There was a debate on a forum recently about ‘the lack of middle class games’, which attracted me, because I thought it would be a (possibly amusing) discussion of games aimed at middle-class, and indeed middle-aged people. In fact, it was about mid-tier games, inbetween indie and PC. Ho hum. I was expecting mortgage-repayment sims and puzzle games based around getting planning permission for a loft conversion…

I think there is little debate that the average age of gamers is rising. This should also be combined with the realisation that a lot of younger gamers don’t think games should cost any money (witness huge sprawl of F2P games. Such games are anything *but* free, but that’s a separate topic). These two factors are combining to suggest that there is a very large, and relatively lucrative market for gamers aimed at people in their 30s, even in their 40s, with disposable income.

Everyone seems to be falling over themselves to make games for the attention-deficit-got-no-money-angry internet kids generation, but in so many ways this seems like suicide. Lets look at reasons to consider our perfect gamer to be aged 30+, with a decent job, probably a mortgage, blah blah.

• They have less time (work + family) so don’t expect a 60 hours+ RPG for their money.
• They have more money.
• They probably bank online, or worry more about viruses / the law etc than kids, so likely pirate games much less.
• As people with jobs, they don’t resent paying other people for their work.
• They have probably been gaming for years, and are fairly tech savvy, understand how to install and patch games etc.
• They have played enough games to be honestly open to playing something new.
• They remember crappy 1980s graphics, so won’t vomit if forced to play a game without bump mapping.

He didn’t get where he is today by playing World of Warcraft…

These all seem like good reasons to target these gamers. The thing is, what games do they want to play? I’m 41 (oh my god!!!) and if I’m honest, probably pretty darned middle class,. I have a nice house and car and listen to radio 4. The evidence here is pretty overwhelming.  Do I think gaming is targeted at me right now? Not really. Some games such as this and maybe this, seem open to targeting my demographic, but generally, if I want to play a game, I need to disengage the grown-up bits of my mind and think ‘lets blow stuff up! cool!, or similar.

As a middle ground, I think a lot could be done to mitigate the extent to which my demographic is turned off by games. I think playing a fantasy RPG is perfectly reasonable, but if all the female characters have breasts like barrage balloons, and everytime you kill someone a fire-hydrant of blood spurts out their neck, then this is not so much *cool* as it might be aged 14, but more *tragic* and ultimately embarrasing, once you reach the age where you worry about your pension plan.

Who out there is making a game aged at people in their 30s-40s? post a link in the comments if you think you are successfully targeting the older gamer.

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When my site got hacked recently (bah…) I had to go through a lot of html checking it over. As I did this, I began to realise just how much of my site is effectively useless. I’ve been running it sicne 1997, so there is some crap there, like this early game or a whole bunch of ultra-low selling affiliate links. The affiliates sell very little, and I’ve handed over my ideas for an indie games website to showmethegames now, so they are redundant.

My first thought is to junk almost all of it, keeping  just the sites for GSB, Kudos 1 & 2, Democracy 1 & 2 and Rock legend, maybe Starship Tycoon and planetary defence. I can just delete the rest, and have a tidy site.

My second thought is that this might be bad, from a search-engine optimisation POV. suddenly googlebot will see a whole bunch of dead links, will this affect my page rank? Should I do some clever htaccess crap? or is it just fine to junk it all and let my normal 404 to the homepage redirect handle it?

Does anyone have experience of tidying up a really old site? is it worth doing?

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Thankyou Scott Fadick!, for alerting me to my blog giving some arcane error. I assume it was hacked, because I haven’t changed a thing, and wordpress was hugely out of date. Anyway, a simple one-click update to the latest version (things really have improved since I last went through wordpress upgrade hell), and it all seems fine again. Let me know if it isn’t.

That awful dread feeling I had when I’d finished a long (but very productive) days work, had a quick game of Battlefield:BC2, and thought it was time for a glass of wine and an episode of spooks…. and then to think the evening would be spent fiddling with databases and php….Bah. What a pleasant surprise to have it fixed so easily.

The trouble with being an indie is that such problems all become yours. If you are thinking of leaving a coding day job for indie software business, consider this:

• Do you want to be in charge of the design, code and management of your company’s website?
• Including the blog?
• And the forums?
• Do you want to be the one who talks to the accountant and works out stuff like VAT and corporation tax?
• Do you want to be in charge of choosing which subcontractors to hire, and haggling over how much to pay them?
• Are you confident your idea for a product is so good it can pay for your family for the next 2 years?
• Are you confident enough of financial success that you can set aside money for a pension, and if you are in the US, for private health care?

For a lot of people, the answer to all of that is ‘yes!’, but they fall at this next fence:

• Can you get out of bed promptly every morning, and go sit at a desk and do a full days work in your own home?

Most people can’t. It’s generally hard, although I have various tricks to make me do it. One day, I’ll give a talk at some games conference about it. or maybe a series of blog posts. Hmmmm.

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First up, let me point you at this interview with Celso Riva from winter wolves games. He makes ‘visual novel/ RPG hybrid games that you will love or hate, and pretty much owns that as a niche, which is a cool position to be in. Some of the art in his games is great. Also, I humbly point out that ShowMeTheGames now has an RSS feed. I presume I coded it properly, but who really knows!

I shot some arrows yesterday, in my first archery bout of the year, although sadly it’s not so warm today. I did surprisngly well. Only 1 out of 20 missed the target, which after 6 months of no shooting ain’t so bad. Got 4 bullseyes too. It always amazes me how much archery makes you realise how stressed or distracted you are. It requires you to be attentive, focused and relaxed, and right now I’m none of those

Here is a lesson for those who think ads don’t work. I recently bought a car (haven’t physically got it yet, but I’ve ordered it). It’s my first new car since going full time indie, so it’s about bloody time. Anyway, I’m not really a ‘car’ person, and know very little about them. I have no idea why I need multiple valves or what torque is.

Anyway, I did a little bit of research, wanting a geeky car with awesome mileage that looked nice. I did 3 test drives, and bought the one I liked the most. So far, so meh.

THEN, I realised when watching TV, a few days later that an advert I *know* I’d seen before (because I commented on the way people hold drumsticks in it), but which I hadn’t even realised was for a car (I must have ignored the rest of the ad) was the car I chose. Not only that, I really *like* the ad. It appeals to me in the way 99% of car ads do not.

Now that could be a co-incidence, but there are not a ton of car ads on TV right now, probably due to the recession. There is a BIG variety of cars to choose from, and the one car I chose was the one car ad I like, from the limited pool of car ads currently running. That could be just luck, but to quote a wise man “In my experience, there is no such thing as luck“. It might seem like I could have bought any car, but it always looks like derren brown is offering you a choice of a pack of cards, but he isn’t really. We are all sooo soo easily led.

Food for thought, perhaps.

BUY MY GAMES!!!!! BUY MY GAMES!!!! BUY MY GAMES!!!!!

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It’s actually nothing to do with me directly, but the enthusiastic modders who fiddle with Gratuitous Space Battles (and there are a LOT of them), have been running a competition on the GSB modding forum for the last few weeks. I blogged one of the designs a while ago, one I really liked. Anyway, there has been voting going on and a winner picked, and here is the ship with the most votes:

It’s extremely awesome to see people producing new ships for the game, and obviously what they are doing is cutting and pasting and tweaking and blending the original ship grpahics to make much bigger new ones. I also released some of the raw lightwave models, and did some re-renders, because I’m a big fan of decent modding, I see there is also a fan-made editor for the game which is probably better than my own internal tools (almost certainly so!). Some of the stuff that’s being modded into the game is really cool.

I’m well aware of the fact that GSB wouldn’t have any modding community at all if it was not for

1) leaving all the games art files in native, usable formats like jpg and DDS, so people could see them and change them, rather than hidden in some pak or zip file.

2) Having forums on my site for people to chat about the game and discuss it. Some indies see forums as more trouble than they are worth, but I strongly disagree

Thanks to everyone still playing the game and producing mods for keeping interest in the game alive. I look forward to seeing people mod the campaign game, now it has a proper directory structure that trivially supports extra maps. (It’s still not a modders paradise, but I hope my next game will nudge further that way). If you are a big fan of GSB and want more ships, or to change some settings, or fiddle around, have a look at the modding forums, there is a ton of stuff there.

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My next game has a tile-based system behind it. Gratuitous Space Battles didn’t have tiles because if it did, all of them would be “tile 1: space“, which is kinda dull.

Tile-based games are typically associated with very old school RPGs and with early top-down very basic RTS games. Generally, these games seemed to have a set number of tiles (a ’tileset’) and the tiles would be of  fixed size. The tile size was small, to enable sensible pathfinding, but this would make the terrain look very obviously gridlike, with tiles repeating and the largest terrain objects being tiny.

Tech has moved on, and we can afford to have big textures now, but the problem is that a system that uses the tiles for non-visual stuff (pathfinding, AI, terrain etc) still probably needs fairly small tiles. For a while, I was struggling with small tiles and coder art, but the first few bits of proper art have forced me to reassess how I was doing things.

It’s all coded now, and the solution was to basically have two overlapped tile systems. Effectively, the game grid works on smallish tiles, and the visual tiles that have textures applied to them are four times the size. This is completely transparent to the gamer, but it does make for a slightly strange ‘change edit mode’ button in the game editor, and some slightly messy code. Eventually, the system I plucked for just uses the smaller tiles, in the game engine and the editor cunningly lets you apply the larger ones, and transparently splits them into 4 and applies them to the smaller ones for you.

It was a bit of a pain to code, but worth doing. One day I’ll have screenshots to show!

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Increasingly, my thinking is that ‘knocking out’ a quick, easier to make, low budget indie game does not make economic sense. That has never been my plan, but I’m getting even more convinced that to do so will not work.

Obviously there are arguments in favour of a low budget quick, small project (I’m defining that as under 6 months development time for 1 person). I’d guess they are as follows:

1. Spreading the risk. Multiple games per year, so chances of having a zero-profit year are lower
2. Multiple rolls of the dice. You have more chances to hit on a perfect design and implementation
3. Lack of burn-out. You finish a game before you get bored with it, everything always feels fresh
4. Keeps you in the public eye. Your hardcore fans can buy a game from you every 6 or even 3 months.

I think this is outweighed by the downsides:

1. Lack of polish. It can take 50 people 6 months to polish a AAA game. If your game is all done in 3 -6 months, there is likely no polish, no testing. You are selling a half-completed game
2. Lack of wow-factor. Like it or not, many people ignore a game that isn’t awesome in screenshots and videos, and which doesnt have a huge feature list. You won’t get *less* press coverage, you will likely get *none*.
3. Lower price point. If your game looks like it took 3-6 months, good luck charging $20. It *might* work, but you will likely charge less. Lower prices mean many marketing possibilities, like advertising are no longer cost effective.
4. Lower mindshare, market-share and virality. If your game is played by 500-1,000 people, it is unlikely to build up momentum in gaming communities. A bigegr game selling 10,000 copies starts to get multiple mentions on forums, people hearing about it from multiple sources. 100,000+ and the effect is much much stronger.

I know some devs making a living from small, quick-development games. Personally, I think that they would make a better income from bigger, higher budget titles that they spent longer on. Obviously YMMV, and your aims may differ. I know many devs suffer from critical burnout, and love short dev cycles. I think my limit is 2 years, I’m not massively keen to continue tweaking and adding to the GSB code base now. However, I am assuming that the new game (sort of code worded LB) will be of a similar development scale and polish. Hopefully much more

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After a long period existing as a rather ugly thrown together mess, my little side project indie games database / promotion website ‘Show Me The Games’ has got a decent revamp:

http://www.showmethegames.com

I think it looks way better:

What do you think?

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In my never ending quest to have 1% of the metrics-obsession of zynga, I’m going to just brain dump loads of web stats and see if anyone can drawn more epic conclusions than I can.

For the last two weeks (27th feb – 12th march), here are some analytics web stats for positech.co.uk

There were 32,500 visits, and the bounce rate was 66%.

32% was direct traffic, which is interesting becauise I’d assume that was forum stuff, but the forums aren’t tagged by analytics at all. Weirdly, the top content for direct visits, with 10% of the total is the Kudos homepage. I bet this is a link through some [code] tags on a pirate site, hence no referrer. Oh joy.

If I look at new visitors, their top destination is Gratuitous Space Battles.

If I look, in general at visitors to the GSB homepage, the bounce rate is 44% which isn't so bad. 24% of those who stay go to the demo page next, which is also a good sign.

When looking at the demo page itself, 18% of people bail out here, the top move for people who don't is the demo download link, other people visit other parts of the site. That's pretty good.

The second most popular page on my site is the positech homepage itself. It has a bounce rate of 45%, which could be lower, considering there are so many possible destinations from there. Scarily, the top destination from the homepage is actually this lil ol blog here. Very surprising, I'd expected the top result there to be GSB. Should this bother me?

Quite a few people click the small icons going to pages for affiliate sales. Harvest:Massive encounter got over 200 clicks in 14 days. There were zero sales, and generally affiliate sales are very low. I am strongly minded to remove all that from the front page, and concentrate on my own games, especially as I now have showmethegames to promote the general indie scene.

Looking at visitors, I can see that firefox is #1, followed by chrome. Internet explorer has just 23.8% of visitors. Specs-wise, the most common screen res is a scarily low 1024x768, followed by 1280x800. This seems to me that it is mostly laptop and netbook surfers. I surf a lot on my laptop, but work on a massive four trillion pixel monitor.

Demographics wise the top visitors are from the US, then UK, Canada, Germany, This is all good, and due to me changing the settings on my ad-campaigns no doubt.  Stats are awesome, the top state is California, and the top city is San francisco. You SF surfers are busy, with a shorter time on site than average . Scarily, if I look just at users who visited the GSB buy page, the #2 country is Brazil. I can't find any sales to Brazil, so one can onyl hope thiose Brazilians tell their German friends they should check out the game...

I know... I need to get a life or something

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There seemed to be a time where everyone worked in, or owned factories. Those factories would make widgets. You would build a widget factory that could make 10,000 widgets a year, and it would need to sell 5,000 widgets to break even. If you were unlucky, you sold less, but you probably had upgraded from a 2,000 widget shed/living room/small workshop, so that was unlikely. The best scenario was you sold 10,000 widgets, making perhaps twice the expected revenues and four times the profit. Maybe next year, you can borrow the money for a 20,000 widget factory, assuming widgets are still popular. Over a decade or more, you may end up tripling your salary, as owner.

Now it’s different. If my widgets are digitial, I can scale my factory far more cleverly. In terms of physical workspace, I need none, because bandwidth can be bought per MB and per second in ‘the cloud’. If I need more staff, I can recruit online, choosing from the estimated 1,966,514,816 people who are online, rather than the 2,000 people in my town. My ad budget can scale upwards by a factor of 100, or even 1,000 in the click of a mouse. You can even hire people online on a piece-work basis, and happily outsouce the customer service, the usability testing, the payment service, product fulfilment…

In short, a purely digital business like mine can just scrape along earning $10,000 a year, or thunder along earning $10,000,000 a year, like minecraft, and it can go from one to the other within weeks. WEEKS.

Obviously the reverse is possible too. The zero-infrastructure means there is nothing to sell when things go bad. The benefits of zero physica assets can also be a curse, in terms of the company having no real physical assets of any worth whatsoever.

It occurs to me that this is leading to far wilder income disparities for entrpreneurs than ever before. Only the most hardcore socialist thinks that everyone who runs a business is somehow evil and rich. We all know our local corner store that looks a bit ropey and probably doesn’t earn much. Generally, with the exception of bankers, we consider that competition works, and that businesses are making a reasonable profit, but not likely anything extraordinary unless there are outside signs, like a 10,000 strong workforce or huge headquarter offices.

Online changes that. Its only the publication of his sales data that makes it clear that minecrafts creator makes so much money. It’s only the l33t published office pictures that hint that puzzle pirates brings in some decent cash.

Online is different. People running a business online may be (often are) barely breaking even. They may also be multi-millionaires. I know quite a few people with online businesses, and their profitability varies dramatically. Despite my awkward admission I paid £75 for some jeans once, only me and my family know if positech is any sort of financial success.

Just as there may be more minecrafts than we know, there may be more penniless businesses too. If your corner store drops down to earning $100  a week, the rent is too high and your business folds. I know MANY people who have an online business that earns under $100 a  MONTH. The businesses still exist, albeit as part time ventures. Website rent is trivial compared to bricks and mortar, and the businesses remain active. The spectrum of online business success is far far wider than it is in the real world.

We live in interesting times..

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