Is anyone else as frustrated as I am about Clickteam's complete lack of communication skills and marketing savvy? Let me give you (the 5 people that are left on this website) a few examples of how awful pretty much everything on the non-coding side of this so-called "business" is, from my very own personal experience:
DISCLAIMER: I know it's rude to get personal and that's why I'm not posting on the official forum. Also I have a rep to maintain there, or something, or not, whatever. Also I believe getting personal IS necessary here, as of course a business is made up of people and people are not androids (except Simon, probably, but that's ok). What I'm going to say also echoes the concerns of other users, who have been brave enough to post on CT but who's voices were not heard. I remember Yves even asking for the names of his offending employees, but of course no-one stood up to that request.
1. I requested a quote on an upgrade to F2.5 Developer on the official forum. After ages I was told to do this through the official website page. Did that. Three weeks later... nothing. Sent an e-mail... nothing. PM'd Jeff, apparently all my requests got 'lost' somewhere. Great. After another while he finally sent me an upgrade code, which has probably since expired since I only wanted a quote and didn't use it because I can't yet afford the upgrade "discount".
2. I wanted to put some helpful links to my examples in my signature, but there's an 80 character limit. Great. I PM Sparckman and he says it's out of his hands, even though his sig has AWESOME COLOURS and HEAPS OF LINKS! Amazing. I asked politely in the forums about extending the limit and maybe turning off the inclusion of BB code. Someone (non-CT) with knowledge of the forum system says that this is possible. Simon says it's not. After some back and forth finally Simon relents and adjusts the limit to 250 characters, including BB code. This is still not enough to put in a measly four links, even though they have been shortened to the bejeesus with bit.ly.
3. Clickstore: So I want to sell a 99c thingy (early days). I can sign up for a customer account but not for a seller account - the button isn't linked to anything. Awesome. I PM kisguri about this... nothing. Why are there people already selling? Where do I sign up for that? A while later they seem to have figured it out so I upload my sweet money-spinner. Guess what.. half of my carefully written copy has been butchered and the rest put in some obscure section nobody will ever look at. Ok, so you need to keep a format, but at least TELL ME ABOUT IT FIRST! The video I linked? Forget it. Had to PM kisguri twice to get him to link it, and even then he never acknowledged that I'd sent him the link twice in the form that was directly on the upload page. The 70/30% split in earnings? Ridiculous. You are not Steam Clickteam, do you really expect to make that much money off the backs of your user-base? Disgusting.
Now you may think that things of an aesthetic nature may not matter BUT THEY DO because first impressions are so much more important these days than in the days of Windows 3.1. And if you don't think so, guess again why you're not selling any of your products. I'm not even going to talk about Fusion's UI. Now they're offering a publishing service where they'll supposedly do the marketing for you. Not. Touching. That.
4. Bugtracker: we all know this one, but I had an issue with Multiple Touch registering all instances of an object instead of the one selected. You'd think that people want to drag around a bunch of cool little actives with their fingers, right? Clearly not... it took A YEAR for this to get fixed. I'm not exaggerating. WTF.
5. Steam key: I wanted one so that I could join the growing bunch of kids and noobs who don't know what the hell a forum is and are stuck in a closed-off world of micro-transacting for random pieces of information. PM'd kisguri again as was suggested on the forums. This was more than a week ago. Nothing. I post in an existing thread with a similar issue, to which Jeff finally replies and says some utter nonsense that has nothing to do with anything. "Yes SolarB, hey presto, here's your Steam key, we're so glad you bought our products and we love the fact that you're so keen to be helpful around the community!" Yeah, right, that happened.
6. Communication skills: Yves and Francois are French so their english grammar and cultural heritage may indeed be mistaken by an anglo for rudeness, but they are actually quite polite and helpful (when pressed). Honourable mentions go to Jeff and Chris C. for being total wangers who would do well to go back to university and get a communications degree, or at least a certificate, or an 8-day seminar.
Final words: Scirra has 3 employees. That's right, 3. Clickteam has close to 20. Construct 2 has far more exposure and a larger customer base than Fusion ever had in its 30+ years of existence. Why?? It's almost like they DON'T want any money! Please explain this to me, or don't, I think it might have something to do with all of the above.
Now I know if the people I mention here ever read this any favours I might ever ask of them will be met with even more silence and rudeness than before. Wrong approach. I am a paying customer, if you don't subscribe to the "always right" approach then at least give me the respect that I deserve instead of giving me the "suck my balls" and "maybe, when we can be assed getting around to it" lip service.
// end of rant. I feel much better now having vented in a public forum, thanks for listening. Please feel free to hurl abuse back at me, I won't be offended.
I am frustrated by their lack of marketing savvy. They have a great product, but no one knows about it, or at least most people aren't aware of it's full potential. It's really odd. Do you really think the things you outlined are the reason for this? I have my doubts. I just think they have poor marketing. Then again I don't really know how many copies of fusion they've sold.
I didn't know they took such a large cut of the profits from their Clickstore, but then again if you agree to them selling software for you then it isn't really their fault. I doubt they sell much of anything anyway.
As for your other complaints, I haven't personally had many issues getting in touch with Clickteam. Every time I PM one of them on the Clickteam forums they get back to me within 24 hours with a solution. I've had fixes sent directly to me before.
Sorry Jeff and Chris, I know you're good guys at heart
@UM - it is odd, you must be one of the lucky ones! However, I do think that a big part of marketing is customer service and good feedback. There are studies that say Word of Mouth is the most powerful marketing device, and unhappy users lead directly to less sales. This I think includes Steam reviews, read through those if you want a bit of a laugh. As for the Clickstore split, well, there's not much choice when you're obligated to agree to the terms in the contract. Looking at my stats and sorting products by popularity gives me a decent indication of how much is sold (in my sections anyway) and yes it's not that much. Still, I think an 80/20 split would be more productive, encouraging more users to get on board with it.
I've been lucky for a long time. I've used all the Clickteam products since Klik & Play, and I've never had any problems with their support.
I scanned through the steam reviews and they were mostly positive from what I could see. Even the negative ones had their concerns addressed in the replies to their reviews.
I saw some of those concerns on the forum going untouched, so it's a bit sad that it takes a bad review to actually get things done.
Lol well, now I have a whole bunch of steam badges that I didn't pay for. Simon's gonna fix it "tomorrow" (ie today).
So now I review someone on Clickstore and hey awesome my real name is associated with the review! Changed the name in my account, nope, no changes in the review. Can't delete the review. E-mailed Chris again. Now the waiting game, meanwhile my privacy is being violated...
Got hacked yesterday too.. I wonder if that's as a result of this thread?
I'll echo the lack of marketing statement. It's really like Clickteam doesn't even exist. Whenever I go to game events some people are familiar with Construct. No one has ever heard of TGF/MMF/Fusion etc. :/
I bump into a lot of people who got into making games through Klik n Play and Games Factory but I don't know many who use Fusion now. Unity, GameMaker, UDK seem to be the big ones and I imagine thats down to how they can port to console, mobile more easily.
It does feel limited in performance too. I'd love to stack shaders, love to throw more stuff into a game before it slows down.
I'm not saying I don't love Fusion and Clickteam, I do! It's just the customer service/marketing side that really gets to me. I would have certainly moved on to another tool (Unity, probably) and not be crapping on here if it were otherwise
With Chowdren, if you're used to Fusion there's absolutely no reason to be using anything else, really, since it does the same job YoYo compiler does (again, sad that Clickteam didn't work this out on their own and it had to be done by a third party. Mathias, btw, was for some UNKNOWN reason denied his mod status, rather than being hired).
About shader-stacking, you can merge shaders by combining their output in the code. Still learning this one. I'd like to know if there's any disadvange in doing this, though.
Btw are you BB/RBS Dr. James?
edit: I take back my apology to Chris because he still hasn't got back to me. I'm pretty sure the privacy issue is, to put it mildly, unethical.
edit 2: I restore my apology to Chris, we exchanged a few words and it's all good.
Obviously we aren't perfect, and I can't ever see us being perfect. But we can ALWAYS improve and I have noted in your comments where we can continue to improve.
As far as the "total wangers" or the 8-day seminar business, I don't know where we can go with that. So I suppose we will try to be less wangerery and say that all 9 of us are constantly trying our damnedest to do the best we can.
Advertisement
Post Reply
Edited by SolarB
I've used all the Clickteam products since Klik & Play, and I've never had any problems with their support.
