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

Category: democracy3

DEMOKRATIE 3

Ok, so after my fairly low key release on my own site, finally Democracy 3 was released in German to steam yesterday. It’s been trickier than I suspected it would be, mainly due to GUI annoyances and web page shenanigans, but it is on-sale now.

Sales to Germany have been pretty good, with 6% of revenue coming from there, in the English version 9and there are other countries that speak German, obviously). if I can boost sales to those countries by 25% then I have made money on the translation, so hopefully it will exceed that. It’s also cool to have more people play the game, and it’s interesting and exciting to have done something (funded and managed a pro translation) that I haven’t managed before. (Democracy 2 was translated, but on a revenue split basis).

As is typical, I’ve scheduled this for a stupid time (23rd December!) so I won’t get any press coverage, but just having the game come up with a German option has to boost sales in the long term. I can make German language copies available to any German gaming sites who only cover translated games, which is a bonus. I made a decision to go as far as I could in translation terms, so I translated the game text (obviously) and also the logo, got a new trailer done (twice!) translated the positech site page, and changed the steam screenshots and promo assets to have German text. I even have some German adwords ads I might experiment with a bit.

Anyway, if you have German speaking friends who have turned the game down until today, please point them at the games German website or at the steam page for the game. Danke!

The Laffer curve in Democracy 3

From my forums, but thought blog readers may be interested…

For those new to economics the laffer curve can be read-about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
I’m not going to debate the validity of the theory, merely describe how it is implemented (and adjustable/moddable) within the game.

Basically the laffer curve is saying that higher taxes may bring in less income than lower taxes, at some ‘hard-to-define’ point. In other words, you can set the tax rate *too high* if you goal is to raise money for the state. At first glance it may look like the laffer curve is not modeled in Democracy 3, but it is. If you look at the slider for income tax, you will see that at high levels, it brings in more money than at lower levels, which might seem to imply a non-laffer simulation. However, the values shown below the slider are simple calculations, not forecasts based on full models.

If you set income tax punishingly high, more income will be raised, in the immediate term. However, this high rate also acts as an input to ‘bad’ situations such as brain drain (I can see an argument for suggesting it should affect corporate exodus too). If the brain drain kicks in, there will be noticeable hit to GDP (12%!). This lower GDP will affect income raised by the tax, because almost all taxes in the game are in some way scaled by GDP, in terms of what income they raise. Therefore, it is entirely possible (and indeed likely) that when looked over a medium to long term, a higher tax rate brings in less revenue. Of course, this is only one argument. You may wish for higher income tax rates for non-revenue reasons such as political popularity with socialists or a more equal society.

So in short, the laffer curve is in the game, albeit in a fairly complex and ‘binary’ way. You could easily make a ‘laffer mod’ that more directly introduced a gentle curve to GDP from higher rates of income tax, without using the situation-triggering mechanism.
Hopefully that makes sense :D

The games industry has weird taboos…

I tried to advertise with a BIG game-advertising agency through their self-service system to place this ad on a major US games site:

gamespot_rect1

I got this:

Message from the publisher: I’m sorry, but your ad banner is inappropriate.

Me:

so… why exactly?

Or do I just spend my money elsewhere?

Them:

I apologize, but we can not promote any politics as this is a sensitive topic.

WTF? I bet ads for games like hitman, or GTA, or games where you get slow-mo closeups of people’s skulls being blasted apart by high-caliber bullets are just fine. But discuss income tax? OH NOES THE WORLD WILL END! I saw a clip of mortal kombat on that charlie brooker doumenatry that made me feel sick, but apparently we as an industry are just FINE with that… It’s stuff like this that sometimes makes me ashamed to be in this industry. Half of the industry wants to be grown up and accepted as art, the other half have the mentality of seven year olds. I’m pretty cynical, but I never expected my ads for a game about government-simulation to be too controversial to be shown (for money no less…).

My next game will be gratuitous homicide battles. I bet everyone will let me promote that one eh?

 

German translation lessons…

So I’m getting Democracy 3 translated into German, if you didn’t already know :D. This has involved quite a lot of hassle, so i thought I’d jot down some thoughts and lessons learned. Firstly, I’d like to make the business case for it. The case is based on this:

  • Germans love strategy games
  • Germany is the top selling market for the game that does not have English as its first language.
  • The non-English speaking German population is non trivial. (src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population) at 36%.
  • If I assume that the game has only reached the 64% of potential Germans who speak English, and do the maths, if there is a corresponding bump in sales of the German version, then this will put the port into a decent profit.

Add to this the fact that a lot of people outside Germany also speak German, plus that percentage of people who speak English but would prefer the game in the first language, and I think it makes economic sense. I’m also figuring in some ‘goodwill’ value for translating a small indie game to German.

Ok, so it makes sense, but what are the costs?

Firstly there is the cost of the actual translation. The game has 34,000 words of text, so that is quite a big expense. I know many indie games ‘crowdsource’ this stuff, but I find that a bit risky. Don’t forget some people on the web are just maniacs, how do you *know* that half way through the description for income tax there isn’t a huge racist rant, or maybe a load of swear words? or in my case, more subtly, how do I know the descriptions of the voter types and policies have not been skewed to suit the persons political views offering the ‘free’ translation? I prefer to have a contract, and right-of-redress for any lawsuits/damages/grief…

Secondly, there is the fixing of the code. German is loooooooooooong. A simple word in English is often about 10,000 syllables in German. Don’t believe me? just listen to Henning:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/comedy/long_words.shtml

But I digress…. What this means is that a lot of text blocks in the game no longer fit. Buttons are not big enough, titles need to word-wrap or be cropped, and so on. Plus of course there are exciting new characters to be added (only a few), and because Democracy 3 uses bitmapped fonts (pre-rendered) I needed to change code to support that (and re-render them all). The vast majority of this work is just scanning through the code and adding scrollbars to text and ‘…’  where it might be needed. The GOOD news (and another reason to do German first) is that once this is done, if I choose to do French, Italian or Spanish, the text should already fit fine.

And lastly, there is the admin cost. The steam promotional graphics need to be changed. My own webpage will need changing.  I’m planning on translating the trailer. New builds need to be made, and the translated content checked so it works ok. Plus I actually need to upload the stuff. Democracy 3 is about 200 MB on disk. It comes in mac,Linux & PC, so thats 600MB. It goes to my site, BMTMicro, Steam and GoG, and the mac game store. This is a huge number of builds. Now double it for German. I have rural broadband. This literally starts to take days to upload… (You can do a ‘shared content’ thing on steam, but thats only for steam, so I’m keeping it simple and just doing totally fresh builds for everyone).

Will it be worth it? Who knows! I hope so, and I’ll certainly blog about it’s success/failure.

BTW Redshirt is 25% off for a while. Go get it.