I can’t believe how the digital distribution aka the backbone of my business is doing well. Amazon.com had a “record holiday orders” with 210 countries delivered. And a peak at 72.9 items sold per second. Talk about crisis.
Steam is skyrocketing. when I remember its launch and how people were just puking on it. I remember saying to myself that they had balls and a big big vision at Valve, an independant PC game developer. It was a mess but it was for the better.
Five years later, 559 games are available on the service which has 16 million active user account (suck it WoW). Jon Blow said that Valve was not really interested in his game Braid, except it’s now a success. They answered back and they want to publish the unique 2D platformer now. I think it proves that success is not turning them from the focus of providing great games (L4D is of course another proof).
In his last interview, Jon talks about the PC and once again, I totally agree (about consolish PCs):
“I think both those things are true. I definitely like Steam, in that I can buy a new computer and bring it home and turn it on and install Steam and I have all my new games on there. And pretty soon, they’re doing the settings and stuff now [via Steam Cloud, which allows users to store save game and configurations server-side]. That’s pretty cool.
At the same time, I definitely want to be able to play games that aren’t on Steam, right? I definitely want access to services that are not Steam and that are competing with them, because maybe they’ll do something better. Maybe they’ll do something in a different way.
So I’m in favor of both. And I realize that that introduces some amount of chaos into the thing. That’s okay, though, because the PC is the place where that can happen.”
This amount of chaos diminishes every year, every time people want to do things better. Man, LOOK at these websites they are promoting INDIE GAMES:
Polytron, Fez game.
Beatnik Games, Plain Sight game.
Pieces Interactive, Walkie Tonky game.
These games are still in beta. These games runs on PC with no Steam or whatever client. How would you describe their websites? Far from the chaos. More like neat products, almost like they were there before you.
It strikes me.
Plus on my three examples, none are from the US. I mean, the industry is focused on the US world number one game market where there is too much actors and companies focusing the same market (GTA/ Saint Row example). Jason Holtman from Valve is right, we need to listen and search for people who want to play our games. The world is large, there is about 100 and 200 millions PCs sold every year, we now have reached the billion machine connected on the internet..
The future of entertainment is not gonna be produced in one region of the world. Neither it’s gonna be on a closed platform with partners doing about everything they can to make the life of third-parties indies harder. MS seems to be the only one -hey it’s a software tools maker company first- to acknowledge that.