If the past 30 years of games have taught us anything it is that war is fun. Yet actual conflict teaches us that war is hell. How do we square these two opposing results? With Positech “Cliff “Cliffski” Harris” Games’ latest release, Gratuitous Tank Battles. …
There was recently a big sale on at Show Me The Games, the indie games portal set up by Positech’s Cliff Harris. I was keen to find out how the sale had gone, and how the site is doing. Hit the jump for Cliff’s thoughts. …
With certain new games set for release at ever higher prices, while others (such as Men of War) have a distinctly lower price point and regular sales, it seems time (as ever, I suppose though) to think about what games should cost. Rather than blathering on in an opinionated fashion, I did a little survey, firing off a short list of questions to a section of The Reticule’s eminent friends in development to see what they thought about it. …
I stumbled accross SimSocial after reading about it on Cliffski’s blog. Interestingly enough, SimSocial is based on Cliffski’s excellent Kudos 2.
Edmund McMillen has become a bit of a poster boy for what it means to be an indie developer. He’s constantly producing games (and I really mean constantly) of a high caliber and a thoughtful content. They’ve been pushed towards the ‘art’ side of the indie scene, but they still remain very fun. In Aether you can launch yourself into the heavens by way of monster tongue, after all.
Cliff Harris, more commonly known as Cliffski or Cliff is the person behind one man indie game studio Positech famous for such games as Kudos 2 and Democracy 2 amongst many others. I recently got the chance to quizz Cliff on his games, life as an indie game developer. We also talked about that ever controversial issue of Piracy and DRM.
Hit the jump to read the interview.
Positech founder and indy game developer Cliffski has recently been talking about indie game sales and specifically Positech game sales on blog.
In something I think came about from this Rock, Paper, Shotgun comments thread Cliffski posted some thoughts about sales volume.
This led to a group of people to answer his question about how many copies we thought Democracy 2 and Kudos 2 had sold. Numbers ranging from 1 to 12,258 were shouted out, none of which Cliffski can confirm nor deny due to being “commercially sensitive” information.
Despite his lack of total openness, Cliffski did reveal that the money he makes from direct sales of his games via the Positech site are enough to pay the bills and such like. His point was that he doesn’t need the sales from other channels like retail sales or digital distribution networks.
He then showed us this fancy graph;
Moral of the story then? If you really want to help an indie game developer you are best of buying directly from them as more of the money goes right into their pockets. Cliffski’s graph shows that this is the current trend, for him at least. People are buying more Positech games directly than through other sources. Also of note is the spike in sales, these fit in with the releases of both Democracy 2 and Kudos 2.
It would be very interesting to hear more from him on this subject, and indeed more from other indie developers about this.
Kudos 2 by Positech Games (aka “Cliffski”) is an interesting life-sim game. I have the demo, yet unfortunately I haven’t had much time to play it, though I am sure that I would really enjoy it.
Regardless, Cliffski has done a nice little Post Mortem on the game, it is well worth a read right here.
While you are at it, don’t forget to check out the demo, or even buy the game from this lovely page.