Thanks to Boston tech blog BostInnovation for including us in their 4th of July article about independents and games.
Things are coming along fantastically with the new game – we’re waiting on announcing it in part to get the logo. More as soon as we have it.
If you haven’t heard, there is currently a thing called the Humble Indie Bundle. It’s now officially a Big Deal. No pun intended.
The HIB, as we’ll call it, consists of all the following games: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, Penumbra, and Samorost 2. They usually have a sticker price of something like $100.
Remarkable Thing One: All these folks got together and said, pay us whatever you think it is worth. You can go and get all this for as little as $.01.
Remarkable Thing Two: You can then split the money you pay up between the developers and two charities – The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play.
Remarkable Thing Three: The bundle was on sale for about a week, and now has been extended a couple days further. To date, they have had almost 125,000 separate contributiors and made over $1,140,000 in revenue, about a third of which is going to those two charities. Several of the developers are also now releasing their games as open source, with Lugaru already out there.
Holy crap.
As Jay Barnson pointed out on the Rampant Coyote blog, they’ve shown how powerful some indies working together can be. Without no marketing budget to speak of, they’ve galvanized over 125,000 people to pay money for their game. These numbers don’t even include the pirates downloading it off BitTorrent and such! Repeating this exact thing event would be difficult (if not impossible), but this should encourage all of us indies to be audacious and to try big things.
Another big thing to note is, they were really frigging smart about this. They set up something that was pretty easily doable with out-of-the-box technology + the web skills they possessed. For a minimum time investment, they set up what may turn out to be the most significant business event to date for game dev indies.
I’d encourate everyone to go buy the Humble Indie Bundle. If nothing else, you’re getting some seriously kick-ass games at whatever price you think is a good one.
This is the first of several dev blog posts we’ll be doing as we head in to PAX; this first one focuses on our release strategy for All Heroes Die. Our further posts later this week will start to delve into the specifics of gameplay.
Right now, we’re working hard to get ready for our “$5 Beta” at PAX East. I’ve been asked a lot about exactly what the $5 Beta is, and wanted to take a few minutes to explain it.
What I call the $5 Beta is a release strategy that has been used by a number of smaller / indie studios, as well as by many other products in other industries. With it, you are looking to release your game in a very rough form; in some ways, the rougher the better. It’s a very Web 2.0 philosophy: ship early and often. Get your game into the hands of the people who will play it, and then use their feedback to develop it further. It’s a strategy that I first saw used by TaleWorlds’ for Mount and Blade, and also is being used by the gorgeous indie MMO Love. The indie devs Wolfire are also doing something similar with their game Overgrowth.
There are some advantages and disadvantages to this strategy…
Pros
Cons
Overall, we feel that this strategy is a great one to take for first-time game makers like ourselves – to us, all the cons I’ve listed are overcome by the first pro point – real feedback. The amount of time and energy you put in to a game means that you’re going to have blinders on regarding your gameplay and UI – you’re eating and breathing this thing, and you most likely long ago made your peace with dozens of issues that will completely vex your players. Getting honest feedback on these things is paramount.
Personally, I’m quite interested to see how this strategy turns out for us, and I’ll definitely be blogging our results. All Heroes Die is a curious mix of old-school and new-school, in terms of its technology and business model. On the one hand, we’re using an installed .exe that people download – very close to the shareware model that was pioneered by Apogee and ID in the early 90′s. On the other hand, we realize that our success is tied on almost every level to having a robust and engaged online community – something that brings us a lot closer to the social games of today.
Before I go and do another IGDA profile, just wanted to share a fantastic post from Gareth Fouche’s Scars of War Blog. Scars of War is a 3D RPG being built with Torque.
In essence, Gareth looks at a guy on DeviantArt who decides, inspired, that he is going to start painting and drawing, and keep going until he’s good. I’ll leave it to you to click the link and see the results.
Starting my own studio has an exercise in ignorance. Just about every day I’m asked a question or confronted with a decision that I have no basis for dealing with. And hey, I’m supposed to know all this stuff by now, right? It’s not like I started this all yesterday. And man, I hate making mistakes.
Seeing this guy’s art… that’s inspirational.
Courtesy of the Rampant Coyote.
Recently Microsoft made a couple changes to the Community Games section on Xbox Live. The first was that they changed the name to Xbox Live Indie Games. The second and more significant change was to their pricing structure.
Previously, you could charge$10, $5, or $2.50 for you game. The new structure will be $5, $3, or $1.
There are a couple things to see here, from an indie perspective. The upshot for me? I’ve never felt better about my decision to not create a game for the Xbox.
I think in the longer term, this price change hurts indies in general… but the big question mark here isn’t the price point, it’s how much more exposure the Community games channel will get to the public. One thing is for sure – Microsoft doesn’t want developers like me making Community games.
It was already extremely difficult for an indie to make a living or run a company off Community games – the numbers we started seeing earlier this year confirmed that. From what I saw, people mostly put this down to a lack of marketing and exposure for the channel to the Xbox 360 userbase. Much like we see on iPhone game sales, if you’re not a big hit, you’re not going to sell enough units to cover your costs. But on the iPhone, this is because the channel is so incredibly crowed and noisy. On the Xbox, it’s because no one knows the channel exists.
The price change brings Community games more in-line with the iPhone game prices. This could help some indies sell more games on the Xbox, because the pricing is just that much more trivial to the user. But really, it still comes back to getting more people playing and buying Community games.
Longer term, this kind of pricing is a “race to the bottom”, as Jeff Vogel describes in an excellent series of posts on his blog. In enforcing this kind of price structure, Microsoft is saying that more complex, longer games don’t have a home in Community games. That’s the message I’m getting, at least.
A price point of $5 doesn’t make business sense for us on most any platform. And for one where people aren’t showing up in large numbers it’s even worse. What Microsoft is saying with these changes is, a) we only want games that you can make for about $3 a copy and b) trust that we’re going to publicize the channel a bit more.
I like Microsoft a lot – I used to work with them as a publisher, and I’ve always appreciated their excellent attitude on supporting their developers. But I’m going to need a bit better of an offer to prove out their business model for them when I’m taking all the risk.
Cory Doctrow has a very interesting article up on Internet Evolution. In it, he puts out an idea he thinks could help resolve the issue of internet makers creating things that infringe on other people’s intellectual property, said IP holders then bringing onerous lawsuits to bear, etc. His idea is to do a hybrid Creative Commons license for your content.