game verification on galaxy

When galaxy was first launched, the only criteria for game verification were a few simple rules like “only submit games you made” and “no ads”. The intention behind this policy was to foster an environment where new developers could learn and grow based on feedback from the community. However, as the website and community expectations grew, this policy was revised to be more restrictive with regard to the quality of games. Simply put, it no longer felt right to subject the work of new developers to the scrutiny of games on the homepage. For a while, this meant we would reject submissions that we deemed “low quality” without much feedback, suggesting that developers look elsewhere for feedback. To try and address the really frustrating issue of not knowing what a few people don’t like about your game, we’ve launched Oversight to try and introduce more transparency to the process. Although most games will go through Oversight, a select few may bypass it, such as new releases by well-known developers or games that are markedly high quality.

For more information on oversight, you can read the publicly accessible handbook that contains all the information that members of Oversight are given.

more notes

If you don’t want to read the handbook, here’s a distillation of the most common rejection reasons.

• the game having heavy use of generative AI material
• the game being very short
• the game touching on contentious real-world topics
• the game not being in English
• the game being a modification that doesn’t differ enough from the base game
• the game containing paid advertisements
• the game containing microtransactions purchaseable by galaxy users