This Saturday, 12/7, is the first annual Ohio Game Developer Expo. I will be there and am looking forward to meeting people and participating in the discussions and activities.
http://www.ohiogamedev.com/
How’s that kickstarter doing?
I’ve backed a few kickstarters over the last couple years… I guess 15 altogether. Since I’m a busy person, I haven’t exactly followed each project closely. I figured it was a good time to review the projects I’ve backed to see how they’ve done.
In alphabetical order:
Aaron Swartz Documentary – The Internet’s Own Boy
Still in production. I funded at the DVD level, and supposedly should be getting my DVD in March 2014.
Beautiful vim Cheat-Sheet
This one was successfully completed, a bit delayed but not too bad.
Big Blue, an underwater adventure game
This sequel to the videogame Ecco The Dolphin failed to achieve funding, raising less than 10% of goal. I guess the team is still trying to find a way to get a game developed somehow.
Chip Maestro – An NES MIDI Synthesizer Cartridge
This project completed successfully, albeit delayed by over a year. It was frustrating to wait so long, but the finished product was good. I didn’t get the feeling that Jarek wasn’t capable of delivering, just that his estimates for how long it would take to do the things he promised were overly optimistic, and the response was larger than he anticipated, which added complications.
Code Hero: A Game That Teaches You To Make Games
This one doesn’t seem to be as well managed as the others, with the main project website having difficulty remaining up, and delays in releasing updates. The primerlabs.com website is currently down. :(
The Jason Scott Documentary Three Pack
In progress. Jason has been doing a good job at keeping followers updated with the project. Jason did an amazing job on his first kickstarter project, Get Lamp, and the self-funded BBS documentary before that, so I’m confident that this project will be completed successfully, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the final results when they’re ready.
Light Table
I consider this one a success. Beta builds have been released, the latest 0.5.0 in August 2013.
Metal Savior
A game developer friend of mine recommended I back this one, but it failed to achieve goal.
Neurodreamer sleep mask
I received my reward (the “trip goggles” that serve as a sort of prototype for the sleep mask) for backing this one a long time ago, and just saw Mitch announce about a week ago that the sleep masks had been produced.
OUYA: A New Kind of Video Game Console
The fundraising effort for Ouya was a huge success. I received my console a few months ago. It’s
Project Maiden – a Zeldalike in reverse
I only backed this one for the minimum level, which gets my name in the credits. I figure if/when the game gets released I’ll buy it… but I see that he’s actually releasing it DRM-free, free to download, forever — a gift to the world. Really amazing, and I think if the game is as good as it looks that I’ll send him a rather large tip as a thank-you.
Looking at the project pages update log, it looks like Kevin & Co. have been working diligently and productively on this project. I’m really looking forward to playing this when it is released. Considering that the team only raised $12000 for this project, the fact that they’re releasing the finished product as a free, no-DRM download is amazing.
SPORTSFRIENDS featuring Johan Sebastian Joust
I backed this project on the strength of BaraBariBall, which I had the opportunity to play at the Cleveland Game Developers booth at Cleveland Ingenuity Fest in 2012. The game was quite playable and fun even then, and so it’s a bit disappointing to have waited this long and still not seen the game officially released yet. The release was supposed happen in October 2013, but has been pushed back. I don’t really care about the other games, I want my Barabariball!
Spriter
Still in progress, but they have been releasing beta builds and making strong progress for some time.
Star Castle 2600
Completed successfully. I received my game cartridge and downloaded the ROM to play on emulator. It’s a VERY difficult game in emulation. I would have liked a slower-paced version of this game.
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games
Anita Sarkeesian has been somewhat slower than expected at churning out her series of videos, to date having produced just four videos of the series so far, out of a total of 12 announced (7 of which were made possible by reaching stretch goals). The videos have been about what I expected in terms of quality and content, which is to say pretty good, overall. They have generated a lot of negative response from certain segments of the gamer community, which deserves more analysis than I’m prepared to give here.
The twelve topics announced on the kickstarter page were as follows (the bolded ones have been produced):
- The Damsel in Distress (parts 1, 2, and 3)
- The Fighting F#@k Toy
- The Sexy Sidekick
- The Sexy Villainess
- The Background Decoration
- Voodoo Priestess/Tribal Sorceress
- Women as Reward
- Mrs. Male Character
- Unattractive Equals Evil
- Man with Boobs
- Positive Female Characters!
- Top 10 Most Common Defenses of Sexism in Games
So, despite the four videos being released, it feels like there’s still a long way to go for this project to be completed. It would be nice to see the release schedule sped up, but not at the cost of quality.
Kickstarter… Good? Yeah, I’d say so. YMMV
Over the last year or so, I’ve read and heard about backers regretting backing one project or another because it was poorly managed and failed to deliver once successfully funded. And, to be fair, there have been some high profile projects that raised a lot of money and ended up failing. It seems that there is a danger with overfunded projects succumbing to scope creep, hype, and unrealistic expectations.
It’s definitely worth keeping in mind that fundraising success doesn’t guarantee project success. If you look at kickstarter projects like a pre-order system, I think you’re more likely to be disappointed. If on the other hand you look at kickstarter as an opportunity to give an inventor or creative person a chance at making something cool, it’s a different story. While a failed project is still disappointing, understanding that failure is a possibility and that fundraising success doesn’t guarantee project success, it can put things into proper perspective. Limit your contribution to what you’re comfortable losing, and hope for the best.
At some point I realized that, despite there being many projects out there that seemed interesting and worthy of support, I couldn’t possibly keep up with all of them if I wanted to, so I limited my backing to projects that I really wanted to see make it, and that I felt would deliver rewards that I would enjoy or find useful. I also begged off funding projects if I heard about them after they were already above goal, so as not to contribute to the overfunding leading to unrealistic expectations problem. I figured if the project was successful I could probably go out and buy the product when it became available.
Overall, allowing leniency on time, I’d say that the kickstarters I’ve chosen to back have been mostly successful. With the exception of Code Hero, I haven’t felt like I’ve been burned yet. Delays are disappointing, but understandable, and as long as progress is communicated regularly and honestly, I can live with them, within reason.
Outage(s)
Sorry for the downtime. I’m looking for working on migrating to a new webhost. Hopefully will be on a more stable one in a few days.
PayPal are Jerks
It’s no secret that PayPal is a favorite target of hatred among web-centric companies, for many reasons, but basically boiling down to customer-unfriendly policies, poor customer service, and abuse of a more-or-less monopoly. PayPal has competitors these days — Google and Amazon most notably. But because PayPal is owned by eBay, and eBay has a commanding marketshare in the online auction market, they can be dicks with almost complete impunity.
Everyone hates PayPal for something. Everyone. Except maybe the founder, the CEO, and the CEO’s mom. So I am not anything special in hating them and using them only grudgingly, and when I absolutely have to.
Over the life of my use of their service, I’ve been the buyer approximately 90% of the time. It’s relatively simple to send money to another PayPal user using PayPal. Bravo. Congratulations to them for figuring that out.
I understand the headaches are even worse when you’re the seller receiving funds at your PayPal account — or more to the point, extracting funds so you can put them into a real bank account. I’ve done a little selling on eBay, and for the most part the process has gotten better over the years, but it’s still almost too much work to list things when you consider the payoff that you get when you actually sell.
Since I recently started selling again, I basically had to connect a bank account to my PayPal account, so I could transfer funds back to myself and get my money. At this point, using my PayPal account to make payments has turned into an unpleasant experience.
Previously, when I’d used PayPal primarily to make payments, I used my credit card to provide the funding source. It was the only account connected to my PayPal account, and it was actually beneficial since using the PayPal account as a proxy for my credit card keeps the credit card number from being exposed to anyone but PayPal. So as a buyer, I kindof liked PayPal for that.
But now, with a bank account connected, PayPal’s strong preference is that I fund my PayPal purchases with funds from my bank account, because doing so avoids giving business to the credit card companies who they regard as competitors, and having to pay merchant fees to the credit card companies, so they basically force me to use my bank account to be the default payment method. Meanwhile, I vastly prefer to use the credit card, because I can never overdraw my credit card, and also because my credit card gives me reward points for spending money through my credit card.
So PayPal and I am at loggerheads. I want one thing, and they want another. And I’m not really a believer in “The customer is always right.” but I am a believer in “You should make your customers happy.” They… are not making me happy.
So… I can override their default setting, but only per transaction, not by setting my default account to the one I prefer. And it turns out, even when I’m really angry and determined to make sure that I always change the funding source, I still somehow manage to fail to do so very frequently. And even when I succeed, it’s several extra steps, which is an inconvenience and reinforces my tendency to feel angry about the whole thing. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to order the payment source priority to my preferred order.
So I wrote to their help, asking them to help me arrange things thus. I got a response fairly quickly, in about an hour, which is pretty impressive, but it wasn’t a helpful answer. Basically they told me that I couldn’t do it, and that if I didn’t want the bank account to be my default payment source, I would have to remove the account. In other words, they don’t care what I want, it works the way they want it to work, and if I don’t like it I don’t have to do business with them. Or I can, but I can just not connect a bank account with my PayPal account, which makes it a one-way proposition and not very useful if I’m trying to receive money.
Well, that sucks.
So, what to do?
Well it occurs to me that I could solve the problem pretty effectively by holding TWO PayPal accounts.
One account, I’d use ONLY for spending money and receiving payments. That account would have my credit card attached to it, so that when I need to make a payment, the credit card comes into play, I get reward points, my credit card number is protected so that only PayPal sees it, and I’m happy.
The other account, I’d connect to my bank account, and use ONLY for receiving transfers from the first account, and then transferring again to my bank account.
I haven’t read the Terms of Service yet, but I expect somewhere in there I’ll find some clause that prevents me from doing this, such as a rule allowing only one account per person, or something, but I expect that there’s still some way around it, such as setting up one account for a business, and another for me, or another business I create. Either way, it’s a lot of extra work, but if I really want to do it, I can.
So, that being the case, then, PayPal, why don’t you stop being jerks and allow me to fund my payments through your service as I prefer?
Reflections on Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat came out in 1992, the year before I graduated from high school. It’s 2013, which means that MK is old enough to drink. Last weekend, I met it at a bar and caught up with it for old time’s sake.
I first saw Mortal Kombat at the local bowling alley in my hometown. The graphics looked impressive, the photograph digitally sampled sprites and rotoscoped animation giving the game a lifelike feel that no other game had. Yet, somehow I felt turned off. I wasn’t really interested in playing it at first. It looked like it was trying to be too hardcore, and the blood and violence felt more like gimmicks to me. Plus, it cost $0.50 to play.
It wasn’t until I went away to college that I first played it. The student center building at my college had a bowling alley in the basement, and there were a few arcade games there, one of which was a Mortal Kombat. There weren’t that many options, and it seemed to get a lot of play from the other guys who hung out there, so I gave it a try. It wasn’t long before I grew very well acquainted with that machine, and I probably dropped over $100 into it by the time I graduated. It was the first videogame that I ever played that I felt was worth two quarters to play.
Mortal Kombat was mega popular in its day, and notorious for its blood and fatality moves. Frequently cited by social critics who tried to call for censorship of games, it was a game parental groups hated, and it rode the publicity to the top. But all that controversy masked that the gameplay was solid, and the game was a lot of fun to play, offering tight balance, considerable depth, and a learning curve that took weeks if not months to master.
I got pretty good at it, but always felt like a second-rate player compared to some of the other guys I played against. I could hold my own against anyone using Scropion, but I secretly felt ashamed, like he was an entry-level character, certainly the first one I tried with any success, with easy to learn moves that did a lot of damage and were easy to land a high percentage of the time, and I felt like my victories were cheaper when I used him, though I never would have admitted it.
I got to like the cheesy Bruce Lee ripoff character, Liu Kang, and, to an extent, Raiden, who seemed to have been ripped off from the cheesier (though great) Big Trouble in Little China —although, due to an unfortunate leg-sweep vulnerability, bug he was a broken character.
But there were two players at my local arcade who were definitely better than me all around — who knew the moves of all the characters, not just three of them. I watched them play, and tried to learn the moves and the timing, and with a lot of practice I developed skill, which was what caused me to respect the game. Mostly I tried to play the single player tournament mode, where I had a decent chance of lasting a few rounds, but when they were around, I’d inevitably have to face their challenge. I got my ass handed to me a lot, but eventually I got good enough with Scorpion that I was pretty evenly matched against anyone.
Still, I never managed to beat the single-player tournament. I got to where I could get up to Goro, occasionally on one credit. But beating Goro was a seriously difficult feat, which I might have managed a handful of times. And then Shang Tsung, seemingly a weaker boss than the underboss, was somehow deceptively able to beat you before you knew what was happening. I had a rule about playing, I would never let myself spend more than $10 at a time, so if I couldn’t do it for that much, I had to walk away.
Last weekend, I was at 16-Bit Bar in Columbus, where they have a lot of great classic arcade games on free play, and I got to give Mortal Kombat another run. It’s been a good 15-16 years since I put my last quarter into it, and at first I couldn’t remember Scorpion’s fatality move. Embarrassingly, I lost a round in the second fight. I continued a lot. But it was on free play mode, and it started coming back to me.
Somehow, this time I managed to beat the single-player tournament. I’m not sure how I managed to do it. Somehow, it didn’t feel as difficult as I remembered — despite having noticeably diminished skills, I just kept trying until I got to the next level. Oddly the game felt slower than I remembered it — probably, I think, because of how later fighting games have gotten progressively faster over the years. Also, I started to notice what worked and what didn’t, and figured out timing and spacing that would enable me to land the powerful attacks that normally get blocked. Instead of going in headstrong and aggressive like my old playing style, I took a more methodical approach and picked apart the AI’s defense. I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt to me like I was able to see the weak points in the AI, and exploit them with predictable certainty.
I actually wondered whether the old game I used to play was set to a higher difficulty level — it’s certainly plausible, although I hope not. The endurance matches took several rematches, and it took a bunch of rematches before I beat Goro. I worked my way up the ladder, and knocked Shang Tsung off the top. I felt elated and accomplished for hours afterward. Taking 20 years to beat a game that has taken your measure is pretty indescribable.
And yeah, when I did it, I screamed “Mortal Kombaaat!!” like in the movie soundtrack, and felt every eye in the bar directed at me for a few seconds before turning back to whatever it was they were doing. Let me tell you, it enhances the experience, even more than you’d think it would.
Intestines Inside parody logo t-shirt
As an experiment, I created a design parodying the famous “Intel Insides” logo, and created a limited run of t-shirts of it, which I am selling on eBay. This is a high quality parody of the original “Intel Inside” logo. I am proud of how the logo and the t-shirts turned out, and I like the design so much that I am keeping one for myself. I even did research to find out the Pantone color that Intel used for their logo, and use the color in my design. It is about as authentic looking as you can get:
If this design sells well, I may in the future create t-shirts with other artwork that I have created, such as my pixel art superheroes, or pug art. If you would be interested in seeing this happen, please comment below with what you’d like to see.
GameMaker Studio 1.2.1146 update greatly expands tutorials
From the release notes:
- Tutorials and Demos are now downloaded from our servers, reduces installer size – allows us to add many more tutorials and demos
- Uses an RSS feed to get the information, allows other feeds to be added
- Users can create their own RSS feed for their own Tutorials and Demos
- 16 New Tutorials added that cover a variety of subjects from getting started, through touch controls to ads and facebook integration.
This is a very cool feature indeed! The ability to add third party RSS feeds to the Tutorials and Demos promises to make the GameMaker developer community even tighter, by accelerating the sharing of knowledge and techniques. While there is a great deal of information on how to do things in GameMaker at the GMC Forums, on various websites, and on YouTube, now users will be able put everything into a nicely aggregated channel accessible directly through the GameMaker: Studio IDE.
I’m really looking forward to seeing what the community of developers, which likely numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands, comes up with.
If I had a nickel…
One of the nice things about being an indie game developer is the community of devs who find each other through the internet. On one community that I frequent, I posted an idea a few weeks ago:
Starving Indie Marketing idea: Add a global counter for the total number times the game has been played by anyone, anywhere. Every time the game state reaches “Game Over”, the counter increments.
Then as the game over screen is displayed, the text: “If I had a nickel for every time someone played my game, I would have $” + global.games_played/20 + ” dollars…. In reality, I have $” + revenue ” dollars.”
Then display the IAP screen.
I’ve been wanting to see this tried, but haven’t been ready to set up a game for commercial release, so I just put it out there for anyone to run with it if they wanted.
So, one of the guys did! Jason Artis, of Hurgle Studios, is working on a Sudoku game for Android called Sinister Sudoku. Currently in beta, it will implement my “If I had a nickel” idea. So I’m really looking forward to seeing if it helps draw revenue.
My theory is that by providing immediate and direct information to the player about how well the game is doing, it will help provide the necessary incentive to the player to pay for a game if they enjoy it, to encourage the developer to continue working and release more games. I believe many players justify not paying for games because they rationalize that the game must be a success and must be making the developer all kinds of money, when the reality facing most indie game developers is anything but that. I like the free-to-play because it lets you experience the game to see if it’s worth paying for before you sink any money into it, and I like pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth models because it removes the excuse that many freeloaders use when pirating games that they’re “too expensive” and that they “would pay something, but not that much.”
Hopefully, by showing just how much revenue a game has generated, it will get players to realize how much labor and expense goes into producing a game, and drive home an understanding that it’s not free to produce them, and that good development cannot be sustained by low revenues. As a result, my hope is that those who are able to pay for games will be more likely to pay what they can and what they think the game is worth.
DRM signals early death knell for legacy GameMaker development
It’s generally known that GameMaker 7 and 8 use a DRM technology called SoftWrap to manage license and product activation. Today, YoYoGames released the following announcement, regarding this technology:
Update for GameMaker 7 and 8 Customers: Please Read
We want to inform all GameMaker 7 and 8 customers that Softwrap, our exclusive technology provider for GameMaker 7 and 8, has announced a change to its business. By August 31, it will no longer be possible for GameMaker 7 and 8 customers to install or reactivate their licenses. After August 31, if you are having issues reactivating GameMaker 7 or 8, please register a ticket that includes your Softwrap license code via the YoYo Games Support Center and our agents should be able to help you.
In reaction to this news we would like to help migrate users to GameMaker: Studio. “Studio” is the current version of GameMaker and the only version where we offer regular updates and support. We’re therefore offering customers of GameMaker 7, 8 and 8.1 an upgrade to GameMaker: Studio Standard for only $9.99., which is a $40 saving on the regular price.
To upgrade to GameMaker: Studio Standard, simply click here and enter your Softwrap license number to purchase a license for GameMaker: Studio Standard.
For more information on how to migrate games from GameMaker 7 and 8 to GameMaker: Studio Standard, please read our Wiki entry “Porting GameMaker 7 and GameMaker 8 to GameMaker: Studio.”
We apologize for this inconvenience but hope you find our offer to upgrade to GameMaker: Studio compelling enough to take advantage of it.
Thank you for your continued support of YoYo Games.
The YoYo Games Team
It’s not entirely clear from this what the help YYG plans to offer GM7 and GM8 users will consist of, or how long they’ll continue to offer this help.
A consumer friendly failsafe for the contingency of the DRM license servers going offline should be to unlock the product for all users. Not doing so can present a great inconvenience. If YYG and Softwrap goes out of business, or simply change their policy, that’s it for your GameMaker license. Short of hacking around its product activation, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to use it again.
That’s for a product that you paid for. This changes the nature of purchases into something more akin to a subscription or rental — only, your continued right to access that which you have paid for is contingent upon the continued existence and goodwill of the business entity who provided it to you.
Imagine having a tool chest filled with expensive tools that you paid for, but then finding one day that the chest has become permanently locked as a result of the manufacturer going out of business. That’s what it’s like to use DRM-encumbered tools.
Offering a discounted upgrade path to developers who haven’t yet adopted Studio is better than nothing, but it’s likely that developers who are still on these old versions have not upgraded yet not because of financial reasons, but because of legacy projects that are not easily ported to Studio due to a dependency on now-deprecated functions that are no longer supported in Studio. For any such developers, migrating their codebase from GM7 and 8 to Studio could involve substantial re-engineering.
YYG no longer use SoftWrap DRM with GM:Studio, but does continue to use a DRM solution, and YYG have stated in the past that they will likely never abandon DRM. I disagree with their stance on the matter, but I recognize that it is their decision to make. I continue to recommend that they abandon DRM in the future, and figure out a business model that allows them to do so.
I also encourage them to release a non-DRM encumbered version of GM7 and 8 for existing licensees who wish to continue supporting legacy codebases that they are unable to port to Studio. When a business elects to cease support for a product that they released, the most ethical thing to me would be to release the source code for the product, so that those who wish to continue using it can develop their own patches and updates. Failing that, at the very least they should unlock any DRM that would prevent customers from being able to use what they’ve paid for.
Phil Fish vs. Marcus Beer: We all lose.
This is just my opinion, and I don’t have all the information:
I don’t know Phil Fish personally, but I do follow him on Twitter. I have yet to play Fez, I’m sad to say, but it’s obvious to anyone who watched Indie Game: The Movie that he poured his soul into it.
The impression I get from his appearance in IG:TM and his twitter feed is that he’s an emotionally high strung guy, rather sensitive, and prone to lashing out in anger when he perceives that he’s been hurt or slighted. The most lasting impression I came away with was the part in IG:TM where, on camera, a very upset and overworked Phil Fish stated several times that he would kill his former partner if he did not release his share of Fez and allow Fish to finish and release the game. While I understood very well how deeply angered Fish must have felt, having sunk so much of his life into a game that he was depending on to do well, only to be left hanging by the legal fallout of a broken partnership that might prevent him from releasing it at all, it really did not seem like a wise thing to be saying stuff like that, certainly not in front of a camera. It just made Fish look bad, at best a temperamental artist, at worst a loose cannon who might actually go off. It didn’t matter that I felt that he was in the right and getting screwed, he was handling it badly.
Yesterday, it seemed like the whole indie developer world was talking about the latest Phil Fish meltdown. Fish was quitting game development. There would be no Fez II.
The last major meltdown that I’m aware of dealt with Microsoft’s treatment of Fez. Fish wanted to release an update on XBox Live, but Microsoft’s policies were getting in the way, and for a solo developer getting through the red tape hurdles and costs were tremendously burdensome. Fish’s outrage was as righteous as it was epic. I felt like he was on the side of every small developer who wanted to put out a major release.
This time it seemed that he had few friends or supporters, and lots of haters. At best it seemed his fans were mainly expressing disappointment at the announcement of Fez II being canceled, or expressing hope that he’d cool down and come back to the project. But Fish was spewing profanity about the abuse he’d been on the receiving end on, and it didn’t seem like anyone sympathized.
What was it all about? Something to do with “Annoyed Gamer”. Who? Some guy on YouTube with a following, who likes to give his opinionated opinions on games and the game industry.
Apparently, “Annoyed Gamer,” aka Marcus Beer, had gone off on Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow on an episode of Game Trailers’ Invisible Walls for not wanting to give a reaction to a recent Microsoft announcement that the XBox One would allow developers to use a commercial XBox One as a development unit — no need for a special developer’s version of the console.
My opinion on this is that Annoyed Gamer is entitled to his opinion, but is wrong to call out Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow for not giving comments on demand. If the media covering the game industry seeks an opinion on an industry development and asks someone who’s a big name in the industry says “No comment,” THAT IS THEIR STATEMENT. Sure, you can be an asshole and continue to press the issue until you annoy your interview subject and provoke them into blowing up at you, but when you do that, YOU are the asshole, not them. Being an indie gamer is stressful enough without having to deal with goddamn papparazzi who won’t take no for an answer. “You have to suck it up and talk to the press whenever we want, about whatever we want, because it’s an honor for us to want to talk to you,” is simply arrogant. Calling people names because they don’t want to answer your question is bullshit.
Yes, game developers have something to gain from media coverage, and many of us need it in order to promote and market their projects. No one has to give an interview if they don’t want to, or answer a specific question if they don’t want to.
At the end of the day, Jonathan Blow and Phil Fish give us games. That’s more than enough.
Marcus Beer, and his ilk, on the other hand, give us opinions and information. This is also valuable, but it’s information and opinions about the games that developers make. We can come up with these on our own, easily, although there are a few who are unique voices well worth listening to, and I’m glad they’re out there contributing to the conversation.
Without the developers developing, there’s nothing to talk about. We might need each other, but one of us comes before the other.
It’s certainly possible to gain a name, a following, and influence in the industry — whether you’re a dev or a reporter. There are powerful people on either side of the symbiotic relationship. But however much influence you might have, you can’t always get your way. Ultimately, the media coverage exists because the game industry exists. Everyone should be entitled to respect and basic decency, especially people who have given us a celebrated magnum opus like Fez or Braid.
The industry is bigger than any one person, and there will be no shortage of good games to fill the void that Fish will leave behind him. But it’s still something that shouldn’t have happened, and because it did, we all lose out on the games Fish might have created. I don’t mean to defend his personality or the way he handles being in the spotlight, but frankly, to the vast majority of us who don’t know him personally, those things are secondary to his works, and aren’t really of concern to me as a gamer. Leave him alone and let him make games, the gamer in me says. I don’t care what he says in an interview, or if he gives an interview. I want to interact with his creations, not him.
In deference to those who do know Fish and care about him as a person, and to the man himself, he deserves to be given his space and the right to be left alone. With some exceptions, journalists should respect a person’s wishes to be engaged with on terms of their choosing. Game development, particularly as a solo dev or small team, is incredibly stressful, demanding, and difficult. Everyone needs to recognize that, and acknowledge the sacrifices and dedication that are required of game developers, and give them the respect that they deserve.