I haven’t been able to access the 2dBoy blog for some reason, but I trust that Rock, Paper, Shotgun has reported this accurately: Kyle and Ron have released sales stats for their birthday sale experiment. During the week-long sale you could pay whatever you wanted for World of Goo.
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people paid $2 and under. But I think things worked out well for 2dBoy in the end – they made 57,000+ sales and generated $100,000+ in one week. Not a bad present for the young game (and its proud papas)!
A survey that players could take after purchasing the game reveals more interesting information.
Alec Holowka, Ron Carmel, and Simon Carless in attendance (photo by Dan Tabar)
The Austin GDC just finished up. It sounded like a lot of fun, with many indies in attendance for the first IGS in Austin. Here are write-ups of the various talks that were given by independent creators last week:
Day One
How Fantastic Contraption Became A Fantastic Hit (Gamasutra) – “Fantastic Contraption creator Colin Northway explained how he created his Flash-based physics game with no pro game experience, and “made a boatload of money” along the way.”
NinjaBee’s Fox Gets Practically Indie (Gamasutra) – “NinjaBee’s Brent Fox discussed the history of the company, which was set up as a brand for original IP in 2001, and has made Xbox Live Arcade games such as Clonin’ Clyde, A Band Of Bugs and A Kingdom For Keflings, talking in human terms about creating a stable indie game company.”
Gaijin’s Roush on Bit.Trip’s Indie Construction (Gamasutra) – “The original concept of the first Bit.Trip title was ‘Pong with music,’ said Gaijin Games’ Mike Roush Roush—but ‘we all know a great game needs more than a concept.’”
Certain Affinity’s Bullard On Bootstrapping Your Indie Business (Gamasutra) – “In an intensely practical Indie Games Summit talk at GDC Austin, Certain Affinity (Age Of Booty) production manager Jennifer Bullard talked about the realities of game business for a mid-sized independent developer, spanning business to relationships and beyond.”
Wolfire On Making Indie Marketing Buzz (Gamasutra) – “Wolfire’s John Graham discussed how to get the word out about your independent game, based around successful tactics for upcoming PC action game Overgrowth.” Slides available here.
Day Two
2D Boy’s Carmel On ‘Beyond The Finish Line’ (Gamasutra) – “World Of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel from indie studio 2D Boy examined the world ‘beyond the finish line’, discussing what happens after your indie game is released and how to deal with it.”
Swink, Wegner On Blurst’s Rapid Prototyping Madness (Gamasutra) – “Flashbang Studios’ Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink explained how their rapid prototyping of web-based games like Off-Road Velociraptor Safari gave them larger life lessons.”
Lost Garden’s Cook On Why Premium Flash Games Rock (Gamasutra) – “Bunni co-creator and Lost Garden blogger Daniel Cook explained why he believes charging users for more complex Flash games is the wave of the future.”
Twisted Pixel Talks ‘Splosion Man Postmortem (Gamasutra) – “Mike Henry and Sean Riley from Austin-based indie Twisted Pixel used their Independent Games Summit talk to postmortem the six-month XBLA project ‘Splosion Man, a significant indie success in the ‘Summer Of Arcade’ for Microsoft’s Xbox 360.”
Storytelling Through Independent Games (Destructoid) – “Alec Holowka, formerly one half of Bit Blot (Aquaria) and currently the head of Infinite Ammo (Paper Moon), was the last speaker to go on at the Independent Games Summit of GDC Austin.”
I am so sad I’m not at GDC Austin right now. Brandon Boyer’s New Indie Hotness session alone would have been worth the trip. (Not to mention the indie love explosion that’s undoubtedly going on this very minute!)
Fortunately, the unstoppable Simon Carless is doing his best to cover the event. Keep an eye on GameSetWatch as the week goes on.
Simon has already posted his wrap-up of day one, with pretty thorough articles on many of the sessions. It’s like you’re right there!
Admittedly somewhat of a wry smile, but then I imagine that’s just how you would smile when you’ve just allocated half of your £4.5 million budget on british indie games. Alice Taylor is the Education Commissioner for Channel 4 as that linked interview reports, Channel 4 being a UK TV network already responsible for funding the BAFTA winning web-game Bow Steet Runner, which is a stunning FMV-Adventure style georgian crime drama. And really quite good.
A somewhat worrying figure in the interview is that the scheme will be supporting projects which currently have a budget of up to £800,000. Braid is one of the more recent examples I can think of where a large price-tag was admitted by the author, somewhere around $200,000 dollars, so the idea of helping out £800,000 productions is kind of confusing. The people I think it could help out most are the ones working for a hundreth of that sum, if not less. Still, if there is that much money around and brit-indies are confident in asking far less than that amount in terms of support then I’d be cautiously optimistic for them. Maybe I’m just intimidated by anyone with that much money.
What’re peoples immediate reactions? Are they any british developers who’ll be looking into this as a source of funding?
Chris Heckerhas announced that he’s been laid off from Maxis, where he was a major contributor to Spore. In the announcement Chris reveals that he’ll be working on Spy Party, a game which he demoed at this year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. In the game you play a sniper watching a cocktail party from another building, trying to figure out which of the partygoers is the spy by looking for various tells. I saw it at EGW and it’s a cool take on the spy genre.
Chris isn’t new to indie games by any means, having helped organize the Indie Game Jam and The Experimental Gameplay Workshop for several years. He also infamously ranted about the Nintendo Wii at GDC 2007, which – even though he was speaking for himself – ended up becoming the rather lurid headline “Spore Developer Calls Wii a Piece of Shit.” Good times!
It’ll be exciting to see what Chris comes up with now that he’s gone ronin! Good luck, man!
For more information on Tim Langdell / Edge Games, visit our Edge Games Info Page. There’s also a long-running thread on the conflict with Mobigame in the forums.
I cannot say what this means for the future of Edge.
Seems Steam has answered the indie games D2D package with a package deal of its own (two, in fact): Audiosurf, Blueberry Garden, Braid, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Darwinia, Everyday Shooter, Gish, Mr. Robot, The Path, World of Goo, all in one package for $30. And a subset of five of those for $20. Ends Monday.
Direct2Drive currently have a sale on until the 9th of August, with the five above games on sale for £11.50/$17.75. It’s not often when Direct2Drive gets a shot in on Steam with the deals and so whether you would actually agree if these are ‘THE BEST OF INDIE’ or not they’re certainly a steal for the price being asked, and for these kinds of bundles in the future I will be looking at the site to see them if they are there or looking again another day to see if they are after they have not been there before when I have looked.
So, who’ll be picking these up? Any game in particular you’d be most interested in with this pack?
Kind of the antithesis of the video from a while back (IT HAS FLAWS!), Anthony Burch of Destructoid.com has been making a series of weekly ‘Rev Rants’ which are basically 4-5 minute critiques of certain parts of gaming culture. These could be simple concepts in games such as moral choice systems, or much more widespread subjects such as this week’s ‘Donate’ video.
‘Donate’ is about the state of gaming in the sense of how we choose to pay for games, what games we choose to pay for and the biggest question of ‘Why?’. It does deal with mainstream games quite a bit but there is a large amount of relevance in there for indie gamers/devs if you care to watch through it. If you can get past the sometimes iffy edits (the problem with appearing on camera for the entire segment is you’re giving yourself no opporunities to cut away if you mess up a take) and the mental image that it could be Iranian President Ahmadinejad ranting about games it’s worth your attention, for this week certainly.
To the Tim Langdell/Edge Games page I’ve added links to documents pertaining to the Cybernet Systems v. Edge Games case (which is still ongoing, despite the fact that Cybernet’s Edge of Extinction has been inactive since 2002). These documents were obtained through PACER, a service that provides online access to court records. Anyone can get an account and the data is considered public record.
Among these documents are emails sent by Tim to Cybernet, as well as various exhibits submitted to the court by both parties. One of these exhibits, shown above right, is a really curious thing – to me it looks like a very amateurish mock-up of an Edge Magazine cover (the real issue from July 2004 is shown on the left). I’m wondering what it’s actually supposed to be, because in “Answer to Complaint, Counter-Claim, and Affirmative Defenses,” it states that the exhibit is a sample “of the EDGE brand as used in connection with computer hardware in various formats.”
The rest of my opinions are hidden behind this jump:
A quick news bite for anyone following 
