THE DRAMA

I am a bit late on the matter, but in case you haven’t seen the new "drama" that has been happening for the last couple of days here on Gamejolt, allow be to recapitulate.

Last week Gamejolt added a new feature to their website called boosts. It’s a way for people to spend money on this platform to boost their posts, profiles or even games into the algorithm, so it can get more engagement. It's pretty much a pay to win kind of deal where you would have to pay just to get noticed more by the algorithm.
Understandably, some people got pissed about the feature, which lead to some making posts criticizing it.

After a while, some devs that criticized the boost feature got their games "shadow banned" from the feature/best categories, mainly Luminance with their game Rat Race (https://gamejolt.com/p/shadow-banned-by-gamejolt-ssu2wunk)

I initially shared this with some of my friends because I honestly thought it was so fucked up of Gamejolt's part. However, I didnt want to immediately jump into conclusions and waited for them to make a response. And guess what? They did one today! (https://gamejolt.com/p/we-re-noticing-some-troubling-messages-and-misinformation-circulati-eymi6ev4)

They pretty much claim that there wasn't any kind of shadow ban involved and the issue was pretty much an error/mistake they made on their part. I don’t have any problems believing this claim, sometimes mistake happens (although I will point out that the feature tab is manually picked by Gamejolt themselves, at least from what I know, so the games disappearing from there is a bit suspicious).
However in response to people making posts bringing awareness to the situation, they decided to remove the creator status of said people.
I did not like this way of responding to the criticism. One of the people that got affected by this was a current modeler for FN2R @Kutejikashi

He was trying to bring awareness to what he saw as people's games being hidden from the site because they expressed their opinion on a new feature. And in return his creator role got taken for "spreading misinformation" for "personal gain".
However, this people had no way of knowing that this was all because of a supposed “error/issue" caused by Gamejolt. They also didn’t assume it was fake because the games that got affected were coincidently the ones made by the devs that criticized the feature. And that was hard to ignore. They simply didn’t know any better and jumped into conclusions. Gamejolt shouldn’t have done such extreme punishment for devs that simply didn’t know the whole truth. And this way of handling things really makes me have a negative view of Gamejolt.

TL;DR: Removing the creator role for certain devs wasn’t the best way to deal with it and I hope this gets fixed.

Aside from that, in my honest opinion, I do not like the booster feature at all. It feels like a pay to win deal where you must keep spending money just to even get recognition. It also encourages people to only make fangames to get attention/recognition from it, and not for the love of the source material. Hope this kind of monetization is removed from the platform or at least substantially changed.
(I feel like I am going to Gamejolt’s blacklist for saying all of this but honestly I don't care lmao)

WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THIS PAGE?

I will be real, I still have no idea lol. On one hand this definitely sours my view of the people behind Gamejolt but on the other hand, this website is the most common way to find fnaf fangames and is really good for having direct interaction with your audience. I have considered Itch.IO and other places but I am still not sure if I will make the switch or not. I will let this situation develop a bit more, in case come substantial stuff comes up from it. In the case I do switch, I will make a post here warning about it.

200 FOLLOWERS

Giant wall of text aside, I would like to say thank you all for 200 followers! I really appreciate the support, especially with all the recent stuff happening. In terms of current development, I finished coding Freddy's based AI into the game!
For the next few months, I will be busy with IRL stuff so there probably won’t be that many updates for a bit. Have this screenshot of Freddy in the office as a little gift for you all.