Weapon of choice

I’ve decided which engine/editor I’m going to use to make my first games.

I’s called Construct, a free open-source 2D game creator and it’s by the guys at Scirra. I compared it with GameMaker 8 from YoYoGames, a very similar piece of software, and for my purposes Construct beats it in almost every way.

The main difference it that it is much more of a piece of development software, with variables and settings exposed to the user, whereas with GameMaker, there were so many variables and rules they could only be gotten at by drilling down through several levels of pop-up dialogs. So much stuff could easily be forgotten, and in a larger game hunting around for a bug would be a nightmare.

I know GameMaker is well established with many great games on their website, but for it to appeal to me it would need a ground-up re-write. For any 3D games I decide/have time to/have money to/am made enough to make, Unity Indie is the obvious (and pleasingly multi-platform) choice.

Currently working on a basic prototype of the game featuring the main gameplay elements with placeholder art. Won’t have any screenshots to show for ages. However I’m also working on some concept and some actual art, one piece of which currently adorns the new website.

It’s a lovely world

I was at the World of Love indie games conference last Friday (25th June) and I have a head full of ideas and thoughts and comments ready to spill out when they are slightly more fully formed than now. However, a brief run-down and some links for the interested:

Never been to the Channel 4 building for a start, I’ve only been to London a handful of times so it was interesting to see another area of the city I’d never visited. The ’4′ logo statue outside was covered in umbrellas, which was slightly incongruous given the 24° heat outside. We were in the Channel 4 cinema, the metal-walled ante-chamber of which is situated directly underneath the walkway up to the front door which we could see through the toughened glass ceiling. I felt like I was stuck in a 2002 Half-Life MOD. Quite eerie.

• After a cup of tea and a short intro, the first speaker was Chris Delay of Introversion who gave us a special preview of their new game Subversion. All I’d seen and heard of the game so far had been some technical discussion about generating cities so I had no idea what to expect. What we got was a very detailed and very funny demonstration of a bank heist (one of many things you can do in the world) that got a huge round of applause at the end. No coincidence that when I heard all their previous games were now £5 on Steam I went and bought the next day!

• Next was the softly-spoken Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV fame who gave an informative talk on jams including TIGSource and The Games Collective. Not something I’d ever considered, being someone who likes to take the time to mull over things, but a nice insight into the scene.

• Sean Murray of Hello Games, developer of Joe Danger (just released on PSN), gave us an interesting talk about his and his team’s inspirations, collaborative development and gave a fantastic construction/architecture analogy regarding the difference between AAA development and indie games. AAA games are the commercial skyscrapers – they need millions to build and must have detailed plans from the off to get backing. Indie games are individual boutique houses – a singular vision that stands out from everything elseand typically run by one person. Problem is, publishers only recognise a house as a house when the roof has gone on, which is far too late for the indie who needs the capital for the foundations. Also interesting in that he said PSN was the only way to release a game on console without a publisher.

• After a short break, Steven Lavelle admitted his presentation was really boring so did a ‘tell us about yourself’ session instead which, although slightly awkward to start with, did give a good insight into the sorts of people who had travelled to the conference.

• Following him, Tom Betts admitted he was a graphics whore. But then considering he is doing a PhD specialising in generative art and interactive games, you can forgive him! His was an extremely interesting talk which touched on some thoughts of mine about indie game graphics and how they are stuck in a retro ghetto.

• Then just before lunch, Eskil Steenberg gave us a demo of the LOVE game tools he had created, specifically the dynamic, real-time UV unwrapping and procedural texturing tools. Eye-opening stuff, but I wager well out of the league of most indie devs.

Buffet Lunch! Mmm, spicy chicken spring rolls, micro hot-dogs, ham salad baguettes, fish-and-chips on a stick.

• Simon Oliver of Hand Circus (he made Rolando for iPhone) was next and gave an infectiously enthusiastic run down of the games he had developed and his inspiration behind them.

• Sophie Houlden then gave a brief talk, greatly hampered by reading her notes off a PSP screen, about her thoughts on indie development.

• Cliff ‘Cliffy’ Harris of Gratuitous Space Battles fame gave a superb talk (uncluding the hilariously messed-up slides) about the money side of being an Indie Developer. Namely, how you won’t make any. At least not if don’t take the business side as seriously as the development side. Really useful stuff – made tons of notes.

• The afternoon break gave way to Nicholas Lovell, founder of Gamesbrief and experienced businessman gave us some of his tips on Marketing, Finance and permission or lack of. Good stuff although a few too many plugs for his book for my liking, but then again when you’ve got a captive audience… 

• Gobion Rowlands of Red Redemption then gave us a good background on his company and the new climate modelling game they were creating.

• Alex Chapman from Sheridans solicitors came on and gave a brief run-down of some points of law that indie developers need to be aware of. He didn’t go into too much detail – for that I guess you need to pay him – but he brought up some things I wasn’t aware of.

• Next up was Amy Casson from Littleloud (yeah, I’d never heard of them either). She gave us a talk about how she used Actionscript in her development. To be honest, not much of interest for the non-Flash developers and also none of her flash games would work which was a shame. But it did get me checking out the Channel 4 website to look at their Bow Street Runner, which I hugely enjoyed!

• And to round things off, well-known PC games journalist Kieron Gillen of RockPaperShotgun (and writer of Marvel and Image comics to boot) gave an update of his Freeplay Melbourne 2005 conference speech How to Use and Abuse The Gaming Press… He talked about how indie developers can and should advertise themselves, how to get your name heard, how to get your games known, and how to be clever about it.

After that it was down to the pub around the corner where the upstairs had been booked for us. Now I’m not the most social animal around strangers, but everyone I did get to talk to was overwhelmingly friendly and enthusiastic and there was quite a mix of people: experienced indies, newly indies, those still at big publishers, press, scouts, oh and Nicholas was hawking his book

Overall it was a fantastic conference with a good variety of discussions, some more useful than others but I’m sure everyone’s definition of ‘useful’ will be different to mine such was the variety of people there. The tea breaks were times of active discussion, although some people were hard to get a word with, being quite popular. I’m almost certain there will be another one next year, given this one sold out so rapidly. All the talks were videoed and will be up online eventually so we’ll get to see what the feedback was from those who missed it, but it was well worthwhile from my point of view and I can’t wait to do it again!

E3 thoughts so far

Bombarded. And pleasantly confused. Like an old man at a Playboy hottub party who can’t remember his name. That’s my overall feeling seeing the all the news, videos and screenshots being disgorged from the overstuffed bowels of E3.

Lots of “game changing”, “new paradigms” and “future of entertainment” – the usual PR-speak nonsense. Ignoring all that guff, there are really only a handful of things that have piques my interest, and a couple that left me feeling very disappointed:

+1 Nintendo 3DS – WANT. ONE. The technology looks amazing from the hands-on videos I’ve seen (e.g. Eurogamer) and the list of games they are lining up, with a nice selection of brand new plus updated N64 titles sounds fantastic!

+1 Playstation Move – Wasn’t really bothered by either Natal/Kinect or Move, but there’s something about the solidity and responsiveness of Sony’s version of motion control that just tingles me better.

-1 Kinect – Ignoring the name that sounds like a stapler tumbling down a flight of stairs, the evident lag is a concern as are the games shown. This seems to be much more of a ‘Wii copy’ than Move and I get tired enough waving the Nunchuck and Remote about let alone my whole body. Will still be cool to navigate menus with – hey, there’s an XBLA game idea: “Menu Revenge!” Copyright me.

-1 Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Sigh. I love the Zelda games, but this was shown off way too early. I understand it’s a big title for them and they want to explain how the Motionplus is integrated, but the main draw of the games for me is the story, the characters and the world they create. All we saw was what amounted to a training video featuring the usual line-up of enemies in some rather basic environments. They should have kept this back for GDC or later – the 3DS would have been enough.

It looks really nice

I got myself a PS3 Slim a few weeks back (yeah I know, I’m always at the head of technology) along with copies of Uncharted 2 and Heavy Rain. Not played that much of the latter so far, mostly because I got completely turned off by the utterly confusing movement system. I feel like I’m playing the original Resident Evil all over again…

Anway, I’ve been playing through Uncharted 2 and finished it at the weekend. I can see how this got it’s 9/10 and 10/10 reviews: it is highly polished visually, the cutscenes and story are slightly better than the traditional writing videogames offer the player and it’s got some nice set pieces which I really enjoyed. However there were many things about it that I felt disappointed by.

For a start I thought it was far too long. Admittedly I got distracted by the hunt for treasures and spent probably a good 1-2 hours purely searching nooks and crannies for them. But ignoring the time spent gathering shinies it still took me over 12 hours to finish. My thoughts while playing were that a lot of the time it was being padded out needlessly. A lot of the navigation ‘puzzles’ were just time sinks to delay you and didn’t feel like a challenge I had to overcome for any important gameplay reason other than the basic ‘get from A to B’. As such, a lot of them could have been cut and the game would not have lost anything. The Monastery was the worst offender. I would complete one tiresome section only to reach a corner of the mountain to see yet another collection of improbably perched ruins waiting for my aching arms to climb. I almost gave up at that point as I was just wanting to finish the damn game.

Another thing was that the entire time I was playing I had the constant, nagging sensation that I was moving too slowly. Even when running full pelt it felt like there was something holding me back, like I had invisible tyres round my ankles. Can’t quite describe it, but it was infuriating when playing for long periods. It certainly didn’t help when yet another huge section of level was revealed to me (see above). Must admit I did wonder if the developers were aware of this since when I had a look at the Bonuses, there was an unlockable one for ‘Run faster’ (forget the actual name). A bit of a self-aware dig perhaps?

Finally there was too much gunplay! I genuinely hadn’t expected this much. I’d heard sarcastic comments about Nathan being a mass murderer and how it was completely at odds with the pulpy story, but didn’t realise it was so true. Combined with the never-ending levels and slow movement speed, some of these battles were interminable! This wasn’t helped by the developers falling back on the decades old crutch of gradually adding in harder-to-kill enemies the further you get in to the game. Guys with riot shields – fair enough, cute idea and a good challenge. Then guys in kevlar body armour with shotguns, then guys in metal body armour carrying massive chainguns (eh?) then finally blue-skinned mad natives with superhuman strength and stupidly powerful weapons. THIS IS NOT FUN GUYS!!! This is supposed to be the prime example of action-adventure videogaming, top of it’s class and all that, and you’re simply throwing more and harder enemies at me as I go along!? Bloody hell.

Still, I enjoyed it for what it was, but won’t be chasing any remaining treasures. Trade-in time!

[Oh, and I'm ignoring the physical improbability of surviving such close contact to explosions and huge falls, the impossibility of being able to climb, jump, run, fight like that for such protracted periods of time, the unbelievable jumps across gaps (world record held by athletes 8.95 metres FYI) - including backwards jumps from holding onto a ledge etc, etc... after all, it's a videogame ]

Piracy by the bundle

I’m sure all of you bought the Humble Indie Bundle last week (if not, shame , and it’s still on sale!), which raised over $1million for charity, indie developers and the EFF. It was a very successful experiment in both selling indie developed games, the key factors being that there was no DRM and you could pay what you wanted for the collection of games.

However, in a very illuminating blog post, Wolfire estimates that up to 25% of the downloads of the game are pirated, as they define it: “users download from shared links from forums and other places without actually contributing anything”, not including torrents. Now remember that this is a bundle of games which are all DRM-free, that you can pay as little as $0.01 for and where you personally decide who gets the money: charity, the EFF, the developers or a combination of any. Despite this, people are still finding ways to get it for free.

Now there are two ways to look at this. Either:

1. This proves that there is an absolute need for DRM to prevent unauthorised downloads, since even giving the option to pay just one cent does not prevent piracy.

OR

2. This proves that DRM and price are irrelevant factors when it comes to piracy.

My disagreement with point of view 1. is that I have yet to hear of any game that uses DRM that has not been cracked and ended up on bittorrent. Yes it may take some time for newer/harder methods to be broken, but they always get there in the end – witness the Ubisoft ‘always online’ DRM which has now been cracked in two different ways. Therefore the argument that DRM prevents piracy is false. At the very best it delays it by a month.

But if point of view 2. is correct, doesn’t this mean that that 25% of people who downloaded a copy of the bundle for free (approx. 25,000 people) are pirates? Well ’pirates’ is an extremely nebulous term which can be defined to mean what people would like it to mean at any one time. Avoiding using that term means you have to look in detail at the kind of people who are actually downloading titles for free. Here is a non-exhaustive breakdown formed from my own thoughts, those of Wolfire and from some commenters on their blog:

• Crackers whose only goal is to break DRM on titles to be the first to get the game online = a very small minority of people who do it for the prestige for themselves or their group
• Those who refuse to pay = a group of people who won’t pay for anything digital be it games, movies or music, mostly for a personal belief that by doing so they are giving a finger to the ‘system’
• Those who are unable to pay = they don’t have any money to pay
• Those who can’t pay = people who don’t have credit cards/PayPal accounts or access to one, in the West most likely to be kids, elsewhere in the world, likely to be a heck of a lot of people (see comments in the Wolfire blog by people from South Africa and Russia for instance)
• Those who are lazy = can’t be bothered filling in card details or going through PayPal login, especially for cheap impulse purchases
• Those who expect anything they download to be free

Out of these, in the case of the Humble Indie Bundle we can discount: crackers since there was no DRM, and those ‘unable to pay’ since you could pay 1 cent if you wished. What’s left is the 25,000 who downloaded the games for free.

Now those guys who refused to pay, not even a cent (which they could choose to give to charity btw), well they are just selfish wankers in this case as there is no ‘man’ they are ‘sticking’ anything ‘to’. Not saying they are always selfish wankers despite the fact I don’t agree with their beliefs, but in this case they definitely are.

This then leaves three main groups: those who can’t pay even though they want to (kids, no credit card for personal or poor credit reasons or those in countries with no/poor credit card systems or cards that cannot be linked to PayPal), those who can’t deal with complicated payment systems and those that believe that anything downloadable is free (all ages, all races, all over the world).

If we go back to point 2. above, we find this agrees with it.

DRM is irrelevant as these people are not crackers proving a point and because they would not have bought a DRM copy anyway since they would always have got their copy through filesharing or a free link where it’s already been cracked.

Price is irrelevant in two ways. The ‘free downloaders’ to whom digital == free do not care if the game originally cost $100 or$1, it doesn’t even register with them. This is a generation where a digital video of their friends on holiday is equivalent to a video of the film Iron Man for instance. The reasons for this I won’t go into here to keep this post small, but I will discuss at some point. Secondly those who couldn’t pay or were too lazy to pay wanted to pay, but were prevented by technical/financial admin/national/tedious payment system reasons.

The payment issues can be solved by giving people as many ways to pay as you possibly can, thus preventing them from having to seek out a free version. The remainder, to whom everything digital is intrinsically free are not your customers anyway as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, so don’t worry about them.

So, this being the case, Wolfire’s decision that they are not going to do much about the free downloading (other than request those people torrent it instead to save their server bandwidth) makes perfect sense. In their own words:

“When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, “How many legitimate users is it ok to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?” The answer should be none.”

Some links you may like

Nothing deep or meaningful to say in this post really, just wanted to bring some useful website to your attention:

The first is RockPaperShotgun – a PC games blog run by several well-respected games writers. Always fun, and always finding wierd stuff I’ve never heard of before.

The second is TIGSource - a fantastic indie games website started by Derek Yu (he of Spelunky fame) which features reviews, news and one of the most informative and friendly forums out there for indie devs.

The next two are for cheapskates like me

SavyGamer – a blog that tracks cheap game deals both online and in stores. If you find a cheap promotion you can let them know and they update regularly.

Finally BestGamePrice (UK only) – type in the game you are after and it thieves the latest price from as many online stores as it can to show you the cheapest. I use this all the time – but check SavyGamer first for any offline deals that might be better.

That’s all!

Indies think big! Small.

I know we’ve all been battered over the head by developers (large and independant) telling us that the best way to start making games is to start small, but don’t you just want to launch into that massive genre-defining RPG you’ve had in your head for years? Or you think you can do better than Modern Warfare? Maybe you have a World of Warcraft killer MMO you need to unleash on the world! And there are some people who say “sod the ‘start small’ lot, go big – dive into that RPG and even if you never finish it you will have learned so much from the experience you will always be glad you did”.

The usual reasons against starting a massive project are: keeping yourself motivated for years while working on the same thing, endless feature creep, iterative technical progress in the underlying code with no visible change in the actual game itself, and if you are part of small team multiply all the above times the number of people you have – and if one person drops out what happens to their workload?

But to many people those things are ephemeral, only ‘potential events’. They think “Yes, but that won’t apply to me, my game will be ‘different’.” For these people (and that included myself at one point) they need some clear evidence. Evidence:

Standard 2D top-down action-RPG example – Zelda III: A Link to the Past

• Development team size = 16 (Not including production/managers [1])
• Development time = 24 months (development actually started in 1998 on a NES Zelda III, but they switched to SNES for the eventual 1991 release, so assuming only 2 years of ‘proper’ development on the SNES title [2])
• Man hours = 65280 (based on 8 hour working day, 5 days  a week, one week off a year and not including very likely overtime)
• = 1632 weeks, = 32 years

Standard 2D Platformer example – Super Mario World

• Development team size = 10 (again not including production/managers [3])
• Development time = 36 months [4]
• Man hours = 61200 (based on same hours as above)
• = 1530 weeks, = 30 years

So. Got a spare 32 years to make the next Zelda: A Link to the Past? Or perhaps 30 years for the next Super Mario World seems more maneageable for you?

FYI I have used these two games as examples since you will often find prospective indie devs say they want to create games like these. Also I use them because they are relatively simple 2D games (by today’s standards) made by small teams. For any large 3D title, multiply the above by 100 e.g. Modern Warfare 2 was 100 devs for 2 years. I’ll leave you to do the maths 

Now maybe you decide that despite the evidence above, you think you can do it. Either on your own, or in a small team. All I can say is good luck to you and your game will probably never see the light of day. It definitely won’t see the light of day in it’s original ‘high concept’ form. It may do if you cut back features, remove areas and make it simpler – but then it’s no longer the big game you envisioned is it?

You may even accept the evidence and decide that despite knowing you will never finish the game it will still be worthwhile for you in terms of development experience. In which case go for it! Why should you be ‘forced’ to have to do several small games instead? Unless you are banking financially on the game being released, why not let your imagination run wild, dive into the big project and come out a couple of years down the line with masses of development experience. Then you can take that experience either into the games industry itself, or into your own smaller titles if you are going indie.

Now if you accept the evidence above and realise that you actually want to release a game in your lifetime, then small games are the way forward for you. Not only do you gain experience of the whole development cycle (as opposed to a seemingly endless mid-cycle grind) you actually get the thrill of releasing a finished game. And maybe some pennies for your efforts to give you the resources to work on the next one.

What you do is of course entirely your choice and a lot will depend on your motivation and your personality. But whatever you do decide, I hope that you are at least no longer heading into it blindly and that the figures above inform your decision.

NB: I do realise that both these titles were the first of their kind on a new piece of hardware and that there are many dev tools and free-to-use assets out there now that take care of a lot of the background work, making 2D RPG and platformer creation far easier than it used to be. However I’m hoping these examples will serve as an eye-opener into the amount of work the titles that inspired us took to create and that it isn’t a trivial matter of ‘knuckling down’ to make our modern homages.

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[1] Zelda III Credits on MobyGames: http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/legend-of-zelda-a-link-to-the-past

[2] Zelda III Development info on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_A_Link_to_the_Past

[3] Super Mario World Credits on MobyGames: http://www.mobygames.com/game/super-mario-world

[4] Super Mario World Development info in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_World

UDK less attractive to Indie developers?

Well, reported today (although apparently the details have been known for a while, slow news day perhaps?) have been the details of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) commercial licencing terms. In brief (focusing on indie game development) the details are, and I’m assuming this is all on a per-title basis as it doesn’t specify:

• $99 (£65) up-front
• 0% royalties on first $5000 (£3250) of UDK related revenue
• 25% royalties on all revenue above $5000

They have some examples behind the second link, but basically you get £3185 per game before their royalty kicks in. This might sound great to aspiring Indies, and yes it does mean you have access to one of the most widely used and respected game engines, but I personally feel it would be a bad deal. Say you make £5,000 revenue from your game (sorry for £s but hey, I’m from the UK ), now comparing it with Unity Pro as an example:

Unity Pro - you pay £780 for the engine with no royalty terms.

• Total cost = £780 upfront
• Total profit = £5000-£780 = £4220

UDK – you pay £65 up front, 0% on the first £3250, then 25% on the remaining £1750.

• Total cost = £65 + 25% of £1750 = £503
• Total profit = £5000 – £503  =£4497

So the upfront cost of Unity Pro is higher, meaning you make £227 more by using UDK on your first £5000. Great! Until you realise that you will always have 25% taken from any future earnings. In fact any revenue above £6250 will see you worse off under the UDK deal. And unlike big studio developed games that aim for that sales spike on release to reap most of their profits, Indie devs rely much more on the ‘long tail’ – those sales that keep trickling in months, years after release. If you depend on that revenue model the UDK royalty deal is far less appealing.

What also concerns me is this particular section of the terms:

“UDK related revenue includes, but is not limited to, monies earned from: sales, services, training, advertisements, sponsorships, endorsements, memberships, subscription fees, rentals and pay-to-play.”

Most royalty terms I’ve seen for other engines focus on revenue from sales of the title only. However Epics’ terms not only include revenue from direct sales, but also seemingly any revenue generated by ad banners on the game’s webpage, Google ads/adwords for the game or money coming from third parties that you use to promote your game (e.g. at a con or in an Indie game showcase). And the ‘but is not limited to’ means they could stretch this to anything bringing in some cash that they deem to be in any way connected to the game you have made. For example, you make game related T-Shirts or some art books to sell - 25% cut please. Your game wins a competition that comes with a cash prize – they would be well within their terms to request a 25% cut of that too as it is ‘UDK related revenue’.

Now I’m not promoting Unity over UDK as a game engine. Unity is great, but as engines go UDK is far more established, more feature packed, incredibly powerful and using it will give you many transferrable skills should you wish to apply for a ‘proper job’ in the industry. But using Unity as an example of an engine with a flat-fee and no royalty structure, especially with regard to where the smallest Indies make profit, UDKs royalty structure is not a good deal. Also their far-reaching and simultaneously open-ended definition of what constitutes ‘UDK related revenue’ should be very concerning for any Indie that relies on trickle revenue and merchandising sales to keep things ticking over.

In fact I would go so far as to say that any royalty-based deal for a game engine for an Indie is a no no. You’re already having big % cuts taken from the likes of Steam and/or your website store provider, you don’t need yet another party taking yet another cut. Pay a single upfront fee instead – it will hurt more to start with, but you will benefit in the long run.

Game demos are advertising, not revenue

You probably heard Cevat Yerli (CEO of Crytek) talking about the ‘end of free demos’ last week, if not here’s a link to the interview.

None of his comments make any sense to me. Let’s take them one by one:

1. “I think that we’ll see more and more games not carrying a demo in the future, because it becomes prohibitively expensive.”

How does a demo become prohibitively expensive? You are not going to be creating demo-specific assets apart from some splash screens, a bit of coding to cover the premature ending and the ‘wrapper’ for console demos. It is only on PS3 that Sony charge you for each download of a demo – Xbox 360 and PC are free. And if you have scheduled in the demo-specific requirements from the beginning (and you have done that haven’t you Mr Yerli and you’re not just trying now to ‘fit in’ the demo before you go gold?) then you have already factored in the man-hours expenditure.

2. “Also, given the time pressures in making a demo – in fact given the time pressure of making a quality demo – I think it all becomes really difficult to work with…”

Again, if already scheduled in, as any competent producer should have done, there are no time pressures. Therefore there is no concern about making a quality demo. Certainly there can be bugs and development issues that you don’t want affecting the quality of the demo (which is typically taken from pre-Gold code so that it can be released prior to the full game) but that’s why the demo is planned in, to take account of these recognised difficulties. It only becomes “difficult to work with” if you haven’t planned properly.

3. A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don’t have in other industries such as film.

A couple of points here:

• He is deliberately conflating game demos with price to try to create a duality that doesn’t exist. Game demos ARE free. That’s the whole point of them. PAID demos do not exist. They never have (unless you count those £1 demo discs you very rarely get in games stores). By this reasoning no one would ever give away up to 1/2 of their entire game content for free to entice customers to buy. Good grief, it’s like shareware never existed.
• And he obviously hasn’t watched many film trailers recently. Or development diaries by the director/actors/production crew/special effects team featuring behind the scenes and actual film footage, released for free on official websites to promote the picture. An absolute luxury with no function I can discern for the film or their potential customers.  /sarcasm

4. “Because we’ve had this free luxury for so long, now there are plans to change this people are complaining about it.”

Again with the ‘free luxury’ falsity. Cevat, your customers are complaining because they don’t want to pay for your advertising.

Also, a minor technical point regarding PC demos: many people use these not just to sample the game, but also to see if it will actually work on their near-infinite combination of graphics cards, sound cards, drivers, memory, OS, installed software etc, etc.

Demos have been used for decades to allow the player to sample the game to see if they want to purchase the full title. Start charging for demos and they are going to start NOT buying the demo OR the full game. This is another example of companies trying to ‘lock in’ their content to try and squeeze more money from it. Where next – no gameplay videos unless you pay to subscribe to their website? Each screenshot you view on EuroGamer swipes a 2p micro-payment? The more you lock in content designed to advertise the game, the fewer people see it so the fewer people buy, because they either didn’t know about your game or did but never had the chance to sample it so aren’t going to chance £40.

Bit of a shame he has such blinkered thinking on this issue, as some of the other points he talks about in the interview are valid.

Piracy, filesharing, killing industry, yadda yadda…

I’ve been thinking about ‘piracy’, filesharing and the like a lot recently as I approach starting my own indie games company. Obviously it’s a concern for any media business as to how your game/ebook/movie/music is being distributed, and naturally you will want to get the biggest return on your effort that you can. But for a long time I haven’t been convinced with the pro-ip groups’ arguments.

The central pillar of all their arguments is that every illegal download is a lost sale. Where that originates from I don’t know and I’ve always considered it bogus.

Well now the details of the actual data the pro-ip groups use and how they came up with their financial figures have been picked apart by the US Government Accountability Office. Full article with link to US Government report: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars

For my part, my thoughts are thus:

There are a large group of people who essentially live on the filesharing networks, leeching and seeding stuff all the time. They are not doing it out of some great internet pirate mission to stick it to big business, they do it because that’s the new distribution medium for anything digital. It isn’t the fact that this content is free that drives them to share, it’s that they love sharing as a form of communicating ideas to others both in their original forms and as mashups and so on, and this mechanism has been shaped organically by filesharing programs, the internet and the users. Many younger generation users of the internet consider it perfectly natural to freely download gigabytes of music and games as the mechanism is already there and they have an ingrained hunger to consume media. The two fit together perfectly. So, these ‘natural sharers’ were never going to buy your game/music/movie in the first place, they do it because that’s simply how digital media is distributed now.

Of course looking at this as an old-school media businessman or someone uninitiated to this new world, the natural thought is “Well, how are you supposed to make money if everything you do is available for free?”. Simple answer is “You are looking at it the wrong way!” Filesharing isn’t theft of property in any sense, it’s a potentially massive and free-to-use marketing tool! One torrent of your game isn’t a lost sale, in the same way that 10 leeches of that torrent isn’t 10 lost sales. Think of it instead as a self-perpetuating digital flyer. Worthless by itself, the more it spreads, the more word gets around that this is something good that is to be shared, the more ‘flyers’ get distributed. With little effort you now have a new audience, who will communicate to all their friends how good this thing is.

Now this means that by trying to crack down on all filesharing by wrongly labelling them as criminals, trying to restrict your content with DRM and suchlike you are actively and deliberately cutting out (not to mention alienating) a potentially massive audience. If just 1% of all those that download a copy of your game think it’s good enough, then that’s 1% of an audience you would never have had if the torrent didn’t exist. And the other 99% will not have “cannibalised” sales, since they were never going to buy anyway, but are instead actively helping seed your game to a bigger audience.

So as far as I see it: higher torrent ranking DOES NOT EQUAL more lost sales. Higher torrent ranking EQUALS bigger customer pool for your 1% conversion.

Oh, but of course this only works if your content is worth talking about in the first place. Don’t dump out shit then blame filesharing for poor sales. It didn’t sell because it was shit, full stop.