f13.net

Has this made the rounds here already?  I found it off of PA today.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/3
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/9/4
http://www.the-underdogs.org/scratch.php

I find I agree with almost all of it.  A lot of the thoughts he puts down are thoughts I've had myself but described more completely.  Basically we a very good, well-marketed, indie-friendly iGames to start kicking some butt and getting some dollars in the gaming market.  Cut out retailers and provide a channel for well-marketed low-budget games.  The only thing I'd add to what he has to say is that I think he needs to go a bit further with how to develop a taste for indie among gamers.  Not that I think there are any easy answers there, I just think it is more important than the space he gives it and a problem that needs to be solved for his ideas to really work.  The dollars all start in consumer's hands and the market won't shift until consumers indicate a willingness to spend differently.

And as mentioned on PA, he's actually investing his own money and time in to trying to make this stuff happen.  Bravo I say.  It's one thing to post this stuff on the internet and flame people who disagree with you.  It's quite another to quit a comfortable job and actually try to make the thing happen. I'm not sure he'll succeed but I think at least he's trying the right sorts of things.

Gabe.

I went into it thinking "Sure, no shit, but what's gonna stop it?"

Now... well, the guy has conviction.  Would be nice.

Pie-in-the-sky bullshit. All of it.

Customers are whores. The vast majority of them want the shiny. Delivering the now epic amount of shiny they want requires more than 1 douche in his basement with a VIC-20 and a good idea.

"WAH WHY CANT WE GO BACK TO THE DAYS WHER INNOVATARS COULD MAKE A HOJILLION SELLING TITLE ON A $5 BUDGET??/?/???"

Well, look at the hardware, you idiots. being innovative now is harder than ever not because people have been brainwashed by the industry, it's just that the medium is no longer as new. At the dawn of games, fucking everything you could make was innovative and hadn't been done before and could be done on a shoestring budget since you needed only programmers and zero art staff.

"Hey, what if you could make this white square bounce off of other white squares? Like a ball? And maybe use a paddle type thing to bounce it into them?"

"My god, you just invented a genre!"

Kill the game industry? We fucking made it that way. Either we tear the industry down and rebuild it, or the vast majority of us consumers dramatically alter our expectations and taste in games.

And that's not happening any time soon.

I think the article makes a very good point about how movies and books, very similar media, still manage to sell small budget items to Indie-conscious and niche consumers.  Comics went through a period where they were in a very similar place to where games are now -- but there is a lot of innovative and inventive indie and non-indie working going on in the comics industry these days.  Internet distribution through programs like iTunes is doing a great job of driving up sales and visibility of indie bands.

The technology point is largely moot.  If you think that the only way to sell a game is to match the rate of progress of the hardware then you are just saying that you too are in the "me-me-shiny-shiny" camp.  I do think there are plenty of us who are not.  Enough to at least allow small budget, but well-marketed games to sell a couple tens of thousand copies and generate meaningful profit for small-time developers.  Or even more.  Look at games like Lumines which had a relatively quite small budget and yet has superb production quality and gameplay.  This is what I think we need more of and I think could be start impacting the market more and more with robust enough internet marketing/distribution system.

That it will be hard to do is a given.  Yes, the of majority consumers are idiots.  Yes the industry is entrenched.  But it doesn't mean we can't still try and come up with solutions to move on from where we're at.

Even worse than the "want-the-shiny" attitude I see in consumers is this hardcore, angst-ridden, "developers-just-want-to-circle-jerk" atittude.  That really just justifies complacency about the market and indulgence in self-fulfilling prophecy.  There is this knee-jerk reaction to scream at any developer-type indicates who indicates any innovative tendencies at all and makes no sense.  Just look at reactions to the DS or to the new Revolution controller (and mind you I'm not a Nintendo fanboi -- my DS was my first Nintendo system in 15 years).  Whether Nintendo or Mr. Costikyan's innovations work or not I can't see how anyone who wants fun games can rationally oppose or spew such hatred towards developers who want to try and find new gaming goodness to the gaming market. It may not be exactly the games you asked for but given time you may be surprised to find that it becomes part of your gaming habits anyway.  And if it fails, it fails, and you lose nothing.

Gabe.

I think the mentality that's doing the most harm is "working 16-hour days to finish a game is expected and meritorious" when in actuality "working 16-hour days to finish a game is worse than working 8-hour days because you make more bugs in the last 8 hours than you fix in the first 8".

It's like spam. Not only is it noise, not only does nobody fall for it in sufficient numbers to be profitable, but THERE ARE PEOPLE SPAMMING WHO CAN'T EVEN WORK A SPAMBOT AND THEY THINK IT'LL HELP. Sweet moogledy fuck, if I get another message informing me that I, $SUBSCRIBER_NAME, am so very fortunate because mortgage rates in $SUBSCRIBER_CITY are as low as $LOW_PERCENT, I'm going to open up an SSL socket, and by SSL I mean 'Shotgun ShelL' and by 'socket' I mean 'missing head'.

The only people who make money from spam are the people SELLING the spambots and addresses. I have to wonder if there's some industry of psychologists treating chronic burnout whispering things into the game industry's ear...

--GF

I don't know about inventing genres but I do think we're going to see an explosion in indies.  The tools to create niche products that can support sub-50k players are already dirt cheap and actually quite good.  And a lot of those "turn-key" tools are actually quite scalable if it turns out the indie has released something compelling.  Hell the open source UO emulator RunUO already supports up to 10k players on (serious) "hobbyist" equipment.

Take a look at Torque for example (http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=1) - for $100 US you too can create a living breathing proof of concept that's already bulding market interest before you shop the idea to investors.  We're already seeing a vibrant after-market opening up to sell character models and textures as well as custom services to Torque indies.

This is a huge trend - the sort of thing commercial server emulator builders like myself have been predicting since the first UO emulator.  I do think this is a threat the Massive CMOGS who will eventually see market share ceded to smaller decentralized products which are defined as massive by the interconnections to other worlds rather than by the maximum number that can be crammed onto a single "shard".

I hardly started to read the Scratchware Manifesto when I started sputtering.  My local bookstore and my local recordstore are closed, replaced by megachains and Amazon. Small press is a tiny puddle of a few dedicated publishers, each nursing a series of barely known publications that cost more per word than mainstream books, but pay authors half the pittance that the mainstream doles out.  Books and records are all in the chokehold of major companies as much as games, but the creators of books and records  really can do sometihng novel and innovative on their own.

Games require teams because they are a multidisciplinary medium.  Without coders, musicians, actors, writers, artists, designers, and managers, yes, managers, you are going to get a second rate product, because it will be amateur night for part of your game.  You may not need much of all of those specialties, but without a little of all of them, you will have a game that is clunky, no matter what nifty notion it was based on.

People do not love Teh Shiny because it is shiny.  The love it because it is well done.  Why should players be expected to embrace games that are twenty years behind the state of the art?

All this is not to say that the industry does not need drastic reform and rebirth.  But that change will not come because we revert to older standards.

I'll read the Escapist stuff now, but I've got a lot of problems with the assumptions the Scratchware Manifesto is based on.

Ok, I'm happier with the Escapist piece.

Mind, I think the way the author waved off DRM issues was weak.  If you are going to get away from brick and mortar, DRM is a key issue.

And I strongly disagree with the dis of glitz.  Like any major paper magazine, The Escapist has lots of shiny pictures backing the articles.  It would be faster to download white pages, but the extra bits are there because they expand the audience from people who read white papers to a larger, less hardcore group.  Games need the same broadening of appeal, even if they are niche products.  Particularly if they are niche products.  How else will the niche grow?

There is a real problem with the existing distribution path, and it really is stranglling creativity.  One of the good sides of Amazon is that it allows for the Long Tail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail).  There is the best hope for niche product, IMO.  And it is the best hope for good gameplay to become a market force.  Ditto for creativity.  And if the originals are still in the active distribution channels, the clones are going to need to be better than the originals to match the originals' success.

So here is a question.  Why don't sites like this one have clear paths to the existing indie channels?  Perhaps a box of links on this page. (http://www.f13.net/reviews.php)  Yeah, free advertising for aggregation sites and indie game makers.  It's not like these people have the ability to pay to advertise on specialty boards like this (unless maybe the specialty board drew a lot of that sort of traffic), so there is no real ad revenue to be lost, and there is a service to provide both the players and the developers that might earn some good will.

And what about the rest of us?  If I mention a book in a post, I try to link to the Amazon page for it, so that interested parties can look at it, maybe even buy it.  Why don't I do the same for games?

I don't know if we can blow up the publisher/retail monlith, but can we chip at the foundations a little?

Common misconception: The machine's name was VC-20 - for "Video Computer". There is no I in between, though people add one when pronouncing it.

Back to subject: Indie games exist and, as far as I can tell, thrive with online sales (and distribution); stars include the makers of Uplink (in a genre by itself) and Darwinia, not to mention small game distribution channels like PopCap and GarageGames (if I understand their business model right) or download.com and the likes. Kinda what Magnatune (http://magnatune.com/) is for music - you can make decent gameplay without having to spend millions on 3D models, textures and shit that your users need to upgrade their computers to experience.

So screw the mass industry; henceforth I will prefer cheap indie games and only buy "industry" games at discounted prices or budget label editions. Why pay $50-$60 for a game that will cost half that in a few months' time?

To be fair, there may be other reasons why your local media supplier got co-opted by The Chain. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html)

--GF

You know why people do stuff like this?

Masturbation is fun. Suriously.

Edit: Actually, Gabe, people quit their jobs to do something more promising every day. It's merely one aspect of the idealist mind. Megalomania is also. And after playing God of War, Resident Evil 4, Indigo Prophecy, and a handful of other games this year, I think his measures are extreme. I'm lucky to see 3-5 good movies a year. I shouldn't expect more from the gaming industry. I WANT more, but I'm not going to expect it. Most developers create trash that I simply won't spend money on. Low Budget Games without boxes are something I typically don't spend money on either, if only because $10-$20 is still a lot of money for something that isn't half as fun as a perfectly crafted big budget game like the ones listed above. That said, I support indie developers doing their things and planting seeds in the minds of the people who create big budget games. Without Gish, we'd have no Loco Roco. Without Every Extend, we wouldn't have Every Extend Extra. Without Counterstrike, we wouldn't have....counterstrike? Point being, it takes money and lots of it to compete in this industry, Indie developers are instigators of the collective money-grubbing hivemind. It's a shame, but it's just how it is.

Edit: Also, in response to the part about the retail monolith, as much as I hate shopping at Walmart and love shopping at Fry's, the prices there are often cheaper than EB and GS after 2 months. Also, once EB and Gamestop merge and collectively have +-33% of the gaming market retail space, they will not be dropping their prices. According to them, Fry's takes a huge loss on games which is a problem for them because it's all they sell. Though, I reckon fry's doesn't take such a huge loss given the sheer number of games they buy. At the end of the day the publisher is the evil here. He sets MSRP. Nintendo fucked us with a high standard in the 80s and that carried on to the cheaper DVD format (I reckon a dvd based game costs less than $3 lock stock and barrel for the printed artwork, manual, disc, packaging and shipping. That's problematic.

The book industry is a terrible comparison. 5% of books do 95% of sales in the US, and getting published for the first time is extremely difficult.

I've read all of this stuff before. At first it was just "damn this sucks." Then it became something more coherent like "the developer/publisher relationship sucks." Fine, we know that. It does suck.

Also, I see some blinders on the author. What about a game like Rez? What about all the music-based games? (I mean, how expensive is the art in Donkey Konga? Ten bucks?) What about your Paper Mario, your Katamari, etc. It IS quite possible to create games that don't have the latest and greatest glitz - as long as those games aren't competing against similar games that do. Monkey Ball? How much did that cost to develop? It couldn't have been a lot, it's all repetitive textures and geometric shapes.

I think that is one of the real problems here: I don't think most DEVELOPERS want to create games with indie aesthetics. They want to be able to create the next Doom 3, just on the cheap somehow. If you go to a web discussion forum focused on novice game makers half of them want to create a MMORPG!

I see pieces like this as long on problems and short on solutions. "We must tear down the distribution model blah blah.." Ok, stop talking and rip off a chunk already! Waiting for someone else to do it isn't going to work. How about, you go collect a bunch of great games and set up a website that sells them, then scrounge up some money for some ads? Sounds like a plan.

As someone who doesn't produce games, my only really relevant response to this is going to be to wait and see if anything happens.  And, I doubt it will; it's been said before.  Repeatedly.  To say that someone can sit in their basement and put out an "indy" game that will rival something done by id is a nice sentiment, but even the biggest corp isn't just hosing green around at random.  They actually pay people to make (or try to make) good games.  If you think that a team of five people who get a kick out of making games on their laptops are going to be able to rival that, you're going to have to give me some evidence.


Exactly.  I mean, if you're going to do things to a reasonable level of competence, there is a HUGE amount of volume that simply needs to get done.  I don't care how talented a 3D modeller you are, it takes time (and a lot of it) to put together a decent 3D world.  Being skilled or not can only speed this up so much.  If you want to stick to doing flash puzzle games or whatever, fine.  Yes, you can make a profit with that kind of thing.  But if you're running around shouting shit like "We will turn this industry on its head.  Tremble, Redwood City! The forces of revolution are on the march." then I hope to God you've got something you can point to that's better than fucking Tetris.

I have no qualms with the stated goals of this kind of thing... but I'll believe it when I see it.

Again, these things are all true. But... people are putting together graphics and even rule bases now for resale.  There was once a time when folks were paid seven and eight figures to put together the kind of presentation high school kids now do solo in Powerpoint in just a few hours.  We're smack in the middle of the same trend for games.  Don't let what "everybody knows" from three years ago blind you to what some folks know now.

I refuse to have my retina assualted by the Escapist again. Fuck them.

Also, I couldn't finish this article. I kept seeing myself at 16, railing against TEH MAN. I got about halfway down and just said fuck it.

Everything he claims will kill the games industry and recreate it as some new phoenix rising from the ashes CAN ALREADY BE DONE SUCCESSFULLY. It just takes doing it by someone willing to do it. Most people like regular paychecks as opposed to starving for an ideal. Psychochild has been doing it for years, and more power to him.

But don't try to claim that you're some kind of fucking Unabomber that's going to bring down the great Satans of the game industry. Let them have their Madden 2030's and their Ultima Onlines and do your own goddamn thing. You're not trying to achieve any more noble goal than make money, the only difference is you are doing it at something you love. It's harder and less profitable. Boo-fucking-hoo. The people interested in indy games find them, the people who never will be never will find them, nor will they play them when they do. El Mariachi was a great movie, made on a shoelace fiber budget, but just because it was well-done does not mean the mass market would like it. It just doesn't. It made a profit and the director went on to get other films made with bigger budgets. Hooray for him.

But he didn't destroy the movie industry, he actually helped grow it. 

Not long ago, I finished reading a book written in 1945.  It was pretty good.  Since it all took place in the 17th century anyway, it could have been written last week and it wouldn't have made one goddamn bit of difference.  Until the English language changes so much that the dialect of a good slang-free writer of 1945 sounds like Ye Olde English to modern ears, it will never really become dated.  Games hold up, shall we say, not quite so well.

Ehm, UO was developed as a niche product, but it turned out to be very profitable, and EA started taking those profits for granted.


I agreed with a lot of what he said and liked seeing him knock Jessica Mulligan on the first page.  I disagree with about 99% of the stuff I've seen her spew.

The "manifesto" is rather sensationlist.  I added there only for flavor really -- the Escapist piece is the real meat of it.


As far as glitz, the problem is that glitz is replacing substance these days.  And the essay correctly pin-points why this is: because glitz and not gameplay sells to execs and retail chains.  That's really why we need to get past the big publishing houses and Walmart, EB, Gamestop, et al.  By the way, were you trying to say that EB and Gamestop are better than Fry's and Walmart, schild?  Because they're not.  In a number of ways (like how they pander to the hype machine), they are worse.  Personally I buy almost everything either on EBay or Amazon.  I get the best price, it's always in stock, and I'm not supporting the worst of the retail outlets -- three wins.  The only loss is that I may get it a few days later and that is mitigated by not having to walk through a mall to get it.

It's not like the author of the essay or I are asking for permission to publish games that are ugly.  Instead we are trying to find ways to market games based on "fun" and not on the ability to sell it to a marketing exec at EA or at Walmart (or Gamestop).  And to keep creative ownership of the game while doing so.  It is possible to have good graphics and good gameplay.


Masturbation has nothing to do with it.  And in topics like this you always bring it up without any justification.  How about you actually tell me where he is wrong.  Do you know a lot about actually selling a game?  Because I actually do.  And the author is absolutely correct that selling most games (to a publisher, venture capitalist, retailer, etc.) requires pandering to marketing execs and retail execs and has very little to do with whether the actual game is fun.  A marketing exec can show a pretty picture on a slide and he can talk about how many polygons are being rendered.  But he has no way of selling fun gameplay through a slide-show (nor would any relevant exec understand him if he did).  This mentality of divvying development out based on graphics and render-counts is driving most of the decisions that result in the games we see on the market.  And it sucks and I can't see why we would want to continue it, as developers or gamers.  Neither of us are in a good position here.


Sure there are quite a number of good games.  But it shouldn't require sweat and tears to actually make a few bucks on a fun, off-beat title.  That a few decent ideas make it through the system doesn't mean that the system still isn't quite piss-poor.  I'm not saying that everyone who thinks they have a good idea needs to be handed thousands of dollars to make a game either.  Rather something in between.  The market right now sucks for promoting ideas.  Ideas, gameplay and "fun" have very little to do with 98% of the important decisions that lead to the games we get to play every year.

By the way, notice how many of the "innovative" titles these days come out for portables and not consoles.  The reason for this is of course that they market is a bit wider there and the budgets are a little lower.  Of course with the PSP that is not unlikely to start changing.  Not that I don't like the PSP, it's a great device.  I just see it as part of a natural progression to bring portable gaming into the same echelon as console gaming and that will have lots of different effects.


Gabe.

Also if you want to dismiss the article because the book and music industries also suck then I think you are missing the point.  Yes, they suck.  Publishers suck all around.  They stifle new ideas and make it very hard for a creator to maintain ownership of their ideas.

The point is that these are still far better off than the gaming market.  You can still easily find lots of off-beat, creative works, even in Barnes & Noble.  And these are both benefitting from online distribution.  I know a few people who have their books on Amazon and even make a few sales there -- and could never get their books on a shelf in a bookstore (outside of perhaps a university bookstore when used as textbooks).  iTunes and the internet music industry is doing good things for music.  Etc.

Even if we can't immediately step to a perfect solution we need to find ways to at least start heading in the right direction.  If we were at least as good as books or music then that would still be better than we are today.

Gabe.

/homecoming queen clap

I don't think you understand. Most people here agree with what he said - we've heard it before. What's the next step? Complaining is not a next step.

Five years ago this may have been very novel, now it is not. That's why people called it masturbation - these complaints are old hat now.

The article in question says exactly how it thinks we should move on from here and the author has quit his job to try to implement it.  That's not idle masturbation.  I'm saying I think he's nailed what most of the problems in the industry and I just hope he manages to get a following and at the very least you could say how you think he's doing things wrong.

Or maybe actually support this sort of thing.  Because you know, for any change like this to actually dent the market the following is going to have to happen:
Consumers, like you guys, have to stop complaining yourselves, stop masturbating over every new tidbit of hype that Sony/MS/EA/et al sends you and put your money where your mouth is.  And actually support a developer that tries to do things differently instead of bringing out The Hate at any idea that deviates slightly from the norm and is expressed in a slightly different manner than you might like.

Gabe.

I don't bring out the hate. I bring out the reality. The reality of it is that he/they don't have enough money to do it. The reality of it is that it's all pretty knee-jerk. The reality of it is that people have failed in the past and I don't see what makes this attempt any different. The reality of it is that outside of these types of communities, no one knows who these people are. The reality of it is that it's still masturbation.

That said, I'd like him to succeed. I'd like to read more about it. But I'm not getting my hopes up.

If he releases something I want I'll buy it. I'm hardly a raving fanboy, and unlike many people on this board, I won't complain about a game and still pay for it. I'm not playing any MMORPGs right now because none appeal to me. I'm not buying a next gen system until I have good reason to. I bought a GarageGames development license.

I don't see how GarageGames isn't already doing what he is talking about to some extent anyway. I guess GG looks like it sells only Torque games but I think they are open to other things.

What Marg said. When I get bored I stop playing. If it's a good game and I hear about it I'll play it, regardless of production values or glitz. Something devs need to realize, however, is

As to the first article, welcome to creative endeavours meet business reality.  You don't like it, you can go and do your own thing and hope you sell enough via whatever distribution you find to pay your bills.  It happens in Art, Architecture, Design, Music, Photography and other 'true' arts every day. People make a meager living doing it because they love it while people like myself say it's stupid to do so and continue to shit-out subdivisions that look like every other or those by-the-dozen paintings you can buy at Target.  Very few people ever achieve the success to be able to do both A and B in any of these fields.

Railing against the machine is futile. It's there and it's not going away because it provides a product people want at a price they'll accept. You can only do the best you're able to do by working within it or hope you can survive by working outside of it.

All I see in the article is a guy saying 'this sucks, wah' over and over. The second article he's at least trying.  He's still wrong, because people are going to prefer brick & mortar sales for a long time.  Look at the warm reception Steam got among the gaming crowd.   Oh wait, it didn't, it was Lukewarm at best.  A few folks love the idea a few folks hate it and the majority couldn't care less, except for the fucking authenitcation that keeps going down.

   Digitial distribution is in it's infancy and it won't catch on in large part for another 10-15 years, as the youngin's now adopt it and accept it.. like every other technological breakthrough.  Don't fall into the trap of your own techiness saying "no way, they'll accept it before that" just because you do and you wish everyone else would.  HDTV hasn't even penetrated the market in large part yet, and home computers only achieved widespread penetration in 99, so there's no way you're going to get DD penetration in just a few years.

So instead of the corporate whoring he advocates.. an indie publisher one-stop.  Which, of course, will just become another EA the way he's selling it.  Indie music & films became 'trendy' because a few of them made big bucks, so larger companies bought them out and are playing corporate shell games while promoing them.  True indy music isn't heard on the radio, and it isn't advertised in the way he seems to think it is.  I imagine the same is true for films.

  Selling counterculture is just corporate whoring in a different package.  Do real 'goths' shop at Hot Topic?  Would real 'hardcore indy gamers' shop at a site with such lame marketing as "Tired of sloppy x-box seconds?".  I sure wouldn't, I think it's insulting.  But kids are dumber so perhaps they would, and they're the ones you're going to have to change, not me.

I still say it's pie-in-the-sky. The biggest stumbling block is people want and expect something physical.  Christmas, birthdays, anniversarys, or 'good job' presents are expected to be physical objects.  How lame is it to get gift certificates instead of the actual object?  It's be doubly lame to get a printed cert or e-mail with a download code.  So until that aspect of consumer culture changes, the B&M stores are still what you need to work through.  And for that, if you want to sell, you'll have to go through the publishers.

If there's an example community anywhere that does this it would be this one.  I'm nowhere near as aggressive an early adopter as most here but I invest in stocks and I invest in myself/family.  I don't invest in games but simply consume the service when something comes along that's interesting.  Considering my disposable time decreases as I get older such products pretty much have to be complete the day they open their doors.  Viewing the wreckage of flawed MOG launches over the last few years it appears I'm among the majority.

I think Teh Hate has finally died out here except with a few folks whose opinions are pretty flaky anyway.  To my relief - it always grated on my nerves.

It's in the indies' aggregate interest to pool into co-ops or even cartels.  Strength in numbers matters.


And yet iTunes now sells more music digitally than is sold in packaged form.  Every console maker also accepts that their future revenue comes from software/content electronic distribution and are aggressively tryng to lock in those channels hence why I think Nintendo in the next decade will be remembered much how we view Atari and Magnavox from the 80s (and for the same reasons).

Your numbers should be in months not years.

Who's using iTunes?  Nobody I know except the one guy who owned an iPod.  That's who iTunes is selling to, iPod owners, so I view them as separate in the discussion of digital distribution.  People who buy iPods see iTunes as part of the bundle.   Unless you're suggesting that every computer is going to come with digital download software and an integrated service with the sale.  Then you're once again outside of the arena of small time publishers and you're poking into MS and yet another monopoly lawsuit.

iPods might be big among geeks and early adopters, but in big terms I'd hardly say they have enough market penetration to say digital distribution is a rousing success.  There's fewer iPods out there (http://advisor.investopedia.com/news/05/AAPL_Rotten_to_the_Core.aspx) after 4 years than PS2s in the first 5 years (http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/050603e.pdf) I'd hardly call the iPod a well-penetrated product since gamers are a much smaller niche than music listeners.  But their sales are picking-up, as Apple pushes the price down so who knows, perhaps people WILL become more accustomed to it sooner than I think.  However, adaptation of other tech used by a broader base hasn't been any faster, so I'm pretty comfortable with my estimate.

I find it funny that I wrote an article saying pretty much exactly what St. Gabe said in this thread many months ago, and Gabe shouted me down for it, boiling my article down to me calling devs stupid.

Even using the inflated numbers from RIAA iTunes moves more music than the illegal p2ps. (http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,15547697^15343^^nbv^15306-15317,00.html)

Over a year ago they sold over 3 million individual songs (not including albums) in a single week. (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/may/05itunes.html)

The trend is well established and the record companies know they're losing ground. (http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=38439)

You may not like iPod but they are basically the same business model as a game console.  Not surprisingly there is huge overlap between console players and mobile music listeners.  And overlap with people who use mobile phones as more than just a mobile phone, which is why Apple's collaboration with Motorola is just huge and took away the one last ace recording companies had up their sleeve.

Microsoft has made it very clear they see future revenue growth in selling content over their platform products.  Starting with the 360.

This trend is moving much faster than you give it credit - perhaps because you're confusing a global business trend with your life experience of a single iPod-owning friend.

I see tons of people around with iPods. I think digital distribution is not that bad. We already have the fileplanet Direct2Drive stuff, Steam, etc. The problem people have with Steam is that it is flaky and the DRM stuff kind of gets in the way.

I don't think a game with solely digitial distribution is going to sell as many copies as GTA, but it doesn't have to. Some of the things from PopCapGames do well enough, and those are digital only.

I think the idea that we need to replace the publisher model is separate from having a place where indie games can be sold online. The second is very doable. The first will take a much longer length of time.

Uhh, because you did. :)  You only wanted to talk about developers furiously masturbating as though it was all their fault that the market is as fucked up as it is.

Your article was about how indie developers just need to band together and share source code and art and stuff as though it would magically solve all their problems.  And the fact is that they already do all that.  But they still are awaiting (and trying to build) a market that will actually support products that don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars of marketing behind them.  A much more real problem for indies is the insane cost of entry that consumers have allowed publishers to put on the market.

Changing this is going to require two things:

1) Better distribution systems that avoid publishers and retailers who (mostly) only fuck up the games and take the profits.
2) Consumer adoption and support.  Nothing can happen without that.

And these are the points I was harping on months ago.  I was saying then that what we need is an iTunes for games and to get there we need consumer support.  Grass roots support for which is something which can best happen in fringe boards like this. 

Instead of furiously masturbating, indie developers like the author of this paper are furiously trying to make a market where fun games can be bought and sold.  Consumers just have to meet them halfway.  And somehow we need to get rid of the retail/publisher dependencies and the hype machine.  Buy from Amazon or Ebay, even that is better than buying from Gamestop or Best Buy (let alone Walmart).  Put up free ads for indie games on your websites.  Give news coverage of new attempts to create internet distribution mechanisms -- even if most of these attempts will likely fail.  Try to create some hype for stuff that doesn't come from EA, et al.  Stop reiterating existing bullshit hype like: OMG, the next consoles are going to be better than PC's.  Actually try out some of the innovative ideas that do make it to the surface of our industry before you rant about how bloody awful they are.

And get over this stupid, unfounded stereotype of "furiously masturbating game developers".  What basis does this prejudice have and what purpose does it serve?  All I see it doing is serving as a rallying point to piss on anyone who actually tries to innovate.  Are there assholes making games? Sure. Assholes exist.  Almost everywhere. But you act as though a few assholes define the entire industry.

Gabe.

It sounds like a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument from here.  You're saying companies need consumer support to produce good games, while some of us are saying companies need to produce good games to earn consumer support. 

I mean, there's that old expression:  Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.  With regards to this Indie Gaming thing, it sounds to me like we're sitting around debating proposed designs this path could take, and assuming that maybe someone will take care of the mousetrap aspect at some point.

As I see it, either you can make a good game or you can't.  If you can't, I won't buy it, regardless of how awesome your distribution scheme is.  It's great if you're being creative and doing what you love, but don't expect me to finance it.  On the other hand, if you can make a great game, I'd buy it off your notepad-spawned Geocities page if I had to.  No, you're not going to be the next John Romero, driving around in your gold plated elephant-drawn wheeled submarine, but you could make a living doing it.  Some people already do, and have for some time. 

It seems to me that this element (can I make a good, profitable game on a low budget) is more pivotal than revamping the whole publisher/retailer relationship.  If you can make good games without them, this issue will resolve itself rapidly.  If not, you're going to have serious problems getting it started.

About the most relevant example I can think of is webcomics.  A decade ago, they basically weren't viable.  Comic book (Marvel, DC, et al.)  publishers look at the internet and can't see a real, effective way of distributing their stuff online.  Scott McCloud publishes a book, "Reinventing Comics," and rifles off a few ideas on how you could make a profitable online comic business, which bears a number of superficial similarities to this conversation.  Fast forward a bit: a few comics become very popular, experiment with various payment schemes.  Now, there are a number of people making a living off of online comics, and a lot more who use them to suppliment their regular income.  But McCloud's ideas (at least with regards to business) are still not widely accepted; most comics do things very differently.  Almost all the real progress has come from people "on the ground" so to speak, who have a successful comic on their hands and are looking for ways to earn some money off it.  But the product came first, and they designed a solution around it.  They didn't look particularly hard at "Reinventing Comics," and why should they?  It was all just theoretical stuff, and they had a real property to sell to real people.

If we're going to see any real progress with the idea of "Indy" game shops, someone needs to come up with a great product first.  People will need to want to buy it.  Any significant reform we get is going to come after that.  Everything we do until then is just "Reinventing Games."

It's called a "website." Welcome to 1997!

Seriously, what is hard about this? There are already websites that sell games. You can already buy full games online. The technology is there.

It's a matter of someone setting up a websites and finding some decent games to put on it. The second is the hard part. I still haven't heard how this is different than GarageGames.

First of all, the web comic revolution never would have happened if people on the net didn't start getting excited about it.  If everyone had sat on their asses and said, "it's just masturbation it will never touch REAL comics" then web comics would still be a dead art.


Yeah and no.  There are good indie games already.  More importantly there is a LOT of talent out there that really wants nothing more than to just make good, fun games and could care less about the hype, the franchises, the licensing, the marketing, and all the general crap in the market that tends to make games suck.  So it's not like the resources aren't there to make very good games.

It is not in the interest of a publisher to let this talent loose however.  They don't get anything from doing this.  Sure they might get a few titles out of it but by and large the more open the market is to talent and innovation the less their market share will become.  The market gets too chaotic and spreads out to lots of individuals instead of the one monolith.  It's simply good business for them to stifle innovation and keep putting out the same sort of crap -- as long as they can get away with it. Which brings us to this:


Money is an issue.  A developer can starve themselves or work after hours on a game, but their won't be an explosion of really good indie games until it becomes possible for indies to pay for their time with their work.  But that's not the biggest problem for indies.  The biggest problem is that the cost of entry into the legitimate market is too high.  You may be able to make a good game on a minimal budget but if you can't get it to the real markets where people are actually buying games then you won't make money anyway.

Publishers do everything they can to increase the cost of entry into the market.  I wouldn't say it's evil, it simply happens to be in their best interests.  The Hype machine is their best friend.  Because in a market where hype is necessary to sell a game and where hype costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to create, only the big guys can compete.  On top of this are the costs to get any title on a shelf in any store or other market where Joe Gamer is actually going to shop which are significant and out of reach of any true independent.

That market is a product of producers and consumers.  On the producer end, we have publishers doing everything they can to shift the market away from smaller, independent game developers.  And on the other side of things, unfortunately, we have consumers buying it up like crazy.

Just read around these boards and see how many times you can spot someone buying into big publisher hype or talking about going to Gamestop, Walmart, et al, to buy a game.  Schild in a thread recently, for example, was trumpeting the next batch of consoles as "ahead of the [PC] curve" even though that is nothing but MS/Sony marketing bullshit and any and all comments from actual developers working on these consoles indicate that the next gen of consoles is still far behind the curve, will only barely be able to do high-def TV and are only slightly better than the last gen.

Now, read around to see how often an indie game gets hyped.  I'm not saying it doesn't happen.  I'm just saying that it is a rare event.  What we need is more hype for indie games.  Who cares if not every indie game or new distribution scheme lives up to expectations?  It's not like every EA/Vivendi/Sony/MS game lives up to expectations -- far from it.  Most of the time when any company or individual tries to do some actual innovation, far from hype, we hear about what "masturbating" bastards they are and how they everything they touch is going to turn to shit.  And yet isn't this the direction we want gaming to go?

It's not about developers needing to make all the changes.  Because most of the developers who actually have money, etc., don't want change and are selling their model quite well to consumers.  And those who do want to create change are trying to offer their talents and products and simply can't capture enough of a market to grow.  It's probably unfair to say that consumers need to make all the changes too.  Yes, there needs to be some good offerings out there before you can buy too hard into any concept.  But that's not what I'm saying anyway.  I'm saying that indies (and any developers trying to innovate) and consumers need to meet in the middle.  Indies and innovators need to keep trying to create new products.  But consumers need to help get the buzz going when they see something that might actually work or is at least headed in the right direction. 

Schild is a fanboy, we all know that.  :evil:

That said, I STILL haven't heard how this is different from GarageGames. I'm just going to keep saying that over and over again.

You mean like this (http://www.f13.net/reviews.php?subaction=showfull&id=1116014376&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&)? Or maybe this (http://www.f13.net/reviews.php?subaction=showfull&id=1122607631&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&)? You couldn't be talking about this kind of game (http://www.f13.net/reviews.php?subaction=showfull&id=1117825934&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&)? Or maybe you meant this (http://www.f13.net/reviews.php?subaction=showfull&id=1116723393&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&) game instead.

We do. We are. But mainly we talk about the shit that interests us.


MMOG's.

Sure, you reviewed an Indy game or two.  You still shit on innovation in general when it reaches the forum, support the retail market, hype big publishers far more than indie games, etc.  Blaming this on, "an MMOG developer touched me in a bad place" doesn't accomplish much except to further a prejudice that is anti-innovation and pro-hype.  Especially when most indy games aren't MMOG's.

GarageGames is good and I never said it wasn't nor did I say that Costikyan is the only independent effort out there.  I do think his essay nails most of the essential issues facing indie developers though.  And I think that Costikyan understands better than a lot of others that the fundamental problem for indie gaming is that of getting exposure to the gamer audience -- competing with and displacing the publisher's marketing machines.  GarageGames needs more hype, more buzz, more interest, more money.  And that's stuff that is going to need support from consumers to happen.   Talent and desire to create good games that gamers will enjoy isn't the bottleneck. And access to good tools has essentially become a non-issue as well, there are a lot of good, free or very cheap development tools out there.

Gabe.

I do my best to hype up any good indie game I find.  The problem is that the last several indie games I've found haven't been good, and I figure it doesn't really help the indie cause if I hype up bad games.

This is because 90% of everything is crap, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law) remember?

--GF

Innovation is the mother of all fuckups. Innovation is great when it works, it's total shit when it doesn't and it should be labeled as such. Horizons was innovative. The Virtual Boy was innovative. World War II Online was innovative. They were also total shit for games, unfun, buggy, a veritable black hole of suck from which no light can emerge. If a game doesn't touch me in the goonies in a good way, or worse, kicks me right in the chao sack when I try to play, it deserves all the scorn and derision I can heap on it. Consider it the forum version of the MMOG death penalty.

Meanwhile, Starport and A Tale in the Desert were both innovative and fun, and didn't make their users want to stab the developers with pointy sticks. And I have "hyped" both, in either reviews, my forum posts, or in my commentary articles. Mythic, who is still an indy developer, is a crew that I have constantly said should be emulated, at least from a business and design perspective. It's only been when they've muddled their game beyond belief, or tried to convince me Romans in Space and Warhammer of Camelot are the next big things that I've given them shit.


Like most Americans, I shop on price. The retail market (EB) usually gives me the best price AND I get to trade in my old games for more money off. I win.


Yes, because articles like this (http://www.f13.net/commentary.php?subaction=showfull&id=1103043716&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&), this (http://www.f13.net/commentary.php?subaction=showfull&id=1100125293&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&), and this (http://www.f13.net/commentary.php?subaction=showfull&id=1116003045&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&) do so much to hype the big publishers.


MMOG's are my thing. I like to muse about them because I think they hold the most business and design potential, and am utterly disgusted at how shittily developers have handled the implementation of them. See innovation above. I should still be playing and loving Shadowbane for the innovation it brought to the table, yet I'm still lamenting the fact that all that potential got pissed away on ego and hype.

I am also utterly disgusted at the way developers let publishers rape the industry. And I do believe that direct marketing to gamers and direct distribution is a better model than what we currently have. Which is what I said months ago that you disagreed with, apparently because I view many developers as furiously masturbating with phat publisher money instead of producing and distributing games on their own.

In essence, I'm agreeing with what you have said, only you told me that wouldn't work many times over the last few months. So color me surprised at your response to this article. I guess when the Escapist says it, it must mean something.

The number 1 problem is better games. Without great games this is all academic. Exposure for mediocre games does nothing.

In my experience this is almost never true.  EB frequently marks up above the suggested retail.  Amazon.com often offers at below suggested retail.  And EB gives incredibly crappy prices for buying or selling used games.  If you want a good deal selling your old games or buying new ones you need to go to EBay.  On top of that, items are almost always in stock at Amazon or EBay. 

I've bought two games from Amazon at below suggested retail when EB still had a $5 premium on their copy (in one case) or were out of stock.  Over the past few months ago I've purchased a DS (used but in perfect condition) and 5 games from Ebay for $160 after shipping.  I was in a mall and asked the guys at EB what they wanted for one of these games and they offered me $5 (to put it back on the shelf at $20).  Ended up selling it to the guy next in line to me for $10 and saw it was worth 12-15 on EBay.  I believe I've only only purchased one game in the mall this year and that's just because I'm a weak-willed being who couldn't wait an extra couple of days for for AWDS.

Gabe.

EBGames prices everything at exactly the retail value. Saying anything else is utter bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. Also, making an extra $2-$5 is not worth the hassle that is Ebay. Time is money man, and Ebay is a black hole.

I'd still like you to show me where EBgames "frequently" marks up above MSRP. Because they don't.

By the way, thanks for learning how to use the quote function.

In every EB I've ever been to in West LA.  Example, Untold Legends.  I wanted to get that for my PSP three or four months ago.  It was sold out at every Best Buy I tried.  The only EB that I saw it in had it for $44.95.  "List Price" according to Amazon is and was $39.99.  And they were selling it for $36.95 (just checked my order history).

I frequently see DS/PSP titles in the EB's around me for $5-$10 above the "list price" according to Amazon.  At least in the period of a few weeks after a release.  By the time the prices drop they're sold out anyway.  That's being the other problem with EB's here.  They never fricking have any more decent games.  They have buttloads of all the crap releases but the good stuff always gets sold out and seemingly never restocked.  If I ask when "X" will be around I tend to get told vague bullshit like, "we might have that next Friday".  Gee, thanks.

Gabe.

Ya know, I'm going to go out on a limb here and just flat out say you're insane. EB prices for new product are nationwide. I worked at EB shortly after the PSP launch and bought 8 of the PSP launch titles the day before the system came out. Untold Legends was $39.99. Also, you know exactly how the preorder business with EBgames works. If you don't preorder and/or spend a couple hundred a month there (in other words, they know who you are), they simply don't care. They get inventory off preorders. Also, 99% of the time, EBGames have stuff in stock. But the employees are holding copies for themselves. If there are copies in stock, the warehouse won't ship new copies to the stores. I'm not saying it's important to be special or known at your local game shop, but it helps if you want new releases and don't want the hassle of preordering.

Also, all the decent games are hidden for the customers they like - just like new releases as I mentioned above.

You can call me insane all you like.  Doesn't change the fact that I ordered from Amazon exactly because the extra price at EB pissed me off.  I've changed my buying patterns in the last six months and there are two reasons for it:

1) Working in the gaming industry  it is a lot more apparent to me that the retail market is a bad thing.
2) I've consistently found I could get things cheaper online.

And fuck pre-orders with all that other marketing bullshit (love how you every time you even say hi to an EB employee you get a 15 second preamble of advertisements for whatever shit title they want you to pre-order).  I'm not hyped up to the point where I need to remember when release day is, give money a month in advanceor suck up to EB employees just to get a copy of something.

In LA, to actually get a decent price on something and know it will be in stock, I depend on Amazon and it works quite well for me.  And for the used market, EBay completely destroys the prices that EB or any other retailer offers.  Whether you are buying OR selling.

Gabe.

You call it sucking up. I call it getting my way.

So, who do you work for "in the gaming industry?"

Yes, I'm baiting you.

You guys did a great job of derailing this thread. EB may or may not charge $5 more for game...wow that's an exciting discussion!

If your local EB charges more, don't shop there. How did you guys turn this into multiple paragraphs?

I call ordering from Amazon/EBay "getting my way for less money and less hassle". *smirk*

I've been lead programmer for two games with a company called Sennari.  www.sennari.com.  Starting work on a third game as we speak.

The company did some GBC, GBA and PS1 work and a GC title and now has moved on to mobile gaming and services.  If you've ever played a bowling game on a cell phone that's almost certainly ours (it was and probably still is the most popular mobile game in the US).  It's not the sexiest work in the world but I enjoy it and I get to meet a lot of interesting people.  It's a lot better than grad school was.

That satisfy you? :)

Gabe.

You did better than Bruce. He worked on some MUDS I think. But I can explain why the folks who sell mobile phone games don't have high regard for EBGames employees. They think you're a joke. The kiddie table. And compared to Japan, the mobile phone game market in America IS the kiddie table.

That said, Margalis, the original stuff was and still is masturbatory bullshit - and as I said before I'd like to think some of it will happen, I'd like someone to put enough money towards making some of it happen...but will some of it happen? Probably not.

(http://www.f13.net/images/JamDatSpot_small.jpg)

You mean that?

Schild, leave him alone.  I want him to answer Haemish's post more fully, rather than get pulled into a 'my job's better than your job' discussion...

This wasn't about my job, nitwit. It was 100% about the fact he said he was "in the industry" and I wanted to know where. Knowing where now I understood fully where most of his opinions on the game industry come from. You may or may not know, here in America the mobile phone sector is publically laughed at by the people who work at stores like EBGames, CompUSA, etc. The industry is doing well, and there's a huge future there. Unfortunately our cell phone networks don't support anywhere near what they'd need to (and our phones are pretty much universally shit) for some of the games that exist in the world today. I'm fairly certain there isn't a single phone from any American company that would run Crisis Core (the final fantasy mobile phone game) acceptably. But even then, it would take a hell of a game to really break the market wide open. It's a shame the NGage was such a terrible piece of shit. The idea was brilliant. Also, your average American gamer has a better way of playing games - a PSP, DS, GBA, whatever. There's no reason whatsoever to play games on a mobile phone. But if I lived in Japan or China or even S. Korea? Shit yeah I'd be playing mobile phone games. You couldn't pay me to carry around my precious portable systems. Too many people. There's a different mentality east of here towards portable gaming. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if it's completely different in parts of Europe as well. But I can say this, it's a long hard road ahead of the cell phone game folks before they aren't considered tacky chintz and can actually compete with the double headed dragon of Sony and Nintendo for retail gaming market shelfspace. And this concludes my explanation as to why Gabe is such a staunch supporter of this "Death of the Industry" shit. Of course, I may be completely wrong about the quality of phones and phone networks in America, but I don't think I am. I KNOW for a fact exactly how the gaming retail industry treats the cell phone games sector: as if it had the plague.

Anyway... I wouldn't mind seeing Gabe respond to Haem either considering how definitive his post was. In other words, Haem is 100% right in what he's saying - particularly the opinion parts and that part about us not caring either way really about what happens to the mass market folks. I, for one, will stick up for the little guy nearly 99% of the time. But this current situation is that 1% where I'm not following a burning plane.

Actually I've never had a conversation in a game store about my job.  I don't walk around with a sign on my back saying "mobile game programmer".  Also I didn't say that my games were to be sold in the US. So that has very little to do with my opinion of those stores.  Most of what has influenced me is working with and meeting people who have worked across all strata of the industry.  I've got to hear a lot of stories about working with publishers and the development process and the underlying theme is that retail/publishers fuck up games far more often than anyone else.  For the reasons I've mentioned already and more.

To discuss mobiles for a second:
Yes, there are different cultures mobile usage patterns and cultures in the US versus Asia or Europe (Europe is also far ahead of the US in terms of mobile usage .  It's incorrect, however, that there aren't mobile phones in the US which can't handle high-end games.  Treos and Blackberry's and other "smart" phones are certainly available here.  These guys have decent screens, decent memory, lots of storage space.  They do have really crappy control interfaces but they can do some decent high-end stuff -- there are already several 3d libraries for mobiles which do work on some if not all US phones.  It's more the problem that the carriers are still supporting the older phones and to get a game published/distributed by a carrier (necessary if you are going to reach more than a small % of the market) you need to guarantee that you can support most of their phones.  You can write a great game for a high-end phone but to actually sell it you're probably going to have to make it work on 128x128 or lower resolution.  For a lot of older phones the total game, including graphics and code, has to be below 64kb.  That's quite a hurdle to overcome while still keeping any fun gameplay.  Actually that's one thing I enjoy about the market.  It's fun to try and crank out a complete and fun game with those constraints.  As a coder I'm best at optimization-fu.

As far as the 99%:1% thing you have yet to say, schild, why you think Costikyan is wrong.  Not in his manifesto which is fun to read but sensational, but in his Escapist piece.  Personally I'm guessing it has more to do with me posting it than with any of the actual ideas in the post.

Gabe.

I don't know about other places, but generally speaking, in my area if there is a lower price on a game, that price is at EB. Occasionally other places like Wal-Mart or Best Buy will sell it for cheaper, but on the whole, EB is either at list or below. AND they have a ton of used games for less than list price, which the others do not have.

And for Ebay? Fuck that, convenience over the little amount of money you'd get on Ebay. It's just not worth it.

EDIT:

The next big MMOG company that will hit it like Mythic did? They'll finance it with the profit from mobile phone games. Maybe 5 years from now. The shit is extremely profitable compared to any other type of video game, because the budgets are just so fucking low.

The fact that the NGage got made at all shows that the Euro market (Nokia being a Euro company) is a bigger mobile phone game market than the US. That will change, but only when the carriers upgrade and the phones stop sucking ass. Oh and wireless net access on phone plans goes down in price.

The article in question is mental masturbation, about topics I've already covered. It's also in the Escapist, which makes me discredit it on general principle. Sure, some of it's probably right, but saying "Death to the retail market" is stupid. It isn't going away, ever. At least not until they can transport physical goods over the Net. So not in our lifetimes. The retail market will help keep the indy market afloat. Saying that indy games are automagically better (or more valuable) products because they are indy is high school stupidity. Everyone wants the same thing, to make money selling their game, the indy just chooses a harder road. So be it.

But come with the good fucking game or shut the fuck up.

Haemish:

I do think we agree on some of the directions the industry needs to go.  I just think that we disagree on most of the details of why and how.  And that's why I faulted your past article.

Until consumers get more involved there isn't money to support an indie market.  It's impossible that the indie market can go overnight from bust to boom just because a few developers want it to.  Developers already want more control.  They are already working longer hours than they'd like for the wrong bosses and see their games get fucked up.  But they can't change that without money.  So the masturbation comments are moot and only piss off the people you should be trying to support if you want real change.

I believe I said back then that I agreed that retailers need to go away.  I just don't agree with the "why" of it.  It's not that retailers take a cut of the profits -- that in itself would be fine.  It is that they control the market and the direction of the market more than the people who actually have the know-how and they have a vested interest in continuing the Hype and avoiding innovation or change that might damage their business model.

Most of your angst in the past article was misplaced.  It was directed at the developers themselves when it is mostly the executive folk who fuck up the game.  Most of your complaints had to do with marketing or retail and having to sell games through people that judge games not on the gameplay but on things like: is it a good license, is it a good franchise, how pretty are the graphics and what's the feature list?  Almost none of your complaints actually were the result of intellectual masturbation. 

Your perception of Joe Developer was vastly different from my experience meeting developers from all segments of the industry and I said so.  You were ranting at and faulting the wrong people.  You were shitting on the very people who need your support if they are going to get any positive changes.  You were giving patronizing advice like, "learn some business" and "share some code", that had no insight into where developers actually are.  Developers (indie and not) already share copious amount of code and there are already very good free libraries available for most of what indies need to do.  There are lots of intense discussions in the indie field about how to market the games and if anything the problem is that developers know economics too well to start working on indie projects.  They know that until the market is actually supported by consumers, they won't be able to make a living there.  I'd love to do indie work myself but I'm also starting a family and my assets right now are dwarfed by grad school debt.  So until there is a market, my indie work will have to be reserved for a couple hours here and there when I get time after work.

We do agree on some things.  I just think you need to incorporate a view of where the developers are at into your mindset if you are really going to have anything useful to say about the issues.  You are asking developers to make all the changes and instantly serve up on a plate exactly what you want.  But until they start to see some reliable income from going indie there isn't a path to get there.  Market changes like that can only happen slowly and only with consumer support.

Amazon is almost always cheaper (edit: and you can buy used games there).  EBay isn't that inconvenient.  Get a bidsniper program and just put a bid down in the morning, check in the evening to see if you won.  If money is your concern you won't find it cheaper to buy or get nearly as much money selling.

And the problem is really that we are stuck in a local minima.  There's no way out without possibly going through some inconvenience.  On the one hand you are asking developers to starve themselves to make you the games you want.  On the other hand you aren't even willing to wait a few days in shipping to get a game just to stop supporting a retail market that is bad for the industry.

Gabe.

I fully agree with this and it's one of the reasons I'm more likely to refer to publishers rather than devs.  Being an hands-on IT architect myself it's rare when the implementors are the actual problem.

Developers who run their own shops, OR who work for the cocksniffers like EA, are the executive folk who fuck up the game.

The %'age of developers who run their own shop is incredibly small, almost small enough to not even be considered.  And these companies tend to put out better stuff.  But even they have to go through retailers and sell the to the lowest common denominator.

For the developers who work to EA we are back to the same thing:  you want developers to starve themselves to make the games you want, but you yourself aren't willing yourself to take the slightest inconvenience in how you buy your games to support the market changes you want.  I'd love to do indie work.  It just isn't feasible for my life right now.  And so I make mobile games instead (not for EA, but there are executive types involved) which is still fun and pays my bills.  It's not ideal for you as a consumer and it's not ideal for me as a developer but that's the local minima that the market is stuck in right now.  Moving away from that is going to take action from both sides.  There are lots of developers who want more control over their games.  Lots -- and they have the tools they need and even the business savvy (many of them do anyway).  Consumers have to find a way to make sure that their money ends up in the pockets of these developers and not in the pockets of EA, et al.  We can't force consumers to give us money.  And we can't just start turning out brilliant games until we can afford to quit our day jobs, hire other talented people and just sit down and do the work.

Gabe.

Where have I said developers should starve themselves? Never.

Mobile phone games. Development companies banding together to self-publish (Skotos.net is an example of that) all of their individual company's titles. Think of how GOD Games was supposed to be, before the peen-measurement got in the way. I have never and will never advocate the starving artist method, because it's not going to work for most people. Psychochild is an exception.

But working for EA? That's a choice, and nobody has to do it. Starving would be a better alternative.

Developers don't have to have publishers to get their products in the retail market. But they do need power, and one development company can't do that alone. Or are you going to try to tell me that if Bioware, Creative Assembly and Mythic all got together and pitched their products to EB as a bundle deal that EB would tell them to fuck off? 6 indy developers combined into one entity would most certainly wield almost as much negotiating power as Blizzard.

Of course, I also believe the PC gaming market IS coming to a screeching halt at the retail level. But I think that can only be a good thing.

You and schild both.

 :roflcopter:

Remember: I work for a small start-up'ish company (we're not a startup but in many ways we're very similar) working in the mobile space after having tried to get good operating funds off of other low-budget endeavors such as GBA titles.

It's not really like you make it out to be.  The mobile space is already almost closed and had issues to begin with.  EA, et al, are moving in as quickly as possible. 

To really make money with a mobile game you need to somehow get yourself on the carrier "deck".  I.e. the list of applications and games that are listed in the phone menu itself.  To do that you need to sell your game to a carrier (i.e. sell the idea).  The carriers themselves are the equivalent of retailers.  Only much more restrictive.  The development for one version of a mobile game is pretty straight-forward.  Maybe a 2-5 months with a programmer and an artist working full-time.  But then you have to port it to at least 20-50 handsets, depending on the carrier, before they will even consider it.  Then you have to get your game through a lot of testing.  And all that assumes that the carrier was interested in talking to you in the first place. 

Some money was made early on.  Jamdat made a lot of money with Jamdat Bowling for example.  Enough to become a publisher for the mobile world and start emulating EA.  My company, well, I'd love to use us as an example but unfortunately I can't.  We'll see where we're at in 5 years.  If you look around, the net is littered with literally thousands of mobile titles, many of them quite good given the technology they are on.  Most of these won't make any money.  Of those that do, most had licenses (i.e. "ESPN's Golf Challenge") and had someone to wine and dine the carrier folk, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

There was a window for mobile gaming and people ARE still making money there.  But it's not what you make it out to be -- a place full of money for game developers to go play around in for a few years and fund what they really want to work on.

The PC market is a much better place for the revolution to occur.  It's a much more open platform.  If consumers can get interested, there is no need to deal with publishers, retailers, carriers, etc.  There are good tools to build high-production quality games that will run on the machines of most of your target audience.  Mobile will make some dev houses some money and some of them will go on to fund good games on their own.  With every innovation we get a few early adopters that come out of it all with enough funding to do what they want to do.  But these are the exceptions and not the rule.  And there certainly isn't the momentum required to make ditching the publisher model feasible for the vast majority of developers.

As for skotos: yes, banding together is good.  And we see that happening all over the place.  But it doesn't magically conjure the money required to get a product on the shelves in EB.  You can stop trying to give two-bit business advice about stuff that indies have already been trying for some time.  It's obviously not enough, alone, to change the market.

I thought it quite reasonable your employer presents themselves as an overarching retention partner rather than a mobile games publisher.

I'm even more skeptical cell phone-based games are a huge market than I am Haem's & schild's insistence that consoles will edge out PC games to the status Mac owners "enjoy" currently.  Ring tones, obviously.  Convergence of phone and mp3 player, again obviously.  Convergence of phone and still/video camera, obviously.

But not games.  Form factor matters - people are getting larger, not smaller.  Particularly in the Asian markets.  Being comfortably middle-class has that effect.

Cell phone game hype is all too familiar to me as the b2b hype of six years ago.

Now handheld game devices are another story.  I do think that's as positively inevitable as the convergence examples I already gave.

You seem to think that I believe all of these things will happen magically and without any effort on the part of the developer, or that it will somehow turn the market into some grand socialist utopian scheme where every quality product makes money and all shit is destroyed. I don't. That's a ridiculous notion. You also seem to believe the same thing will happen with your idea. It won't.

The retail market won't go away and no one should want it to. Hell, despite my intense hatred for all things EA, I really don't want them to go down in a flaming pile of shit. Well, maybe them, but not all publishers. The industry needs that big money from the mass market to keep vital. Those pub houses and the retail market are GATEWAYS. They get people into the hobby, just like WoW brings people into MMOG's despite being the shallow and derivative.

The people who really want to game stay for better games, games they won't get from EA. They move on to buy Bioware games, to search the web for better, more in-depth RTS's than Starcraft, for more interesting role-playing than Diablo. The indy houses can be there to fill that need. But with the vast majority of the mass market, those indy games will never click, and that's ok.

An indy developer needs to reconcile himself with the idea that he'll never make more money (or as much money) as mass market products like Madden 20xx, but that he can live profitably and well making his own brand of decent games.

As for the mobile games, I didn't say that there was boatloads of money just sitting out there to be made. I said there was profit to be made. Profit = business stays afloat and gets to expand. There isn't some magical bees that bring money from the magical bee hive. There's working for a few years on multiple (hopefully profitable) mobile games to fund something a bit larger, using some of the same techniques Mythic used on DAoC to make a better quality title on the cheap. Modular, licensed software, perhaps some shared assets, maybe even a consistent brand or an upgrade of an earlier game system.

Nobody is going to hit the lottery in the indy market unless they get bought by the mass market. Trying to all be the Amazon's of the game industry will get you on the shitpile fast. But just like MMOG's, you don't have to be the biggest to be a happy developer. And you don't have to take some "FIGHT DA POWA!" high school wank attitude in order to do it.

As for PC vs. Console, PC games and developers would be better off focusing their efforts on the Internet as opposed to the retail chains anyway.

Uhhh.....thanks for putting a lot of words into my mouth?

I have been saying all along that developers and consumers need to meet halfway.  It can't happen if only one side is willing to try new stuff.  I absolutely agree that indie development will have to be niched and while I preach the abolition of retail I don't expect it to completely disappear.  Not for a while anyway.  Retail is bad for the quality of the market but it's a crutch that many people are unwilling to give up.  Retail and publishers will have to be circumvented more and more though, both by developers and consumers, if we are to get a significant indy market going.

And I absolutely disagree with the ease you assign to making money with some small project to fund the rest of your stuff.  And I'm in a pretty good position to know.  Mobile gaming, by and large, is NOT profitable.  Most people who go into it won't make a lot or any money.  Those who do will be exceptions, not the rule.  It's already a little late.  Most of the early-entrant profit has already been made and the market is looking more and more like the console market every day.  I would recommend going into PC shareware with casual titles myself.  The market is bigger and more open right now (more casual gamers actually playing on PC's as well as no need to work through the carriers), if not still quite hard to make a buck on. 

Gabe.

The console market is more profitable than the PC gaming market. Someone who wanted to make a big splash PC wise would be better served making a budget console game than a PC shareware game, if the mobile market isn't profitable.

Longtime PC game developers have shifted focus to console games (or simultaneous development of PC/console versions) because it is more profitable. Making a niche shareware title would be a bad idea, IMO.

That doesn't follow.  You are talking about the "average" title.  I am talking about casual, low-budget titles which have a larger PC market and are easier to do on a budget.  The idea of a "budget" title itself is very different between the two markets.

To be most clear, I am talking about exploiting the 35+ year old housewife dominated market of casual gamers.  How many 35 year old housewives have XBox's?

In short, I think you need to leave the business planning to people who have a lot more experience in the industry and get over yourself and the notion that all developers are stupid and you inherently know better.  Almost every idea you mention is being and has been tried dozens of timers over.  The market hasn't magically become what you want.  Ok, where do we go from there?

Gabe.

You're not going to change consumers. They're not going to meet you halfway.  Ever.  You have to sell to them, entice them, explain to them and educate them. You have drag them to you if you're not going to go to where they're at.  That's the way it is for every person trying to break in to every single established market out there.

 Indys need to make the large corps work against themselves by working at tighter profits, tighter payrolls, tighter resources.  My divison at work is being closed down not because we can't make money, but because we can't make ENOUGH money.  We're publicly traded and need to show 15-20% Profit after overhead, minimum.  Private builders around here work at 10% maybe 15% doing the exact same stuff. They're booming, we're closing our doors and going someplace else.

Bingo. Merusk gets a cookie.

One of the more sad things about the dot bomb era is how many people refused to build a business the old fashioned way and stay private as long as possible.  I've learned to steer clear regardless of sector of any business that whose controllers' sole business approach is acquisition and cashout.  The folks who benefit from that approach are a very small (and usually unethical) number and the employees are almost never see the reward for their work.

Best kind of company is run by some crusty guy/gal who doesn't believe in stock/options and instead emphasizes end of year bonuses.

Wow, way to be a condescending douchebag. I love how the exact same sins you accuse me of, are the exact same thing you are doing. I'm rubber, you're glue?

You program games. Would you like to tell me how many business plans you have produced for said games? I am going to wager that you have produced less than two and more like zero. So either we should both shut the fuck up and stick to what we know, or continue making conjectures based on our personal experiences, beliefs and individual knowledge and have a goddamn discussion about it, you fucking arrogant sack of monkey nuts.


I bet there are a shitton more 35+ year old housewives with mobile phones than there are housewives with computers and the knowledge required to find, download and install an indy PC game. If that's the market you are trying to target in order to make enough money to make a big spalsh PC game, you are better off making a fucking web version of parlor games in Java that can also be ported to cell phones fairly easily. There, two markets with 1.5 codebases and shared art assets. See how easy that was?

Or maybe it wasn't easy. Perhaps that market is already swallowed up the Pogo.com's of the world. Why are you targeting what are in essence NON-GAMERS. 35+ year old housewives don't play the kind of big splash PC games we are talking about, so the experience in design you'd gather from making a game that does hit that market doesn't translate very well. Your eventual market, i.e. more hardcore gamers who will actually search out and buy innovative indy games, will look at your previous design experience in the same light as the guy who made Mary-Kate and Ashley games. You'll have to work twice as hard to get that indy audience's respect.

Now if you make a cell phone/web version of Go or Space Invaders, you won't be quite so easily dismissable. That's marketing.

Also, Merusk has the right of it. You aren't going to make consumers meet you anywhere they don't think they want to go. You have to convince them, entice them, shit the only thing consumers can be made to do is run away from your product, say if it causes cancer or something. That's why marketing, even and especially for the indy shops, is so important. The publishers succeed because they utilize big marketing budgets to make sure you know their game is coming and it will be the BESTEST EVAR! Sure, it's retarded, but it works.

They can get on TV. Indy devs can't. But that doesn't mean indy devs are powerless to sell their games, they just have to be more canny about it, more efficient with their marketing dollars, and make sure their games don't suck, aren't buggy and are an order of magnitude different/better than what the consumer can get elsewhere from the big guys.

Same holds for publishers, developers.  You aren't going to make them start making games in a different way until you give them a reason to.  Hmm, quit my job and work on a game that probably won't make me money.  Or hold a nice job, save up some money for a family, and have some fun if not quite as much fun.  Easy decision for me.  If I try to do anything else it's for me, asshole, not you.

As far as making business plans.  I've made about the same number as you.  But I am at least working in the industry and seeing the nuts and bolts of how things work.  I'm not saying "there is profit in mobile games" because it sounds good and furthers a prejudice I have that developers have all sorts of options and are simply douchebags that choose not to exercise them.  I'm telling you that I work with people all over the mobile industry and I know, more or less, what kinds of money is being made and by whom.  And while plenty of money is being made very little of it is going to indies.


There are a lot of 35 year old housewives with mobile phones.  But they still play more casual games on PC's.  Most of them don't play any games on their phone.  It's not as conducive to their playstyle and they aren't the ones who are savvy about phone technology -- their kids are.  That market hasn't matured yet -- it probably will but not for 10 years.  A contributing factor is that communit is very important.  Far better than a hearts game is a hearts community where the 35 year old house wife can meet her Hearts friends and play a few rounds -- and phones aren't ready for that yet, the interfaces suck and the connectivity sucks more even in Europe.  And even if that 35 year old housewife is interested in casual games on her mobile phone, she's going to buy the one that is at the top of the list of the games section on her phone menu.  Not the one that she has to surf around the internet to find and figure out how to install through her web services on the phone.  You aren't going to get on that menu unless the carrier gives a shit about you -- which leaves most indies out in the cold.  Almost all money in mobile gaming is being made by companies who can get their games "on the deck" and those are mostly the estabished publisher types or people who, guess what, work through a publisher.

Are you done explaining my own industry to me yet?  Or is there some other useless, made-up bullshit business advice you'd like to give me?

Gabe.

And this is different for mobile titles?  Have you played many mobile titles.  Technologically they are probably behind casual PC games.  The most "hardcore" mobile titles right now are 2d platformers.  At least with PC casual games you can develop a good 2d engine and target a medium that is similar to your final PC or console target.  I'd say that designing for both markets is probably a lot more interesting than you give credit for, but mobiles have no edge over PC casual games for "learning".  For mobiles, as an indie, you're also going to have to port your game to 20-50 phones (publisher types will farm this out to an in-house or other porting group).  Are you going to learn a lot from that?  No, not really.  Unless knowing that Nokia phones have fucked up sound and don't implement certain API functions is actually useful for making a 3d shooter, etc.  And it rather debunks the whole notion that you can just write a java game for the web, once, and have a mobile game too.  It's going to be work to make that work on one phone, let alone 20-50.

I don't think pogo.com has taken over the market for these casual games.  Check out, for example:
http://www.dexterity.com/articles/
if you want some actually qualified advice about the shareware casual market.  I think this article overhypes but read it too:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/14

Gabe.

Don't quit your day job.

Also, don't link me to another fucking Escapist article. Jesus Fucking Christ and Muhammed could write on there and I WILL NOT READ IT.

Zee goggles...!

God damn this thread is retarded.

Anyone who thinks they can build up dev studio by starting on mobile games should go ahead and try it. Good luck! You would be better off saying "open a successful laundromat then get into the games business with the profits." Only, opening a successful laundromat is probably easier.

So you just made a kick ass mobile game...now what? Seriously. Put it on your homepage and hope people download it? I would hazard to guess that 1% of mobile games make 99% of the money. Mobile games are like PC games, only worse. They are easier to make than PC games, but at the same time harder to sell. At least with a PC game you can get your download on FilePlanet or some press in Gamespot or something like that.

If you are an indie studio PC gaming is the only way to go, because it's the only way to distribute anything without having connections.

That is part of the problem - Haem and Gabe are striving for agreement across non-compatible sectors.  Problem is neither personality is at all concerned about synergy.  Just debate positions.

Which is a nice way of saying...

(http://www.elviscostello.info/pic/no_prima_donna.jpg)

I like Van Morrison.

Me too.

That woman scares me though.

Sorry to post before I finished reading the entire thread (and sorry I missed the thread in the first place, it's been a BUSY week!)

Speaking of Indies, more hype, more buzz, more interest, and more money...we just got finished with the Indie Game Convention (http://www.indiegamescon.com) this past weekend, and I wanted to say just a couple of things:

1) We officially announced the first "Indie" game available for XBox 360: Marble Blast Ultra. All comments about Marble Blast aside (FYI, the major addition was multi-player) good or bad, I thought it was pretty amazing that Microsoft themselves brought the very first playable XBox 360's in North America available to the public to an Indie games conference. The buzz is at the corporate level, and it's going to filter down, and hopefully sideways as well as sites like this become more and more aware of various Indie efforts. I want to say that again: the first publically playable XBox 360's in North America (Amsterdamn X05 beat us by about a week) were at a convention for Indie Game developers...

2) We saw some pretty damned amazing innovation at the conference (much in rough demo form, but some extremely polished)--including the winner of the "Most Innovative" category, a game called "Facade". This was literally cartoon graphics, but the gameplay mechanic was carried off very well: The precept is that you as the player have caused an argument between a couple, and you must convince them to get back together. Sounds hokey, but it honestly got some amazing playtime as people tried it out, and became extremely addicting to both male and female players alike very quickly. It's obviously targetted at the female casual gamer market, but it was amazingly innovative and addictive.

3) NCSoft (Steve Snow, Publisher rep for Auto Assault), Microsoft (Greg Canessa, Microsoft Casual Games and Katie Stone (EDIT: Sorry, she's not REALLY married to Steve Snow!), XBox Live Arcade Program Manager), GDC (Chris Crawford), Popcap (James Gwertzman), Ageia (Tom Lassanske), and Oberon (Dave Nixon) all had speakers at the conference, and spent quite a bit of time looking at the casual game and serious-but-indie game offerings that were demo-ed at the show.

Ironically, the biggest challenge IMO now is for the "indie movement" to avoid being swallowed up by the big names as it becomes more prevalent--the money the people listed above represent is extremely attractive to the indie developers that are starving themsleves and their families trying to make innovative games.

On a personal note, the most amazing thing I saw at the conference was from a commercial developer using the Torque Shader Engine: on a contract from NASA, they captured real terrain data from Mars (yes, the planet), imported it into the engine, and had a demo of one of the Mars Rovers running around the terrain (controllable). Was simply breathtaking for me.

PS: Be on the lookout for "Tube Twist" in the next couple of months...

PPS: We had some amazing press there as well, from many of the large print mags to gamasutra freelance journalists to PCGamer. You can listen to an interview with Jay Moore (Marketing Evangelist for GarageGames) on the PCGamer Podcast (http://www.garagegames.com/news/8917). It's long, but you get to hear Jay about about minute 13 or so.

Does GG sell games that are not developed with GG technology? Just wondering.

Yes, for example Gish.

Absolutely. Gish (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=3387.0), Void War, Bridge Construction Set (http://www.f13.net/index2.php?subaction=showfull&id=1117825934&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&), Mutant Storm, Aerial Antics, and more.

Interestingly, when GG was first established the idea was to provide the tech to make the games, wait for a bit, and then sell/distribute the games made with our tech. Unfortunately, the rate of quality indie games at that time wasn't enough to sustain a company providing tech like GG does for such a low price, so the publishing side of things has dropped quite a bit off the horizon, but I know for a fact that once the indie game flow kicks into high gear, it will become more and more of our business model as we originally planned.

Some further info I've gathered after finally catching my breath from the long week:

Wik & The Fable of Souls (this years IGF winner), Mutant Storm, a complete and total port of Joust (yes, the old arcade game Joust), and Geometry Wars were also announced this week for XBox 360 Arcade. Joust got a bit of retro loving at IGC, and Geometry Wars was pretty popular as well.

Late add (trying not to spambump the thread): Gamasutra has released the first two feature articles about IndieGamesCon (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051013/dillon_01.shtml), including some text bites from some of the big (and little!) players.

Also in related news to Indies making it: Andy Schatz, an ex-game dev pro turned indie (and quite young as well, I'm guessing mid-late 20's) just announced last week a  world wide publishing/distribution deal (http://gametunnel.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=442) for his game Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa (http://www.wildlifetycoon.com/) with MumboJumbo (http://www.mumbojumbo.com/) for release in Q1 2006. Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa will be available on both PC and the Mac in both online and retail distribution channels, and was developed using the Torque Game Engine v1.3 (http://www.garagegames.com/products/1) and associated products.

Yes.

We need an indy market in and of itself.  Not just a small chance for talented people with no funding to break into the market, as it stands, and then start working for the traditional publishers.

With mobile gaming we have basically seen that a new market emerged and lots of people jumped into it.  Several made money before the publisher types took the market seriously.  But those who made money are going on to become tradtional publisher types themselves or to start working directly for publishers.  And increasingly the mobile gaming market is looking like other video game markets where, without ties to a publisher and/or a sexy license, you aren't going to sell anything. 

What we need is a market where it ok not to have a sexy license or a publisher and where developers can maintain control of their ideas. Not just a side-market where a few companies can claw their way up to the top and get just enough cash/notoriety to move on to the "real" market of making games for EA/Vivendi/et al.