ALIEN FLUX 1.4c released

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#41

The registration-by-username thing is pretty specifically done that way because in the real world that’s how it should work. It’s also linked in a way to the “forgetting the registration” thing - we write a file into the application’s working directory rather than stuffing things into the registry. The reason we do this is specifically so you can copy the file about and play the game on other machines! (Like, give the kids a copy on their computer, or register it at work and bring it home, or most likely because you just want to give it to your mates…)

As for all those budget titles… they still require going out to a shop and wasting time. And I wonder just how many budget vendors are going to be in business 5 years from now. The margins are pathetic. On a £3 game, they’d be making £1.50 on a sale at retail - and they’d likely be giving most of that to the distributor and developers. Let’s guess they’re making £1 on a sale optimistically. They’d have to sell a hell of a lot of games to attain serious growth.

And when a retailer’s got space on their shelves guess what sort of boxes they want to put on them? Boxes that make £1 profit, or boxes that make £20 profit?

Cas :slight_smile:

#42

I presume the markup they make is sufficient for the company to make a profit. (otherwise, they wouldn’t be doing it - right? ;))

From the retailers perspective, I would also guess it makes sense, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing them on the shelves of nearly every major highstreet games shop :o
And from a consumers perspective, should I care if any particular company won’t be around in the long term?

They’ve identified a product(mid-life games), and a market(budget), and have made it work.
I applaud them for it. (mostly cos its let me get hold of all the games I never had the cash to buy full price ;D)

Don’t get me wrong, i’m not trying to de-value what you are doing with AF, just to highlight 1 of the markets you are competing with. (though compulsive purchases arn’t meant to have competition… are they ;))

#43

[quote]I presume the markup they make is sufficient for the company to make a profit. (otherwise, they wouldn’t be doing it - right? ;))
[/quote]
In many cases I suspect not. Welcome to the murky, bordering on extortionate, world of retail sales…

You don’t typically sell your games to shops. You pay them for the priviledge of them allowing you to put your titles on their shelves. Usually, you also guarantee a minimum number of sales - and if they don’t manage to sell that many, you have to pay them for the unsold units (the specific penalty is negotiated according to the relative power of you and them, e.g. are you an EA or a one-man-distie? Are they a one-man-shop or Walmart?).

So, it’s highly likely that some shops use this power to force publishers to allow them to sell not-that-old games at extremely low prices - you might expect this to be a pre-condition of stocking, say, HL2 - “first you have to let us sell HL1 @ 2.50”.

OTOH, according to the trade press, there’s a lot of profit being made in budget games, although IIRC it’s in the £7.50 - £10 games, where the margins are quite high (note: pretty much all the marketing costs etc have already been paid for when the game was a “full-price” game; now it has to cover the cost of the box, the manual (usually a PDF on the CD to save money), and not much else - e.g. for distribution cost, you just throw a few extra crates into your delivery van when it goes out to distribute your major games.).

Anything less than a fiver I would expect to be a loss-leader to get customers to walk in and browse - and it’s the publishers who will normally be making the loss on it, not the shops.

NB: I’m not in the distribution industry (although I’ve been in a similar market before), so take that with a pinch of salt.

#44

[quote]You are being seriously undercut by the budget title ranges like Sold out, Best of, Xplosiv and Take Advantage.
[/quote]
What are these games? Never heard of Sold out, but I did hear about a game called Soldat.
And then about the money issue:I don’t think protecting little cute furry things will be of much appeal to the main gaming audience. They want games like Splinter Cell and Doom3 or RPG’s. Don’t take me wrong, I am not saying this game is bad (in fact, reminds me of Phoenix for the TI83), I am just saying that you might have trouble selling the game.

#45

Sold Out, for example, published Worms Armageddon for £5 here in the UK. In honesty that’s a stupid price for such an excellent game - nearly anyone would have bought it for £15 - but they inexplicably chose £5.

Cas :slight_smile:

#46

I have to say I’m a lot more likely to buy a game for £5 than £15. That’s a really big jump!

#47

Three times as likely? Probably not. If it was a game you wanted you’d pay £15 for it, no sweat - it’s such a good game and everyone knows it. But if you just wandered into a store and saw it for £15 with no idea what it was you would be much less likely to buy it on impulse than if it were £5. The thing is, with WA, it is a desirable game - they didn’t need to discount it like that.

Cas :slight_smile:

#48

scratches head

Actually, I’m probably four (or more) times as likely to buy a game on impulse for £5 than £15… ;D

At £5 it’s really very obviously in the pocket change category - I might even be carrying that much shrapnel around so wouldn’t even use a note. At £15 pounds I’d be handing over a five and a ten, or even a twenty (and getting change) - that’s a really big difference.

It’s like music sales: I don’t buy a lot of CDs these days because they are obviously a cost - you need to use notes or plastic to buy them. If you could buy individual songs for a few coins, what then? I’m rather relieved that iTunes isn’t available in this country because I fear I’d sink one hell of a lot of cash into it. After all, what’s one dollar…?

#49

Hm, music is just such excellent value for money compared to computer games. You can play an album for hours and hours and hours before you get bored of it. And then you might dig it up again several times over the next 20 years (and it’ll still play!).

I wish I could figure out a way to sell for $5 and still make a ton of money out of it.

Cas :slight_smile:

#50

AlienFlux was introduced in the biggest finnish games maganize, www.mbnet.fi (Mikrobitti). It was mentioned in the current issue at “Indie games” section. It received a good review and recommendations to try it out.

#51

Can’t understand a wordski!
It needs username and password to get in too :frowning:

Cas :slight_smile:

#52

I just want to say WOW! Oh, to have such a smooth scrolling background in space. :slight_smile:

M

#53

Odd - not a single sale this month so far.
Is November a bad month?
Is there perhaps some way I could tweak the selling process to make AF into a Christmas gift?

Cas :slight_smile:

#54

Sure… change the graphics to put little Santa hats on the fluffies :slight_smile:
The green jellies are already grinch coloured :slight_smile:

#55

Are you scrolling one large background or tiles? The scroll is fantastic.

M

#56

Not even tiles… that’s a quadtree.

Cas :slight_smile:

#57

I have reviewed the concept of quad trees, but only for collision detection test zones. Will have to hit google for using them for backgrounds/images.

Thanks

M

#58

It’s not a very conventional use of a quadtree really, and it was originally because I wasn’t quite sure what what going to go in my backgrounds. As it is it’s very flexible - the quadtree just holds loads of triangles, and it’s frustum culled of course. I could for example bung all sorts of strange geometry in it which would be scrolled the same as the rest of it. Maybe in Alien Flux Supreme with Cheese.

Cas :slight_smile: