Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Indie Games Business Suckage
Mike Rubin over at The Monk's Brew has a little bit of an analysis and commentary on the indie games business as viewed through the success (or lack thereof, depending upon what you are looking at) of Mousechief's Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble. The game was a critical success, but has failed to break even.
The details of the core issue can be found in this thread. They were depending upon portals to help sell their game, but due to a controversial scene in the game - which had passed their internal QA without comment - the game was quickly pulled from sale. BFG had received too many complaints, I assume.My biggest complaint was the description of the girl kissing her smoking gun. I think, "OW! Burned lips!"
I expect this will have a chilling effect on any developers wanting to make a game with anything close to "grown up" content with hopes of getting on casual portals. The message here is that no, the casual-centric portals don't want anything even approaching controversial. Even though the median-member of their audience is old enough could be the mother of the median-aged hardcore gamer, anything inappropriate for a 12-year-old is verboten.
Although I believe Cute Knight did pretty well on the portals, and I don't know if anybody complained about the implied prostitution in that one. Hanako, do you want to weigh in, here? And to be fair, not all portals are created equal. Manifesto Games, in particular, seems to embrace controversial material - but as far as I can tell, they have yet to find their audience.
Anyway, bottom line - as Rubin notes - the game is having trouble recouping its relatively moderate development expense, in spite of its critical acclaim. Although I should mention that assuming $20 per game profit on the part of a developer is a bit off. Portals rarely offer even 50% of the retail price to the developer (and often play with the retail price), and even e-commerce providers like Plimus and BMT (which I use here at Rampant Games) demand anywhere from 10% - 20%. Then there's affiliate commissions. So really, you are probably closer figuring an average of $10 / copy.
Anyway, enough of my rambling - Rubes is more eloquent:
(Indie) Business Is Business at The Monk's Brew.
Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:07 AM (Permalink)
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At portal level, no. It caused a big problem somewhere else, though, but that's not a story for this space. :)
However, early in development when I realised some people were looking at my demo and promptly giving it to their under-10s, I adjusted the language on the "partying" to try and make it go right over the heads of anyone too young to handle the concept.
It's a lot less explicit than pants-around-ankles, at least.
However, early in development when I realised some people were looking at my demo and promptly giving it to their under-10s, I adjusted the language on the "partying" to try and make it go right over the heads of anyone too young to handle the concept.
It's a lot less explicit than pants-around-ankles, at least.
$20? I'd never heard of the game until it showed up on Steam a few days ago at a regular price of $9.99, with 10% off as an introductory offer. I bought it immediately after glancing at the screenshots and description, because the price was right and it looked like a hoot.
It's STILL on the Steam front page's new release list, and was in fact one of the games favoured with a larger graphic when I last checked the store page.
As long as my own tastes aren't TOO unusual, I think it's a neat little game that should do quite well at that price point, especially after word-of-mouth sets in.
It's STILL on the Steam front page's new release list, and was in fact one of the games favoured with a larger graphic when I last checked the store page.
As long as my own tastes aren't TOO unusual, I think it's a neat little game that should do quite well at that price point, especially after word-of-mouth sets in.
# posted by 
: February 25, 2009 6:20 PM
: February 25, 2009 6:20 PM
Nice catch on the portal cut of the sales price, forgot all about that. Of course, that just makes it even harder to break even, particularly given the typically low conversion rates.
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