Category: business

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.

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?

I’ve started reading a book, and ordered another one, that focus on the topic of business processes for small companies. Essentially the theme of them is that far too many small businesses are built around the hands-on skills and knowledge of a single person -> the founder, and that this can act as a roadblock to the company expanding and flourishing.

This rings very true to me. People sometimes suggest I get a full time artist or coder, but I never do, and what I really need is either a clone of me, or an all-rounder who can do a bit of everything, marketing, business stuff, design, coding, testing and artwork. Such people are not easy to find. A lot of indies use interns or junior / student employees, but I always try to ensure I get the very best, and the very best are normally not looking for a job, they freelance, and are booked up a year on advance.
If I can’t expand by hiring, something I can do is to try and streamline all of the different systems that make up positech. My current systems are a mess. I run backups when I feel like it, I check my ad and marketing budget stuff at random intervals. I have no organised calendar for anything, no dates on GTB milestones, no quarterly assessments of sales, it’s a mess.
So this is something I’m going to work on fixing, over the next few weeks. I’ll hopefully identify a few areas where some new software or cunning scripting can save me time, and make sure I am more organised, and that everything is better documented. One day, I might even end up with some staff.

In the meantime I showed Gratuitous Tank Battles running on a big TV to two fellow indie devs recently. It looked good on the TV, ran without issues, and I think they likedit, which is reassuring :D

I’ve never bothered getting personal business cards printed until now, so I figured that I might as well get some l33t ones, and I always liked the design of the swarm horus frigate from Gratuitous Space Battles…

You can’t tell from the picture, but they are metal, with etched-out lettering and cut-throughs. They are a bit thin, so don’t feel especially metal, but they look pretty l33t. I was trying to imagine the sort of business card anakin skywalker would have. That’s pretty much how I chose my car too. Yeah, I’m sad.

In all these days of bundles and steam sales and DLC and blah blah, people are happy to shout loudly about what they think about any particular pricing model or experiment, but I don’t come across much discussion about pricing models in theory, from first principles.

So I’m going to ask, in theory, given magical powers to make anything work (like workable DRM, or perfectly rational customers etc), how would we sell and price PC games?

Thinking about that makes us consider what the theoretical demands should be of a perfect system. What do we even mean by perfect? I would humbly suggest the following basic principles:

1. The financial success of a game is strongly correlated to the amount of fun and enjoyment that it has provided, as a whole to the gaming population
2. The financial success of a developer is independent of any personal relationships or circumstances. Games should not be hits because the developer plays tennis with the owner of another company etc.
3. Gamers should feel that they are receiving a fair deal for the money they pay
4. There should be a strong system of market signals. Good games should make piles of cash. Poor games should fail, thus encouraging future promotion of good games.
5. There should be a level playing field. It should not be possible to purchase success, through sheer weight of advertising
6. It should be financially viable to produce niche games, not just blockbusters.

Do these principles seem sound? Any I’ve missed? Given that we accept these (for the sake of further typing…) what sort of system would exist, or what changes need making to the current industry to move us closer to it? I feel that the existence of a few major distributors and publishers that have gatekeeper status seriously undermines 2) and to some extent 5). I think that piracy of games seriously undermines 1) and can cause problems for 6).

My main concern is with 1). If 2 games cost $10 and one provides an average of 22 hours of play time per purchaser and the other provides 3 hours, we really should be finding a way to get more money for game 1’s developers. The solution to that could be DLC, where the 22 hour players are happy to pay more because they are still into the game. Does that seem fair? It certainly seems more viable that game setting it’s price at 7 times that of game 2. Of course, it could be said that game 1’s better quality will lead to great word of mouth and 7X the sales, but I’m not sure that works in practice.

More widespread use of demos would help with item 3) surely? or could we make an argument that DLC helps here too, because with DLC as an option, players are spending more closely what they choose to buy? Maybe we should go so far as to say that F2P and microtransactions solve all of these problems? except that kills of 6), because the many players + few whales strategy doesn’t scale down easily to niche.

No wonder game pricing is such a mess.