Everyone seems to be talking about fellow indie game developer Cliffski and his request for pirates to tell him why they pirate his games and his summary of everything that he learned.  There were a lot of valid issues raised about games (mostly mainstream).  I'd just like to chime in that some of us (and this is fairly common for indie companies) have already tried to take many of these issues into account.  Below are many of the issues raised and how we handle them.

Too expensive: Currently Depths of Peril is selling for $19.99.  Personally I think this is a great value and much better than the typical $50-$60 retail game.  We also have tons of players that have characters with days of playing time.  That's way less than $1 per hour for just one character.

Tech support: We support our games quite a bit through our forums and over email.  Just read a bit of our forums to see how often I post helping people out.  This even includes strategy and mod related stuff, so we try to go further than just tech support.

System requirements: We purposely try to keep our systems requirements reasonable and they are much lower than mainstream retail games.

Too derivative/gameplay issues: We try very hard to release games that are very different.  This is something that I plan on doing for all games that Soldak creates.  For example, Depths of Peril's competing covenants and dynamic world makes it a very different game than the typical action RPG.

Demos too short: Our demo only has a portion of the world and has a level cap, but you can play it as long as you want.  I have heard from many people that have played our demo for 5+ hours.  That's more gameplay than some full games.

DRM: We don't use any real DRM.  The only thing we use at all is a simple activation key on some versions of Depths of Peril.

On top of all of this, we offer a 30 day money back guarantee, so there really isn't any risk of buying a game from us.

If I am missing anything that we should change, free feel to speak up.  I don't always do what people suggest, but I do always listen.

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Ok, we are going to do something a little different today.  Felicia Day has mentioned playing Depths of Peril a couple times, so I sent her an email asking if she would send me an export of one of her Depths of Peril characters.  I never really expected a response, but it turns out she is very nice and gladly sent me a character export.

The format for character exports works better in the forums, so you can check out one of her characters here.

BTW, if you don't know who Felicia Day is, she is an actress, writer and web producer.  Some of her current work: she plays Penny in Dr. Horrible.  She stars in, writes, and produces The Guild.  The Guild is a very funny web show about a group of people in a MMO guild (as in very gamer centric).  You can also check out her blog.

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If you haven't watched the movie The Mist, based on a Stephen King novella, and don't want to read spoilers (especially about the ending), don't read the rest of this blog entry.

Ok, normally I don't do this, but personally I really didn't like the ending of Mist.  Usually I'm ok with tragic endings, but only if there was some point.  I could write up many good examples of this, but that would just spoil other movies.  So what happens when I get bored or I don't like the endings to movies?  My inner designer kicks in and I start making up something more interesting or in this case a better ending.  So here's what I came up with about 30 seconds after David used up all of the bullets.  I'm not sure how well this is going to come across in print, but here it goes.

The vehicle runs of gas.  Dread settles over the car.  Now what?  David checks the gun, only 4 bullets left.  He briefly thinks about shooting everyone, but discards that idea as the cowardly way out.  He can only think of two decent choices.  They can all stay in the car and hope for the best or run for it.  Everyone so far has been relatively safe when enclosed by something, so that might be ok, but how long can they really sit in the car?  At least running is doing something and the mist can't go on forever.  It's going to be slow with the two old people and the child, but they decide to run for it.

They start running through the mist.  They can hear monsters all over the place, now that they are outside of the car.  They keep hearing more and more nearby sounds and even get glimpses of monsters here and there.  They are all getting more and more terrified, already regretting getting out of the car.  Crunch. Everyone stumbles some because the earth just shook.  Crunch.  All of the other monster sounds start moving further away.  Crunch.  The group starts recognizing the crunch noises as footsteps.  Crunch. The boy, who is being carried by his father, looks behind them and screams.  The huge monster that went past them earlier is now on their trail.  All of the other monsters have fled.  The rest of the group turns and sees also.  Some of them scream, some of the curse, but they all run for their lives.  They keep running, but they can't outrun the huge beast.  It is quickly catching up.  They are so very screwed.  The monster has caught up and is bringing down it's huge head to eat them.  There is this big explosion from in front of the group and then the sound of an object moving really quickly towards them.  Just before the monster gets it's head down to the group, the tank shell blasts right into the monster's head.  The smoke clears a bit and there is a huge gaping hole in the monster's head.  The blast staggered it back a bit, but it starts falling over dead.  The group keeps running to avoid the monster crushing them all.  It's a close call, but they make it and as they run, the mist starts clearing up and they start seeing the army with their tanks, flamethrowers, and soldiers in contamination suits (just like the real movie).  They have all escaped narrowly with their lives.

I can now think of ways to probably improve this, but like I said I thought this up like 30 seconds after the bullets scene during the movie (except the flamethrowers and contamination suits).

I'm obviously not a writer and most of this would work better with visuals than in print, but I think it would have been cooler than the real ending of the movie.  Just my opinion of course.  What do you think?

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Yeah, yeah, I know we are now making the transition from DVD to Blu-Ray, but I'm really starting to miss VCR tapes (in some ways at least).

I still have some movies where, imagine this, I stick the tape in, there is a short logo animation and then the movie actually starts.  This was great, but I'm not surprised at all that this has gone away completely.

The rest of the VCR movies have advertisements of course, but if I don't want to watch them the VCR has this great feature called fast forward.  On a VCR this just works.  I hit the button and it actually fast forwards.

Yes, in theory my DVD has fast forward also, but every time I put in a different DVD it's a little war between me and the stupid little disc on how to skip all of the ads for movies that I have already seen, know I don't want to watch ever, or I've already seen the commercial a million times.  Occasionally fast forward actually works, sometimes skip forward will work, sometimes pressing the DVD menu button will work (except this skips everything), and sometimes you have no choice what so ever.  Way too many DVDs disable at least one of these methods.

Just a little tip for people that make movies.  When I have to fight the DVD to skip the commercials before your movie, I'm really annoyed when your movie starts.  So the likelihood that I enjoy your movie has now gone down.  I'll put this in more direct words.  Your chances of getting money or more money from me just went down.  This same thing goes for games that have intros that you can't skip. 

Don't annoy your customers right before they use your product.  That annoyance will carry over to the rest of your product.

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It's sometimes strange when you are the only owner and employee of a corporation. 

For example, every year I must have a shareholder meeting and a director meeting.  So each year I legally have to have 2 meetings by myself, where I vote for the directors, chairman, president, and secretary of the company, and do various other stuff.  Can you guess who gets elected each year?  I bet you can. :)

Another strange thing: Soldak has to pay unemployment taxes to the US and Texas.  I'm currently the only person that gets a salary.  So I guess I'm paying unemployment just in case I fire myself.  What's even worst is that Texas has a range of rates that companies can pay depending on their past history of former employees that have received unemployment payments.  As a new company you start out in the lower/middle of this range by default until you have built up enough history to push it lower or higher.  So not only do I have to pay unemployment in the first place, I have to pay a relatively high rate, just in case I fire myself.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other weird things, but those are the two that come to mind today.

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My wife thought this was interesting, so I thought I would post it here.

So I walk into the other room where Delilah is watching Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and almost immediately point to the Penny character and say "She's played Depths of Peril".  Yep, the actress that plays Penny, Felicia Day/, blogged about playing Depths of Peril a while back.  Once again the world seems kind of small.

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No, I'm not going to come right out and say what our Mac sales are specifically (although it is very tempting).  However, I will talk about them in relative terms.

Currently, the Mac sales of Depths of Peril are almost 30% of all of our direct sales (not counting retail or portal sales).

Considering this is for a market that only has somewhere between 6 to 10% of the overall PC market and the Mac version was released 9 months after the Windows version, this is really good.

Assuming nothing drastic happens, I'm pretty sure this means our future PC products will have Mac versions also.

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Some games are going to a model that is free to the user, but hosts advertisements to pay for the reoccurring bills and the development cost.  Many users think this is great, and it is nice on the surface, but there's a problem.  What?  There's a problem with getting to play games for free?

The problem is that now the developer is working directly for the advertisers and not the gamers.  Sure, without gamers you can't sell your advertising, but you are getting all of your money from your advertisers.  Who do you think has most of the power here?  If the advertiser tells you to do one thing and the gamer says to do another, which one do you think most developers are going to listen to?  Personally I would say listening to your customers is the smart thing to do for the long term health of your company, but since when do people or companies do what is smart for the long term?

Everyone does remember a firing at a popular gaming site recently, supposedly, at the demand of an advertiser, right?

Anyways, at a minimum advertising splits a developers loyalties which can be a bad thing for gamers.

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