Implications of the Amazon-IGDA spat

In case you missed it, there's been some interesting goings-on in digital distribution land, in particular with Amazon's Android Appstore, and the dev community (via their proxy, the IGDA) taking issue with some of the terms in their distribution agreement.

The IGDA, in service of it's members, posted an advisory calling Amazon out on several of the points they viewed as egregious and called attention to the risks they believed developers were taking on in accepting such terms. You can read the IGDA's letter here.

On their developer blog, Amazon responded the following day, stating simply that the policy in question was from a dated text file, and that a PDF elsewhere on the site contained the correct terms.

The response seems fishy. The IGDA's letter states that they reached out to Amazon several times and that Amazon were unwilling to change terms. If it were simply a matter of referencing the wrong terms, surely they would have pointed that out. Secondly, Amazon's response doesn't actually address the concerns stated in the IGDA letter. Even taking Amazon's 'correction' into account, many of the IGDA's concerns still seem valid.

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

However, I wanted to call attention to a couple things I think are worth noting about this chain of events.

1) As Dan Cook pointed out in his excellent GDC presentation, platform owners and/or retailers may act in a way that is detrimental to developers, depending on their motivations, business interests and the stage of their life-cycle.

Amazon here is a retailer with far less interest in the success of the platform than they have success in capturing revenue/market share away from other android store fronts. This is a formula for a Tragedy of the Commons where it will be the developers upon whom the livestock graze.

So, this current Amazon/IGDA tete-a-tete serves to draw attention to the issue from that perspective. In a case like this, Amazon may be very different from Apple. For that matter, Amazon's Android Appstore may be very different than their Kindle Appstore.

2) Another way to think about this, is as a form of collective action. Not formal collective action such as a union might undertake; but rather collective in the sense that as the hive-mind of the developer community becomes educated about the implications of terms, they can jointly act.

3) As Dan also pointed out in his presentation, large companies generally don't like bad PR, especially when it presents them as Goliath to a game developer David. I think this is a great example of the kind of collective developer action we are going to see to try to shame platform owners into curbing one-sided practices. I'm surprised their weak response isn't developing more outrage.

We've seen previous efforts in this vein. e.g. When MS was proposing changes to the XBLA royalty structure, or when MS did a dashboard update that buried the indie games channel. In both cases, developer outcry caused at minimum a public response, if not a back-pedal on policy.

So what is the real implication?

Developers, and the indie community in particular, have always had a 'sneaker net' with which they supported each other with information about platform and distribution portal learnings. However, today with social media tools and groups like the IGDA, developers better armed than ever to take action when terms aren't in their favor

The question portals, distributors, and retailers should ask themselves is how they would feel about their terms coming under public scrutiny. Today this is about Amazon, but in reality it's about 'little guys' vs 'big guys'. The little guys are realizing they wield more power than they thought, and are starting to learn how to use it. One need only look to the past months' developments in the middle east to see examples of it in other contexts.

[Update - April 19: IGDA responds to Amazon's response]

The Reasons For Making It

I read a quote that I think bears paraphrasing and applying to games:

"A game is only as good as the reasons for making it"

I think it beautifully captures the reasons why games succeed or fail, as well as why a well crafted indie game like Braid, Portal, or World of Goo take take their place in the pantheon of great games alongside Red Dead Redemption, Half-Life2 or other AAA productions.

A game made for reasons of love and conviction can - if carried through to its maximum potential - trump any game made for want of commercial success.

Game Dev Story: A Niche market is you!

Game Dev Story is a fun little iphone sim about running a games studio. I found a lot of developer friends talking about how enamored they are with it.

I found it ironic that I saw Facebook contacts raving about it the same day I saw an announcement that there are now 300,000 apps on the iTunes store.

At that point, iPhone devs constitute an interesting niche market, and selling them this game is kind of our industry's version of shovels-to-miners.

As an aside: Hey Apple! Pro-tip: When you have that number of apps, this is no longer a positive number for your marketing pitch. You are essentially telling devs the store is overcrowded, and your consumers that they may have trouble finding what they want. At this point "lots" will do as a tag line.

Why aspiring XBLA devs should buy Comic Jumper

Comic Jumper is a lot of fun. It's a testimony to it's quality that I'm playing it through to the end despite the fact that I normally am not a run-n-gun platformer fan.

Anyhow, developers thinking of doing console downloadable titles should consider it required reading for two reasons:

1) Because Twisted Pixel are just a great bunch of guys that everyone should support.

2) Because among the bonus materials unlocked during the game are videos and artwork that were used as part of the pitch material to land their deal with MS.

The quality of the pitch trailer and supporting materials are pretty high, especially considering that these guys had *already shipped* a title (The Maw) with XBLA before pitching the game. This should give aspiring XBLA devs an idea of the expected level of quality to compete for console vendor interest.

Ilomilo!

Polish + Cute + Platform/Puzzler. Coming to XBLA. Looks awesome. This and Monday Night Combat are all I'm really excited for... esp since hearing that Joe Danger isn't coming to the platform :-(

Kim Defines "Independent" (Dice-10 Post3)

There was an interesting 'hot topics' session at DICE in which Chris Taylor (Gas Powered Games) and Michael Capps (Epic Games - standing in for Tim Schaeffer) debated "Independent" development and "Indie" development.

Chris at one point made the assertion that there are different tiers. For example, there might be "2 guys in a garage" independent", Gas Powered Games-esque "$5M title bankrolled ourselves" independent, and there's Epic/Valve "We're sitting on a fair pile o'cash" independent.

There were some bar conversations (the best kind at DICE, of course) about this and about the difference between "independent" and "indie". There was some degree of concensus that the former has to do with influence and decision making. Dependence on someone for putting food on the table, etc. The latter seemed to mean different things to different people. The type of game design to some, the aesthetic to others, the 'spirit' in which the game is created.

Anyhow, here are my definitions of the two based on the epiphany I had in Chris's/Michael's talk and on the subsequent conversations (and libations):

Independent Developer: One having funds at their disposal to cover payroll through the next one to two cycles of development. (This definition works if you are sleeping on your friends couch while working on your Flash game, or whether you are covering 150 heads through a 2 year dev cycle).

Indie Game: One who's development and/or design tells a story that goes against the convention of the time. (This definition works for a game design or aesthetic that is different or goes against the grain - it also works for someone that does a run-of-the-mill schmup but does it on their own terms and funds it through kickstartr)

Please iterate and refine (or refute) in the comments .

Indie Pop

I've often found that some of the best lessons in marketing are those involving commodity products. No difference between Coke and Pepsi, so the marketing better get creative, right?

Well here's a great video about the Soda Pop Stop, an indie grocer that has carved out a niche for himself by combing the world for quality product, catering to only those customers that care for such, and telling Pepsi to pound sand. I love how passionate he is about his customers and his products. Awesome.

I really hope this guy has kids and/or nephews. What a great role model he'd be while sating a kid's sweet tooth.

'top grossing' appstore list challenges assumptions

The iphone appstore added a 'top grossing' filter to the 'top paid' and 'top free' lists (which were based on units only.

Some of the takeaways are going to challenge conventional wisdom, which is that (a) there's a $1-2 sweet spot where impulse buys propel you to riches, and (b) that originality and innovation will be rewarded.

Some things to note on the list:

• Only 5/25 are $1.99 or less, and only 1 of those is a game (Battlebears).
• 14/25 are games. Just over half, despite a huge glut of game titles in the appstore overall
• 5/25 are priced $29.99 to $99.99 (Utilities, GPS apps...)
• Brands rule: Of the 14 games, 10 are around recognizable IP (Madden, Scrabble, Uno, Tetris, Bejeweled, Sims, Need for Speed, Dexter, Monopoly, Civilization). More than ever, brand matters when you have limited time and space to influence purchase decision.
• Publishers rule: EA has 6 of the top grossing apps. Gameloft has 4.

They don't state if this is the current week only, or cumulative lifetime gross, though I beleive it's the former, or the list would be far more stagnant.

This approach isn't perfect. Why should an app's large gross revenue be an indication of whether I want it or not? And like any of the lists, it can be gamed (a publisher could, say, purchase a bulk number of applications to prop up their own numbers).

Still, it's another perspective, and thus interesting.

So, if you are a small indie developer, what do you do?

• Develop remarkable product. There's a lot of competition, and if you don't have something special, and you don't have a publisher's marketing budget, then nothing's going to help you.
• If you don't have a recognizable brand, then at least develop an intuitive name. (I'll post a presentation I did a couple years back at the Montreal Game Summit on this subject, but the challenge I discussed in that presentation was about the casual games space where the same limited shelf space, attention time, etc, exists: You have a fraction of a second to get someone to determine if your game is something they might like. "Magic Gem Collapse", "StuntBike", etc) Oh, and don't make the name one that is so long it gets cut off in the app store list! Looks like approx 24 characters is it. Unbeleivable how many people blow that one.
• Lobby Apple HARD for a Sundance Channel style indie games list. You want a store where you don't have to compete with EA. Then work with the dev community, press, and Apple to make it cool for people to buy games there. Both hard tasks, but the alternative is competing with EA, and last I checked, that was hard too :-)
• Build community on the web, use your community to market outside the appstore. Use the community to game the app store itself. Lots of people experimenting here, but the idea is to get escape velocity and get your app into orbit (aka on the prominent lists). One idea might be to offer a PC version for some amount of time before, offer a code for an extra level for people that buy the game, provided they buy it during the introductory week. Get them on a mail list for when launch is going to happen, and then when it does, get them to go buy, mail them invite codes they can mail friends to get a discount or free extra level or something.

It starts with building a great game, but now more than ever, that's only the beginning. In a limited shelf-space world (and don't kid yourself, Digital Distribution doesn't fix this, it only changes the rules a bit), marketing matters more than ever, especially for the little guys.

PAX'09 thoughts

I did a whirlwind trip up to PAX yesterday, leaving at 5:30 for the 3hr drive up to seattle, and arriving home at around 11:30. Six hours in the car wore me out, but well worth it for what I compressed into the remaining time.

I hang my head in shame and say this was my first PAX. When I was living up in Seattle I had schedule conflicts that kept me from attending the past couple of them. Decided I'd make the effort this year and was glad I did.

Some quick thoughts on the event, with a few topics requiring lengthier posts later.

The event itself: Wow. PAX has grown up. I think the E3 Supernova helped them get escape velocity, and now even with E3 making a comeback, PAX remains a big deal. We'll wait to see attendance numbers, but it felt like a 10k+ attendee event.

If you haven't been, I'd describe it as follows: GDC is the nerdy kid you knew in high school. E3 was his Jock older brother who drove a Chevelle and got all the chicks and gave him wedgies. PAX was the middle brother who listened to GWAR, wore combat boots, played D&D and smoked weed while doing it, and who mom and dad didn't really mind skipping out on the family reunion. :-)

There are panels and other sessions at the event but they aren't the point of the event itself, which is really a mix of game/geek culture celebration, fan-fest, and game companies exhibiting their goods to the hardest of hardcore gamer fans. Oh, and there's a pretty big lanfest and some board gaming thrown it for good measure.

Talks: I only attended two talks and a keynote, but I'd say that the fact that these aren't the main focus of the conference, and the quality is indicative of that. Not that the ones I attended were bad, but the quality varied, showing that it was largely up to the individual moderating the panel. (Vs GDC which scrutinizes talks and speakers to quite a degree).

I attended a panel on 'game developer parents' that had a number of industry veterans who are also parents (and two of whom were former co-workers of mine), who were supposed to discuss issues around games and parenting. I'd say it was 10% that, and 90% anecdotes about their kids, which would be ok except that those were half sage advice and half boasting about their offspring. mildly disappointing.

I attended Ron Gilbert's keynote which was humorous and moving, but not mind-blowing or anything (like say, Will Wright's Siggraph keynote)

I attended a legal issues in games panel, with a variety of legal folk around the industry. Was suprised when they asked "how many people here are lawyers or law students?", and had like 40 people raise their hands! This panel was better run (but not excellently run) and covered a number of timely topics, with the panel offering opinions on each. A few of which were:

• The "Edge" trademark hullaballoo: Tom Buscaglia had to tread lightly around this one because of Langdell's IGDA involvement, etc. The short version of the opinion was that trademarks and copyrights have their place and people have a right to defend them. In this case, both parties have behaved very poorly from the outset and dug themselves into a hole.
• The project Entropia Banking license thing (my question to the panel on this one was what their impressions where, and whether they subscribed to the theory that eventually all MMOs are banks, and regulation is inevitable): At least one panelist agreed with the theory, and two expressed sentiment that the Entropia thing in particular was a good thing, shows games offering more, growing up, etc.
• SW Patents: The usual lawyer-speak about "ya better file 'em!", but Tom B had a good answer to an audience question/comment about SW patents being evil, etc. He made the point that (a) the patent portfolio isn't the problem nearly as much as poor scrutiny of claims at the USPTO, and (b) a patent portfolio is something that can serve as collateral to borrow against with banks, and that Harmonix in particular did so against their patent portfolio and used that cash to survive a tight spot before their big hit. i.e. While there are plenty of examples of patent trolls, this is a counter example of patents saving what otherwise would never have become Guitar Hero.
• First amendment/free speech vs regulating violent games, etc. Good precendents set now with universal defeat of these initiatives across more than a dozen states. Sign of games success and also their growth into a major media. "they join the club of art forms across history that have been feared and attacked in similar ways: movies, rock music, etc"

The show floor:

A mix of exhibitors from the major publishers (EA, Ubi, etc) and HW vendors (Sony, MS, Intel, Alienware) but with a disproportionately high number of indie studios meeting their fans and selling merch. (Twisted Pixel, Dofus, The Behemoth, many others).

Trends:

Cosplay: Wow there was a lot of it. Plenty of galleries online.

Indie Games: Lengthier post on this later, but there's both good and bad here. The "indie game" meme has caught up with publishers, and so they are nabbing up titles whereever they can. Good to see guys getting funded, but this results in muscle put behind these titles and ups the pressure for higher polish etc. As an example the quality of some of the showcase titles in the Xbox Indie games (formerly community games) was fantastic, but these are looking like multi-month, multi-person team titles, and it's not clear that these games can generate the numbers on that channel to justify the investment. Not picking on MS, this is a problem across the board about which I'll post a lengthier piece when I get some time.

Some photos in my next post.

Hecker gets let go, goes Indie

Kotaku and Gamasutra picked up on the news Chris broke that EA laid him off. He's now going to work on an indie game called 'SpyParty', a prototype of which was shown at the 2009 GDC EGW. I'm pretty sure this version was born out of an even earlier prototype done as part of the 2005 Indie Game Jam 3 and shown at the 2005 GDC EGW, in a barrage of 'people interacting' jam prototypes.

Anyhow, SpyParty's got a fantastic core idea, and Chris is f***ing smart and driven, so I'm excited to see the game when it eventually ships.

PC Version of Braid gets a level editor

Turns out the PC version has a built in level editor.

that popping sound you hear is aspiring developers brains the world round exploding in rapid succession.

Oh, and it got a trailer too:

Braid trailer from David Hellman on Vimeo.

Introversion giving a peek into the XLBA process

For those that haven't been pointed to this, and who might be considering doing an XLBA title, the folks at Introversion are really giving a decent peek inside the process, including the background on email threads from their initial contact with XBLA bizdev (back in 2006) through to the most recent bug reports and the like. The playtest & usability reports for example, are a really good insight into some of the services MS can provide when working with XBLA devs. Would be nice to see someone comment on whether Sony & Nintendo are comparable.

Bob's game update

I posted a while back about Bob's Game, the one-man project from Bob Pelloni who was staging a sort of shut-in/coding-binge to try and force Nintendo's hand into looking at the title.

Kotaku posted a response from Nintendo where they politely but firmly said 'we looked at it, we don't like it.' or something to that effect.

Guess Bob should have had a plan B.

Braid PC release announced: Mar 15, $15, no DRM

Jon's announced the first release of the PC version of Braid (he's doing several releases with different distributors). This one is with Stardock, whom you may have heard of from their forward-looking anti-DRM stance. Initially it was announced at $20, but Jon dropped the price to $15 following grumblings on the web. Note the DRM stance:

Where possible, the game will be released without DRM. Some online publishers include their own DRM as a matter of policy, and of those guys, I am only signing with the ones that have light and non-intrusive DRM. My goal is to give people a reasonable choice about where to get the game, and if they don’t like someone’s DRM or someone else’s launcher client, they can get it from whoever they like most.

Now everybody be good boys and girls and buy the game! Support indie development and don't provide fodder for pro-DRM folk to say "I told you so".

Oh, and I love this comment from Jon in the discussion thread, where someone criticized his late PC release as indicative of his being 'anti-PC':

I’m not some kind of weird platform loyalist. The PC is not some sports team that is playing the Xbox 360 for the World Cup.

Indeed, it's not, though I think the PC would kick the 360's tail if it did! (Though continuing this analogy, it would be more like a soccer match of 16 pro athletes on one side, against 1600 guys on the other side, most of whom weren't in as quite good shape.... but I digress).

Seth Godin on the Games Business

Seth has a good post up about changes in the Music Business. A little creative replacement makes a good point about Flash games, Flash MMOs, iPhone, Facebook and downloadable consoles titles - and anywhere else indie games are showing up, kicking ass, and taking names.

The music games industry is really focused on the ‘industry’ part and not so much on the ‘music’ ‘games’ part. This is the greatest moment in the history of music games if your dream is to distribute as much music many games as possible to as many people as possible, or if your goal is to make it as easy as possible to become heard as a musician game developer. There’s never been a time like this before. So if your focus is on music games, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl cardboard boxes and DVDs, it’s horrible. The shift that is happening right now is that the people who insist on keeping the world as it was are going to get more and more frustrated until they lose their jobs. People who want to invent a whole new set of rules, a new paradigm, can’t believe their good fortune and how lucky they are that the people in the industry aren’t noticing an opportunity...

'nuff said.

Online business models: Lessons from Comics

Jeph Jacques, author of webcomic Questionable Content (one of fave webcomics) has written an interesting blog post about business models for online comics. You can read it here.

He's written it as a response to a post by another comic artist (of the more traditionally syndicated variety), who was lamenting the death of newspapers, and how this was taking comics down with it.

The original post suggested 3 business models that might work online:

• Subscription: Jacques points out that the original author's DRM dependance is full of FAIL.
• "Interactivity": Not what we'd mean by it in the games space, he's talking here about what I'd call customized content. Jacques concedes that this could work, but that there aren't succesful examples in the webcomics space.
• Donations: Jacques claims this can work, but has a high risk of eroding readership over time. (Mind you, you could make the same argument about PBS, NPR, etc. If you stay relevant, I beleive this could work)

Jacques looks at a one other business model in the space: 

• Make the Comic free, sell merch: This is Jacques' model, and seems to work well for him.
  

There are then other flavors of these, or hybrids, mentioned in the comic thread, pointing to the successful examples:

• Sell advertising on the website: Penny Arcade, others
• Sell your original inked pages as artwork: Octopus Pie.
• Limited merch (like signed limited edition prints): XKCD did some of this
• Sell the 'dead tree' version: MegaTokyo

I think it's a really interesting thought exercise for indie game developers to look at this space and think about which, if any, of these models apply. 

Some examples:

• Donations: Kingdom of Loathing (they also sell merch)
• Ad-supported: there's a ton of this in the casual space, though usually with a portal/middleman. Some amount on iPhone, etc.
• Customized content: That (or the illusion thereof) and merch together are BuildaBearVille's business model, which is what I wrote about in my post that Gamasutra picked up.
• Subscription: We have the usual subscription-to-a-given-game model; but it's worth thinking about whether the webcomic model would work: If a developer released a game a month, and a subscription offered 1-month-early access to each of these, and made you part of a club of sorts, would this work?

I'll leave the remainder as an exercise for the reader. I think, though, there are some interesting lessons here. Just as casual games with their smaller budgets are able to experiment with different business models and hybrid models more quickly; indie games should be able to do the same to an even higher degree.

If you are reading this and other models or examples of successes or failures come to mind, please point to them in the comments. I'm curious to see what trails are being forged.

Go Go Goo!

As Kotaku points out, lil' indie game World of Goo went to retail and made NPD's top 10 chart. Go Goo!

NPD Sales Charts January 11-17

1. WoW: Wrath of the Lich King
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
3. Fallout 3
4. World Of Warcraft Battle Chest
5. Spore
6. Left 4 Dead
7. The Sims 2 Apartment Life
8. World Of Warcraft
9. Call Of Duty: World At War
10. World of Goo

Either a positive statement about Indie games, or a statement about the sorry state of PC gaming. Either way, Woot!

Daring Deeds of Desperate Developers

So I just picked up on this story about developer Bob Pelloni, who's staging a 100-day, uh, I guess it's a sort of a cross between a sixties sit-in and a coding binge in order to convince Nintendo to give up a dev kit so he can officially 'release' his game, Bob's Game.

By day 21, as Joystiq puts it, things are getting a little weird.

So first off, my 2c about this case:

It's pretty clear by reading the text on his site that Pelloni is probably a little, er, socially challenged, but more importantly doesn't really understand everything there is to understand about the business side of what he's doing. To say there's no cost to Nintendo isn't true. Any game shipped for a console reflects to some degree on those making that console, so they need to be ok with that and put some effort into getting behind the title (even though Nintendo does notoriously little of that).

Is his game any good? No idea. However, as a developer, he really shouldn't be putting all his eggs in one basket. [He mentions doing an iPhone port among others as his backup plan, but is naive to think that just because you can get the iPhone SDK that you won't run into other 'soft censorship' issues].

But anyhow, that's not the real story here.

At the high level, the thing that's interesting about this is visibility that little guys with a bone to pick can get in today's connected world, and what that means to those that offer a platform for content.

XBLA was hailed as the indie path to the 'console big leagues', but has endured it's share of criticism from small devs,with that criticism getting some attention. Criticism for non-transparency, soft-censorship, royalty rate changes, and lengthy cert processes, to name a few reasons. Beleive me, the posts by outspoken folk like Minter or others complaining about XBLA cert process, rate changes, etc, get the attention of execs. Being perceived as the big guy that tramples the little guy isn't good PR (whether or not it may be good for business).

In the past, only the big guys (like the one at the top of this post) could speak out against The Man and get any attention. Today, anyone with a good story and/or a crafty way to tell it can be a thorn in the side of a publisher or platform owner.

So now you have an issue if you are the big guy: Deal with the bad PR, or deal with the little guy. "Ignore him" is no longer an issue. Ignoring will let you filter out those unable to figure out a unique angle, but the rest become problematic.


And the thing is with little indie guys is that people WANT them to win. One could imagine this case ending with Nintendo saying "we looked at his game and it's CRAP!", to which the Intertubes would reply "shouldn't that be for us to decide? Give him his damn dev kit!".

Now whether fans beyond the hardcore ever speak with their purchasing dollars (i.e. "I'm refusing to buy a DS because they won't help indies like Bob") is another matter, but the possibility is there, and worth thinking about.

It's like the Kryptonite problem of publishing. Fun.

iPhone Games Market: Promised Land or Cesspit?

While at TGS, I had a lot of hallway & dinner conversations about iPhone games, with people weighing in on whether the iPhone Appstore was the promised land (a la XBLA circa 2005) or whether it was going to rapidly turn into something less than that.

Some thougts on the subject:

• The fact that the Appstore was not part of the initial design of iTunes is apparent. There are some fundamental features you would want to enable here that are lacking. Most significant of these is a "Try'n'Buy" mode which right now developers are implementing by shipping two versions of their games, which is a broken experience. Other examples include couponing, gifting, friend invites, discounting, retail point-of-sale cards, on-deck pre-installs, etc. (some of these, like gifting and friend invites, are going to become especially important when you look at the marketing challenges which I discuss below)
• Two different people involved in the business of iPhone games told me that "Try'n'Buy models actually often result in people NOT buying the games". This may be true, but the opposite means that the customer has made a purchase he/she will regret, and will be more reluctant next time. If it's good product, let them see it and try it. Fooling them into buying it is a loser strategy.
• The "open" policy of letting developers put anything up on the store (vs, say, XBLA's approval process) is good for a number of reasons, but it has implications:

The store is CROWDED. Even more than XBLA, the responsibility of getting your app noticed falls on the developer. Crossing your fingers and hoping to make the "featured" page or the "top 25"page is not a strategy.

The quality level is highly variable, and the long-term effects this is going to have on the customer impression of the store is TBD. My guess is that over time, there's going to be negative perception for this reason, and Apple's going to start reeling it in (either by pushing low-quality titles to the 'back shelf', or pulling them off altogether).

• We are going to start hearing questions about transparency. For example, if the Featured page is a big driver, then how does something get featured? Can people buy their way onto that page? Maybe not today, but the pressure will be there to do so going forward.
• An additional driver for transparency will be that some developers will choose to 'spend their way out of the clouds' in terms of development budgets, quality, etc. If they do so, they are going to want to know BEFORE they develop their titles, if they are going to be allowed to ship. This is especially true for apps that might be viewed as conflicting with Apple's business model or on-deck apps, but also true for games.

All in all, I think some of the shine is going to come off the apple, but that it's definitely a compelling platform and has reached critical mass as a platform that it's here to stay for developers. 

I don't think developers should delude themselves though. This is rapidly going to become an even more crowded space in which quality titles are going to be expected, and in which the challenge will be in overcoming obscurity - which you can read as "developers need to do their own marketing and they need to be good at it". Alternatively, they an rely on a publisher to do that marketing for them, which is one of the reasons that a publisher business makes sense in this space (Ngmoco, for example, was an early entrant into this space).

[Speaking of Ngmoco, they've announced their first couple titles, and while I'll reserve judgement on Maze Finger and Topple, I will say that Rolando, an innovative platformer using both accelerometer and touchscreen, looks awesome. Trailer here]

Last thought: On the subject of marketing, several folks I spoke with were in agreement that devs/pubs need to do their own marketing outside of the Appstore e-tail placement. However, there was some varied opinion on what that marketing should entail. Several folks I spoke to were of the "viral" mindset. (i.e. you do it on facebook and myspace and via mechanisms incouraging friends to join mail lists and such). There wasn't much excitement around traditional mechanisms like, say, print ads. On the other hand, if you think about it, this is a very interesting marketing problem. The iPhone customer, I'd guess, has a widely varied demographic, is affluent (they aren't cheap), and there may not be one answer to he question of how to reach them. Maybe print ads make sense, but if so, where? Wired? Forbes? Tiger Beat?. Maybe do something at retail, but where? Target? AT&T stores? Starbucks? Maybe coupons/invites in your cell phone bill? Will be interesting to see what turns out to be successful here.

Braid & Indie 'Escape Velocity'

[OK. Last Braid post for a while, I promise.]

I checked out the Metacritic score as of this morning, and it's weighing in at 92, which makes it the top rated XBLA title, and the #10 ranked title of all time, just nudging ahead of Mass Effect, a multi-million dollar title from a large team. Braid cost under a quarter million.

[Update: A few people picked up on this post, and the WSJ one saying Jon invested $180k of his own money into Braid, as concrete evidence of the development cost of the game. I should clarify: Although I had some involvement with Jon, I have no idea what it cost to make the title. That's his business, and up to him whether to disclose. Secondly, my *estimate*, having given it some thought, are that its much higher in total. Likely more like $300k-$400k. Jon's $180, plus an unspecified amount borrowed, but let's assume it's a significant amount, plus the costs that MS covered as advances on royalties for localizations, ratings, etc. Jon talks about some of these here. Anyhow, if you look at it as a $400k dev cost, that's still about 40k unit break-even. More if you consider the tax issue that Jon mentions. And let's not forget that 'break even' isn't the goal, or at least it shouldn't be.]

Now Metacritic is useless in many ways (e.g. there are interweb thoughts on MC scores of Wii not being indicators of sales; or MC scores being too harsh on XBLA titles, etc), but it's still followed closely by console manufacturers and publishers as an indication of what does well and what to aim for.

Which means that people are going to be looking at Braid and trying to emulate it/follow it. This is not unlike how Geowars inspired a publisher/platform vendor thirst for small two-stick shooters (e.g. I courted Everyday Shooter for some time as a more 'arty'/indie title, but Sony wanted the title far more than I did. There are a ton of other examples, both good and bad).

I think there'll be a few misguided publisher/developer/console companies that look at Braid's success and say "we need painterly-rendered platformers with time mechanics!", but I think they'll be small in number. They'll also be wrong in pursuing those as root causes of Braid's success.

What I think is shining through, and what I think the majority of the industry *will* get, is that Braid's success comes from the delivery of a game containing an undiluted form of its creator's passion and vision. Which is, IMHO, what the overused "Indie" moniker is really all about. It's not about small teams, small budgets, or "wackiness". It's about artists taking the vision in their minds eye, and wringing it out in blood, sweat and code.

And if you think about what might happen if the companies in the industry actually take that to heart, well, that's interesting.

If it were to mean a willingness to fund, pubisher or otherwise support titles, while acknowledging that their success will come from completely relinquishing control to those with the original vision, well, that'd be good for 'indie' games now wouldn't it? It would mean 'escape velocity' for indie games, where the metaphor refers to the gravitational pull of the mainstream and the dollars that fund it.

Of course, at some point, those converations within those companies will start to include words like "risk aversion", "focus group", "market trends", etc, and then it'll be hard to stay hands-off, but one can always dream.