ah. a troll. i should probably not feed you, but let's see if one trip around the block leads to either sense and/or reason. i doubt it, but...we'll give it a whirl.
lostwolfe: because development costs money?
because people might want to give them some money for the enjoyment they've gotten out of the game at this point?
lots of reasons. pick one.
jcdenton2k: All of that is irrelevant in today's competitive games market. If you want to try an emotional appeal to me then that isn't going to work. As a consumer, I ask why I should pay for something when a similar/better version is available both for free and open-source.
i was not really trying an emotional appeal. i was simply stating facts. it is true that games cost money to make. it is also true that people who have played this game might feel it is in their interests - to help the developer stay afloat - to pay them for their game that they have enjoyed for free.
as this is a case-by-case issue, people can choose to give the developer money or not. [given that there was a free version floating around and given that people can probably track that down, still.]
related: free vs paid is a value proposition for many, many pieces of software. you choose what you want. sometimes, the free product - as you've alluded to - can be good and good value. sometimes not. you get what you pay for. perhaps this developer wants to step up the development pace of this game and perhaps one way to do that is to quit their job and work on it full time. ergo: more will come to this game as a result of it being a paid product than less. that doesn't - for what he has here - make it any less of a game. just a more refined version.
jcdenton2k: There are dozens of open-source projects related to the Rogue and NetHack style of games, with ascii art or 3D graphics or otherwise. I thought GoG curated their store instead of letting any low-effort copy-pasted trash get thrown up onto it. It takes up attention and space that should be reserved for other BETTER games. That's why I buy on GoG instead of Steam. If I wanted just piles and piles of trash games I'd go to Steam.
ah. i was patiently waiting for this once i saw the beginning of your screed.
gog's curation /is/ wonderfully curious and woefully underserving some of it's customers. i will completely agree with that. but they DEFINITELY curate. perhaps that curation is a bit overboard, but we have a vastly different set of games here. if this were steam, you'd be dealing with literally broken games that didn't run and were only around to fleece you. on gog, at least, if you're fleeced, you get a product that [mostly] works.
but let's address your actual complaint. your perspective on this is subjective. completely so, in fact. i don't like shooters. i cannot abide them. but do i stomp my foot when one arrives on steam? no. because i am not the target audience [if you'll pardon the pun] for those games. however, there's certainly an audience for those games.
likewise, this is a roguelike. a genre that's been forged in a fire of time - refined and distilled to various flavours for different people. you don't like it? that's fine. move on to games you do like.
that this is a "worse" game than "some other game" is entirely an eye of the beholder issue.
jcdenton2k: Right now the game is trash and seems like minimal effort was made to actually do some development. I'm questioning whether the devs bothered to even do any work themselves or if they just pieced together stuff that is open-source and public-domain and tried to make money off of it. Using 'Games in Development' as a shield against criticism doesn't work if the game is for sale.
by all means, please, show us your labour of love that you have programmed for the last nine years. by all means, allow us to savour the depth of your knowledge with regards to some sort of game genre that you're wedded to. by all means, if you can do better, prove it. this /may/ seem like trash to you, but to people who have sunk many hours into it, it is quite the opposite. in the last several years, whenever i've talked to people who have played qud [and who are into roguelikes] - they have had nothing but praise for it.
jcdenton2k: Any game for sale that takes money is subject to criticism. If they wanna crowdfund it they can throw it up on KickStarter/IndieGaga/etc sites and get laughed all the way to the failure pile.
i agree with some of this, for sure. criticize all you like. some of your criticisms may be fair and valid. and sure. people can do what they like and crowdfund all they want. however, you would be surprised at what people are interested in. for example: many of the new, interesting rpg's have had crowdfunding done and have succeeded. if someone were to take a game like this - and do a proper campaign, i would almost bet that it would attract money, because there's still an audience that wants this sort of hardcore experience. so, absolutely. down talk that kind of thing. i think you're going to be a little...surprised by what you find in the real world.
jcdenton2k: In fact, if I had the time to do so today I'd love to go through and grab some of the open-source projects I know of and do a direct comparison between them and this game. If GoG wants to do a code compare between the latest dev build of the game and open-source projects then there's ways to do that. Almost all of them are under GPL (though some are MIT/PD) so if there's any GPL violations then these 'developers' will be in a lot of trouble.
oh. an interesting idea. i'm not sure what this will prove, other than "people work on software." but that's a neat learning experience for someone.
