Semi Secret's Adam Saltsman

Yeah, for sure. It's a very simple problem. If you're not thinking about money and all you're trying to do is make a thing to go on the internet or answer some questions that you have about game design, all you're thinking about is trying that idea, and trying anything that might make it work. If you're thinking about something that you're maybe going to sell, every time you come to some kind of fork in the road - and in game design there are a lot of forks, all the time - you end up having this question you have to ask. If you're being responsible and a diligent businessperson, you have to think how each decision will affect the commercial viability as well as the design.

That's the natural, responsible thing to do if your goal is to make a commercially viable game. If that's how you approach it you're asking all of a sudden a question that doesn't have a lot to do with making the right design right now. It's also usually based on something made up - there are very, very few people who really know what people want to buy. I think Minecraft is probably a reasonable testimony to that. I don't think there's many people sitting around going 'Y'know, we could make a super lo-fi game about cubes and digging and it will be a bigger success than the top-selling iPhone games of the year.'

They may, but I'm not sure if they understand it. It's so far outside of their normal engagement with games. There are just very few big companies out there who have a framework for approaching and developing and marketing a low level of visual polish, sandbox kind of game. It's happened before, with Fantastic Contraption three or four years ago. It wasn't as big as hit as Minecraft has been, but definitely similar. I don't even know how a company like EA would go about making something like that, they don't do the kind of iterative, exploratory development that would yield that kind of thing.

They may adopt the lo-fi cubes aesthetic, go "whoa, that's a cheap way to put out a game", but it's not representing the same infinite possibilities.

I don't think there's any risk in taking something that's appealing and just adding these extra levels of stuff behind it. You don't have to access it - nobody playing Canabalt has to engage with what might be going on in the background, but if you want to there's some stuff there. I think that seems like a low-risk way of engaging a lot of people.

There's something my artist friend says: there's no ugly colours, there's only ugly combinations. I think that's probably true of most weird, new financial models in any way. There's probably a game out there that makes a ton of sense for microtransactions, but it's a design that does it from the ground up. I don't think that design is 'buy the rocket launcher.' I think FarmVille is a particularly ugly collection of colours... There are so many people playing games, and it's so hard to make a game that's the right size for everybody. I very much enjoy a five hour game or a ten hour game: that's about the maximum that I'm going to put into almost any game at this point. Just because of the constraints of reality.

I would think that, having weird financial models for your game where you're going to take sixty dollars and get the 80 hour MMO version, or you could pay fifteen dollars and get the five or ten hour, all the filler's been cut out version... Or you buy the $15 version and then you pay $5 here, $5 there to buy more filler if that's what you really want. There are people out there who totally want that - they want some crazy, unlockable thing. There's a bunch of data about casual gamers being more willing to do that than hardcore gamers, etcetera etcetera, which is totally legitimate - it just has to be deployed in a useful and interesting way. I don't have a ton of interest in solving that design problem especially. The 'what do we want to make?' circle in our little Venn diagram generally precludes weird financial models for now.

Generally, it's six or eight man months for me and my business partner to put together a game. So we can put out two or three games a year if we're actually being diligent. Hopefully we won't have to make too many predictions like 'oh my God, this next game cannot work the way we've built it' - we have some established channels for notifying people that our new games are out, which helps a lot. But if we get to the point where we put out a game, and we feel really good about it, but it's not sticking, I think we can go 'oh - this isn't working anymore.'

The other thing is, if all the way all the big games are succeeding is following one particular business model, going head to head against them is pretty intimidating too. Our model has been to make something that's pretty successful but doesn't have to go top 10. Which means there's a lot less competition, and so far that's worked out okay. But our first two games did better than our third, so I think it's going to be very much a game of trying things, seeing what works and if free-to-play and ad-supported or microtransaction supported becomes really the standard, then that is something that might affect the 'can we sell this?' circle.