http://www.squidinabox.com/2012/04/waves-the-postmorteming/

He opens up about Steam, sale pricing (and normal pricing), piracy (and why he thinks it's bad news he's not being pirated a lot in the first world), etc.

Draw your own conclusions. I have no idea if someone linked it deep in a thread here or if I ran across it somewhere else, I just thought was super interesting. Also, Waves was a Steam daily deal this week.

Interesting, I'll have to have a look at that game later.

Was worth reading just for the "This is because people still measure the value they get from a game in how many hours of their life it was able to distract them from their inevitable death." line :)

I wonder where he gets the "pirated in Russia" numbers. For everything that's not a very local-interest TV rip (e.g. Schatten über Notre Dame, Sengoku jieitai) I go to the two largest "international" torrent trackers I know.

This is also why I don't believe the Spiderweb Software guy when he says he "needs to feed his children" and therefore doesn't lower the DRM-free prices.

Pirated in Russia is mostly because of the hackers/crackers there.Pirate scene in Russia is enourmous. Especially for Movies/Games.

Wait, steam can actually tell how long you play a game for, or how do they get those statistics?

I suddenly feel very violated, even though I practically never use it.

Steam keep stats on many things :)

I'm pretty sure it's in your library right next to the listing for each game. You'd have to rather unobservant to miss it...

A fine read. Thanks for the link.

This got me thinking, if you're an indie developer, your best way of making it with your game is to get as many people as you can talking about it. Open threads on popular forums about your game, contact more known YouTube 'stars' to review or talk about your game, make a few giveaways here and there (especially on Reddit), try to work a deal with Valve so that your game could provide a hat or two for TF2.

(will keep this in mind in case my game dev ambitions start to live again)

But then he couldn't bitch about Steam!

Btw, the link doesn't work for me.

Yes but why isn't that just for the eyes of the user themselves? Where is the basic concept of privacy?

The website is being hammered right now.

It worked finally (GOG that big now, huh ?;-).

I must say his conclusion makes some very wrong assumptions. First of, he says his game didn't sell well because nobody heart of it. Yet, the demo to purchase ration was only 6,8%. That means luss than 7% of the people who actually were interested enough to check the game out, were interested enough to actually buy it. (Even if you suspect "rampant piracy" that number would never go above 15% - 20%). That means in conclusion that people were simply not interested in his game and even those who showed initial interest didn't like it enough to buy it (even as a daily deal).

And then he makes the offhand comment about how just about nobody paid full price. But the "problem" weren't the dailys, but the bundles with 53%. Has he, ever for a second, thought that a good portion of those sales were not because of his game, but because it was in a bundle with other games?

His real problem isn't that he made a bad game, or that he made some bad PR choices, but simply that he made a game that nobody really cared about. Heck, I remember the daily, and I buy just about any Steam Daily indie game, if only to funnel some money the right way, but that game simply didn't have any appeal to me. I might even have it on some bundle which I haven't redeemed yet, but I'm not really bothered to look.

Agree with most things, but I think the most important issue is that the game doesn't have much of a character and something to be remembered after.

For example, you have Super Meat Boy, a boy made of meat that splashes at spikes and other stuff, and blood flies everywhere, and it tells a not-so-great-but-nevertheless-kind-of-unique story about a fetus that kidnapped your girl (which is made out of bandages), pretty messed up yet compelling. You have Braid, which is this neat little game with time bending mechanics, beautifully painted graphics and a nice music, and it indirectly tries to tell you about the first nuclear bomb, while the whole time you were trying to rescue your princess.

Other examples, Amnesia, Penumbra, Binding of Isaac, Trine, World of Goo.

You have Waves, in which you shoot shapes and some numbers appear (I'm guessing, as I've not played the game, just looked at a few screenshots)... I doubt many people will remember the game as having something unique.

Why do you need to keep how many hours you've played hidden from steam?

Why do you answer questions with questions?