{"id":1468,"date":"2011-06-05T14:42:56","date_gmt":"2011-06-05T13:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=1468"},"modified":"2011-06-05T14:42:56","modified_gmt":"2011-06-05T13:42:56","slug":"indie-games-how-to-reduce-your-sales-53","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2011\/06\/05\/indie-games-how-to-reduce-your-sales-53\/","title":{"rendered":"Indie games: how to reduce your sales, #53"},"content":{"rendered":"

There were a few games that came up in the 10 games you should have played<\/a> session at GameCamp which I’d never heard of \/ played. One of these was SpaceChem<\/a> – sounded interesting (the 5-second description was something like “great game which teaches you how to do real Chemistry”).<\/p>\n

Someone else mentioned this game to me today, in passing, which reminded me to go check it out. I went to the website, looks vaguely interesting (although the site design is very ugly – normally a big FAIL in web-marketing – I’m happy to ignore that since I’m after a *game* here).<\/p>\n

The only info I’m allowed to see about the game – no screenshots etc – is an embedded Flash video that’s taking ages to download, so long in fact that I gave up.<\/p>\n

So I try to get the demo instead.<\/p>\n

“requires mono”<\/p>\n

Oh, FFS. Forget it. No, I’m not going to download 500MB (or however much it is these days) and endure extra debugging, manual configuration, etc just to install your game.<\/p>\n

If this is a commercial operation (and it is, judging by their huge “buy now for $15” text), then it’s a waste of time to release a Mac version that’s any more complicated than “drag one icon to install”.<\/p>\n

The Apple Mac Store is *live*, people! It’s even less hassle to buy things there (the “drag icon” bit is done for you automatically).<\/p>\n

More generally, if you’re going to release games, don’t tie yourself to a 3rd-party platform that requires a large download and isn’t pre-installed by default on desktops.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There were a few games that came up in the 10 games you should have played session at GameCamp which I’d never heard of \/ played. One of these was SpaceChem – sounded interesting (the 5-second description was something like “great game which teaches you how to do real Chemistry”). Someone else mentioned this game […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,59,58],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}