A fellow indie developer, Cliffski, blogged the other day that releasing games as an indie is stressful.  I can't find the link though (maybe it was an article and not a blog post).  He sure is right about that.  There are a number of things that make being an indie much more stressful.

When working at a mainstream developer, the owners have to worry about paying the bills of course, but the normal employees are pretty oblivious.  Plus the developers tend to have a relatively (what relative means could be another entire blog) steady advance payment coming from their publisher.  With the indie, the indie is the owner and pretty much always knows how far out he/she can pay the bills and there is no steady payment coming from anyone.

Most of the risk for mainstream devs is getting the project signed in the first place (we've seen plenty of devs go out of business from this), not when shipping (at least short term risk).  When the game is finally done, gone gold, and is selling, everyone except the developer starts making money.  On most projects, the developer never sees any money past their advances anyway, so there isn't a huge amount of worry over how well the game is selling.  Everyone does want their game to sell well.  There is just a huge gap where the advances need to get paid back and publishers usually only pay royalties once a quarter.  It's hard for people to be too concerned about something they don't expect and won't happen for at least 3 or 6 months down the road. Indies on the other hand, don't typically get publisher advances so almost all of their risk happens when they ship a game. Will it sell well or will it flop.  If it flops, can the indie survive? Most likely they won't.  With a mainstream developer as long as they sign the next contract, they will be mostly ok.  An indie needs their games to sell reasonable well so that they can fund the next game.  If they don't they go out of business.

For a mainstream developer, there is also a nice 2 to 3 weeks break between going gold and the game hitting the shelves which is great because you probably just worked a ton of hours in the last month or six.  Indies tend to release their games through digital distribution which means there is no or very little time between gold and shipping.  The day of or maybe the next day the indie is at least hearing about issues if not already trying to actively fix them.

So anyway, if you are prone to worrying about things or stress bothers you too much don't become an indie game developer.

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With Depths of Peril we released our first demo about 3 1/2 weeks before the game released.  I think this worked really well in most ways.  The demo was pretty solid, but we found out about a lot of issues and we fixed a bunch of things for the final release.  Overall we shipped a better game because of the demo.

However, this isn't the point of a demo. :)  The point of a demo is to let gamers try out the game, get excited about the full game, and ultimately buy the full game.

So I think I'm going to change things slightly for Kivi's Underworld.  What I'm thinking of doing now is the first build that is public is going to be an open beta, not a demo.  This is mostly just a semantic change because the build is still only going to be the first small portion of the game, but there is a big perception difference between an open beta and a demo. 

An open beta means there are still changes that are going to be made, that the company is actively looking for feedback, and the testers have more involvement in the direction of the final game.  A demo, on the other hand, implies that it is very representative of the full game and not much is going change.

Basically Depths of Peril's first demo acted like an open beta, but was called a demo.  With Kivi I'm planning on having an open beta and then a demo near when the game is released.

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It seems to me that lately the PC games industry and pirates have been waging war on one another.  From my perspective, it's just like an arms race.  One side increases their arms and the other "needs" to increase theirs also to keep up.  All the while both sides are screwing themselves.  The industry is losing customers and the pirates are encouraging developers to stop developing on the PC.  The term mutual self destruction comes to mind.  And as usual the actual paying customers are caught in the middle and are taking collateral damage.  Spore is just the latest high profile game to use a pretty restrictive DRM scheme.

I keep hearing a lot of people say Spore's DRM sucks so much that they are going to pirate the game.  I have mentioned many times why this is a really bad idea, but here's another: you are supporting the pirates in this stupid war.  You have just helped them increase their arms and if things keep going like they are, the industry will respond with even worse DRM.

If you don't like internet activation, limited installs, and other types of restrictive DRM, teach them an actual lesson.  If you buy a game like this, you are telling the developer you are ok with the DRM.  If you pirate the game, you are encouraging the pirates and teaching the developers that their DRM needs to be stronger. 

Even better is don't buy that specific game AND don't pirate it either.  Don't support either side in this war.  Go find one of the countless games that has perfectly reasonable DRM or none at all.  Hint: indie games are typically very good in this respect.

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