Category: business

I’ve worked as first, second and third line tech support for IT companies, and I also run an indie games biz and handle my own support, so I’m in a reasonably informed position to dosh out some handy advice here to people who run into a tech-support brick wall. here goes:

1. If sending email, ensure there is a subject line. I’m serious. blank subject lines aren’t going to leap out from someone’s inbox. I get quite a few of these.
2. Make sure you state up-front and clearly what product or service you have a problem with. In my case, that would be *which* game. It saves a lot of guesswork on time
3. State anything unusual about your setup. I get a lot of people who only mention they are running the game on Linux (officially unsupported) under WINE after about 6 emails. That’s silly. Let the tech support guy be the judge of what is relevant to the cause, don’t assume.
4. Find out your rough system specs first, and state them in the email. Everyone will need to know what version of windows you have, and for games, what video card. Find this out *before* you email them, because they are going to ask you anyway.
5. Don’t get abusive. Especialy not in the very first email. People who are there own boss, like me, will just delete those emails. At the very  least, you go to the back of the queue.
6. Don’t write a novel. The guy scanning tech support issues is busy. Don’t include too much fluff.
7. Include any previous correspondence, quoted below or attached. In an ideal world, all tech support staff can instantly see a log of your problem and previous emails. In practice, esp for small companies, we don’t have a system like that. And even when we do, scrolling down an email to see what was said is quicker anyway. This saves us a whole bunch of time.
8. Understand the problem from the other guys POV. Every consumer computer on earth has a different combination of hardware and software and configuration. It’s not ‘stupidity’ that has resulted in a software crash. They are likely more annoyed at the software having bugs than you are so remember by default, they are on your side.
9. Use email if you can, and there isn’t a dedicated support form. Email is easily stored and searched. I get tech support requests by forum PMs, by twitter, facebook messages, blog posts and everywhere else. At least try to find the contact email address for support, as this will get the quickest response. My email is cliff@positech.co.uk. Good companies do not hide their email address.
10. Don’t assume you are being ignored. It’s a big world and tech support may be asleep while you are awake (I’m in England). They may also be investigating the bug before getting back to you. Some problems are fixed in 2 minutes, some take 3 months.  If you need to chase up a problem be polite, and remember 7.

Of course, this doesn’t always work. Some companies, which I won’t name, but they are global internet companies, ignore all communication that isn’t by phone. *Sigh*. But you certainly can’t be *worse* off for keeping this stuff in mind.

Before I became ‘the Gratuitous Space Battles guy’. I made other games. They aren’t as good as GSB, I know that, but they aren’t bad*. I did newer versions of two of them (Kudos and Democracy).  Some of them may not run on some newer video cards or O/S versions, but they all have demos.

I mention this because I’m bundling Kudos, Democracy, Starship Tycoon, Planetary Defence and Rock Legend together for $5.99, which is very cheap.

Get it here, and enjoy.

*I have made some bad games, which I don’t even link to on my site. Everyone has to start somewhere :D I’ll be talking about this more in a few days, when I talk about GAME FOUR, and why that is the games working title.

In other news, there is a mouse loose ‘somewhere’ in the living room. I am in a 1950s sitcom.

This sort of thing happens all the time, but it’s usually less obvious, and less ‘all-at-once’.

People generallhy consider there to be two business growth strategies. I think it was Joel (of joelonsoftware fame) who called them Ben & Jerrys Vs Amazon. Amazon’s strategy was ‘Get Big Fast’. It depended on getting tons of customers, very quickly, and growing, growing, growing. Making a profit was irrelevant, that would come later. Ben & Jerrys was slow sustained growth (like positech!)

It’s also a strategy for building a games portal. If I had the time, and knew the right people, I’d be doing it myself with showmethegames.

Two portals are currently engaged in the mad rush to get customers. One is games for windows live, one is indiedb. Indiedb are doing it cunningly and cleverly with a competition, where you need an account to vote (please vote for GSB!)

Games for windows live are doing it by offering an old game, that they own, for 99% off. People think this is incredible generosity, but it really isn’t. If they could find a way to pay YOU $10 to sign up for an account (assuming you are someone who ever buys games) they would.

This isn’t a bad strategy, or an evil strategy, it’s very good business. It’s also very risky. If you win, in the long term, you become steam / amazon and make hundreds of millions. If you lose, you earn nothing, and you blew $10 million trying to make it work.

I’m too much of a wimp to actually remortgage the house and try it with SMTG. I’ll probably regret that one day :( At least I’m still biz-savvy enough to only include one hyperlink in this post though :D

An idea as old as stonehenge, is that indie game developers should band together and start up an ‘indie portal’. The idea goes to discussion, then argument, then an obsessive ranting over the topic of what is considered indie, and then devolves into a sort of kibbutz-style hippie-love-in where no decisions ever get made because everyone had to agree on everything, which never happens, because we are, as a tribe, very independent.

So after watching this spectacle about 100 times over the last decade, I decided that what was needed was someone to just bulldoze ahead like an egotistical dictator* and say “this is what we are doing, take it or leave it”. I also thought that a full blown steam-style portal would never happen, so thought it best to start smaller. And this is how ShowMeTheGames got started.

Here is the website in question:

www.showmethegames.com

It was a domain name that was free, and reminds me of Jerry McGuire, which is, after all, a story of a guy quitting his corporate job to go indie…

Now I know what you are thinking, “why haven’t I heard about it then?” isn’t it usual form for me to go on a publicity blitz? When am I going to punch Keith Vaz on live TV? The whole point of SMTG was to prove 2 basic concepts:

• You can get almost 20 indie game developers to co-operate, and actually pay money into a mutual project
• You can make advertising work for indie developers, it we club together. (this is why we tested it as an ad-driven site at first)

I think SMTG proves both, but you’d have to ask each contributor if its working to get an unbiased view. Basically, we have been running google ads that point to that page, on the basis that if you see an ad for defcon, come to SMTG, you might try out defcon, but you might also like GSB, or Smugglers IV or Castle Vox… That way, it’s like having the advertising and catalog clout of a portal, yet we all still independent, all taking 100% of the sale price. The site is php and randomises the order of the games, so nobody has a better slot than anyone else.

I think there is some future in SMTG. We might start running competitions to win games, or have discount bundles of our stuff, or post up interviews and previews of new games. I just don’t know yet. So far, it’s just an experiment. One decent outcome from it so far is this:

If you are trying to explain to someone what an indie game is, you no longer have to point them at a single example or wave your arms saying “Stuff like World of Goo”. Just point them to showmethegames.com, it has a whole bunch of the best indie games I could find. If you can find it in your heart to tweet a link to the site, hashtag #smtg, that would be awesome.

*can you guess who that was?