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TomFulp
Hi there! In case you didn't know, I created newgrounds. No, it wasn't made by some giant company - just some dumb kid who now has help. I also co-founded the Behemoth; we made Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers. Icon by Pegosho, banner by OmenaKettu.

Age 45, Male

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Questions

Posted by TomFulp - January 20th, 2011


There are a growing number of accounts that frequently submit games... I won't call them shitty games but they are cookie cutter games that appear to just keep rolling off an assembly line. The creators are either opportunists who employ third world labor, or developers who are swapping out some graphics and exerting minimal effort to submit as many games as possible.


Now, we've always been pretty lax about SPAM and we let you guys attempt to BLAM or PROTECT it... A lot of these games manage to make it through with reasonable scores in the 2.5-3.0 range and I guess some people are enjoying them. Many of them are somewhat decent, they just happen to be re-used over and over with new themes.


Do you think games like this should just continue to exist and pile up on NG? Or should we some day face a COOKIE CUTTER GAME APOCALYPSE where they all get mass-blammed?


I also am weary of the growing trend of games where you don't know who really made it. We don't allow you to submit a "stolen" game that someone else made, but we do let companies submit games that were produced by their staff, or developers they sponsored. Stuff like this likely won't be deleted, but as the amount of submissions on NG grows, I will continue to tighten the focus on games that were made by recognizable individuals. So keep that in mind when it comes to assigning credits.


Thoughts?


Comments

Yes

There is indeed too many games being rip-offs where there is just a slight change in the graphics. So yes, another vote for blam apocalypse.

nuke that shit

BURN THEM TO THE GROUND

I read in the comments that adult content is going to be filtered from awards. I love you Tom, I love you. I've been bugging Luis with this everytime I submit a submission and a hentai gallery gets an even or bigger score than my games which I work hard on.

My game's ok... please don't delete it! I tried hard :(

Me and my friend have a few suggestions:

-Raise Cookie Cutter game Awareness to support fair judging on games.
I should definitely make a cartoon of this.

-Add "What makes your game unique?" on the submission form.
The submitter will have a chance to defend their games uniqueness
and viewers can vote fairly depending on what was said.

-Implement a time system relating to a games score.
Games and movies scoring between 1-2.5 could be marked for deletion and have a limited time on Newgrounds after judgment before they're blammed for not being awesome enough. The time can span from a month to a year.
That way you don't have too much old crap cluttering up your storage.

That's all we can think of and we hope it helps. *SALUTE*

Apocalypse.

it doesn't matter if you delete the flash's the user that uploaded them will keep on uploading them. Delete the users. Some of the users actually steal some newgrounders own submissions and claim as their own. and i want a fucking apocalypse destroy every piece of cookie cutter crap. We might need more mods for this.

Stolen flashes do not belong anywhere unless they were put there by the original author.

In regards to the so called "cookie cutter" games, I have to agree with PsychoGoldfish and Luis. If someone wants to rapidly pump out crap flashes and submit, there's no reason why they shouldn't. The problem doesn't lie in the ability to upload these flashes, but the judging process once it is uploaded to the portal. If you don't like the flash, vote accordingly. If it passes judgment, then it passes judgment. But if the flash has no unique, redeeming qualities it will just fade into oblivion and leave room for work that should be showcased.

I think a big problem comes from the fact that if people think a flash has a remote chance of being accepted, then they will vote at least enough to get the save point. If we want to extinguish the rampant upload of crappy, cookie-cutter flashes, we need to be honest in our opinions and votes to improve the overall quality of submissions.

I stopped playing them after I saw 3 repeats. They're all the same, just with different graphics. I'm tired of seeing them on newgrounds.

it seems like deleting them goes against what Newgrounds is. maybe you could meet this halfway, and just exile the cookie-cutter games to a shitty games collection- that way people know you hate them, but tolerate them anyway because that's what NG does.

I know what you mean, Tom. I see those games under judgment all the time. Those numerous dressup games and other basic games that feel like they should be on some children's TV cartoon website have been just flooding through the portal. The games really aren't too great and it's kinda ridiculous to see half of them.

"Dress up Justin Bieber"
Seriously what the fuck.
They might be worth the whole apocalypse thingy since they really don't even feel like they were made by a human being to be honest.

This reminds me of Law and Order where they explore the fringe cases of the law that seem to exploit the holes in the system and make people think "man why do we have a law like that on the books?!"

Then some smart-A attorney reminds us that the freedoms we enjoy are based on those same laws even though they're not perfect in the gray areas, it's important that we don't get too over-controlling because then who knows where the ball will stop rolling and whose rights will get trampled?

For example, lots of times sequels use the same or similar engines. Even though that kind of sequel is really annoying to me, flagging things for "unoriginality" might eventually lead to those sequels being blammed too...which wouldn't seem right.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT ;)

Only thing worse than the cookie-cutter games are the cookie-cutter movies.

Sorry couldn't resist!!!!

Oh and one other thing.
More than half of these games have an amazingly low file size, which leads me to believe that they're actually hosted on different websites. The only reason they're up here is prolly to advertise their sites.

Hey guys I just made this great new game! You play as a rotating .gif file who bounces a ball off bricks! It's called CocoBust!

On a more serious note, Tom, do you really expect one of the cookie-makers to post in defense? Everyone's gonna say Blammageddon.

Holy shit, well this post really got people going.

And yeah for whatever it might be worth, I have to say that I'm in agreement with most peoples' opinions.
As a long-time artist but relatively new animator, I've always come to Newgrounds for the original content and, as RedHarvest pointed out, the appeal of being able to sort of put a face to a flash, in a sense. I think the one thing that Newgrounds really has going for it that sets it apart from other sites is that whether or not you want to call it a "community", there really are a range of distinct styles and personalities and the way the whole system is set up is very welcoming to newcomers and would-be creators who want to get in on the action. The community support and feedback (even when it's crass) is really unique, and so when you see these total asshats roll up and pour their bullshit into the portal just to get some ad views on the off chance that spreading their asinine pollen everywhere will germinate some cash, it's just straight up offensive.
It's not only rude because they have no other site involvement or interest whatsoever, but their games tend to lack anything in the way or personality or originality and that pretty much just makes them dead weight and total fodder.

On the other hand, yeah, it does seem to go against a lot of what NG stands for to start placing restrictions, so maybe harsher guidelines are in order? I mean, just look at what Vimeo has going, they encourage original content but forbid people to use it as a server for their business videos.... I think that's just about right, at least in the sense that other companies are just using you as a host for their ads and you shouldn't stand for it.

HERP DERP TL;DR - BLLAAAAAAAMMMMMM THOSE PIECES OF CRAP

Although I vote for an Apocalypse as well, it needs to be done with a little planning first. Since some of those cookie cutter games might actually be made by simple Newbie flash artists.

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