Category: Uncategorized

For top-secret reasons, I’ve recently been looking at a bunch of indie game websites. Some are great, most are not. Some are laughable.  I’ve had an indie games site since 1997, and obsess over it’s performance. Here’s some things I think newcomers to indie game selling should take note of.

1) Show me a game. NOW.

I’ve arrived at your site. well done, that’s 99% of the effort done. But if you want me to skip a flash intro or hunt the screen for a button that says ‘games’ then I may well get bored. Check your webpage stats for people who arrive at the site but bounced out before even seeing a game name. That was money you just set fire to.

2) Show me a screenshot. NOW.

I know, I know. Your game isn’t about graphics, it’s about the fun! You need to engage the user in the fascinating story of your protaginist ‘klaude’ and his awesome backstory about when he was a small boy…<click> That’s another bored visitor. You need a screenshot, because that’s how people make an immediate editing choice about continuing further. I can tell your game is a high quality and colorful side scrolling 2D platformer within 2 seconds of seeing your screenshot. Quicker than I can even read ‘high quality and colorful side scrolling 2D platformer’. Screenshots are what get people to hang around and read about the game. You need them. Preferably lots.

3) Give me a demo and a buy button.

Preferably two of them. One at the top, so I can immediately skip to the demo if I like. One at the bottom, so when I’ve finished reading the blurb, I am right next to one. Use a big clear font, make it obvious it’s clickable.

4) If the game warrants it, add a video

Watching a 30 second youtube video tells me tons about what your game will be like as a player, at least initially. Video is often better than static screens, but it depends on the game. Kudos looks crap on video, so does democracy. Gratuitous Space Battles looks way way better. While we are on the topic, use youtube. Youtube works for everyone, and hosting is free. having some fancy java video player embedded in the site will go wrong for a non trivial percentage of visitors. Make sure you have a good reason not to use youtube.

5) Study your web traffic.

Which gets more downloads. This

or This?

I don’t know yet, but I will do in a weeks time. Yes, this sort of testing does make a difference.

6) Optimise

Go to googles homepage, look at the source. Holy lack of whitespace batman. That’s getting really anal, and I don’t bother much with the text, but try to be sensible with screenshots. Jpgs can very very often be reduced in quality and nobody but a computer can tell. Not everyone has fast broadband, and some are sharing it with other people streaming video or surfing other sites. Assume the worst, and make sure the filesizes are as small as possible. It takes just minutes to do this.

7) Don’t make it too short.

Is your game worthy of my time? If you can’t write two decent length paragraphs about the game, then I guess not. I guess you knocked it up in 10 minutes and have nothing to say on the topic. The screenshots get people to stay, but the text is what justifies to people that you should get their money. People making an adventure game have it easy here. By all means have some backstory, some concept art sketches and so on. If your game is a casual game, you are screwed on the PC selling direct anwyay, so assuming it’s a relatively hardcore PC game, there should be LOTs to say. make it look like your game is worth buying.

I know, some of the games on my site break these rules. But not the big ones. Not the ones that I promote, and that sell.

• “Only the paranoid survive” – the story of Intel.
• A book on tactics and strategies used in war
• A pizza cutter shaped like the USS Enterprise NCC-1701
• A darwin fish car sticker
• A book on advertising
• A trip to see the stage version of ‘Yes Minister’.

Answers on a postcard…

There are basically two types of big budget studio-made PC game. The AAA singleplayer or multiplayer game, and the MMO. In some rare cases, the studio will hold over a big proportion of the budget to provide post release supprot to encourage continued playing of the non MMO game. The best examples of these are clearly Team Fortress 2 and Galactic Civilisations. Both games have had tons of post-release add-ons and support and patches. I think they may even rival GSB. (I’m only half kidding, GSB has had 47 post release improvement patches).

The majority of gamers, commentators and critics would describe this trend as being a “good thing”. I agree, I find it awesome. As games visual fidelity improves, and the rate of the improvement slows, we are increasingly finding that a four or even 6 year old fgame is perfectly playable, without cringing. I have recently become re-addicted to Call of Duty 2 multiplayer, and it’s a relief to see some people still playing that game everyday, enough for a decent game when I feel like it.

The problem with the ‘ongoing, maybe never-ending post-release support’ thing, is that it costs money. Valve are treating TF2 as their internal business test-bed, so sales are fairly irrelevant to them, but stardock can only pump money into GalCiv, or Elemental, until the money runs out. Paying a whole studfio with offices and pensions costs a lot of money.

And here is where I think it gets interesting. Take indie games like Minecraft or… GSB for example. Minecraft has made enough money to buy the moon, so it’s already achieved what I’m thinking of. GSB hasn’t done so yet. But the interesting thing is that, in theory, if GSB could break through it’s current threshold to have a high enough level of ongoing sales over time, it *could* become a permenantly supported and expanded and improved game. Effectively an MMO without the fees. Paying just my wages is far cheaper than an entire studio. Massively cheaper.

This is a bit of a pipe dream, but when you think about, you’ll see how it explains a lot of what I’ve been doing. There have been 4 expansion packs, and a campaign expansion is coming soon. The  existing expansions don’t bring in buckets of money, but they do keep the game in the news and in the minds of gamers, and help it to continue selling. If I was to publish daily sales figures, you would see them as laughable next to minecraft, but I don’t need $100,000 a day to keep working on GSB. I don’t even need 1% of that.

The likliehood is that the campaign will make *some* money, and hopefully tide me over for a while as I get stuck into my top secret next game. But in theory, if I could propel it slightly higher, could there be another year of continual improvements to GSB? The game could become truly awesome over that time. It’s not like there aren’t 500 new ideas for stuff to improve the game. Hmmmm.

Are metrics killing creativity?

Imagine a future where all TV is either watched digitally, or streamed online, and the TV networks have 100% certain data over what program is watched, when channels are changed, and a good idea of what adverts were shown. The precision of the data would be vastly better than we have now.

Now combine that with the current trend for intensive study of audience reactions. Lets say in 2020, no TV program will get commissioned without the pilot being screened to 500 people in MRI scanners, to observe their emotional response to each line, each character, each event, each word.

This is probably how zynga would make TV, and who can blame them? All the data shows that if you collect extensive metrics on everything, you can fine tune the design of entertainment to maximise the audience figures and the revenue. The problem is,  sometimes the first impressions are just wrong. Sometimes, people think character X sucks, in the pilot, but goes on to be the best thing about the show. Sometimes, series I is basically a bit hit-or-miss, but by series II or III, its an emmy-winning masterpiece.

The first attempt at anything, with a new crew and cast, is normally a bit wobbly. People don’t really know what they are doing, how the whole experience will ‘gel’ and what the character of the program will be. I remember thinking that the first series of QI, and the first series of ‘would I lie to you’ on BBC TV, were both a bit ‘meh’. Apparently, the first series or two of Dragons Den had low audience figures and were dull. All 3 are hugely popular now.

I’m glad sometimes stuff that might seem a bit ‘meh’ is allowed to work out the kinks. The metrics are screaming ‘KILL IT!’, but if there is someone really talented behind a project, who can really see it in their minds eye, those things often go on to be the best things around.

We all know that the beatles got turned down by many record companies and that the sims was turned down by everyone. What if its true that not only are the big money-men often wrong with their first impression, but all of us are often wrong too? Maybe we shouldn’t trust the metrics 100%?

Check these out, they are great:

http://www.thelessonlibrary.com/games/gsb/wallpapers.html

It’s done by one of the GSB players (Adsadafafas) on my forums, link here:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=5400