17119480
submission
spidweb writes:
An Indie developer considers the possibility that setting a fixed price for games is obsolete. The huge success of the Humble Indie Bundle suggests that some small developers might be able to make more money abandoning prices entirely. From the article, "Suppose you're writing a cheap, impulse buy, casual game and you had the chance to make it donation-ware. Should you? Quite probably! You need to charge a small amount anyway to work as an impulse buy. And, if you ask for donations, some people will give you more money. Maybe they love Indie developers, or they feel the higher price is fair, or they just hate having money. Either way, it's freely given, so grab it while you can!" The article also suggests some situations where doing this might be horrible business suicide.
14684088
submission
spidweb writes:
One Indie developer has written a nuanced article on how software piracy affects him, approaching the issue from the opposite direction. He lists the ways in which the widespread piracy of PC games helps him. From the article, "You don't get everything you want in this world. You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both. Most of the time. Because, when I'm being honest with myself, which happens sometimes, I have to admit that piracy is not an absolute evil. That I do get things out of it, even when I'm the one being ripped off." The article also tries to find a middle ground between the Piracy-Is-Always-Bad and Piracy-Is-Just-Fine sides of the argument that might enable single-player PC games to continue to exist.
9958540
submission
spidweb writes:
Much virtual ink has been spilled over Ubisoft's new, harsh DRM system for Assassin's Creed 2. You must have a constant internet connection, and, if your connection breaks, the game exits. While this has angered many (and justifiably so), most writers on the topic have made an error. They think that this system, like all DRM systems in the past, will be easily broken. This article explains why, as dreadful as the system is, it does have a chance of holding hackers off long enough for the game to make its money. As such, it is, if nothing else, a fascinating experiment. From the article, "Assassin's Creed 2 is different in a key way. Remember, all of its code for saving and loading games (a significant feature, I'm sure you would agree) is tied into logging into a distant server and sending data back and forth. This vital and complex bit of code has been written from the ground up to require having the saved games live on a machine far away, with said machine being programmed to accept, save, and return the game data. This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent."
9734324
submission
spidweb writes:
The founder of Spiderweb Software is celebrating fifteen years of being business by beginning a series of articles with advice for starting a small, Indie software business. (Or any small business, really.) The first topics covered are picking a product to make, choosing your tools, and getting enough sleep. From the article, "When you're running your business, your job is to pry the credit card out of peoples' wallets. Again and again. Look real hard at your idea. Hunt the web and figure out how cheap the games you'll be competing with are. When you are sure you want to write a game (or graphics editor or genealogy program or random number generator or whatever) that can get people to hand out their credit card numbers, only then may you proceed."
7132990
submission
spidweb writes:
Gaming blog The Bottom Feeder has an article on game difficulty. The big idea: Unless the player specifically asks for a game to be hard, it should always be really easy. The instinct to punish a player is almost always a bad one. From the article, "If your game is actually fun, killing the player won't make it more fun. But nothing sucks all of the fun out of a good game faster than repeated failure. I can almost hear the heads of hardcore gamers imploding with impotent nerdrage. But seriously. If you have a problem with this, I think you're getting a lot of your fun from making other people have less fun."
