View our trailer and sign up for the closed beta here:

Sugar Rush Official Website

If you’re going to Austin, and you’d like to meet up, feel free to send me a message. This is probably the key year where developers and publishers alike are gearing up for the big Free-to-Play / Social Networking games war, so I’m pretty interested in seeing what other studios are up to.

Also, thanks to everyone who tried out Sugar Rush at PAX! The response was overwhelmingly positive, and all the constructive feedback we’ve been getting are all getting addressed. It’s a good feeling when the process works

Also, while at PAX, I’ll be giving a talk on Designing a Free-to-Play Game on Friday the 29th, from 3-4PM, so feel free to visit.

Can’t wait to see you all!

Link.

Also definitely looking forward to Parveen’s take on the iPhone SDK.

1) Players are turned off by the mass and not bothering to go through every game there is.

2) Developers’ ideas are turned down because there’s already an (allegedly crap) game of that genre in the pipeline

Fair enough. But really, lots of shitty games isn’t the problem. Metanet’s problem is one of control and visibility.

Control

What I mean by control is that platform holders hold the keys to the channel, and choose games based on some formula that they’re not showing. One of the criteria is a minimum quality bar, to make sure the developer can actually finish the product. Others are presumably based on their portfolio range, whether it will annoy retail distributors, and other means that could be perfectly reasonable but which we know not of.

Visibility

The problem with visibility is that all the games are lumped under one huge long list. If you do not have a recent update, the chance that your game is seen is largely based on the first letter of your game name. So, if there is a huge number of games that you don’t particularly like, you’re not going to see the ones you do. Okay, there is also some categorization of games, but it’s not exactly ideal.

Solving Metanet’s Dilemma

I think it’s clear that every platform will have a fair share of good vs. poor games, and that one persons treasure is another’s dog poop. That is, unless, you run the platform like Steve Jobs. Although even that’s wrong now that the SDK is out.

So saying that a platform holder “shouldn’t release bad games” isn’t the answer (even if we all know some of the games out there are indeed simply bad, in every sense of the word). The problem is that the platform holder is trying to control the releases based on more than simply the fact that they can indeed finish the game without breaking any laws. Indeed, they are basically saying that they know what’s best for their customers.

Instead, if Microsoft opens up their platform, and does not discriminate based on portfolio, an interesting thing happens. All sorts of games come in and you basically have a free market in the ecosystem. This of course creates an even bigger diluge of games, making your game even harder to find. So the obvious next step is to create as many ways to find the games you want as possible. Ratings is one. Tags is another. Recommendations is another. Suddenly, if you made a good game, visibility isn’t a problem any more. This is saying that the customers know what’s best for themselves.

Really, coming from the Web 2.0 side of things, this is all common sense and has been done over and over again. In fact, it’s being done on the hobbyist, community XNA games, so it’s unfortunate that they’re not doing it for professional game developers.

We don’t know the Truth

One thing is for sure — there’s a reason for all this not happening, and the reason is not that the people running Xbox LIVE Arcade are stupid. It may be that their priorities are different than ours (retail will kill us if we threaten them), and it may be that if they implemented these features they’d have a break through product.

But we don’t know what reasons they have, and it may be that in 6 months we’ll realize why they’ve been holding off, or that they’re already implementing it. Well, we know that they’re certainly implementing something for Xbox LIVE — it would be naive to think they’re standing still.

Anyway, looping back to the beginning — good job Raigan, on speaking your mind. And N+ is both dog poop and an amazing game. I prefer to think it’s the latter.

Now, I also happen to be a 2D Zelda fan. The 3D adventures of Link were always impressive, but I could never get enough of the beautiful simplicity of the 2D action. Now, put N+ and Zelda together and you have one happy camper.

Enter the Legend of Zelda remade in N+ (via Kotaku).

On a completely unrelated note, I love this quote by Michael Capps of Epic:  “the narrow range of folks who can afford to do high-end, Direct X 10 PC gaming are also the guys who really understand how BitTorrent works” (source: gamesindustry.biz).

Also: Pandemic’s Josh Resnick had a great talk at GDC about the difficulties of starting a game studio. I unfortunately missed it, but heard about it through Nick. Today an article came out that hinted they are looking at the Free-to-Play model. EA has had some success in this department, so it’ll be interesting to see what they’ll do.

• It’s too hard to manage the content
• By definition, it means some games are rated badly, and we want to position ourselves as having no bad games
• It’s not in our schedule
• We want to handle our own PR and portfolio
• It’ll piss off publishers
• We have no way of deleting offensive content (!!!?)

While some of these are real concerns, I don’t see this having stopped Amazon. Or Ebay. Or Facebook. I suppose XNA on the 360 addresses these issues, but I still think all content on the 360 should be rated, commented on, tagged, and searchable. And while I’m on my pipe dream I may as well wish for being able to write plug-ins for the dashboard, and that monetization for those plug-ins should be easy. Yes, these are hard legal issues, but I also think it would rock everyone’s world.