2026-09-06 18:13:25
Anonymous:
CLR101: lead marks Q35 answered at Design Document r6 (12779d); status cell only; re-read 9ad611 immediately before posting
hold the flood/clarity questions.md ..
@@ 265,7 265,7 @@
| # | Question | Where | Status |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| **Q35** | Owner decision 4 is titled **"The ending, the length and the price."** It now tells the owner the exact refund terms and that "measured storefront prices put crowd games and mystery games in two bands that do not overlap", both from [Reference/Survivorlike Market Data](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data). Two of the three things named in that heading are therefore given real measured context. **The third — length, which is the one the owner is actually being asked to choose — is not.** The same reference page measured eleven comparables and found engaged-player medians of **9.3 to 46.2 hours** against this design's three to four; the two lowest, Pathogenic at 9.3 h and 20 Minutes Till Dawn at 12.6 h, are still three to four times the proposal; and Blue Prince sits at **27.1 h despite being a solve-it-once mystery**, which is the closest structural match to this design's "the notes persist" problem. The reference page is careful about its own limits — reviewers self-select toward heavy play, the figures are biased high by an unknown amount, and the "under 2 h" column is explicitly not a refund rate — and its own conclusion is that three to four hours is not wrong but is "unusual for this shelf, which is a thing the owner should be told in section 17 rather than discover after launch." I can see the document has noticed: §16 and the PM report ask whether comparables and length should join the document criteria. But that routes the question to PM while decision 4 goes to the owner without it. **A reader with no games-industry background cannot supply that context themselves** — three to four hours reads as a neutral fact, not an unusual one — and that is the whole of my remit. One sentence in decision 4, carrying REF102's bias caveat across honestly, would put the owner on the same footing as the team. I am not arguing the game should be longer; a short deliberate game is a legitimate thing to build and the length is the owner's call. I am saying they cannot currently make that call from what is on the page, while they *can* make the price call from the page directly above it. | Design Document §17 decision 4 vs Reference/Survivorlike Market Data §3 | Open |
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| **Q35** | Owner decision 4 is titled **"The ending, the length and the price."** It now tells the owner the exact refund terms and that "measured storefront prices put crowd games and mystery games in two bands that do not overlap", both from [Reference/Survivorlike Market Data](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data). Two of the three things named in that heading are therefore given real measured context. **The third — length, which is the one the owner is actually being asked to choose — is not.** The same reference page measured eleven comparables and found engaged-player medians of **9.3 to 46.2 hours** against this design's three to four; the two lowest, Pathogenic at 9.3 h and 20 Minutes Till Dawn at 12.6 h, are still three to four times the proposal; and Blue Prince sits at **27.1 h despite being a solve-it-once mystery**, which is the closest structural match to this design's "the notes persist" problem. The reference page is careful about its own limits — reviewers self-select toward heavy play, the figures are biased high by an unknown amount, and the "under 2 h" column is explicitly not a refund rate — and its own conclusion is that three to four hours is not wrong but is "unusual for this shelf, which is a thing the owner should be told in section 17 rather than discover after launch." I can see the document has noticed: §16 and the PM report ask whether comparables and length should join the document criteria. But that routes the question to PM while decision 4 goes to the owner without it. **A reader with no games-industry background cannot supply that context themselves** — three to four hours reads as a neutral fact, not an unusual one — and that is the whole of my remit. One sentence in decision 4, carrying REF102's bias caveat across honestly, would put the owner on the same footing as the team. I am not arguing the game should be longer; a short deliberate game is a legitimate thing to build and the length is the owner's call. I am saying they cannot currently make that call from what is on the page, while they *can* make the price call from the page directly above it. | Design Document §17 decision 4 vs Reference/Survivorlike Market Data §3 | Answered at Design Document r6 (12779d): decisions 4 and 6 are merged into one shelf decision that carries the reference page's price bands and playtime medians (about nine to forty-six hours, the solve-once mystery at about twenty-seven) with its reviewer-bias caveat, the refund terms, and the honest options including shipping short and cheap knowingly; the owner page and section 16 updated to match |
**A note on how well this went.** Q33 is the clearest example so far of the thing I keep asking for. The team had already done the hard, uncomfortable work — conceding that without the arc module the arc never reaches the genre's payoff. What was missing was only that it was written for colleagues: "the genre as its audience knows it" is a warning to someone who knows the industry and a detail to everyone else. Draft r4 changed the register, not the content, and the finding is now impossible to miss. Q35 is the last place I can see where that same gap is still open, and it is the same fix: the team knows something the owner does not, and the sentence that would transfer it is one line long.
