Very well said. I agree with everything you said below.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Feir" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 4:00 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] To the developers of Montezuma's Revenge
In my judgement, Tom has found the most fair approach in this tricky
situation. It all started out because he wanted to save those of us who
had waited ages for James North to finish Raceway and Montezuma's Revenge
from the crushing disappointment we faced when he decided to pack it in.
That attempted good deed has brought him no end of grief since. Everyone
has had to compromise somewhat. We, the customers, won't be getting
precisely what we originally paid for. However, Tom is going to give us a
new and improved platformer so we'll at long last end up with a good one
of those which is fully accessible. I've long felt that this genre would
be spectacularly suited to blind people and be helpful to people just
getting used to computer games as opposed to a fully 3d adventure. I'm
profoundly grateful to Tom for deciding to do this. It wasn't an easy
decision for him to reach and I know he has his own dreams he'd rather be
working on. Although he has a lot of creative latitude now, I believe he
would rather work on fully 3d games. Ultimately, I believe we'll end up
with a spectacular platformer as long as we give Tom the patience and good
will that he needs and deserves.
Due to this whole episode, I don't believe we'll see any developer put a
game up for pre-ordering again. Too much distrust and damage was done to
the whole concept for it to work in this gaming community. It can work for
the sighted gaming world because the companies producing their games have
the financial backing to handle things if projects go bad on them. For us,
we're just too much at the mercy of the personal life circumstances of our
developers. That's a sad thing because it could have helped established
developers finance better assets such as sound effects and music to put in
to their final products. I've just begun working on an accessible game
which I believe will take me something like four years to create. I'm
engaged to be married in around a year's time to a wonderful woman I've
had the good fortune to find. Anticipating tougher economics after we're
married, I decided to purchase royalty-free music while I still have my
own source of income. That way, she's not going to have to sink any of her
income into what is essentially my dream. In total, I've spent a little
under $400 on the music. During my last attempt to create a game, I spent
around the same on the SFX kit from Sound Ideas. That has around 20000
sounds I can legally use. Altogether then, I've spent around $800 on my
dream of creating an accessible game. It helps a lot that I'm currently
single and don't have other financial responsabilities. Most developers
aren't in my somewhat unique circumstances. Unless I ultimately succeed in
creating the game, I'll never see a dime of that investment.
What happened to Tom was a stroke of tremendous bad fortune which has had
repercussions for everyone connected with accessible games. I believe that
it has lowered the sense of trust and solidarity in the community as a
whole. It has put everyone more on a business footing but somewhat reduced
the overall feeling of community developers could once have enjoyed. This
is ultimately a good thing as we'll see a lot less hopes being dashed due
to developer burn-out in the future. However, new developers may find
enthusiasm for their ideas somewhat more lacking. Less attempts at
creation mean less successes as well as less failures. This community
can't afford to lose any more game developers for any reason. Games take
too long to create and we don't have that many who are known to be working
on new games. That's also a sad part of the fallout from this whole
episode. Developers are likely to be a lot more careful about what
information they release than they were before all this happened. This
means less information for Audyssey issues and less community discussion
of fresh ideas that are actually being worked on. Dry spells will seem a
whole lot longer due to this.
As members of this community, we likely don't have the ability to
financially support new game developers other than to purchase their games
once created. However, there's a whole lot that we can do to support
developers who we already know about and encourage new people to take a
crack at making accessible games. We can be patient and offer moral
support while a developer works on a project. An encouraging email can
count for a whole lot when you're slogging through the long dull aspects
of creating your masterpiece. It makes such a nice change from "When's the
game going to be ready?" When we see evidence that people are pirating
games, we should take that evidence to the developer so they can take
countermeasures. We can also be ambassadors to people about accessible
games and help spread word about the games which are out there. Over the
past while, I believe I've noticed a number of new members. That's a good
indication that we're at last moving forward as a community. We also have
at least one new developer working on a project that I know I'm going to
love. A sound-based rpg is certainly going to go down my gullet nicely.
It's Thanksgiving Day here in Canada. A very appropriate time to say a
public "thank you" to Tom and all other developers who are working away.
Games are a very powerful art form and you bring that splendidly to a
group of people who otherwise would once again be stuck on the sidelines.
I salute you all and hope one day to add my contribution to your own.
---
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