This week I was contacted by a person I have never met before by the name of Jonathan Nadeau to do an interview on his podcast. Apparently he found me on thegamecrafter.com where my game Camp Nightmare is available to buy and decided that he wanted to chat with me about the game and share it with the world.
What a strange and wonderful world we live in that things like this just happen! The internet!
Today we did the interview. That itself was pretty much what you would expect as we spent half an hour talking about the way the game plays, how the theme works, and what is cool or unique about it.
The podcast can be found here: http://nadeaumedia.com/category/pixels-and-pirates/
The podcast featuring me isn't there yet, but it will be sometime in the next week or so. If you like the idea of podcasts about indie games feel free to browse - I can't say much about it as I haven't listened to much of it but learning about all kinds of new games seems entertaining.
The sorts of questions the host asked were definitely familiar to me. I have talked about the game to all kinds of people so it was easy to do that again in a slightly different setting. I enjoyed the chat as I like talking about how the game plays and why I made it that way.
It turns out that Jonathan is also working on launching a new website that aims to bring together a community of people interested in new games. The idea would be that they would feature a new game every day, help the author promote it, and take a cut of the gross orders.
This is one of those ideas that I think is cool and a lot of people I know might be interested in it. Unfortunately I don't think the financials make any sense for me. If I took part I would still have to order my copies from thegamecrafter.com, take delivery, then ship them out again to all the people who order. At $35 a pop for the game, plus $10 to deliver, plus the cut for the website, I would need to sell them at $50 each just to break even. The game doesn't have that much in it so I would be surprised if I could get significant orders at that value, and even then I am taking risks and making zero profit for a considerable amount of work.
Lots of work for no pay seems like a poor deal.
If I sold them for $60 a pop I could make money, but only if nothing goes wrong, and $60 for a small game like that is a real stretch, especially when you can just order it directly from thegamecrafter.com for cheaper than you order it from me.
It seems to me that if I really wanted to do a ton of work I could use this opportunity to possibly get my game into the hands of a few more people - perhaps dozens, perhaps hundreds. But that just isn't so appealing to me. I am happy that the game exists, and increasing the copies in existence from 100 to 200 doesn't change my life or happiness in any way. If I could change that 100 value to 100,000 then we would be talking! Even ignoring the money that would have a real impact.
So while I like the idea of the website I don't think it is a good idea for me to get involved in it, except possibly as a customer.
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