Comment by dkersten
6 years ago
> You are not representative of his customer base.
Sure I am. I buy and play a lot of indie games. My steam and PS4 libraries have hundreds of Indie games in them. The vast majority are pixel art or other low budget graphics. I commented in the previous thread saying that I don’t require fancy or expensive art. Hell, I’m perfectly cool with programmer art, but it needs consistency in style, colour and lighting. His art isn’t terrible, but its also not great and I actually did pass over some of his games in the past because the look just felt a little off.
So you’re almost his customer base?
The ones who buy these games are the people not turned off by the “style, color and lighting” deficiencies.
I looked at his games for the first time after the earlier post and am also not representative of his customer base.
I am also almost his customer base, along a different axis. I have very fond memories of Exile, and every time I am reminded I go to buy something new and remember that none of it is for Linux, and don't quite manage to check whether it works fine on wine.
This isn't a complaint, really - I have plenty to fill my time - just surfacing my experience. The art has never been an issue.
Releasing a Linux version is pretty much never economically viable. Planetary Annihilation made a Linux version and despite representing only <0.1% of sales Linux users accounted for >20% of bug reports[0]. That's pretty damning.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
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All his new games play fine via Proton, FWIW. Haven't tried mainline Wine.
These days, though, I prefer the iPad versions when available.
Almost your customer base is where you look to expand sales.
It's not like he couldn't possibly have thought of that (in fact he goes in detail about this exact thing in the post, and even gives numbers).
You only expand sales if you have the money/time to invest in doing the things to expand your sales. And even then, it's a risk (they might not expand).
He'll need to not merely expand, but (almost) double sales just to earn back increased cost - and that is a business risk he's not willing to take. In a follow-up comment, he mentions the looming recession and how the last one destroyed his sales.
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> but it needs consistency in style, colour and lighting. His art isn’t terrible, but its also not great and I actually did pass over some of his games in the past because the look just felt a little off.
I am not surprised and there are certainly more people like you. The issue is that, as he says:
> I am still super-bad at art. Always have been.
He knows his writing and game design can sell games. It is totally reasonable for him to stick to his strengths.
It would be nice to see better support for custom tilesets / assets built into his games, but that also takes time / money.