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[s0]

honestly if i boycotted the work of everyone who has some questionable opinions or is unlikeable as a person i'd have to boycott a whole fucking lot of shit.

also wait wait wait, this is coming out for pc? i thought it was gonna be a timed ps4 exclusive? what happened to that? im out of the loop, pls halp!!

also it looks extremely visually stunning, just thought i'd say that.

[ProgramGamer]

I hope it runs fine on my computer. That's all. If I buy it that is.

[DireLogomachist]

honestly if i boycotted the work of everyone who has some questionable opinions or is unlikeable as a person i'd have to boycott a whole fucking lot of shit.

This.  I never got the hate against Phil Fish either.  You don't have to agree with everything they say, just enjoy the fantastic game you got from them.  In fact, I'd probably give more leeway to Blow/Fish/etc. than some random internet asshole, because hey we got good stuff out of them.  Don't kill the golden goose because they said something stupid.


*Cough Cough Fez 2 Cough*

[ProgramGamer]

Actually Phil was very rude to a lot of people on social media. Almost anyone who complained or provoked him got berated with insults on his part, and that made his reputation as a person go down very quickly. Basically what happens when a child of the internet goes famous.

I think, don't quote me on this...

[cynicalsandel]

except gamers don't care about his twitter antics they just whine about the one time he complained about handholding in some japanese games

[ProgramGamer]

What? Really?

[cynicalsandel]

that was a bit of an exaggeration. i searched for this video that's made the rounds a lot

if you haven't seen it.

but this thread is about jblow. i think it takes a lot of guts to invest all of your savings into a game. twice. his games aren't really suited to my taste, but i respect them. and his opinions on good code don't really bother me even though i'm the exact disaster he's talking about. (worse actually)

edit: holy cow when did youtube embedding happen

[Mittens]

He tells indie developers that them not following "good code standards" is killing the industry.

He wants people to code better I guess, I no see problema?

He once said that if you can't afford the Greenlight fee, you shouldn't be an indie developer.

if you don't believe in the importance or validity of your own work to spend even 99 bucks on it, you probably are doing it wrong, right?

He's generally behaves like a rich classist asshole and I have no interest in giving him any money.

he's a nerd obviously, being social is a challenge for him, all things considered he handles being a public figure pretty well I think.
You sound like you have more issue with him being fiscally successful than anything he's actually said
I don't really care enough about him either way, but I liked Braid and Witness looks vpretty

[SirNiko]

also wait wait wait, this is coming out for pc? i thought it was gonna be a timed ps4 exclusive? what happened to that? im out of the loop, pls halp!!

Steam sez it's out on PC in less than a week. Perhaps Blow discovered a loophole that lets the timed exclusivity period be measured in seconds.

[Oddball]

He once said that if you can't afford the Greenlight fee, you shouldn't be an indie developer.

jb does sound kinda like a dick but let's be real this is one is obviously true

This attitude really pisses me off. When I released my first game I didn't have $100 to my name, but luckily it was before Greenlight so I didn't have to pay $100. I was living hand to mouth out of a single room. I developed the game on a broken 5 year old laptop that I had to hold the power cable in a certain way or it would shut down. What are you saying? I shouldn't have bothered? Let's try something new and help people up instead of pushing them down.

[Mittens]

relax, nobody is saying "give up if you're poor"
it's more just acknowledging that games cost money to make, usually a whole lot more than 100 bucks.
Generally speaking if someone can't afford the submission fee then they probably wont be able to afford the other costs a game will require to be commercially competitive. (or even the hardware and software required to try!)
That's not classism, it's just making a statement about the state of the market/industry.
 
Sure some people might defy all the odds and have a zero budget game be financially rewarding, but these are exceptional games, it's just not safe or wise to plan to be exceptional.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

He once said that if you can't afford the Greenlight fee, you shouldn't be an indie developer.

jb does sound kinda like a dick but let's be real this is one is obviously true

This attitude really pisses me off. When I released my first game I didn't have $100 to my name, but luckily it was before Greenlight so I didn't have to pay $100. I was living hand to mouth out of a single room. I developed the game on a broken 5 year old laptop that I had to hold the power cable in a certain way or it would shut down. What are you saying? I shouldn't have bothered? Let's try something new and help people up instead of pushing them down.

it's not valid if you're talking about before Greenlight. IF you have confidence in your game you can make the 100$ from selling your game outside of Steam. If you can't sell enough to make 100$ outside of steam, i'd say that yeah, don't bother putting your game on greenlight.

Indie industry is evolving at a fast past.

[JWK5]

relax, nobody is saying "give up if you're poor"
it's more just acknowledging that games cost money to make, usually a whole lot more than 100 bucks.
Generally speaking if someone can't afford the submission fee then they probably wont be able to afford the other costs a game will require to be commercially competitive. (or even the hardware and software required to try!)
That's not classism, it's just making a statement about the state of the market/industry.
 
Sure some people might defy all the odds and have a zero budget game be financially rewarding, but these are exceptional games, it's just not safe or wise to plan to be exceptional.

Vet bills are pretty ridiculous. One time my cat fractured a bone in its foot and the vet wanted close to $1000 to fix it, which we didn't have. We tried working out a payment plan or anything we could do but they pretty much shrugged off everything and their final response was "If you can't afford to pay your pet's vet bills you shouldn't have a pet." It's kind of like saying "If suddenly your income takes a bad turn get rid of your children, you're too poor to deserve them anyways."

The statement you are referring to kind of reminds me of a lot of that. He's not saying "If you don't have the money don't give up, keep working at it until you do." He's saying nothing motivational, helpful, or positive at all. All he's saying is "Unless your resources and capabilities are up to my standards don't even bother." Sounds like classism to me. It's just another variation on the old "you're to poor to even deserve a chance" sentiment that entitled people like to throw around at "lesser" folk they sorely underestimate.



* We wound up getting lucky and got a grant from the Humane Society, his leg healed but then that same vet fucked it up anyways by wrapping the cast too tight and causing an infected friction wound which we had to treat on our own because we couldn't afford the visit to fix the damage they caused... Thankfully we did get it to heal, though.

[ThemsAllTook]

What was the actual quote? With a quick google search for "jonathan blow steam greenlight fee", I only found these:

So many articles about how Greenlight's $100 fee is some kind of crime against humanity... proof I should not be wasting time on the web.

"Making a game for somewhere like Steam, that people are going to want to pay for, is a lot of work," Braid developer Jonathan Blow told Ars. "If someone is able to do that much work, it's hard for me to think they can't come up with $100. Maybe you can think of some extreme case of someone in the developing world who is using a computer they got for free or something, but I think if you show someone like a publisher, Indie Fund, or a site like Kickstarter a strong game, it is pretty easy to get $100."

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

relax, nobody is saying "give up if you're poor"
it's more just acknowledging that games cost money to make, usually a whole lot more than 100 bucks.
Generally speaking if someone can't afford the submission fee then they probably wont be able to afford the other costs a game will require to be commercially competitive. (or even the hardware and software required to try!)
That's not classism, it's just making a statement about the state of the market/industry.
 
Sure some people might defy all the odds and have a zero budget game be financially rewarding, but these are exceptional games, it's just not safe or wise to plan to be exceptional.

Vet bills are pretty ridiculous. One time my cat fractured a bone in its foot and the vet wanted close to $1000 to fix it, which we didn't have. We tried working out a payment plan or anything we could do but they pretty much shrugged off everything and their final response was "If you can't afford to pay your pet's vet bills you shouldn't have a pet." It's kind of like saying "If suddenly your income takes a bad turn get rid of your children, you're too poor to deserve them anyways."

The statement you are referring to kind of reminds me of a lot of that. He's not saying "If you don't have the money don't give up, keep working at it until you do." He's saying nothing motivational, helpful, or positive at all. All he's saying is "Unless your resources and capabilities are up to my standards don't even bother." Sounds like classism to me. It's just another variation on the old "you're to poor to even deserve a chance" sentiment that entitled people like to throw around at "lesser" folk they sorely underestimate.



* We wound up getting lucky and got a grant from the Humane Society, his leg healed but then that same vet fucked it up anyways by wrapping the cast too tight and causing an infected friction wound which we had to treat on our own because we couldn't afford the visit to fix the damage they caused... Thankfully we did get it to heal, though.

that's so different in a lot of levels.

this is about 100$..... and it's greenlight. nobody dies because your game ain't in steam.


@ ThemsAllTook  Thanks for putting the real quote.

[jeremiah]

I'm a big fan of Blow, follow him on Twitter, and will buy the Witness for $40 despite that being the most I've spent on a game in years.

Still, his hobby seems to be telling people how much they're shitty developers:

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/608760382358880256

https://twitter.com/jonathan_blow/status/621874948311650304

https://twitter.com/jonathan_blow/status/452631995219476480

[s0]

the quote does come off as kinda dickish tbh. just because he was able to secure funding for his game, doesnt mean that the games of people who couldn't are somehow not "strong" enough. thats some bs neoliberal thinking right there.

there are lots of factors that have 0 to do with game "quality". does your game really deserve  to fail just because you lack marketing knowledge, for instance?

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

wasn't he just talking about the 100$ greenlight fee? 

i don't understand how people misread between the lines.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

He once said that if you can't afford the Greenlight fee, you shouldn't be an indie developer.

jb does sound kinda like a dick but let's be real this is one is obviously true

This attitude really pisses me off. When I released my first game I didn't have $100 to my name, but luckily it was before Greenlight so I didn't have to pay $100. I was living hand to mouth out of a single room. I developed the game on a broken 5 year old laptop that I had to hold the power cable in a certain way or it would shut down. What are you saying? I shouldn't have bothered? Let's try something new and help people up instead of pushing them down.

The Jonathan blow quote (which I hadn't read) posted above spells out my stance pretty clearly. I absolutely support you making games man -- most of my time learning 3d and how to make games has been done right at or below the poverty line. But while many people who make games can't afford to live comfortably, coming up with $100 for a commercial game -- no matter how small -- is very easy in this day and age.

If you can't generate $100 you don't have any business trying to sell your game - either your game cannot generate revenue on its own, or you don't have the resources to market it to make it viable.

(Releasing it for free, obviously, is a whole other thing - lots of great creatives works aren't intended to be marketable.)

Edit: To qualify this a little more -- games take months or years to make. Assuming you work on your game for a month, you only need to generate ~$5 per day, whether by saving or working extra or marketing or getting help from someone or whatever. Indies have no problem asking for thousands and thousands of dollars worth of unpaid or underpaid work from collaborators, but can't get what usually comes to a few cents per day worth of liquidity?

there are lots of factors that have 0 to do with game "quality". does your game really deserve  to fail just because you lack marketing knowledge, for instance?

Deserve to? Of course not, there's no way to frame this in morality. But will it? Absolutely. Should you know better? Definitely. Releasing a game is marketing work, complaining you need marketing knowledge for it is like complaining you need to know how to program in order to program your game.

[Oddball]

If you can't generate $100 you don't have any business trying to sell your game - either your game cannot generate revenue on its own, or you don't have the resources to market it to make it viable.

What if it generates enough to home and feed your family, but not enough for you to plough spare cash into the business. Everyone is talking like $100 is pocket change. I am very pleased that some of you don't feel like $100 is a lot of money as it means you've led a comfortable life. I can assure you though that for many people $100 is a lot of money.