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

Category: business

Open letter to Ubisoft management

Hello ubisoft, how are you? It appears from this:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=235290&site=pcg

That you are making DRM in your new game (Assassins creed 2) even more inconvenient for paying customers than before. Apparently if your net connection drops slightly, you will get kicked out of the game.

This is madness. Have you not heard that DRM is actually unpopular with paying customers? As a gesture of goodwill, I offer you the most exhaustive consultation on the causes of piracy ever done.

The conclusion is that DRM == net loss in terms of sales. Maybe one day there is flawless, transparent DRM, but that day is not today, and this is not it.

I am not some pirate at slashdot or digg telling you this, but a game developer who makes his living from copyright, and who strongly, passionately, fiercely opposes and hates piracy. DRM like this does not work, and it’s silly to keep using it. Please do not do this to PC gamers.

That is all.

The Milky Bars are on me!

I suspect that there are two types of ads:

1) Ads that draw your attention to stuff, and maybe sell it

2) Ads that act as background noise to constantly remind you of a companies or products existence, so you recall it at a much later purchase time.

My ads (and likely ANY indie game ads) fall into 1). We hope you see the ad, read the ad copy, click it, and try the demo, then buy the game. Ha! we hope…

But look at TV ads. Pay attention to the next group of TV ads you see, and count what percentage of them are ads for products you haven’t heard of, or companies you don’t know about. I bet its zero percent. These ads are either shown 10 times a day or not at all, because they are all type 2) ads. They don’t work on their own.

The best examples (and the most annoying) here in the UK are car insurance comparison websites. How many can you name? Try it (if you are a brit )

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I bet you named gocompare and comparethemarket.com. And when was the last time you needed to get a  competitive car insurance quote? On average 6 months ago, if at all. These ads work like  the ads for directory enquiries numbers here in the UK. You will notice that there is little or no actual information in them at all. I’ve seen 100+ adverts for mazumamobile.com, and have no idea what they said. They only really need to say a single thing:

mazumamobile.com

And that will eventually stick in your head.  The majority of  TV ads are semi-ignored, absorbed in our peripheral vision, or maybe just overheard from another room. Ad designers know this. That is why TV ads are so annoying and seem to be targeted at idiots. The content is, sadly, irrelevant. All that matters is the name. That name can stay in your head for decades. If the name sucks, you need a tagline. If you are 30+ in the UK, do you remember these?

“I’m a secret lemonade drinker”

“Made to make your mouth water”

“Helps you work rest and play”

If you EVER saw these ads, I bet you know the products, now, even fifteen-twenty years later. Scary isn’t it?

One of the small number of companies I own shares in is Marks And Spencers.  One of the reasons I own them is they have a flipping superb ad agency working for them. One that we will remember years later,

Remember, this wasn’t just a blog post. This was a Marks and Spencers Blog post :D

I wish my ads were that good…

$630,000 a year

If this is right:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/Inside_ms.mspx

Microsoft have $58 billion revenue a year and 92,000 employees.

The average revenue per employee is thus $630,175 a year.

Holy shit.

I must remember this the next time I read some microsoft bashing from linux or google fanboys. Microsoft isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

Democracy 2 (still)

I restarted some of my old ads for my politics sim Democracy 2. I’m just trying to see if they still generate more sales. This is a game that has surprisingly good sales, even over 2 years after it was made. It’s never going to be #1 anywhere, some portals still won’t even sell it, but it was well worth making and definitely a profitable game.

TBH I have no idea why sales of it have recently been so good. It might be the’free Democracy 1 for Maine and Michigan students’ thing. (I must look up here the sales are from. I wish BMT had better reporting…). Or maybe its the fact that the US has upcoming midterms and the UK an upcoming election?

Either way it’s welcome…

Xbox? No, not for now anyway.

Over the last few days I’ve been seriously considering making an effort to get Gratuitous Space Battles onto XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade). I have decided not to do so (I must send that email…) and here is my thinking:

  • According to wikipedia, the Xbox has sold 34 million units. I suspect that less than half are used by people who are happy to buy and play downloadable games. Most will be used purely for Madden and for Call Of Duty. So that’s 16 million, vs 25 million people with an account on steam. Lets round up the other digital dist sites and say there are 35 million people able and willing to buy PC games online?
  • Games on XBLA are cheap. people gnash their teeth about $15. As someone who sells a $22.95 game and a $19.95 game, this does not bode well.
  • On PC, I can sell direct, taking > 90% of the price. Through portals such as steam, it’s less, but still quite good. On XBLA There would be a Microsoft cut, then probably a publisher cut, and then I’d get the crumbs. All out of a smaller price.
  • The Xbox has a long list of requirements about how games should play. Obviously it must be played with a gamepad, which is awkward enough, but platform holders have a funny habit of insisting you use their latest feature, even if it makes zero sense in context of the game. I hate that.
  • On PC, there is no publisher involvement, and no approval process. I know 100% that at some point, someone somewhere at Microsoft would say that the game would be better if you could control the ships. They are wrong, and I’d have to waste precious hours of my life arguing the point. This would not be fun. I’ve heard numerous horror stories from fellow indies about this sort of thing.
  • There are up front costs, for ESRB, getting a dev kit and so on. I already have a dev kit for PC games development, it’s called a PC. This is a big chunk of cash I need to find on the off-chance that I’m ‘allowed’ to publish a game for less money, at a lower royalty, that I had to redesign to fit at a low resolution using a controller designed for beatemup games. hmmmm
  • Xbox gamers are not known for their love of slow paced heavy thinking text-based strategy games. GSB is not Halo, or COD. They may hate it.

So combine all that and I have no urgent need to get involved with the Xbox. Maybe this is a mistake and it would have sold 100,000 copies on there, but I suspect not. Maybe if you didn’t need the ESRB stuff, and the dev kits were the same price as an xbox, and they automatically approved any game that passed a basic ‘not offensive’ check, I’d be more tempted, but as things stand, PC beats XBox for me, and it beats every other console out there.

BTW I worked around the vertex buffer thing, patching both games to not use vertex buffers at all. This is slower, and infuriating, but it works. Grrrr.