Humble indie fumble: an XBLA horror story

I played an early build of Shuggy nearly four years ago when some of my colleagues were reviewing Dream Build Play games. Even back then, it was surprisingly close to a finished game; carrying a coat of polish that was very rare among the other contest entries. It was far and away my favorite game of the competition, so it was hard to watch it from a (pretty far) distance while it struggled to find its way to XBLA. When it finally did land, it didn't make so much as a peep.

This is a sad story, but let it serve as a warning: Publishers, just like any party in a business relationship, have their own priorities and motives. You need to understand those of whoever you enter into business with. And furthermore, you need to demand final cut for the key parts of your business, and that includes marketing yourself and your product. If you're not good at something, don't assume that getting another party to do it for you is a panacea. You need to become enough of an expert to know when they are doing you a diservice.

I read it as a Humble Indie Bundle: an XBLA horror story and thought it was a story about Humble Indie Bundle. It's not. The story has nothing to do with Humble Indie Bundle. In fact this story goes on to show the need for something like Humble Indie bundle for xbox.

A story worth reading. I'm sad because I'm afraid of being in the same boat (although I'm just starting out basically). The takeaway from my perspective is this: pick the platform carefully as it may narrow your space of movement so much it might just screw things up for you; and secondly, do some marketing yourself if possible.

  [column inches, websites] may be easier than ever to do it
  yourself - but that doesn’t guarantee anyone will care.

Apparently, letting the relevant department do it didn't guarantee anyone would care. If you're too much into coding, you may forget other aspects of business. Oh, and things sometimes fall apart even if everything is done the right way.

I never understood the hope XBLA inspires. The ecosystem is limited and tightly controlled. Access to the market is entirely at the whim of Microsoft, who will also be your main competitor.

From the outside it looks like a huge trap for catching cheap IP as it develops.

The story is not done, seems it will have a happy ending IF he ports it to Steam. Whats another 1-2 months doing that and getting some more multiple? But something tells me the contracts he's done restricts what he can do with the IP.

I tried the game and passed on it when it was released. I can't speak for the general public, but it was not a failure of marketing for me. It just wasn't enough to get me to spend money on it. It was polished, and not bad, just... sort of forgettable and average. It would be a big assumption for me to assume that my experiences are more consistent with what happened to the game in reality, but the article doesn't tell us how many trial downloads went along with the poor sales either.

Glasgow may have a self-deprecating culture similar to that here in New Zealand. We've had to learn the hard way to be -- by our local standards -- incredibly pushy. Hopefully my business partner won't mind me quoting an article he wrote for Ars Technica [1]:

Then come the cultural differences (or perhaps they're just personality differences.) Whether it’s a New Zealand-wide trait or not, we tend to talk ourselves, and our products, down. To boast about how great you think you are seems arrogant and obnoxious, but when you’re trying to get people excited about your games, underselling it (and yourself) can backfire horribly.

I’ve seen the same confused facial expression from many overseas visitors when I modestly described my game as “alright." If the creator doesn’t think his game is totally super awesome, they seem to be thinking, then why on earth should I check it out? We've had to learn to talk our games up. Even if it makes you cringe inside, developers have to show others why they're spending their life making these things!

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/sell-in-america-live-i...

Isn't indie game development all about being self-publishing aka independent aka indie?

It was difficult reading that article since it had so many grammatical errors, but worth it.