GarageGames Name Joins Torque Game Engine In Retirement
OK, I get to be all sentimental again. A month or so ago, GarageGames pulled the original Torque Game Engine off the market. Now, they are pulling the name GarageGames itself off the market, and replacing it with Torque Technologies. I can’t disagree with the decision Brett Seylor, TT VP of Tech and Tools, made to change the name. Torque is a shiny new modern 3D game engine, and they have decided that the idea of programming in a garage is not quite the image they want to project. Even though I understand, it still tugs at my heart strings.
GarageGames Logo and Motto
When Jay Moore and I used to head out on the road to evangelize our idea, we loved every minute of it. It was exciting times doing everything we could to help indies. Having a mission that fills your heart as well as your brain makes you do things you would not normally do, like working for little to no money for a long time, or getting up in front of big crowds to do public speaking (which I hate), or cold calling hardware companies to have them help out at IndieGamesCon.
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Torque Game Engine Enters Retirement… Bittersweet For Me
Yesterday Brett Seyler of GarageGames posted a blog announcing the release of version 1.0 of Torque 3D, which is a $1000 updated version of Torque, with new rendering, tools, art pipeline, COLLADA support, etc. It looks awesome, and I know their world-wide team worked incredibly hard on the product. I congratulate them on this release, and wish them great commercial success.
However, buried in a single sentence of the blog was the following statement:
“No matter what the results, there will be other changes to the Torque product line up as well. Biggest of all, as of November 1st, 2009, past versions of Torque (TGEA, TGE) will no longer be available for purchase.”
TGE and TimAste Art
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Flashbang Guys Getting It Right
Flashbang Studios, creators of the portal Blurst, which is filled with their own games such as Off Road Velociraptor, Blush, and Minotaur in a China Shop are really doing things right. They have now self funded five titles and try to come out with a new game every eight weeks (six per year total). All of their games use the Unity web plug in for a nice, high fidelity game experience in the browser on both Macs and Windows machines.
Flashbang's Blurst Game Portal
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PushButton Engine Open Beta Launched
Two days before Game Developers Conference we opened the PushButton Engine site in Beta form to the general public. The PushButton Engine is a Flash game engine released under the extremely liberal MIT Open Source license. If you are interested in Open Source Flash game development, you should check it out!
PushButton Engine Logo
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Risk Assesment: Don’t Put All Your Games In One Market
Owen Goss, the owner of Streaming Colour Studios released a great article about his iPhone App Store experience that has been sweeping the Indie blogosphere. If you have not read the post, you really need to do it right now, but the gist is that Owen invested $32,000 in Dapple, a color matching game, that has returned only a couple hundred dollars in the first few weeks of release. Owen’s post was awesome. He was not whining. He was just putting out a data point for the community to digest, and I, for one, appreciate his honesty.
A day after the release, the article was picked up by Slashdot, and Owen wrote a follow up article describing the responses he has gotten. Here is an excerpt:
Perception of whining or quitting
Many people perceived my post as whining about my sales, or that I was giving up on the game. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The post was meant purely as informational. I thought it would help people to see that selling an app on the App Store is just like selling any other product: it takes a lot of work and you shouldn’t expect to be an overnight success. I am also not giving up on Dapple; far from it. I’m only just getting started with it. That post was only a single data point on what I hope is a long upward trend for the game. Every game, every company starts somewhere, and I wanted to document where that was for me.
Don't put all of your eggs in one basket, or your games in one market either.
The observation that I would like to make is that it would be great if Owen’s work could be leveraged across multiple platforms. I think Dapple looks like a game that would work in the casual portals, on Facebook, and in the Flash market. Adding all of those revenue streams together may not have made the game profitable, but it could lessen the blow, and who knows, maybe activity in one market will lead to recognition in another market.
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Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes You Nothing
The success of the iPhone App Store is bringing out a lot of pontification about what is wrong with the market and how to fix it, but I think many of the ideas are dead wrong. Develop Magazine’s interview with developer Nnooo finally pushed me to write this article to debunk some of these ideas before they become dogma.
If you think there are too many games in the iPhone App store now, just wait. There will be many more.
On 3/3/2009, 148Apps announced that the App Store had over 25,000 apps and games in the marketplace, prompting Develop Magazine to interview Nnooo, WiiWare developer of the product Pop. Pop is a nice looking game, and there is some great information in the interview about the juxtaposition of development on the Wii vs. the iPhone, so it is definitely worth reading the article. However, a good portion of the interview was spent with the founder of Nnooo explaining that the ease of development on the iPhone is causing crowding in the market, and that a lot of bad product is making it onto the system thus lowering the sales of the good games. Wow! Yesterday I had a fairly polite response written, but thinking about it last night really pissed me off, so I changed it.
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One Way To Divide Your Company Equity At Start Up
Dividing your company equity at start up can be a difficult problem. Here is a method that takes a lot of the emotion out of the process.
What Is My Game’s Sales Potential?
Make It Big In Games community member, JefferE, posted the following question in the MBG forums:
What I’ve always struggled with that I’d like to hear your slant on is how to judge if a game is worth producing. That is, you’ve got an idea, you think its a good one, but how do you go about judging the sales potential? There are very few resources that I’ve found that publish stats on game sales. For a very simple example, you’ve got a Match 3 or Hidden Object game (ala Big Fish Games style). How do you find out how much potential that has? What’s the ‘average” return on a game like that if it sells bad, good, or is a hit? Is it $1K – obviously no one would produce them, is it $10k, $50K, $100K? Basically, how do you go about figuring out if its worth even starting a project – beyond dreaming, right sizing, and just going for it?
How Much Money Your Successful Game Makes
Fishing Girl Is Fun
Normally I don’t refer to specific games on this blog, but I can’t help it on this one because it is fun and it is a great example of how to make money on Flash games. A few months ago Dan Cook, of Lost Garden blog fame, created all of the art and a loose design frame work for the game, and is holding a contest to see what the development community can do with the assets and idea.
Well, Andre, from developer Luna Drift, took up Dan’s challenge and made a fun game that I have spent a lot of time on. I first ran into the game on the Flash Game License site (also a 2008 Biggie Award winner for Best New Business Idea), and watched the sponsorship bids go up to $4,000. Between Mochi Ads, site ads, and sponsorships, a real Flash game monetization process is starting to emerge.
Click on the icon below to go to the Jay Is games review and play the game.
Update: I wrote this post on Friday, and now it is early Sunday morning. Dan posted the contest results last night, and Andre won the Gold Medal! Congratulations!
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
The Art of Backing Off
Backing down from your initial expectations for your game can be a good thing.