What? Some Indie Games Made Money?

I think the XBox LIVE Indie Games project is really cool and exciting. For the first time, random losers like me can write a game and sell it on consoles. This really excites me, because my games are far too small and niche and low-budget to have a chance of getting on, say, XBox Live or WiiWare.

Sure, there are problems with the service. It has predictably taken a bit of time for the quality to come up. And I think you should be allowed to charge more than $10 for a game. But this is still a darn cool opportunity for small developers, and Microsoft should be applauded for it.

But that leaves a big question: Can any developers actually make money on the darn thing? Well, we now actually have some hard numbers for earnings of the top games. Take a look. They are very interesting.























1. Good stuff makes money!

The top two games for numbers of sales are I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 and Avatar Drop. And, coincidentally, they're the two games on the service I've actually bought. I MAED A GAM3 is the best dollar I've ever spent on gaming. (Just narrowly edging out CrushCrushCrush on Rock Band.)

Excellent party games, and you should buy them.

1b. I'm just sayin' ...

If someone makes I MAED AVATAR DR0P W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1, I will buy it.

2. Don't undercharge for your work!

But look at the profits column. Two of the three most popular games had developers who wisely chose not to charge a paltry dollar for their labors. Though the amusingly named "ezmuze+ Hamst3r edition" is down at #18 in number of sales, its higher price helped it to make a pile. The $2.50 games are making more than the $1 games, because that price increase (from almost nothing to almost nothing) isn't causing sales to drop by 60%.

I MAED A GAM3, to make a lot of money at a dollar price, had to get a LOT of exposure. Most developers won't get that lucky. You can luck into a quick payout, but you can't build a lasting business (meaning making a living off of multiple titles over a period of years) making dollar games. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Don't race to the bottom! Figure out a fair price for your work, and stand by it.

3. The kids love the vibrators.

I hate it when people act like Indie developers have some obligation to be always super-creative and artsy and like Jesus or something. I know some people are miffed by the popularity of the "massage" games, two of which are on the top twenty. But freedom to do whatever you want will result in a lot of ... Well, try out The Drinking Game, and you'll see what I mean.

I personally think that the "massage" games are pretty innovative. They saw demand for something nobody else was doing, and they made it. That is what innovation is. Which teaches a valuable lesson. Even when you get the innovation you want, it will still probably suck.

Resident Evil 5 and Racism!!!

First off, how's that for a article title? Doesn't that just get the blood flowing? (And also get this article to pop out nicely in a list of blog posts, thus generating more hits.) This is how sausage is made.

I got through about three quarters of Resident Evil 5 before my XBox died. I just got my replacement system, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to work up the energy to finish the game. This is a real disappointment to me.

I was really looking forward to Resident Evil 5, since Resident Evil 4 is one of my favorite shooters, like, ever. It was the first Resident Evil game I'd played, and man, I loved it. It's out for pretty much every system in existence. You really should play it, though the Intellivision and Vectrex ports are, frankly, subpar.

And Resident Evil 5 definitely has it's good points. It's very pretty. The battles are paced nicely. It gives you a period of exploration to catch your breath, and then it hits you with a horde of zombies. I'd prefer the hordes were bigger, but still, it rarely irritates you with enemies constantly coming in dribs and drabs. And the boss fights are very cool. I liked them a lot.

But there are several elements I found super-disappointing.

1. The Plot Is Dull. This simply amazes me. The game is about a zombie outbreak. In Africa. Zombies. In Africa. HOW CAN THAT NOT BE AWESOME!?!? Packed cities. Desperately poor people with automatic weapons. Incompetent and corrupt governments. Plus, you know, the relentless assault of the living dead.

And yet, the plot is just sludge. Most of it involves finding out what happened to the former partners of the two main characters (about which I could not care less) and chasing some terrorist for reasons that are never explained. (We're supposed to hate him as part of some Pavlovian response to him being called a terrorist. Didn't work.) And, while the city settings are cool and creepy, you're soon wandering around solving puzzles in some generic ancient tomb, losing all of the awesomeness of being in Africa.

What a waste.

2. The Inventory System Constantly Spoils Your Fun. Fighting the inventory system is a constant distraction. The inventory system in Resident Evil 4 was cool and realistic, and I actually had fun shifting the items around in my briefcase to solve the puzzle of making things fit. In comparison, the new system is an aggravation and trading gear back and forth with your partner is doubly so.

Now, I know I wrote a few months ago how you shouldn't be afraid to make changes to your game. But that doesn't mean every change is good. You must be merciless about improving the worst elements of your design, but you also should be determined to leave alone the parts that are actually good.

3. About the Racism Thing. I didn't have any problem with this for most of the game. You have to fight zombies somewhere. And, wherever they are, you're gonna' shoot a bunch of former people. Having that take place in Africa is no more racist then setting the action in Dubuque. The early levels, in the city, are very foreign and cool, and I think you'd have to be pretty oversensitive to have a problem with them.

Then you go out into the back hills. You enter villages of straw huts and fight zombies wearing straw skirts and wielding spears. And the bosses are ooga booga witch doctors with big masks.

I'm not going to call this racist. Throwing that accusation around cheapens it. It's not racist. It's just dumb. I may be wrong, but I suspect, if you go to an African village today, the young men won't have grass skirts and spears. They will be wearing ratty t-shirts and wielding AK-47s. And they will mess you up.

This is like setting the game in modern-day Japan and having the villages be full of sumo wrestlers, samurais, and J-pop stars. Although, of course, if this was the case, I would never stop playing that game.

Also, since every pot in the villages was full of either gold coins or bullets, I think they could afford something a little deadlier than spears.

4. Oh. One more race comment. About your hot, sexy, hot girl sidekick. She's an amazing bit of art direction. It's amazing how they were able to make her as white-looking as a human being could possibly be and still be plausibly identified as not white. I'm just sayin'.

This is all not so much a review as a bunch of impressions. And a bit of public mourning. I suppose it was foolish to expect more, but after the pure game goodness of Resident Evil 4, I wish I could say more than, "Meh. It's worth a rental."

Oh, and to pre-empt any criticism. I'm not politically correct. I'm just plain correct.

Thoughts On Plants vs Zombies

I just spent a bunch of time playing almost all of Plants vs Zombies. Then I watched my seven-year old daughter play it. She loves it. A fairly fun game, and, from an Indie gaming perspective, very, very interesting. If you haven't yet, first watch the viral video that's been selling the game like mad. After that, trying the demo (at the very least) is really worthwhile.

Some observations ...

1. You Could Have Written This Game. - Two or three dedicated people, in two years, could make this game. It'd take hard work and skill, of course, but that is always true. Even in the age of the blockbuster, a small, good team can still make a title that gets a lot of attention.

2. You Can Do Something New With An Old Genre. - If someone had e-mailed me a year ago and asked my opinion about whether it would be worthwhile to write a tower defense game, I would have been, like, "Are you crazy? The secret is to find an underserved market you can really rock, not an insanely saturated one." Shows how little I know. If a genre is popular, it's always possible for a really smart designer to find a new angle on it and gain some serious traction.

3. The Game Is EASY. - Wow, is it easy. Tower defense games are general about being ground down by stronger and stronger waves of implacable foes until your inevitable defeat. Not your cheery, casual-friendly sort of thing. Plants vs. Zombies starts easy and stays easy. Anyone with much gamer experience is going to chew it up and spit out the bones. Only the final survival mode levels (which you have to play most of everything to unlock) require any real thought.

This is GENIUS. I think, if the game is a real success, resisting the urge to make it hard will account for most of the victory. It made it a potential buy for a whole new universe of fans, and, to keep the hardcore around, it has a clever strategy ...

4. A Thousand New Things Is a Thousand New Things - There are dozens of plants you can buy and dozens of types of zombies to fend off. Even when the game is so easy as to be a bit tedious (as I found), the new stuff really helps to maintain interest.

The thing is, most of the new stuff is fairly shallow. "Here's a zombie with a special sort of shield." "Here's a plant that can shoot around that shield." Only a few of the plants and zombie types are really unique, but the constant barrage of pretty new stuff is enough to maintain interest.

In sum, interesting stuff. And the game is a bit on the casual side for me, but I did enjoy it. And it helped to pass the time until my XBox gets fixed.