A good while back, I released an alright game entitled Grizzlies2: Grizzly Warfare. Upon initial release it got a humble 25 downloads, but my point is that one of those people was good enough to review it. The Hill Gigas (who has subsequently erased all evidence of his existence from The Daily Click) wrote a good, balanced review which was largely complementary, giving the game a fairly respectable 7/10. He had some pretty strong views about the control system (he hated it) but he was good enough to offer up alternatives. So why am I writing this? Well it is my current policy to review around half the games I download (which admittedly isn't many due to my 33K connection). I see this as giving something back, in the form of a service that helps others with connections as bad as mine to decide whether or not they want to spend the best part of their lives downloading a game. Sure, I may not always get it right (I'm not sure Colej_UK will ever forgive me for falsely accusing him of ripping some of Planet Wars graphics) but I think I usually get it fairly right. Obviously, opinions vary, but your own opinion is as valuable as anyone else's.
So then, I finally get to the point. I have more recently released 2 games; Stick Matrix, and Grizzlies 3. I think stick Matrix has had about 180 downloads, and Grizzlies 3 has had around 197. I can't complain really, those are pretty respectable figures, especially considering the initial problems I had with both games' links. But I'm going to complain anyway, because after almost 400 downloads not one person has reviewed either game. But it's not just mine, every day for weeks I checked the reviews section, only to find that it hardly ever changed and many other games went by similarly un-reviewed. And it's not only the reviews; there have been so few articles lately that 200 people have resorted to reading my article on using ini files to make management games, which I only wrote because I thought there weren't enough articles around and I couldn't think of anything else to write about. So here's my complaint: Complacency. People just aren't doing enough these days. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, indeed there are still many excellent games released, and the boards are still visited by a great many kind, or insane people who are willing to answer anything from the most humble beginner's query to the experts enigma, but elsewhere The Daily Click seems to be in decline. Perhaps it's just me, as far as my membership with TDC goes I am indeed young and idealistic, and there have been a fantastic number of donations lately (though hypocritically I admit I am not among that number, primarily due to my lack of credit card), but I still think people ought to do just that little bit more.