Indie devs, this is how you respond to criticism about your game

How do you respond to someone who has criticized your games? While it’s always easy to simply go, “Don’t play it if you don’t like it,” Thailand’s Sanuk Games showed off a better plan of attack yesterday.

The developer recently published a Bomberman clone called Bombing Bastards, available on the Nintendo eShop and Steam. Youtube video game critic TotalBiscuit featured this game for a video series he calls 15 Minutes of Game, where three games are picked and given fifteen minutes of airtime.

TotalBiscuit’s criticism of Bombing Bastards is pretty harsh, and his repeated deaths in the game don’t help this. All in all, it doesn’t sound like Bombing Bastards is a good game at all.

But TotalBiscuit has 1.88 million subscribers. The video has received over 180,000 views so far. His audience is huge. So Sanuk Games released its own video in response. Games in Asia also reviewed Bombing Bastards before, albeit without any sort of response from the developer.

Managing director Yan Marchal narrated the video, where he first thanked TotalBiscuit for picking up on it before addressing a couple of issues the reviewer had faced in his playthrough.

Marchal’s response drew praise from viewers worldwide, most of whom had taken notice of the video after TotalBiscuit retweeted it, calling it a “level-headed video response.”

The devs of Bombings Bastards issued a level-headed video response. Linking it here so you can see it – http://t.co/d06JLp1lCT

— TotalBiscuit (@Totalbiscuit) December 16, 2014

Sanuk Games’ response video now has approximately 28,000 views, and the company has gained more attention – this time in a better light – because of it. It has also set an example for many in the games industry to follow, and hopefully Asia’s fledgling developers will take the same path when faced with this sort of dilemma in the future.

See: The 3 things Pocket PlayLab thinks an indie studio needs to focus on