I have been playing Jeff Vogel's games since Exile 1 in 1995, and I'm still playing them today with the Avadon series. He's a fantastic author and fantasy world architect, however I strongly disagree with his opinions on the game industry.
This is a guy who was selling a 20+ yearold game as a downloadable installer from his ancient website for $30 while new indie authors were pumping out new games on sale for $10, $5, or less. Who was making more sales, and ultimately more profit from this? Evidence it wasn't him: http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-hal...
I think Jeff is a dinosaur, stuck in the 90s shareware era, and bitter that people can make more money by selling games for $3 than he can by selling games for $30.
In Jeff's case, I suspect that the low audio/visual quality of the games that he's been releasing since 2000 has been a significant factor in the weak reception he's seen them receive. Reviewers have been consistently dinging his games since Geneforge in 2001, and he's still using the same game engine (and a lot of the same graphical assets!) in his current releases. Plainly put, his games look and feel dated.
Is graphical polish a make-or-break factor for games? Of course not. But that isn't a license to ignore it, either. "Lo-fi" graphics can be attractive as an intentional design choice, but that isn't what he's got, and I suspect it's turning off a lot of potential players.
Later, when he actually dropped the prices to something that average people might feel like actually paying for games built on such retro foundations, he sold 33,000 bundles in one week (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vo...)... while misunderstanding the effects of lower pricing on his target audience enough that he thought he'd sell "less than a third of that".
Comments
I have been playing Jeff Vogel's games since Exile 1 in 1995, and I'm still playing them today with the Avadon series. He's a fantastic author and fantasy world architect, however I strongly disagree with his opinions on the game industry.
This is a guy who was selling a 20+ yearold game as a downloadable installer from his ancient website for $30 while new indie authors were pumping out new games on sale for $10, $5, or less. Who was making more sales, and ultimately more profit from this? Evidence it wasn't him: http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-hal...
I think Jeff is a dinosaur, stuck in the 90s shareware era, and bitter that people can make more money by selling games for $3 than he can by selling games for $30.
In Jeff's case, I suspect that the low audio/visual quality of the games that he's been releasing since 2000 has been a significant factor in the weak reception he's seen them receive. Reviewers have been consistently dinging his games since Geneforge in 2001, and he's still using the same game engine (and a lot of the same graphical assets!) in his current releases. Plainly put, his games look and feel dated.
Is graphical polish a make-or-break factor for games? Of course not. But that isn't a license to ignore it, either. "Lo-fi" graphics can be attractive as an intentional design choice, but that isn't what he's got, and I suspect it's turning off a lot of potential players.
Seconded.
This is a guy whose total sales of games were low enough under his original model that one of them sold about 4,000 copies total since its release (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...).
Later, when he actually dropped the prices to something that average people might feel like actually paying for games built on such retro foundations, he sold 33,000 bundles in one week (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vo...)... while misunderstanding the effects of lower pricing on his target audience enough that he thought he'd sell "less than a third of that".