Ask HN: How to say no?
One of our aims to differentiate our product is to create an open platform which lists free games and mods as well as commercial games and indies. This doesn’t however mean that we want to list absolutely everything as I believe this degrades the user experience and draws attention away from developers that go above and beyond to polish their work.
For example the iPhone app store: I find it crazy that they brag about having hundreds and thousands of apps and yet only 50 apps in the top charts get any coverage. As a developer who spent ages working on perfecting an app - i'd find it annoying to have my app drowned in a sea of duplicates. As a user I find it frustrating that when I want an app that does X there are hundreds of matches, the majority of which are quickly built. I know there is a good app in there, but finding it is a real challenge. Many times now i've brought an app with great reviews and description only to discover it isn't as good as another app a friend recommends a week later. It isn't a user experience I enjoy.
The challenge is that no one wants to be told their game or mod doesn't qualify - so most digital distribution services simply ignore the majority of applications and only respond to those they are interested in. While that would be easy to do, we view that as a cheap cop-out (is there anything more infuriating than having your email ignored?) so instead we want to tell developers the areas they don't qualify. But that is equally challenging because there is no easy way to say no and not everyone will agree with our reasoning so we want to come up with a basic checklist which we can give to teams. This way everyone is graded by the same criteria, and if teams want us to explain beyond the checklist we can.
Obviously being bug free, legal and owning full rights is a must. After that we hit the grey area of criteria such as: not unique, polished, suitable or deep enough. What information should we provide in this checklist? As a developer how would you like to be responded to, good or bad?