Reader Mail Bag #1
Welcome to the first reader mail edition, where I respond to comments on my blog, news, and other interesting articles. Although for today, I’ll just focus on comment. I hope the Reader Mail Bag will be a regular edition to this blog. I have to thanks agorist(black market anarcho-capitalists) blogger, FSK for introducing me to this concept.
My first essay on this blog, “Redesigning RubyTet: Competition versus Cooperation“, attracted a lot of interest in the concept. There were some confusion on about how the gems work. One common suggestion was to make pictures showing how it all work. I guess I’ll do that in the following week.
Shawn42 is the only guy who commented on this essay. Listen to what he have to say:
Kiba,
This is a great idea for a game. I like how you arrived on the game design. Not sure I agree with all your thoughts, but the ones pertaining to the game sound interesting. I would like to play this game when you get it built. Good luck.
If he ever tell me what he doesn’t agree with, I’ll be glad to try to defend my views.
On my next article, I wrote You Need An Attitude Correction for indie game developers. Like the last article most free gaming geeks agree with me. One even lament “if only indies read this”.
Qubodup repiled:
“Stop whining and adopt” – absolutely!
By making it easier to by music rather than steal it, you will get your money. And it’s still not super-easy to download torrents (it’s easy, but not super-easy). So it is not really that hard. But I think they got the message already.
Related: About why recording companies suck at handling reality.
Not all indies whine. A lot of them probably accept “piracy” as fact of reality. However even among non-whiners, most of them developed a strong hatred for “pirates”. This make them blind to the historical and economic perspective, which I think are immensely important to navigating the marketplace. It is one thing to know that customers will hate you for implementing DRM but it is quite another to understand the pirates’ role in the market place.
Shawn42 sent me a challenge:
I agree that business models need to be agile and adapt to the current state of things. Whining doesn’t make a dime, but I challenge you, Kiba, to define and outline an example of this. (maybe in the next post?)
I once wrote a business plan for my Space Fighter Ace project but however, I forgot to move the entry from my old(kibabase.libregamewiki.org) wiki to the new one(wiki.kibabase.com). I assure you that the plan is quited detailed, but that is now lost to time. In the mean time, there are a few business model ideas floating around. One is the benefactor system that Jason Rohrer used to make his living. There’s also the ransom model which have a history of failures for various reasons. I’ll probably eventually write out a new business plan for Space Fighter Ace. Whether it will be in next post or the next two, I don’t know.
There’s one thing that I think everybody should watch out for is the collapse of the copyright system but that’s another idea for another time.
As for programming projects, I only got a few local commits done for RubyTet. Ironically, this is because I spent too much time writing articles! Not only that, I got some school projects to worry about. These two combinations doesn’t make for great programming productivity.
Tomorrow is the last day of school before spring break so I’ll have no shoolwork for one week. Plus spring break afforded me lot of time to write and hack as well. If I don’t squander like I usually do, it will be an unusually productive week. By the end of it, I’ll turn 18 and hopefully a lot of hacking under my belt.
After all, people are looking forward to a major revision to the RubyTet line. If I disappoint them, somebody is eventually going to execute my ideas before me and get the bigger piece of the pie.(This is called the first mover advantage) Can’t let that happen.
Happy hacking
~Kiba
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