Whats your opinion on devlogs? What do you think how many actual players / other developers read them? It seems to me that today when a (potential) player visits a game`s site they just want to grab the Steam and (maybe)Twitter links and leave.

I see devs that like to go on about the caching / geometry optimization problems they encounter and everything, and others dont say a word.

http://the-witness.net/news/

I bet you know this game. Here they post about everything:) Here`s the opposite:

http://fezgame.com/

Now Polytron has something that could be called a devlog for FEZ, but most of that is just screenshots. Yeah, many of the succesful devs and small studios seem to go by the "the less you say the better" thing. Does letting people see the real dev process hurt your game`s success so much? or is it just irrelevant so they dont bother? What are your thoughts?

To be honest I love reading the dev logs. In some cases even more than playing the actual game. I've even bought games that I know are not going to be my kinda thing because i've followed the development process.

I never read them.

I do sometimes read the blogs of programmers, who talk about programming and some of the things they're developing. However, "devBlogs", and especially devBlogs dealing with game programming, I rarely find interesting. The programming blogs I sometimes read usually deal with stuff on interesting research problems in computing, where programming is treated more as an activity that someone must engage in to do something that is actually interesting, rather than an activity that should itself be focused on.

For me personally, writing my own is a good way to organize my thoughts into a presentable manner. I see it sort of as another form of rubber ducking, as a way to get a sanity check, as a means to share things which excite me, and as a way to see where I came from.

I do like to read other dev blogs as well. Some are great reads, others are not. There's a lot of variety on the style and content of dev blogs. Some just use it as a way to communicate new feature updates to an existing audience, a way to share news on what's coming down the production pipeline, etc. Some devs use it to share big code samples (personally, I'm quite uninterested in that since 99% of code is meaningless without a deep understanding of the context it's being used in).