Promoted Game on Games page
2 years ago
Germany

LMAO nice one Sad you will get banned :(

YUMmy_Bacon5, SioN, and O.D.W. like this
Turkey

Yeah the longer we stick with speedrun.com, the more it becomes all about the money, its like a college student getting into college because his father donates thousands of dollars, the game doesn't deserve to be on the front page but jts there anyway

Turkey

Also I suggest not running the game because if we were to run it, it'd show that it works and they'll continue doing this

Pear, Kups and 3 others like this
United States

I mean, aggressive advertising turns me away to begins with so I wasn't really planning on running it. Even if I did, I already got too many other games on my list to begin with, and I'm not particularly good at FPS games anymore.

Have to give my pessimistic side credit, it saw this coming months back, but I decided to be at least charitable for a while. A boycott is well and all, but alas, our voice of grievance is drowned out by the deafening silence of the complacent majority. It's possible that @Liv is on the mark with the Q&A parallel, and I won't disagree that this is all kinda sketch. The whole thing about front paging streams of this game over the United Kingdom Speedrunner Gathering also burns, especially since they just started today.

On the bright side, this issue got noticed on r/speedrun and it's managed to bring itself to the very top of late, so we're not alone. https://old.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/pq5j54/speedruncom_now_has_promoted_games_on_the_games/

But I'll be honest, I'm rather tired of all the recent controversy and negative feels of late, so I'm probably just gonna peace out from threads like these for a while. I prefer positivity and supporting things over having to express discontent and criticism into a void. What I think about this subject should be clear by this point, y'all know where I stand.

Winter_Doggo, NotTheJohn and 3 others like this
Germany

"That said, wouldn't surprise me if this "closer relationship" was in fact just using speedrunners as glorified, unpaid QA. As "A Hat in Time" devs basically did.

I primarily just don't understand why relationships with devs are even necessary or wanted at all. It's obvious that a lot of them don't give a shit about the actual community and just don't want to do the work to find bugs, exploits and imbalances in their games so they use us to find them for them. Once again going back to Gears for Breakfast (HiT Devs). They usually turn out bad, like parasocial relationships, basically."

As an admin in the Hat in Time speedrun community, this is so wrong and based on misinformation that was spread back then by angry speedrunners because they patched specific glitches. Some of those glitches were even patched without others in the dev team knowing about it because one of the devs noticed the bug and just patched it real quick. It was a huge communication issue and also one of the reasons they have a CM now and why we talked a lot to them. GfB pretty much did not touch the speedrun and even made specific versions of the game a specific branch for speedrunners, as those versions are the fastest versions available to runners.

Please if you do not know the full picture, saying something like this is stupid.

Merl_ likes this
United States

I'll just throw my 2 cents in:

First, devs aren't to blame. Naturally, a dev wanting to appeal to speedrunners would reach out to speedrun.com for advertising. Common sense, and not particularly bad behavior. The site is already plastered with ads to the point of being unusable, might as well have some of those slots filled up by things the minority of people without an adblocker installed would enjoy?

The real issue is w/ Elo. Naturally, this is ANOTHER change that is neither communicated with the community nor wanted by them. A lot of the advertising for this game is not properly disclosed as advertising, making it either outright illegal or at the v least, a "convenient coincidence" that further plummets the already-skeptical community's trust in Elo. Though frankly at this point, I can't imagine there's a single person left on sr.c that doesn't have a reason to dislike Elo and what has happened w/ the site in the past year. This is just a monthly occurrence at this point.

And for anyone reading this thinking "cmon guys its just a tiny little box, you guys are overreacting 4head." This is just an extension of a year's worth of destroyed faith, to the point where even many of the site's defenders have to admit that the critics make a compelling argument. If this weren't paired w/ the promise of heavily wanted features without an ETA, an excessive amount of ads that crash some browsers, months of a borderline non-functioning website, unwanted features, significantly decreased transparency, and an utter lack of meaningful communication for any of these changes while regularly insisting "we totally care about the community uwu <33333. we luv speedrunners!!", then yea it'd just be a tiny box 4head.

BionicMan2051, O.D.W. and 3 others like this
United States

The game probably won't be deleted off the site ever, but hopefully we can show we don't like promoted games

Gaming_64 and Act_ like this
Japan

[quote] hopefully we can show we don't like promoted games [/quote] I would honestly have nothing against promoted games if they weren't paid to be promoted. If there was a small game instead then I would've been totally okay with it, there are so many games that deserve a spark of players one way or another, but of course, they want to profit off of promoting the game and not us the runners of the game to live in a more active and bigger community.

I really dislike the direction where SR.C is going right now, their website is just a big clump of ads at the moment and all they're trying to do is add more ads and features that get them more money. We got promised mod tools this summer, it's the middle of September and as far as I can tell they're not here, nor any of the other community suggestions.

Pear, Merl_, and TRLittleToaster like this
Germany

Also, mandatory rant about how you cant make a speedrunning game, a game will be speedrunned because people like it.

Pear, nupali, and 1 like this
Japan

[quote=Mantse007] mandatory rant about how you cant make a speedrunning game, a game will be speedrunned because people like it. [/quote]

  1. It's very possible to make a speedgame, there's many examples of games being made specifically for people who speedrun, however those games don't receive the attention they would've deserved because it's a pretty new genre of games.

  2. Regarding the second half of the message, there are countless games on the internet that did receive a lot of attention through playthroughs and other methods and were given very positive feedback, and yet they only have a few active runners at most. Even my only game falls into that category; it has tens of millions of plays over on flash game websites, with millions of views on YouTube, and yet there's only 10 active players. While the game itself pulled off an impressive amount of plays, the speedgame had very few promotions over its lifespan, even though every big name that has run the game claimed that it's a very good speedgame. I bet there's many many many more games that are in the same scenario which would greatly benefit from being promoted on the main website which thousands of people visit every day.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
United States

Hi all,

First, I just wanted to say that we appreciate the honest feedback everyone is sharing related to this promotion. It's the first time we've done something like this, and we thought it was worth a test. Generally speaking, we're cautiously optimistic about the idea of partnering with game developers/publishers to help promote speedrunning as a meaningful part of their game launch. Obviously this may involve paid marketing/promotion, but there's also an opportunity to help make their games more accessible to runners with built-in tools, skippable cutscenes, leaderboard integration, etc. It's easy to be pessimistic about these things, and we also know that runners choose games (not the other way around), but it's still an interesting space where we've seen increased interest from developers in the past year or so.

Mea culpa:

  • We could have done a better job with labeling/delivering the promotion
  • We know that your trust is a precious commodity am sorry we missed the mark here
  • We do read all of your feedback and take it to heart
  • We will continue working to improve the site, both with features/fixes and better communication

I'd like to offer clarification on a few things:

  • This did not in any way delay other efforts such as mod tools. More on that later.
  • This is a limited time promotion and the game will be treated exactly like others once it's over (if it attracts genuine interest from runners then it will be visible on the games page, otherwise it won't, governed by the same algorithm as other games)
  • The blob post that was written by Meta about Severed Steel a few months back was not part of any kind of paid (or unpaid) promotion, it was just a post about a cool upcoming game that the author was really excited about.

Speaking of mod tools... we'll be releasing our Moderator Hub tool next week. The initial launch focuses on improving the run verification tool. It will make it easier to see the verification queue status for games you moderate, find runs in different states more easily, see all of the metadata (variables, etc) for a run in one place, and easily review then verify/reject without navigating away from the page.

In a series of future updates we're going to tackle the mess that is levels/subcategories/variables, making it easy and less confusing to setup boards, make changes to categories/subcategories/variables without orphaning runs, mass-edit runs, etc. This will take some time but we're fully committed to end-to-end moderator improvements and want to tackle the biggest pain points first.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, and thanks for reading my post (if you made it this far).

Edited by the author 2 years ago
nupali, HoonGoons and 14 others like this
New York, USA

"there's also an opportunity to help make their games more accessible to runners with built-in tools, skippable cutscenes, leaderboard integration" P sure Celeste devs did a good amount of this without needing to pay Pac or MSushi.

Pear likes this
United States

[quote=Lieutenant_Boo]"there's also an opportunity to help make their games more accessible to runners with built-in tools, skippable cutscenes, leaderboard integration" P sure Celeste devs did a good amount of this without needing to pay Pac or MSushi.[/quote]

Definitely, and to clarify, this kind of advocacy is not something we expect to be paid for. We know that most devs won't care, but ultimately every developer/publisher relationship is an opportunity to advocate for things that make games more accessible for speedrunning.

YUMmy_Bacon5 likes this

@Lieutenant_Boo Sure, and Celeste is proof that people can make a successful speedrunning game.

Anyway, if there's going to be advertising on the site, clearly identified promotion for games with leaderboards on the site seems like the best option, in that it's more likely to be relevant to our interests and less likely to be malicious. It's a rare instance where internet advertising could potentially provide positive value for the users in itself, rather than maxing out at "necessary evil".

Merl_ likes this
Japan

[quote] we also know that runners choose games (not the other way around) [/quote] Then what if you come up with a way that would involve the runners choosing the game(s) that would be promoted instead of the developers of the games choosing them (preferably for as cheap as possible if not for free)? Maybe choose some volunteers from the community or something that would choose the promoted game(s) with your guys' approval. That way it's at least more likely for an underrated speedgame to be promoted instead of a game that didn't even come out yet.

Speaking of which, I thought that submitting games that aren't out wasn't a thing. I know when a friend submitted a demo version of a game it got rejected the day after he submitted it, so what happened here? [quote] It's the first time we've done something like this, and we thought it was worth a test. [/quote] It probably was worth the test, but again just like every other time you've done something new, you could've avoided some mistakes if you just were more transparent to us about this idea. Maybe a thread where you'd simply say something along the lines of "Hey guys, we want to try promoting games, would you be ok with that?" and then explain how you thought it should work would've been very appreciated.

I know I've probably criticised your post a lot, but while there are some things that you guys didn't get right or could've done better, I appreciate that you took the time yet again and inform us about the situation.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Pear, Dare and 2 others like this

@Hi From the game request rules: [quote]Well-known users or moderators of other games in a series may request unreleased games beginning 21 days prior to launch. In rare cases, requests for unreleased games may be accepted by well-known users and only at site staff discretion. Series moderators may also add games to complete a series. Games will not be added prior to release for users who are not well-known.[/quote]

Well-known is not defined, but I assume it's one of those things where if you have to ask, it doesn't apply to you.