When I played the Short Snow demo back in the day, I posted a short review to my Steam curator page. Nearly every major mechanic—UI, inventory layout, wolf struggles, loot searching—felt lifted directly from TLD. Except this version was buggier, emptier, and rough around the edges in ways that even Early Access can’t excuse. (Pretty on par with most demos, though.) But, given that the game was a demo, I rated it informational rather than negative, since I was pretty sure I wouldn’t pick it up. (Also encouraging you to avoid it as well.)
The developer didn’t take it well.
A string of PMs hit my Discord inbox—first from one account, then another—pressuring me to change the review. The defense was the usual mix of “I’m a solo dev,” “it’s different now,” and a lot of “you don’t understand how hard this is.” When it became clear I wouldn’t alter the review, the dev purged their side of our messages on the main account.
At the time of writing, the game sits at Mixed on Steam. The positive reviews? Surface-level, vague. The negative ones? Full of detail… and disturbingly consistent: multiple players reporting harassment or bans from the developer for sharing criticism. I even confirmed with someone via DM that their feedback had been deleted from the game’s Discord.
Click to enlarge
Here’s the thing. If you’re going to be a developer, especially in the survival space where friction and failure are baked into the genre, you need a thick skin. Players will have thoughts. Some of them won’t be nice. (Okay, many of them won’t be nice.) But chasing people around the internet to demand positive words isn’t just unprofessional—it’s a great way to ensure no one takes your game seriously. (Unless you’re trying to be combative, like the Wendy’s account on Twitter. In which case, you also need to learn to be funny.)
Also, has anyone heard of the Streisand Effect??? When you try to suppress something, it blows up even bigger? (It’s named after Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to remove a photo of her house from a public archive resulted in tens of thousands of people viewing it. Oops.) Pulling shit like this makes people like me appear and call more attention to it.
So, to the dev behind Short Snow, and anyone else walking this road: You don’t fix a rough game by deleting reviews. Or bullying, or bribing, or whatever. (I mean, can things be hidden by bullying/bribing/censoring- sure. But you need to be competent at that type of fixing.) You fix it by listening, improving, and releasing something worth playing.
All that effort spent deleting feedback could’ve gone into fixing the damn game.
