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

Category: business

When is it fair for the game servers to switch off?

Here is a question for you. For how long after the release of a game do you think there should still be support for online features to that game?

I’m not talking MMO games here, obviously that should continue all the time any sort of subscription fee is being charged. I’m talking about games where you buy it once, and you own it, but part of the game is online. Like Guild Wars (although that’s all online) or, to a smaller extent: Gratuitous Space Battles.

Gamers are rightly angry when they suspect the servers for a game get shutdown just to encourage you to buy this years copy. EA are great at that, as I recall. The thing is, we can probably agree that if a game hasn’t sold a single copy in ten years, turning off the server is just fine. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. We also all know that most evil EULAs indicate the servers can be turned off when they fancy it, so it’s not a legal issue either.

What we lack, as an industry, is any sort of expectations or standards for this. If I buy Guild Wars today, and the server is turned off in 6 months time, is that just tough for me arriving late? Or is it understandable?

We could argue that as long as one person has bought the game in the last six months, the game should still be running, but what if that person bought the game in a steam sale or pay what you want deal for just $0.10. Still reasonable?

I guess to me, one benchmark would be profitability. If the server costs $100 a month to rent, and the game isn’t bringing in $100, it seems fair to axe it, although even then, what if 8 people bought it yesterday for $10 each?  It seems right now a long way off for me to worry about that. GSB made much more than $100 yesterday, let alone this month, and as a fraction of the server costs, it probably doesn’t cost $100 a month to run anyway. Also, the server is busy:

New challenges posted in last 24 hours: 48
Challenge victories in the last 24 hours: 143
new survival mode scores in the last 24 hours: 6
challengevictory: 170

This will not last forever though. When sounds reasonable to you as a gamer?

****Note: I can’t see the GSB server being shutdown deliberately before 2015 at this rate, so don’t panic :D****

 

constant password changing silliness

And I quote:

Use the form below to change your login information.
* Make your password something you can remember and difficult for others to guess.
* Your new username/password will be effective immediately
* Password should be at least 6 characters long and should contain at least one capital letter and one digit
also, your password must start with a letter. (legal characters: a-zA-Z0-9_\-?!@#&$%^*()|)
* Password expires every 90 days.


You get no warning it will expire, and when you are FORCED to change it, they demand you reply to an email which they haven’t sent, as of ten minutes later. I can effectviely no lonegr use their service.

Somewhere, some flipping idiot at Plimus thinks this makes their system more secure. it doesn’t, it just means I switched to BMTMicro.
Dorks.

Gamestop buy impulse. what does it mean?

So the big news in online games selling circles is that US retail giant gamestop have bought out impulse, the online games portal owned by Stardock. What does this mean for gamers, game developers, and indie devs like me?

Disclaimer: I sell my games through Impulse right now.

There are some possible good points in this, and some possible bad ones. The good ones, as I see it, are these:

1) A sign that retail gets that PC games are big business. I don’t bother going into retail stores for a PC game, because they hardly bother stocking any. This could be a sign that they have finally worked out that PC gamers didn’t die out, they just spent their money online. Could this be a sign of a turnaround for stocking pc games?

2) This is a big investment in a competitor to steam. I love steam, and have to admit it’s probably the most user-friendly games portal, if buying from a third party is what you want :D. However, monopoly is never a good thing. Monopolies can be very dangerous, and anything that helps balance out the market has to be good in the long term

Possible bad news…?

1) Impulse used to be a nice developer-friendly portal owned and run by some guys who were basically indie devs themselves. I’ve always found the guys at stardock really great to work with, and easy to get hold of. Will that remain the case  when the company bloats out with gamestops money, staff and working practices? Hard to say.

2) This is another case of big money coming in and showing how you cannot really sell games online unless you have ten trillion dollars to spend on building up your site. It makes my feeble effort (showmethegames.com, in it’s own way) look even more feeble.

3) This could spark a price war, meaning games prices will drop. I am not confident that this can happen without developers losing out. Games take time to play, and gamers time is finite. If all games get cheaper, there is a limit (maybe we are at it now) where no more games get bought, and total revenue could fall. Some indie devs won’t survive that.

On balance, I think it’s probably no real change, positive or negative. I can see the active competition could be great for the industry, maybe even for develoeprs (after all, we are the guys who theoretically control the supply of games. Developers can exist without publishers but not vice versa). The flipside is, I can see a short-run price war (bah) and possibly it getting harder to deal with one of the big portals. I’m happy to be proven wrong about that.
We live in interesting times

The aging gamer

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.

Website tidying decisions

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?