NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
The Long Dark devs on balancing player feedback with creative vision
Steam’s Early Access program has helped many indie games get off the ground by allowing developers to sell their in-progress games to fans. Players get to play the game long before it comes out and contribute feedback to its development, and creators get the steady funds needed to complete their games.
Hinterland Studio Inc, the Canadian developer behind the Early Access survival game The Long Dark, has learned that while player feedback can be a great help when developing a game, sometimes a line has to be drawn between the demands of the players and the creative vision of the team.
“The challenge is that now you have thousands – and in our case, hundreds of thousands – of players who all have opinions about the game,” Hinterland founder Raphael van Lierop told GamesIndustry.biz. “You need to be open to feedback, but also very firm in your vision and stubborn to some degree. When you have a lot of people yelling at you about something that they don’t like, not only do you feel like you should listen to that, but it can erode your confidence about what you’re trying to do. Sometimes you need to step back and plug your ears a little bit.”
He added, “Acknowledge that people don’t always know what they want. They think they know what they want.”
According to van Lierop, many players came into The Long Dark as fans of DayZ, another Early Access survival game. Those players enjoyed the differences in The Long Dark, but they frequently suggested changes that would make the game more like DayZ, including adding multiplayer and zombies.
“We were going against the grain on a lot of different levels: gameplay, aesthetic, tone, everything,” van Lierop said. “We knew that was going to limit our reach at the end, but we were comfortable with that. It was a choice. It was more important to make this game than it was to make a really successful, popular game. In the end it’s been both. I’m not saying we’ve done DayZ numbers, but we’re doing something that’s resonating with people. That’s heartening.”
Image credit: The Long Dark | Hinterland Studio Inc
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
- 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
- 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.
