But come on! Blaming your audience is a cop-out. I make games so that people will play them; I'm not gonna cut up those same people. If they don't feel like sinking more than 30 seconds into my game, whose fault is it? My own. I don't have a marketing team and mainstream press coverage to make sure people know what's in my game and why it's worth playing. I have a 30 second blind trial by someone gracious enough to waste their valuable browsing time.
If you have a great game and you think no one's giving it a chance, the solution is not "put up more barriers to entry". Criminy, why would you want less people playing your game? What you need to do is make sure that person willing to give you 30 seconds has a hell of a time immediately. If you have a great game, make them play it right away.
I'm of the opinion that content makers should never waste an audience's time, whether money's involved or not. And I don't think you can get outraged at the typical Flash portalite who feels the same way.
Congrats on the sponsorship! What's 'er name? Let us know when it's out.
Here, just take a step back. Make the games you want to make, but don't kid yourself into thinking you can make whatever game you want to make and it'll do just as well in the Flash market as it would anywhere else. Consoles, Steam, Web, Mobile all of it is very, very different, right down to the portal you put your game on. Of course, if you naturally make games that are conducive to the Flash scene, then you're in the right place, right? But if you're into making some mythical MP RTS MMO with a tech-tree the size of Canada, is Flash still the way to do it just because you'll get millions of players?
I know it seems like I'm blaming my audience and whining, waving my arms in the air, but it's really not the case. I'm blaming myself for not seriously considering if our game was being presented to the
right audience. Certainly we considered it, but the whole time we kind of knew in the background... "Yea, our game is pretty hardcore, zero-sum 1on1 real-time stuff based on skill and strategy. hmmm." But it's not like we could change platforms back then. Now we can. And will.
Here's a little tangent I'd like to go on about audience:Take Matthew Barney, husband to björk and hip video artist that created
The Cremaster video series. Here I found one randomly on
. I'll pause while you watch it.
So... whatever your opinion is on this kind of art, if you like it, it moves you or you think it's stupid, none of that really matters. You see, he charges $100K for each DVD set. There are a limited number of copies and there are 20 sets. He sells one set to a collector/fan and he makes 2 MILLION DOLLARS minimum. If he released his DVDs on the free market what do you think would have happened? He would have been extremely lucky to make that kind of money during his entire lifetime had he done that.
But this sidetrack isn't about money. Barney has found an audience for his kind of work. Granted he's a "video artist" in the most pretentious sense of the word, but he certainly is smart enough to know that simply releasing his DVD to stores isn't the best idea. Not because it would have led him to the poorhouse, but because nobody would have given a shit. By hiking up the price tag on his DVDs, people take it seriously, they see it as something beyond mere film and start calling it high-art (not completely the reason, but you know what I'm getting at so let's just go with it). Surely there is a much greater divide between something like The Cremaster and modern film than there is between a free game and one that's paid for, but I think the correlation stands true. As I said in my article, it isn't logical (and it certainly isn't fair) but it's the way it is.
Finally, I just want you to know I'm not outraged. None of this is even a fraction of me beating my chest getting all frothy. I'm just putting an opinion out there based on my own experiences. Hell, I'm still working on Flash games and I love doing it. I plan to continue making Flash games, but I wouldn't kid myself into thinking our next big project would do as well* as a free-to-play Flash/Web game as it would in downloadable/console form. I wish I was wrong about this, and maybe I am. I'm open to that, but from where I'm looking right now I don't see this whole relationship going much further when it comes to our "Big Projects" which are the games of love we pour ourselves into when we have enough resources to pull them off. Smaller Flash games are still a labor of love, but they are more like affairs than wife-n-kids type stuff. Nawmean?
As a real sidenote, I just stumbled onto this. If you're interested in maybe checking Unity out here's a neato tutorial series for Flash developers making the jump:
http://ethicalgames.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/unity-for-flash-developers-tutorial-1/
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