on almost every project i view, there are almost exclusively people who promote thier own videos. i hate that noone is giving genuine feedback and instead just advertising themselves
i think a good way to stop this self promotion is to not allow people to post video links in the comments, or to make it so they have to support the developer before they can share links, so that the developer at least benefits from all this self promoting crap
I'm confused, are you complaining about people posting videos of themselves playing a game in the comments of said game? Personally I love it when people do that for my game. I'm always trying to get people to letsplay it.
Developers can delete comments on their games. If they didn't want those videos to be there, they'd remove them.
I think video comments are good if the videos actually show the game. Some people try to spam their channels with unrelated videos though. That's no good, if you see something like that report those and we can clean them up for spamming.
Maybe another thing we could add is the ability for developers to disable video comments on their games if they really don't want them?
I remember the same "conversation" (read: flame war) in Game Jolt, and we basically came to the same conclusions....
"I think video comments are good if the videos actually show the game."
I must agree with leafo on that one (and no I'm not trying to score points with an administrator). There are not many ways in which a YouTuber can make the dev of a game know they shot that video, and loads of people will actually be interested if it handles videos about the game, whether it be "Let's plays", walkthroughs or reviews, or just videos showing a few playing techniques. Should all be allowed. When people do indeed shamelessly promote their channels regardless of being related to the game, I too think they are spam.
Now on Game Jolt I've seen a side problem in this discussion though. Some people branded YouTubers who posted RELATED videos to games as spam went shouting and using abusive language towards the YouTuber to vent their views on that. I don't know how that goes here on itch.io, but I think it should be taken a look at if that happens here or not.
Banning video posts from comments is not gonna solve matter though, and is in fact a very bad idea. For starters, I've already received some videos in comment sections on games I posted (not on itch, but on other sites) where the videos showed some very nasty bugs, and it was only to those videos I could see why they happened and come to a fix. Furthermore, especially when videos contain "Let's plays" or reviews, the videos do add information to potential players about the game, which can help them decide if this is the game for them or not, particularly since itch.io also allows selling stuff, such videos can then be of vital importance.... And I don't think dev approval is gonna work. Some devs never mind the comment sections of their game, and considering the time you sometimes need to put up a good video, it can scare serious video posters away, making everyone to suffer.
Best way to go is... Is the video related, leave it be. You don't HAVE to watch them. If it's pure channel promotion, report them, and let the moderators handle them.
Now what is meant by "bad review"... bad quality of the review itself or a review speaking bad about the product being reviewed. The term is always confusing...
And your post can be interpreted in multiple ways... A review of a reviewer who didn't understand the product they were reviewing, or a clear obvious fake only written to either give a game false praise in order to get more downloads/buys... In the case of self promotion the latter seems most likely. Fake reviews are often easy to recognized by not mentioning anything content-wise that makes the reviewed product unique, like story-line stuff for example. I've also seen fake reviews (plus ratings) in a way to give a game a bad rep, as a kind of trying to break somebody. Both are equally terrible in my book .
