Pricing and Petititons

Posted by oddbob on October 11, 2008 · Lovingly Filed Under Articles 
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It’s been, how shall I put this, “interesting” to watch some of the news stories floating around the indienets this week and certainly in one case, just plain embarassing. The sort of embarassment where you want to crawl into a box somewhere, bury the box 30ft below the ground shouting “I’m not here” so that no-one contemplates lumping you in with the show of embarassing actions.

The first news story to hit my radar was quite a noble if misguided piece. Well intentioned, but ultimately missing one important factor in its analysis. Before I get into that though, I suppose I best link to the article in question. It’s here and it’s a discussion on the Indie pricing row. My first gut reaction, aside from thinking “man, if you thought Stu was harsh about Braid you seriously missed Darwinia-gate” is that yes, it’s a good and fine point. And it is.  Rewarding people for their work is a good thing. The bit I would take issue with is towards the end of the piece:

“Joakim Sandberg isn’t using that money to buy another diamond speedboat, he’s using it to buy the time necessary to complete his latest game (I assume he is, anyway, his website hasn’t updated in a while). If you like the demo, and his previous free games, then pay the toll. It will lead to more of his games coming your way.

That $20 is a pledge of allegiance, a donation to the International Independent Gaming Party. It will help to foster a world in which “indie” is a more viable concept, a happy world where passionate, talented people are rewarded for all their hard work.”

Actually, it’s $20 to Joakim Sandberg for Noitu Love 2. A worthy investment, I might add - but certainly not one that effects every single indie across the board. We’re not a gestalt entity. I think this is a pretty important point to stress as the breadth of indie games is wide indeed and supporting one specific indie developer is not necessarily “supporting Indie”, it’s “supporting an indie”.

Naturally, I encourage everyone to support their favourite indies. It means food and whores and more games (ok, maybe not the whores…) and perhaps, keeping someone in a livelihood that they can actually enjoy.  I also encourage people to just go out there and check out more games from people as there’s a wealth of great games to be found created by indies.

Please don’t buy a game “to support Indie” though. Buy it/donate to the cause/spread the word because you like the game and you want to support the developer.

As I say, it’s a noble article. Anything that challenges the notion of “gamers rights” is fine by me, it’s just not quite right.

Ah, gamers rights. It’s a term I’ve heard bandied around to describe those who believe they have the right to own/play every game regardless of whether they spend out or not for it. It’s not a very nice term, all told. I’m sure it could be argued that those who it’s referring to aren’t very nice either but that’s not an argument I want to go into here. What I’ve found interesting is that this week has proved that sometimes it’s not just the gamers who believe they have an inate right to something. It’s developers too.

One of the other “big” stories to hit the indienets is that of the ever so slightly petty “Get our games on Steam” petition currently doing the rounds and something that’s being misinterpreted as meaning “get more Indie games on Steam” despite saying no such thing in the text of the petition.

What we have here is a group of Indie developers who believe (if the text of the petition is to be taken as meaning what they mean) that they deserve to be on Steam regardless of whether Valve agree or not. Additionally, if they can’t be on Steam then Valve should publish a checklist of reasons so that they can tick the boxes to get onto Steam or, failing that, just whinge again when they’re not accepted despite hitting every tick box.

Let me make this abundantly clear, I want to see more Indie games on Steam.  As a person who’s been pretty happy with Steam even in its awkward beginning years and is more than happy to purchase something from there, of course I’d like to see more Indie titles getting the exposure Steam can bring. I would, however, prefer that they were on Steam because someone looked at the game and thought “hey, fuck yeah, that’s cool - we can sell that” rather than because it meets a series of portal-esque requirements.

If someone is willing to dress as a tomato (and answers on a postcard as to what that particular stunt is supposed to achieve if you want to be taken seriously) and fly out to Valve HQ to deliver the petition when it reaches an arbitrarily chosen number of signatories, I can’t help but think that perhaps instead of going through with all this rigmarole - couldn’t you just, I don’t know, fly out there and arrange a meeting to chat with them instead? It certainly seems to me as a more productive use of time and effort and one far more likely to yield rewards than shitting on the internet crying out “let me in, you bastards” at them.

When mainstream companies act like petulant children over sales, distribution or the dreaded P-word, they get derided. And rightly so. To see a bunch of Indies claiming that they have some sort of right to be distributed on a platform and crying foul at those who got there on their own merits by implying that they’re on the service through some sort of “friend of a friend, secret handshake that only two people and a goat know” system deserves the same amount of disrespect.  It is not a developers right for Valve to carry their product and in my opinion (as a developer, a human being and a customer), nor should it ever be.

And before you sign the petition, ask yourself “am I signing to see more cool games or am I signing to help encourage people to behave like spoilt brats when they can’t have their own way?”. Me? I don’t like to encourage that sort of thing.

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