Category: business

I’m ‘exchanging contracts’ with a publisher for something right now. I signed two copies (two!) and they insisted on them being physically shipped. This isn’t unusual, or particular to them, but now that FedEx have seemingly lost the ‘parcel’, it makes me reflect on the insanity of the situation.
There are three types of business:
1) Businesses that allow you to email you an agreement, or at the very least, print out a document, sign it, scan it abck in and email it back. Needless hassle, but the best of the three. (I know for a fact that they can’t tell if I just pasted a fake signature from photoshop onto the document without bothering with the print/scan bit).

2) Businesses that won’t accept that, but will accept a FAX. This is the most insane of the three, because the people at these obviously do not realise that a fax gets converted into bit and bytes, and so does an email. A fax is just a really special=purpose clunky way to email a scan.

3) Businesses that insist on a physical copy.

The physical copy thing amazes me. what IS the difference? Is it REALLY harder for someone to ‘forge’ a contract signature by physical mail than it is by email / fax? Do they think that if it goes to court, that forensic teams will carry out analysis of the paper fibres and handwriting and proclaim it to be original or a fake? Is this REALLY going to happen?

People have forgotten that paper was used to send INFORMATION, and contracts were used for that purpose. We have moved on from fingerprints or making an ‘x’. We do not need to squirt some extract of a squid on parchment and then put it on the fastest coach and horses any more. Some clever dudes invented email.

Presidents, Soldiers, Criminals, Journalists, even my retired father and my technology-hating old boss who makes wooden rowing boats have all embraced EMAIL. Join us lawyers… you are late… but you are welcome…

I love google analytics. You get stats for EVERYTHING.

• Visitors to my site using firefox spend 7.95% less (estimated from buy page views) than visitors using internet explorer.
• last week I got more visits from china than I did from France
• Canadians like Democracy more than any other game. Brazilians prefer Kudos
• I actually get more visits from firefox browsers than IE
• Only 2% of the visits are from dialup users
• The top 5 countries supplying visitors are US,UK,Canada,Germany and Poland

The indie games community is ablaze with much shouting about how one of the big portals (I won’t link to them) has just cut the price of every single game to $9.99, and is offering a lot of them for $6.99.

Where the developers notified in advance, consulted or given the option to opt out?

NO.

Some portals (the ones I prefer to deal with) are really good like that. They treat the relationship as a real partnership, they credit you correctly and link to your site, and try to co-ordinate any sales or promotions with you. Other portals act like WalMart treating it’s suppliers, and basically regard the game developers as people producing cattle-feed.

This price war is going to be a major kick in the nuts for people whose business plan amounts to “make what these big publishers want, and take what they offer me”. I have to say, it was predictable a long way off. I even wrote an article be-moaning the complete lack of independence amongst so-called ‘indie’ developers a while ago.

For me, the solution was easy. I don’t consider my games to be disposable throwaway match-3 clones and do not want to be priced the same as a game that even a child finds boring after 20 minutes, so I’ve sent out the emails that remove my games from that portal. I know another indie dev has done the same thing. We have decent direct sales, and we base our businesses on selling through multiple channels at the same time. This is true independence, when nobody can tell you what games to make, or dictate terms to you. This week, people with strong direct sales were able to breathe a sigh of relief that they are not 100% dependent on portals.

We live in interesting times.