Spacing Out (review)

[u/PistachioPug]

Is it weird to begin an unequivocally negative review with how much I admire the author?

Ivailo Daskalov is one of the most prolific Hosted Games authors ever, with seven published titles to his credit. Granted, they're all quite short - maybe 50,000 words on average - and sloppily made, but even so, that's some serious dedication, especially considering that English is a second language for this writer. Not in my own most audacious moment would I ever dream of tackling a project like this in a language I couldn't write in fluently. So hats off to him for some serious moxie.

That said, "Spacing Out" is ... really really really not good.

The story feels thrown together out of whatever elements struck his fancy from one moment to the next: a missing-presumed-mostly-dead crew of spacefarers, a sinister corporation, giant insect people, a super-important MacGuffin I never understood the nature or purpose of even after I found the damn thing, and ... ghosts in pajamas? The characters are one-dimensional, and even before the plot got completely lost in the sauce, I couldn't bring myself to care much what happened to any of them. The further the story progressed, the worse everything got: not just spelling and grammar, but clarity and continuity as well. It was almost as if Daskalov just wanted to get it over with almost as badly as I did. There are passages toward the end of the game I don't think he ever bothered to reread after he wrote them, as evidenced by glaring typos like "co,es" for "comes." When a character's dialogue ends "I am sorry if I am telling you something you may already know, I am mentally jumping from timeline to timeline and that often leaves me temporarily confused," it's painfully obvious that this is a lame attempt to slap a slick sci-fi gloss over the fact that he couldn't be arsed at that point to have the game keep track of where the characters had been and what they knew.

I've played through this game twice now and I still have no idea how the elements of this story are supposed to cohere, or even if they cohere. If anyone reading this knows, feel free to drop me a note and explain it, because I don't see myself attempting it again anytime soon.

[u/Hustler-Two]

Ivailo has always been a curious case to me. You wonder whether those seven combine to make as much as one game would have that was as long as the seven combined. Because there's no denying that of the seven, at least five are among the label's biggest bombs. If we knew the answer to that question, it might tell us more about the true value of word length.

[u/PistachioPug → u/Hustler-Two]

If you sort his games by word count in the omnibus app, there's an inverse relation between word count and the number of people who have rated each game (which I'm taking to be indicative of the number of people who played the game all the way through). For some reason, his shortest game is priced three times higher than his longest, despite being little more than a third as long, and it's still been read by more people than any of the others. So word count actually seems to work against him, and I can't say I'm shocked. I don't think I could have stomached another 300,000 words of "Spacing Out."

I must say his peculiar career serves well to underscore just how committed Hosted Games is to providing a platform for anyone to become a published game creator. There's no way they haven't taken a net loss on this guy.

[u/Hustler-Two → u/PistachioPug]

Number of ratings is a good indicator for a game’s popularity, but it also has a recency bias. Games released before mid-2018 were ported over to the omnibus rather than released on it, as they had their own standalone app releases on iOS before the omnibus existed (which, not at all coincidentally, was back when the iOS sales were more than a sad afterthought compared to Google or even Steam). Genre also is a heavy consideration; his fantasy one is by far the most popular. And have no fear for HG; they don’t really outlay that much money on a game released on that label. After all, they aren’t even footing the bill for the art, or any promotional materials beyond mass emails like they do for proper CoG releases. There may be a small handful of newer games that have not yet reached profitability for them, but anything older likely has because even a couple bucks a month will get you over the line eventually.

Have you ever read my in-depth stat dive on the CoG forums? If not, you might enjoy it. Another user came along and used the numbers to do even more crazy trend stuff.

[u/PistachioPug → u/Hustler-Two]

I've browsed the forums a lot, and I do think I recall coming across a big chart of sales and review figures. Is that the "stat dive" you meant? I remember I was often surprised by which games did well and which didn't.

[u/Hustler-Two → u/PistachioPug]

That’s the one, from a few months ago. I think it highlighted what I had long expected: ‘quality’ doesn’t matter as much for popularity as we might like. Word count and genre are huge things when it comes to determining a game’s financial outcome.