It is all explained in the actual post mortem. before going on, I suggest you go and read it

yes, this thread is suddenly starting to take a turn to the worse...

I'm saddened by this. Really.
Imo, as it has already been said, the devs should have waited a bit longer before giving up. Bundling a game that way so soon is an implicit sentence to death.
I'm sure that with a brief but strong discount in major stores they would have spread the word, then they could have discounted it again at lower percentages after it became more famous.

I'm dubbing it your premise since it's in the thread title, and also in post 1: Apologies if I'm misunderstanding the thrust of this thread.

No, it isn't whine marketing. It's not marketing at all. He wrote up the postmortem - as often happens with smaller developers - and some sites decided to quote some snippets from the larger piece. He likely has no control over third-party sites picking quotes from his larger piece and making an article out of it, such as the one you linked. This isn't to say that whine- or sympathy-marketing isn't 'a thing' (charities do this all the time), but that's not what's going on in this particular case.

As an aside: the original piece is called "Where the Water Tastes Like Wine Postmortem". "Postmortem" is an industry standard term for this type of piece.

Have you read the source piece yet? https://medium.com/@johnnemann/where-the-water-tastes-like-wine-postmortem-211a1f9d791a

Edited because it originally came off as needlessly harsh. My apologies.

I feel like an indie game really has to stand out for me to pay it any attention, regardless of how Steam or GOG or any storefront markets it. Even the front page hype stuff doesn't typically arouse my interest, unless I hear good word of mouth, see gameplay, hear that it's interesting, not too gimmicky, etc. Examples of this are Hollow Knight, which one, is a genre I already love, two, had great reviews, even from /v/, good word of mouth, was fun and challenging, and was enough to pull me out of my massive backlog to install and play it. Salt and Sanctuary was another one, along with the River City Ransom redux game.

I don't typically go looking for heavily story laden adventure games unless they have a major draw or appeal, like say, Ethan Carter, so that's one strike against it. If critical reception was lukewarm, that's two strikes. If I've gotten zero feedback about it, and have never even seen it or heard about it, then I'm probably gonna give it a hard pass, especially when I have multiple AAA games in my backlog that I'm still in the process of finishing.

Add a new season for Path of Exile, and I just don't have the time in between work, sleep, the occasional date and other social activities to squeeze in an arthouse game that doesn't even stand out aside from the title, which, considering the title and the name of the publisher, I'd assume was a religiously themed game or something.

In conclusion, I empathize with him, but I don't owe him a sale, and neither does anyone else. It's disappointing to throw yourself into something for any length of time and not get a reward for your hard work, but just because you worked hard on something doesn't mean it's going to pay off. Game dev, like movies or books are a gamble.

Larger ones also, but it is not published in blogs. However, in the GDC vault you can find postmortems of games like Doom and Diablo, most recently Nier: Automata and Monster Hunter World - https://www.gdcvault.com/

I'm not anxious. Devs won't ever outwhine their customers.

Unless you're this guy.

Get a refund, citizen.

My quote clarifies it right there, if you were misunderstood.


It says he spent that on "collaborators" one of which happens to be chubby yoga pants lady...............
Someone said they had Sting doing a voiceover in parts. I guess his expensive taste in funny pants needs to be paid for.
https://worleygig.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/sting-dune.jpg

unless you start treating people with normal decency and respect, there is no point in this. the only thing you manage to show here now is that you are rude and do not know what your are talking about.

ikr? Who knew that people want you to do things with them? It cuts into gaming time! :|

>Purposely make game which is as obscure, weird and pretentious looking as possible
>Cry when it fails
Hmmmmmmmm