{"id":27584,"date":"2014-03-15T01:06:43","date_gmt":"2014-03-15T01:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/indie-developers-are-having-an-especially-troubled\/"},"modified":"2014-03-15T01:06:43","modified_gmt":"2014-03-15T01:06:43","slug":"indie-developers-are-having-an-especially-troubled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/indie-developers-are-having-an-especially-troubled\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Indie developers are having an especially troubled time in this environment. For every story about a venture-capital-backed superfirm pulling in daily revenues of $2m, there\u2019s another tragic tale of some tiny studio trying to find success in the F2P market and getting crushed. Mikengreg\u2019s Gasketball gave too much away for free and flopped. Earnings from Rubicon\u2019s Combat Monsters have been \u201ctragically disappointing\u201d, according to the studio\u2019s Paul Johnson. When Radiangames launched F2P puzzler Bombcats, \u201cpeople just never felt the need to pay for stuff\u201d, explains creator Luke Schneider. Punch Quest was \u201cway too generous\u201d at launch, says Rocketcat Games\u2019 Kepa Auwae. Just 0.1 per cent of the game\u2019s players spend money on the game. \u201cWe raised the prices of everything by around six times [to make it successful],\u201d Auwae explains. \u201cWith this style of game, where people buy progress, you really want to intentionally hobble the balance of your game so it preys on people\u2019s impatience.\u201d Namco Bandai\u2019s recently released iOS version of Tales Of Phantasia demonstrates how F2P cash grabs can destroy a game, though. In this incarnation \u2013 available only as a free title \u2013 the game\u2019s difficulty has been cranked up and key save points have been removed in a bid to get players to buy resurrection orbs at $2 a pop.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/www.edge-online.com\/features\/how-clones-fear-sanitisation-and-free-to-play-soured-the-ios-gaming-revolution\/\">How clones, fear, sanitisation and free-to-play soured Apple&rsquo;s iOS gaming revolution | Features | Edge Online<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Indie developers are having an especially troubled time in this environment. For every story about a venture-capital-backed superfirm pulling in daily revenues of $2m, there\u2019s another tragic tale of some tiny studio trying to find success in the F2P market and getting crushed. Mikengreg\u2019s Gasketball gave too much away for free and flopped. Earnings from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-7aU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}