Emails about long dead games are one thing, but it also means you have communications about long dead publisher deals and other biz stuff. I am owed tiny amounts of money by at least 4 different publishers and payment providers which are below the threshold for paying out, yet spam me each month with an automatic royalty report. (RealGames, I can guess I’m not selling any copies next month, so lets give it a rest shall we?). This sort of stuff is long redundant and could probably be spam filtered out, but actually its not the ‘really’ old stuff that is the biggest legacy distraction.<\/p>\n
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Believe it or not, Democracy 3<\/a>, a game which still generates comfortably enough for me to live on, and for which we will soon release a Unicode update with exciting new language support… is now considered legacy in my mind. This is partly because Jeff now deals with it, but mostly because I have moved on to do other stuff. We did D3:Africa, then Political Animals, and Shadowhand is coming, and of course I code Production Line<\/a>. Frankly, in my mind, Democracy 3 is history, at least in terms of day to day concerns.<\/p>\n Yet to loads of people, it absolutely is not history, but a current, new game. I get emails from publishers wanting to discount it in sales, I get more requests to do academic stuff around it than you would ever guess, I get a bunch of interesting emails about modding it, I get requests to bundle it, requests to list it on new stores, obviously I get some tech support (not much now, happily), and so-on and so-on.<\/p>\n I know this sounds a little ‘first world problems’ but actually, you don’t realize how much this stuff builds up. If you are working on your first indie game, or have just released it, you have 100% focus. When you get an email about ‘your game’ you KNOW which one. You never get confused as to whether its Democracy 3 or Production Line that has a fix for certain sound card bugs. You never forget which game you are running an ad campaign on, or confuse which one is in a sale this week. (FWIW several of my games are likely in this weeks GoG sale<\/a>. Off the top of my head…no idea which ones<\/em>).<\/p>\n I am beginning to think there is a very good argument for restricting the game output for a single-dev studio to below my current level. Make a few games, make them long-form hits. There is definitely a diseconomy of scale when it comes to multiple projects over time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having a long established business brings benefits (FWIW Positech was formed in 1998, as I recall). You get tons of experiences, and contacts yada yada. It also has a negative side. British Airways used to be a really major force in UK aviation, but got hammered badly by ‘low-cost’ airlines and is struggling to compete.<\/p>\n