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Crispy™ Puppygames developer goes postal... and pretends he's totally calm.

Metro

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Massive rant... err... excuse me... 'essay' from him:

There are unwritten taboos on the internet. There are things you Don’t Say. There are replies you may not give. There are comments you may not make. There are truths you may not tell, in the world of public relations, for the public are fickle, and behave as a mob. A mob in all its feral, brutal depravity, lacking any and all of the qualities we laud upon humanity that allow us to feel so smug over all of the hapless animals that we raise ourselves over. And we are all, whether we admit it or not in public, under strict censorship of the mob. Even admitting that the mob censors our thoughts and feelings and the expression thereof is risky. Be careful! The mob may notice.


Some parts of the internet glory in the mob. 4chan exists, possibly, only as an outlet for the mob. Even mentioning 4chan is risky. It’s like standing in a city full of ravenous zombies, armed with a lowly fire axe, and shouting “BRAINS! HERE! GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE HOT!”. If too many zombies notice, you’re toast. They’ll silence you. So we don’t mention 4chan. For similar reasons we don’t mention /r/Games either.

We’re especially careful in comments sections on the internet. Our own blog is mercilessly and ruthlessly moderated with a low-orbit ion cannon. We’re even more ruthless on the Steam community forums, because we’ve got even less control and they don’t even technically belong to us.

But let me talk to you about the dark side of indie public relations a bit.

There’s a thing on the internet called a “troll”, which everyone is well familiar with. They are easily dealt with on your own bit of the internet. Quite often you let them ramble on, and they spool out more than enough rope to hang themselves, and as often as not, a bunch of fans will come whaling in on them. Even if fans don’t step in, usually they have left a lovely permanent record of how twatty they were for all to read. And if it’s just a bit too rude, you just vape ‘em, and probably ban ‘em for good measure.

Trolls are more problematic elsewhere.

When a troll starts to spout shit on some high-profile and influential site on the internet, you have a problem. It’s a very thorny problem because even discussion about the fact that it is a problem is license for the rest of the internet to start trolling you. It has been said that the best way to deal with trolls is of course, not to bait them, but unfortunately they can leave some fairly high-profile bullshit lying around on the internet referring to you, and that’s pretty difficult to deal with when it’s attached to your permanent and public facing persona as an invidual and/or a business. If it was just some random argument on some random site between a couple of random usernames… who cares? Who gives a crap? No-one. And all is well.

But woe betide you if you actually have to step in and reply and say, “Er… no. That is not true.” Especially when it’s the species of troll which plays computer games all day long.

So here are a few things you can’t say, because it upsets everyone. A lot. And I’m going to say them, in a way that will make you think for a few seconds, before you immediately burst into flames with RAGE and spew vitriol into the moderation queue.

Firstly, gamers aren’t very nice people. Yes, you. You are not a very nice person. Statistically speaking. By which I mean, independent game developers get more nasty shit from gamers than they get praise. Right now you are preparing to lecture me about how I talk to customers, or how I deserve to be broke and unsucessful. If you’re feeling particularly sanctimonious you’ll tell me you’re never going to buy any of our games again. If you’re especially spiteful you’ll also tell me that you were about to buy one of our games (for a dollar! ho ho), but now you’re not going to.

I wonder just how many other creative industries have to deal with customers like this. Then again, maybe all of them do. I just make games, so I happen to know about the games side of things. Maybe a musician can chime in and tell me how shitty people can be. Or an artist.

No matter. What does matter is you’re not allowed to point out when someone is just being a shithead to you because they can. Don’t do that. The internet hates you.

Secondly, there is a school of thought that says, there’s no such thing as bad press. Were I being politically correct right now and toeing the party line I would instantly disagree with myself. “NO! Do not argue with the trolls! You make yourself look bad!” And indeed, the internet will be right there to tell you, directly or snidely and indirectly that you’re making yourself look bad by defending yourself. Look at fucking Phil Fish! LOOK! Look at what happened to him! We all remember Phil Fish in sad, reverential tones, as he were an allegory of How Not To Handle The Internet. Poor Phil, we say. He meant well but he lost his cool. He let the internet bring out his naughty, bad side. The side that spoke what he actually thought and felt. Look what the internet did to him! Now he’s a gibbering bearded recluse used as a cautionary tale in two-bit backwater indie game developer blogs. If only Phil had kept his mouth shut, we say. If only Phil hadn’t fed the trolls, we intone. If only.

If only.

Fuck that! Phil Fish, you fucking told them what you thought. You told them how you felt. You told them the actual score. What was actually going on. The internet however decided it didn’t want to hear it, because the internet is mob and the wisdom of crowds is inversely proportional to the square if its size. But deep down we all know, really, that Phil Fish was right. He said what we were all thinking. He said what we want to say. But you can’t do that. It’s taboo. It’s censored! Not allowed.

But this leads us to another, darker, nastier, unwritten thing, that we all think but we don’t talk about, not ever. In fact the one time I ever did allude to it I was permanently banned from the TIGSource forums for daring to say it. But this is my piece of the internet and I can say what I like. And here it is – the bombshell. The more we argue, the more we bait the trolls, the more we seem to get into a death spiral of internet hate… the better it is for us. There is no such thing as bad publicity. Phil Fish may have turned in to a gibbering bearded recluse but now he’s a famous gibbering bearded recluse. Phil Fish only has to tweet a fart and it’ll be all over the internet. Given that discovery is the #1 problem for an indie developer (and always has been), you can see that the more infamous and terrible we are … the more money we make.

But it’s absolutely, utterly fucking forbidden to ever say so.

Good old Phil is sitting pretty on a giant mound of cash the likes of which you will probably not even be able to comprehend, let alone earn in your lifetime. For every one of you that enjoyed denigrating him and thrilled at insulting him, there are now another thousand people who listen to every word he says. When he walks into the restaurant where you pitifully scrub the floor like a servile wretch in order to pay for DLC in DOTA2, you’ll call him sir.

And lastly, the worst, most hideous truth at all, and there’s a bit of history behind it.

You are worthless to us.

What? Did he just say that? I? Your fucking customer? You just said your customers were worthless! Fuck you!!!!11!1!! I’m never buying anything from you again! I’m even going to uninstall all your games you ignorant self-important cunt! How dare you speak to me, your customer, like that?

Woah there, inflamed of Tunbridge Wells. Let’s just rewind a second and analyse that statement for a moment. How did we get here? Let me count the ways.

Once upon a time, back in the early 2000s or so, games would sell for about $20 or so. Some developers did really well at that price point – I mean really well. Most of us didn’t do that well, and made beer money, but we carried on making games anyway because that’s what we liked to do, even if nobody wanted them. When we got a customer we were able to treat them like royalty. Apart from there not being that many of them, twenty bucks is a pretty reasonable chunk of money and you should damned well expect it to work properly. Of course, 99% of the time, when things didn’t work it was just because the customer had shitty OEM drivers that were simply broken. (Interestingly I don’t ever hear of people taking their laptops back to the shop – which remember cost $500 or more – and yelling at the salesmen for selling them something that didn’t work). So what would happen was we spent a not insignificant proportion of our time – time which we could have been making new games in and thus actually earning a living – fixing customers computers. Note that we weren’t fixing our game. We were fixing customers computers for them. It’s a pretty tedious affair. When the same problem turns up 20 times in a day (or even, during a sale, 200 times), and the answer is always the same, that’s the very definition of tedium. So we jokingly used to say that we sold you a game for a dollar and then $19 of support. That’s actually pretty close to accurate when you work out the time spent fixing someone’s computer for them. We relied on enough sales going through without problems to come out on top slightly, though the reality was that we never actually did.

Then Steam came (and to a lesser extent, Big Fish Games).

Things changed fast. So fast that in other industries it would have been seen as a cataclymically disruptive event. The upshot of it is, within 5 short years, the value of an independent game plummeted from about $20 to approximately $1, with very few exceptions. Steam is great! You can sell loads of games! But only if they’re less than $10. Technically Valve don’t actually dictate the prices we charge. Actually, they do. Utterly. It’s just not talked about. In fact technically, I don’t think anyone’s allowed to talk about it.

Then came the Humble Bundle and all its little imitators.

It was another cataclysmically disruptive event, so soon on the heels of the last. Suddenly you’ve got a massive problem on your hands. You’ve sold 40,000 games! But you’ve only made enough money to survive full-time for two weeks because you’re selling them for 10 cents each. And several hundred new customers suddenly want their computers fixing for free. And when the dust from all the bundles has settled you’re left with a market expectation of games now that means you can only sell them for a dollar. That’s how much we sell our games for. One dollar. They’re meant to be $10, but nobody buys them at $10. They buy them when a 90% discount coupon lands in their Steam inventory. We survive only by the grace of 90% coupon drops, which are of course entirely under Valve’s control. It doesn’t matter how much marketing we do now, because Valve control our drip feed.

Where does this lead us to?

You are worthless to us.

Where once you were worth $20, and then you might have become a fan and bought another 4 games off of us for $20, you were worth $100. We only had to fix your computer for you once, as well, so the next four games amortised the cost of the initial support. If we were lucky you were a gamer and already had drivers and liked our stuff and bought the lot. Sometimes you’d tell your friends and maybe one of them would buy a game from us.

But now?

Now you’re worth $1 to us. If you buy every one of our games, you’re worth $5. After Valve and the tax man and the bank take their cuts, you’re not even worth half a cup of coffee. So, while we’re obsequiously polite and helpful when you do contact us for support, even if it’s just the same old “please install some actual video drivers” response, you really should be aware that you are a dead loss. Even if you buy everything we ever make again. Even if all your friends buy everything we ever make again. You just cost us money. Not just fictitious, huge-piles-of-filthy-lucre indie-game-developer who made-it-big money. All our money. We barely scratch a living, like most indie game developers. You quite literally cost us lunch because the shop sold you a computer with broken software on it.

So you’ll understand now why customers aren’t worth anything much any more. You’ll realise why we’re actually happy to see you go if you feel like insulting us. You might add two and two together and realise that for four, we’re not going to cry ourselves to sleep over the loss of your custom when we don’t take your shit.

But we’re not allowed to say it, because it makes customers feel bad. Customers all think they’re worth everything in the entire world to us. The funny thing is, you are. Without customers, we’re dead in the water, homeless and living in a cardboard box outside Berko sewage plant. But individually, you’re like ants. And all of developers secretly know it and don’t talk about it. You’re not worth supporting. It’s far, far better to completely, totally ignore support, if you want to make a living. Developers don’t like to talk about it, and they certainly don’t want to make customers aware of it. Some developers right now are bristling with public-relation-inflating indignation, waiting to burst into my castle in shining white armour championing the cause of their customers, and how they treat their customers like royalty still. But I know, and they know, they’re only doing that because it’s actually yet more Dark Side of Public Relations. It’s a lie. The numbers do not add up. I’ll show you where they do add up – on Steam, on the App Store, on Big Fish, on Google Play. That’s where all of the money is going these days, great sucking, black holes, spewing out tat on their event horizons and hoovering up pennies from wallets worldwide. You can yell about how important you are into the black hole if you like. No-one cares. You can “take your money elsewhere” and “never buy another product from you again, EVER”, and the black hole will continue to treat you exactly as you deserve – with impassive, voracious, inexorable silence, and still ever-growing. Because you’re worthless.

Does anyone think we wanted it to happen this way? Seriously?

Don’t talk about it though. It wouldn’t do to let anyone talk about it. 4chan are coming. I’m going to get my head down and keep writing games, because that’s what I like doing. PR sucks.

http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574#more-1574

Then, despite being above the metaphorical fray, he dives into the comments at RPS and argues with 'trolls' who he constantly reminds they aren't worth his time... by spending more and more time responding to them.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/18/puppygames-battledroid-basingstoke/
 
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Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-sjw-ist-verboten.57009/page-897#post-3441237

Auditing the beg auditor.
Excellent reading though. I remember Revenge of the Titans in some bundle fodder, but I didn't even play it.

The butthurt level is amazing, my favourite part.

Good old Phil is sitting pretty on a giant mound of cash the likes of which you will probably not even be able to comprehend, let alone earn in your lifetime. For every one of you that enjoyed denigrating him and thrilled at insulting him, there are now another thousand people who listen to every word he says. When he walks into the restaurant where you pitifully scrub the floor like a servile wretch in order to pay for DLC in DOTA2, you’ll call him sir.

The werewolf man is a role model. What is amazing he made some good amount of cash on it. Steam sales are killing our industry! Self contradicting itself. If your game is good it will sell, it's that simple, but let's blame internet trolls for everything, that's convenient.
 

Trash

Pointing and laughing.
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Revenge of the Titans is actually pretty kewl. They also made a Galaxian clone that I enjoyed as well. Seems they fucked up with the finances and are going down. Not wierd that evokes a meltdown, though I'd say he got better things to do than talk smack on the internet.

And they did fuck it up themselves. Their games sold reasonably well and got more than decent reviews. Probably overreached and ran out of steam.
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
the ranting works, sales increases.
ur all suckers for spreading his marketing.
 

Stefan Vujovic

Educated
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Feb 6, 2013
Messages
93
Internet is really a foul place to be, while you can certainly meet some nice and interesting people, 99% are insecure mom closet fag boys, especially that one faggot who is so mad cause he could a have payed 1c for a game(fucking ONE cent)... Am totally with puppy games on this one, and i would a have done the same, there is some things money just cant buy and its called self integrity, and fuck that "you are a poor salesman" spin, they are game makers for niche markets anyway, and their games are much more worth then peanut money they are forced to sell them for...

Just try to imagine how does it feel from a developer side that the game you spent 2 years making is selling trough some humble bundle bullshit on day 1. And then that same costumers expect that you treat them as royalty, as some precious asset, fuck that i'll treat them as they deserve, a fucking freeloaders trash...
 

Angthoron

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Messages
13,056
Just try to imagine how does it feel from a developer side that the game you spent 2 years making is selling trough some humble bundle bullshit on day 1. And then that same costumers expect that you treat them as royalty, as some precious asset, fuck that i'll treat them as they deserve, a fucking freeloaders trash...

Hey, guess who it was that put those games on Humble Bundle? Hint: Starts with Puppy, ends with Games.
 

Stefan Vujovic

Educated
Joined
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Messages
93
Just try to imagine how does it feel from a developer side that the game you spent 2 years making is selling trough some humble bundle bullshit on day 1. And then that same costumers expect that you treat them as royalty, as some precious asset, fuck that i'll treat them as they deserve, a fucking freeloaders trash...

Hey, guess who it was that put those games on Humble Bundle? Hint: Starts with Puppy, ends with Games.

Uhhh, hmmm, can i get another hint?

You are missing the point, hes doing it solely to survive, and those ungrateful fucks are expecting a lot of in return for 1cent... Being a customer is overrated...
 

Angthoron

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
13,056
Just try to imagine how does it feel from a developer side that the game you spent 2 years making is selling trough some humble bundle bullshit on day 1. And then that same costumers expect that you treat them as royalty, as some precious asset, fuck that i'll treat them as they deserve, a fucking freeloaders trash...

Hey, guess who it was that put those games on Humble Bundle? Hint: Starts with Puppy, ends with Games.

Uhhh, hmmm, can i get another hint?

You are missing the point, hes doing it solely to survive, and those ungrateful fucks are expecting a lot of in return for 1cent... Being a customer is overrated...
Oh, really? Was he forced to put a game in beta to that bundle as well? I distinctly remember some unfinished games in it. You know what that is? That's undermining your own business. There's been a whole bunch of devs that delivered quality games without resorting to this sort of behaviour - Gunpoint, for example, and Banished. How did Terraria make millions? "Devs got lucky"? Fuck no. For starters, they didn't put their games into a bundle before the games were ever heard of by general population.

And yeah, there's people that way 1 cent. Sure. There's also people that pay a lot more, pay some attention to "Average donations" in HB - are they 1 cent? No, they're usually ~7 kwabux for PC, and higher for all other platforms.

If you don't like being a customer, go back to TPB. I like putting my money to things I think are promising. Hell, I just dumped 15 kwabux on Dex because I'd like the devs to succeed - 15 kwabux I might've dropped on Puppy's swan song if the guy didn't decide to be a dick to his own audience.
 
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Secondly, there is a school of thought that says, there’s no such thing as bad press. Were I being politically correct right now and toeing the party line I would instantly disagree with myself. “NO! Do not argue with the trolls! You make yourself look bad!” And indeed, the internet will be right there to tell you, directly or snidely and indirectly that you’re making yourself look bad by defending yourself. Look at fucking Phil Fish! LOOK! Look at what happened to him! We all remember Phil Fish in sad, reverential tones, as he were an allegory of How Not To Handle The Internet. Poor Phil, we say. He meant well but he lost his cool. He let the internet bring out his naughty, bad side. The side that spoke what he actually thought and felt. Look what the internet did to him! Now he’s a gibbering bearded recluse used as a cautionary tale in two-bit backwater indie game developer blogs. If only Phil had kept his mouth shut, we say. If only Phil hadn’t fed the trolls, we intone. If only.

If only.

Fuck that! Phil Fish, you fucking told them what you thought. You told them how you felt. You told them the actual score. What was actually going on. The internet however decided it didn’t want to hear it, because the internet is mob and the wisdom of crowds is inversely proportional to the square if its size. But deep down we all know, really, that Phil Fish was right. He said what we were all thinking. He said what we want to say. But you can’t do that. It’s taboo. It’s censored! Not allowed.

Actually Phil lashed out in the most fucktarded way possible. He still is, if his recent tweets are any indication.

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2014/08/19/fez-2-will-never-happen/

Phil Fish Says People Don’t Deserve Fez 2, It’ll Never Happen


August 19, 2014

Written by Zarmena Khan



Just a year after announcing the cancellation of Fez 2, Phil Fish has taken to Twitter again to reiterate that a sequel to the critically-acclaimed puzzle platformer will “never” happen.


Seriously, shut the f*** up about Fez 2. never going to happen. you don’t deserve it.

Developer Polytron announced Fez 2 during the Horizon Conference last June. A month later, Fish announced the game’s cancellation and his decision to quit the video games industry owing to the “abuse” that he had received.


Fez II is cancelled. i am done. i take the money and i run. this is as much as i can stomach. this is isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. you win.


The outburst prompted Cliff Bleszinkski to write an open letter to Fish, asking him to reconsider his decision.

[Source: Twitter via IGN]

If only Phil stopped being retarded. If only...
 
In My Safe Space
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Codex 2012
And yeah, there's people that way 1 cent. Sure. There's also people that pay a lot more, pay some attention to "Average donations" in HB - are they 1 cent? No, they're usually ~7 kwabux for PC, and higher for all other platforms.
(7 USD - charity, - bundle tip)/10 games. That would be about 0,5 USD per game.

15 kwabux I might've dropped on Puppy's swan song if the guy didn't decide to be a dick to his own audience.
How was he a dick towards his own audience? By letting them know that their choice of how much to pay has influence on their importance as individual customers?

By the way, I think I got Revenge of Titans in one of the bundles. I need to see what it's all about.
 

Telengard

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Just try to imagine how does it feel from a developer side that the game you spent 2 years making is selling trough some humble bundle bullshit on day 1. And then that same costumers expect that you treat them as royalty, as some precious asset, fuck that i'll treat them as they deserve, a fucking freeloaders trash...

Hey, guess who it was that put those games on Humble Bundle? Hint: Starts with Puppy, ends with Games.

Uhhh, hmmm, can i get another hint?

You are missing the point, hes doing it solely to survive, and those ungrateful fucks are expecting a lot of in return for 1cent... Being a customer is overrated...
Any halfway decent - hell, even a kinda sucky - marketer will tell you not to go from full price to 99% sale! in one day. That's pants-on-head retarded stuff. Not only are you undermining yourself, you just pissed off every single person who bought full price. Because not only did one just undermine the value of one's business with that retard move, one just undermined the value of the money all full price purchasers paid. All those people just pissed away all of that value on nothing at all. Unless they feel like donating to the developer out of charity, even though it's not a charity but a business. What's more, the value of money is the amount of their life they spent earning in. So, that dev just essentially caused them to piss away a portion of their lives. And did so for no real gain.

If your game sucks and you have no money to do normal things like pay for advertising, and you can't network for beans and so can't start a social buzz, and 10%-20% sales aren't causing any sales because your game doesn't have any unique hook (or just plain sucks), then by all means, go onto a bundle site and get enough buyers to get auto-voted through the Greenlight process. Otherwise, you've got no business bundling.

Back in the 90s, there were game bundles, discount bins, and dump sales. These things are not new, not by any means. And the same rules applied back then as they do now. --Each of those things in its time. You are the company you keep (in a bundle). Every sale (no matter how cheap) is a potential full price sale of a future game, if they like what they found.
 

Angthoron

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Joined
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Messages
13,056
And yeah, there's people that way 1 cent. Sure. There's also people that pay a lot more, pay some attention to "Average donations" in HB - are they 1 cent? No, they're usually ~7 kwabux for PC, and higher for all other platforms.
(7 USD - charity, - bundle tip)/10 games. That would be about 0,5 USD per game.
True. Who holds new devs at a gunpoint to do this, though? Admittedly, I'd have probably never bought Revenge of Titans at all if not for the bundle, but it's my 50 cents vs someone else's 10 dollars if it never went to bundle, how is this a smart move? They could've made a demo, they could've contacted som YT personality, fuck, anything would've been better than dumping beta in a bundle - even free access to beta would probably be a more positive net result.

The whole "let's put it on Humble Bundle" thing was a retarded move.

15 kwabux I might've dropped on Puppy's swan song if the guy didn't decide to be a dick to his own audience.
How was he a dick towards his own audience? By letting them know that their choice of how much to pay has influence on their importance as individual customers?

By the way, I think I got Revenge of Titans in one of the bundles. I need to see what it's all about.
I don't like being guilt-tripped, either I feel interested and pay the full sum or fuck you. I also don't like meltdowns where devs blame everyone but themselves for fucking up. And I've worked with customers long enough to know that you don't try to fucking shame them even if they are a bunch of greedy, stupid bastards. It's just going to bite you in the ass.
 

Raghar

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Massive rant... err... excuse me... 'essay' from him:

There are unwritten taboos on the internet. There are things you Don’t Say. There are replies you may not give. There are comments you may not make. There are truths you may not tell, in the world of public relations, for the public are fickle, and behave as a mob. A mob in all its feral, brutal depravity, lacking any and all of the qualities we laud upon humanity that allow us to feel so smug over all of the hapless animals that we raise ourselves over. And we are all, whether we admit it or not in public, under strict censorship of the mob. Even admitting that the mob censors our thoughts and feelings and the expression thereof is risky. Be careful! The mob may notice.


Some parts of the internet glory in the mob. 4chan exists, possibly, only as an outlet for the mob. Even mentioning 4chan is risky. It’s like standing in a city full of ravenous zombies, armed with a lowly fire axe, and shouting “BRAINS! HERE! GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE HOT!”. If too many zombies notice, you’re toast. They’ll silence you. So we don’t mention 4chan. For similar reasons we don’t mention /r/Games either.

We’re especially careful in comments sections on the internet. Our own blog is mercilessly and ruthlessly moderated with a low-orbit ion cannon. We’re even more ruthless on the Steam community forums, because we’ve got even less control and they don’t even technically belong to us.

But let me talk to you about the dark side of indie public relations a bit.

There’s a thing on the internet called a “troll”, which everyone is well familiar with. They are easily dealt with on your own bit of the internet. Quite often you let them ramble on, and they spool out more than enough rope to hang themselves, and as often as not, a bunch of fans will come whaling in on them. Even if fans don’t step in, usually they have left a lovely permanent record of how twatty they were for all to read. And if it’s just a bit too rude, you just vape ‘em, and probably ban ‘em for good measure.

Trolls are more problematic elsewhere.

When a troll starts to spout shit on some high-profile and influential site on the internet, you have a problem. It’s a very thorny problem because even discussion about the fact that it is a problem is license for the rest of the internet to start trolling you. It has been said that the best way to deal with trolls is of course, not to bait them, but unfortunately they can leave some fairly high-profile bullshit lying around on the internet referring to you, and that’s pretty difficult to deal with when it’s attached to your permanent and public facing persona as an invidual and/or a business. If it was just some random argument on some random site between a couple of random usernames… who cares? Who gives a crap? No-one. And all is well.

But woe betide you if you actually have to step in and reply and say, “Er… no. That is not true.” Especially when it’s the species of troll which plays computer games all day long.

So here are a few things you can’t say, because it upsets everyone. A lot. And I’m going to say them, in a way that will make you think for a few seconds, before you immediately burst into flames with RAGE and spew vitriol into the moderation queue.

Firstly, gamers aren’t very nice people. Yes, you. You are not a very nice person. Statistically speaking. By which I mean, independent game developers get more nasty shit from gamers than they get praise. Right now you are preparing to lecture me about how I talk to customers, or how I deserve to be broke and unsucessful. If you’re feeling particularly sanctimonious you’ll tell me you’re never going to buy any of our games again. If you’re especially spiteful you’ll also tell me that you were about to buy one of our games (for a dollar! ho ho), but now you’re not going to.

I wonder just how many other creative industries have to deal with customers like this. Then again, maybe all of them do. I just make games, so I happen to know about the games side of things. Maybe a musician can chime in and tell me how shitty people can be. Or an artist.

No matter. What does matter is you’re not allowed to point out when someone is just being a shithead to you because they can. Don’t do that. The internet hates you.

Secondly, there is a school of thought that says, there’s no such thing as bad press. Were I being politically correct right now and toeing the party line I would instantly disagree with myself. “NO! Do not argue with the trolls! You make yourself look bad!” And indeed, the internet will be right there to tell you, directly or snidely and indirectly that you’re making yourself look bad by defending yourself. Look at fucking Phil Fish! LOOK! Look at what happened to him! We all remember Phil Fish in sad, reverential tones, as he were an allegory of How Not To Handle The Internet. Poor Phil, we say. He meant well but he lost his cool. He let the internet bring out his naughty, bad side. The side that spoke what he actually thought and felt. Look what the internet did to him! Now he’s a gibbering bearded recluse used as a cautionary tale in two-bit backwater indie game developer blogs. If only Phil had kept his mouth shut, we say. If only Phil hadn’t fed the trolls, we intone. If only.

If only.

Fuck that! Phil Fish, you fucking told them what you thought. You told them how you felt. You told them the actual score. What was actually going on. The internet however decided it didn’t want to hear it, because the internet is mob and the wisdom of crowds is inversely proportional to the square if its size. But deep down we all know, really, that Phil Fish was right. He said what we were all thinking. He said what we want to say. But you can’t do that. It’s taboo. It’s censored! Not allowed.

But this leads us to another, darker, nastier, unwritten thing, that we all think but we don’t talk about, not ever. In fact the one time I ever did allude to it I was permanently banned from the TIGSource forums for daring to say it. But this is my piece of the internet and I can say what I like. And here it is – the bombshell. The more we argue, the more we bait the trolls, the more we seem to get into a death spiral of internet hate… the better it is for us. There is no such thing as bad publicity. Phil Fish may have turned in to a gibbering bearded recluse but now he’s a famous gibbering bearded recluse. Phil Fish only has to tweet a fart and it’ll be all over the internet. Given that discovery is the #1 problem for an indie developer (and always has been), you can see that the more infamous and terrible we are … the more money we make.

But it’s absolutely, utterly fucking forbidden to ever say so.

Good old Phil is sitting pretty on a giant mound of cash the likes of which you will probably not even be able to comprehend, let alone earn in your lifetime. For every one of you that enjoyed denigrating him and thrilled at insulting him, there are now another thousand people who listen to every word he says. When he walks into the restaurant where you pitifully scrub the floor like a servile wretch in order to pay for DLC in DOTA2, you’ll call him sir.

And lastly, the worst, most hideous truth at all, and there’s a bit of history behind it.

You are worthless to us.

What? Did he just say that? I? Your fucking customer? You just said your customers were worthless! Fuck you!!!!11!1!! I’m never buying anything from you again! I’m even going to uninstall all your games you ignorant self-important cunt! How dare you speak to me, your customer, like that?

Woah there, inflamed of Tunbridge Wells. Let’s just rewind a second and analyse that statement for a moment. How did we get here? Let me count the ways.

Once upon a time, back in the early 2000s or so, games would sell for about $20 or so. Some developers did really well at that price point – I mean really well. Most of us didn’t do that well, and made beer money, but we carried on making games anyway because that’s what we liked to do, even if nobody wanted them. When we got a customer we were able to treat them like royalty. Apart from there not being that many of them, twenty bucks is a pretty reasonable chunk of money and you should damned well expect it to work properly. Of course, 99% of the time, when things didn’t work it was just because the customer had shitty OEM drivers that were simply broken. (Interestingly I don’t ever hear of people taking their laptops back to the shop – which remember cost $500 or more – and yelling at the salesmen for selling them something that didn’t work). So what would happen was we spent a not insignificant proportion of our time – time which we could have been making new games in and thus actually earning a living – fixing customers computers. Note that we weren’t fixing our game. We were fixing customers computers for them. It’s a pretty tedious affair. When the same problem turns up 20 times in a day (or even, during a sale, 200 times), and the answer is always the same, that’s the very definition of tedium. So we jokingly used to say that we sold you a game for a dollar and then $19 of support. That’s actually pretty close to accurate when you work out the time spent fixing someone’s computer for them. We relied on enough sales going through without problems to come out on top slightly, though the reality was that we never actually did.

Then Steam came (and to a lesser extent, Big Fish Games).

Things changed fast. So fast that in other industries it would have been seen as a cataclymically disruptive event. The upshot of it is, within 5 short years, the value of an independent game plummeted from about $20 to approximately $1, with very few exceptions. Steam is great! You can sell loads of games! But only if they’re less than $10. Technically Valve don’t actually dictate the prices we charge. Actually, they do. Utterly. It’s just not talked about. In fact technically, I don’t think anyone’s allowed to talk about it.

Then came the Humble Bundle and all its little imitators.

It was another cataclysmically disruptive event, so soon on the heels of the last. Suddenly you’ve got a massive problem on your hands. You’ve sold 40,000 games! But you’ve only made enough money to survive full-time for two weeks because you’re selling them for 10 cents each. And several hundred new customers suddenly want their computers fixing for free. And when the dust from all the bundles has settled you’re left with a market expectation of games now that means you can only sell them for a dollar. That’s how much we sell our games for. One dollar. They’re meant to be $10, but nobody buys them at $10. They buy them when a 90% discount coupon lands in their Steam inventory. We survive only by the grace of 90% coupon drops, which are of course entirely under Valve’s control. It doesn’t matter how much marketing we do now, because Valve control our drip feed.

Where does this lead us to?

You are worthless to us.

Where once you were worth $20, and then you might have become a fan and bought another 4 games off of us for $20, you were worth $100. We only had to fix your computer for you once, as well, so the next four games amortised the cost of the initial support. If we were lucky you were a gamer and already had drivers and liked our stuff and bought the lot. Sometimes you’d tell your friends and maybe one of them would buy a game from us.

But now?

Now you’re worth $1 to us. If you buy every one of our games, you’re worth $5. After Valve and the tax man and the bank take their cuts, you’re not even worth half a cup of coffee. So, while we’re obsequiously polite and helpful when you do contact us for support, even if it’s just the same old “please install some actual video drivers” response, you really should be aware that you are a dead loss. Even if you buy everything we ever make again. Even if all your friends buy everything we ever make again. You just cost us money. Not just fictitious, huge-piles-of-filthy-lucre indie-game-developer who made-it-big money. All our money. We barely scratch a living, like most indie game developers. You quite literally cost us lunch because the shop sold you a computer with broken software on it.

So you’ll understand now why customers aren’t worth anything much any more. You’ll realise why we’re actually happy to see you go if you feel like insulting us. You might add two and two together and realise that for four, we’re not going to cry ourselves to sleep over the loss of your custom when we don’t take your shit.

But we’re not allowed to say it, because it makes customers feel bad. Customers all think they’re worth everything in the entire world to us. The funny thing is, you are. Without customers, we’re dead in the water, homeless and living in a cardboard box outside Berko sewage plant. But individually, you’re like ants. And all of developers secretly know it and don’t talk about it. You’re not worth supporting. It’s far, far better to completely, totally ignore support, if you want to make a living. Developers don’t like to talk about it, and they certainly don’t want to make customers aware of it. Some developers right now are bristling with public-relation-inflating indignation, waiting to burst into my castle in shining white armour championing the cause of their customers, and how they treat their customers like royalty still. But I know, and they know, they’re only doing that because it’s actually yet more Dark Side of Public Relations. It’s a lie. The numbers do not add up. I’ll show you where they do add up – on Steam, on the App Store, on Big Fish, on Google Play. That’s where all of the money is going these days, great sucking, black holes, spewing out tat on their event horizons and hoovering up pennies from wallets worldwide. You can yell about how important you are into the black hole if you like. No-one cares. You can “take your money elsewhere” and “never buy another product from you again, EVER”, and the black hole will continue to treat you exactly as you deserve – with impassive, voracious, inexorable silence, and still ever-growing. Because you’re worthless.

Does anyone think we wanted it to happen this way? Seriously?

Don’t talk about it though. It wouldn’t do to let anyone talk about it. 4chan are coming. I’m going to get my head down and keep writing games, because that’s what I like doing. PR sucks.

http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574#more-1574

Then, despite being above the metaphorical fray, he dives into the comments at RPS and argues with 'trolls' who he constantly reminds they aren't worth his time... by spending more and more time responding to them.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/18/puppygames-battledroid-basingstoke/
So he has a social life. That's nice of him, asocial wouldn't give a shit.
 

Cromwell

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2013
Messages
5,443
Also he rants that people treat him like shit for a game he sels for a cent and a hug, he never thinks about that he treats himself like a worthless fuck for setting the game up for that price. When I see a bundle and I see a Game in it that I can get for a cent, a game of which I never heard before I automatically assume its bundle trash. That maybe unfair to some games but my reasoning is simple, if the developer doesnt think the game is worth more why should I? It may be different by games that start at 20 or ten and then land in promotional bundles, i treat that as a lucky day for me to get a game this cheap for which I would have spend more.

If you dont have the self respect to treat yourself a little better and think better of your own work you can go ahead and fuck yourself. That behaviour is like bending over to the worst kidns of customers and after getting fucked complain that they dont invite you to dinner.
 

Cromwell

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2013
Messages
5,443
I can has tl;dr?

:kittypic:


Dev Put up Game on Hobo Bundle for a cent, rants about that he only gets 40 thousand cents. Then goes on to complain about how cstmrs are all worthless because they pay only the asking price. then he cries about trolls.
 
In My Safe Space
Joined
Dec 11, 2009
Messages
21,899
Codex 2012
And yeah, there's people that way 1 cent. Sure. There's also people that pay a lot more, pay some attention to "Average donations" in HB - are they 1 cent? No, they're usually ~7 kwabux for PC, and higher for all other platforms.
(7 USD - charity, - bundle tip)/10 games. That would be about 0,5 USD per game.
True. Who holds new devs at a gunpoint to do this, though? Admittedly, I'd have probably never bought Revenge of Titans at all if not for the bundle, but it's my 50 cents vs someone else's 10 dollars if it never went to bundle, how is this a smart move? They could've made a demo, they could've contacted som YT personality, fuck, anything would've been better than dumping beta in a bundle - even free access to beta would probably be a more positive net result.

The whole "let's put it on Humble Bundle" thing was a retarded move.
Possibly.

I don't like being guilt-tripped, either I feel interested and pay the full sum or fuck you. I also don't like meltdowns where devs blame everyone but themselves for fucking up. And I've worked with customers long enough to know that you don't try to fucking shame them even if they are a bunch of greedy, stupid bastards. It's just going to bite you in the ass.
Why guilt-tripped? He just says how it is. The article contains a lot of interesting information about how stuff works - about 1 vs. 1000s internet fights and how market changes with lower game prices influence stuff like support and how sales caused these games to be bought almost exclusively during sales nowadays.

Ah wait, you're customer service scum? Goodbye, alien.
 

Stefan Vujovic

Educated
Joined
Feb 6, 2013
Messages
93
Basically what he said is i won't take false criticism from someone who is furious for paying a 9$(even although game is worth much more ) for a game he could pay 1 cent, and then bunch of self righteous "customer is always right" assholes started bombarding him how badly he is handling his business... Even what's more interesting is how the indie teams are the ones least to fuck you over, and their games have best buck for value, yet most of them get crucified for telling the truth.

Some serious butt hurt over momma's boys not being special customers...
 

Cromwell

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2013
Messages
5,443
Why guilt-tripped? He just says how it is. The article contains a lot of interesting information about how stuff works - about 1 vs. 1000s internet fights and how market changes with lower game prices influence stuff like support and how sales caused these games to be bought almost exclusively during sales nowadays.

Ah wait, you're customer service scum? Goodbye, alien.

Where exactly did he give vauable information? Customers are always worthless pieces of shit who know nothing about anything, and you never say that directly to them. The Point still stands if his game isnt good enough to get more money then one fucking dollar i wasnt good enough to get 20 dollar when he was able to charge them. He lets i sound like he is forced to compete against this onslought of good games but its only a mass of games which arent worth 20 dollars, and because theres so many of them now he isnt able to charge 20 any more. Who would have thought that its far ore difficult to develop a game then just shitout some 8 pixels and call it a day, who would have thought that even if youre game is really good it wont sell itself you have to do something more.


Nobody forces him to put his fucking early acess beta alpha shit on the humble bundle and be done with it, maybe it would have been a good Idea to actually finish it and promote it, I dont know if its any good, maybe it is. But If he ddoesnt see the worth of the product and pups it out for a dollar why should the cstmr be any diferet? Theres a reason ape fanboys think apple is superior and the price is part of that reason, a reason for which it doesnt even really matter if the product itself is superior.

Also ithout his customers he will go bankcrupt. So they may be worth only 1 dollar to him, but since he is content with 1 dollar per game he alsos ays "im a fag whos live is only worth one dollar"


Basically what he said is i won't take false criticism from someone who is furious for paying a 9$(even although game is worth much more ) for a game he could pay 1 cent, and then bunch of self righteous "customer is always right" assholes started bombarding him how badly he is handling his business... Even what's more interesting is how the indie teams are the ones least to fuck you over, and their games have best buck for value, yet most of them get crucified for telling the truth.

Some serious butt hurt over momma's boys not being special customers...

Nobody said customers need special treatment, and he is right that he cant give special service if the product went out for a dollar. But he is the one who decided to do that, not the customer, and a customer is always an asshole. But hes an asshole you need.
 

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