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

Category: business

Pricing for gratuitous tank battles

I am not sure what the right price for gratuitous tank battles should be, even this close to release, so I’m going to dump my brain here, to help me think.

Gratuitous Space Battles was $22.95 on release, and as I recall a bit cheaper in beta/pre-order ($19.95 I think).

There is a lot of downward pressure on games pricing. people expect to get indie games for less than the price of a large coffee, which is silly, and frankly, a bit of an insult.

It’s a few years since GSB. There has been inflation since, about 5% in the UK. My bills sure keep going up.

GTB is a MUCH more fully-featured game than GSB was at launch, or even is now. GTB has achievements, a built-in editor, multiple game modes, better visuals, and more content. It is also more polished in every respect.

Nobody knew what to make of GSB, so it was a bit of a risk for many buyers. People know roughly what to expect from a positech strategy game now, so maybe they are less scared of parting with ‘large pizza + some beer’ music for one of my games.

None of this brings me to any specific conclusion, but I can say without any doubt that anyone who thinks it will be *less* than $19.95 is being optimistic :D GTB is a HUGE game. It’s taken quite a few people a hell of a long time to make. I guess I better decide soon…

One thing is certain: even if the game is $0.01 people will shout at me for being worse than hitler and call me stupid for getting the price *wrong*. Bah.

Top secret project is….. Redshirt!

For quite a while, I’ve had a little side-project that I’ve never talked about. The reason for that is basically that we were waiting until we had any final artwork at all, before revealing it. The side-project is a new life-sim game called ‘Redshirt’. It’s a bit of a departure for me, because I am not the coder or designer (although I do chip in the odd idea). The game is being developed by fellow UK indie -> Tiniest Shark.

Positech Games is  effectively the publisher of the game, although I hate that term because it implies evil bean-counting and not caring about the game. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get over it.

So what is redshirt????

Check the website, and also check facebook.


Well you know in all those sci-fi series there is always some crewmember in the background, with no dialogue, who nobody knows his/her name, who always gets shot in the first 15 minutes, and tends to wear a red shirt…. Well that’s YOU. It’s a game where you are not Luke Skywalker, you are the guy who fixes the drinks machine in Luke’s quarters on hoth. You are the guy who fixes the sliding doors on the enterprise when they get stuck. You are the girl who offers Kirk a notepad for him to scribble on. You are basically the bottom of the hero career ladder…

And here is the thing. It maybe AD 2652 (or whatever) but people manning space stations are just as shallow, self-obsessed, dorky, and fixated with social-media as they are now. none of this ‘enlightened future’ crap that you see in star trek! The interface for the game is loosely based around modern social media apps, so it’s a nit of a humorous dig at sci-fi conventions and social media obsession.

If you played my life sim game ‘Kudos’ you will have an idea of how these things work. Only this one has cooler outfits, and space! and aliens!

There will be lots more information on the game in the course of time, I’m just basically waving ym hands and saying “We are making this game, what do you think?” right now :D.

Look! Naked Booth Babes!!!!!!

It’s sad isn’t it, that this is probably one of the most cost-effective ways to get attention to your game. In my dreams, I’d love to  exist in a world where the only PR that was necessary was to send videos, screenshots (real ones, not ‘target renders’) and playable demo copies to journalists, and then let the public and the critics pick the best games on their merits.

But it is not.

I could get 100,000 people to come to my site tomorrow. It’s easy. You just take out your checkbook and pay the money to google adwords, or yahoo search marketing etc. It’s a done deal, it’s easy. Of course, it may not be cost effective. And this is where it gets murky.

I am currently investigating the pros and cons of flash game sponsorship as an alternative to traditional banner-ad promotion, which I have toned down a lot for the last 2 months. So far, I think I like it, even though I had one profitable sponsorship, and one relatively disastrous one.  What I’m thinking about now, is actual physical promotion at events such as trade shows. They vary widely. I’ve been looking at how many people come to these shows, the cost of hiring a booth, and a monitor and PC, the travel costs to and from for me and probably at least one other person. Overnight accommodation etc…

And rapidly it becomes very very expensive. I’ve heard quotes of $200 to ‘hire’ power cables at your booth for 2 days. Are you fucking kidding me? Yes…it costs money to rent a big hall and promote a show, but lets live in the real world for a moment. Do we really want an industry where the only games that get press attention are the ones that set aside $30,000 for trade show expenses? This is insane. That $30k doesn’t make the games any better.

I’m pretty sure a business case could be made for me going to some agency, hiring a few bikini-models with huge chests and long blonde hair, giving them ‘Gratuitous Tank Battles’ T shirts, and sticking them on a booth for 2 days to pout at journalists. The thing is, I’d feel like I was just cheapening the industry I like, and wasting money that could have gone on music, sound effects or art. Can you imagine ‘booth babes’ at a literary festival? Do they have them at Cannes? (I really have no idea).

I don’t think I’ll be hiring booth babes any time soon. I’m sure eventually there will be some cheaper, less tacky indie-focused events for me to promote my games at.

The kickstarter reality

It’s great to see a game get made that could not be made because a publisher would not fund it, made real because actual real gamers, who are the whole reason for everything, stepped up and pledged the money. It’s great news.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/09/double-fine-kickstarter/

But this is not *the* new publishing model, far from it. RPS noted that the developers ‘don’t have a publisher breathing down their necks’. Really? Maybe they have 10,000 publishers now, impatient, possibly wanting contradictory stuff (almost definitely…in fact), and not restrained by the politeness of scheduled milestone meetings behind closed doors. I hope it goes well, but it could get messy.

Plus the developer is boxed into a corner, they know exactly what they have to do with that money. This is not always a good thing. I ship maybe half the games I start. Gratuitous Tank Battles was not the game I intended to make. I intended to make a life-sim game, then abandoned it to make an RTS, then it morphed into GTB.

What if kickstarter had funded subversion? the game that introversion admit ‘didn’t work’ when they actually got half way through development. Would they have had to plough ahead, and ship a game they fundamentally knew was broken? Not a good position to be in.

Yeah I know… I’m mr doom and gloom.

Server Move

The positech server, which hosts the website, this blog and various other magic, has hopefully today moved. If you commented on a blog post or forum thread, and it disappeared, that is why. Sorry about that.

This is part of my sudden desire to organise and professionalize everything here, so that things run more smoothly. The new server has more hard drive space, better backups, and double the memory. This should ensure a smooth release of Gratuitous Tank Battles in 2043 when I finally finish it.

I have many tedious admin things to do now, plus I have a potentially really cool thing happening which i can’t discuss yet. Sorry! Plus…. If you are in London, come along to the ‘bit of alright’ thing tomorrow to hear me waffle about stuff. I blogged about it, but I think the blog post got lost in the shuffle. Typical eh?