Re: Audio wizards has been released, and it’s awesome
To go back a little more specifically to your question, why don't we have more complex games ?
Here some thoughts about the last comments (and we are going a bit out of topic, but before other players give their opinion, I give mine which is the one of a small developer trying to make a good action for once in his life)
According to some statements, 20 million blind and visually impaired have a mobile phone, and only in this website about 150 000 lovers of audiogames have created an account. Similar amount is in AppleVis I suppose. But for some reason, audiogames don't sell enough. Was it because games were bad, they didn't invest on marketing, or target market didn't want to spend money on them? Everybody talks still about Papa Sangre and others classics, but the common point of all those games is that the companies behind them closed their doors because they never got their investment back. And that is one of the reasons why you don't get more complex games. We developers don't last enough time to grow, evolve, and create the games that you all want (and everybody seems to have a different opinion about how a perfect game has to be).
In my case, or myTrueSound's, we published now AudioWizards, and we are trying to get MusicMaze by December. We would like also to start with the AudioWizards multiplayer. But you know what? To get the investment back, just to cover the expenses of the salaries of the developers and marketing people (not mine because I'm super cheap and I have put my heart on this), the office rent (we have a small room), etc, we need to reach in the order of 10000 copies. Yes, ten thousand, because after the 40 % that Apple Store and other taxes get from us, we will get 30000 €, and that is the minimum amount of money that will cost us to keep a team of 5 working for a period of 6 months, and that is the minimum time you need to invest to create the beginning of one of those cool games that everybody wants and many become very critic if they don't get.
In order to fulfill this dream, I have been also pitching to investors, asking them to support us and also the blind community, so we could create fantastic games which will sell like a lot. And do you know what they said to us? They said "Show us the numbers". So if we are not able to reach our goals on selling numbers, and show those numbers to them, we won't either got their support neither. And then we might be one, like many others, that just didn't do it, but everybody remembers (or not) because did a couple of cool games that people talked about for just few days or years.
So I would say, that if you want that there is a real jump in audiogames' quality and variety, there has to be a change in the way the community supports the industry. If you liked one game, support that developer, not just for gratitude, but to get from them better games in the future. Because that indie developer perhaps has energy and ideas to make things cooler and better, but will die out of resources before has the chance to move forward. Call your friends, to all of them, tell them how much you liked that game you just played, how cool was the story, the sounds, whatever made you feel happy for some hours. Share it with the world, not just in here, but in blogs, reviews, youtube, facebook, twitter, etc. If there is a market, show it to the world, and other developers will come too, I almost can promise you that.
I really think that this is the only way that developers like us can do it. That if we make a game that is liked by 85 % of the players, those players take care of spreading the voice and make the mouth-to-mouth really to happen. Otherwise, it could be also Game Over for us, and so the next developer starts again from zero.
Somehow I didn't want to talk about this topic, since we are however enjoying these days the small but nice success we got from AudioWizards. But this is a topic that believe me is on my mind everyday, and I just don't know how to solve it by my own. If somebody wants to talk about this, I think the case is of enough interest to start a new topic in another room. Cheers to everyone!
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