Ok, I'm 3 months of sales reports in now - all in Euros:
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October (was on sale for one day) November December January |
206 704 355 261 |
Nothing to write home about, but I am happy to see that the sales-for-Jan > sales-for-Dec/2 ... maybe it won't be asymptotic, which would have capped the lifetime sales at about $1600... but have a longish tail, and make a little more than that.
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Got my first month's sales data for sixty second shooter Deluxe. Without further ado:
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Australia Canada France Germany Italy Japan Spain United Kingdom United States |
23.13 30.08 10.99 12.56 9.42 322.83 7.85 51.68 235.53 |
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704.07 |
That's in Euros, bringing my total up to 910 - about 500 units.
sixty second shooter Deluxe had a number of reviews in the low twenties at the end of November - so, looks like about 1 in 25 players gave it a review. If you assume the same ratio for other games, you can get an idea how other titles on the platform are doing.
It's about what I expected so far. At the moment I don't want to make another game for the platform, but maybe sssD will have a long tail, or maybe Sony will promote it some (in the North American PSM store, anyway, the same five titles have been in the top bar ever since it launched...what's up with that?), and maybe PSM will grow as it gets more adoption on Android.
Surprised that so many sold in Japan! It wasn't even localized into Japanese.
In other news, I'm hearing that sales in the Windows 8 store have been horrible. Worse than this. So it seems I backed the right horse. But it also makes it look like my whole "launch titles are awesome" theory is wrong: the Chrome store, PSM, and the Windows 8 store have all been disappointing. I'm really surprised by Windows 8 - if anybody had the muscle to make a store decent it was Microsoft, I figured. But I never intended my 'make launch titles' strategy to mean 'make one launch title and then give up' - I knew it was a numbers game, and you'd have to make a bunch and maybe one would hit big.
But the platforms on the near horizon don't seem like they're going to sell a lot of games. I love the idea of Ouya but even if they sell ten times as many units as they have during their Kickstarter it's still a fraction of what one of the Big Three consoles do. The GameStick and nVidia Shield, probably similar deals. Steambox will be huge, I bet, but launch titles will be competing with Steam's entire linux back catalog.
Hmm. If I had to bet on another platform that'll help some new titles go big, I'd bet on Apple TV...
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That's right, sixty second shooter Deluxe has won Playstation.Blog's Playstation Mobile Game Of The Year Gold award.
I wonder what sort of sales bump this news might get. All I can do is check the number of reviews that the game's gotten. It's been a while since I've checked, unfortunately, and although it's gone up a few since I last checked, no way to tell if that's in response to this news.
I am expecting my first month's sales data any day now...
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Here's what I've come up with for the description of sixty second shooter Deluxe for the Playstation Store:
You only have sixty seconds to destroy as many targets as possible in this new-and-improved version of sixty second shooter, the only dual-stick shooter you can play in the time it takes to microwave a frozen burrito.
At Happion Laboratories, our scientists have worked tirelessly to bring you a dual-stick shooter that will stimulate production of the highest possible levels of adrenaline and dopamine in your central nervous system - for maximum euphoria and excitement. Warning, side-effects may include: dry eyes, dry mouth, increased heart rate, increased perspiration, and twitchy fingers.
Will you press your luck and fly to the deep levels where the truly treacherous enemies await? Will you shoot your enemies on sight or wait until you've racked up a higher multiplier? Will you use your missiles to build a large chain bonus - or to secure an area - or to save yourself at the last second? Will you detonate the bombs immediately or lure your foes to them first? Will you unlock the death blossom? Although the game is very short, its strategies are very deep.
“This game is a hidden gem. It's worth getting into.”
- Tomo Moriwaki, producer of Medal of Honor and creative director of Spider-Man 2
Created by Jamie Fristrom, the game developer behind the critically acclaimed and award-winning games Spider-Man 2 and Schizoid.
Well? What do you think? If you had a PSM device, would you buy it (I'm thinking ~$3 USD)? Why not?
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There's been a lot of doom-and-gloom in the indie game developerosphere for a while now. A lot of us corporate developers jumped ship to make indie games because we saw how succesful others had been. For me it was Xbox Live Arcade - "Look at these games! They look like they take only a few person-years to make! And they're making bank! Let's do one!" - for most it was iOS.
The early days of Xbox Live Arcade were heady. It seemed like even mediocre games were profitable on the platform. But it took a year and a half for us to finish Schizoid. The market seemed strong almost all the way up until we shipped - a couple titles came out before us that didn't sell much but we could rationalize it away. "That was a truly crappy game." "That was a sequel." We even turned down publisher money because with our back-of-the-envelope forecasts it seemed we'd make more going on our own.
And then we shipped, and our sales were not anywhere near where we expected. A lot of that was on us - we had a terrible conversion rate. Maybe the game wasn't as good as we thought, maybe the trial was terrible, but part of it was that XBLA was maturing as a platform. There were a lot more titles on there, and if someone was only 'meh' about your demo they would go download another one.
We weren't completely naive - we knew that the gold rush days of XBLA couldn't last forever. But we did think we would make it in time.
The iphone happened somewhere in there. We weren't in any position to get in on that - too busy with our stuff.
The iphone has been the same story. A lot of developers who took a risk when it was an unknown quantity did scary well; there followed a gold rush where a lot of the fast developers also did well; and then things petered out. I have plenty of iOS developing friends who were in the same boat as us - by the time they shipped, it was hard to make a buck anymore.
What's easy to forget is that this has been going on since the beginning of videogame development time. The same thing happened with the Atari 2600. The early crappy games on the 2600 sold like hotcakes, and then one day ET comes along and takes up a landfill and the entire game industry imploded.
(Okay, I'm not that old, I wasn't in the industry yet. Close, though - I started making PC games around when the SNES came out.)
Back then it must have been quite a shock. What seemed like a guaranteed stream of revenue suddenly dried up. They had nothing to compare it to. They didn't have this history of consoles and platforms coming and going that we have now. Videogames as a whole looked like a fad whose time had run out.
Eventually, of course PC game sales and Nintendo reanimated the corpse and the game industry looked better than ever. It's an eternal cycle. New consoles, platforms, storefronts arrive. The products in those stores/ channels do really well at first, because they don't have much competition. Those early successes even help the products build mindshare, build their brand, so they can go on to have good sales in other, cluttered, channels. But then the stores get cluttered and it becomes hard to stand out. This doesn't mean the platform's completely useless anymore - it just means mediocre and unremarkable products aren't viable. A remarkable product with good marketing, or a product that already has a strong brand, will do fine. Like Fez or Minecraft on XBLA this year.
So when I say Xbox Live Arcade sales aren't what they were, or iOS sales aren't what they were, I am not pointing fingers or casting blame. Some do blame the platform creator. "They made titles less discoverable!" they often shout. But it is not the platform holder's fault. This is what platforms do.
So if your business strategy is "We're going to make a lot of games for Platform X" you are being naive. I suppose nobody would disagree with that right now. But in the gold rush days of a popular platform, it's easy to forget. You let yourself believe that sales on the platform are always going to stay strong even for the median titles.
Allow me to suggest two other strategies.
This brings me to a really interesting thing: Kickstarter.
You can think of Kickstarter as a platform / store / channel. There's products in there and people buy them. But it's much less cluttered than the traditional store, because once a product is in Kickstarter, it only gets to be there for a limited time, and then it's booted out to make room for the next product. Clutter is gradually increasing a little in Kickstarter because it's becoming more popular, but I don't believe it's the nonlinear growth you see in a standard digital store where products live there forever. Kickstarter could have some serious legs.
So, me, I'm not feeling the doom and gloom. Videogame development is and always has been hard - every now and then some group of developers are in the right place at the right time and catch a big wave, and then other developers are disappointed and frustrated to have missed it - but:
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Because Playstation Network isn't available yet for Playstation Mobile, I'm not sure what I should do about leaderboards and statistics for sixty second shooter Deluxe in the meantime.
I can support the same leaderboards that sixty second shooter for Chrome uses: an advantage here is that PSM and Chrome players would be able to compete head-to-head. On the other hand, that would be weird, because they're really two different games at this point. And on the gripping hand, this doens't provide friends leaderboards. (I don't know about you, but I don't care how I do compared to the world champion, I just want to beat my friends.)
Or I can spend the time working on individual stats reporting: tracking your averages day-to-day and week-to-week and reporting on your progress. Because sixty second shooter is such a high variance game, this would be a useful tool to measure whether you're getting better - whether your practice is paying off. The problem here is you have no idea how you're doing in any semi-objective sense. I can imagine people saying, "Whoo! I got 25000 points! I've mastered this game! On to the next one!"
So I throw it to you - take the one-question survey:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sixty-Second-Shooter/147543672027135?sk=app_127709503932081
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(I said I'd write fewer 'stupid programming tricks' articles, but that didn't mean I'd stop completely. )
I was asked about getting started with PlayStation Mobile. They've already beaten me to it at Games From Scratch, and I used some of their tutorials to get up-and-running. Nice work over there.
The biggest tip I could give right now - I've tried three different ways to render text on the Vita with PSM: UIComposer, emulating some of their demos, and using the FontMap stuff from their GameEngine2D. UIComposer was unusably slow - it may be fine for a front end but not an in-game HUD. Some of their demos render text - apparently on the CPU - to a texture, then render that texture to the screen. Better, because you can cache what you're doing, but still not great. The fastest result was the FontMap. Even if you weren't planning on using their 2D engine (I wasn't, since this is a port of sixty second shooter we're talking about) it's probably worth using it just as a quick way to get fonts in your game that run quite fast ... and some UI sprites.
You can use the 2D engine on top of the 3D easily, by setting it to update manually and setting the scene to not clear. There's some sample code here. I've ended up using the 2D engine for my entire UI.
The problem with FontMap right now seems to be the font is packed a little tightly in its bitmap, and depending on your choice of font size and rendering size you can see bleed from one glyph into the next. Messing with sizes let me work around that.
(Update 8/31/12:) Also - be sure to use the Label() class to draw your fonts, rather than the DrawTextWithFontMap, which currently can make the text appear squished.
(Update 9/1/12:) Also - your font may appear fine on some resolution devices but on others show the glyph-bleed. Messing around with the FontMap size and width can fix that. Your font may appear fine with half the width - mine did.
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The reports are that the PlayStation Vita isn't selling that great - underperforming similar handhelds from previous generations. Maybe that's partly the price point. "I could buy a PS3 for that!"
But it's a really nice device!
I've been playing a lot of Sound Shapes, which is brilliant. Also Everyday Shooter and Super Stardust. (I'm looking at the dual-stick shooter competition, obviously. I totally have them beat on session length!) And really looking forward to Super Crate Box - I can't stand the interface on my iphone but it's definitely the sort of game I want to hold in my hand.
And it's a great NetFlix server.
I'm on PSN as JamieFristrom. If you have a Vita look me up.
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Now that Gamescom has come and gone it can finally be announced: Happion Labs is one of the developers that Sony has signed to make a game for their new PlayStation Mobile service.
Which means we'll be able to play a new and improved version with more stuff and a macro game on the Vita and various compatible Android phones and tablets! It's up and running at a smooth framerate on the Vita already and it's a pleasure.
There'll be a 1940s themed 'vintage mode': in mostly black-and-white, with jazz music - giving new meaning to 'retro gaming'. But you'll also be able to play it with the original techno look and sound.
Here's a prettified announcement and new landing page for sixty second shooter Deluxe!
If you want to get the game as soon as it launches, get on the mailing list.
If you have any questions about the game or developing for PlayStation Mobile, fire away!
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So - what have I learned so far using Playstation Suite Studio? (Playstion Mobile Studio?)
The GameEngine2D has its charms. I'm avoiding the tweens. I asked in the last post 'Why do I need a scene graph for 2d'? And the answer is - same reason I eventually put one in Schizoid, but didn't call it that - so I can have hierarchies of 2d objects. And also so I can place my squares relative to the board rather than relative to the world. Turned out to be pretty handy.
To avoid duplication of data, I'm accepting that my game data is conflated with the sprite data. I have a 2D array of sprites and am toggling them visible or not to indicate which squares have already been set. Otherwise I would have had my 2D array and then had to propagate that information to the sprites.
There's an Angle member built into the sprites, which I didn't notice at first - I want my tetronimos to rotate smoothly (I'll have to figure out the complications that'll cause when a still-rotating tetronimo hits the flat floor later) - and I jumped straight to rotation = new Vector2( FMath.Cos(theta), FMath.Sin(theta) ) - when there was this handy Angle thing there already. When you set the Angle, it seems to automatically clip itself, which caused some weirdness - I made it so the player can queue up a bunch of button presses, so if they spin the thing more than 360 clipping caused weirdness. I don't need clipping - I'm sure the user won't be able to spin the tetronimo so much that it'll cause precision problems in the brief time it's onscreen.
There's some collision detection built into GameEngine2D as well - the GetBounds() function on the sprites. Not pixel perfect or anything, but for my smoothly falling tetronimos it was useful after some jury-rigging.
When rotating, the sprites look aliased. No big surprise there. Probably have to put translucent edges into my sprite textures.
I'm not seeing any post-processing effects or render-to-texture in the GameEngine2D. You can pass shaders in to the sprite renderer, so, cool, that sounds like an easy way to make the background interesting. (I can use my purple smoke from sixty second shooter - though it's in GLSL and needs to be in CG.)
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