Space Strike, Kongregate, and Newgrounds

As you may or may not know, I am a flash game "developer", developer in quotes because I've really only made one game. The one game is: Space Strike: Wormhole. Now, I'm not going to say this game is awesome, however, I wouldn't say it's bad either. Personally, I like this game, probably beacuse I made it, but that's beside the point. The 2.70 out of 5 rating the game has on Kongregate says it's pretty bad. However, the 3.25 rating on Newgrounds says it's actually pretty good. I wondered why there was a fairly large gap in the ratings, so I did some investigating

Alright, all I really did was check the high scores of the kongregate version, but I found something interesting. Some players only passed the first round, and quit playing (As evidenced by their high score in the "Round" stat being one). This, in its self isn't a problem, they probably just didn't like it, no big deal. The problem is that they rated the game. How can you rate a game after playing a single 40 second round?

Let's back up for a second. This game was uploaded for the "Stride Longest Lasting Game Contest" where the one of the top 15 rated games get a chance to win 10,000$. So is it possible that a contestant would down rate games to make their entry look better? I think they would.

Let's take one user as an example, piman314. Piman submitted the pretty fun game Microbe Chain, personally, I enjoyed this game. However, I don't think Piman thought the same about my game.














As you can hopefully see from this poor quality picture above, Piman has only played one round of the game, again, not a big deal. However, if you check his points record you'll see that he has rated the game. How can you accurately rate a game after a single forty second round? Well, if you check his points history, it shows him rating nearly every game in the stride contest. I bet if we were to check his scores in those games aswell, he probably didn't play them very long. So, he played one round of the game, and rated it, we can assume that he went to all the games in the contest and down rated them to make his entries look better.

Alright, alright, I know how this sounds. It sounds like I'm trying to crack down on poor Piman for doing no good. Well, that's not what I'm trying to do, I'm sure plenty of other people did this, I'm just using Piman as an example, I have nothing against him, he was just the first person I caught. Besides, who knows, maybe the scores didn't submit correctly, maybe he played through many rounds and gave the game a fair rating. I could be 100% wrong. I'm not trying to insult Piman, I'm not trying to get him in trouble or anything, I'm merely trying to come up with an explanation for the rating difference between my Newgrounds submission and Kongregate submission

So let's just get one thing strait, I'm not accusing Piman of being a bad person, I'm not saying his games are bad. I'm just using a little bit of evidence to suggest that maybe he down rated games. It's this a big deal? No, not at all, tons of people do this, it only makes a slight difference. I'm not mad, I'm not complaining I'm just coming up with an explanation for the rating difference.

So yeah, I hope that was at least slightly interesting. Hopefully I didn't sound like some crazy conspiracy theorist, or a total douche, or both. I'm simply sharing some interesting information that can easily be totally wrong.