I have never had commercial success. Not once. Every game I've ever made has only been played by the smallest of audiences with notable exceptions due to the distribution platform (flash games). Even those exceptions have never made anything even close to a profit though. Do you want to know the most money I've made making games? It was 4 days ago, when we sold 263 pre-orders of Under the Ocean on Reddit.com due to being on the gaming front page for linking to the pirate bay with our now notorious "Annoying Cockroach Edition", linky.
This post was spawned after receiving a letter from a (claimed) developer this morning saying promoting piracy is ruining the industry, and calling me out for doing exactly that. I say fuck you and fuck your shitty cash-in games. I say this publicly because I am sure there are others - I'm not promoting piracy on your games, only mine, leave me alone. I have had more success keeping it real with how the internet works and treating people like people, than wrapping my products in a assload of DRM and treating everyone like a borderline criminal, you should try it sometime. So to those who emailed me asking if I was trolling or joking about the Cockroach Edition, my stance is still "If you can't afford my game, pirate the fuck out of it", because it's better to have someone play my game, than fall into a sea of obscurity.
Onto some lighter topics - Black Market got into the excellent www.indiefort.com bundle, which has a pile of other great (mostly RPG) games in there. I offered to give away Rambros pre-order to anyone who got the bundle if we got over a certain amount as a sort of nice bonus, some of the other developers offered their next games up also! But news also related to the above - thanks to the huge interest we got from Reddit, Mike and I have been able to move full time on Under the Ocean for around 2 months, so we will be livestreaming the development, 12 hours a day, every day, until the game is complete. Check the website for details and come say hello (www.underthegarden.com down near the twitch.tv link), heres a bit of a teaser trailer for the livestream!
Thanks guys, thanks to everyone who pre-ordered Under the Ocean or the few who helped with Rambros IndieGOGO....
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ReplyDeletePlease post elsewhere, this is the nice people only comment section, thanks in advance.
DeleteCongrats on the publicity I suppose. I also think your model is great, because you make people feel bad for pirating the game ;)
ReplyDeleteThanks dude.
DeleteMan, thanks so much for making the step and getting out of the hipocresy.
ReplyDeleteAs just commented at IGD, the interests of those that promote the copy without authorization of digital content as something evil in nature, are not really the same interests of those who actually create and consume the content.
Cheers to you!
Any publicity is GOOD publicity!
ReplyDelete