I think the rest of thread essentially says that the cost for Sun in producing (because they’d have to be the ones to do it), licensing (because their lawyers would have to be involved) and supporting (because at the end of the day, developers come back to Sun) a new version of the JRE isn’t worth the small additional market prescense they’d get through the indie game market. Thats probably an oversight by the grown ups - but heh, c’est la vie.
Kev
You’re being a tiny bit naive with your interpretation of what you can see here Chris. The rules are not written down; they are the rules for success. For sure, they are a shifting sand, but this rule stands. In the extremely competitive portal space, there is a top ten list, or there is nothing. You are either in the top ten, or your revenues plummet and your game is rapidly gotten rid of. The top ten list is manipulated by hand, for marketing purposes; and also to some extent automatically.
The main factor in achieving the top ten list in a portal is sales. Nothing else. Sales is a direct ratio of download successes. Download successes is a direct ratio of all manner of different factors but the key issue here is that they are factors. If any one factor is sub par it will bring down the relative success of the game. If any one factor is at 50%, you will lose 50% of your sales.
I can almost live with that because I only sell from my own site and a few affiliates. But if you wish to aim for a portal top 10 spot then every singly tiny factor which puts you at a disadvantage next to another title pushes you further down that top 10 until… you’re no longer in the top 10, and you’re nobody, again.
Using OpenGL, for example, automatically disqualifies your game on 35-40% of all downloads. This means to compete with exactly the same game that uses DirectX rendering or even plain software rendering, you have to achieve 50% more sales!
A secondary download has a (roughly) 50% factor on users (guesstimate, haven’t calculated in a long time) - meaning that overall, your successful download count will roughly halve if you require a secondary download. This immediately means you need a game that sells simply twice as well as another similar game for it to compete successfully. Now imagine a secondary download of Java runtime requirement plus OpenGL: the factors multiply together, to give us a success rate of just 30%. This means your game will need to literally sell three times the number of units to compete at this level.
That’s the facts, and you won’t readily be able to dispute them with a straight face in public. The anecdotal evidence is of course, the complete lack of Java OpenGL games on any portals, and pure Java games are similarly rare as hens’ teeth.
WildTangent is in a spot of bother it would seem btw. and for what it’s worth, the reason is because it is not popular and not competitive with alternative distributions being provided by all the big portals. The same kinds of games are available from portals that do not require WT, and subsequently, the portals are destroying WT.
I don’t mean anything by the Mac comments btw, it was just an observation about the current state of the Mac portal market: that it is absolutely in its infancy, at around the same position the PC portal market was about 5 years ago. I expect it to develop far quicker as the established technologies and practises have been worked out to a fine art now.
[quote]Does not rule it out. I believe this over and over and over again: If your game is compelling enough, people will get the download. If people want to have access to a portal with a bunch of free games but have to do a 16M download first, they will.
[/quote]
Again this belies a lack of understanding of the casual and independent markets. The demo of a game is an advert. It has to be fed directly to users; if anything, it is a nuisance having to play so many demos to find out what you like and buy something. The key point here though is there is an opportunity cost involved. If the user does not have a JRE then they will very likely ignore your advertising as it will be invisible. The game can only be compelling if it can be played in the first place so we have a chicken-and-egg situation here. One that is not resolvable I’m afraid.
The reason that Flash has become so successful is because it is ubiquitous; that is, it succeeded where Java failed, by getting a decent enough implementation built in to Windows - years ago. If Java is to succeed in this area it must be bundled as OEM software by Microsoft, and then we’ll all have to wait 4-5 years before it’s a viable platform for delivery of advertising in this manner.
[quote]Here is a question for Cas, after embedding the JRE and stripping out the bits you don’t want, has your download for Alien Flux changed dramatically? Are you getting into many more portals than you had before? If you have, that’s awesome. If not, why?
[/quote]
At 20MB with embedded full JRE, at the time of release, no-one wanted Alien Flux at all as it was four times the size of its contemporaries and has the OpenGL problem. Now at 10MB it sells occasionally from my site but no portals want it because it’s far too difficult a game.
In contrast Ultratron sells very well, getting twice the downloads that Flux achieves. The main difference is that Ultratron is half the size of Alien Flux, as my downloads are spread over many sources and more or less untargeted and random.
One portal was interested in Ultratron; the others said “No” because again, it didn’t fit with their customer base and the OpenGL issue reared its head again. In other words they thought there was no chance it’d ever make it into the top ten so they gave it a miss.
[quote]Tell me, what other technology offers all of that with the same distribution that Java has? None that I can think of.
[/quote]
BlitzMax, which is, frankly, better.
[quote]But some of the old assumptions about the market are just wrong.
[/quote]
Many things have changed in the last 3 years by the way… the nascent Mac market for example. And the new accepted download size is now between 10-15mb, which is nice, but along with that comes the expectation for a ton of pretty graphics and music.
Cas 
[quote]At 20MB with embedded full JRE, at the time of release, no-one wanted Alien Flux at all as it was four times the size of its contemporaries and has the OpenGL problem. Now at 10MB it sells occasionally from my site but no portals want it because it’s far too difficult a game.
[/quote]
Cas, how do you explain the success of Puzzle Pirate beign in the top 10 on miniclip.com? I can’t see how size can be that much an issue when they are saying that puzzle pirate is a 28 megs download. We’re still talking about casual games here. I don’t know if the game is packed with a JRE but the fact is that it’s 28 megs which is much more than 20. Like Chris said, if a game is great AND targets the audience than it shouldn’t be that much difficult to be distributed at least.
A lot of the time people try to extrapolate the success of just one game and say that because it worked there, it will work everywhere. I must emphatically beat this point out but this is a game of statistics. I for one am not willing to invest 5 man years developing a game like PP and have it flop. I want my risks minimized.
FYI Tribal Trouble took as least as much time to develop and is deployed in a very similar fashion but it’s not managing even 1% of the sales of Puzzle Pirates. So you can see with a 100x difference in factor there that I’d rather not bet the farm on a huge game.
Cas
where are these evil portals i keep hearing about?
a few links to some would be nice, thx.
Here is a list taken from my bookmarks (not in any order):
<A HREF="http://java.gametrust.com/index.jsp">Java.com Community Games</A>
<A HREF="http://alawar.com/">Alawar</A>
<A HREF="http://www.bigfishgames.com/">Big Fish games</A>
<A HREF="http://www.miniclip.com/Homepage.htm">Miniclip.com - Free Games and Shows</A>
<A HREF="http://www.popcap.com/allgames.php?deluxePC=1">PopCap Games - All Games</A>
<A HREF="http://www.pogo.com/home/home.jsp?sls=2&site=pogo">Pogo</A>
<A HREF="http://www.garagegames.com/">GarageGames</A>
<A HREF="http://www.toytoygames.com/">ToyToy Games</A>A mostly complete list (and alot more info on the myths and realities of casual games development) can be found on the Indie Gamers Forums - List of portals
For those doubting what Cas I and I are speaking about; -visit these forums and ask the people making the casual games that are on the portals. The reality and the myths will be pointed out with glaring clarity by the veterns of the industry.
damn it looks competitive on those sites and some of those games look sweet (off to play some demos)
Hmmm…Costs $100 and has no distribution as a technology. Not even close
-Chris
I’d pay you $100 to be able to distribute my games without worrying about your damned license! The runtime’s a lot smaller, too…
Cas
Where do I send the check?
What is the problem with opengl ? games like quake3 use it and unlike dx its multiplatform so doesnt that mean it is better?
Why do you have to be aslave to the portals, surely there are better ways to publicice ur game.
if i ever make a game i think is worth selling, and most games i see on portals frankly are not. then i would write a native installer that automatically dl’s / updates the jre when it installs, and informs the user in a simple way what it is doing also.
And how will people find your game in the first place?
That’s what the portals do - you bring the game, they bring the customers - Millions of them. It’s not impossible to do on your own, but it can take years to build up the traffic to your site and alot of time and money. Even if they get to your site, why will they come back?
The reason the portals get the customers are -
They…unfortunetly… have the upper hand and to play in the casual games world, you need to play with them or forget the idea of making a profit.
How about giving it to bloggers to do reviews of it, spread copies of it on file sharing networks(yep), if your game is any good you will find people will seek it out, most games on portals are just mindless clones, im not surprised people dont buy them.
Getting way off topic now! Best start a new thread.
Cas
Agreed Cas
-Chris