Re: myTrueSound feedback and some comments related to audiogaming
Okay, just waying in here.
Firstly, I confess I am a little sorry music maze is abandoned since two of the people who worked on the game were myself and Mrs. Dark, we spent several hours modifying the script and smoothing typos and grammar before Mrs. Dark recorded all of the lines, ---- I was voicing the menu, she was going to be the in game announcer and was quite looking forward to being a little elf like creature .
that being said, the gameplay sounded in some ways similar to audio wizards so I understand the decision.
As far as the financial angle goes, myself I'm afraid I don't think the lack of sales is due to either lack of promotion, unfair pricing or of piracy, it's the old problem we have with audiogames.
%0.3 of the population, or roughly one in thirty thousand people are legally blind. of that one in thirty thousand %90 are over the age of sixty five, and thus unlikely to play computer games, aside from the fact that even among those who do, many are on lower incomes anyway as has been said.
Unfortunately, the customer base is just not large enough to promote serious financial investment. We've seen it time and time and time again.
Those people who develop accessible games therefore, either are producing games which also have a wide audience among sighted people, EG text based games, or develop audiogames alongside working on other software, or they are hobby developers for whom the financial side of development is more to recoop costs and provide a little extra, than a total income.
There is of course a growing audience (in this case literally), of sighted people listening to audio dramas, and I believe some groups like earplay and the developers of games for Alexa have tapped into that market, but in terms of actually supporting a developer financially full time, I don't think we're quite there yet.
Of course what might happen in 10 years or so as the Atari generation grow older and more of them start to lose their sight, we'll see.
So, I would suggest myself, either working on other none audiogame projects to pay the rent in addition to audiogame development, or developing projects with a specific appeal to sighted gamers, and perhaps an in built access component as well, such as goodwolf studios did with the code 7 series.
As far as the Steam debate goes, I'd say at the moment Steam is usable, not accessible, that is it's possible to run things on, but not as easily as a sighted person can , and this is only likely to improve accidently since Valve's attitude to accessibility (or lack there of), is pretty terrible, stil Steam also has the distinct benefit that games would be far more available to the sighted public (A blind legend did fairly well on Steam I believe).
I'd certainly not be against buying games on Steam myself now I've got the damn thing running, but if the games were available on another platform, I'd probably choose that first to save on the inconvenience.
Both Mrs. Dark and I will be available for voice acting, and I would be quite happy to contribute writing wise to any future projects, indeed I'm already working on a sequel to my audio wizards story, since I got rather fond of the characters in that one.
Good luck, I'll be looking forward to seeing what happens in the future.
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