Rejected by Steam

[Governmentyard]

RE: the cracker thing

Cracking is a game to these folks - it always has been. Nothing about who does or doesn't deserve it, more who can crack the most games to work their way up a monthly chart to be the top release group. If you make it harder to crack you'll take time out of your schedule to give them a challenge and they'll just take it up.
I reckon the best thing is to just make it a ballsache for the casual pirate and concentrate more on the fans who would actually buy it.

Dat man him speaky sensible.

[oddbob0]

Cool, I've not seen that one before.
The reply from Steam had a 'decision is final and we are not prepared to discuss' feel to it. I suspect getting SoC on Steam will require going past the front desk to someone higher up.

Quickly because I really should be getting some sleep...

The response is a generic one and I gather they'll pretty much only deal with you via the submissions these days (especially considering they're inundated now PC is back in vogue)

As Charlie and Gaz point out, get it under the noses of some journalists, get some buzz about it and resubmit once there's some words out there about it. It reads final but it's not necessarily final (also, it's done in such a way to stop people going WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY STEAM WHYYYY hence the abrupt nature of it).

RPS are lovely, Danny or Lewie at Indiegames.com would be your best bet out of the staff there now Tim's taken a back seat. Outside the uber-mainstream, they're likely to be your number 1 targets for something like SoC.

IndieGameMag and DIYGamer are relatively low key but might be worth a looksy all the same. I'll happily write some stuff about it for Retro Remakes now I've kicked that up a notch again and getting some copies off to Eurogamer, Hookshot Inc (if it's going to sell for under $15) and hitting up the mainstream too isn't that much of a bad idea. No need to just keep yourself limited to specialist press, right?

Promoter: http://www.madebypixelate.com/blog/600- ... y-platform will help somewhat and save you the effort of googling. Also, the web app is lovely.

Also yeah, definitely get a shorter video out there too. A minute, a minute and a half tops just showing off the game at its best. People will skip past 9 minutes of an unknown quantity so get something they can eat a biscuit too or something.

Aaand it's esoteric enough that it might be worth punting it out to some awards or festivals. Every little bit helps.

Generally, push it. It's a bit of a grind and might need a bit of badgering people en route to get featured but once you've got that press, resubmit.

[Stuart B]

It might also be worth trying to get it on something like Totalbiscuit's WTF Is... series - TB has a considerable audience and likes to showcase indie stuff in that series.

[Iain]

A couple of questions:
Do I need a company name?. I have just used my own name before, but all other indies seem to have a company name these days. And if I do, should it just be 'Spheres of Chaos games', to leverage (I hate that marketspeak word btw) my established brand?.
What sort of limitation should the demo have?. I used limited levels last time, which is easy to do and easy to protect. But I see 1-hour time limit seems to be the favoured option these days, which is harder to protect because you have to store the time somewhere.
p.s. thanks for the promoterapp suggestion oddbob0, I signed up for that.

[super charlie]

I don't use a company name, i can't see that it's done me too much harm.

It'd be much easier to limit levels rather than impose a time limit for the reason you state. Just pick some levels the show the game off best, they don't have to be in the order they'd appear in the game.

Who's favouring time limits?

Cheers
Charlie

[oddbob0]

I thought that was only casual portals?

[super charlie]

I thought that was only casual portals?

Well, that's what i thought too. I haven't played many demos lately though...

Cheers
Charlie

[Iain]

I thought that was only casual portals?

Maybe it is, I was just googling around and 'the portals have done a lot of testing and settled on 60 minute time limit' is an opinion I saw more than once. They could well have been talking about casual of course and I wan't paying attention enough.
I seem to have largely missed the rise of the portal and the complete change in the indie in recent years, stuff I am learning about in a hurry now. The game I play the most is Robotron (with hacked joypad code) so I'm not exactly 'with it'.

[oddbob0]

I'd stick with your original plan of just making the best demo you can out of a collection of levels and hold back options/whatever as required.

You can pretty much ignore any advice about the portals, they're redundant unless you're making a hidden object game or something and the advice is remarkably specific to the kinds of games they sell. A good demo is one that fits the game rather than attempting the one-size fits all that portals use/abuse*.

The Waves demo is just one stage and as far as I know, that's served Rob fine so I can't imagine SoC being too different. Let's face it, folks will pretty much know if it's for them in minutes, the rest is faff time to let them play so an hour is probably waaay pushing it.

*Your sales heirarchy would probably be roughly Steam >> Direct >> Anywhere else (where anywhere else is a massive drop off but usual nothing guaranteed, expect fluctuation and bollocks disclaimers) so it's worth building what works for *you* anyway. You can always fuck around and A/B to see if one demo converts more than the other anyway by shifting some levels/options around if you really wanted to.

[noodles]

No luck trying the Humble Bundle route ?

[RiK]

No luck trying the Humble Bundle route ?

You really need to be cross-platform for the Humble Bundles

[teamonkey]

Gabe says he's going to try to make Steam more open to Indies.

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editoria ... ther-w/all

[Iain]

Well I finally published it, yours for $4.99, or approx £3.15+vat.
Grrrrr vat, I'm not vat registered and should not have to charge it at all, but fastspring only has 'we handle vat' or 'you handle vat if you give us your vat registration', there's no 'don't charge vat at all' option.
I sold 6 copies already, with no publicity at all, time to do some of that now...

[disciple]

You'll have to publicise better than that. Where can I buy it from?!

[Iain]

You'll have to publicise better than that. Where can I buy it from?!

Not steam, ho ho ho!
www.spheresofchaos.com