Bug handling

[Tisaac]

First, the good news, Amalfi bug was indeed a defect and is now fixed, which is great. Thanks for reaching out the dev.

Second, does that mean that the bug reporting system isn't really working, as we had to take another way to expose the bug?
The dev is clearly reactive as the bug was quickly fixed but the way we report bug seems inefficient.

As a side note, I took part in various online dev project, in PHP (was I was much younger and less careful about my code's quality) and in JS (more recently) and I really understand the difficulties of handling this kind of stuff.

At work, we have a part of the team that want to focus on bringing new functionalities, and the other part that want to focus on improving the quality of the product (robust product, more testing to avoid regression, improving performance, avoid technical debt, better UX,...)
I'm in the second part, obviously, and I understand well that choices must be balanced by the economy and other external factors.

My point here is that BGA seems to totally ignore the quality part and let it in the hands of the (unpaid) dev, which is a shame.

They should have an employee, with a technical background, who should be in charge of reviewing bugs, extracting critical ones and propose paid missions to fix them, for example (this is one solution, other exist) but current solution of leaving it on the good will of the dev, with a pretty useless bug reporting system full of false positive is not a good idea.

I'm pretty sure that as long as they keep getting new subscriptions, they don't bother about the reasons why paid customers stop their subscription, and we can't guess about that without real statistics. This will work for some time, but won't last forever...

I hope it'll get at least BGA attention.

Ghorghor

This kind of already exist : there is a bounty hunter thing where you can get reward (points for premium) by fixing the most upvoted bugs. However, i havent seen a lot of them being claimed in the past.

how much does it cost to develop a game for BGA?
say a complex one such as Anachrony, and the developer is given a reasonable salary for their time.

and how much money from premium subscriptions are shunted to the publishers?

what i'm asking is, is it profitable to publish a game on BGA?
(that many games, such as Anachrony, are published without expansions, may be a hint towards how profitable it is)

This is pretty easy: it depends on the audience of the game. Take all the premium subscription money for a month, then share it among games depending on audience, then share it between bga and publisher depending on the contract and who paid for the game.
So you can't really predict if a game will be profitable, it's ultimately dependent on whether it will be played or not.

[Fletcheese]

From my limited personal experience, BGA devs tend to get started as a result of their personal interest and passion in development and board games. Very few are doing it as a full time job. We make some money but typically less than we could be making applying development talents elsewhere. So like others have said, there is not a economically feasible way for BGA to enforce the maintenance of games. The system relies on the passion and good will of the involved developers, but ultimately past the initial development period fixing bugs is volunteer work. And there are so many false positives and poorly detailed bug reports that an already not fun process becomes even less fun.

[maveleo]

Is the code open source? If so, does anyone know where is possible to view it ?

[ChesseTheWasp]

I can't submit any bug reports because it is too difficult to fill out the forms on mobile