They say that there are 800 million people on the web, and google claims to have indexed over a trillion pages now. Anyway you look at it, the web is a BIG place, with tons to offer, lots to do, and bags of opportunity. The web is the very first real worldwide marketplace, where anyone (even a guy in his bedroom in England) can sell something he creates all over the world, to an audience in the hundreds of millions. Surely there is a catch?

Yes.

The catch is, that those 800 million people aren’t looking for what me or you makes, and even if they did, it’s not easy to find us. I think part of the problem is that as human beings, we haven’t really adapted our brains or our attitudes to the web. We are still thinking like apes, clustered together in our own little social groups.

Think of the last time you read the world news online. Think of the time before that, and the time before that. I’m 95% likely it was the same sites all three times. Right? I know I get my news from the same place (BBC news), despite the fact that I could just as easily read it here or here or here. And that’s just the Uk take on the world news. Maybe I want a US view? or maybe Australian? How about a totally different point of view?

I don’t go to any of those sites often at all. I stick with what I know. So do most people, for news, stock market information, travel information, the weather, and for entertainment.

If people get their games news from a site that doesn’t ever feature indie games, they may never hear of my games. If they buy their games from Steam, I’m invisible to them. If the maybe 0.01% of games sites that i advertise with arent on their radar, I am invisible. Obviously that’s bad for me, but it’s also bad for them.

When was the last time you went to a totally new website that you haven’t visited before? and what eprcentage of your surfing is truly exploring what’s new, as opposed to rechecking the same 20 URLS in your bookmarks? And most relevantly to me, where do YOU get your games news, reviews and demos?

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Have I mentioned this yet? Democracy 2 is now out on the Mac.

BUY IT HERE or get the demo HERE

In other news, WTF is in my fingers? Acid? My keyboard is gradually losing it’s most used letters:

I suspect its my fingers. I managed to wear off all of the black coating on my guitars volume knob too:

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No it’s not a scam or a joke it’s real:

http://www.zombie-cow.com/?p=96

Know anyone with a great indie game that has really bad art or music, and could do with $400? Nominate them…

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According to a recent perusal of my ad stats, it seems that I get a better return on investment advertising Democracy 2 on politics commentary sites than I do on news sites. I get as many site visits from both, but the people coming from the news sites are more likely to buy.

I can’t pretend to be massively shocked. Hardcore gamers tend to be a bit more demanding of games visuals, many of them refusing to even consider playing a non 3D game. A lot of gamers also have a ‘shopping list’ of features that MUST be in every game if they are to buy it. They demand multiplayer, co-op, extensive mods, variable resolutions, a persistent world, HDR lighting, several hours of music, etc etc.

People who don’t generally play games tend to be more impressed just by how easy it is to play, and how much fun it is. They don’t automatically compare a game to it’s rivals, as they haven’t played them. Very few people who bought the wii as their only console ever bitch about its low-poly models. They have no means of comparison, and don’t care.

Perhaps this explains the whole casual-games boom? These gamers don’t know any different. They don’t demand multiplayer or 3D, because they don’t know what they are. They just want fun. Happily, they also don’t know about pirate websites (or are too sensible to risk using them). Anyway you look at it, these people are a desirable group to sell my games to. Thats’ something I decided today

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There is a big difference of opinion in the indie game developer community regarding whether or not to sell direct or work with portals. For new developers with no web presence doing casual games, its an easy choice (use portals). For devs doing hardcore games that are not portal friendly (big RPGs, FPS games, hardcore shooters) the choice is easy too (sell direct). For the people like me who have both options available, and do games that are part hardcor, part casual, it’s more of a dilemma.

On the one hand, it’s mad not to use them. Some portals (like bigfishgames) have a HUGE audience, and can put your game in front of tons of eyeballs. They can generate serious income for you, and they do marketing, promotion and some limited customer support. Probably more people bought Kudos from a portal than from me.

On the other hand, the portals customers remain theirs. I don’t get their email address, or any custom from them. A portal sale boosts the profile of the portal, more than me, and that’s effectively helping my competitors to grow. Also they take a BIG chunk of the money. It *might* still be a good deal though. There are two further things that need to be calculated though:

1) Are people buying the game from the portal rather than me, who would have bought direct from me otherwise? If so, I stupidly gave up a chunk of my sales to someone for no good reason.

2) Will the portal undercut me? If a portal has no cap on the sale price of the game, then they can churn it out for $5.99, making my prices seem artificially high. I’m effectively forced to play ‘match the lowest price’ with all the portals I do deals with. I can’t make a living selling games for $5.99. These aren’t throwawy bejewelled re-skins, my games take massive effort to make.

So what will I do with Kudos 2? No idea. I am genuinely in a dilemma. It all comes down to hard negotiation over contract terms and minimum prices. I can see portals refusing to agree to anything that prevents them bundling my games for a pittance alongside some diner dash clones. If they really stick with that, then I’ll just sell the game direct. I guess I’m lucky, I don’t *need* the portals anywhere near as much as most indie devs, all thanks to people like you, who found my website, and buy my games from me.

Thanks guys and girls!

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If you aren’t from the UK, or are not over 30 you might not know what the today program is. It’s the early morning weekday news program on BBC radio 4. It has a lot of listeners, but it’s impact is way bigger than that, because it’s the #1 place that politicians get grilled by journalists, and news stories are often broken by it.

Famously, it’s also used by the captains of british nuclear submarines to detect nuclear war. A sub under radio silence listens for the today program each morning. If it doesn’t hear the program for several days running it assumes the UK has been destroyed.

No I’m not kidding.

Anyway… this morning they were discussing music piracy, but seemed incapable of calling a spade a spade, and kept calling it ‘file-sharing’ instead, which anti-copyright kids think makes it sound cuddly and harmless. So I emailed them, and they read out my email on the air. bwahahahahah. here it is:

I see you have swallowed the anti-copyright crap wholesale. It’s not
‘file-sharing’ its theft, or piracy. Are you now going to call shoplifting
‘food-sharing’? is car theft ‘car-sharing’?
Stop dancing around the issue. File-sharing is theft and the people doing it
should be prosecuted.

Made me feel better

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I’m currently writing the code for magazines for Kudos 2. Magazines are something you can buy, but only read once. The upside is that they come out every week, so that you never get into the situation you had with the original game, where you read all the books and thus had ‘finished’ that part of the game.

The downside is that the magazines are an expensive and slow way to pick up knowledge. I’m trying to balance stuff so it’s an interesting decision to make. You can buy books and magazines at your leisure, effectively putting you in control of when to learn, as opposed to evening classes. This means they must have some disadvantages to counteract this. One option is for the magazines to only cover the basics of each profession, scientific_principles_1 basic_law etc etc. The problem si that it’s exactly the ‘late game’ stuff I need to expand on, not the early stuff.

This has cropped up because I’m trying to decide if magazines need a pre-requisite system or not. I’m guessing not. magazines are by definition mass market things. I reckon I’ll make them beginners guides only, just like books, but more relaxing.

Another option is for magazines to be auto-read. Assuming you read a few pages each day, just like I assume with newspapers. This would be possibly the more interesting choice. This does slightly ‘break’ the ‘one-task per day’ paradigm of the game, but it’s already borked with pets and newspapers anyway, both of which have daily effects without user intervention.

I think that might be better…

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I tweaked the code for the snow effect in Kuos 2 today.  I always was unhappy with it, and wanted it to be better in the new game. The snow used to ‘settle’ a bit in K1, but that effect was always a bit poor. In the new game it looks better, plus I also coded a system that lets me adjust the colors of all sorts of interface bits depending on stuff like whether its snowing which makes the game look much more interesting.

As part of doing all this, I reinstalled Deep Space Nine: The Fallen, a game which I remember had awesome snow effects. It’s an old game, but it’s still quite funny to replay it and see just how poor those effects were. Despite using the unreal engine, their snow looks way worse than mine .

I also started thinking about the kudos 2 website today. I want a much better website than my earlier games, but I’m not sure I can justify paying a proper pro web designer to do it, and no pre-made templates seem to fit it at all. I knocked up a test page today, but it took me ages, and looks crap as I have zero web design skills. If anyone can recommend a talented and not uber-expensive web designer, just let me know.

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I’ve been doing some housekeeping on my website this morning. Nothing too thrilling, just redoing the page for StarshipTycoon so it matched the same style as the other pages I recently tidied up. over the years, the site has come to look a bit of a mess. I’m only really happy with the Democracy 1 & 2 and KRL websites tbh.

I found a lot of now dead links to older phpbb forum installs, so they are tidied up now, and thus my server error log is less spammy. In other news, the Mac version of D2 should be ready VERY soon, and Democracy 2 is also now on sales through the new Stardock Impulse system.

I have vague plans to a do a bit of fiddling to Starship Tycoon 2 to improve some of the shoddier bits today and tommorow. It’s something I can do thats relaxing and not too like real work. It’s a really old game, and part of me is seriously considering dropping it to just $5.

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I should know, I used to work as one. But check this out:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7508842.stm

I quote:

A Gartner analyst predicts the demise of the computer mouse in the next three to five years.

Taking over will be so called gestural computer mechanisms like touch screens and facial recognition devices.

“The mouse works fine in the desktop environment but for home entertainment or working on a notebook it’s over,” declared analyst Steve Prentice.

I hate to burst Steves bubble, but people keep the same laptop for five years quite often. How he thinks that facial recognition will take over in 3-5 years is beyond me. Plus there are approx 500 million people who are comfortable using a mouse or trackpad. How am I going to use facial recognition to select all the files in a folder? And why the hell would i want to learn a completely new interface system to do it?

Someone pays these idiots to spout such crap. Maybe in fifteen or twenty years. MAYBE.

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