Indie Game Developer does 100 day protest Nintendo | Hacker News Reader

Indie Game Developer does 100 day protest Nintendo

bobsgame.com

31 pointsjflowers4517 comments

It's amusing to see this guy's story circulate from the indie gaming forums (where it showed up a few weeks ago) onto Hacker News.

Everyone already agrees that he's doing the wrong thing if he wants to be successful, and that he's got a degree of dedication that would allow him to sell his title independently for other platforms (computer, Xbox Arcade, etc.) or join an existing company. Everyone is also bothered by his extremely huge ego, which rivals that of Lord British (Richard Garriott) himself.

He's trying to aspire to some sort of weird ideal of being one of the last single-person developers who publishes a mainstream console title, something which doesn't really exist anymore. It's noble, but foolhardy.

He's just hard to write off, because he's not just some loser who is being unrealistic. He is an insanely devoted, multi-talented person who is being unrealistic.

Yeah his ego is really a big turn off.

"I did this pixel by pixel, beautiful isn't it?" "One time it took me 3 days to draw this tree."

You clearly have never spent a week polishing a 16x16 system tray icon.

:-)

I think he's deserving of his own admiration for what he's accomplished.

He picked the worst company to go with. They are a million times worse than Apple with their "closed-system" iPhone. As much as I want to feel sorry for the guy, it should have been his business to research if he would be accepted. I know if I were to sink a large amount of time into an iPhone app, I would make should it would get approved before starting all the work.

It seems odd that he can't simply find a distributor that already has a Nintendo license. Maybe Vivendi or Atari.

The big problem with iPhone apps is that there is no way to get initial preapproval before starting work, and where Apple defines what is acceptable for the app store is fairly vague and not consistent. There've been plenty of cases even mentioned here on HN of developers who spent x amount of money and y amount of time on an app that was rejected or ignored by Apple.

I'm not sure why Apple doesn't do it. It's not like anyone's asking them to approve apps for the store at the idea stage...I think most devs would be satisfied with getting conditional approval for their ideas, subject to additional reviews (i.e. implementation) before it is approved for the app store. If Apple wants to charge more, so be it, at least it would remove the uncertainty of clients not sure if their app would be approved and developers wary of wasting their time.

I would definitely find that useful, as I'm sitting on one half baked iPhone app and idea that, depending on how you interpret the iPhone dev agreements, may or may not be offensive in nature. I don't want to continue spending the dev time if Apple decides it's too offensive, but it would be pure agony if I found out someone else had the same idea and was approved.

Last I checked, I got some support tickets for the iPhone whenever I paid my $99. Why don't use use one of them to ask?

Because those are code level support tickets I don't really want to waste on something Apple probably doesn't even have existing policy for.

Or, imagine what would happen if I used one of them to ask "Hey, so I have this game I am working on and I wanted clarification on one of your rules for acceptance to the app store. I'm not sure if this is offensive or not based on the standards you are not making public that I will also not make public because this correspondence is NDA'd. Please give me some sort of conditional acceptance on the idea itself". I would probably get shoved to one of the devrel people who then tell me to just upload my app after I'm ready to submit to app store.

On the other hand, your comment made me realize asking devrel and submitting a couple radars first couldn't hurt, except someone's already done it: http://www.openradar.me/6218801

I don't know why... But I feel very bad for this guy. I think I would go insane if I was trapped inside a room for 100 days.

It's a great marketing ploy though.

> It's a great marketing ploy though.

Just like online petitions...right?

The sad news is Nintendo probably doesn't care even about the public backlash stemming from this 100 day protest. Actually, what backlash? A lot of the criticism I've read on neogaf, kotaku, joystiq and others is criticism of the game and the developer, and not much of Nintendo's actions, especially from people who seem to know something of the whole process.

I personally think he should invest a big chunk of time into Android and iPhone ports of the game, as well as XBLM and maybe even a regular ol' PC version. I can't speak for Nintendo, but I'd take impressive iPhone app store sales over the dev locking himself in for 100 days any day. And he's spent so much time on the game that it seems a waste not to port to other platforms anyway with all that publicity and effort and with Nintendo ignoring him. Imagine what kind of sales World of Goo would get if/when they release an iPhone port.

Don't get me wrong, I think what he's done is impressive for a one-person job, but he's not doing such a great job selling himself or looking into alternatives earlier.

> Just like online petitions...right? This seems better than that. It will surely make it's mark.

Well, he's anyway found out a new kind of protest 'online protest'. Better than online petitions. And it's close to live protest :)

Your point to invest in Anrdoid apps, I agree. He should just go abt developing an Android port of the game. Google would anyway soon open up a payment system for the android market place and now since the android market place has very few apps, he surely has the advantage of getting noticed there.

I would like to know the result of this protest once it ends.

P.S: As a sign of good will, we all hackers should click that blue "let Nintendo know" link and mail Nintendo about it. My mail contents included the url to the website and "We want to play Bob's Game"

If you read down a ways, he says, "... I'm working on the Android and iPhone ports for 100 days straight. These platforms are awesome! Yuu doesn't even need a publisher! What a great idea!"

Sigh, that is a far way down on a site that is painful to read ;)

But it is nice to see he is looking into alternatives to publishing his game. It's what he should have done instead of this 100 day nonsense.

It doesn't matter what alternative platforms he decides to port to, just that he does it and actually releases the game so people can play instead of whining about people stealing ideas and how he can't show off too much gameplay until Nintendo does something. Even if the game is awful there is still going to be an absolute ton of people wanting to try it out because of all the publicity it has received.

And frankly, I don't think this is any better than online petitions, I actually think this is worse. He wants Nintendo to pay attention to him and he's doing so by locking himself up in his room? That's not the best of attitudes to convey. It's like the complete opposite of being at least somewhat professional..it sounds a lot like what some of my baby cousins do when they're mad at something. :\

The marketing ploy, according to some, is that he's getting people to talk about him and his game without any effort of his own, except for expression of his overblown ego.

Why not just sell it to the NDS homebrew community?

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