Be careful if you want to release your game on GoG

Hi,

I was about to release my game on Steam so I put a launch date on it.

Afeterwards GoG, to whom I had sent a request a couple of weeks before, contacted me asking when I was planning to release it because they did not want to miss that.

GoG represents exactly the way I see games. Therefore I was so proud that they could be interested in my game. As a dungeon crawler it is exactly in their range.

So I told them, the release date was planned for 4 days later but that I would delay it if I had any chance to work with them.

They told me that they were gonna test the game more sooner than later.

Good!

Then comes the wait...

1 week...

10 Days...

My concurrents began to show their cards announcing the release of their games.

I won't hide you that I spent all this time waiting eagerly for an answer from GoG.

So I sent them another mail asking if they were able to go further on the subject?

And then came the wait again ...

After 3 days I decided to release my game without them.

And then I was able to sleep again...

Today it has been 2 weeks since I asked them for a status and they still didn't give any answer.

I know I am no one, it is my first game, I don t have any portfolio, but I deserve a little respect anyway.

A quick answer saying they don't have the time, I don't know, anything...

I worked 4 years on this game, including 2 years in full time, I delayed my release date for them and they don't even dare answer a status request, about the work they told me they were supposedly doing.

Their email is welovedevs@..., and they claim everywhere that they support Indies, in my case they did not love me so much.

So, if you want to work with them, at least know that what they try to show is not exactly the way they do things.

I think that would avoid some disappointments.

 

That sucks. It would have been good of them to give you some kind of concrete estimate when they responded to you, since "more sooner than later" isn't exactly information you can plan with. That said, I also understand that with the volume of communications they might have literally not had a chance to get back to you since then.

For what it's worth, speaking professionally a 4 day turnaround isn't something that's ever going to happen if they're going to do proper QA, which is what you want on a curated platform. Even with Apple you're going to expect at least a full week (though sometimes you do get lucky, you can't count on it).

To do this kind of thing properly you want to have long lead times and be talking with distributors months out from your planned release.

 

Not a good experience, thanks for sharing.

Will keep in mind what to expect from gog.

 

Do you have a link you can provide to your game on steam?

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/492500

 

Hey, that looks rad!

 

Hey guys, to keep you posted I started the same conversation on reddit and there developpers are saying that GoG always take a lot of time to answer.
They are a small team and they want to do everything by themselves.
In my case it s just too bad that it was during the release.
So maybe what we have to remember is not that they don t respect developpers, maybe they will answer one day or another, but for them sooner than later is not in the same range as us.
If we know it from the beginning we should avoid this kind of disillusion

 

Just remember to learn from this. If you want to release on Gog, either email them a couple months before release and work out a solid schedule for completition to release. So they can test near complete version of the game, to gain their confidence in your product.

Or

the other more frustrating route is knowledge that if you complete a game and email them, it maybe 1-2 months before you get a reply.

At least you got interest, i just got a rejection from them....unsurprisingly. Not really there type of game.

Good luck in the future.

PS: Nice looking game. Well done.

 

A friend of mine told me on at least two occasions how frustrated he was that games he was playing on GoG didn't receive updates as soon as the steam version, or not at all because apparently it was too much of a hassle for the dev.

Is being on GoG even worth it sales-wise? I'd imagine if you release on steam and GoG at the same time, the bigger portion of GoG sales would have been steam sales without the GoG release.

 

It had a big impact on Reddit and they answered to me :
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/54khiq/be_careful_if_you_want_to_release_your_game_on_gog/

Maybe all that story will make them take care a little bit better of us, because other developpers complained about their attitude too.

I hope so, because for sure my family and the seven generations that follows won't be in good terms with GoG ;-)

 

Yes, depending on the audience you're targeting, there are sales you may be missing on because the game wasn't available on a DRM-free platform like GOG. I know the sub-reddit for Obduction (the latest game from the company that made Myst) had a good number of people asking if there would be a copy available without DRM.

 

Do you have actual numbers though? Even if 1000 people speak out for a gog release or else they wouldn't buy it, that doesn't necessarily translate to 1000 sales when they actually release on gog. They might have caved in to steam in the meantime, or only argued out of principle, or no longer care about the game, or wait for a sale, etc..

 

For a game that hasn't been released yet? For the audience the game will be targeting? No, I don't have actual numbers but I do know that Cyan has a very solid fanbase and that most of their titles have a DRM-free copy available. Plus it isn't like GOG is going to turn down a title of that quality.

For a game like that OP has created I'm doubtful it would benefit from GOG. I know I wouldn't hold my release back waiting for a response from them but that's also partially because there are no guarantees you'll be able to get onto GOG. They are very picky about the titles they accept unlike most stores.

 

Maybe there is no setup that would reliably prove whether GoG sales only cannibalize other sales or how big a share of them wouldn't have happened without the game being on GoG.

I'm a bit in a hurry but this looks interesting:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186940/defenders_quest_by_the_numbers_.php

 

I knew a guy that refused to buy drm games. He'd willingly pay for them on drm-free platforms (gog was his favourite) but if the company didn't release a drm-free copy then he would find a pirated copy.

 

Looks cool. I started to click buy but saw it was Windows only. Any plans for macOS or Linux?

 

Unity can export easily to these platforms but I 'd like to test it personnaly, to be sure the experience is Ok.
And right now I don't have these :-(
Maybe I could rent a mac... I should try to see if it is possible!!
I add it to my ToDoList

 

@fairtree: You could always buy a cheap USB flash drive and install Ubuntu to it. That'd cover Linux pretty easily.

 

This looks like an excellent game. Seems like you and @SteveJ should consider teaming up to make larger games. I mean the games are fine to me but I noticed one person on Steam complaining about $8 being too high for the amount of game (apparently 5 to 6 hours of gameplay on average). People are very spoiled these days. I wonder if they complain about spending $8 or more to watch a 2 hour movie? lol

Good luck!

 

If they have netflix there's a good chance that they no longer buy dvds or go to movies.

Edit: for quite a few people "hours per $" is actually the way they rate the value they got out of a game. Could be one reason why games got so grindy.

 

That would be an idea!!!
But I guess Steve, like me, must be a solo developer. Anyway his new product looks ten times better than his previous one, I hope him a lot of success.
The review you talk was the second one I received, after a first one wrote by a competitor one hour after the launch, with the aim to kill the game.
I did not sleep a lot this week-end, and did not feel so good ;-)
Fortunately other people came by and began to say they liked it and that they found the price honest.
So the community is not only a bunch of assholes, the major part are normal people, it is just that these assholes talk louder ;-)

 

IIn that case they should avoid online game stores and stick with videogame rental services such as Game Fly (or whatever the popular rental service is these days).

That could very well be it. Devs got tired of people complaining "I only got 5 to 10 hours of entertainment on my first playthrough and it cost $10. Way overpriced!"

I could see that. If it was a tiny minority like seems to be the case for this game then I'd ignore it but if 50% or more people were griping about game length then I'd do the same. Add periods of grinding to fill in some extra time. Because whatever price I charged initially was what it should be for what it was at that time. Might even charge $1 more after adding the grinding due to extra development time.

 

Then charge dlc to unlock/remove the grindy bits so that it is a more streamlined game I.e. What you originally intended it to be. People are used to paying extra to get a benefit so that they are more powerful etc which in turn means they finish the game quicker. So, people complain if they buy a game & it finished to quickly for what they think is good value but they will willingly pay extra above the base game price so that they get stuff to help them finish a game quicker.

 

As a gamer I want to own my games. Rentals aren't an option. For music and movies I don't care and streaming is fine. I tried the Playstation Now thing or whatever it was called, for a while on PS3. And while the value was ok, it ended up really bothering me that I either stay locked in to keep paying for eternity or lose access to all those games. I quit my subscription and ended up buying at least two of those games again on steam. And I'm subscribed to humble monthly now where I get about half a dozen games each month for 12$ (to keep, not rented), of which usually 1-3 were on my steam wishlist already. Quite a few good ones I owned already, so I can't complain about their choices really. It's just weird that if you want to maximize the value you get out of such a service, you should stop buying games elsewhere to minimize that redundance in owned games. I can't keep up with playing through those games anyway.

 

The problem with this outlook is that it ignores the value of time. It treats it as something that should be used up rather than something that should be used effectively.

The experience is what matters, not the hours. If someone can fit the same experience in a shorter period of time then I personally think they should. The quality matters to me far more than the duration, and stretching things out to fill more time just means you're diluting it without adding to it.

Besides, assuming there's quality there then $8 for 5 hours is pretty good! It's a far better ratio than the $50 for 10 hours that a lot of big budget titles give you. Even at 30 hours a "full-priced" game is giving you less value if measured in $-per-hour.

I think that The Witcher 3 is possibly my best value ever. Not only is the game excellent, it's also really long (I would estimate I got 100 hours, and there's still quite a bit more), and I think I paid about $35 for it (and that's Aussie dollars, too). There's no way I'd have played that much of it if it wasn't as highly entertaining, though. If a game feels "grindy" I play something else, because I don't like my time being wasted.

 

The OP hits to the crux of the market at the moment. There just isn't enough time and resources to fully curate a large storefront. So you get something like steam with huge amounts of poor quality community curated content. Or you get GOG that doesn't have the time to check many games and gets new content slowly, if at all.

 

That's what I figured. I know there is a lot of craziness going on in the world (killer clown panic seems to be the latest madness) but would hope the majority of people are not so unreasonable as to think $8 is too much to spend on a good game. I guess it is probably the huge amount of games out there that is causing these people to place such little value on games. Yet they probably spend more than $8 buying coffees and other stuff that is just "gone for good" and think nothing of it.

 

You've hit on the reason I am increasingly thinking a game like this is ideal for a solo Indie developer:

Caves of Qud (already sold over 18,000 copies in Early Access and has Very Positive ratings)

I had already scaled presentation goals down to the "Atari 2600 to early 80s arcade games" level but I'm thinking that might still be too big of a presentation scope. By scaling down further to the Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress presentation level I could focus almost exclusively on just the game and that should help a lot to build a quality gameplay experience that lasts longer (than if I had not scaled presentation down).

 

Is the stuff on Steam really of low quality overall? I admit that a huge amount of it doesn't interest me, and I know there certainly are things that look terrible that make it through, but on the whole is it really that bad? Or are our expectations jacked up significantly because we're now so spoiled for choice?

To me the main issue is that it's really easy for much of the stuff that doesn't personally interest me to look "samey". For people interested in that stuff it probably doesn't, because they'll notice important details I'll miss. I see a huge difference between Battlefield and Call of Duty, but I definitely understand the point of view of people who just see "military shooting game" and consider them to be identical, and I kind of suspect that's equivalent to how I see a million pixel art platformers as all being pretty much the same - it's quite possible that they're not, and that I just don't know enough about them to see the difference.

 

Wow. They've successfully overtaken Ancient Domains of Mystery now by about a thousand. For a while they were almost identical in number. Is it sufficient income for a single developer though? Roguelikes often take years of development to reach the point that these two have achieved and Caves of Qud doesn't have all its content finished yet.

 

That's a good question and honestly I am not sure. I just find that designing and programming is so much faster (for me at least) than working on presentation stuff. Just designing & building systems and having them work together.

I hadn't seen this particular game before. Thanks for sharing the video! Seeing these (good!) games the past few years with such minimal focus on presentation being very well received is inspiring to me. I like how this ADOM game is using static images for the player & character yet the developer used programming (I'd guess) to give the movement a little bounce effect. Great stuff.

These kind of games I think will always be a niche market but that is fine. The market will likely grow slowly over time.

They remind me of this from long ago

 

Nice suggestion. May also consider giving someone who has a linux machine a free copy to test.
@Ryiah can you point to guide for this process, specifically for testing, for a person not 100% down with linux and operating system installs.
My 'friend' is in need of this info.

 

Basically you follow the installation guide for Ubuntu but choose your USB flash drive as the target.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/install-ubuntu-desktop

If you want to just start using Ubuntu without going through the hoops you can also buy a premade flash drive off eBay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ubuntu-Linu...nt-/172298668112?_trksid=p2141725.m3641.l6368

 

I honestly don't know. Plenty of people seem to be complaining about it. But it's mostly here, so it might just be developers who complain. I tend not to actually browse the steam store. I mostly just buy games from steam I've heard about elsewhere.

 

Years back, installing any linux distro seemed like an insurmountable task for the uninitiated. Nowadays it's pretty much click 'next' until done, so find a distro (ubuntu is an easy start) and read their installation guides.

 

For many people it is exactly that though. I think for us it's easy to forget what "boredom" is, since we can just throw 500 hours at our hobby like it's nothing. There are people that have a job, but no family and no time consuming hobbies besides gaming, that basically "need" to get a big amount of time out of their games.

Most people are terrible at math. Also biases created from the price itself might play a factor. The 50$ game is always something "new and shiny", while the same game 2 years later for 10$ might be perceived a lot less valuable because 2 years worth of games have come after it and no one is talking about it anymore. If anything was innovative about it at release, chances are you've seen that thing rehashed in other games after it. The "novelty" value of older games is worse if you stay up to date on games.

I do agree with all you are saying though. There also are a lot of people who have very limited gaming time and measure only by quality of time spent and not the amount. If I only had half an hour of gaming a day I'd want all of it to be the quality of e.g. The Last Of Us. The story DLC of it had rather poor hour/$ performance but it was really good and therefore worth the price to me.

I feel like in most genres that interest me there actually aren't enough excellent games. E.g. bleak first person singleplayer open world zombie survival games, which sounds like the blandest, most generic genre ever, and has critics instantly rolling their eyeballs, but I can only think of 3 great games there: Dead Island, Dead Island: Riptide and Dying Light (and all of those still are heavily flawed). But there are well over a dozen games that try to be like them and fail, or aren't finished yet.

It might be a good idea since ASCII graphics will be a barrier to a lot of people that you probably don't want to buy your game in the first place. Maybe check the review scores of a bigger number of those games to confirm, but my impression was that they are usually well received.

It's the huge amount of games and the sales prices. Recently a friend considered buying a game on sale but concluded 4$ is still too much given the high chance of him losing interest after 1 hour of playing. Since I played a demo of that game a while back I'd actually tend to agree.
Buying Starbucks Coffee seems pretty unreasonable to me too though, but I don't even like how it tastes.

If I recall correctly GoG is on record saying that they don't want to do the steam-style sales because they think it devalues games in the minds of people and is bad for the market, but now they do it too, probably because a 15 year old game (that you might already own on a disc) for 10$, seems crazy expensive compared to a 5 year old AAA game for 5$ on steam. So they might have been forced to adopt the same strategy by the consumers who adjusted their expectations to steam sale prices. And since the sales are frequent enough to just wait for a sale for most games that interest you, steam sale prices are effectively the baseline price of games you would compare other games to, for many people. For games like COD where you can't wait so long because the multiplayer userbase will be a lot smaller a year later when the next one comes out, exceptions will be made and the bias that someone just paid 5 to 10 times the price they usually spend on a game, might factor into their reception and expectations of the product.

The whole topic reminds me of this:

 

I think you are right in that a game with ASCII graphics immediately weeds out those that would post negative reviews as they wouldn't even think of downloading it. A friend recently brought this one to my attention, I think I might check it out and it is on Steam for $13.37

http://kotaku.com/the-hacking-mmo-where-cyber-heists-are-encouraged-1787136864

 

That sounds cool. I like these kind of ultra low and no graphics games. The game in some ways takes place much more in our minds than anywhere else. While I think that's true of all games to a degree I always think this drive for uber presentation loses something. And I think that something is using our imaginations to fill in the blanks.

Anyway thanks for sharing this!

 

in my case it has been 1,5 month- or 6 weeks no reply after they say that they're interested in releasing the game and after I sent them to test. Maybe it has been throughout new year and takes even longer.

 

Time is a very subjective thing. To me spending a few weeks on nothing but graphics would be a crazy long time. For many of the people here it would be completely reasonable and even a tiny amount of time. You spent 4 years making the game and yet for you waiting for a few months for GoG to move forward is unreasonable. Yet they are likely busy dealing with MANY different games and game devs.

When dealing with other people you have to respect their time. They told you they'd get back to you and I am sure they will at some point. All you can do is decide to wait (perhaps improve your game even more?), create a marketing plan to help drive people to GoG, Steam etc so you're ready when your game is released. OR decide to move on without them... forget about them.

Impatience when dealing with others usually / never works out to your advantage. And here is a perfect example where it will bite you in the ass for something far more important than games... if ever find yourself in the unpleasant situation of your girlfriend or wife leaving you saying she "needs time, space for a while"... please remember this... don't bug the hell out of her asking for a timeframe for her return. Just keep busy and improve yourself and give her time. Every person deserves time. GoG or otherwise.

 

+1

You can sometimes get a game very quickly in GoG.
For you it's a lack of luck, or too much impatience, forget it and work on your next game instead, a response will come some day.

 

Id just stick with steam

 

Steam isn't an option if you want to release a DRM free version of your game.

 

Op do you mind sharing how much money you made with this game on steam?