Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: business

The post-release crush

There is tons of stuff to do after you release an indie game. There isn’t much of a relaxing pause as you might assume. Sadly, many indie devs DO take a few weeks off after they release a game, which is a mistake. There is much work to do! (I am planning on a holiday but not for about 3 weeks yet).

Firstly there is the telling everyone you have released a game bit. I’ve done a *bit* of that, and a proper press release will go out to people on Monday. I told a few journalists I know personally, and have a few more to do. If anyone knows a website that reviews games and might be interested in Kudos 2, point them my way (or me at them)

Then there is the download sites like download.com. They are less and less useful these days. They are still worth submitting to, but their relevance compared with ten years ago is minuscule. These days it’s all about the ‘portals’. This sucks slightly, because the download sites ranked stuff according to popularity and often thus, how good it was. The portals rank stuff based on how much money they make from that sale. This is very different :(

Then there is the tech support. All games ship with bugs, and Kudos 2 did too. And even after the patch it seems I still have one. It’s to do with the script parser. Basically, some of the scripts have blank newlines in them. This is no big deal, as any script parser worth it’s salt will discard empty lines and not process them. Mine does this fine, at least it does on my two test machines, and all my friends test machines.

But lo! There are machines which seem to interpret low level text reading code differently and thus the empty string discarding isn’t working. I think this is trivial to fix, and tbh, I could have fixed it in the last patch, but I wouldn’t have been understanding the bug then, just sticking big sticky tape over it and pretending it was dealt with. That is the WORST way to debug. Proper debugging means you find out exactly what circumstances had caused the problem, fixed it, and verified that those same circumstances now no longer cause issues, as well as being 100% certain you are aware of how the new code operates in all circumstances.

This is harder, and takes longer, but bitter experience eventually persuades you it’s the way to go.

So far sales are ok, but nothing that inspires me to buy a new yacht, or indeed a new car. I am going out for a meal at a pub tonight (it won a gastro pub award once!) so that’s about the level of riches the game equates to.

“Cliff is a stressed, tired software-developer.“

I’m tired and keep getting confused…

I’m 7 days away from releasing my new game, and the list of stuff to do is a bit grim. I keep making silly mistakes, like giving people the wrong version of files, and then doing it again,

It’s like crunch time, but being the only person who has to do everything. Arggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It’s all about the numbers

If you look at a publishing contract, there are pages and pages of legalese bullshit. 99% of it is the same crap you get in all of them, which 99% of the time is totally irrelevant in practice. it has to be there, so both sides are happy but it’s not a practical problem.

This is stuff such as “you didn’t rip this game off anyone else” and “we have right to use name of the game to market the game” etc. Unless you are dealing with satan, a lot of games publishing contracts for on-line are very similar.

And then there is the vital stuff such as:

What royalty you get per copy sold

What the deductions can be

When you get paid.

Those 3 lines pretty much sum up the haggling of games contracts. It matters a BIG DEAL how much royalty you get. Some websites reckon they are doing you a favour to offer you 40% (yeah right, fuck off, I don’t need you, but you need games). Some pay a lot more, some pay a huge amount.  Some have a nebulous definition of deductions. And many of them assume you will take whatever is offered (think again).

I’m about to contact a few on-line portals to sell Kudos 2 through, alongside my own site. Of course, I REALLY want people to buy the game direct, because I make the biggest cut that way, but some people are so used to buying from certain other sites it’s tough to tempt them away. Generally, I make about 50/50 from my site and from everyone else. If it started skewing too far towards other people, I’d panic. I want to earn money to pay MY rent, not everyone else’s.

Here’s a last reminder for anyone who hasn’t heard it before:

“IF YOU DO NOT SELL YOUR GAME AT LEAST PARTIALLY DIRECT FROM YOUR WEBSITE YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST THROW A PILE OF MONEY IN THE FIRE”

Customer attitudes

Which of the following two attitudes do you think is best:

I went to download your game after I lost my copy which I bought a year ago, and can’t find the email, I have no idea how to get hold of the game I PAID FOR. Send me a new link for a game that I PAID FOR NOW, or I will forward the details of your company to the police and have you prosecuted for fraud.

or

Hi, sorry to be a pain but I formatted my PC and didn’t back up my email for purchasing your game, and need to re-download it. I bought Democracy 2 around November last year using this email address and the name Joe Smith. Is there any chance you could resend the original email? Thanks!

Which one do you think gets answered first?

I agree, it’s the second one, so why do so many people make their first port of contact with a business an angry aggressive and insulting rant? I have had people insult my intelligence (when they could spell it), call me a thief and a fraudster, say my games are shit and they could do better in a weekend, had people email me asking for tech support on a pirated copy, accuse me of being ‘in bed with the MAFIAA’ etc etc. It’s not like I’m the local drug dealer, or some kind of evil fascist dictator. I just make PC strategy games for a living and sell them online. Chill out people.

And why we are on such topics, I feel duty bound to point out something else that people seem to ‘not get’ about the internet. All websites are owned by someone. All forums have admins, all forums are hosted by someone paying the (often large) bills. I’ve seen so many cases of people crying out that “This is FASCIST CENSORSHIP!!!” when a forum admin or site owner removes comments that they want removed. This is just being silly. In a free country, you can say what you like, but you can’t demand that other people pay for a website for you to do it.

I mention this because today I removed a few posts from my forum that were completely silly and tired rants about all intellectual property being imaginary and arguing that the price of something should be it’s marginal cost (wrong!). I’m sick of reading such twaddle, especially from people who try to lecture me on basic economics as though I never did my degree in the topic…

Anyway, there are penty of sites like slashdot or digg were amateur economists can try and justify piracy on some shaky belief that marginal costs are everything and that content is manufactured by space pixies who don’t need food. I don’t need that stuff clogging up my games forums :D.