I'm fine with people pointing out the potential pitfalls. That's how I think about things myself.

The problem I have with the other thread is that the very first thing you read is "Looks like amateur hour."

That's a problem of tone, not content, and it's something that can be fixed at zero loss to the value of the site. By us, the users.

Discourage negative tone, encourage actual thinking.

I agree hence my personal 3 rules of feedback :)

I don't think someone asking for a million-plus dollars of the public's money for their project deserves protection from slightly harsh critique. I made no personal assaults on the developers in question and provided a short list of detailed critiques about the project and apparently the only thing you read was the first sentence. What do you think is harmful about that? Do you think the critique would be more useful if I prefaced it with glowing praise that I didn't actually mean?

If you went and pitched your project to an angel asking for $50-100k of money, or went and pitched to a VC, would you expect them to be all rainbows and sunshine? Or would you expect them to be honest and tell you why they aren't interested in giving you money so that you can improve and address issues?

Knowing a lot of VCs and having seen many startups pitch I can tell you that "amateur hour" isn't a word that is used.

The problem for your argument of course is that they got much more than they asked in just 24 hours so apparently they aren't amateurs which you would know if you saw who was behind it.

So as much as I defend your right to express yourself in any way you want, the joke is kind of on you don't you think?

Yes, I suppose the joke is on me if they collect $10m, flame out violently, and inflict tremendous negative harm on the game industry and android game development for years to come, isn't it? I'm laughing already.

Money isn't success. Congrats to them on having money.

In this case money actually is success since that was their goal.

Whether they will succeed with their next phase is another question.

I said the problem was not the content, but the tone.

I stand by that.

Of course, at the same time, given the history of phantomware in the console sector, I'll be a lot more impressed when the actually ship good, functional hardware.

But that's the great thing about time. It will tell.

The majority of the comments in the previous thread was about the hardware which as always is a bad indicator of success. Just go revisit the original geek comments about the iPads configuration when that came out.

Wrong axis to judge somethings success based on.