Ok people, today is apparently rant day, so please bear with me.
I understand that you want to sell your software and to do so you want to give out free trials. This makes perfect sense to me, as a developer. What I don't accept is how you do so with deceit and trickery. Come on people. When you offer a limited function version, you need to say that right away.
In the last 48 hours, I installed three short-cut game developer packages. You know, those apps that say "Use us to make mobile apps and we'll make all the cross-platform junk for you!" Yes, I'm actually a developer, but I was really curious to see these bundlers in action, and also because I was curious if point and drag development could make something as full-featured and fun as standard.
Yeah well instead of seeing either of those things, and being able to make a happy little review on them next week, I'm going to have some fun lambasting them here, by name. I want to preface this by stating that all three of these packages advertised that they were free and gave you the ability to cross-develop, and all included iOS, Android, HTML5, and more. Seems they all had one thing in common, trickery.
Let's start with GameMaker Studio from YoYo Games. It looks very promising, with the ability to start developing right away with what appeared to be rather intuitive options, though it did take me a few minutes to figure out how to zoom in/out on my canvas. Then I noticed that it was set to HTML5 in the type, and I wanted to set it to Android, the environment I wanted to test. I click android and get a "oh no, you need to download that plugin" kind of alert, with a link on it. Fine. Well I follow the link and see the pricing page. Full version software (Which I assume is needed to install the plugins) was $99, and that's not counting the plugins. iOS was $199 and Android was $199... that's five hundred dollars just to do what they told me I could do for free before I started!
Now let's talk about Construct 2 from Scirra. Once again, the interface was clean, though it was a bit confusing as the "Browse examples" button opened explorer showing me lots of examples that doubleclicking didn't open, I had to try dragging it off the explorer window onto the canvas which loaded it, but then I got a jQuery error when I tried to run it. So the software was a little buggy, it happens. But again, I went into more detail to try and export into Android and sure enough, please buy the full version. Small print later told me about the fact that I had to upgrade to "Personal" for $120, or "Business" for $400 to export to mobile devices, which was the whole sales pitch of the product in the first place.
Finally GameSalad. This one I heard about long ago but remembered in the back of my mind so I thought I'd check them out after being let down twice. This time I was more careful and just perused the website. Go ahead, look at it. Right of the front page, on the left: Create Games Rapidly, Drag & Drop, no Code - Download Creator for Free - Develop and publish on all major platforms, then it showed icons for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android.. the usual suspects. Did you hear "try our free version" anywhere in there? Did you get the idea that the download it's offering you can't actually publish on most of those listed platforms? No, in the top right corner of the page, there's a tiny little icon that says "go pro" and that takes you to the page that tells you that the pro version is $300 a year. (This one DID allow iOS dev on the free version, to be fair)
There you go, three examples of why I'm pissed off this morning. Yes, I looked back at the steam pages for the first two and after scrolling past all the descriptions, right above the comments I saw the small print that mentioned that the version that was free didn't actually do anything but these other versions that cost money did, but I am very frustrated that I needed to look down to the small print to see the "All important advertised features not available in this version" note.
So yeah, people, please. I'm not asking you to stop making trimmed down versions of your software, just be honest in what someone's spending their time getting.
I think where this is the biggest issue is "shortcut" software - something that suggests it can do something very difficult with minimal effort. Game design is tough. Developing for a single platform is tough. How can they make game design for multiple platforms easy?
ReplyDeleteHonestly, and without looking at the apps you mentioned, I'd be very surprised if they did a tenth of what they say they do. Past experience has taught me that all shortcuts are a scam. There is no shortcut to game design, coding, marriage, the top of the corporate ladder, wealth, or the ice cream shop. Anything worth having is worth working for. And the harder your work at it, the better it's going to be.
But I'm just a misanthropic curmudgeon with a seething pit of hate where my heart should be. So I might be biased ;)
By that definition, all software is "shortcut" software if you're not coding in assembler. Compiled languages are a custom written language that, when you're done, is translated (compiled) to a deeper machine code.
DeleteSame with this. These packages were not so simple that there was no longer a learning curve. I suspect hours if not days of tutorials before I can present a basic, reasonable game prototype for a VERY simple game. (IE a "hello world, yay you clicked" level game). The benefit of those packages was that they "compiled" into more than one base language so that you can easily distribute.