Indie godfather Cliff Harris
One-man studio Positech on how to build the indie Steam, fear of App Stores and why Minecraft threatens big devs
The only thing that keeps me awake at night worrying about it is that, if say the Apple App Store on Mac does very well, if Apple can then get away with saying for the next version of the OS that "there's too much malware out there and dodginess, so from now on you can only install stuff that comes from our App Store"... That would of course have massive, cataclysmic whining from everybody, but I can imagine there's an accountant somewhere saying "we can eat that amount of unpopularity in exchange for 30 per cent of the global app market." If that works on Apple, then Microsoft would be interested for PC. That's the only thing that I think could really be a nightmare - if Windows 9 or whatever required you to sell through the Microsoft store.
I doubt that could ever happen because of Steam... unless they did a deal with Steam. I'd probably just grin and bear it, just sell through third parties, because I love what I do so much, but I think it would be really bad. You wouldn't then get your Minecraft and your Dwarf Fortress and your little sort of hobby projects that then become huge. That's what makes the PC so good. Nobody would ever go to Sony or Microsoft and say "Dwarf Fortress, hey?" I hope they [Apple and Microsoft] are sensible enough to not go down that route.
The other thing that could happen is price pressure, that all games have to be free and monetised on the back end. I was having an argument with someone last night who thinks that will definitely happen, but I don't think it will. I think this is a bit of a short-lived thing - I'm probably going to look like an idiot for this. The idea that everybody wants everything for free, and every game should be free forever, it works now but in 20 years time I think people will think it's ridiculous because we all know they're not free, really. 'Free to play level 1': people will wise up to that to some extent.
Even though most people find it quite depressing, this "free is going to take over and everything's going to be microtransactions", what I like is that then they release another Call of Duty of Warcraft expansion and it just completely flattens all other numbers. Actually, if you make a really good or at least well-polished game, put it in a box and sell it to people for £40, you still make a billion dollars. It's going to take a long time for that to turn around.
Yes, but the important thing is that people don't think it's weird to pay for a game in that old style of paying up front and getting a piece of software in exchange. I think that keeps it viable in people's minds.
I was hardly involved. I used to be a Mac engineer actually, which makes it amusing that a) I don't own a Mac and b) I don't do my own Mac ports. Simply because I'm insanely busy and I don't want to have to do tech support for Mac as much as anything else, so I got a third-party company that translates all my stuff to Mac to handle putting it on the App Store for me. I've been blissfully ignorant.
It's done very well, actually. I think it was the number five grossing game on there, or something like that. Though I can't even look at where it is in the charts because I don't have a Mac! Occasionally I just get an email saying it's sold however many thousand copies. I don't think that it's such a big deal, really - Steam is already selling Mac stuff, Apple was selling stuff anyway and then there's all these other places where you can get stuff. I don't think there was this huge group of people who weren't going to buy online until they had this official 'App Store.'
The experience I did have of it was, because GSB had this online challenge system, they wouldn't allow that. So that part of the game is missing if you buy it from the App Store - so it's a bit cheaper because of that. Which is a bit unfortunate, and one of the things I don't like about it, dictating how the game would work. I can understand why they do it, but I'm slightly wary of it because some people are buying it that way and thinking it's the same version. Hopefully that won't be a negative thing.