I wonder if any IF authors have suffered the same experiences as I (and my fellow ADRIFT author Finn Rosenloev) have in my efforts to find beta-testers?
As well as a request on this forum, I have posted a call on the game-testing.org website requesting beta testers for my ADRIFT game “The Fortress of Fear”. I have had more than a dozen replies to this call, I receive an email saying “Dear Larry Horsfield, I am interested in playtesting your game. Best regards, etc.”
I reply immediately to the email address given for this person, thanking them for offering to playtest my game and I ask them a couple of questions: “Do you have ADRIFT installed on your PC” (I ask this as if they do, I can send them the game as a blorb) and “Have you done any playtesting before?”. I then send the email.
What has happened for the last 7 or 8 occurances of the above (I do have two playtesters who replied to the call who have been testing the game for some time, btw) is that I hear absolutely nothing more from them whatsoever, they don’t even reply to say “Sorry, I don’t think this game is for me.” or “I don’t have time to playtest” or whatever. My first thought is whether I have offended them somehow in the questions that I have asked? I showed the email I sent them to my wife (a schoolteacher) and she said that she would not be offended by the email.
My next thought is why on earth do these people bother to answer the call and then do not contact me ever again? Why has it happened time and time again, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Are they just messing me about for the sake of it? Are they genuine playtesters or just trolls? As I mentioned above, this has also happened to a fellow ADRIFT author and he has sent his game to several “testers” and never heard another word from them.
A fellow drifter on the ADRIFT forum has argued that anyone replying to my call is not obliged to reply or do any playtesting even if I send my game to them, as I am not paying for their services. However, I would have thought that common curtesy comes into play here, surely it is not too much effort to send a quick email explaining why?
I would be very interested to learn if any other IF authors have had similar experiences? Are there any playtesters who would like to comment on this?
Thanks for reading this.