If a game you are a patron of, advertizes for a really bad dev, does that bother you?

[botc76]

I'm just wondering, I am a patron (low tier tbh) for some games and follow a few more devs on patreon, and at least once or twice a month, they do a promo-post for another game/dev, which is of course perfectly fine.
What I do find a bit irritating is that most of them don't seem to check, at all, what kind of game or dev they are promoting.

There are, sadly, a few devs with questionable creed and behaviour and frankly there are some really shitty games around.
That is of course a subjective assessment, but if you support a dev, who has great visuals, good writing and a well-working and set-up game, it is kind of weird when you see them writing about their "dear friend Tremmi Games" or the great dev they found "Slonique" just fe.
Not that it's a big thing, but I just have this reaction "dude, did you check this game for five minutes?" because if you had, you would have seen that being connected with it in any way can only be detrimental to you.
Let's say a dev I support tells me how great a horrible game, by an asshole dev is, and I check it out, maybe become a patron, maybe buy it on steam or GOG.com, and then I realize how bad it is, personally I would be a bit pissed about the dev who told me how great the guy/the game is.

It's a bit like when a Youtuber or twitch vlogger (or whatever you call the latter, don't use that stuff) has ads for trashy products or even scam sites.

 

[Meaning Less]

I guess it depends on how the advertisement was made, if it was something professional and direct I wouldn't care, they are probably just promoting for eachother in hopes of sharing patreons.

However things do get a bit murky if they are too personal about like "I really love this dev and personally recommend you support them as well", in which case it might make them sound a bit scummy.

 

[anne O'nymous]

However things do get a bit murky if they are too personal about like "I really love this dev and personally recommend you support them as well", in which case it might make them sound a bit scummy.

Mostly my thoughts.

The promotion don't necessarily need to be purely professional, but I would make a difference between a post saying "this is a friend, take a look if you want" (knowing that "friend" have a really large definition nowadays, especially on internet), and "this is a good game made by a friend, help my friend".
One thing that have to be kept in mind, is that the creators doing this probably expect some reciprocity.
So, they can advertise for a bad dev who have a lot of success, in hope that he'll do the same and it will lead to more support for them. Or it can be the opposite, and they feel the need to talk about a dev, because he advertised for them.

Personally I'm more concerned when the promotion happen in the game itself. There's few games like this, who suddenly introduce, the time of a scene, characters from another game they like, and the whole scene is purely intended for people who know both games. Anyone else will just witness something generally boring and totally meaningless.
Or, the worse from my point of view, when it's the other games dev that import both his characters and universe into a game. The time of a long scene, you suddenly jump into something else and, even if you possibly make the transition rational (like by example by saying that it's a simulation), it's not the same writing, the same rendering/drawing quality, nor of course the same story.
If one want to promote friends, what by itself is perfectly natural, there's so many way to do it, way less invading, like by example putting a poster for a movie having the name of the game, a flyer saying that the game is out, or things like that. It will be in the background, can possibly appear many times during the game, but will not be annoying, nor interfere with your game and story.

 

[Icarus Media]

It's why I only recommend things I've played personally myself and I'm VERY selective in who I do recommend and promote, it's easy to do 'like for like?' stuff and things like that but in the end whatever they put out and you do will rub off on each other. If you recommend something crap or a dev with a bad rep it can rebound on you. At the end of the day it's your reputation, your brand, i.e. YOU. Which means at the very least do your due diligence or it could damage you.