As a gamer since a good 30 years, I support a lot of smaller developers, indies and smaller studios. What I like about those I chose to support is very simple:
complete transparency.
If there’s an upcoming feature, the community is told about it. A delay? The community is told about it AND WHY. Any shortcomings we get informations about.
So the community keeps supporting simply because trust develops between creators and clients.
I see that trust (or rather what’s left of it) eroding a lot, for a while now, among the different members of the community towards DF administration…
We once again don’t have a road map.
There are no Q&A and it often seems that not even community managers are properly informed as if the devs didn’t want us to know more than the absolute necessary minimum.
Even the things that are on the road map are very vague like “a new map” at least let us know which campaign will get a new map.
The contrast between Darkflow and other small devs is odd. Take Arrowhead pre-Helldivers 2 popularity as an example, they posted on social media a few times per month (could even see the actual human devs behind the game!), frequent dev blogs/community updates that were written by a real human person that possessed humor, funny holiday posts, etc. pretty much the complete opposite of Darflow. This is not uncommon either, most small devs are very open/transparent and communicate often
Darkflow feels like a faceless entity, I couldn’t name a single dev behind Enlisted because we never see them in the community, asides from the regular few CM/helpers. The official twitter posts game updates, sales, and the occasional meme, but still feels very corporate compared to other studios.
Practically nothing is announced ahead of time, so we never know what they’re working on. When something major does happen, it takes months for any kind of “official” response (if we even get one).
If there’s one area I think the devs should focus on improving in it’s communication, the rest will follow. Without good communication, everything else becomes harder.
I think the last Q&A was in July, maybe time for another one?