Help The Little Guy...Hipster Rant.

"Joshua "Dr. Science" Gilbert" (joshuagilbert)
08/19/2014 at 00:06 • Filed to: Video Games

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Sometime in high school... back when Apple had their own Downloads section, before the App Store and the lack of PPC support. These were the good old days, back when Apple was still simple but also had Intel. Back when COD4 was the shit. Back when iTunes wasn't a dizzying array of album covers and iPhones 1 and 3Gs didn't die every five minutes. (Wait, were iPhones out yet?) Back before Apple became a complicated control freak pretending to be its pre-2008 self.

Anyway, in those days I discovered an RTS freebie called Droid Assault by British studio Puppygames. I downloaded it of course, from the Downloads page on Apple's website.

Droid Assault is one of my favorite games ever. It is the one thing that has stayed on my computer since forever and I don't regret buying the post-beta version of it. I got legacy'd into Steam, too.

However, any small, independent producer of any product (for example, Aston Martin) needs both funding and distribution. Without this funding and distribution, there is no development or customer base. The guys at Puppygamesare passionate artists. Very, very broke passionate artists. About two years ago, Puppygames joined Steam. And then Steam ran them dry, somehow. Along with taxes, support fees and the progression of time. Puppygames, the publisher of beautiful, simple, addictive retro-arcade games (that are entirely original, with original, hand-made graphics and music) had run aground in the shallow waters of independent game development.

On August 13th, after almost a year of radio science, Puppygames updated their blog concerning the development of their newest project, Battledroid.

Alas, woe unto Puppygames, for we are broke. Due to several decisions of dubious merit last year we've ended up wasting most of our cash on things that never flew. We tried for several solid months to rescue our direct sales but it seems nothing but nothing that we can do will change the fact that at any given moment, Steam comprises 97% of our income. And that's just when there isn't a crazy Steam sale on. So we wasted months on that and achieved precisely nothing.

This is especially depressing when we consider that those months could have gone into furthering the progress of Battledroid.

Battledroid has in fact come quite a long way – we've got all the backend services working nicely, and battles are resolved on the server(s) accurately and transmitted back to the client deterministically. Twiddling the AI parameters of the robots makes a considerable difference to the outcome of the battle, as does initial positioning. It was all looking really great…

…except we only had about four months' cash left in the bank (as of the start of May), and by my best estimates, we needed to spend about another 12 months on Battledroid before it could actually take in any money (which itself is a dauntingly difficult prospect for a game we were planning to release for free ).

This left us with a conundrum. We needed another 8 months' cash (which in Puppyland amounts to about Ł64,000) to release Battledroid. We had always thought we'd do a Kickstarter project to raise the money but some uncomfortable truths about Kickstarter raised the spectre of doubt. The first was, we'd need to spend another 2 months on Battledroid to get it to the point where we could show the real gist of the game from end-to-end, where you choose a territory to attack, place robots, twiddle them a bit, watch the simulations, submit the army, await the result, and then watch the actual battle. That'd be enough probably to show a Kickstarter viewer what we were planning to do. Then we'd need to spend about another month creating a kick-ass Kickstarter pitch, and finally, another month curating the project and drumming up support.

At the end of which we'd have no money left in the bank, no game that we could actually sell , and in all probability… no funding from Kickstarter. It's a gamble. Free-to-play games are apparently even less popular than normal Kickstarter game projects, and we need a not-insignificant sum of money to get it to release. Furthermore we're hobbled by having to do our project in UK sterling, which means we lose 20% of it to VAT, and probably another 33% of it due to the fact that most people backing Kickstarter are Americans and most Americans are terrified of anything that isn't a US dollar and won't back it.

Today, Kotaku posted a commentary on Puppygame's quite intellectual "BECAUSE YOU'RE WORTHLESS: THE DARK SIDE OF INDIE PR," blog post/rant essay that was published on the 18th.

Do you like artists? Do you like videogames? Then go buy their games, directly. Donate extra. Give them a smile. And stop being a horrible person. Seriously, you won't get it till you read !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! And puppies are cute, right? Seriously, I can't stress how much these guys deserve to flourish in a world full of Michael Bay'd Call of Duty cookiecutter-one-man-army games.

DISCUSSION (4)

norskracer98-ExploringTheOutback > Joshua "Dr. Science" Gilbert
08/19/2014 at 00:14

I agree many times Indie games are better than many AAA games on the market. I'd buy more I could afford to buy them but at the moment I can't really afford any games.

 V8 Rustler > Joshua "Dr. Science" Gilbert
08/19/2014 at 00:23

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Conan > Joshua "Dr. Science" Gilbert
08/19/2014 at 00:24

It's unfortunate. They're in a tough situation. One if my favorite indy stealth games totally failed their Kickstarter.

AM3R > Joshua "Dr. Science" Gilbert
08/19/2014 at 01:15

before I finish reading this, I just wanna say cod4 is STILL the shit