There were a few games that came up in the 10 games you should have played session at GameCamp which I’d never heard of / played. One of these was SpaceChem – sounded interesting (the 5-second description was something like “great game which teaches you how to do real Chemistry”).
Someone else mentioned this game to me today, in passing, which reminded me to go check it out. I went to the website, looks vaguely interesting (although the site design is very ugly – normally a big FAIL in web-marketing – I’m happy to ignore that since I’m after a *game* here).
The only info I’m allowed to see about the game – no screenshots etc – is an embedded Flash video that’s taking ages to download, so long in fact that I gave up.
So I try to get the demo instead.
“requires mono”
Oh, FFS. Forget it. No, I’m not going to download 500MB (or however much it is these days) and endure extra debugging, manual configuration, etc just to install your game.
If this is a commercial operation (and it is, judging by their huge “buy now for $15” text), then it’s a waste of time to release a Mac version that’s any more complicated than “drag one icon to install”.
The Apple Mac Store is *live*, people! It’s even less hassle to buy things there (the “drag icon” bit is done for you automatically).
More generally, if you’re going to release games, don’t tie yourself to a 3rd-party platform that requires a large download and isn’t pre-installed by default on desktops.
2 replies on “Indie games: how to reduce your sales, #53”
It’s not those guys fault that Mac remains 20 years in past development-wise. How can you build a good product if you don’t enjoy the process?
@Den – there’s lots of ways to target Mac. If you don’t want to / can’t be bothered to do anything fancy, then it takes – literally – a few minutes to create a correct Mac app, from scratch (it’s just a ZIP file with some extra files inside it, and a special name).
There’s plenty of x-platform libraries out there, too, if that’s your thing. Most of them have decent installers, or there are examples of how to package them for Mac (because plenty of people have done this already)