Yes, game reviews have their consequences. However, this isn't a game review site. If this was Metacritic, or if it was Steam, or even Affect3D, you'd have a point, but this is primarily a pirating site. Whether your score is good or not, usually doesn't result in you getting sales. And bad game reviews, hurt sales. But in order to have sales to begin with, the game has to be at least at the level of an early beta, for most game curating sites (ie Steam, GOG, etc) to sell. Itch is a special case, which can be useful none the less.
The point of scoring here is more to encourage or discourage pirates from playing a pirated copy of the game. You occasionally get the developer to come here. I score games based on the gameplay and sometimes the sexual content. If the game is a pure gallery, I often will score it extremely highly, because you don't have the gameplay to stumble over. The problem then comes if the gallery is something I'm into. Like PoseViewer is a very cool piece of software, but I'm not into Futas. WildLife is pretty awesome, but I don't meet minimum specifications for it.
Now if you want words of encouragement, the best place to find that is in the forums itself. I post my scores for players, moreso than the developer. If the developer wants words of encouragement from me, then the best place to do that is over Discord, where I'm the most active. For games that have sales, like Steam, I post the reviews primarily for the developer, rather than the player. Its an unfortunate evil, but unless something hurts a company's bottom line, they often don't address it. Like Mass Effect 3, they weren't going to do anything about its ending, until EA's stock price dropped ~$15 per share in 24 hours.
When young people draw something, usually they aren't demanding money for their early works. If a 6 year old child was charging you $10 per simple drawing, the analogy quickly falls apart. You might be the exception to the rule, but the majority of game developers here, are trying to charge $10+ for their simple drawing. Yes, people need money to perfect their art, but the level of scumminess some developers go to to charge for a pre-alpha prototype is equally as bad. Its one thing to have strict DRM in a completed project on Steam for $30. Its another to have DRM on a prototype that frequently crashes, and costs $30.
Just because something is their first project, doesn't mean they deserve money for it. My first project, I tried to sell on GOG. They said it was mechanically interesting, fun, and challenging, but the lack of graphics or sounds, they said they wouldn't sell it for any price. You'd think that if they had such high praise for the experience, that it would be worth something, but nope. There is lots of first projects on Steam too, of games that developers poured their heart into, but due to some gamebreaking issue, it failed. Like a good friend of mine, who created CDF Ghostship, the game was quite interesting, with great horror ambience and an interesting story, but the AI was dogshit, and it was UDK, so no easy AI solution, and the game failed financially.
Words of support are a great motivation, but trying to find them from pirates is a problem. Again, I'm more than happy to provide words of encouragement, just not here. I do the majority of my playtesting with game developers on Discord, and offer my bug reports and words of encouragement there. This forum just isn't well designed for providing or encouraging people to continue their work, as its meant for pirating and discussing games with other pirates. The number of times I've had my feedback / words of encouragement deleted on this site because someone flagged it as "off topic", is at like 20 times now. I've gotten tired of my feedback / encouragement failing to make it to the developer, so I frequently don't bother doing things like this spiel anymore.
However, when the developer shoots down someone for providing feedback, it highly discourages them to be supportive. Just remember its a two-way street. If the developer bites the hand that feeds, they can't expect a positive response. As I stated in my review, I'd change it if things improved. So dismissing most of my points out of hand, as merely opinions and not objective facts, really irritates me. Why should I play the game again, if a developer is so dismissive of my feedback? Hrmm? I strive to make my feedback as objective as possible and try my utmost to keep my subjective opinions as opinions.
My game is non-porn. Porn is a very small market, and rife with pirating. I'd prefer to focus my energy on developing something that has more mass market appeal. I might at some point create a pornographic game, but my focus is more GOG, Steam, Itch, etc... with a none 18+ tag attached. I'm also currently porting the game to Godot, so if you want the last stable version, in its current library/language send me a PM and I'll get you a link.
I don't rate most games as 5 stars, as I can almost always see room for major improvement. I haven't found any porn game I'd rate as 5 stars. However, some games in the past (non-porn) that I'd rate as a 5 star experience, is:
-> Space Pirates and Zombies 1
-> Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion; Only Bethsoft title I completed without mods.
-> Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim
-> Fallout 2
-> C&C Tiberium Sun
-> Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
-> Duke Nukem 3D
-> Raptor: Call of the Shadows
As for porn games, 4 stars would be likely the best I'd rate:
-> Hentaikey 5
-> Wild Life
-> Lust's Cupid
-> Sex Villa 2
-> Escape Dungeon 2
Primarily, I like porn games that are more galleries than games. Most games encourage you to fail to see sex scenes, whereas the ones listed, don't or gameplay doesn't interfere, or there is alternatives to failure, to get the good stuff.
The point of scoring here is more to encourage or discourage pirates from playing a pirated copy of the game. You occasionally get the developer to come here. I score games based on the gameplay and sometimes the sexual content. If the game is a pure gallery, I often will score it extremely highly, because you don't have the gameplay to stumble over. The problem then comes if the gallery is something I'm into. Like PoseViewer is a very cool piece of software, but I'm not into Futas. WildLife is pretty awesome, but I don't meet minimum specifications for it.
Now if you want words of encouragement, the best place to find that is in the forums itself. I post my scores for players, moreso than the developer. If the developer wants words of encouragement from me, then the best place to do that is over Discord, where I'm the most active. For games that have sales, like Steam, I post the reviews primarily for the developer, rather than the player. Its an unfortunate evil, but unless something hurts a company's bottom line, they often don't address it. Like Mass Effect 3, they weren't going to do anything about its ending, until EA's stock price dropped ~$15 per share in 24 hours.
When young people draw something, usually they aren't demanding money for their early works. If a 6 year old child was charging you $10 per simple drawing, the analogy quickly falls apart. You might be the exception to the rule, but the majority of game developers here, are trying to charge $10+ for their simple drawing. Yes, people need money to perfect their art, but the level of scumminess some developers go to to charge for a pre-alpha prototype is equally as bad. Its one thing to have strict DRM in a completed project on Steam for $30. Its another to have DRM on a prototype that frequently crashes, and costs $30.
Just because something is their first project, doesn't mean they deserve money for it. My first project, I tried to sell on GOG. They said it was mechanically interesting, fun, and challenging, but the lack of graphics or sounds, they said they wouldn't sell it for any price. You'd think that if they had such high praise for the experience, that it would be worth something, but nope. There is lots of first projects on Steam too, of games that developers poured their heart into, but due to some gamebreaking issue, it failed. Like a good friend of mine, who created CDF Ghostship, the game was quite interesting, with great horror ambience and an interesting story, but the AI was dogshit, and it was UDK, so no easy AI solution, and the game failed financially.
Words of support are a great motivation, but trying to find them from pirates is a problem. Again, I'm more than happy to provide words of encouragement, just not here. I do the majority of my playtesting with game developers on Discord, and offer my bug reports and words of encouragement there. This forum just isn't well designed for providing or encouraging people to continue their work, as its meant for pirating and discussing games with other pirates. The number of times I've had my feedback / words of encouragement deleted on this site because someone flagged it as "off topic", is at like 20 times now. I've gotten tired of my feedback / encouragement failing to make it to the developer, so I frequently don't bother doing things like this spiel anymore.
However, when the developer shoots down someone for providing feedback, it highly discourages them to be supportive. Just remember its a two-way street. If the developer bites the hand that feeds, they can't expect a positive response. As I stated in my review, I'd change it if things improved. So dismissing most of my points out of hand, as merely opinions and not objective facts, really irritates me. Why should I play the game again, if a developer is so dismissive of my feedback? Hrmm? I strive to make my feedback as objective as possible and try my utmost to keep my subjective opinions as opinions.
My game is non-porn. Porn is a very small market, and rife with pirating. I'd prefer to focus my energy on developing something that has more mass market appeal. I might at some point create a pornographic game, but my focus is more GOG, Steam, Itch, etc... with a none 18+ tag attached. I'm also currently porting the game to Godot, so if you want the last stable version, in its current library/language send me a PM and I'll get you a link.
I don't rate most games as 5 stars, as I can almost always see room for major improvement. I haven't found any porn game I'd rate as 5 stars. However, some games in the past (non-porn) that I'd rate as a 5 star experience, is:
-> Space Pirates and Zombies 1
-> Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion; Only Bethsoft title I completed without mods.
-> Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim
-> Fallout 2
-> C&C Tiberium Sun
-> Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
-> Duke Nukem 3D
-> Raptor: Call of the Shadows
As for porn games, 4 stars would be likely the best I'd rate:
-> Hentaikey 5
-> Wild Life
-> Lust's Cupid
-> Sex Villa 2
-> Escape Dungeon 2
Primarily, I like porn games that are more galleries than games. Most games encourage you to fail to see sex scenes, whereas the ones listed, don't or gameplay doesn't interfere, or there is alternatives to failure, to get the good stuff.