Words of Wisdom: Dave Edery on Digital Distribution
This talk is awesome. I mean, really, really relevant stuff if you are an indie trying to get your game onto XBLA, PSN, WiiWare, or Steam. Dave Edery delivered a fantastic keynote at the Digital Distribution Summit in Australia on what indies can really expect to have to do to get their game accepted onto the Xbox Live Arcade, where the bar is an how it’s moving, and how to best hedge your bets and make sure that your game does as well as it possibly can.
Skip to 8 min in and then watch the entire video. It’s super business oriented but again, if you make games and are serious about making a living doing so then I would really recommend checking this out.
November 24, 2009 | | Comments Off
Category: Words of Wisdom
Tags: business, dave, david, digital, distribution, edery, keynote, lecture, psn, steam, wiiware, xbla
Digital distribution comparison
There aren’t that many statistics on WiiWare, PSN, and XBLA sales out there, and it is very hard to draw a straight comparison between the different platforms. Simon Carless gave a great talk at GDC where he summed up his findings on the state of sales, but we wanted something a little easier to read at a glance.
Enter Dave Nelson, our resident Sloanie (MIT MBA) who took the time to dig up some sales stats on all three platfroms. For good measure Dave threw in some figures on Steam and iPhone sales too, just for comparison’s sake. The work is great, so we thought we’d post it here. Great job Dave!
Full chart is available here, after the jump. (more…)
May 12, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Numbers
Tags: carless, david, digital, distribution, iphone, nelson, psn, sales, simon, statistics, steam, wiiware, xbla
Bit.Trip Beat: Pong meets Rock Band
Ralph Baer, one of the most awesome people in the world, made pong on the Brown Box almost 40 years ago. The killer game on it? Pong. Since it’s release many have wondered “How could I make Pong more awesome?” Turns out that setting the game to chiptunes music seems to do a damn good job.
Aksys Games just came out with Bit.Trip Beat, a new title for WiiWare that goes full-on retro in a most amazing way. You control the famous paddle, and are tasked with swatting back pixels as you would expect. The twist? Like in Rez, all the enemies come at carefully timed intervals so that when you kill them you build up a song as you go. The pixels themselves are merciless – the game is very hard, and we’ve yet to beat level 1. Despite this we’ll probably go back and play it on a regular basis, as there is decent 4 way co-op multiplayer and we’re gluttons for ridiculously hard retro games.
The game is $6 (600 points) on WiiWare. It’s worth it. We need more games like this out there.