Last week, my post was admittedly reeking of manifesto snobbishness. I felt like I needed some strong words to describe the changes that are happening to the industry.

This week I’m pulling back and writing about my own experiences with the Try & Buy, PC Download market. Eets: Hunger. It’s emotional (not the best game name ever), was released in 2005 as a try-before-you-buy download title. We sold it on our own site, and over time expanded to the major portals such as Yahoo! Games, Big Fish Games, and others. These are my top 3 reasons why I won’t be doing that again any time soon:

1. Developers take all the risk.

In this market, most developers create the game entirely on their own budget, and then ship it off to the distributors to sell. The distributors then put the game up on their site, and if it doesn’t hit certain metrics within a short time span, the game gets pulled off the front page, buried underneath hundreds of other games. You can bet the long tail is hard at work after this point, but selling a few copies here and there over a long period of time doesn’t benefit the developer — it benefits the distributor because of the volume of games. Hence, it’s in the distributors best interest to grab as many games as possible to build their library up and fatten the long tail.

In addition, because of the promise of “free” volume sales the distributors hold, they offer low royalty percentages. The result is that developers take all the risk in developing the product, while distributors get the largest profits if the game is successful. If the game isn’t successful, that’s still good news for the distributor as it builds the library.

Note: I’m not a big fan of “fairness”. Distributors shouldn’t be giving better percentages out of the goodness of their hearts — they worked hard to get into the position they’re in, and it’s an enviable position (for now). I simply feel there are other opportunities out there for developers that have a better risk/reward structure.

2. It’s not very exciting.

Last week I argued vehemently that fewer people can acheive better results than a huge group of people. I could write an entire article just on this (people have written books on it), but the most important ingredient in all of this is passion. The fact is, Klei is not staffed with people who are passionate about building games for this target market — that is, players who buy games off of Yahoo!, MSN, and Big Fish Games.

We believe we can and do make games for mass market audiences, but from our experience, the players on these sites are a very small subset of this pie, and the games that do well on these sites are not the type we wake up hoping to make.

Note: A few months ago, I went to a conference where a prominent casual game developer stated along the lines of “The console titles are working with such a niche, whereas the try-before-you-buy market is HUGE! Just look at how many people have computers connected to the internet!” To that, I say: Nike doesn’t sell to everyone with feet.

3. We don’t believe in the model.

Even disregarding everything above, I believe the market goes against the greatest strength of the internet. It can be encompassed with one word: Service. The future of games, especially ones delivered over the internet, is providing not just a finished product, but a continued service. But everything about this market stops you from doing that:

• You only have on point of contact to the user — the sale of the game. You will never earn another dollar off that customer for that game.
• Each portal has a different DRM, and you have no control over their priorities in updating your game (very low), so even if you wanted to, you can’t improve your game over time.
• Each portal’s largest asset are their visitors, so they will do everything to stop visitors from leaving their site, hence most players will never arrive at your site to participate in your community.

So there you have it. My top 3 reasons we’re no longer in this market. My prediction is that over time, these large portals will have no choice but to provide games as a service (some already do) (Okay, two of those three aren’t portals) (Actually, GoPets IS a portal, but it’s hidden behind a game). I realize I’ve opened a big can of worms right here, but I think I’ll leave that topic for another day.

Edit: Warren posts a very valid point, and after thinking about it, I realized that my title and post are somewhat mismatched. I’ve changed my title from “Top 3 reasons Klei isn’t into PC Try & Buy”, to “Top 3 reasons Klei doesn’t do Casual Portals”. In addition, here are my thoughts on Steam:

Portals such as Steam are a great step in the right direction. They give more visibility to the games they launch, are more selective with their choice in games, and they understand and promote games that are continually updated and modded upon. They also promote episodic content. That is, they get it.

I still feel it’s an more an incremental improvement than a revolutionary one, but I think Steam has great potential to be so much more. It’ll be interesting to see where portals take us in the next couple years.

Next week: Where Xbox Live Arcade excels