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

Category: business

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.

Press button, get banana

I’ve been playing the star trek online beta (let’s just say I won’t be buying) and I also not long ago experimented with farmville, for research purposes (far too cute  a game for me). I am not a fan of these sort of games, in fact, they depress me…

MMO’s in general (not Eve) and many facebook games annoy me because they seem designed by business types who want to maximise player-time and revenue, rather than real fun. There seems to be a tendency for business types to equate an ‘addictive’ game as being ‘good’. Not fun, enjoyable or rewarding just ‘addictive’ will do.

We are at the very very early stages of research into how people react to games. 50 years ago, I could watch you through one way glass playing a game or watching TV, and make notes. I could maybe ask you subtle questions about your experience, and do some guesswork to interpret the real answers.

These days (if I wanted to) I could log every mouse movement, every delay, every button click, every action, and analyse you along with thousands of other players to work out all kinds of subtle effects.  It’s theoretically possible for a game to auto-adjust its gameplay to maximise revenue, and player time. This isn’t commonplace, but if people arent already working on it, I’m amazed.

Yet this saddens me. I play games for fun, to feel like a President or a Starship Captain. I don’t play games just to kill time or spend money. In short, the aims of the more cynical game developer (Get them to keep playing, tell their friends, and spend money) don’t marry up with my aims (have fun!).

Right now, it’s fairly easy to look at farmville and see it as a cynical viral marketing/push-button-get-banana business, that I stop playing the minute I see how shallow it is. But in 10 years time will it be so easy? I saw a furniture companies ad earlier today that was targeted directly at me, based on items I’d looked at days before on their website. Will Farmville IV be so perfectly targeted, so acutely balanced based on 50,000,000 playthroughs, that my brain is just incapable of letting me stop playing?

I don’t buy anywhere near as many games as most game designers. I get halfway through the demo and find myself having an internal conversation that starts “Am I having fun right now?” and the answer is often no. I might be wanting to see what item I unlock next, or what happens when I reach the next level (often nothing special), but is the actual process, the actual journey fun? often no.

I am not aiming to make addictive games, or viral games, I’m trying to make fun games. They probably aren’t as profitable (nowhere near as much), but it makes me feel better. You press a lot of buttons in GSB, we don’t always give you a banana, but I hope the button pushing was fun in itself.

Todays’ Specials

This is the one silly gratuitous thing I’ve bought for the office in the new house. I’m not very organised on the whole, and I tend to have sporadic moments of sudden ideas, and no consistent way to keep track of the huge huge list of things in my head. Clearly the solution is a great big chalkboard on the wall behind me.

I’d forgotten how horrid the noise of writing on a  chalkboard is :D There is a company that will print anything you want (logos etc.) onto a chalkboard, although it’s surprisingly expensive. I spend so much time doing the actual coding, and am so busy that I really need to grasp at anything that makes the coding time more efficient, and I think this will help me think more ‘big picture’ and still remember what I was thinking 10 minutes later :D

And my next guest…

I did a pre-recorded interview for Canadian radio today. The show is question is this one:

http://www.cbc.ca/spark/

Because it’s a big proper national radio station, they wanted decent quality, so I had to go to the nearest radio studio which turned out to be the historic city of Bath, set for many a Jane Austen novel, and home of lovely bath stone, used for practically every house around here. It also meant having lunch in ye famous Bath Pump Rooms, a very old (1789) building, which just goes to show the elegance, care and grandeur with which people built everything back then. These days we build featureless glass boxes. Bah.

The show itself was quite good fun, I did feel a bit like frasier crane sat in front of a microphone with a light on the wall saying ‘on air’ (although it was pre-recorded). The show was about piracy, and involved me because of this blog post. I’m fine with doing that, but it’s a bit frustrating to be ‘the piracy guy’, just because I’m open about discussing it. There are a ton of hot topics in games I’d love to talk about, the mis-management of projects, development costs, sexism in games, game violence, game pricing, blah blah. Maybe next time :D