Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

You are unimportant. This is ok.

Posted on August 30, 2022

How psychopathic narcissist CEOs teamed up with money obsessed statisticians to trick gamers into thinking they are heroes

I recently watched a video about dark matter, which casually threw out a reference to a particular group of about 100 galaxies. I also recall seeing one of the first images from the James Webb space telescope, which covered a trivial, tiny piece of the night sky, and showed hundreds of galaxies. Galaxies are HUGE, and we can’t even see all of them. Even our tiny little solar system is huge, its hard to get your head around the distances involved in space. Mars is a LONG way away. Hell, I’m impressed with how big my country (the UK) is. I certainly would not casually walk from one end to the other. Even walking to the nearest shop seems a long way away.

I’ve sold over 3 million games. Even as I type this, it seems ridiculous. Its taken a long time to do it, about 20 years, but still its a pretty good record to have hit. In comparison to a lot of solo indie devs, it seems staggeringly high. But guess what… My business is irrelevant, a rounding error. Activision have no idea I exist, nor do they worry about me as a competitor, I’m sure Epic, or Microsoft and Apple also would consider me an infinitesimally small and irrelevant speck in the world of software.

The thing is, I am kind of fine with that. It is the absolute stunning height of arrogance to look at a world of billions of humans and assume that in some way you are one of the most important ones there. Absolute insanity. And yet… this seems to be an attitude that is getting more and more prevalent in society.

Video games have definitely played some part in this. Video games are totally different to movies, books, plays and operas. These are tales of other people. There is a Hero, or Heroine and they are special, and what they do shapes the story, and the story is basically THEIR story. They change the world, they save the world, they explore the world. And we read about it, and are impressed.

Video games let you actually be the hero, and then let you make decisions so that you really FEEL like the hero. This is a big difference. You are not witnessing great events, you are shaping them. Go you! You must be so awesome. Everyone else is just a ‘non-player-character’ (NPC), and their contribution to the universe is to help you on your epic quest. Their lives are irrelevant, as you can see from most MMOs now. They just stand there, waiting for an interaction with YOU the hero. You are the reason they stand in that marketplace all day hoping to find someone to give a quest to. Don’t worry, they wont give the quest to anybody else, only you. Everyone else is just filler. Its all about YOU.

And this would not be too bad a thing, as a little bit of escapist fun. I’ve played my fair share of video games and still manage to function in society (more or less). I think the problem is, that this is spilling out into society at large. Mostly because of our old nemesis: social media.

The idea that we all have a ‘feed’ and ‘stories’ that we must update on an hourly basis is laughable. Social media firms tell us we need to keep our timelines populated with interesting stuff so that our followers (yes we actually call them followers, a bit like disciples) can keep themselves informed about the minutiae of our lives. Its somehow EXTREMELY important that we keep our vast crowds of followers informed.

Twitter is currently in a furious legal dispute with Elon Musk over whether or not twitter lies about how many of its accounts are bots, and therefore likely fake. Some bots are to be expected… but more than 5%? Some say its vastly higher, and when you think about it, twitter has a huge vested interest in artificially inflating follower counts. Why on earth would you bother tweeting when you know you have 0 or 2 followers? Give a man 1,000 followers and they will feel special. Give them 10,000 followers and they will feel amazing.

Last time I looked I had about 10k followers, but I’m determined not to care. If they swept out fakes and it turns out I have 100 followers I’d just find it funny. I’m just a middle aged dude who makes computer games and plays guitar as a hobby. How do I have *any* followers? I’m not a famous philosopher or the prime minister. Why should anybody care about my life unless they actually know me? Do you REALLY want to know what meal I ate yesterday? or what I think of some new TV show? Why?

Luckily I am 52 or 53, can’t even remember now. This means I’m not in the peak target demographic for social media, where billion dollar businesses are desperate to give you body-shape dis-morphia, or a worry about skin blemishes, or a need to have urgent plastic surgery to make your nose 1% more attractive. We have a vast sprawling empire of businesses who exist based on a single premise: “You are unattractive”, and now we feed into the whole beauty industry with a new feeder-industry called social media. Instagram makes money by telling your your friends are more attractive than you. Then the skincare/cosmetics industry swoops in to make more money by claiming to fix it. Problem and solution wrapped up in one nice self-reinforcing money-machine.

The problem is… most of us are not actually going to be heroes. We will not save the day. Most of us will never be on the news. Most of us will never sign autographs, never trend on twitter, never be front page on reddit, and even if we do, its hardly world changing fame anyway. Its not all about us, all the time.

The reason I complain about this? because its come back full circle to video games and ruined them. There was a time, back in the distant rosy past where video games were cool and fun and the word ‘monetization’ had yet to be bastardized into existence. Back then, you just bought a game, and played it with friends. Some of the most fun gaming sessions of my life were playing as team in ‘return to castle wolfenstein’ when I worked at Elixir, or when I played against some serious hardcore gamers in the testing department at Lionhead for our lunchtime or after-work Call of Duty sessions.

Both games were very much team games. The aim was to work as a team. Are we defending the bunker tonight? or assaulting it? Emphasis on WE, not I. We worked together, picking roles that supported each other, and what mattered was which team won. Nicely balanced, pretty immersive. I could tell who is on my team, because tonight we are th Germans, or because tonight we are the Americans. Storm that beach!

This is all gone now

The trouble with the ‘saving private ryan’ concept of an online team shooter is twofold. Firstly, everyone is working together as a team, which means YOU are no longer the most important person in the universe. Secondly, I cannot sell you hats. If you are all dressed as the Wehrmacht, or as American GIs… then where is the opportunity for micro-transactions? How the hell are we supposed to profit off gambling addictions in the 1% of rich players if you all dress the same? madness.

EA/DICE have now completed their absolute destruction of what used to be a very successful, very popular, very highly-regarded and profitable gaming series: Battlefield. The same was done by Activision by another competing but equally huge franchise: Call Of Duty. Both games totally and utterly destroyed, robbed of all immersion, with all sense of teamwork blown to pieces, all sense of being part of a big event, a small cog in a big wheel… totally ripped apart so the guys in suits (who have never played a video game in their whole life) can sell you more expensive hats.

Of course its didn’t end with hats. You and I might think selling $100 virtual hats to people with addiction issues is a good days work, but you aren’t thinking as cynically as the people who took over gaming do. You can only wear a single hat at a time you idiot! Lets sell you masks, shoes, gloves, and DIFFERENT COLOR GUNS. Yes, for every gun, lets have multiple skins, for each part of the gun. You want a gold plated muzzle on your sten gun? well boy do we have a good deal for you today, 50% off at just 5,000 credits. Not Dollars of course, if we priced stuff in dollars you might see how ridiculous it is. Its all priced in a currency that never sub-divides into round numbers of items…

Now in a sense, I don’t care if other people want to be ripped off for such trinkets. I’ve bought a single hat in Battlefield V, mostly as an experiment. I grinded through 1,300 hours to unlock absolutely everything else. Why should I care if other people prefer to just shovel money rather than… play the game… in order to ‘unlock’ all of that content that we apparently did not pay for when spending $60 on the game…

The reason I care is that I am now in a fancy dress ball instead of a war. Its true, not all uniforms would have been identical. Some soldiers got separated from their units in battle and got drafted into fill gaps in existing units. Some may have got hold of some decent winter scarves or boots from the body of some poor civilian. Some of the soldiers would be carrying different gear, or maybe uniforms would be tweaked depending if you were a radio-dude or a line infantryman… But no. Nothing exucse the ridiculous fancy dress car crash that is a modern online shooter.

Do not be under ANY illusion that the people with any vague sense of artistic skill think that this is ok. NOBODY at a games company who actually designs characters is sat there looking at an American GI, Someone wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses, someone with a clown mask on, and someone with luminous dreadlocks holding a pink bazooka, thinking ‘Yup, this is how I imagine world war 2 looked’. Anybody with any artistic sense at all knows its just a huge, embarrassing kowtowing to the gods of monetization.

And actually…thats bad enough, but its not even the worst thing. The worst thing is that for a sizeable chunk of modern game sessions… I’m not allowed to play. Not for any technical reason, but because the end of each round MUST contain a lot of mini cut-scenes where we show the victory animations of the clown, the dreadlocked bazooka kid, and the skateboarding panzergrenadier. Everyone HAS to have their moment, where the camera zooms into them in slow motion, where we all get to see in closeup that they spent extra money on that little silver pocketwatch strapped to their top hat. We are forced to spend as much time as we can bear looking at the amazing outfits of the other players, like we are fucking fashion correspondents at the paris fashion show. Modern shooters don’t have battlefields. They have catwalks.

Oh and those stupid victory poses, and the absolutely cringe inducing ‘sassy’ lines they speak? Yup, everyone hates those too, and they even silenced them after player outrage in Battlefield 2042, but they HAVE to be there, because after the hats, the masks, the dreadlocks, the skateboards, the gun skins, the victory poses… some idiot thought they could make even MORE money selling cringe-inducing victory quips.

Stop trying to pretend I am a hero, or more importantly I COULD be a hero if only I spent enough on microtransactions. I don’t care. I am fine with the concept of just enjoying an experience. I don’t need to be the center of attention. FFS probably half the world are introverts. Half of us (and we are clearly underrepresented in the boards of directors at games companies) are the kind of people who would DREAD everyone looking at what we are wearing and passing judgement.

Modern hero-shooters are a bastardization of decent games, driven by the unrelenting avarice of money obsessed suits who hate gaming, and by the narcissistic savior-complexes of the psychopaths who run games companies. I have advice for both:

Monetization guru: Please fuck off back to the stock market where you can play with numbers and be as cynical as you want all day without ruining peoples entertainment.

Game CEOs: Please get some fucking therapy. Not everyone wants to be you, not everyone is you, not everyone wants a thousand spotlights on them, not everyone daydreams about being on the cover of Newsweek. Blame that private school education that gave you an overinflated ego, and an inability to understand other people.

Yes. This is a rant, as all my blog posts turned into, but its a rant from the heart from a gamer who just despairs at how the industry he is a tiny tony (and happy to be so) part of has been ruined so dramatically.

Don’t forget to tweet and share this article. Its hugely important to my self worth to know that it is vastly popular*

*no it isn’t.

The unavailable gadget we badly need to invent

Posted on August 19, 2022

As a bit of background to this post, its worth noting that I am massively into solar panels. I have 10 in my driveway, and I even started an energy company to build solar farms. Bizarrely, I currently own over 3,000 brand new solar panels, and they are sat in a warehouse. Its a very very long story. Anyway…

Solar power has a problem. Its a problem that we are working around, but it also represents an opportunity, because if someone can seize the opportunity, its seriously going to help everyone. It will help energy security, it will help the cost of living, it will help equality, it will help fight climate change. An opportunity existing precisely because solar power has a problem:

Solar panels are things we all know about. You can get big ones, and small ones, even tiny ones that power something as small as a pocket calculator (remember those?) or that unroll and plug into your phone to charge on a sunny day. We all know about solar panels. What most of us are not aware of, is inverters, and how our home wiring works. The big thing I need to get across in this post is that right now there is a LOT of complexity and crap that goes in between those solar panels you see on someone’s roof, or in a field, and the wall socket you plug your TV into.

Solar panels generate DC power. Houses use AC power. Basically AC is safer. AC gives you a shock that throws you across the room. DC is the one that locks your hand in a grip, and makes you look like wile-e-coyote when he gets electrocuted. Its the one that will kill you. Because solar generates DC and we need AC, you need a gadget that swaps one to the other. This is an inverter, and in most solar installs its a pretty big box of electronics and wiring that is usually hidden in someone’s attic or a cupboard somewhere. Here is mine:

The solar panels get connected in one end, then you get AC power out the other end, that goes through a big DANGER cutoff switch and then onward to a meter that calculates how much of a feed-in-tariff I get (old discontinued subsidy), and eventually feeding into the main energy supply for the house.

There is a big bit missing (for another 6 weeks!) from this picture, which is battery storage. To be of any REAL use to me, I need to store that power somewhere so I can use it later. I need home storage. I have ordered 2 big 8.2kwh batteries that will get connected to all this, involving yet more cabling. Each one of those is about 50% bigger than the inverter, and they ALSO need their own inverter, and their own cutout switch, and will be wired up in the cellar.

So to recap, to have a decent bit of renewable energy and home independence that lets me help prevent climate change, gives me energy security and independence, improves the resilience of the national grid etc… I need… *deep breath* Some solar panels, an inverter, a cutout switch, cables, a battery, another inverter, another cutout switch, more cables and a meter.

Actually thats not really the problem. This is the problem:

To even have THE OPTION to have all that, I need: A roof that I own (or in my case a yard/driveway), a cellar or similar space to stick a big box or three… oh and about £10,000 minimum. ($12,000). Yikes.

So what this means is… solar is really a nice handy, excellent option for middle+ income homeowners with a house and access to twelve thousand dollars. Great news for us I guess. Go team us! But hardly much help to people who live in apartments, or who rent, or who frankly are having to struggle financially as it is, ironically in no small part due to high energy bills. How can we solve this?

What we really need. What we REALLY BADLY need, is a way for people in any situation to be able to do their bit. They may not have $12k to invest in renewable energy, they may not even have $1,200 to do so, but they might have a few hundred dollars, or even fifty dollars. We need a way to dramatically scale DOWN solar power so that pretty much anyone, regardless of circumstances, can do something.

The big problem we have is that the entire solar and storage industry is designed to scale up. Just like with wind energy, it seems the easiest way to get costs down per megawatt is to go big. Bigger panels, better panels, bigger batteries. Big solar farms, Big battery storage. Not powerwalls, but powerpacks, or megapacks, or bigger. Bigger is cheaper, so bigger is better right?

The trouble is, this strategy is a way for the rich to get cheap energy, and leave the poor in the dust. Its great news that solar panel prices are falling and battery prices are falling, fantastic news for people who already have a pile of money. But where is the solution for people who are struggling? how do we avoid leaving behind everyone on average or low wages? Are we heading towards a society where energy bills only matter to the poor (who are crushed by them) because the rich generate their own power quite happily, and don’t know what the fuss is about. Maybe they don’t even know the price of energy any more…

What we need is a gadget most people probably already think is there. We need a gadget that you can plug a solar panel of any size into, and then plug it into your wall socket, and have your own micro version of the 4kw + big battery setup that those people with money already have. It needs to be really cheap, and really easy to use. It absolutely needs to be something that does not involve an electrician to install, and is totally safe. Just like plugging in your TV, although you plug in your solar panel instead, and it automatically sorts out whether to charge it’s little mini battery, or feed that power immediately into the house to supply anything that’s currently running…

The thing is… batteries scale down really nicely. My car (Tesla model S) is just a big fat block of small cylindrical batteries known as 18650s. They are used in EVERYTHING. I noticed our vacuum cleaner uses the exact same batteries. You can even just buy a bunch of them on ebay, they are not super obscure tech. And solar panels… they are pretty much a commodity. There are differences at the high end, when you build a solar farm, but you want a 400w panel? a 200 watt one? a 50w one? a 2w one? you can get anything you want..to suit your budget.

The tricky bit is the integration with a small inverter, and the knowing what the house is doing. With current solar installs, this involves additional cables and things called CT clamps to work out if power is flowing in or out. Its complex, and messy, and annoying. Maybe electrical wiring means we just cannot do that, which means we have to go with a bit of a bodge solution, which is one of those small battery/inverter ‘powerpack’ gadgets that you CAN get on amazon:

These are obviously cool, but they are absolutely aimed at people who are going camping, and want to power a laptop or a small TV or whatever, while they are out of the house. Again…its a luxury product aimed at people who want to mess around with a mains-power TV while out on a camping trip. Its not designed to be something used as part of your house, and the assumption with most of these is that you are either charging from the house, or from solar… and then at some later time watching TV.

We need that…but as a permanent thing, in a fire-and-forget setup. In an ideal world you would output from this to a big powerstrip with a ton of devices that you use a lot on it. So TV, plus any speaker system, or streaming stick or DVD player…whatever, so it gets a bunch of use. Something you can buy once, and just use to reduce your household energy bills.

And we need this to ABSOLUTELY become a thing that people do. Not solar geeks, not environmentalists, not people who go on demonstrations, but it needs to become a thing that yeah…if you have $200, then you obviously get the powerpack+battery kit, you stick the solar panel in the window, and plug it in, plug some appliances in…and then your energy bills go down. Not a lot, for sure, and you would be WAY better off with 4kw of solar on a roof, but for someone in a small apartment who has high energy bills and a window that gets a ton of sun…we need this.

All the big tech companies are wasting their time, messing around with nonsense none of us asked for like ‘the metaverse’ or mobile phones that you can fold (why?) which cost $2,000. Or they are working out how to make your next unaffordable luxury phone just slightly thinner. Whatever…

Where is the apple iSolarPack? the google solarpack? the amazon solarpack? the brilliantly engineered (and produced in massive, massive volume) solution that helps absolutely anybody in the world feel like they can partake even slightly, even in a really small way in the revolution in renewable energy. We absolutely massively need this, and if you can make a thing that just unpacks and plugs in and saves everyone a bit on their energy bills, its going to sell like mad.

Even if we cannot do anything better than just make the existing idea of a powerpack much more affordable, and pair it with recommended solar panels in a nice easy package aimed at people whose idea of technology is plugging in alexa once… we really need to do this. Sadly nobody of any size seems to be bothering :(

Officially announcing the next Democracy 4 expansion

Posted on August 4, 2022

In the old days, I used to send press releases to news websites etc…and maybe I’ll still do that once I’m testing this and have some screenshots to show. Not that screenshots of Democracy 4 are exactly a visual feast that makes people’s jaws drop as they gasp at the photorealism…but there ya go.

There is to be another expansion pack for my latest game Democracy 4. It will be a straight data-only expansion, which will add six new countries to the game. Those countries are:

  • Greece
  • Ireland
  • Poland
  • Turkey
  • Switzerland
  • Brazil

I think this represents a pretty good mixture. Greece and Ireland are fairly similar to some of the other countries in the game, but we have a fair bunch of players in those countries and people like to play their home country. Plus Ireland is a bit interesting because it is basically an economic disaster due to geography, which is able to work mostly because it has ludicrously good rates for companies to base their HQ there for tax purposes. Its basically the largest respectable country that serves as a tax haven.

Brazil is obviously interesting because of its size, and its rainforest, and its status as a relatively poor country with relation to the existing game countries. Switzerland has its own unique properties, such as being super mountainous, fanatically neutral in diplomatic terms, and its hyper-democratized system of voting. Its also famous for nuclear shelters everywhere and a high level of gun ownership, but low gun crime.

Turkey is a fascinating country, as it sits between two continents and has influences from both. There are obviously some unusual positions regarding democracy and religion there, that are not really explored in the existing countries.

Poland is also interesting, sitting between western Europe and Russia, one of the last green countries in terms of energy use, and a country very nervous (with good reason) about its borders.

Its going to be hard to really capture the flavor of all these different countries, and I expect at least one major post-release revision as I collate feedback from players. It should be interesting though, and hopefully widen the appeal of the game a bit.

I don’t have a final release date yet, or pricing, but here is the status of the current todo list:

  • Initial statistics for each country 100% DONE
  • Country descriptions 100% DONE
  • Map icon and flag icons 100% DONE
  • Initial policy positions: 55% DONE
  • Extra dilemmas TODO
  • Extra Events TODO
  • Extra Situations TODO
  • Country specific simulation overrides TODO
  • Translation of all text into all languages TODO
  • Testing TODO

…so still lots to do…

In unrelated news, I got covid, and omg it was horrible. I basically suffered badly for a week, but am feeling much better. I have also been avoiding social media, which I increasingly view as a mistake, a dumpster fire which anybody who values their sanity should run screaming from. I might use it in future only as a way of linking to my blog.

In even less related news, I finally moved positech’s entire online presence away from a dedicated physical server (a hangover from days long gone when I had a lot of direct traffic, and hosted forums on the server, as well as a site dedicated to indiegames), and to a simple VPS. Like any hosting company, I was recommended a server package that was stupidly overspecced for my needs, but politely declined that. As a result I managed to cut my hosting bill by more than 50% which is very welcome.

There is still the ongoing saga of the solar farm BTW. Its not abandoned, we are still hoping to get it done, but its going to be at least another 3 months of bureaucracy (don’t get me started on this…) plus a likely extra year of waiting for a grid connection even if we get it. If there is ever anything to report, I’ll blog about it…

Modern Technology: Please stop trying to be helpful

Posted on July 17, 2022

A minute ago, I tried reading an article on a super-popular news site. The page it opened had no scrollbar, and as with all modern ‘writing’, the top 800 pixels is a large image, rather than any text. Luckily, my laptop has a touch screen but….no joy. I still can’t scroll. I just assume that this is some stupid clash with ghostery, so turn it off. The site still cannot scroll. I’m sure the content must exist, I just am not technically able to access it.

I’m not an idiot, I used to be an MCSE qualified systems engineer. And yet in 2022, I cannot scroll a web page.

The problem, as I’m sure you have guessed, is some sort of stupid bug in what passes for web development code these days, where the scroll bar is handled by the page, not the browser, and it has decided, given various parameters, that it should hide the scrollbar from me, when in fact it is totally and utterly fucking wrong.

I am unsure as to precisely what this is trying to achieve. Back in the 1990s, web browsers just added vertical or horizontal scroll bars when they were needed, and we all got on with our lives. Apparently, in 2022, there is mass hysteria at the thought that I MIGHT see a scrollbar when I do not really immediately need it, and this would be a mortal threat to me. The sight of a scrollbar at any point in my life other than one nanosecond before I intend to use it, is apparently a fate worse than death.

GMail, before I gave up on its frankly appalling spam filter, used to pull the same trick on me. I have a lot of email folders, and this requires a scrollbar, which apparently would give me cancer if I saw it before I went ‘hunt the scrollbar’ with my mouse in its general direction.

I get it. Some graphic designer, who probably got into a lot of debt to get that degree, thinks that a scroll bar breaks the ‘clean simple’ look of their art / web page, and that my life would be simpler if I could never see it. Apparently it compromises the artistic vision of the designer if the web page includes any actual functionality.

Sadly, its not just functionality, but content that is actually offensive to these people. The layout of a web page is apparently an exhibit at the Guggenheim museum, not actual information that anybody would wish to consume. All news articles must contain a massive stock photo of some vaguely related phenomena with a proud GETTY logo in the corner, lest we confuse it with anything actually relevant. After scrolling past this waste of time, we are lucky if 50% of the available space contains any text, and thats even after ghostery has blocked all the ads, and after we ignore the ‘sponsored’ content.

Once you scroll past (tech permitting) the stock photos, the ads, and the sponsored concept, you are left with an amazing display of unfettered white-space. Acres and acres of plain white background. This is apparently clean. This is apparently simple. This is actually ridiculous. Apple removing the headphone jack was just the white-space/scrollbar trend in real life. Remove everything. Pad everything. Everything you buy must be a multi-layered unboxing ‘experience’ designed for Instagram, not common sense.

Just like the curse-of-white-space and the banishment of scrollbars, I find almost all modern tech trends designed to help me, actually hinder me. The chief example is of course the dreaded social media ‘algorithm’. I am yet to find a single tech site or service where I prefer their algorithm over a simple search/browse/directory structure. The worst possible offender has to be youtube.

Youtube’s algorithm is like a hyperactive puppy on amphetamines. You dared watch a video of someone playing a van halen song? Well OMG DO WE HAVE THE VIDEOS FOR YOU. Expect 50% of your suggested videos to be variations on that theme. If you dare watch another one, the puppy will get even more excited. WATCH MORE OF THE THING!!! it shrieks at the top of its voice into your eardrums. Meanwhile, a second puppy constantly pimps already-stupidly-popular but absolutely unsuitable videos that you have never shown any interest in, while a third puppy keeps suggesting you re-watch a video you literally watched an hour ago.

Streaming services are no better. Netflix is so in thrall with its algorithm that it actively lies. ‘Popular today’ means fuck-all. It means ‘stuff the algorithm thinks you want…which is popular today’. At one point I had to create a completely new Netflix profile called ‘not korean’ to escape its dumb-as-fuck constant pimping of NOTHING but Korean dramas to me. Amazon prime is even worse, actively promoting the latest football matches to me whenever there is some tedious football event. I have been an Amazon customer since the month the site launched. I have never, ever, in all these years, ever watched/streamed/bought/rented anything even tangentially related to any sport, ever. I assume there is a ‘sport’ section, which I could presumably find, if I suddenly change after 50 years.

Stop trying to help me. You are rubbish at it. If I go into a book store, back in the real world, (the one that is not infuriating), I see a ton of shelves, nicely labeled, showing me all the content on offer. Amazingly, my primitive brain enables me to browse, to decide what to show an interest in, what to look at, where to go. This works. Its worked for hundreds of years now. Its fine. But… imagine a bookshop where there were no shelves, no departments, no books, just a fucking annoying sales assistant holding up a ton of books that were the same as the last book you bought, yelling BUY THESE! THESE ARE WHAT YOU WANT!

I yearn for simpler times, not because I’m a technophobe, I’m a fucking computer programmer, but because I despise seeing so much effort go into efforts to actively make my life worse in so many tiny ways. If the text doesn’t fit in the box, show a fucking scrollbar. Not only when your machine-learning bullshit thinks I need it, but ALWAYS. If I have something that is laughably called a ‘timeline’ in your social media app, then ONLY EVER show it by time.

In a line.

Its not much to ask.

What income can you get from your old indie PC games?

Posted on July 3, 2022

There are a whole lot of different strategies for running a pc games business. I know people trying a bunch of different strategies and here are a few:

  • Publisher-funding model. Get publishing deals, and charge enough for the development milestones that you make a profit regardless of whether the final game makes a profit or not.
  • Patron model. Using patreon, or kickstarter or other methods, build up a loyal fanbase that pays you money to make games, regardless of whether they play them, or buy them in any quantity.
  • Straight sales model. Self-fund games, release them to the world as self published titles and hope the royalties exceed the development costs on a continual basis.
  • The big hit model. Go all-in, on a big title you bet your entire financial resources on, including remortgaging house/car etc. Assume that scale brings its own bonuses, and that the huge payoff outweighs the risk.
  • The continual release model. Release multiple games each year, maybe one a month, hoping that over time, the long tail builds up a relatively stable income.
  • The searching-for-a-hit model. Similar to continual release, but in this case the aim is to hope to strike it big with a sudden hit. Always be poised to drop everything and ramp up any game that gains initial traction.

Unless you didn’t already know, my method is the straight sale model. I’m pretty conventional in that I think the model where you just make the best games you feel comfortable with, from a risk POV, and aim to have them sell enough to result in a profit… is the most ‘normal’ and sensible way to do things. This plays to my strengths, because I’m not scared of risk, but not nuts, and also not a people-person as you need to be with patreons etc, and as a self-code-engine guy, I’m not churning out quick asset flips hoping for a hit.

However…

Because of the sheer bloody-minded determination to stick around, it turns out I have been making commercial aimed games since 1997, and therefore I have ended up with a big bunch of older titles that still run on most PCs, and can still generate revenue. have I perhaps become the ‘long-tail-indie’ just out of sheer hanging around? Could it be that actually positech games is self-sustaining on the basis of really old games, that although they do not sell much each, combined they add up to a tidy sum?

I’ll be honest, I have no idea how much those older games make without digging into the data, but I thought either way it might be interesting, so here goes.

Kudos 2 (2008)

This was the first game I made that made proper ‘omgz’ money. I got a cheqck one month for $20,000 and it was on the basis of that game, selling on about 15 different casual games portals. This was amazing. It was however, a long time ago now… 2008 apparently. This was certainly not my first game, mobygames catalogs a bunch of earlier ones, but it was the first one to make enough money that its worth even looking at the numbers.

Kudos 2 is unusual in that its not on steam. I also actually made it free on itch last year, but people tend to follow old buy links, and I still sell copies through BMT micro. Lets look at the last 365 days income from Kudos 2 for BMTMicro:

269 copies for a total of $1,463.69

Not bad, but this is pretty much the only income for the game. I accept donations on itch for it, and earned another $49

Gratuitous Space Battles (2009)

I always think of this as the game that was released on steam the day I moved house. That was a stressful day. Anyway… its old now (2009), and its on steam, and sold through BMT Micro, and also sold through apple on various devices. Lets check the last 365 days data:

Steam net income: ~$8,700 Apple sales: $0 BMT sales: ~$120

I actually forgot that apple sales were zero now because apple decided anybody who wanted to play 32bit games on devices they bought and paid for could go fuck themselves and revoked that ability, so there you go. Just one of many reasons I despise the company. But anyway… its about nine thousand dollars in the last year. Which for a game released 13 years ago is… pretty amazing?

Gratuitous Tank Battles (2011)

This is a game I often consider a flop, but its not really because it made a decent return at the time. However, its a game I have kind of forgotten about, after I made a single expansion pack. Its now 11 years old, so how is it doing?

Steam net income ~$550 BMT sales: ~$14

Whoah what the hell? Are those number correct? Yes they are! pretty bad. But why? I think its because the total peak sales of Gratuitous Tank Battles never managed to hit a real escape velocity. When it comes to long-tails for games, I get the impression that there are basically two scenarios:

The ‘Meh’ game.

This sort of game sells some copies, and maybe makes a profit, but it never really ‘takes off’. You don’t see dozens of youtubers covering it, there are not more reviews on websites than you can count. The community for the game never really gets going. Its not a watercooler discussion topic. People see its released…some buy it. And then its over. Gone. Done. The end.

The ‘Hit’ Game.

This doesn’t have to be Minecraft. It can just be a game that hit a certain threshold. I don’t know what that threshold is, but my best guess is $1-1.5million gross sales on steam. Once you hit that sort of level, you have a ‘community’. There are people posting online about the game every day. People who ask questions get community answers. People make mods, and the game thus expands. There is justification for DLC, which leads to more news, more coverage and more players, and you get a flywheel effect.

GSB and Kudos 2 hit the ‘hit game’ level. Kudos 2 is now so old its become irrelevant, but amazingly GSB still sells a non trivial number of units each year, and makes comfortably more than beer or coffee money.

Conclusion?

I think a lot of developers get frustrated that they are constantly in a grind, always having to desperately work on a new game to hopefully release it in time to survive the drop in royalties from the last one. Residual income from old games is almost zero, so you are constantly working away like a developer on a production line, never getting to relax.

I suspect many of these developers are at 90% between ‘meh’ and hit, but the problem is, being 90% of the way is not enough. Its pushing really hard on that flywheel, and feeling absolutely despondent, because you simply cannot see that point in the future where the momentum takes over. Its very, very easy to think things will never change, and that extra effort on a ‘failed’ game is simply not worth it. I totally understand why people do not push things that extra mile, when it feels like you have been pushing for the last 99 miles and got nowhere.

FWIW I think this applies to almost all endeavors, but especially creative ones that require popularity. I used to be in struggling heavy rock bands, and the constant putting up of posters and handing out of flyers for gigs, in the seemingly futile, pointless effort to get a few people to show up is soul-crushing and demotivating.

But in a sense, that explains why so many fail. Only dumb optimism or sheer bloodyminded obsession with success can possibly explain why some people still go out every single night and stick up those posters or give out those flyers, or keep tweeting and blogging about their video game. It always looks hopeless, totally and utterly futile, and impossible odds, and never gets you anywhere…until it does.