watcher13,

Hi Watcher13,

Thank you for your (as usual) detailed comment. I wish that more community members had posted more detailed feedback on the many games we received between December 2006 (when the game side of the project started) to March 2008 when 7 days a week games stopped following the financial crisis; (game prices in real terms crashed significantly, i.e., arcade games used to cost on average $19.99, but early in 2008, prices dropped drastically to between $4 to $6 per game). We continued to get games most weekends from April 2008 to 2016 before Alawar and Playrix cut ties with the site. From that point on we got games from the free game sites (with some reduction in the adware that is always present in games from those sites) with the occasional limited giveaways from Steam until Falcoware filled the weekday gap in 2018.

Back in the day, when we were getting games 'every' day from the likes of 8 Floor, Jadeware, Alawar, Playrix and other independent developers. I'd hoped that this site would become a nexus for indie game developers, who would take on board the comments left by the community, that would give developers more ideas and help with improvements to their games. I firmly believed that if the community had responded to my requests for positive and negative constructive feedback on the games we were given; developers would continue to give away their games and possibly use the site for βeta and αlpha testing and feedback, with the promise of giving the final release to those who participated. I used to ask the community to post their detailed feedback for those reasons.

Sadly, it wasn't to be. There were some community members who did post decent feedback, but they were few and far between. At one point while still asking the community for help, I'd post statistics where I'd quote the percentage of useful feedback from the number of comments and the number of downloads taken on particular occasions. The figure rarely rose above 0.01% of the community bothering to even comment; and often was less than 0.005% of the community commenting that could be regarded as useful; bear in mind, this was when we often had upwards of 20 000+ downloads for each game given away.


I've still not heard from Itch.io about Ashoots games. I may have to send another email; especially considering yesterday's game is the second where two different developers appear with the same game?

Still, I'm sure both Falcoware and Itch.io wouldn't entertain a developer who steals work from another developer. The most likely explanation is that Ashoot uses different developer names, but I will try to confirm that eventually.

Whiterabbit-uk, I share your hopes in the regard of Ashoot, and I have also mentioned, I think after you did, that Ashoot might have developed under different names in the past - an old veteran returning previous efforts to circulation. I've also mentioned a couple of other benevolent possibilities: that Ashoot has collected a number of games from other developers, who may have gotten out of the business, with their permissions or, at least that Ashoot may be recycling abandonedware. That last, though perhaps ethically murky, at least may be bringing these games back into circulation. Though perhaps Ashoot, for his or her own reputation, should check more carefully that some of these are truly abandoned, and not available for free elsewhere. Or just come here and address the issue. And, it just occurred to me, that Ashoot's efforts may be a combination of all of those things. I'm perfectly willing to think happy thoughts. :P I guess in the future this discussion will only arise if some other commenter here happens to notice an Ashoot offering available elsewhere under another name for less money. So it probably won't come up much, if at all. I can say that I won't be spending time searching the "provenance" of these.

Or maybe Falcoware can shed some insight on this, since they've, as you've said, have shown an admirable tendency to respond in the past. I thought they weren't involved, other than providing the new installer that doesn't balk at either XP or 32 bit, as the old weekday 1 did. (I believe that JED - or maybe it was mike - pointed out that the old one likely required a .net framework level incompatible with XP, which sounds like the most plausible possibility.) I checked one of Ashoot's offerings and it wasn't on the Falcoware website, but Spring Boy is. Is there a way for you to contact them? And Falcoware's Spring Boy page doesn't mention a developer. In any case, I'm going to leave this alone, so, unless we get more "I've seen this somewhere else under another developer's name for free" comments, which, of course, started this discussion, the issue may just fade away.

JEDIGEG,

Hi G,

Thank you for your excellent feedback; really appreciated, and, more importantly, glad to hear you are able to play the game, considering the games you've had to miss. :) Stay safe my friend.