Broken Hourglass interview at Four Fat Chicks
Broken Hourglass interview at Four Fat Chicks
Interview - posted by Vault Dweller on Fri 23 February 2007, 15:12:35
Tags: Planewalker Games; The Broken HourglassFour Fat Chicks has posted a large and interesting interview with The Broken Hourglass developer, Jason Compton.
Can you give us any idea on what kind of distribution plans you may have for The Broken Hourglass?
Well, one encouraging thing is we have had some interest from a couple of publishers at this point—companies that are willing to at least consider taking a chance on an outfit like ours, which is very encouraging. We'll see how that goes. If nothing happens there, or even if it does but there are certain regions that aren't taken care of, we're certainly ready and willing to do our own direct distribution. I am not proud—I will put labels on envelopes and send things out.
I'm interested in digital distribution—I've been a little discouraged about what I've seen in terms of the existing digital distribution options. There are sites out there which cater to digital distribution of the kind of retail, so-called triple-A titles—and so probably aren't necessarily appropriate for us. And then those which do cater more towards the independent game and the independent gamer—most of those are in the casual game space, and casual games tend to be a lot smaller, just physical download size, than ours—so that's an issue as well. And those that aren't, in my estimation, their fee structure doesn't really fit the services that they're providing. I don't mind paying somebody to mind the cash register, but the fee structures I've seen so far for some of these independent portals are much more appropriate for somebody who is a true partner. And I haven't really seen that any of them have a big marketplace of buyers that would justify that premium above just minding the store and sending out the download.
I'm keeping an eye out for things that are happening there—it's always possible that Amazon or Apple or WalMart or somebody will step in and kind of bring order to that marketplace the way that Apple did with iTunes, where they kind of set the standard for what music downloading was going to be like—which kind of whipped everything into shape and gave a little clarity when there were a lot of smaller, fragmented sites where policies and so forth weren't real consistent. That would be one possibility that might make things a little easier on the digital distribution side.
Can you give us any idea on what kind of distribution plans you may have for The Broken Hourglass?
Well, one encouraging thing is we have had some interest from a couple of publishers at this point—companies that are willing to at least consider taking a chance on an outfit like ours, which is very encouraging. We'll see how that goes. If nothing happens there, or even if it does but there are certain regions that aren't taken care of, we're certainly ready and willing to do our own direct distribution. I am not proud—I will put labels on envelopes and send things out.
I'm interested in digital distribution—I've been a little discouraged about what I've seen in terms of the existing digital distribution options. There are sites out there which cater to digital distribution of the kind of retail, so-called triple-A titles—and so probably aren't necessarily appropriate for us. And then those which do cater more towards the independent game and the independent gamer—most of those are in the casual game space, and casual games tend to be a lot smaller, just physical download size, than ours—so that's an issue as well. And those that aren't, in my estimation, their fee structure doesn't really fit the services that they're providing. I don't mind paying somebody to mind the cash register, but the fee structures I've seen so far for some of these independent portals are much more appropriate for somebody who is a true partner. And I haven't really seen that any of them have a big marketplace of buyers that would justify that premium above just minding the store and sending out the download.
I'm keeping an eye out for things that are happening there—it's always possible that Amazon or Apple or WalMart or somebody will step in and kind of bring order to that marketplace the way that Apple did with iTunes, where they kind of set the standard for what music downloading was going to be like—which kind of whipped everything into shape and gave a little clarity when there were a lot of smaller, fragmented sites where policies and so forth weren't real consistent. That would be one possibility that might make things a little easier on the digital distribution side.
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