Thoughts after Releasing my First Game
9/11/2009
Nasty, Rant, Game Dev
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Nasty has been out on the market for nearing three weeks now. It's my first full commercial release. Sales and downloads have been less than expected despite all but one positive review and lots of positive feedback. In no particular order, here are several things that have crossed my mind in the past few weeks:
- I'm not as good a game developer as I previously thought I was. But I'm also confident that my knowledge of that fact is going to help me become better.
- Not everyone likes retro games. In fact, some people really hate retro games.
- Not everyone likes my game. In fact, some people really hate my game...
Okay, no one has said they hate it, but a 2.75 rating out of 5 on XBLIG is more than disappointing.
- I'm also really disappointed I didn't make the top 20 in Dream Build Play. I'm making it my goal to do just that next year. Heck, I'll even try to win it this time.
- Instead of judging Nasty for what it is, people judge Nasty for what they think it should be. Sometimes their vision is an improved Nasty and other times it is completely not what I intended Nasty to be.
- Sometimes someone's vision of what Nasty should be makes me wish it was that too.
- Not having scrolling levels in Nasty is a design decisions that I sometimes regret and sometimes do not. A scrolling Nasty would be completely different, for better or worse is debatable.
- Downloads for a game not on the Top Download or New Release list on XBLIG are low. Really low. It's making me consider a PC release.
- Marketing a game is a lot of work. I've been busier since releasing Nasty than I was while creating it.
- Marketing often feels like a waste of time. I sent out at least 50 emails, many of which I tailored to the specific person, that I never heard a word back from.
- Japan doesn't like Nasty. I don't think I've sold a single copy there.
- Many gaming websites are lazy and just repost your press release as news. Make sure you've got a good press release.
- Most everyone is willing to review your game when you give them a free copy of it.
- I wish that when people reviewed my game, they'd include a link to my website. Most don't.
- I should have put up a website for my game and my company sooner. It takes a long time to build an audience, it would have been nice to have that prior to releasing my game.
- I need to badly do an update to Nasty to address some of the more serious issues gamers have with it. In fact, I'm already mostly done with that update (expect it late this month / early next).
- I suck at making video trailers. But I suck less now than I did a month ago. I'll be making a video trailer for Nasty 1.5 soon.
- As much as I like Nasty, working on a new game is a really refreshing change of pace.
- Writing my second game is going infinitely quicker than writing Nasty did.
- I loath creating tools to make games.
- The code for Nasty is really messy, something I notice more and more as I'm writing my new game and going back to do updates to Nasty.
- The 400 point price for Nasty is looking better and better. Downloads are low, but conversion rates (sales per download) in the past week and a half are high. I'm not sure a lower price would result in any more downloads but it would certainly result in less money per purchase.
- I can't wait each morning to see how my sales from the previous day did, even with them being less than good. Last night's sales completely covered today's lunch with change to spare.
- I really hate the
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