The non-gamers at the publishing company seemed to feel they had to get back to you with a handful of changes. If your game was really polished, the changes would be pointless or even harmful things. I quickly learned to leave in a few obvious things that were trivial fixes, e.g. blocky bitmaps, misspellings, jarring colors.

Instead of coming back with:

> we really like the game, but couldn't the snake be an F-15 fighter, and couldn't the scrolling be vertical instead of horizontal?

...it would be more like:

> Change that color, fix that icon, correct that spelling