? What price do you think this game should be? How how um what do you predict the score is going to be on Steam?

Would you recommend this game on Steam? What would your review on Steam be? What are some bugs? And also, you can do Q QA as well. Uh you can hire professional studios if you want or your publisher will might have a QA uh team to test the game. So, bug, this one's a This one's actually huge. Bugs are huge. I mean, you don't launch a game with bugs, obviously. So, it it's obvious, but it happens. I' I've launched games with bucks. It just happens. Um, but at the end of the day, I think the goal is to get like 200 minimum players to play your game. If you're not getting the score you hoped, and by the way, at the at the Google form, there's going to be a nice pie chart and it's going to tell you what's the average score. If your score is not what you want it to be, rinse and repeat until you get the score you want. By rinse and repeat, I mean

fix the crap that they brought up in the form. Hey, your Steam page said this, but I got this. Hey, Thomas, you said but I got this. Thomas, it's 40. You You're thinking $30. I got this. The content's too is lacking. So, the form will tell you what to change about your Steam page, about your marketing, and about your game. Rinse, and then do another test. And if the score is not going up, something's wrong. Um, but the score should slowly bump up in the beta testing. Once that score is where you want it to be, you're ready to launch the game. This is my experience. I use Air Table. Uh, I used Air Table for Pinstripe and Neverong and also QA with Armor Games, QA with Serenity Forge, QA with Saber, which is the parent company of 3D Realms. So, I'll use Air Table for beta testing, and then QA is something called

gyra. Is that how you say it? Gyra. Um, and they'll record video footage of the exact issue. They'll write out exact steps of how to repeat the issue, and then I'll go in and fix the issues. So, that's what we do. That's how we know if if there's a balance. At the end of the day, guys, it's about balancing. I hope to God I do this with my next game. Please, Lord, please. I hope there's a balance of expectations and value. What is actually given to the player? Some games are like this. The wider the gap, the worse the score. Balance it. Beta testing. Beta testing. Beta testing. You got it. Locked in. Check. Release the game. That's the goal. If you can do that, the theory is you get good reviews. Now, whether it sells and whether you make money, that's a whole

that's a whole other conversation. I hope this was helpful, guys. I love you so much. Good luck on your gamedev journey. And hey, maybe wish me some luck, too, cuz Twisted Towers launch is coming up here. And I hope that uh I hope I'm right with what I'm saying here. Well, it's not what I'm saying. Let's be honest. It's a bunch of other devs as well. I just hope I can execute. Love you guys. Take it easy. Cheers. And by the way, one of the tricks to getting good reviews is just having really good, polished content in your game. And that does bring me to this video sponsor, Fab. Fab is quickly becoming one of the best new resources for Unity developers and artists. It's a growing marketplace filled with highquality Unity assets. things like environments, props, shaders, characters, and tools. This is all ready to drop straight into your project. So, what's great is that you don't need to convert your Unity content or make any weird complicated changes to use Fab. Everything just works right out of the box for Unity. Fab also makes the process of selling really straightforward. You can upload your own Unity assets, set the price, and start

earning right away. And you're also going to connect with other creators doing the same thing. But if you're just looking to level up your next game, there's thousands of Unity assets on the Fab Store right now with new content being added all the time. It's honestly one of the easiest ways to find exactly what you need to speed up your workflow and make your project really, really shine. So, if you're a Unity developer, I definitely recommend checking it out. Head on over to fab.com and browse the huge library of Unity assets or hey, start uploading your own and sell today. That's fab.com, a new home for Unity creators to build, share, and grow together. Thanks, Fab, for supporting the channel and also supporting Twisted Towers development just by supporting the channel. Yay.