Probably not. A couple weeks ago I wrote about the “prologue” trend of putting up a free “demo” version of a game and then having a full version available for sale. Last week the developers of WarriOrb released a game that had a prologue. And it didn’t do as well Continue Reading

Hey I hope you are staying healthy and taking the proper self-care. I know I have been feeling really anxious not just because of the pandemic but also because of my own work. I know I am not as productive as I was pre-pandemic. Part of it comes to the Continue Reading

Not sure if you know, but I have a Discord server. I have been so excited to see people asking really good questions and posting really good answers over there. If you are not over there yet, come on in. Here is a link to my Discord. Side note, this Continue Reading

In my steam research, I saw over and over how important an interesting capsule image was. A good one was a mouse magnet. The participants I observed couldn’t help but hover over some capsules so that the tooltip appeared with the screenshots and tags. This was the first step in Continue Reading

Hi, both of my GDC talks got posted to youtube last week. Here they are What to Write So People Buy: Selling Your Game Without Feeling Sleazy Empathizing with Steam: How People Shop for Your Game One of my favorite parts of the research I presented were the quotes from Continue Reading

One night when I was 12 my dad came home from work and handed me a 3 ¼ inch floppy disk that had a the words “Wolf 3D” scrawled across it in red ball point pen. He said a colleague gave it to him because he thought I would like Continue Reading

Alright, so last week my talks went live on virtual GDC. If you didn’t get a chance to catch them DON’T worry! They will be going up eventually on the GDC youtube channel. Just hang tight.  The weird thing about doing this is I spent dozens of hours on these Continue Reading

Expert guest post Today I am super excited to have Richie de Wit take over my blog to give you a personal demo of his new Steam game estimation tool. It is really neat and I think it is vital to do this no matter what stage you are in. Continue Reading

Did you see SXSW in Austin was canceled? This follows the cancellation of in-person GDC. I know nothing about contagions or epidemiology but it seems good that people are taking this seriously. Many indies go to these shows to show off their games. There are several reasons they buy a Continue Reading

User feedback for your game is one of the most important things you can do to determine if your game is fun or not. Note that user testing is not the same as running a focus group on your game to squeeze out the last ounce of your indie personality. No! Continue Reading