Category: Marketing/Business

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Marketing/Business

Who Is the Audience for a Social Game?

Survey

Raph Koster posted What social gamers look like, which reports on a study that PopCap sponsored to identify the profile of the typical player of social games.

So who is playing these games on Facebook and in other social networking portals? Apparently she’s 43 years old, may or may not be married with children in the home, works full-time, is college-educated, and plays other kinds of games, whether casual or hardcore.

You can dig into the 79-page PDF from PopCap to see the details yourself. Koster summarized a few key points in his post, too.

The study covers not only the profile of the players but also game play behavior, which sites and games were most popular (Facebook by a long shot, Bejeweled Blitz is possibly not accurate due to potentially bad data), social gaming relationships, and how often players spent actual money on these games.

That last bit is important for people who wish to make money creating Facebook MMOs. Less than a third of players have purchased virtual gifts for others. About 72% said they have never paid for virtual currency. While these might sound like poor figures, if you think about it, over 20% of the players are paying real money for otherwise free games. Are your shareware games converting at 20%? That may not be a fair comparison, especially since each player might only spend a few bucks, but there are various metrics available such as Average Revenue Per Player thanks to companies like Three Rings, famous for Puzzle Pirates.

What is also important is recognizing that Facebook is the primary social networking game portal. Over 80% of players reported going there. #2 is MySpace at 24%. Bebo has 7%. I find this reminiscent of Windows vs Mac vs GNU/Linux, although the percentages mentioned have some overlap. While most people are on Facebook, is it possible that targeting MySpace and other social networking sites with your games will mean that you will have a larger piece of a smaller pie? I’m only speculating, of course, but it’s easy to forget that Facebook isn’t the only game in town. Sometimes going in a different direction than everyone else is lucrative. Still, a smaller piece of the much larger pie of Facebook might be worth the competition.

While it’s no surprise that the typical player of social games isn’t a teenaged boy, does any of this data surprise you? Are any of the findings hard to believe?

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Game Development Marketing/Business

Read Up on the Video Game Industry’s Indies

Entrepreneurs, business owners, and other indies have given me a good piece of advice that applies no matter what is going on in the economy: keep on top of the industry. Subscribe to magazines. Go to conferences. Read relevant blogs and books. Be familiar with what your industry is doing.

Why does it matter?

There are a few reasons. First, when you’re in business, you need to stand out and provide unique value. If you don’t know what everyone else is doing, how will you know where to direct your efforts without finding yourself accidentally duplicating someone else’s efforts? Worse, what if you think you’ve created an incredible game only to find that it pales in comparison to an existing game on the market? Being aware of the competition is not only good for helping you avoid problems, it’s also good marketing. What is everyone making, what do the customers demand, and what can you do about either?

It also helps to be aware of trends. You can ignore these trends or go with them, but knowing about them allows you to make an intelligent decision about it. For example, these days a lot of people are throwing their hat into social networking. With millions of people in a highly specific demographic using Facebook all looking for a fun, socially-engaging game, they are an audience with a need that indies and major companies are hoping to fulfill. Some indies are creating games to take advantage of this trend, while other indies are focusing on what they’ve been doing. Both paths are valid and profitable, but imagine if you didn’t know about the social media trend and you could have made a great MMO to take advantage of it. You miss out on opportunities you didn’t even know existed!

There are other benefits, but the point is that being informed, even if only to be aware of things on a superficial level, is way better for your business than being clueless. That isn’t to say that you need to spend more time reading about the industry than making a contribution to it, but knowing something gives you an advantage over someone who knows nothing, all things being equal.

One way to learn about who is in the industry and what they’re doing is to go to conferences. While conferences abound, they’re focused, usually annual events that happen a few days out of the year. So what do you do between conferences? Read up!

What should you read?

I subscribe to PC Gamer magazine, but aside from a few pages dedicated to indie games, the lion’s share of the coverage is for games with multi-million dollar budgets as well as the marketing budgets to buy ad space. Some people swear by Edge Magazine, Game Informer, and other popular game enthusiast magazines.

That’s great for learning about whatever major retail games are being released, but what about games being made by indies? You have a few options. Some are free, and some cost you money. Now, don’t let a subscription fee stop you from getting access to good information! If you’re running a business, sometimes you need to invest in your education, and it should be tax-deductible, too.

First up, the indie game review site Game Tunnel is a popular and free one. Full disclosure: I used to be a staff reviewer for Game Tunnel. This site has developer news, reviews, editorials, forums, and interviews. Add the news feed to your RSS reader, and you should be good to go.

Next, The Indie Game Mag focuses exclusively on indie games and their developers. While it has some free content, there is also a set of paid subscription options. I took advantage of their Pay-What-You-Want Valentines Day Special (which expires on February 14th) to get a subscription after I was given a free copy of Issue 8 to read. I was impressed with the developer-focused articles, such as the 6 part series called Beginner’s Guide to Indie Game Development by Mike Gnade, and the in-depth review of Gratuitous Space Battles by Positech Games. I printed out my copy, and the images and layout were still well put together in dead tree form. Becoming a subscriber gives you access to back issues and resources that are especially useful for indie game developers and marketers (that means you if you’re running the show!). You can also get access to the magazine anywhere you use a computer.

IndieGames.com is brought to you by the same people behind Gamasutra.com (another good resource, by the way). It focuses on finding the best indie games anywhere they can be found. It isn’t unheard of for 48-hour game dev competition entries to be featured alongside of artistic and commercially-available games.

And of course, The Independent Games Festival is held every year at the Game Developers Conference. If you want to see what indie game developers are making a creative impact in the industry, checking out the entries for the IGF is one way to do so.

What do you read?

So I’ve cited a few big resources that I read to keep up on the industry. What do you read? Do you have any must-haves in your RSS feed that I’m missing? Any books or blogs?

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Marketing/Business Personal Development

Happy New Year!

I know. I’m very late, but I didn’t mean for the new year to start without me! What can I say about 2009? What does 2010 have in store?

Let’s look back on 2009 first. I created an index card and kept it with me throughout the year to remind me what I wanted to focus on:

This year\'s focus!

My four main focii: being more decisive, creating more value, delivering more value, and being healthier.

Being more decisive was meant to remind me that I need to be more active in my pursuits if I expect to make a difference. I may want to run my own business and create games, but unless I make bigger and better decisions, I’ll continue to get mediocre results.

Creating and delivering more value? Those two were inspired by Steve Pavlina’s article How to Make Lots of Money During a Recession. Creating and delivering real value to customers is the best, most sustainable way to earn a living. You can probably trick people into parting with their money, but if you can deliver your creations to people who are willing to pay for it, you’ll be well ahead.

And finally, being healthier. I wanted to lose weight and feel as fit as I did when I was in high school.

So how did I do in each focus last year? Miserably.

At the beginning of the year, I was able to leverage the work of outsourced contractors to create a Facebook game, Sea Friends. You can read the post-mortem, but here are the key highlights:

  • It was the most aggressive schedule I have worked on outside of 48-hour game development competitions.
  • I learned a lot about what I can accomplish by leveraging other people’s time.
  • I got a taste of what life is like when you put everything else on hold and dedicate your time and resources to a single pursuit.

That last bit, however, got me in the end. I spent way longer recovering from this project than I would have liked. Between a day job and working on this project, I had no time for relaxing. I couldn’t afford idle time or time spent on anything that wasn’t getting that game finished. I paid someone else to shovel my car out of the snow during this time because I couldn’t afford the time to do it myself! So I needed to take time off, and unfortunately that downtime lasted much longer than anticipated.

And as for Sea Friends, it’s not a very good game, but it still had a few hundred daily active users as recently as a few weeks ago. I could have spent time improving it, but between feeling burnt out and the proprietary nature of the Flash file, I couldn’t motivate myself to do so. I’m not proud of it, allowing those two things to stop me, but it’s what happened.

After Sea Friends, I had a whole year to release a new game, but outside of Ludum Dare competition entries, I didn’t finish anything. So much for creating and delivering value.

I suppose I’m being overly negative. Late last year, I also invested in an online educational course on Internet business development, and since my focus has been there for the past few months, that’s why there has been a drop in the Thousander Club entries (and blog entries in general!). What I’ve been learning there should help me not only with GBGames but also a different website I started.

The focus that resulted in definite improvement was the focus on being healthier. I went from 188 lbs in February to a peak of 192 lbs in May down to 180 lbs in December. That’s a net loss of 8 lbs, and 12 lbs were lost between May and the end of the year! I’ve also been playing soccer, so I’m feeling more fit in general, too. Aside from a pulled hamstring in October, I’ve been improving my health slowly but surely.

So if 2009 was a mediocre year for me, what makes me think that 2010 will be any different?

Because I’ll be leveraging Purpose, Discipline, and Habits this time around.

Last year, each focus was practically the equivalent of a bad New Year’s Resolution. They were vague, and I didn’t do anything to change my life so that each focus played a big role. Yeah, I had a reminder in the form of that index card, but what was it reminding me to do or be?

I realized I didn’t want a repeat of a mediocre year, and so I decided I was going to make changes to my life to ensure it.

First, I didn’t want to feel aimless, drifting from one interesting project to the next without accomplishing anything. I needed to figure out what I really wanted out of my life. I needed to figure out my purpose.

Using the exercises in the book Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life, I was able to get a good start with this statement:

A Life on Purpose is a joyful life of freedom, continuous learning, encouraged and supported creativity, insatiable curiosity, and prolific creation, all driven by passion and a desire for excellence, powered by a healthy body and soul.

Bam. It’s great to have something to help me make decisions. If it doesn’t lead to more freedom and fun, I’m not interested. If being that person’s friend is discouraging and stifles my creativity and curiosity, I don’t want that friendship. If my heart isn’t in it and I can’t improve, why should I bother doing the same old same old? And if my health deteriorates because of it, why should I accept it as a fact of life?

Ok, so what do I want? Generally, I want to be a prolific creator. I want to be a lifelong learner. I want to be fit and healthy. I want to be a leader and role-model. I want to live a life of passion.

I’ve identified four major goals that I want to accomplish this coming year, and while I won’t be able to list all of them here, they all pass my “Is it a match for my purpose?” test.

One goal is to earn regular revenue from GBGames. So far, the only revenue I’ve ever earned is from ads, and it was never significant in the first place. I could basically pay for web hosting. With the recession, my revenues have dropped.

So how do I plan on changing things this year? Hasn’t my goal always been to earn revenue from GBGames? Yes, but I never gave my business the attention it needed. This year, I’m taking steps to change my life so that I can give it that attention.

There is a quote I like about discipline: “Discipline is remembering what you want.” A lot of people fail at keeping New Year’s resolutions because they think they need to dedicate all of their will power to accomplish it and they burn out. Will power is great for short bursts of focus, but it’s the wrong tool to use for the long haul. Discipline is the right tool. Will power will let you do things to change your environment so that discipline is easier to maintain. For instance, if you want to lose weight, using will power to avoid eating all of the junk food you keep in your home every day is a poor use of the will. A better use? Dedicating an afternoon of throwing away your junk food, shopping for healthier food, and planning healthy meals. Now you have healthy meals and snacks because you used your will power to change your environment to match your goals. Set your life up in a way that makes it easy to remember what you want out of it.

How do you do so? You install some good habits. If you can get yourself to go for a walk every single day after dinner without fail, you’re a long way along your goal of becoming more fit, and each day it becomes harder to fail.

So how do I leverage my purpose, discipline, and habits to help me accomplish my goal of earning revenue for GBGames this year? Frankly, my business plan is still being formed, and it’s the subject of another blog post. That said, in previous years, my business has suffered because it was always an afterthought. Development hours were squeezed into weeks full of non-development. 2010 will be the year that I gear my daily actions and habits toward improving my business. I’ve already taken stock of my current situation, and I’ve identified what needs to change. While I feel behind already, this work was important and needed to be done to pave the way for the rest of the year.

In previous years, I believe I have written inspirational posts about how things were going to change, but I never stuck by those convictions. This year feels different. It is different. I’ve hit a point where what I knew intellectually about the connection between action and results is now intuitively known as well.

While I intend to write more about my plans, for now, days after Groundhog’s Day, here’s to 2010!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business

Is Single-Player Gaming Dead?

Sharing the experience

Back in October, Raph Koster wrote about a PC World interview with the lead designer of Dragon Age, a major single-player game from Bioware. Mike Laidlaw on single-player games talks about the idea of creating such games today, when games such as World of Warcraft and even Facebook games such as FarmVille dominate by leveraging their social components.

Social networking games are the current big thing. For indies who would prefer to keep making shareware, the idea that someone could make a ton of money through a relatively simple MMO is as frustrating to hear about as major game developers who learned that Tetris, as simple as it was, sold much better than anything they were working on. I know more than a few indies have grumbled that while selling virtual items and subscriptions to an MMO is piracy-proof, they don’t want to make those kinds of games. With major indies reporting piracy rates of for-sale games in the 90+% range, sticking with single-player games sounds like a tough bet.

So what do you do if you want to make single-player games? Give your player a way to share his/her story.

Instead of a game that tells the player the same story that every other player will hear, give the player the means to create his/her own story. Make the experience of playing the game personal. And make sure the player has a way of sharing that experience.

NetHack is a perfect example of a single-player game that lets you experience a story to share with others. The in-game story is minimal, the NPCs aren’t very complex, and there’s not a lot of dialogue. What the game does do is provide plenty of fuel for stories that players love to share with one another. Yet Another Stupid Death, or YASD, is a common phrase for NetHack fans. I’ve even posted my own stories of these deaths. See Engraved Note to Self and YASD, the First for 2008 for short stories about my own travels in the Mazes of Menace.

Of course, those stories aren’t shared inside of NetHack. While you can watch others play online, most people talk to each other or write about what happened. The game doesn’t easily facilitate communication between friends.

But your game can. Dragon Age apparently has a Social Engine, but as Koster points out, most successful Facebook games are successful because of the player’s ability to interact with others. Even if your game is meant for one person to play, it doesn’t have to be a solitary experience.

Dragon Age has its Social Engine.

There are iPhone games that allow players to send progress updates to Twitter.

Facebook notifications let you know if someone has challenged you in Sea Friends.

Can a friend go to YouTube to view a replay of the way I handled a tricky boss? Can I show off an achievement? Could my friends send me time trial challenges?

What does your game do for allowing shared experiences?

(Photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/wanderingone/ / CC BY 2.0)

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Game Design Game Development Games Marketing/Business

Marketing Is More Important Than Product Quality

GamesIndustry.biz recently published a post called Marketing influences game revenue three times more than high scores. Research has shown that the belief that game reviews have an impact on the sales of a game is a false one.

Or at least a poor quality game with big marketing dollars behind it will sell much more than a good quality game with poor marketing.

On the one hand, it’s discouraging. Gamers already complain about bug-ridden games, the need for patches, and subpar playing experiences. I was shocked to find that FIFA ’09 for the Nintendo DS had crash bugs in it, and according to at least one comment in a game review out there, it seems that FIFA ’10 has its own share of show-stopping bugs. That the FIFA games are at the top of the charts in terms of sales has to make game players feel disheartened. And when game companies start shoveling anything they can out the door, customers will feel the need to be more discerning about their purchases. The video game industry already had a crash when anyone could and did make an Atari game. People stopped trying to find fun in video games when most of the products were horrible. And, of course, marketing dollars become even more important, which means the larger companies with the greater capabilities win.

On the other hand, none of this is really news, is it? Ask anyone who knows anything about marketing, and they’ll tell you that marketing is way more important than most people think it is. If you create a fantastic game that no one wants, of course it won’t sell. If you create a game that a lot of people want, even if the attempt isn’t the best, it will sell. Part of product development should be market research: finding out if anyone cares about what you’re creating.

It’s true across all industries, and it’s true for the video game industry. That said, what can an indie game developer do?

Generating Buzz for Indie Games and Advice for Aspiring Indies have some marketing tips which should fit your budget. It also helps to remember that major publishers such as EA and Nintendo need to make a lot more money than you do, and so your marketing budget doesn’t need to match theirs in dollars. You can spend much less and still make enough money for your business. Also remember that your time is a resource, and there are plenty of ways to improve your marketing that just happen to take more effort than money to pull off.

Marketing will have a huge impact on your sales potential. Don’t ignore it.

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Game Design Game Development Games Marketing/Business

EA Acquires Major Facebook Game Developer

Facebook has grown to be a powerful social networking force to be reckoned with, and game developers who have taken advantage of the popularity are pulling in plenty of money through ads, virtual good sales, and exposure. And now, EA purchased PlayFish, the biggest publisher of social games on Facebook, for about $400 million.

So what does it mean? PlayFish’s business model, selling virtual goods through social games, is appealing enough for a major mainstream game publisher to buy into it. And if EA is buying into it, it means we’re going to see a lot more of it.

On the one hand, indie developers now have to directly compete with EA on the Facebook platform. It was bad enough for a small developer to try to gain some exposure when Zynga and PlayFish were dominating. It isn’t too far-fetched to think that EA is going to get the most eyeballs and sales, leaving everyone else with smaller pieces of the pie.

On the other hand, this is Facebook. With over 2% of the entire world’s population running active accounts, it’s a very large pie. Also, just because PlayFish now has a lot more marketing and production muscle behind it, it doesn’t mean that the smaller indies can’t produce major hits themselves. Long-lasting indie games are the rule. If a game doesn’t last past a month, it doesn’t succeed. If you can create a high-quality game that takes advantage of the social aspect of gaming, you have a good chance of competing.

Earlier this year I created a social game called Sea Friends, based off of a simple game I created called Minimalist. The mechanics are simple, and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a great game, but at one point I had almost 400 people playing it in a single month. I was surprised to find people I wasn’t friends with becoming fans of the game! The game was an experiment in outsourcing and rapid project development, and I wrote a Sea Friends post-mortem if you want to know how it went, but for a game that I think loses its appeal after a few sessions, it seems to have at least a tiny bit of staying power. As of this writing, I can see that a handful of people played it today, and many more have played it in the past week. The top ten players for the month all scored over 50 levels, and the number one player for the month broke 170! Who are these people?! I don’t know, but they’re saving real coral reef when they play, so that might be part of the appeal of the game.

Here are some questions: with EA on Facebook, what will happen to the markets outside of Facebook? Will casual portals see Facebook taking away their traffic? Will we find Facebook Connect on many non-Facebook sites? Can the market get saturated with virtual good economies, or is there unlimited potential here? Can Facebook as a platform be ignored if you’re going after a different part of the market, or is its size going to require you to acknowledge it in some way, even if you don’t make a Facebook app?

And when did single-player games become such a tiny niche product?

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business

Generating Buzz for Indie Games

Paul Taylor of Mode 7 Games, creators of Determinance, wrote an article for Gamasutra called Building Buzz for Indie Games which I think ties in and expands upon Christopher M. Park’s advice for aspiring indies that I wrote about last week.

He starts by emphasizing marketing, quoting Tim O’Reilly’s message that obscurity is a bigger problem than so-called piracy.

Most marketing books and articles will tell you that marketing should start with product creation, that if you created a product before finding out if anyone wants it, you’re going to fail. Taylor and Jeff Tunnell will argue that the nature of the video game industry makes it harder to predict what people will want to play. Who would have thought that World of Goo would have been the success it is?

The bottom line for Taylor: if you are passionate about something, it will be easier to develop, but you’re going to need to find a way to get it in front of people. The more mainstream the product, the easier it is going to be, but the wackier it is, the more work you’ll need to put into marketing. And given that you’re an indie, you’re probably not trying to make something pedestrian or mainstream in the first place.

He talks about the importance of building your presence early on. All you have is simple concept art or a crazy programming demo? Post them up! SOMEONE is bound to care about them. Look at Dejobaan Games for an example. I remember seeing early videos of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity before I even knew what it was. Wolfire Games has a development blog that constantly gets updates with technical details, concept art, videos, and general information about the business of making games. These two indies give their fans a place to rally for them.

Taylor wrote a four page article with marketing tips, taking you from concept announcement all the way through to post-release. Read the entire thing, and check out the links at the end of the article for more information.

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Game Design Game Development Games Marketing/Business

Advice for Aspiring Indies

Back in August, Christopher M. Park of Arcen Games gave advice for aspiring indie game developers.

He has a number of observations after releasing his first game, A.I. Wars, and my favorite part is categorizing what class of indie game you might have your hands on. He separates them into three main groups: Indie Darlings, Undiscovered Gems, and Hobbyist/Nonprofessional.

Knowing which category you’re in is important because it allows you to realize what you can do to improve sales and get publicity. It is very important to recognize if your game is part of the last class. If you think you are running a business, but you don’t set your priorities so that you treat your business as one, it will be an uphill battle until you admit that you haven’t been dedicating the time and effort that a business calls for.

Another set of observations I liked: art is really important, but it’s usually not as important as most people think it is. Releasing a finished game with placeholder art is much better than not, and you can always release an update or a sequel or a completely new game with better quality.

As a side note, I used to think that graphics were much less important than I think they are now. Thanks to my time spent in the Game Design Concepts course and in Twitter conversations on the topic with Krystian Majewski, I’m now of the mind that the audiovisuals are as much a part of the design of a game as the mechanics.

Majewski said:

Otherwise, you run into a situation where you have an addictive game with exchangeable, hollow visuals. A growing problem today.

Bottom line: art is really important, but don’t let it be an excuse for not finishing your game.

Park’s other big observation echoes what you might hear from any discussion about marketing and sales. Refine your story. Tweak your copy. I love that Park gives multiple examples of emails he has sent out over three months.

The article has some good nuggets of information, so I would suggest reading it in its entirety. It’s not going to detail a plan for you to follow, but it is always a good educational opportunity to see what someone’s business looks like when it makes contact with the market.

Categories
Game Development Games Linux Game Development Marketing/Business

What Game Platforms Do You Support?

While I beat the drum about supporting GNU/Linux gamers, more than a few people have noticed that the world doesn’t revolve around Windows vs Mac vs GNU/Linux anymore. Jeff Tunnell wrote in February that putting your game on OS X and GNU/Linux is not enough.

Instead of debating OSX, Linux, and Windows vs. just Windows, you should be considering all OS’s, Flash, the browser, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Steam, Instant Action, Greenhouse, your own site, iPhone, Android, other smart phones, Nintendo DS, Xbox via XNA, XBLA, Playstation Network, Wii Ware, box distribution, Casual Portals like Big Fish Games and Yahoo Games, Flash Portals like Kongregate and New Grounds, international portals.

When I worked to convert a game to Flash and bring it to Facebook, Sea Friends was the result. And until I made this effort, I didn’t realize how much Flash, Facebook, and the web in general were individual platforms.

When Netscape and Java were new, the promise was that applications would no longer be locked into the operating system you were using. All work and play would be in the web browser. The push got stopped long ago, but look around you today. Facebook is huge, and more people spend time logging in there than many other sites. The iPhone had a gold rush, and Android phones may have their own.

And the platforms impact how you play. Games available through Facebook and other social networking sites tend to be social games. It’s only natural. If you can’t interact with friends in some meaningful way, your game won’t get played. iPhone games tend to be quick and easy to play, which are perfect for people who are sitting on a bus or waiting in line somewhere.

If anything, supporting Windows exclusively, as many indies do, is a sure-fire way to marginalize your game in the world. Supporting Windows exclusively is easier, yes, but why should you expect that doing the easy thing will be profitable?

But the bigger point is that supporting Windows, OS X, and GNU/Linux aren’t enough. Does this mean that Joe Indie has his work cut out for him? Perhaps, but it also means your game has many ways to meet potential players. You have many options for testing your game designs long before you invest years of your life into the implementation.

Always see, and really see, what is possible.

Categories
Games Linux Game Development Marketing/Business

Linux Gamers Demonstrate Demand & Support Suppliers

I like calling attention to the reasons why you should support Mac OS X and GNU/Linux as a game developer, especially since so many people still ignore these markets at their peril.

Recently, Koen Witters of Koonsolo Games wrote about how surprised he was to find that Linux users show their love for the company’s indie game. He posted Mystic Mine‘s downloads and conversions stats, and the results demonstrate that GNU/Linux users are a gaming market that is relatively easy to target and is willing to purchase quality games.

Mystic Mine is an action-puzzle game with simple controls. You basically switch tracks for mine carts to use as they collect coins, diamonds, and other items. As more and more carts run around, you’ll find yourself switching tracks just to keep them from running into each other, and the action can get frantic.

This game is available for GNU/Linux as a native client, and the customers are buying. I downloaded the demo, and the game runs right out of the box. It’s a fantastic user experience.

Contrast that experience with EVE Online. Back in February, EVE Online‘s official GNU/Linux support ended. The reasoning? Not enough GNU/Linux users to make it worth the complexity of supporting three operating systems.

If you read the comments of that news item, you’ll see that everyone agreed the native client was horrible. One person said that using Wine to emulate the Windows version worked better than the native client. People even left the game because the native client was so painful to use.

No wonder there weren’t many GNU/Linux users. Based on the feedback I’ve seen, they were treated as if they were second-class customers, given an inferior experience and expected to act like it was good enough.

Again, contrast that experience with 2D Boy’s World of Goo. GNU/Linux users had to wait for that game to be released long after the Windows version was. When the port was finally released, more games were sold on that day than any other day.

This day beat the previous record by 40%. There is a market for Linux games after all 🙂

If you’ve played World of Goo on GNU/Linux, you know that the native client is great. It’s not buggy. It’s not frustrating to use. It just works.

So Mystic Mine and World of Good are both games that treat GNU/Linux users as first-class customer, and the creators are rewarded with good conversion rates and sales. EVE Online produces an inferior experience for GNU/Linux users, and then the creators cite the low number of customers as the reason to drop the poor support they were providing.

If you want to argue that EVE Online is an MMO and has different support costs, keep in mind that A Tale in the Desert is also an MMO, and when it first came out, 38% of GNU/Linux users converted to paying customers while only 20% of Windows users did.

In terms of absolute numbers, there are more Windows users than GNU/Linux users, but there are other benefits besides sales and subscribers. Publicity is a huge one. With websites dedicated to Mac and Linux games, you’ll easily make a name for yourself if your game is well-made. Of course, if you half-ass it, you’ll make a different name for yourself.

I’ve asked before: why aren’t there more Linux-using gamers? But the market exists. It has a significant user base. And they pay money.

As an indie, you can afford to provide a quality experience for these people and reap the benefits, especially since, by and large, the mainstream game industry ignores them.