#you will not regret buying it + youre supporting indie devs

[21stcenturyschizoidfag]

hypnospace outlaw 60% on steam BUY IT NOW

[gb-patch]

Apologies if its been asked before, I couldn't find it in the FAQ, but what made your studio decide to have OL:AB be free to play? Given just how much effort was clearly put into it, how come that decision was made?

I did it because it was the best choice, it's a win-win almost completely all around. Everyone who wanted to play the game got to do so which is something I really hoped for, and we were able to show people what a nice time the experience was.

OL is the kind of game that does honestly benefit from people fully growing up with Cove. It's a lot more convincing than a normal demo/some screenshots on a game page would be at getting someone to then purchase content. I imagine sales would've been lower if we hadn't released the main story for free.

I wish it could be fully good, but I do have one concern about it. Some people look at high-quality free content and realize that it's a perk funded by the people who buy the extras and they simply are glad to have it. But there are people who don't appreciate it. They start thinking it's okay to devalue people's work/expect everything for free because why is that worth paying for when you don't have to buy this other thing? It's not really a disaster when directed at our games because our company is the one benefiting from the release of free content, but it could be potentially harmful to other groups. Many indie devs don't have the resources to release content that's free, they have to set a price for the full length of what they create. But they'll still be compared to games like Our Life that are commercial quality yet free for the main story. That's my only regret about how we structured the pricing for the game. However, from my experience so far, those players are far in the minority. Our fans are very lovely and supportive. Ideally, more people will end up liking indie VNs after playing a free one and then will go on to purchase other VNs from the indie community, so it'll do more good for other groups than ill. That's my positive thinking, at least.

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[acandrewswriter]

Why would you affiliate yourself with Amazon? Is there another place people can buy your books?

Hi disasterhimbo: Because a huge majority of indie LGBTQ authors have little choice but to use Amazon to publish. When you are an indie author, your choices are to go "wide release" through a company like Ingraham Spark (which can theoretically land your book at Barnes and Noble, etc), or to go Amazon exclusive with enrollment in Kindle Unlimited.

Here's the thing: Every author I’m friends with, including quite a few who are making a full-time living writing MM romance and MM fantasy, who has tried wide release has regretted it and gone back to Amazon.

Most books sales these days are ebook sales, and 90% of that market is Amazon. So if you go "wide release," what happens is that you only gain a tiny sliver of marketshare and available audience for your books, but you end up losing out on what turns out to be massively important boosts that Amazon adds to its KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) authors.

Those benefits are:

Higher royalties: Amazon exclusive books earn 70% royalties, as opposed to 35% on Amazon for wide-release books, and much, much lower on other platforms- traditional publishers tend to max out at paying 15% royalties at most. Coupled with Amazon's dominance of the ebook market, that makes wide-release a losing proposition, financially, for any indie author who isn't going to sell millions of books (which is most of us).

Kindle Unlimited: Amazon exclusive content is made available through Kindle Unlimited. Of the thousand or so readers my first book got, 60% of them were on Kindle Unlimited. Without that boost, I would have made even less money on a book I lost money producing. So I would have had 60% fewer readers, and been earning only half the royalty rate.

The effing algorithm: Amazon boosts your sales during the first 90 days of publication by putting your new release higher on search results and category lists. The more sales you make within a short period of time, the more the algorithm boosts the visibility of your book.

It's far more expensive to do wide-release (because, for example, you have to pay out hundreds of dollars to buy ISBN numbers- while Amazon gives them to you for free), and it is never made back in sales (Wide release results in massively lower royalties- a financial loss that is not made up for by the wider release- because Amazon dominates the market). Worse, it is a lot more work to manage- and those of us working full time while trying to write only have so many spoons to go around (especially when we are our own promotion team, our own ARC team, - we are basically doing all the work of a publishing company ourselves).

Even with the support Amazon gives to KDP authors, I'm still not breaking even doing this- I pay out money to produce my books, hire editors so my books aren't awful (dev and copy editing typically costs around $2k dollars), hire out professional artwork for decent covers (around $800), pay sensitivity readers among my beta reading team (again, hundreds of dollars), etc.  And none of that covers the costs of promotion, which is the single most expensive thing in the whole process- more than all of the above combined. In short, to have any prayer of breaking even you need higher sales and higher royalties, and Amazon is the single best chance of either.  

I am lucky that I have a full time job that pays enough that I can afford to do that (a privilege that too many LGBTQ writers can't afford at all). Until I got a higher-paying position at my workplace just before the pandemic, I couldn't afford to do any of that then either. It was a dream out of reach.

If it weren't for Amazon, these books-and a lot of other excellent indie LGBTQ content- literally wouldn't exist. The cost of publishing would be too high, and the returns too low to offset it (let alone make enough actual profit to make a meager living as a starving writer).  

Sure, Amazon is the evil empire- and frankly, it treats its KDP authors in shitty ways a lot of the time (the Amazon marketing platform is a joke, designed to mostly get you to throw your ad money at Amazon while getting almost nothing in return for it- and Amazon frequently jerks authors around without much transparency- we basically can exist as authors only at Amazon's mercy, and that does suck).

That's also why traditional publishers are kind of a joke now- because only the most wildly successful authors stand to gain anything from having a trad publisher (of course, they still have enough clout to “create” wildly successful authors). Small presses force you to do your own promotion (literally, two of my best friends wrote a novel with a trans protagonist published by a Simon and Schuster imprint, and the company did *no promotion at all*, no ARC services, nothing... like, if you are a trad publisher, what's the point of you then? To give an author a lousy 7-15% royalty in exchange for literally nothing except having a publisher's name on spine? wtf?).

Amazon has, smartly and evilly, made itself the only financially viable game in town for niche indie authors.

There are a lot of indie LGBTQ authors on Amazon. A lot of trans authors, queer authors, gay authors, non-binary authors, getting their books published because Amazon/KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) makes it affordable for them to do...

Like most things in the world, Amazon's evil is a mixed bag, and sometimes it's hard to pry apart the good from the bad.  Long story short: If you like or want to read more indie LGBTQ books, Amazon is still evil but it’s also your best bet. 

[rewind-reviews]

So I Just Played... Owlboy

So I just played Owlboy and I have somethings to say. Owlboy is one of the best games I have ever played If you haven't played it stop reading this and play it right now. I got Owlboy as a birthday present this year but didn't play it for a good four months but when I finally got round to it I just couldn't stop. I’m gonna talk a little about story but I will try not tho spoil too much because that's the most important thing about this game. Owlboy is about a little owl called Otus who isn't like all the other owls, he’s small, mute and he can bearly even fly at the start of the game. Otus is constantly put down always being called useless, weak, weird and no matter what happens he is always the one to blame. This really struck a chord with me because I was in the same boat when I was young and it felt good to be playing a character that was feeling the same things I did when I was small. Life isn't all bad for our little hero though. There is one person that's always there for Otus his best friend Geddy. Geddy is the one person in all of their home town of Ville that truly understands and accepts Otus and seeing their friendship and their take on the world attitude when they are together nearly brought tears to my eyes at times throughout the story. Otus is told by his mentor to do one simple little job but when that quickly spirals into chaos him and Geddy are thrust into trying to save the world with nothing but the support of each other and the friends they make along the way. Now I would love to say more but I honestly feel like if you know the story of this game before you play it you would really be missing out. The next parts of this review are going to be a little hard but hey here we go. The gameplay in Owlboy is pretty simple the game mostly consists of flying around as Otus solving puzzles, exploring and grabbing a limited number of coins to get rewarded at the shop that right not buying things rewarded. you don't buy anything in this game as the coins act more as collectables than they do currency, each milestone you hit nets you either a simple cosmetic change or something to give you a little extra help along the way which I think is perfect because all of it is entirely optional plus the dialog with these scenes is absolutely halirous. Not everything is that simple however the combat is where the gameplay takes a turn.  Otus isnt a great fighter he can do a tiny spin which will stun some enemies but can't really kill anything that's Geddy's time to shine. When the need arises Otus will grab hold of his trusty companion and Geddy will use his pistol to dispatch of the bad guy of your choice (it gets more interesting later on in the game but I'm not spoiling anything). When you need to fight the game becomes a twin-stick shooter of sorts you move around as Otus and use the opposite stick to take aim with Geddy to take down the bad guys. I will admit this took me a while to get used to but it soon enough because second nature and I was taking down everything that dared block my path well up until the bosses but you will have to seem them for yourself. Next up is graphics. I'm not the type of person to think graphics are the make and break of a game but if a game looks good hey I'm not going to complain so it's just a bonus that Owlboy looks so spectaular. Everything is done with a pixel art style which yeah is kind of done to death but the detail in this game is something game devs and artists alike should take note of. The art in this game perfectly captures every mood and emotion the story wants you to feel be it full of excitement and optimism when you first see Ville, anxious and fearful in a dark and spooky cave or even full of wonder in a lush green forest it does it all seamlessly. Even the sprite work is downright perfect Otus is constantly expressing his emotion through movement or facial expressions which is great because you know he can't talk. You can always tell what the little guy is feeling through the way he acts and if I'm being honest its pretty impressive because the sprites aren't all that big plus I played through Owlboy on my switch in handheld mode so the screen wasn't super big but I could still see everything the characters were feeling at all times. Owlboy isn't perfect though and fell short in a few places towards the end of the game. There is one section of the game where flight is taken away from you and honestly its the worst part of the game, in my opinion. The whole section is an auto scroller which no one likes at the best of times and you need to jump from one crumbling platform to another while I was playing this I felt like it was impossible, you have nearly no space or time to make the jumps its asking you to do and I had to watch a walkthrough just so I knew what was coming up so I could plan ahead and no word of a lie this one small section took me around an hour and a half to beat. There are also some side quests that I felt were way too hard for a one of event that you only ever see for that quest. Don't get me wrong it is all possible because I did do it all eventually it just doesn't feel like they tested it enough. Overall Owlboy is one of the best games I have ever played, the gameplay is simple but engaging, the graphics are stunning, the music is incredible and the story is one of the best I have experienced in a very very long time. yeah sure it has some issues but that won't stop you from loving every part of this game. So please if you are looking for a fun little indie game to fall in love with give Owlboy a go you won't regret it.

I want to once again say thanks to mousieex on instagram for inspiring me to keep writing here please give her some love she deserves it.

https://www.instagram.com/mousieex/

[ladystylestores]

How the pandemic has transformed work in the game industry

The pandemic has impacted all of us, including the game industry. Sure, many publishers are reporting record engagement and increased revenues as players flock to games for entertainment and distraction. But what about the people who make these games?

Over the past couple of months, I’ve talked to some of the studios, creators, and software makers about how COVID-19 has changed they way they work. Of course, this has meant adjusting to a new normal of people working remotely. Companies used to offices and immediate access to colleagues are now getting used to video conferences and turning personal spaces into working ones.

This changes the way games are made, and it can make the process more difficult.

Development never ends

Chris Wilson is the studio head for Grinding Gear Games, the developer behind the hit free-to-play action role-playing game Path of Exile. It’s a long-lived title that has become popular thanks to a steady stream of constant updates. It keeps offering new content, so its players are rarely bored.

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“One of the big attributes of Path of Exile that’s been successful is that there’s a reliable release schedule,” Wilson told GamesBeat. “We release every 13 weeks. One of the reasons why we get a lot of players at those releases is because the community just knows when — there’s a cadence to it. They know when to come back. They’re excited about it. It’s easy to drop back in. We want to keep that cadence. We don’t want to say, no, we’re delaying stuff for months.”

But not only is Grinding Gear always working on new stuff for Path of Exile, but the studio is also developing Path of Exile 2. It’s plate isn’t just full, it’s spilling over. And now it has to work on these projects with a new reality: people working from home.

“The concept of people working from home was something we really didn’t want to have to accept, but for health reasons of course, we have to put our staff’s health first, so we started to get things set up so that people could,” Wilson told GamesBeat. “And that setup time was important, because rather rapidly, as soon as New Zealand got its first case of community transmission in March, the government announced, you have two days to be working from home and everyone is in total lockdown.”

Above: Path of Exile 2 is Grinding Gear’s next game.

Image Credit: Grinding Gear Games

This is a tough situation for a studio used to close collaboration and outputting new content on a regular basis. Working from home can be good or bad, but it always different. And that uncertainty can be stressful.

“An artist working on Path of Exile 2 assets is going to work at his desk making assets all day just like he was before, which is great,” Wilson continued. “But all of the upper management is scrambling to keep people working efficiently from home, with our existing release schedule of updates. We have a management deficit for the sequel at the moment, which won’t affect its quality of course, because we’ll make sure to do the management as we can. It’s just going to affect its release time. We’re going to be in a situation where assets are ready earlier than we need them, because we’re behind on getting them integrated into the game and functioning correctly and so on. I do expect that the pandemic will probably have a bit of an impact on our release schedule for the sequel, but honestly it was up in the air anyway. It’s an ambitious project. We’ve said we’ll release it when it’s ready.”

Warframe developer Digital Extremes is in a similar situation. Warframe is another free-to-play game that receives constant updates. Rebecca Ford is its live ops director and one of the most visible members of the staff to the game’s community. She’s also the voice of the Lotus, who serves as an in-game guide for players. She does a ton of work for Warframe, and the pandemic has now changed the way she does that work, both in big and small ways.

“I miss having coffee on the go,” Ford told GamesBeat. “I miss having instant access to food I don’t have to buy. I miss our catered lunches. I miss just walking in and being fed. Woe is me! I said, unironically. I have to make my own lunch. This is insane. I have not had to make my own lunch in nine years, just for the record.”

Now that Warframe’s staff is working from home, employees are more dependent on communication tools like Slack to be efficient.

“We’ve been integrated in Slack so heavily for the past five years, I’d say, that it’s not too big of a change in communicating on Slack with my team,” Ford continued. “It’s just I don’t have any other option. I kind of regret how much I relied on Slack before when I could have just talked to people side by side, but now it’s like, you have no choice, it’s only Slack.”

Different platforms, different problems

And depending on what platform you’re developing for, you can discover some unique problems. Patrick O’Luanaigh is the CEO of nDreams, the studio behind the upcoming Oculus exclusive Phantom: Covert Ops, a stealth-based game that has you piloting a kayak.

“We’re a VR developer, so everyone had to take all of our equipment home,” O’Luanaigh told GamesBeat. “You can’t log into a VR headset remotely at the office, because you can’t put it on. You have to have your powerful PC to do your development and test on a VR headset at home. We had to get everyone’s headsets and hardware and PCs and monitors home with them, which isn’t quite the same in terms of more traditional development. But things like dev kits have had to go back to people’s houses. We had to get permission from the hardware manufacturers to take headsets home and all sorts of stuff. That was a bit of a pain initially.”

Phantom: Covert Ops releases on June 25. O’Luanaigh notes that it can be easier working on the post-production part of game when everyone is at home.

“We’ve found that for a game in the later stages, everyone knows what you need to do. You have your bugs to fix. Everyone’s got their task.”

Above: Phantom: Covert Ops is launching during a pandemic.

Image Credit: nDreams/Oculus

Pre-production, however, can be more fluid. People are creating concepts and building the foundations of a game. That can take more iteration and collaboration, which can be difficult when your staff is all working apart from each other.

Joel Burgess is the studio director at Capy, the developer behind the mobile hit Grindstone, a puzzle game that debuted alongside the Apple Arcade subscription service. Capy is based in Ontario, Canada, and Burgess has been helping the government there support gaming studios during the pandemic.

“I got thrown in very quickly when the pandemic started, into this committee for the minister of tourism, heritage, and culture for Ontario,” Burgess told GamesBeat. “We’re doing a whole bunch of meetings and subcommittees and all this stuff every week to make recommendations on how the government can support companies through COVID. I would say 90 percent of these meetings and subcommittee stuff is making sure that there’s financial health for studios.

The committee is especially important for indie developers.

“A lot of those smaller studios, having somebody who started the game pull out and now they’re not going to get a milestone payment, that can bankrupt them,” said Burgess . “The damage to the Toronto indie scene could be catastrophic, if suddenly a bunch of people who had been able to make it because of government assistance, if they can’t because those programs are bogged down in red tape or something.”

As for Capy itself, Burgess is glad that Grindstone became a known quantity before the pandemic hit.

“I wouldn’t say that the pandemic has been good for us. I think it’s more a matter of, from a damage mitigation perspective, I’m happy that we have a product on a platform like Apple Arcade that’s doing well,” Burgess notes. “Grindstone is out. We know what it is. We know what we like about it. We read what critics and fans say about the game and can respond to that. Which means the team has something to work on that’s really clear.”

But as O’Luanaigh from nDreams talked about earlier, stay-at-home work becomes more difficult for games early in the development process.

“We had other stuff going on in the studio that I can’t talk about, because it’s newer and earlier and still secret,” said Burgess. ” That stuff has been much more of a challenge, because those early stage projects have uncertainty in them already, and when we’re in this situation where people have anxiety about their lives and the world, and then you mix that with project anxiety, because everyone has a different version of this game in their head, that compounds.”

Capy is a small studio with just 25 people. This presents Burgess with an additional challenge: protecting his employees’ mental health.

“If I were still at Ubisoft, for example, there’s an apparatus there with HR and management relationships and all of that, to check in on people. When you’re in a small indie studio, you rely a lot more on organic personal connections to check on people, because you’re friends,” Burgess explained. “I’m concerned about it. People on the team with whom I’m close, I can get a sense that, say, this is a rough week for them. But we’re just small enough that we don’t have more formal systems for checking in on people, and we’re just big enough that you can’t rely on it being five people who know each other super well.”

Staying connected while stuck at home

Apps like Slack and Zoom have become a regular part of many gaming companies’ lives. Some are even using programs designed for less practical reasons to help make work more efficient. Benjy Boxer is the co-founder of Parsec, software that makes it possible for people to use cloud gaming to play and stream with each other. But Parsec also has tools for screen-sharing and accessing other computers remotely.

“You can use it as an indie game developer to log into your workstation at the office,” Boxer told GamesBeat. “But there are larger companies that are saying, hey, we really need this so that our game developers can connect to their workstations from outside the office.”

But people are still using Parsec for its main intention, which helps people play games together.

“That hasn’t really changed,” Boxer continued. We’re seeing a very significant increase in that usage, to be frank, but the way that people use Parsec is to play games with their friends. They invite their friends to join their PC and they play together. I believe what is happening is — from the consumer side of things, if you’re interested in that, people need a social connection. They’re using Parsec and games for that social connection, because we’re all isolated and feeling lonely. At least I am. Parsec is a great product to continue to connect to those who you want to be connected to. That’s what’s driving a lot of the consumer usage right now. People need that social connection, and then they want an escape through games.”

Above: Xbox Series X could be coming out during a pandemic.

Image Credit: Microsoft

Matias Rodriguez if the vice president of Technology Gaming Studio at Globant, an IT and software development company. I asked him about a logistical problem facing developers. Many of them have dev kits for the next-gen systems, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. You need those to do a lot of work on games for those upcoming systems, but you can’t exactly move them around to different people’s homes. Is this going to have a big impact on the creation of PlayStation 5 and Series X titles?

“No, there is actually a workaround,” Rodriguez told GamesBeat. “We’re working remotely with them, so there is a workaround. The problem is that for some of the work, like optimization work, even with the best remote solution, it’s not possible. At some point — it doesn’t affect some things, because you can buffer them, but at some point it will require having those devices. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft and Sony are having discussions about that. Now, next-gen, as you can imagine, you also have the complexity of manufacturing. There’s not a lot of stock. Logistics are more complicated. That makes things more sticky. It’s not necessarily a full hold on production, but it’s definitely something — it doesn’t have the velocity or productivity of Steam, something like that.”

Future impact

So far, Microsoft and Sony are still committed to releasing their new consoles later this year. But we don’t know exactly what impact the pandemic will have on the games coming to these systems. Considering the long development period for many games, we could be seeing the fallout of this situation for years to come.

But it isn’t all bad news.

“A positive is that a lot of companies are now seeing that they can have more time to develop,” Rodriguez continued. “That could translate into teams having less crunch time and other things that, toward the end of the game, could be more problematic. Now, if because of the pandemic, you earn four or five months of delays because it doesn’t make sense to release a huge title under these conditions, then you end up with more buffer, more time. Again, that’s on the production side. On the consumption side, for a lot of people, they’re discovering games. There’s something very interesting we saw the other day.”

And once the pandemic is over, can we expect companies adopt more lenient work-from-home policies?

“The honest answer is we have to talk to all the employees,” nDream’s O’Luanaigh told GamesBeat. “We have to see how they feel. People don’t really feel safe yet coming back to the office, and we certainly wouldn’t force anybody back until they felt comfortable. We’re going to wait and see how it pans out. But I’ll be very surprised if we don’t have more flexibility than we did before. I suspect that there will be more working from home.”

Right now, many parts of America are attempting to reopen. This could result in another wave of COVID-19 cases. And even if it doesn’t, the pandemic will have a lasting impact on how the gaming industry operates. Working from home may become more common for companies that once depended on the office environment.

Like most of the country, gaming wasn’t ready for the pandemic. But developers have done what they can to adapt, working hard to offer entertainment to millions of people looking for fun during a dark time.

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