What feedbacks do game developers need to listen to? news - Burnt Islands

One of the new features in build 0.02 of Burnt Islands is a feedback form where you can write your thoughts about the game.

The code behind the form sends a request to a PHP script on a server and posts your message. We are not gathering more information than your thoughts. The only information gathered is whatever is in the feedback form.

Everybody knows that feedback about your work is a good thing. But we have also experienced that sometimes you should not listen to all feedback in order to succeed.

So we wonder, what kind of feedback should we listen to?

Our negative experience was with our first prototyped game named “Monster” that we have developed for 2 years from 2011 to 2012. Some feedback was good, but there were also many negative thoughts primarily about graphics. People wrote things like “Looks like crap” and in the download log we saw that most of them didn’t even download or try the game.

But still, it was a constructive feedback in a way that we understood that graphics mean something and you can of course make a game with crappy graphics, but then you need an insanely good and cool gameplay and people who would try it even though it looks weird.

So back to “Monster” we agreed with all these negative feedback and switched to another idea. But then, we hear about a game named “StarForge”. The game with an idea almost identical to “Monster” is now in the middle of its development, received good help at Kickstarter and was approved at Greenlight. People like it and we just think that maybe we shouldn’t have listened to negative feedback back then.

What is the right answer?