[Opinion] Be careful calling games Abandonware
In the advent of live-service games, have we forgotten that games can be finished works?
I recently got to experience finding one of my games on a user-curated list, labelled as “Abandonware,” to my absolute bemusement. The game in question is completed. It’s single player and not a live service game. Unless I want to add something major like a new translation, there’s nothing left to do with the game. There is no need for ongoing updates, unless a spate of bug reports comes in, or the game breaks because of a major OS update or something goes wrong after an engine update.
A friend of mine was telling me that they’d recently encountered some negative reviews and comments about their game being “abandoned” by the developer for not having updates a few years after release. It’s understandable if someone asks if a game’s status is finished in a community post, there’s no harm in that. But it’s disquieting to see a review on the game confidently asserting the game is “Abandonware” and giving it a negative review for that reason.
Reviews that show ignorance–willful or otherwise–towards a game are inevitable. It’s not fun to get those kinds of reviews, but developers just have to make peace with it. Confidently labelling a game as something that it isn’t can negatively impact smaller developers whose games don’t have many reviews. It’s not just the fact that the review is negative and skews the store stats; it’s that potential players can read the review, take it at face value, and decide against buying a game they would have otherwise enjoyed.
We debated if we were just “old and out of touch”–perhaps the current zeitgeist of live service games meant that younger players didn’t remember a time when games were allowed to just be finished works. A standalone, single-player game that was finished and successfully shipped and doesn’t have any major bugs
It’s perfectly fine to give a game a negative review if you didn’t like it or ran into issues. All we ask is that you engage with the game honestly and take it at face value. Single-player games that don’t see updates outside of the occasional patch for bugfixes aren’t “Abandonware” and shouldn’t be punished for what they are. Sometimes a game is just “complete,” and that’s okay!