Nuclear Monster

  • Valve just added refunds to Steam. CD Projekt’s Gog and Electronic Arts’ Origin already had similar policies.

    If you’ve played a game for two or fewer hours, and want your money back within the first two weeks of your purchase? You can get your money back. It’s great.

    Got an incomplete game in Steam’s Early Access program that isn’t what you expected or maybe just a game that is completely broken? Get your money back.

    Where it falls apart is for developers who must have questions that mostly have bad answers.

    What if a game takes less than two hours to complete and players ask for refunds?

    What if a player buys the game, plays it offline and completes it in less than two weeks and asks for a refund?

    Right now, it seems like developers are screwed in those situation. The game is done. The player gets their money back.

    Valve has said the rules are flexible for users who have played more than two hours or who have had the game in their Steam library for more than two weeks. They’ll still be able to get refunds.

    What if that flexibility extended to developers who could specify a length of time their game takes to complete, and then the refund system could factor in a percentage of that time to allow for refunds? A two hour game could give you 25 minutes to decide if it’s good or not.

    Having a standard policy for customer service agents to apply to every piece of software and refund situation on the service makes it easier for players as well as Valve’s customer service agents to apply that policy but Valve should be flexible enough in their technology as well as their application of this policy to not ruin the experience for developers who want to take risks by making shorter games that don’t require you to be online in Steam to play them.

    It’s always better for a policy and system to focus on benefits for the people that use them, even over the needs of the people who feed these systems with software. Doing the right thing for their customers is why companies like Valve and Apple succeed where so many others fail. Overall, this policy is great. I’m just not sure about the two-hours.

  • Mike Beasley on the beautiful new version of Tweetbot for Mac:

    Tweetbot 2 fully embraces the Yosemite aesthetic that was introduced in OS X last year while still maintaining much of the same functionality and layout with which users are already familiar. Everything has been flattened, and timelines that previously sported a light gray tone are now pure white.

    The dark gray color on the sidebar has been swapped out in favor a dark translucent look, while the sidebar buttons for each section have been replaced with simpler glyphs. A circular blue indicator on the right side of the icon now indicates new activity in place of the vertical bar that previously appeared on the left side (a change which, if you can believe it, actually hampered my workflow for a while). The iconography throughout the app is now more in-line with its iOS counterpart.

    It’s the best Twitter client on any computer.

  • Patrick Klepek has this fascinating article covering two developers who come to find they’re working on almost the same premise for a game:

    Perception, where you play a blind person who taps a cane to see around them, was revealed last week. Soon, an email went around indie studio Tiny Bull. “Panic started to spread among the team,” said CEO Matteo Lana. Why? Tiny Bull had been making Blind, a game with the same premise, for more than a year.

    It all started when a Tiny Bull programmer was surfing new Kickstarter projects and came across the one for Perception.

    “He sent me a message saying ‘Hey, this game looks a bit like our game.’” said Lana. “And I went ‘No, that is our game.’ It was a bit hard. It was quite a blow at the time.”

    This kind of thing happens all the time, a few years ago it was the “year of the bow” when every game coming out seemed to feature bows and arrows regardless of the setting. Even Battlefield 3 added a crossbow. Is this the year of indie games with a visual aesthetic that can’t be played by people who are actually blind? Fortunately there are other developers who make games where all the gameplay is aural. 

  • SourceForge has taken it upon themselves to resurrect “abandoned” projects. Of course, the projects aren’t actually abandoned and have just moved elsewhere so what SourceForge is actually doing is taking free software installers, loading them up with ads, and then shitting them out on SourceForge download servers.

    You can see the full list of projects that SourceForge has gracefully swooped in to destroy here.

    Previously.

  • Katie Chironis on what the massively successful crowdfunding campaign for Koji Igarashi’s Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night means for smaller developers also using crowdfunding:

    Bloodstained isn’t a story of the little guy triumphing over big publishers, it’s the story of a campaign that had millions of dollars of funding before the Kickstarter began and the help of multiple companies handling the logistics of the campaign. They asked for $500,000 to prove a point, not fund a game. The issue is that campaigns like that cause members of the community to believe that $500,000 is all you need to create large-scale experiences.

    When you ask for half a million when you really need $5 million it becomes impossible for games with realistic budgets to survive. It’s not that people don’t understand what a game costs, it’s more that Kickstarter is actively distorting people’s understanding of a sane budget. The ecosystem is being poisoned for projects that need to raise their actual, workable budget for a game.

    There are two kinds of project operators on Kickstarter and other similar crowdfunding services.

    The first, and what I believe to be the majority of projects, is everyone who actually is in their theoretical or actual basement toiling away. It’s here that you find the projects to mock that will never successfully achieve their funding goal alongside game developers who actually need the funding in order to start and complete their project.

    The problem group is the minority. They’re so successful at crowdfunding they blow past their initial goals and quadruple them in hours. They have already started the work and have invested significant resources into producing a compelling pitch video with supporting concept art to demonstrate their potential for success. They can summon significant external financial backing at the conclusion of a crowdfunding campaign which existed only as a representative measure of the potential market to sell the finished product into. If it fails to generate enough funding or fails during production, who cares? They’ll walk away relatively unscathed and might even finish the project with the external investment they already had lined up or move on to another.

    Both kinds of crowdfunding projects have succeeded and failed beyond everyone’s wildest expectations and this has lead some people to declare crowdfunding as a whole either an enormous success or terrible failure. All of the declarations ignore the continued successes and failures of both kinds of project that occur after the declaration has been made. Even this article isn’t immune to sudden declaration syndrome. The opener is:

    We all know the Kickstarter bubble is bursting.

    The difference between Katie Chironis’ declaration and the others is that she is right. The majority of projects can’t compare with crowdfunding goals as low as Bloodstained‘s $500,000.

    Why would anyone running a project who is otherwise wealthy or has external financial backing do the right thing and set their goals appropriately when the wrong thing is working out so well for them?

    There are enough fans of Castlevania out there that the Kickstarter project for Bloodstained is at about $2.5 million. Of which Kickstarter is already set to make $125,000 at their 5% fee. The payment processor will get about the same cut of that $2.5 million if the funding level doesn’t change by the time the campaign ends.

    Why would Kickstarter’s crowdfunding change when they made $1,016,900 for hosting another project webpage, the Pebble Time, with an unrealistic goal, external funding, and an already complete project ready to go to market?

    If Kickstarter’s bubble doesn’t burst for truly independent project operators, it will be because Kickstarter changes to properly support them by focusing on those who aren’t succeeding at finding funding and shipping complete projects instead of passing the blame entirely onto project operators.

    If that happens, Kickstarter might actually earn some of their cut.