Posts Tagged ‘indie’
Macguffin in the Press
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
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.
Boston Indies Take Over the IGDA Newsletter
Monday, June 21st, 2010
I’m really glad Alex Schwartz wrote this up – I wanted to, but didn’t manage it. In Alex’s words:
Without prior planning, FOUR of the articles written for the newsletter were authored by Boston-area indie game developers. As a member of this awesome group of individuals, I take great pride in seeing Boston Indies in the spotlight.
Amen, brother! Check out Alex’s post at the link above, and the IGDA newsletter here.
The Humble Indie Bundle
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
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.
Post-PAX Report – State of the Beta and Everything Else
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Been a bit of a crazy last week. This is the first real chance I’ve had to blog about things – and I’ll have to do it quickly, since there are a bunch of threads from our players in the forums that I need to answer. (Side note – being able to write the last sentence was incredibly exciting to me.)
In the interests of just getting this damn thing up, I’m going to just get the whole Beta and PAX story out in one post. This might make it a bit long, we’ll see.
Given that, I’ll tell you the upshot right here:
- PAX itself was an amazing validation of the game we’re trying to create. We were received with open arms by lots of gamers that think this is an awesome idea. Many have since shelled out an electronic Abraham Lincoln and snagged the beta!
- The other non-game highlights of the week were that I was on NPR (around 25 minutes in) with Mike Dornbrook of Harmonix, and that I and other area devs Ichiro Lambe (Dejobaan Games), Damián Isla (Moonshot Games), and Eitan Glinert (Fire Hose Games) were on a PAX Panel called, “Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees”, which apparently went over like gangbusters at the conference.
- We intend to get our our first update this Friday, with a pile of bug fixes, at least one new piece of event art, and several new events.
Also – pics by fellow Boston Indies crony Mike Carriere. There’s some of me later in the set. I look like I’ve been awake for years. Good times!
So, on with the show! (more…)
Practice Trumps Talent
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
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.
Hats, Schizophrenia, and Indie Dev – Lessons Learned From Trying to Enter the IGF 2009
Friday, October 16th, 2009
So, the last couple days slammed home several things that I’d already been considering. Graham and I post mortemed the May-to-now timeframe, and the biggest problem we saw was that we seriously lacked project management.
But wait! Scott, aren’t you a seasoned project manager? Haven’t you produced games before?
Yep. And it didn’t help. Here’s why. (more…)
Microsoft to Indies: Don’t Quit Your Day Job Yet
Friday, August 7th, 2009
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.
Make Sure They DON’T See All your Content
Friday, June 5th, 2009
The conventional wisdom in the AAA games industry is that there is a sweet spot to hit with your content creation. You want to create a rich game experience for your players, but at the same time you want to make sure not much of your content remains unseen – unplayed content in your game is tantamount to wasted time.
Personally, I’ve been moving away from that thought in the Heritage game design, and this morning it hit me how to enunciate the exception to this rule. In essence, unseen “stuff” can keep your game fresh to your older players. (more…)
Cory Doctrow’s Idea for Digital Licensing
Friday, May 15th, 2009
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.
The Post-GDC Buzz
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
I just flew back from GDC. And boy, are my arms tired.