Noodlecake Studios Gives a Lesson in Customer Service

I've always enjoyed Noodlecake Studios' games. They're very good at making casual or quick-play games without sacrificing gameplay for gold. One of their games, called Wave Wave, successfully siphons off the style and challenge of games like Super Hexagon and turns it into something all its own. Imagine my surprise when I noticed today that its listing in the Play Store is now "Wave Wave Legacy".

I immediately had a suspicion of what happened, and I was right: they released a new Wave Wave but did it as a separate paid app. My initial reaction was ire. What the hell did I buy in the first place, then? A beta? Perhaps my reaction would've been different had the nomenclature been different. If this new app had been called Wave Wave 2, I probably would've had no reaction at all except to consider buying it. Instead, I fired off a snark-filled tantrum to the developer.

20 Points if you got that reference ;)

You never know what you're going to get when you email a developer. You may get nothing at all, dead air. You may get an automated response or a canned response from a customer service team. You may end up with just some guy in another part of the world who barely even knows how to speak your language. Then sometimes, you get a person or a company that just amazes you and forces you to turn that frown upside-down.

The developer emailed me back less than an hour after I emailed them and apologized. They also explained that they did this because they tried just releasing the new version as a replacement for the old one on iOS and had a fiasco on their hands because the two games are apparently more different than I had realized at first (again, why didn't they just call it Wave Wave 2?). Fans of the original were aggravated that their game was essentially replaced after buying it.

What the developer did next was something I never expected, and I think I actually muttered out loud to myself something like, "aww, that's so nice of them!" They offered to refund my purchase if I bought the new game. To be fair, that's exactly what I wanted them to do, and it instantly satisfied my irritation, though looking back, I almost feel guilty that I whined my way to a free game. The new one really is different enough to warrant sequel status, but sometimes a bad marketing decision can have a huge and often irreversible impact on perception.

As a consumer on the Play Store, I've always tried to take an active role in communicating with developers, and in many cases they have eagerly listened and even done what I asked. Smaller developers are especially thirsty for feedback because they don't have huge beta testing teams like Gameloft or other large companies. They can't know to fix something if you don't tell them it's broke, and they can't make something better if they don't know what the users want. It's this ability to connect users and developers that makes me yearn for a day when "Xbox" and "Playstation" are just the names of their respective companies' latest Android gaming consoles.