Puppy Dog Tales

I've no idea. I've got a funny feeling someone might just have got cold feet at the higher echelons of Panasonic and said "what's this?" It's probably a good idea that they did, because Sony unleashed their PlayStation phone shortly afterwards, and I thought "that's it then, basically." There's the Nintendo 3DS and the PlayStation phone, and between them that's all everyone's every going to want for gaming if they haven't got an iPhone already. And the NGP. There was suddenly a heap of competition there. If Panasonic had got it out a year ago, they'd have been OK, but they didn't.

So that was canned, and suddenly I was left with no money at all. That would have meant I'd have gone back to contracting, except that Jeffrey turned up with the Humble Indie Bundle, and that did so surprisingly well for us that I thought "great, we'll just carry on." And here we still are, carrying on. I'm full time on this now, although it seems like I'm doing the 90 per cent that nobody ever talks about - crapping around with adverts, and forum support, and interviews. It's all good, it's all important, but you don't realise that being able to code is only about 10 per cent of what you really need.

We've got to get our arses into gear and start making things quicker. If we muck up and don't make a successful game, we're doomed.

We'd still be nowhere without the Humble Indie Bundle or Steam. We've made $45,000 this year so far in direct sales, which is the best we've ever done. Those numbers have been buoyed by traffic bleeding from the Humble Indie Bundle and Steam, which I find a bit strange as in both instances you could buy our game cheaper on the respective thing that they were being launched on, but people would come to us and buy direct anyway. It always seems to happen. The other big thing that happened to us was the RockPaperShotgun.com mention in May, which flattened our servers and immediately made us $10,000 in a couple of days. I spent quite some time after that beefing all the servers up...

Well, I'd really like to, but even with all this money floating around, we've only got enough to live modestly for two years. Revenge of the Titans took three years to make. So first of all we've got to get our arses into gear and start making things quicker. The other thing is that if we muck up and don't make a successful game, we're doomed. We've spent two years and then suddenly we're broke and have to go back to contracting and that's the end of that. It's a really crappy situation to be in, where every project you do could be the last. So we don't want to basically go hiring loads of people then realise that there's no money to pay them after six months. So it's just going to be me and Chas for now.

Yeah, I have two more sales planned. I don't know what their plan is. And sometime in the next year we're going to do an expansion pack thing, with a few more buildings, maybe an extra game mode, just for a little blip and maybe do a little deal on that. Then no doubt something around Christmas, whether it's 75 per cent off or some other crazy promotion that Steam occasionally does. They're likely to bring in a fairly tidy sum, so I have a feeling that by the time 12 months has elapsed we'll probably have brought in a quarter of a million dollars off Steam.

The graph is quite amazing to look at. It's just a huge peak at the start - literally massive. Then there's a series of five or six peaks getting smaller, then suddenly it's just dwindling along as if it's been forgotten about. However, even though it's been completely forgotten about, it still made $1500 yesterday. Barely worth getting out of bed for! [Laughs]

As I understand it, the revenues we made in our first week were particularly impressive for an indie title.

The Mac has actually gone a bit strange. When we started out with our cross-platform strategy, maybe seven or eight years ago, the Mac was making maybe 50 per cent of our sales. In fact, when we released Titan Attacks we made more money on the Mac than on the PC - surprising given the relative percentages of Macs out there. Nowadays we're seeing more of a realistic split, less than 10 per cent of our revenues come from Mac and it's dwindling and dwindling and dwindling. I have a suspicion this is to do with Steve Jobs' App Store policies. We're no longer featured on the Mac's software store that they used to have, a page that used to say 'download stuff from here' with links. Now, of course, they're promoting the Mac App Store, so that's been deprecated. They won't accept our games on the Mac App Store because they're written in Java. It's crazy, isn't it? I can't quite see the logic in that.

No, we're slightly boned in that respect. There is no path away from Java once you're in it that's easy. There are a few tools that do stuff, but they're either expensive or incomplete, and I don't think it's worth it for us. We can still sell stuff for the Mac, and we're about to find out what the Mac Steam numbers [for Titans] are in fact. That'll give us some direct comparisons for what amounts to completely separate Mac launch, as it's a month later than on PC. So all the buzz from the PC version will have died away and we'll be able to see just how good it is. I think the Mac Steam is taking over where Apple have screwed up.