Blackwell postmortem on Gamasutra today!

[Dave Gilbert]

I wrote this article several weeks ago and it's finally been published.  It's a longish postmortem about the ups and downs of the production process of Blackwell Convergence and what I learned from the process.  Fun times!

Anyways, here it is!

[GarageGothic]

What a great read, Dave. I love Gamasutra postmortems, but this is the first one that I really felt could be applied to my own future endeavors. Thanks! Consider it bookmarked.

[TerranRich]

Very interesting and informative read. I learned quite a bit about the ups and downs of independent game development. I want to take my game development to a more serious level, and this article helped a bit.

[Igor Hardy]

Did the competition really got so tough during the last two years?

[Baron]

Interesting read, especially the analysis of production values vs. profitability.  Do you keep track of all your inputs for each aspect of each project (money spent obviously, but also your time/effort)?  I also wonder how feasible it is to survey your customers, so that you could get more of a sense of what they like and don't like.  I'm always intrigued by the crude stats produced on the AGS Games page, but more detailed information would be helpful to the decision making process.

[Dave Gilbert]

Did the competition really got so tough during the last two years?

Yes an no.  On the distribution networks where I used to make most of my money, things have certainly changed!  As I said in the article, they are lowering their prices to the point where I get very little by the time royalties get to me.  It's forcing lots of developers to make smaller, cheaper games. 

Interesting read, especially the analysis of production values vs. profitability.  Do you keep track of all your inputs for each aspect of each project (money spent obviously, but also your time/effort)?  I also wonder how feasible it is to survey your customers, so that you could get more of a sense of what they like and don't like.  I'm always intrigued by the crude stats produced on the AGS Games page, but more detailed information would be helpful to the decision making process.

I try to!  You can't think in terms of "how many copies has the game sold" but rather, "are the earnings worth what what I paid to make it"?  I knew the higher cost of making Convergence was going to be an issue so I kept very careful track of how much I was spending to see if the higher production values would be worth it once it was released.  As I wrote in the article, they were, but since i spent more money to make the game it made very little difference on the balance sheet.  

[Snarky]

A complicating consideration in these calculations must be that all these factors affect not only sales of this game, but also those of future releases (as well as sales of your back-catalog, but that's easier to track). It's hard to know how your customers really responded to Convergence until you see if sales are up or down for the next release.

(Hollywood blockbusters sometimes offer a demonstration of this, where a film can make modest box office, but be so well-liked by those who do see it that the sequel is a huge success--or vice versa, movies that make hundreds of millions on the strength of the actors, director, or trailers, but turn out to be so boring that audiences stay away from the sequel.)

I'm looking forward to the next Dave Gilbert-produced Wadjet Eye game, though I'm kind of hoping it will be a non-Blackwell title.