In a message on his blog Mark has reiterated the fact that YoYoGames is for all Game Maker made games and not just the best as the total number of games on the YoYo website exceeded 10,000. This responds to some criticism on the GMC where some people have come up with the crazy idea that only a select few high quality games should make it on to the site.
YoYoGames already has a rating system and reviews can be added to games so I really don’t see what the problem is with their open policy. YoYo is in effect a YouTube for Game Maker games, limiting submissions to a select few or imposing pre-moderation on all games uploaded would be counter-productive. Imagine a YouTube where you had to wait several days for a video to appear, and only a 100 select people could post video. It wouldn’t work.
No one is forcing you to play the low quality and incomplete games – the best games are much more likely to have high ratings or become featured anyway.
why did they choose to be the youtube of games?
Well that was hteir decision, but I hoped, when I first heard about yoyogames, they would become something like gamedev.net for gamemaker. A place where game creation was discussed and I thought that maybe thanks to sandy’s connections also proffesional programmers gave little “hints” to what methods they use in their game to handle certain problems.
But I guess that’s not the way yoyogames want to go. (and hence I get uninterested lately again: I want to LEARN not to play).
Also yoy only hear this “everybody has to be able to upload their game” from people who are already well-known, and will have their game with a little bit of advertising being played 100s of times – no matter the quality! It’s like the people saying “money isn’t important in life”…
And think about it this way: when their are so many games the only way one can determine which one is better is by looking at graphics.. But where can programmers like me go? – People who think about putting perfectly programmed games on there? – They don’t always have artistic sense to create appealing graphics however the games they created are solid, and in my opinion much better than any graphics-based game.
Agreed, Phil.
I agree that games should not be moderated, that would be terrible and is in direct violation with the open and free nature of the internet which makes it so great. Unfortunately, this greatness only lasts when people use it correctly, there will always be people posting three or four copies of the same game with slight modifications under the new name “X 1.0”, “X 2.0” which will be incomplete, buggy, and down right terrible.
That’s not to say people can’t show off their first creation, but people will insist on showing off their first creation before it even works, and still others will insist on insulting them for doing so instead of offering constructive criticism. And when users post, as I said above, multiple copies of the same game… don’t even get me started.
Okay, done ranting,
– Leif