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Indie RPG Struggles On Xbox, Yet Thrives On Steam
derGoldstein writes "Two weeks ago Robert Boyd started offering his two RPGs Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World on Steam, for $2.99 (for both games combined). It fared far better than it had on the Xbox Live Indie channel: 'In less than a week, our Steam revenue has actually exceeded over a year and a half of XBLIG revenue for us.' Hopefully this will prompt more developers to port 'smaller' games over to Steam, especially since many of them can run on low-spec machines, like netbooks."
Steam seems far friendlier to indie games. I saw these titles on the front page of the Steam store. I expect they are far harder to find on XBox Live.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
On Steam, the games are promoted with giant images and a discount on the front page every time you visit the site.
On XBLA, finding where the Indie games are is a game in itself. Hell, sometimes even finding a non-indie game that just doesn't happen to be promoted well is difficult. They can't be wasting all that space advertising videogames, after all. They need that precious space so they can sell their paying customers repulsive AXE body spray, beef jerky, cell phone plans, and advertise the latest shitty romantic comedy featuring people you've never heard of.
I think it's pretty obvious. There's a lot of PC gamers who grew up with games very much like indie RPGs. Whereas the average console gamer grew up with twitch games. Does it really surprise anyone which platform will be superior for that genre?
Well, fear of piracy isn't really a BS reason. Large numbers of people pirated the humble indie bundle, despite the fact that it could be purchased for $1 (or was it 1 cent?). Some people are just incredibly selfish. I can understand why devs might want to avoid that, even though I think they're making a mistake if they do.
True, some people will never buy the game. You won't get money from them in any way.
However, for others the case is different. For instance, I first played World of Goo when a friend pirated it and gave it to me. Never would have played it otherwise. Guess what? I now own it on steam. Never installed it (yet), but I might get around to replaying it on there at some point. Regardless, they now have a sale they wouldn't have had it not been for piracy. Piracy can be an indie games greatest advertiser. The game maker even mentions that: he considered that he'd gone big when his game started being pirated. Piracy means your game is actually popular enough people want to share and play it, and that means people will buy it. Some of them anyways.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I wandered through the thread for a while to confirm someone had the right answer.
If this was a comparison between "proper" XBox arcade games and Steam, then it would mean something. But "Indie Games" is a wasteland (because of no quality control or promotion of quality games), and none of the XBox owners I know have bothered to look there for a long time.
There's a strong, justified assumption that if something is in "Indie Games", it's trash. MS need to give some attention to helping promote and discover good games, or else Indie Games will continue to wither (despite, reasonably good tools and technology).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
People always bring up this argument, but it is deeply, deeply flawed.
You assume:
A) That no one who pirates a game would have bought it otherwise. This is false. There are at least some people who would have.
B) That a substantial number of people buy the game after having pirated it. This is true to an extent, but you have no idea how common it is.
If the number of people in category A exceeds the number in category B, then it is a net loss for the developers. The fact that you fall into group B does not mean that most people do.
I bought the bundle on Steam, because I like to support indie games and 2 games for $2.50 was the right indie price. As it turns out, both are excellent titles in the vein of the old Dragon Warrior series and I look forward to further offerings. Steam offers great promotion whenever they run one of their sales or announce something new, and I'm very glad that they extend this courtesy to indie games selling for under $5 as they do big-name AAA titles.
Personally, I feel that we in its entirety, we no longer need game consoles - they're a relic of a day when affordable computing was generally of singular purpose. Today, consoles are more PC-like than ever, save for restrictive OSes and locked down tech to limit doing things to "The Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo" way. Its pretty much holding games hostage - "If you want to play Metal Gear Solid 4, you have to buy a PS3, abide by its rules, use PSN to go online for multiplay etc...". Every game from the indie set to the biggest corporate AAA kit is developed on PCs..so let them play on PCs as well. Many of us own PCs and it costs less to outfit them for gaming with more power and control available for the money. Peripherals and controllers can easily be sold separately and used on a PC - most already are and Microsoft's full support of the X360 controller under Windows shows this in action (Compare to Sony's refusal to put together a driver package for the Dual Shock 3, so you have to use 3rd party hacked drivers and give up an entire bluetooth dongle. Nobody is buying Dual Shock 3 to play PC games or emulators, for the most part, where people are using Logitech F710 and X360 types). I can't think of a single reason for consoles to still exist, save for greed and to a lesser extent "tradition". It angers me further to see the "consolization" of powerful multiuse hardware into locked down content delivery platforms (ie. iOS etc...)
Especially Indie developers who run on shoestring budgets, casting your lot with Steam, Humble Indie Bundles, Desura and other "friendly" digital distribution services is a good move. You'll have quite a bit more freedom than the console stores and have a better chance of your target audience equipped to play your game and willing to invest, especially with niche titles. There are things that I wish Steam would do better (ie. Linux Client.) but they do provide a great value in advertising, showing your game directly to people that buy other games whenever they log in. Consoles seem intent on extorting as much money as possible for everything and their taint has crossed to the PC world quite some time ago, such aswhen Oblivion's PC version had paid Horse Armor DLC on 360, they couldn't provide it for free on PC. Many console (and consolized-favoring) platform owners talk a good game about "develop for our platform and you'll have access to all these people who do X, Y, and Z and you'll be rich.", but those words are just wind. PC development give you choices and allows you to easily port, use or make any tools you desire and basically create as you wish without limits and with plenty of options.
...At least beyond "you can sell absolutely anything if you put it on the front page of steam for $5".
I take this fact alone to be a good thing. This will attract more developers to either port current games to Steam, or develop them simultaneously for multiple platforms *including* Steam. If this happens, then it's just a matter of time before consumers will start being more picky about their choices, and eventually you'll get $5 games that are more than worth the price (of which there already are many).
I can't afford to spend money on dedicated game machines, because of the limitation to play them only at one location. On the other hand, I have PCs almost anywhere I spend time (home, work, travel). I love Steam for many reasons, and one of them is the fact that you can buy anything from a tiny, casual $5 game up to a 40-hour, triple-A RPG, all on the same platform. The addition of more small indie games is always welcome.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
You have to be accepted by Steam in order to have your game on the service.
From Steamworks FAQ: "For new games we look for unique and interesting gameplay and art, and of course it should be fun!" That doesn't give much detail, especially how much of a budget they're expecting to produce "unique and interesting [...] art". Another technical criterion is that it run on a PC, which has its own limitations such as generally smaller monitors than consoles.
I don't know what the system is on the XBox.
Xbox Live Indie Games, as I understand it, starts with legal residence in select countries plus paying $99 per year to join App Hub in order to run your game on a console. Other App Hub members perform "peer review", or evaluation of your game against a technical requirements checklist. Some of the requirements include 1. being written entirely in C# (or another verifiably type-safe language supported by XNA), not C++; and 2. not having any dialogue written in the made-up language of a fictional culture. (Sorry, Tolkien wannabes.) If your game passes peer review, it gets added to Indie Games for as long as you maintain your App Hub membership. Indie Games are not available in countries with a government-imposed requirement of classification of all video games for objectionable material.