Month: February 2012

This is how you should always sell your game, first and foremost. On the Internet.

Perfect! Offspring Fling, makes me think about the unreleased Ookibloks.

People are so great. They know walled garden are a problem. They give in for short term bucks, massive wet dreams and the socially rewarding “I’m making a game for iOS/XBLA, you know the iPhone/360?”.

There is Steam, too. Users can’t shut the fuck up about how it’s great (it is great, for them and me.user) but developers shouldn’t rush for it. Sell your game on your own, too. Keep control over your content. And please users, stop demanding to have all your games in Steam. For creativity, freedom of speech and other matters, you’ll need to move your ass, launch a browser and install a file. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I don’t want that big fat ass middleman in the middle of our relationship. If you can’t take the fact that a great game will not appear in your Steam folder, you need to seek help.

Developers have stars in their eyes thinking about the success of World of Goo on the iPad, forget that as 2DBoy said it, they have been crazy lucky to have their game featured at the right time (just before Christmas). People forget that the initial release of World of Goo made 25% of its revenues directly from their website. They forget that it’s through this release that people like me bought it, played it, and confirmed to Wii users and everybody else that this game was good and worth some bucks.

So it has a great effect: you can release whenever you want with nobody making you wait for anything. I can’t count how many developers complain about this issue on consoles. Second, you get all the money and people building momentum for you (again, as long as the game is good of course).

I know it’s harder and in our idiotic society, it seems lame to have a Paypal account and a web site. You don’t reach people the same way that iTunes or Xbox Live’s virality does but come on you greedy bastard, if in 2008 when Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr and others were pretty much inexistent 2DBoy earned a quarter of their revenue with NO marketing through their website, I bet you can make a lot more today. Ask Humble Bundle. Yes, they use another weakness in humans, the sale/impulse buy mechanic. But again, you might not need to make $1M in ten days. On a side note, I still haven’t played the vast majority of the two bundles I bought.

So just to say, if you think Nintendo channels and App store tubes or whatever are mean and that you are not free I say, you have choice. You are free with the Internet (at least for now). Don’t try to make platforms understand you. They are here to fuck you, it’s the meta-game. Make them scared. Make them understand that you don’t need them like a crackhead needs crack. Stop sucking their dicks. Make them suck yours.

By making a game they want so bad.

The PC aka Windows PC is leading the technology market, as usual.

Look at the mini arcade stick on the left. It screams “play with me!”

In an interesting and quite unexpected move Q-Games, a company working closely with Nintendo and Sony, released its game PixelJunk Eden on Steam, the Windows PC client that rules them all (not really my opinion, but you have to read people’s comments, they LOVE Steam and want everything on it).

Only fairly old people like me see the change, with Capcom releasing his Street Fighter IV on consoles and Windows PC with just a few months of delay. It was years for Street Fighter II and the port was terrible. Street Fighter IV runs smoothly on netbooks. By the way they still sold 25+ millions of these mini laptops in 2011, pretty much on part with other devices that are “taking over”.

People can’t stop talking about the “next” thing, mobile or tablets. The PC market is so enormous, it just keeps growing. It is the blue ocean. Double Fine’s crazy Kickstarted project is scheduled for Windows PC first -and by the time I typed this, they have the money to do the ports-. The most interesting 2011 games are happening on Windows PC -The Witness, Spy party, Dear Esther-. The great, free Stealth Bastard is on Windows. Humble Bundle can thank Windows for making them so rich and successful (70% of their revenues on average).

The argument for PCs is not the up to ten times faster hardware (everything is fast enough today, even your microwave can run Crysis) it’s about the fact that you don’t have to deal with gatekeepers and just focus on the more than crucial part, building a good game.

This is common knowledge, there’s nothing new under the sun but I still have to write about it. Nobody wants to acknowledge that because it butthurts their brand whore-ish minds but it totally is the best, most stable scenario since a couple of years: prototype on Windows, release on Windows, get noticed, build a community, attract money and port. World of Goo. Aquaria. Osmos. Blizzard, Valve. Frozen Synapse, the list goes on. It’s the best for everybody. Freedom from the developer first aiming the biggest platform, reducing risks and then aiming for different experiences, smaller markets with other devices. For gamers everything is a la carte, no more I need to have this hardware to play this because everybody has a PC. Then if you really want to have the game on your PS Tada 3000 4G, ask for it or even finance it. You get to communicate with developers. The Double Fine experiment -crowd sourced adventure game design?- is interesting in this sense.

Weirdly despite being a gigantic hardware pool, The PC architecture is so old now that a shit ton of problems are solved, have been solved or can be circumvented. On mobile and tablets? Problems just keep popping out -screen size, supported or unsupported APIs, bots– and you usually have no fucking margin, thank you closed and tight ecosystem.

Which brings me to another blog post.