These people here are not incurring costs, so 20% is just taking the mikey, they have no costs or risk involved, so 20% is out of order to me.

Welcome to the current state of indie game distribution.  It is a publisher-friendly market, and since most indies don't have a very strong publishing arm, we don't really get a choice.  If you don't self-publish, you are not going to get a very high royalty rate.  Unless you are already pretty successful, a royalty rate of over 50% is not likely.

As I stated before, this is not an issue with Mo'Minis.  It is an issue that affects almost every publishing outlet available to indies.

While 80% is pretty high.  It's really not that far off from what most major portals end up giving you, after all their game club discounts, bandwidth fees, etc.  It all really depends on their ability to get your game out there and produce sales for you.  If I can concentrate on making a game, and then just hand it over to them, and have them sell a bunch of copies for me, then I really haven't earned much more than 20% by today's standards.

The problem is not Mo'Minis offering a low percentage to developers.  The problem lies in the fact that even in other avenues, developers are getting shafted.  Even in more open markets like XBLA Community Games, where I believe the royalty rates for devs are 70%, you are still expected to cough up $100 for a Creator's Club membership, plus the cost of an Xbox 360, which means you are going to be spending at least $300 just to be able to make a game.  The iPhone is no exception, as you need to have a Mac system to develop on, as well as an iPhone or iPod Touch.

What Mo'Minis is offering is free software to develop mobile games, and connections with mobile game publishers.  Now I can't speak for the quality of these connections, but if it ends up being what they are claiming, I feel like 20% is about on par with what they should be expected to give by today's standards.  I'm not saying that it is right, but it really isn't far from what I would expect.

That's hilarious.  Apparently playing a game for 3 minutes qualifies you to write a review of it now.  Goodbye credibility.

I went to last month's and had a good time.  I will be there tomorrow.

In Engineer you take the role of a lone engineer against a horde of zombies.  You really aren't that powerful so you have to rely on fortifications.  Turrets are expensive but are your only hope in later waves, while walls are cheap and can be used to redirect zombies.

Screenshot

Download

I'm really bad at the whole balance thing, so I'm having difficulty with...the...difficulty.  Any help in tuning the game logic to make things more fun is appreciated.  And yes, I am aware there is no sound.  I was planning on using sfxr for some sounds but it decided to stop working on this comp.  Any feedback is awesome, thanks!

I would be willing to help in any testing, I have played the Atari version and the NES version *shudder*

do these social service site allow you to sell stuff, or put adds or links, say put up a demo, then have a link to an outside sales web site?

Yes, yes, and yes.  There are really very few limits to what you can do.  I even got Game Maker games to run embedded in Facebook.

http://s10.zetaboards.com/Zerosoft/topic/7067949/1/#new

Zerosoft is having a retro games contest for cash.

Now we're all just waiting for GW2.

I feel like this sentiment is shared by a lot of former GW players.  I played it for about a year pretty obsessively, I was into the PvE aspect of the game, which basically means I was into farming and making tons of money.  GW is a great game, and the fact that you don't have to pay monthly makes it even better, it's just hard to keep people's attention for that long when your product really doesn't change.  Sure, they had a few expansions, but if you've played one, you've played them all.

I got the email through the Game Maker Games forum.  I did play around with it a bit, and there is definitely some potential.

It is slightly more complicated than GM, but the basic concepts are pretty much similar.  I wasn't able to make anything too complicated, and the sample games they give are pretty basic, as well.  I got some warnings on image file size when using larger background images.

The publishing is a little weird, I actually emailed the developers and was told that you are required to send your source file to them.  This is done on their website, but I hear they are adding functionality to do so in the program.  They then take your file and optimize it to work with as many phones as possible.  They also have contacts with Orange Israel, which provides about half of Israel's cell phones, a couple million or so, although I'm not sure what the actual likelihood of making any money off this is.

Overall, I'm still skeptical as to how this all works, but I am intrigued enough to try it out.  I am probably going to be submitting something soon, and will report back with my experiences.

Problem with Tiki Towers is not that it uses the same idea. It's that it sucks. But there's no reason to be upset about it - shitty, derivative games that don't improve anything are great at punishing themselves and bombing big time.

Unfortunately this isn't the case.  All development is done in-house, so these games usually don't have to sell as many copies to break even.  Also, because Real developed it, they will probably market it over products by outside devs.  These types of shitty rehash games are easy ways for the publishers to make a quick buck without having to deal with those pesky developers.

The casual games market is hardly even worth it.  If you do make a good, successful game, the publishers have in-house development studios that can simply clone it in a matter of weeks.

http://www.mominis.com/gamecast1/

Mo'Minis is running a competition using their software.  It is a Game Maker-ish program designed to make mobile games.  I really don't know much about the software, but thought others might want to take a look at it.

Download Aphrodisias

Aphrodisias is a small experiment in creating a game using nothing but a 20×20 pixel room. It’s pretty bland as far as gameplay goes, but the focus really isn’t on that. Every time you finish a level, a screenshot is taken of your 20×20 level and uploaded to the web. Each image is added to part of a bigger image, creating a sort of collaborative collage.

I’m not sure I’m 100% done with this yet, as I would like to add more options to customize the images produced, such as color selection, so updates are not entirely impossible.

LEFT and RIGHT ARROWS - Move
Z KEY - Shoot
SPACE - Upload Current Screen

Natso made Galactic Hacker.  That was a pretty in-depth hacking game with a multiplayer component which only worked over LAN, so nowhere near an MMO.  There was a  browser based text version of it which functioned as an MMO which I hosted for a while.  It was really small and only played by less than a hundred people but it was really fun.  That is the closest I've seen to that.

It's kind of bullshit, in the sense that I think if he wants to make his game he should be able to make his game, but at the same time it's sort of to be expected, so maybe he should have seen it coming? Business behavior is basically pathological, and I don't think that is a big secret.

Yeah, I understand Nintendo is trying to watch its own back.  They are top of the world right now and the last thing they want is change.  Regardless of whether it is to be expected or not, it is still wrong and should be challenged.

I'm not even sure it is the risk factor, though.  Have you seen some of the shit that comes out for DS?  Or any of the multitude of horrible games that only exist because they have license to use a film's IP?  From what I've seen on store shelves Nintendo isn't too picky on licensing for the Nintendo DS.  I think this is a case of discrimination, which is unfortunately made legal by a single paragraph.

Lady and gentlemen, I give you Karl Marx of the video game industry.

Hell, I'll take that as a compliment, thank you.

It's the same clause that exists everywhere in the mainstream games industry. You can bitch and moan about it all you like (or lock yourself in a room for 100 days) but companies are never going to drop this second line defense mechanism because it's just so darn good.

It's this kind of mentality that fucks devs over time and time again.  The industry model is never going to move past its current state if people keep thinking like this.  Even if you think the guy is a moron and his game is shit, he is still being discriminated against because he is an individual, and this is wrong.

I really don't get why everyone is knocking on this guy.  If he meets the requirements there is no reason Nintendo should be dicking him over.  Developers are the people who should really wield the power in the game industry, and I applaud anyone who takes on a company that is holding back progress in the industry.  He definitely could market himself better, but I don't think he's crazy.

TIA Gory Games Contest - http://www.tiaproductions.com/Competitions.html

But then I've kind of stopped following Sony's escapades. They were so bad they became funny, but now it's past funny and back to bad again.

Ditto.  Any publicity is good publicity, in Sony's case, I guess.  If we all werent able to laugh at them on a constant basis we probably wouldnt even pay attention to them.