A disturbing thought occurred to me a couple of nights ago as I was slowly but surely falling in the domain of sleep: Could it be true that many indie games are seriously harmed by their designers thinking too much about the profit gain logics?

I’ve played web-based MMO rpgs and strategy games occasionally, usually in streaks. The other night I started a campaign of Imperia Online. The game is very basic turn-based (or time-based) strategy / kingdom management game, with lots of optimizing, number-crunching and prioriting to do. Basically you build resource building facilities to be able to produce your fighting forces and keep the production up as going to war is gonna eat a lot of those forces. So, in a few words, lots of fun for your war-monging geeky engineer type, right?

Despite the appealing (if not so much innovative) concept I gave up the game pretty quickly. The reason was Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I posted a Game Link on Fragile Ball. One thing that I’ve been thinking of adding to these game link posts is a list of links related to the game, namely blog posts, reviews, videos etc. When I was looking for these on Bloglines the only results were found on download sites and torrent sites. This was a bit of a surprise to me.

Not the download sites, mind you. It is just the fact that a game that has not really garnered enough interest (yet, I’m sure it will pick up from this) that anyone would have written reviews or even small features about it is already cracked and available on a dozen or so torrent sites. These are really diligent and active types, these warez dudez. With a lot of free time to boot.

And for a game that has a free demo and a really competitive price ($9.95). That sucks. That just sucks. I’m not saying that the availability of the pirated version would necessarily effect the amount of purchases of the game (that is too complex a subject to tackle right now in this space), but the other side of this coin as well. If someone has time to crack a game, I would hope that someone else would have time to give the game a little spotlight on some of these indie game sites or blogs or somewhere. Just to keep the world in balance and in good karma

Rant off.