0.1 Releases and Quality Control

[dspeed]

Over the past year, we've seen a lot of 0.1 releases being posted as F95Zone seems to become less of a pirating site and more of a fully functioning adult games community. Developers post here, (sometimes) listen to feedback and often update the games themselves.

However as the sharp edge of this, the site has ran into the Steam Greenlight problem of lack of quality control making the decent things hard to come by if you're just passing through and often having release threads for projects that are not yet in a state to be referred to as a "Game" or a "VN". Small one scene/15 second tech demos with little story or artistic merit behind them using imported assets and seemingly no plan of a design involved sometimes overwhelm the New Releases forum.

I was wondering what people's views were on this?

I can see both sides personally. This site is pretty massive compared to the amount of staff members on board and any form of quality control does add extra work. Obviously there's the decent argument of where you can draw the definitive line on what constitutes an acceptable product (though this shouldn't affect the extreme examples) and that many games come on here hoping to build an audience on Patreon or some other revenue stream to continue their development.

With that said, I'm not sure what benefits we have in having to trawl through the inevitable slew of poor quality tech demos with little gameplay in them and nothing more than a hope of a future success than any reasonable chance.

Is there a happy middle ground somewhere?

 

[baneini]

Any sort of quality control measures would be welcome, or improved filtering options. The ability to quickly rate game builds and then filter by score would be useful. Tag system needs work, maybe even add a "reasonable amount of content" tag.
Right now new game releases are absolutely worthless because the early builds are not worth to play, some will be worth to play in a year or so and some will get abandoned in a matter of months so you don't even want to touch those. That probably wont ever change.
It's like youtube, anyone can upload crap and you'll just have to wait for the cream of the crop to rise up.

I'm sure admins have plenty of ideas how to improve things but it takes time to implement them.

 

[redknight00]

As always when it comes to opinions, who gets to decide which games are good enough for the site and which are not? And no one has to crawl through 0.1 games to find the good stuff, you're free to ignore then, use the completed tag, start browsing form threads started months ago, sort by date or stars.

And remember, mod and staff are here to keep people under control and the forum running smoothly, no to tell what you should play, that powers is of the fanbase alone trough the review and recommendations system.

 

[TomberryDude]

Quality control on 0.1 versions of shit you get for free on this site sounds a bit exaggerated. I wouldn't mind better ways to look for games but I haven't run into big troubles finding things yet. So I can't say there's a necessity for improvement either.

 

[wep]

I agree with you dspeed. The quality of the new 0.1 releases are dramatically decreased in the last year.
As you already pointed out in your post we (staff, uploaders) are too few to play all the games.

My personal quality control approach is really simple. I don't play anything if it is not at least at the second (better third) releases.

 

[thecardinal]

As a player and a developer, I wouldn't want people determining what is and isn't a game. But like other people pointed, waiting until more updates are will filter out a lot of games.

A lot of the new devs (myself included) are also new to coding, art, and writing. It has been a learning experience and I have gotten better since I started. Most devs know the games are poor quality, but sometimes people like to remind us in the threads in case we forgot.:closedeyesmile:

 

[GuyFreely]

Hey, I'm pretty new here myself, so I can't speak to any changing trends. I agree it's hard to separate out the wheat from the chaff in the current structure. My suggestion for how to deal with this is to break out the games section. I feel like you have three main categories of game. New games (.01) would be one section. Games with a lot content, but not complete (and being updated regularly). Obviously, the last one is finished games. You may want a separate section for abandoned games, but that's a weird scenario.

Now the easiest one for this is finished games, we already have the completed tag and those could be moved over. You still have the issue of when does a game qualify to graduate out of the new game section to the in-progress section. I mean you could do something as simple as time. If it's been around X months, it gets to move up. You could hope devs can manage this themselves or you could have people in charge of this determination.

I feel like moving threads between forums or sections might be extra work for the mods, so I don't know if I'm asking a lot. This is why I'm thinking something time based could just be automated. Your game thread was put into new releases two months ago? Your thread gets auto-shifted to in-progress. You add the [completed] tag to the game, it gets shifted to the completed games section. Maybe this is possible? I don't know what this BBS is capable of.

 

[User_51567]

In theory a fun idea..
But in Practice impossible.

Everybody has different taste, preferences and most important in a demo.. Expectations.
Lets say somebody on this site checks them all out at hates a couple of them so it doesn't get on the site, but a lot of people actually like the demo...
Only thing that's going to happen after that is al lot of discussion why some games not and some games do get a pass..

Maybe there could be a new sub-topic for games that are in their first or second update so people can avoid those if they want.
Because i 100% agree on the fact that there are so many sh*t demo's that 90% don't even get past the first week of development..
And at this point it's more like ploughing through a pile of shit to find that 1 good game..

But in the end i take the same approach as @wep .
I stopped playing first updates and only try something it if it makes it past the third update.

 

[wep]

As a player and a developer, I wouldn't want people determining what is and isn't a game. But like other people pointed, waiting until more updates are will filter out a lot of games.

A lot of the new devs (myself included) are also new to coding, art, and writing. It has been a learning experience and I have gotten better since I started. Most devs know the games are poor quality, but sometimes people like to remind us in the threads in case we forgot.:closedeyesmile:

Just to be clear. I think that the quality of the (average) 0.1 version decreased only because they become ridiculously short and poor in contents.

I can accept bugs or a poor English from a non professional devs but not a 3 (literally) minutes long version that don't even shown the mechanics of the game.

 

[DarthSeduction]

My immediate reaction lines up exactly with what @TomberryDude said. This is a piracy site, even if the developers themselves are releasing the games and involved in the threads. These games do not cost you anything to play. And as a result you have no right to demand quality or control with regards to content. It is up to you as a player to decide what you like and don't.

Is this ideal? Absolutely not. But it's also important you see the other side of this coin. f95 is actually one of the largest adult gaming communities on the internet. Patreon hides our content from it's searches. The communities that exist on reddit are almost dead (seriously, you're lucky if your release gets a single comment.) And while there are a few other forums which provide a similar service, I've found none of them are as well designed as this one.

As a result, this site is the best way for us to get our game out to an audience where people might pick it up. It is our job to provide something interesting, something that makes people say, "Yeah, I'd play that again, and you know what, I'm even interested in supporting it." and if we aren't able to do that, the game will likely die in 1 or 2 releases. You, staff, or anyone else coming in and deciding for everyone else what is and isn't worthy of submission will only add to the already difficult market we face. This market overwhelmingly favors the consumer. But still every month there's a thread in which someone suggests a new way to fuck over developers by trying to implement their new standards onto what is already a working system.