There are many categories of games. There are the obviously good games: creative idea, good graphics, solid content, well polished. There good games that aren’t well received. There are mediocre games that become popular anyway. There are games that are flat out awful… often 13 year olds first touching Flash and following some tutorial. But what I want to know is why developers decide to go ahead and release games that they know aren’t very good (for whatever reason), won’t do well, and likely will do nothing more than put a stain on their name.

Money is clearly not a reason, as games like this either won’t be sponsored or will be sponsored for very, very little and they’ll never get a payout on the in-game ads (ad companies have a minimum amount before they’ll cut you a check). Neither is notoriety or e-fame. I know that if I created something that I knew wasn’t very good, I’d keep it to myself… why do you think I haven’t posted my stick figure drawings or macaroni dioramas?

There are really only a few reasons I can think of to release a bad game (as opposed to keeping it all to yourself, tucked deep in the recesses of your hard drive). The most logical is feedback. A bad game is often the result of an unskilled developer… feedback is a great way to get unbiased information about your game and you as a developer that can help improvement moving forward. Another is the “why the hell not?” mentality. I’m sure some people feel that just because they made it, and there are sites where they can publish it, we all want to experience it… let me assure everyone that this is not the case. Just because I’ve had ants crawling all over my house doesn’t mean I want to eat them. Finally are those few jaded or naive people who actually think their content is good and just don’t understand why nobody else agrees… and we need to take away these people’s computers.

To give you an idea… there are almost 24,000 games on Kongregate. Around 210 of them (less than 1%) have a 4.00 or higher rating. Roughly 1100 are 3.50 or higher. Only 3500 games are even 3.00 or higher. And on the other spectrum, there are over 300 games at 1.75 or lower and about 3500 of the 2.00 or lower variety. Almost 14,000 are 2.50 or lower. So over 20,000 games were released that weren’t even rated as “average” by the masses (we’ll debate whether the Kong userbase is an accurate representation of the masses another time). Why? Why did these thousands of developers feel the need to upload their game in the first place, when they KNEW (or damn well should have) it wouldn’t be good. I wish I knew, because it really doesn’t make sense to me at all.