{"id":1514,"date":"2008-02-08T08:00:11","date_gmt":"2008-02-08T13:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1514"},"modified":"2008-09-18T07:33:07","modified_gmt":"2008-09-18T12:33:07","slug":"xfire-debate-aftermath-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1514","title":{"rendered":"XFire Debate Aftermath, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a week ago I posed some questions<\/a> to indie game developers. Jay and Corvus responded by answering the first couple<\/a>. Now the other shoe has dropped, and they’ve answered the rest of the questions.<\/p>\n

In his response<\/a>, Corvus spends most of his time on question #4, which asked what “else” the developer has to do once they finish the game. In that answer, he has this to say: (Talking to other indie devs)<\/p>\n

Your ideas are what's compelling about your game. You are the story. The industry has been crying out for more notable personalities. We need more Will Wrights, more Peter Molyneuxes, more Tim Schafers. Where are they going to come from? From the indie sector, where we're not contractually obligated to keep quiet about our designs. From the indie sector, where we're free to dream big. From the indie sector, where we don't have lawyers telling us we can't share our business plans and setbacks.<\/div>\n

He also makes the case for going all open-source. He makes a lot of sense. If you’re making a game to make money, you’re probably wasting your time. If you’re making a game because you want people to play it, then the best way to reach that goal is to give it away. <\/p>\n

Like Corvus, Jay spends a majority of his time on question #4<\/a>. He answer is also tainted by the bitter taste of cold, hard truth.<\/p>\n

As an indie, it’s not like you’ve got some built-in infrastructure and information channels that you are already plugged into to get the word out to the potential customers. And when you do, through Herculean effort, manage to make people aware, they simply shrug and say, “Okay, so, when’s the next Halo game come out?” I sometimes think I’d generate better sales for the same effort by going door-to-door. Nobody knows about your game, and nobody cares. Nobody knows why they SHOULD care.<\/div>\n

And while we’re talking about indie developers, Michael Rubin, the developer behind Vespers 3D<\/a>, has started a blog dedicated to Vespers and indie games in general<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Vespers is an interesting project. It’s an attempt to combine the freedom of movement available in a first-person game with the freedom of action available with a text parser. I’ve had my eye on this for a while because the idea sounds so unusual and yet has such potential. I have a lot of questions about how it will work on a practical level, so I’ll be eagerly reading to see how the thing takes shape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a week ago I posed some questions to indie game developers. Jay and Corvus responded by answering the first couple. Now the other shoe has dropped, and they’ve answered the rest of the questions. In his response, Corvus spends most of his time on question #4, which asked what “else” the developer has to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[72],"class_list":["post-1514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames","tag-xfire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}