If nobody says no to you, nobody cares about your game

Post a build or a trailer in Turkey and almost every comment under it is the same. “Nice work”, “this looks great”, “good luck”. The same comments are sitting under the guy who posted an hour after you. So that sentence is not about your game.

You think this is politeness. It is not. Most of the people writing those comments are not in a position to tell you what is good and what is bad about your game. A man who does not know what to say says it looks great, because he has no other sentence available.

There is also the exact opposite. Snake oil salesmen who act like they know a lot and actually know nothing, gathering around events in particular. He speaks on a panel, he tells you what you should be doing, and there is not one shipped game behind him. These are more dangerous than the ones handing out praise, because what they say looks like knowledge and there is nothing behind it.

Then there is the version of this with 2-3 years of experience, still at Jr level, running from event to event. They hand out advice with borrowed knowledge they do not understand themselves, and try to talk down to people with experience.

When something that really should be called out shows up, nobody speaks. A company nobody has heard of, Meaningful Games, announced a game called Osman Ghazi. The trailer is almost entirely AI, not a single frame of gameplay, all cinematic. There is no disclosure of how the visuals were made either.

Their site says the release is Q4 2028, but the prices of three editions are already up, $59.99, $79.99 and $149.99. The standard edition’s feature list has “Day One Patch” in it, so they have listed the day 1 patch as one of the things you are buying. The $79.99 edition has a “Most Popular” label on it. The game is not even on sale yet.

I am not against the use of AI, quite the opposite. And the line is not about whether you use AI or not. If what you are showing is something you will be able to play in the final game, the tool does not matter at all, use whatever you used. If you will not be able to play it, that is a con, and what is being done right now is exactly that.

This is older than AI anyway. The Day Before was for a while the most wishlisted game on Steam. The trailers had an open world survival MMO, what shipped was an extraction shooter. Four days after it went into early access the studio closed, the game was pulled from Steam and refunds were given regardless of playtime. The wishlists they had piled up for years did not save them. There was not one line of AI there either, AI only made that job cheaper and turned it into something you can do in two days.

The guy who ticks the AI box on Steam is taking the risk, the side that hides it takes none, and on top of that puts a $149 tag on it and makes the news. Anyone looking at this picture draws the same conclusion, hiding it wins. That is how the disclosure system collapses, and in the end the man who uses AI honestly and the man who never uses it are met with the same suspicion.

The Turkish press caught it out of the air without questioning it, and some of them are even wishing them good luck underneath. If this ends badly none of them will answer for it, but from now on every game coming out of Turkey will be looked at the same way. When you email press or an investor abroad, this is going to be your reference point.

The other day I watched one of the videos from Laura Fryer, who was on the founding Xbox team. What she describes is this, the Xbox team argued about everything, and from the outside you would think they were fighting. In her own words, “we weren’t wrestling with each other, we were wrestling with the idea”. But the condition for that is trust.

Because that trust does not exist in Turkey, two extremes are left. The man who does not know you comes at you without looking at what you made, the man who knows you applauds without looking at what you made. In neither case is there a single piece of information about your game.

This is why I hate toxic positivity. Nobody tells you the bad part of your game in case you get upset, and you ship with that bad part.

It works both ways. You are going to say the thing you see as bad in someone else’s work, straight out, so he can fix it.

So do not ask a question whose answer can be “it looks great”. When you ask “did you like it”, everyone says yes. Ask “where did you stop”, “which minute did you get bored”, “what did you not understand”. Those cannot be answered out of politeness.

And do not take feedback from people who like you. The guy in your Discord is there because he already likes your game. What you need is the man who does not know you at all and can drop the game and walk off the moment he feels like it.

If nobody says no to you, either you are genuinely very good or nobody cares about your game enough. The second one is always more likely.