Writing Games Is Easy

Oh dear, here we go again. Just saw another string of comments on a RPS post about how "writing games is easier than ever."

Um, no. Writing games is every bit as difficult as its ever been.

Someone else made it worse by saying "No, it's just coding games is easier than ever."

Um, no again. Coding games is every bit as difficult as its ever been. Its just that a lot of very clever people have very nicely done a whole lot of the work for you. This is a good thing - it democratises the process and means that we have more bodies to throw at the "writing games is hard" problem we mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately, if you want to step outside the boundaries of those elements they've been nice enough to provide, you're still going to discover to your horror that coding games is as difficult now - if not more so - than it ever was before.

On Minecraft, Zeitgeist, And Indie Megahits

Gamesindustry.biz has an interview up with Daniel Kaplan (reg rqrd), the business development officer at Mojang Developments, the firm created by Notch from the success of Minecraft.

Much of it involves discussion of the corporate "noise level" they're under, but a big part of it leapt out at me.

Kaplan: "It's really hard to tell. We still don't really know how big Minecraft is - we have to update ourselves! Last year the huge blogs like Kotaku and Penny Arcade wrote about it - that's when we realised, wow. It was already going well, but when those guys wrote about it it started to go great. They made a huge impact on our sales and brand. We are very grateful."

He's keeping it somewhat under his hat, but essentially this has been the way Notch and Mojang as a whole have been all along on the subject of the "secret of their success." This has been in stark contrast with most of the journalists I've read on the subject, who seem to be determined to promote the idea that Minecraft's success was some kind of magical feat, some organic thing that simply leapt fully-formed from the quality of the product.

This is, of course, purest crap. Minecraft is an excellent game with one absolutely masterful mechanic (the spawning of monsters at night-time, which forces the player to engage the world around them with a strict time limit from the start). But there are thousands of excellent indie games out there, and hundreds using the same paid-alpha approach as Minecraft. Why haven't they all made millions?

Because Minecraft, good a game as it is, got its success not from any inherent quality of the game, but from a thousand blogs, forums, and online magazines carrying the news on Mojang's behalf. There's a name for this kind of self-perpetuating narrative. It's called a "zeitgeist". And this zeitgest, this sheer blind luck of the draw, is the secret to Minecraft's success.

Contrary to the magical thinking of journalists, Notch/Mojang simply got lucky. That's all. Nothing more, nothing less.

But here's the awesome part. This industry isn't filled with humble people, not even amongst the indie community (hello there!). And yet... Mojang pretty much hand credit for their success to the blogs and comics. They're talking about funding other indie titles they like the look of. They even recognise the nascent block-em-up genre they've popularised (not invented, incidentally, the concept is a decade old) and seem happy to watch contenders arise. They're pushing to make their users happy, not to broaden their fan base or increase their DLC sales, but pretty much just because they want to. They've made millions, and yet they're displaying humility.

I don't say this often... but in this case it's deserved. Mojang Developments are The Good Guys.

Android Grumbles

We've pretty much ceased to bother with Android, apart from occasional updates to the 3 titles currently on there. The reasons for this:

1) The service is absolutely swarming with crap. There are certain developers that specialise in cyclically releasing virtually invisible updates to their collection of match-3 games every 2 weeks just to stay atop the "just in" list as much as possible. There are hundreds of apps using the name of well-known film or TV shows, musicians, whatever it takes to get search results. There are apps which are basically the name of well-known iPhone games, followed by a lot of spaces, followed by "... Wallpaper". There's a dog fighting game on there. It's not a healthy and competitive market, it's a morass.

2) As a result, most Android users just look at the "Top" section, but that just means that those titles which already sold ungodly numbers sell more. Everyone else is ignored.

3) There's no practical way to market a game to Android users. There isn't even an equivalent of "freeappaday".

4) Android is supposed to be a blanket solution across multiple handsets, but apps have a horrible habit of randomly not working on some handsets when they work fine on others. This gets much worse if you use anything remotely complex such as wifi, bluetooth, or even the Contacts API.

5) Android users don't email to tell you it doesn't work. They give you a 1 star rating and post a comment to that effect. Neither can ever be removed, even if you fix the problem. This routinely happens due to point 4), above.

6) Android users consider £1.50 too much to pay for a game that took multiple people over a month to create, and get angry if the game they bought for 80p doesn't get updated every single month with new content.

So, as you can probably tell, we're not going back there unless someone pays us to, except to bugsplat our existing apps. It just isn't worth the time and effort.