"It should be noted that Touch Arcade has never had an original thought" This made me LOL the most hahahahaa
And the best thing is that all the energy he puts into disagreeing with people is completely lost. Nothing is gained. His opinion is discarded. There is no point in arguing with someone's opinion, because they are opinion. I laugh at this well-deserved FOTY.
I mean, in a way he's right. Touch Arcade would never give anything a negative review on purpose. If you notice, Touch Arcade hardly ever reviews random games on the AppStore, you need to "Submit" your game to TA in order for them to consider reviewing it. If they review the game, it means there's something good too say about it, and they do this from a business standpoint (I assume). Developers would be more... wary (I think is the word) to send in their apps to be reviewed by Touch Arcade if TA gave out negative reviews. Why would you risk your app getting bad publicity? This way, TA and the developers benefit in a symbiotic relationship where the developer -- in theory -- gets a good review (or in a worst case scenario -- nothing) and TA gets apps to review. Smart if you ask me, especially since they had the genius idea of letting members give their own reviews (thus also giving out some negative reviews) also.
You're really mistaken here. TA staff actively looks for random gems (forums helps a lot with that btw) and doesnt wait for devs to submit their apps to review/post about them. In fact I'd go as far as to say that TA posts about more random, 'unheard of' cool games than any other site out there (and no, STP's 1 star review of some random crap game doesnt count. Those reviews are absolute waste of everyone's time) The only reaosn TA doesnt post about bad games is as simple as this - There are 100s of 1000s of bad games in appstore. Its not practical to post about them all. Even if you remove the obviously crap ones, there isnt much point wasting time (both TA staff, Reader's) telling people that some XYZ game they never heard of in first place, isnt worth their dollar.
So am I 50% correct then? I mean, it would even make sense if TA made an "Avoid These:" list every so often to warn people to stay away from bad games, that wouldn't take too long. And I've seen some games criticized on TA, but never an overall negative review. I'm sure there are more than a couple games on the Top 50 that aren't too great, but people are duped into buying them... why not warn us against that? And don't tell me giving out positive reviews doesn't help you guys also. Well I might go as far to say it's unintentional, it definitely does.
TA does that by not reviewing those games.. if a Top 50 game is not reviewed then it is not recommended by TA.
You're being purposefully obtuse. At the end of the day, TouchArcade is a game discovery site. The idea being, you visit the site and find some cool games to try. Pointing out games not to buy is silly, and we really only do it when we have reason to such as following up on a game we gave a decent amount of preview coverage to.
Having done my time as a reviewer, I can tell you that there is only one reason to spend considerable time on a bad review: Lulz. Plain ol' mean-spirited snark. And that's only if your review site just has that kind of voice, which TA doesn't. Reviews aren't just crapped out in 10 minutes. It takes a considerable amount of time to put together a coherent review -- I'd spend upwards of 2 hours on a single review, and that's not even counting the time it took to actually play the game, take screenshots, upload them, etc. That's why sites that don't have a snarky front page voice (which is pretty much anyone but Krapps and my former site) don't waste considerable resources making negative reviews: It doesn't fit the voice, and it isn't financially beneficial to review a game simply to tell people how crap it is. Most review sites pay their staff, after all, so why would they pay for a negative review? The point of the vast majority of review sites, or sites that feature reviews, is to tell people about interesting, or at least amusing stuff, and not interesting in a schadenfreude sort of way. That's what brings the hits and keeps the site going.
Agree with what others have said regarding TAs reviews. Negative reviews really only appear regarding 'big' AAA titles, which is where they're needed.
Why is it silly? I mean if you guys end up playing a game which you initially thought would be good, but it turned out bad, why wouldn't you at least make a comment about it? Chances are if you guys think it looks good, with your experience (not sarcasm, btw), other people would surely think it looks good also.
Thing is, we try to play every game that comes out. Any given week I've tried a few dozen games (at least). How do I decide which of the 90% of those that are terrible to tell you about, short of just making a huge list of games with "AVOID" as the title? Beyond that, there's more than enough good games that come out that we don't even have enough time to cover them all. TouchArcade is really just two full time guys and a very active part time guy. Eventually Blake will be chipping in more too, but it's hard for 3 dudes to catch everything that's good, let alone what's bad. This isn't even taking into consideration that we spend time writing news articles and not just reviews. Right now I think our system is pretty good. We cover the games that really stick out to us personally, and we try to cover all the "big" games whether they're good or not. There's really no hidden agenda behind it.
I agree that most people, including me, probably come to this site to find out about new games that are worth playing. I am not interested in reading about games that are crap. I don't think it's very productive to just criticize and point out flaws in something. Like others (I believe - I somewhat skimmed this thread) have said, if a staff member is looking at 2 games, one is crap and one is great, why waste the effort in writing about the crap? I think their goal is to share great titles with us. The staff is not very large at TA... I think there could be a compromise here: How about TA does a "Do's and Don'ts" feature (a la Vice magazine), which could highlight 2 games people might not ever notice (i.e. not in the top 50), but in a very short manner (1-5 sentences for each). Show one game that is decent, and another that is rubbish. Compare and contrast. I think some developers are jealous that other games get recognition here, when their game gets none. Unfortunately lots of people are convinced they have a good product, when in reality they don't. I think they would rather hear someone else say it (i.e. in a bad review) than realize it on their own.
Dude your a TA moderator, I'm sure you have enough class to just not acknowledge "FOTY" (not that it matters but you couldn't come up with something more creative than that? I guess I just expected more from you...you always seemed so level headed....insightful even....but this is just....well....sad and vaguely pathetic. I guess we'll no what kind of moderator you are if this post remains in the thread.....but if your like one TA "editor" (so called) you'll get offended and delete it no damage done...it just seems like TA staff can dish it but can't take it
