The storefront conundrum

This is an edi­tion of Robin Sloan’s video game devel­op­ment diary.

Welcome: to returning readers as well as everyone newly subscribed. If you missed it, week 1 sets up the moti­va­tion behind this project. All the pre­vious edi­tions are avail­able over on my blog.

Fishmarket, Camille Pissarro, 1902

Global upheaval has thrown me for a loop; I know I’m not alone in this. However, Perils of the Over­world proceeds. My pause in week 9 broke the neat chain of num­bered weeks, and, rather than resume with week 10 or skip ahead to week … uh … 139?, I’m going to just start titling these thematically. Also, I’m not 100% sure I will for­ever and always send them weekly, so real titles work better anyway.

Wot I got

I have finally, finally gotten back to writing this game, and that will be my task for a while now: building out a web of loca­tions and encounters.

The game’s blackjack-esque mechanism has sug­gested some new pos­si­bil­i­ties for the story; there’s a way in which a deck of cards implies a cast of characters, archetypal, maybe even tarot-like. So, hmm, yes, what if your quest involves meeting the real people who have been immor­tal­ized, ide­al­ized, in this deck of cards? What if you dis­cover that the bluff Sen­tinel (pictured on the card wearing his awe­some armor, hoisting his enor­mous shield) is now retired, brewing beer in Porto Calla … ? What if he wants to describe to you the reality of the battle immor­tal­ized and ide­al­ized in those cards?

Okay, that’s inter­esting.

The storefront conundrum

I can now foresee the con­clu­sion of the game’s devel­op­ment, which means actually releasing it is a real con­sid­er­a­tion rather than a hazy eventuality, which means I have to con­tend with dig­ital store­fronts.

In the dis­cus­sion that follows, I’ll ignore the store­fronts built into video game con­soles like the Playsta­tion 4 and Nin­tendo Switch, because, what­ever Perils of the Over­world is, it’s not a con­sole game.

That leaves two broad paths.

One is the phone, which means, to a first approximation, the iOS App Store. I’ve pub­lished an iOS app before and I know how that works; it’s a smooth process, and the App Store is slick. The draw­backs are that (a) Apple takes 30% of the pur­chase price, and (b) the game is only avail­able to iOS users.

(Note to Android devotees: yes, I know your phones are super cool! However, an Android edi­tion is only prac­tical if/when an iOS edi­tion has had some amount of suc­cess.)

The other path is the PC, which means, to a first approximation, the supremely suc­cessful store­front called Steam, oper­ated by Valve Software. It’s hard to over­state its dominance. The video game writer and ana­lyst Simon Car­less pub­lishes a ter­rific newsletter that aims to help indie video game makers reach more players, and it is 90% about mas­tering the dynamics of the Steam store­front. That’s not some weird pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of Simon’s; it is the reality of the marketplace.

The problem is, I hate Steam.

It has the same draw­back as the App Store, the 30% cut, to which it adds gen­eral clunk­i­ness and confusion. Valve’s han­dling of Steam reminds me of Amazon’s han­dling of the Kindle: both enjoy a market posi­tion so com­manding it has led to lazi­ness bor­dering on contempt. You access Steam through a client app, and on macOS, that client is pun­ish­ingly slow; from Valve’s point of view, this is forgivable, since macOS accounts for a single-digit per­centage of all its sales. From my point of view, it’s like …  come on!?

There’s a deeper char­ac­ter­istic that cuts across macOS and Win­dows, and I can’t quite put it into words, even though I feel it keenly. The App Store is at least anodyne; Steam is somehow … entropic. It does not exude craft or care. To me, it does not feel — has never felt — inviting or comfortable.

There are alternatives. The video game maker Epic has lever­aged the suc­cess of Fort­nite (I’m a fan) to estab­lish a whole new store­front. I think it’s better-designed than Steam, and it’s cer­tainly more performant. However, unlike the App Store and Steam, where anyone can sell any game they want, the Epic Games Store is open only by invitation, and there’s no indi­ca­tion that a lo-fi, text-based game like POTO would have a home there.

But there’s also itch.io, the beau­ti­fully simple store­front that is haven for the weird and artful, where a lo-fi, text-based game ABSOLUTELY has a home. It is totally inde­pen­dent and breath­tak­ingly creator-friendly. (Also, its recent Bundle for Racial Jus­tice and Equality raised an eye-popping $8 mil­lion for bail funds around the country.) I dis­tribute the macOS ver­sion of Fish on itch.io, and the whole process was easy and inviting.

But the reality is that itch.io’s cus­tomer base is a frac­tion of a frac­tion … of a frac­tion … of the App Store’s and Steam’s, and the whole point of dis­trib­uting through a dig­ital store­front is to take advan­tage of its sales rankings, rec­om­men­da­tion algorithms, and edi­to­rial cura­tion to get in front of poten­tial players.

There are, finally, other small store­fronts — GOG, the Humble Store, and prob­ably many I’ve never even heard of — but they have the same draw­backs as itch.io without its charms, so they are, for my purposes, basi­cally superfluous.

Where a game wants to be

Let’s think through these options.

I think Perils of the Over­world “wants” to be a game for desktop and laptop computers. The reading expe­ri­ence will be fantastic — dramatic — on a bigger screen, and the ability to offer the game for both Win­dows and macOS means basi­cally all poten­tial players are covered. That feels better than an iOS-only offering.

One part of me says, oh, just hold your nose and sell the game on Steam; that’s where the players are. But, another part asks, is it really where the players for this game in particular are? I’m hon­estly not convinced. Con­sider that, on Steam, video games are mer­chan­dised largely through bright, scin­til­lating demo videos that show off their most visu­ally impres­sive moments. The demo video for POTO would be … a lot of text. Beau­ti­fully typeset, to be sure! But, no flashing lasers, no cas­cading voxels, no swarming minions. (I would love to know how the Choose Your Own Adventure-esque Choice of Games offer­ings do on Steam. There are a LOT of them; here’s one example.)

My heart tells me to dis­tribute the game on itch.io, obviously. The problem is that dis­trib­uting a video game only on itch.io is equiv­a­lent to selling a book only at San Francisco’s City Lights. You are will­fully fore­closing a whole world of com­mer­cial pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Are there any other options? Sure. You don’t need a store­front to dis­tribute a video game. Minecraft was sold for many years on its own dorky little website; you paid $20 and down­loaded it onto your computer, just like the old days! But Minecraft is Minecraft, and fore­going dig­ital store­fronts means everything depends on direct word-of-mouth between players. That sounds both lovely and ludicrous.

The options get even more rad­ical. POTO could be a web game, with nothing to down­load at all; you could just pay $5 to get a login and password. There’s a text-based nar­ra­tive game called Fallen London that has run for years using this model.

Most rad­ical of all, the game could be totally free to play, its devel­op­ment cost recouped from a group of patrons/backers, Kickstarter-style. I’ve done some­thing like this before and I still think the model is very clean and “correct”; it “goes with the grain” of dig­ital media in a way that other dis­tri­b­u­tion models don’t. Tim Car­mody calls it “unlocking the commons.” (You can tell you’re in the “most rad­ical of all” para­graph when every other phrase is set off in quo­ta­tion marks! 😝)

Those latter two options sound good — I mean, they are good! — but I want to under­score that you miss out on reaching a LOT of poten­tial players when you abstain entirely from the store­fronts and their fly­wheel algorithms. My Kickstarter-funded novella Annabel Scheme pro­vides a useful example: I got paid (👍) and the book found an ini­tial crowd of readers (👍👍) but, after that, its read­er­ship grew only verrry slowly. It never got plugged into the supply chain, mate­rial and intellectual, that cir­cu­lates books through the world and intro­duces them to the people who might enjoy them.

Where does that leave us?

These con­tor­tions trace a kind of abstract truth: there is some group of people in the world who might enjoy Perils of the Over­world, and some frac­tion of that group who would pay ~$5 to give it a try. How can I find those people? I’ve found some of you already with this newsletter, which has about 2,200 subscribers. But, not all of you will pay $5 for POTO, and even if you did, I’d need many more to make the project a com­mer­cial suc­cess.

A savvy reader will inter­ject to ask: well, Robin, how many players do you need?

The number I have in my head is 5,000, which feels simul­ta­ne­ously modest and unthinkable. I have a tremen­dous asset: ongoing access to a curious audience, through this newsletter and my much larger, gen­eral-purpose newsletter, too. At the same time, I am pretty dis­con­nected from the cen­tral nodes of, like, Video Game Enthusiasm. There’s a kind of indie devel­oper who is casu­ally tweeting, every day, to a com­mu­nity of a few thou­sand poten­tial players; I am not that devel­oper.

Are there 5,000 players waiting for POTO on Steam? On the App Store? On itch.io? In the blue-shadowed hills of the open web?

This conun­drum remains, for now, unsolved.

But, I think it’s impor­tant for you to under­stand that this is as much a part of making a game as … actually making a game. A media arti­fact without a dis­tri­b­u­tion channel doesn’t do any­thing for any­body. And there’s plenty of room for cre­ativity and inven­tion and — dare I say it — values in this part of the process, too.

(I’ll tell you what: grap­pling with these video game store­fronts has made me grateful for the dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work avail­able to books. Amazon is big, of course, and rep­re­sents a plu­rality of sales for most books pub­lished in the U.S. — but its share is not as over­whelming as Steam’s or the App Store’s are for video games. In addi­tion to Amazon, there are real bookstores — a huge con­stel­la­tion of indies, big and small, all of them exactly the kind of busi­nesses you want to be asso­ci­ated with — and of course, there are public libraries, too: the great backstop, offering the assur­ance that, in the end, any­body who wants to read your book will be able to read it, no matter what. There’s no public library for video games.)

This week

The Lock at Pontoise, Camille Pissarro, 1872

More writing!

What kind of beer is the Sen­tinel brewing? What’s his name? Claude. I think his name is Claude.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. I have an almost clair­voyant sense that some readers missed my Ink tutorial who would have enjoyed it. If “writing the script for a nar­ra­tive game in a simple, screenplay-like format” sounds inter­esting to you … check it out.

This has been an edi­tion of my video game devel­op­ment diary, sent by email every few weeks. You can subscribe: