Hi Dark, Well, the reason commercial thinking has played so heavily a part in this debate is I'm looking at this from the long view. That is to say I am looking ahead into the future over the next five years or so, and seeing where we will be by then. Since writing games and other programs is not a trivial amount of time and work we have to think about things like compatibility, about how we will maintain that software, and how things Microsoft are doing right now will effect our products and services in the future.
Yes, it is true I have only made and sold one game, Montezuma's Revenge, in the past. However, I don't intend that to be our only commercial game. We have Tomb Hunter coming up in development, we have Raceway, and I may or may not create more commercial games after that. Although, I am not in it purely in it for the money I do want to make enough off the games to cover the cost of development, money to buy or license sounds and music, and 50 customers more or less may very well effect our ability to offer the types of games we want to develop. I'll give you a simple example here. You know that DirectSound has been deprecated by Microsoft for quite some time now, will no longer be updated, and is buggy in some cases. Well, one alternative we have been looking into is the FMOD Ex library by Firelight Technology. If we include it in a free game there is no license fees attached, but as we need to make money to purchase sounds, music, and other things for our games we have to sell our games for something. That means we have to pay licenses to use FMOD Ex in any commercial games. Those licenses in turn means we have to make as many sales as we can to also cover the FMOD Ex license too. So we have to take a commercial worldview of our game development unless we want to do what Jim Kitchen does and write purely free games for no profit. In that case if we did it as a hobby without any money involved then it would not matter what platform or platforms we supported, but we couldn't also buy certain music and sound libraries either. As far as free games goes we will definitely be doing some of those. See our discussion on the upcoming STFC 2.0 and our game WWE Slam. Both are free because it costs too much to license the royalties to make them commercial games, and free Star Trek and wrestling sounds are everywhere. I suspect those will be the games we will be less concerned about XP compatibility because there will be no financial investment costs to worry about or speak of. Cheers! On 9/12/13, dark <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi tom. > > I actually fully agree with touch screens being a great technological > alternative, indeed this is part of the reason I've considdered skipping > windows 7 entirely and going onto 8, albeit I'd want to try one first > particularly with seeing how supernova support goes. > > Again, I'm waiting for the games and applications just like ios has. > > Btw, to be honest I don't really see why commercial thinking is playing such > > a part in this debate anyway. You yourself have only ever created one > commercial game, which (by no fault of your own), didn't work. > > The community is made up of hobby developers who aren't! in it for the > money, indeed if aprone said he was going to make an awsome windows 8 game > which was donation only that would be good enough for me. > > Really, is the difference between 100 sales and 50 sales (which as I've > indicated will be 100 in the long run as people like myself choose to > upgrade), so great that you won't use these supposedly awsome new features > you keep talking about? > > And how about free games? > > You keep saying windows xp is a bad investment, then why not make a better > one yourselves and trust people to follow you. > > Beware the Grue! > > Dark. > > > --- > Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] > If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to > [email protected]. > You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at > http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. > All messages are archived and can be searched and read at > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. > If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, > please send E-mail to [email protected]. > --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
