Expansions

My thoughts on game expansions have changed over the last few years. I used to consider elegance the most important aesthetic virtue, I believed that every concept should be expressed in its simplest possible form (but no simpler, of course). Expansions necessarily add more to a game than is essential, and so were not to my taste. Content-based games are a separate category of thing - finite content is eventually exhausted and must be replaced - but a systemic game can last indefinitely, and so never needs to be expanded.

I particularly disliked expansions for board games. They tend to make the games longer. They drastically increase variance and streakiness by increasing the size of card decks (a larger deck is less reliable even if the proportions of card types are kept constant), destroying the delicate balance of the base game. They usually have more complex rules, making them harder to teach and slower to play, for little (if any) gain.
Carcassonne is a particular offender in my experience; manifold expansions churned out for profit with no respect for what makes the core game good. A lot of the strategy in base Carcassonne revolves around knowing what tiles exist and forcing your opponent into configurations that are impossible to resolve; the expansions weaken this by making all configurations possible - you can still try to play the odds, but the strategy largely reverts to maximising your own score rather than spoiling your opponent's position.

But I've learnt that this isn't the whole picture. Many expansions are poor, but this doesn't invalidate the entire concept. Elegance is important, but it can be worth sacrificing some to gain in other areas. Expansions can be done right if you're careful. Add things because they're worth adding, not just for the sake of having more stuff. Understand what's good about it in the first place and preserve that, enrich it, don't break it.

Race for the Galaxy is a perfect example of a game that didn't need to be expanded - it starts with a beautiful system, finely balanced, stable under hundreds of plays - but which grows even deeper with the expansions. This is the game that really sold me on the concept. Designer Tom Lehmann has written about the thought that went into the expansions. Powers that played well but were complex to learn were withheld for later expansions, allowing players to master the depths of the core game system first. The power level of strategies in the base set was skewed slightly towards those that were more difficult to grasp, to encourage players to persist with them - and then balanced back to the centre in the expansions. Close attention was paid to the problem of increasing deck size - expansions add more "explore" powers allowing players to select from more cards, and the third expansion adds a "search" action which allows each player to trawl the deck for a card type of their choice once in a game.

In my own work, I'm finding expansion-type design delightful. Inventing new games from scratch is more important to me overall, but there's a playfulness to building on top of an existing structure that's very satisfying. And it's a lot easier to get into when motivation is at low ebb.
What makes a good expansion depends entirely on the game, but there are some general questions I've been asking myself. Where can new content fit into this? What regions of the design space are so far unexplored? What parts of this system are static that we could make variable, give the players control over? What unexpected corners of the rules can we interact with? What things aren't connected; can we join them up somehow?


I've been messing with Glitch Tank again in the last couple of days. Similar thoughts to when I patched it before. Should have a patch up soon with some bug-fixes and a little bit of new stuff. It's a very tight game, it doesn't have a lot of room to expand, so I have to be careful.

Where can we inject new things?
- Through the initial state. Different map features. The update I mentioned before added walls and teleporters generated at random. I'm not adding any more map features, there are enough.
- New game modes. Started with just one mode in the Kompendium version, added AI and explicit support for turn-based play for the iOS version. Added the 6-hp mode in an update.
- Action cards. In addition to the eight standard actions (forward, back, left, right, fire, jump, mine, replicate), there are an undisclosed number of rare actions. The most common of these flips all positions on both axes; the others you'll have to find on your own. They're not a major feature - you might never see them at all - but they add a bit of occasional variety, and enrich the "glitch" theme. I've added at least one more action, which I'll explain when the new patch goes live.
- Random events? It probably wouldn't suit the game very well to have events happening independently of player actions, but it's a possibility.
- Events triggered by an obscure game event, an unusual corner case in the rules - something that players have control over but wouldn't normally do. Like the glitch that happens when both players die simultaneously.
- Metagame structure: a tournament mode, deck customisation, character progression. Might not suit the game, but worth thinking about.

I'm very happy with the things that have been added, they're definite improvements. There's a real value to leaving a design to simmer for a while, you can come back to it with fresh ideas and deeper understanding. We've been playing this game for almost a year now, so I know it quite well.

      
The first Race for the Galaxy expansion came with some blank cards making it convenient for players to mod the game. I spent some time a few years back experimenting with these, trying to make cards that did things that hadn't been done. Modding someone else's game is a similar kind of design to expanding your own.

The phase-selection system affects the rest of the game but nothing directly affects it, so I tried to make things interact with it - letting you restrict your opponent's options, see their choices, restrict your own options or reveal your choices as a cost. None of the cards I came up with worked very well, but I'm quite pleased with a tournament variant. Apparently the designer had some similar ideas - the third expansion contains Psi-Crystal World. (Part of the reason this works better than my attempts is because it's on a world rather than a development - the effect is balanced by opportunity cost, not just by numeric cost.)

A lot of the game revolves around building engines that produce and consume resources. Different powers on different cards form engine components - producing goods on one world with a power from somewhere else, triggering a card draw from another power, then converting them to points on a different world. Resources come in four different flavours, with different powers synergising with each. I had the idea to have a "wild-card" resource, which would count as any flavour and allow you to connect up powers that wouldn't usually interact. Through a competition, this actually ended up in the official game as Alien Oort Cloud Refinery, which I'm still totally stoked about.
(If you know the RftG rules: the reason it's a windfall world is to allow more powers to interact with it, the reason it can't be traded from even though that would allow even more interactions is that otherwise it would have to cost so much that you couldn't afford to take advantage of all the interactions anyway.)

Short Games

I've had a draft of this sitting around for a while. Then this post by @potatojin showed up and made this a lot easier to finish because now I can just refer to that for half of what I wanted to say: I Like Short Songs.

To summarise his post:
- Short games are awesome.
- A short game is one that you can get good at, because you can play it over and over again. Replayability is excellent.
- Designing a small game, you can hold the entire thing in your head and really make sure it works, rather than just building up a structure and hoping.

I've heard a few times recently games the length of movies described as "short". Let me be clear here: 3 hours is not short. A short game is one you can play multiple times in one sitting. If you play a game and it takes 3 hours, you're not about to play it again today. It's much harder to get good at a game if you can't play it more than once in a row; a tight feedback loop really helps with learning, being able to try out different approaches, see how they work, rethink them, and try again while the previous attempt is still fresh in your mind.

DECISION DENSITY

Let's use the classic Sid Meier aesthetic for games; "a series of interesting decisions" - for different aesthetic goals the following is going to be largely meaningless. What makes a decision interesting? I see two aspects: ambiguity and consequence. If there's no ambiguity, if it's obvious what the correct option is, there's no real choice at all. If there's no consequence, if a decision has no real impact on the game, it's similarly a fake choice.

It's implicit in the word "decision" that there's some level of ambiguity and consequence. These aren't binary values though; a decision can be more or less ambiguous and more or less consequential. So we can ask how much ambiguity, how much consequence a decision should preferably have. This is going to have different answers for different people, but for me: I like decisions ambiguous enough to not be obvious, but not so ambiguous that I'm just choosing blindly; there need to be clear reasons to pick one option over another. I like decisions to be quite strongly consequential, to feel like they have a significant impact on the game; I don't enjoy micromanaging for incremental gains.

This last is a reason I like games to be short. In a smaller game, there's room for more consequential decisions. Shorter games have a higher density of decisions; either you cram the same number of choices into a smaller amount of time, or you have fewer choices but more consequential.

Consider the board game 7 Wonders: it lasts for 18 turns, and on each turn you make one main decision. So on average, each of these decisions contributes 5.6% of your total influence on the game. There are 3-7 players, so each turn you're determining about 1% of the outcome of the game. That might seem like a small number, but it's a big chunk compared to a game like Civilisation, where you make thousands of little decisions across hundreds of turns and several hours of play, and most of them don't matter in the slightest. (It's odd that for all that "interesting decisions" are famously Meier's idea of what makes a game good, I find his own games pretty terrible in that regard, being over-long and riddled with tedious micromanagement.)

There's a possible counterargument here that I'd like to acknowledge. I'm measuring the consequence of a choice by what proportion of the game it affects, how much it affects the outcome. But in a longer game, there's scope for pivotal decisions with a larger absolute effect, that still have an impact hours later because the game is still going. However, there can't be many such decisions; I'll take big decisions in a small game over a few giant decisions mixed in with hours of micromanagement.

CHAOS

I'm going to make an analogy with chaos theory, and I'm not going to be very precise - vague and inaccurate analogies to chaos are traditional, even among chaos theorists themselves. Roughly speaking, the study of chaos deals with systems that are neither easy nor completely impossible to predict. Systems balanced between order and disorder, that produce interesting complex behaviour according to deterministic rules. As you evolve a chaotic system, you get feedback effects - positive feedback amplifying perturbations, or negative feedback damping them. There's a delicate balance there, it's easy for them to fall into order or disorder.

Similarly for games, they're best when balanced between predictability and randomness. Positive feedback helps whoever is winning to maintain their lead, and negative feedback helps their opponents to catch up. Both of these are valuable effects: If there's no way to catch up, then the outcome of the game is determined near the start and there's no consequence to subsequent decisions - order. But if it's not an advantage at all, if it's too feasible to make a comeback, then the outcome ends up being essentially random - disorder.

This balance pushes games towards being short. It's easy enough to make a game behave chaotically for a little while, but it's very difficult to maintain it for an extended period - to have whoever's in the lead benefit from it, but still have their opponents having a chance of dethroning them; to have the game continually progress without falling into order or disorder.

But even if you break the balance in either direction, it's not so harmful if the game is short. When positive feedback kicks in and the winning player can't possibly lose, that's dull for them and horribly frustrating for any opponents, but it doesn't matter if the game's over pretty soon after that - it's when it drags on for another hour that there's a problem. Similarly, if there's no way to hold onto a lead and the game constantly swings back and forth, that's frustrating if it goes on for a long time and nobody can make progress, but it's okay in a short game because you only need to be ahead for a short time to win.

The Sea Will Claim Everything

Jonas Kyratzes is one of my favourite designers. I don't believe there's anyone else right now doing story-focused videogames better. Playing his games makes me question my entire approach to game design, makes me want to forget about trying to generate "meaningful" decisions with game mechanics and focus instead on actually meaningfully meaning something.



His Lands of Dream games are special. The colourful hand-drawn graphics (drawn by his wife Verena) make them resemble children's books, and like all the best books for children they're not aimed at children at all. They deal both with childish things - philosophy, politics, economics - and with serious grown-up topics like what you get if you cross a squirrel with a fox. (A squox, of course - and they're unbearably cute.)

The stories cover the full spectrum of human emotion, not just what fits into the action-movie hero-saga mold videogames usually cling to. They've made me cry, not because of hackneyed tragedies, but by honestly expressing something that was personally meaningful to me. They've also made me laugh, and smile a lot; there's a sense of joy and playfulness to them. For all that games are naturally about "play", they usually take themselves so seriously, as though they're trying to be accepted as "art" and they believe that's a prerequisite - these games don't take themselves seriously at all, and because of that are far worthier artistically than any SERIOUS ART about death or whatever. They're made with love, and I love them.

I highly recommend The Sea Will Claim Everything, the latest entry in the series and the first being offered as a people-directly-pay-money-for-it-rather-than-being-subjected-to-advertising-thing.

Jonas and Verena have also been doing a series of pictures and short stories set in the Lands of Dream: The Oneiropolis Compendium. They're nice.

iOS Sale Numbers

I've written way too much about money on here lately. Clearly it's something that's weighing on my mind. I have enough to live on for now, but I have worries about the future. I was intending to avoid it and stick to games and theory for a while but there are some things that came up and I feel are worth saying.

So there are some misconceptions around about the iOS appstore (the market for games in general, but the appstore in particular). Everyone's heard about the absurd successes - the shallow badly-aliased bird games, the fart apps - and there's this public perception around that it's an easy way to make money. This perception is harmful, I've seen it do harm, I've seen people who really couldn't afford to sink their time into making apps because "everyone knows" it's an easy way to make money, then have them inevitably fail.

But mostly it just pisses me off. I meet someone, chat with them, they ask me what I've been working on, I say I've been doing some mobile games lately. They say, "oh yeah? I bet that's pretty rewarding", rubbing their fingers together in a symbol for money.
No, it really isn't.
It is very rewarding in many other senses; there's cool hardware, there's a powerful immediacy to a touch-screen, it's great for in-person multiplayer games, it's an ideal context for small-scale games, it's lovely to be able to meet someone at a pub and right there show them something you've made.

I've been hearing among game developers for a while statements like "the iOS gold rush is over" (although some disagree that there ever was such a "gold rush"). But in the world at large, this perception's still there. People still believe in the gold rush. And it affects choices they make, it matters. I'm sure the gatekeepers are happy to keep this fable alive. It needs to be dispelled.
That's why articles like these two are valuable: Congratulations, Your First Indie Game is a Flop, IceBurgers: by the Numbers. Everyone hears about the successes - we need to tell more people about the failures. Or the.. things that aren't really failures, but aren't successes either. It makes me deeply uncomfortable to see millionaires rage at someone posting this kind of thing. The conclusions drawn by the developers in those articles may be invalid, but the raw data is not. Negative results are just as valuable as positive ones, but while there are a lot more negative results most of the attention goes to the positive ones. Maybe those are bad examples, maybe they're bad games (I haven't played either and certainly they don't look very attractive), maybe they approached things with the wrong attitude, but this type of message is valuable.

It's really easy to look at articles like those and with 20-20 hindsight explain why they failed. Had Minecraft failed, it'd be easy to write off why - unoriginal gameplay, looks bad in screenshots, no tutorial. But since it is successful we can comfortably praise the originality of the design, the distinctive graphical style, and the joy of figuring things out for yourself. It's much harder to predict ahead of time what will take off.

There are a lot of good reasons people might not make these kinds of numbers public - they consider it personal information, they're under an NDA, they want to avoid an internet comment backlash, they don't want to be seen as a failure and have that colour perception of their future work. It takes a certain courage to be public like this. I admire the people above for doing so. Maybe it's a tragedy of the commons thing - it's not in anyone's individual interest to say this kind of thing because it's negative publicity, but it's in the interest of the whole.

---

So, having talked about this, I should show some numbers of my own. I'm slightly reluctant about doing so - partly because of the reasons in the previous paragraph, and partly because I don't feel like they're very good examples. They're niche games, quickly made, without a focus on selling well.
Some background is necessary. I went through some serious burnout over the last few years, last year in particular. Trying to complete two very high-maintenance projects simultaneously. Hard work. Pushing my limits. Stress. Isolation. Depression. Sense of failure. Major loss of energy and motivation. Still haven't completely recovered from it. I've found some respite in working on small games that are easy for me to complete, using very low-resolution graphics because they allow me to work fast and still make something that looks good. So looking at things I've done in the last year.. there's some bloody good design there, I'm really pleased with some of what I've done, but I haven't been doing everything I could to optimise for sales because that's a kind of work that really drains me.
So please don't mistake me for expecting these to be big successes. I didn't. They're tests to see if I can generate some amount of income from the small-scale things I've been making. Minor forays into the appstore market. Experiments.

So, Glitch Tank. Sold 127 copies in 3 months before Zaga-33 was released. Another 251 in the 3 months since. 378 total.

Zaga-33. 1624 copies total. That's not so bad. At a dollar each, that's ~$1100 after Apple's cut. Not so much less than minimum wage for the month I spent on it. (If you disregard time spent on failed prototypes that don't get released.)
The free PC version's been downloaded some 1500 times. More people have paid a dollar for it than have grabbed it for nothing. I find this most peculiar.

These numbers aren't final. They're still selling a few copies every day.

So I've covered the cost of the iPad (and even the repairs after smashing it on the floor) and the Apple developer license. But not much more.
However, I emphasise again, I do not count these as failures. They've been good for my mental health, if nothing else. People have enjoyed them. I've had some very positive responses to them.
And looking at how Zaga-33 fared so much better than Glitch Tank, and how Glitch Tank tripled after Zaga-33 came out.. there's definite network effects going on. I'm reminded of Bennett Foddy's GDC talk - he showed a graph of ad revenues from his site as he added more games, and the shapes here are looking quite similar to the start of his graph. I suspect a comfortable level of income could be reached eventually just by continuing to release similar games. This is one major flaw in the two articles I referenced earlier - they're both looking at a single datapoint. Two is barely enough to be worthwhile, but at least it's something you can draw a line between. This is woefully incomplete research, hardly worth publishing at all. But maybe it'll be useful if contrasted with other numbers.

It's traditional at this point to ask what could be improved. The main thing seems to be graphics. Both these games look pretty good. Colourful distinctive style, appropriate to the overall design. But it seems like low-res graphics put a lot of people off no matter what. When I can bring myself to, I'll sink some time into high-res graphics and try to get a measure on how big an effect this is. I love abstract low-fidelity graphics and it'd suck to have to give up on them because people are shallow or whatever, but if it lets me keep designing games I'll do it.

Kompendium

This is an album of nine 2-player local-multiplayer games:
Exuberant Struggle, March Eternal, Ora et Labora, Twilight Beacon, Capricious Atom, Chang Chang, Zeta Forge, Hostile Pantograph, Glitch Tank.

itch.io link (windows)
download (mac - almost certainly doesn't work anymore)

I started making these early last year, with Exuberant Struggle for the TIGSource Versus Competition. It felt very rich with possibilities, so across the year I made several more.
At some point someone suggested that I should try putting them on iPad. So I bought one, ported Glitch Tank over, and found it worked amazingly well. Better than the original in fact, as though it was meant for a touchscreen all along. (If you have the privilege of owning an ios device, I highly recommend getting Glitch Tank for it - even if you find this PC version too confusing for you, you'll likely get on with the touch version a lot better.)

I got a bit discouraged after that though, because the other games did not port over anywhere near as naturally and the sales figures for Glitch Tank were not very promising. So I've sat on these for a while, occasionally tweaking them a little, occasionally struggling with the ios versions. But they need to be released, to be played, so here they are!

They're local-multiplayer only: there's no AI, no networking, you just play against a friend sharing the same keyboard.

Find a friend. Play them.

Games vs. games vs. "games"

Yesterday this article by Keith Burgun showed up and sparked a bunch of discussion: a way to better games. Mostly fairly hostile discussion. And naturally so, for the article is written in a very provocative tone (intentionally or not). But there is something of value in there that may be being missed. Not something "new" that will pull us out of some ludic "dark ages" into "enlightenment", but something that might be of practical use to some people designing games.
(There's also a lot that I disagree with, but others are generously criticising most of that already.)

Going to backtrack from games for a bit, start at a high level and work my way down.

Logic allows us to deduce things that are absolutely true. This may be counterintuitive if you haven't studied it, since most of the time in real life we can't know anything for certain, but in logic we can. It's a conditional truth though - we only obtain statements of the form "if A is true, then B is also true", which may not be so useful if we can't confirm A. All mathematics is of this form; everything is logically deduced from a small set of initial axioms which cannot themselves be proved. Logic can only make true statements about abstract systems that don't necessarily correspond to anything in the real world. But as Wigner exclaims in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, surprisingly often these systems can approximate reality well enough to be extremely useful.

Formal definitions are a powerful tool in logic. I posted more succinctly about this last time this topic rose up: definitions. They let us specify a class of objects in a way that's amenable to logical reasoning, allowing us to deduce new facts about it.
How useful this is depends on how structured the objects you're dealing with are. In general, the more restrictive the definition, the more structure there will be, the more truths you will be able to deduce about the objects so defined.
However, if you have too much structure, this can complicate things. Even if you're only interested in studying a single specific object, it often helps to take a step back and abstract it out a bit. Figure out what are the salient features of this object and reason just with those. Very often it is actually easier to prove a general statement that answers more than your original question than to answer it directly on its own. So there's a tension when picking a definition in making it both restrictive enough and broad enough to be a useful abstraction.

You can give a word any definition you want. As when writing a computer program you can define variable names however you choose, when writing a text you can define terms however suits you. But obviously going against common usage makes it harder for others to read, so there's value in trying to construct definitions that are formally useful and also capture the intuitive meaning of the term. It's usually infeasible to define how words are used in a completely precise way, but approximations can still be useful.

A definition is not a value judgement. Specifying a category for consideration does imply that you feel it's worthy of study, but it does not automatically follow that anything outside of it is less worthwhile. (But it's not uncommon for people to treat such a classification as though it contains an implicit valuation. Please don't do this.)

A restrictive definition need not restrict creativity. Sometimes choosing to work under a constraint can be a helpful creative tool; going deep into one area and understanding it thoroughly can generate new ideas. Other times, while you might not have initially chosen to work under a particular constraint, you end up satisfying it anyway; and then you can usefully apply results about it to your work. And if a proposed definition fails to capture what you're interested in, looking outside the intersection of the two categories is often a guide towards good examples.

So, games.

There are two meanings of the word "game" in common usage. One is very broad; as Wittgenstein points out, the word is used to cover a vast range of activities with little in common between them. But the word is often used in a quite specific way as well, to describe a particular kind of structured play, as when one says "it's not really a game" in an attempt to describe a work of interactive art such as Proteus or Dear Esther.
I use both meanings all the time and expect people to understand from context. This expectation is usually justified, but it sometimes leads to confusion - for example, a few days ago I tweeted this provocative statement: "if a game's not worth playing a hundred times, it's not worth playing once", and I immediately received replies suggesting certain puzzles as counterexamples. I agree that once you know the solution to a puzzle there's usually not much value to interacting with it further, but puzzles are not the type of object I was considering; however there was insufficient context to make my meaning clear. (Note that I don't necessarily believe my initial statement, I was just trying it out.)

The first of these two meanings of "game" refers to a very broad unstructured class of objects. There's not much that can be usefully said about them in general! It includes a lot of interesting stuff, but it's not a category where we can expect to logically reason out much of value. That's okay, there are other ways to explore it. Anna Anthropy vocally encourages inclusiveness in the game-development community in order to get as many different people with different viewpoints as possible making different things, and I heartily agree.

The second meaning, however, refers to a tightly restricted class of objects. There's a lot of structure, and logic is useful for navigating it. Numerous people have studied this class over the years. There is not a consensus definition, but various have been proposed. Some authors seem keen to search for 'one true definition' (Burgun among them) but having multiple competing definitions is not a problem. There are at least six different definitions of "matroid" in common use - all equivalent, but not obviously so - and researchers will use whichever gives most insight into the problem at hand. The case with games is similar (although in general our definitions will probably be closely overlapping but not equivalent), and we can similarly pick and choose to think in terms of whichever characteristics suit our present goals.

Crawford defines a game as an interactive activity in which active agents (including players) compete with each other and can use attacks to interfere with each other. This does a fairly good job of capturing the intuitive common-use meaning, but the word "attacks" is problematic; it fails to describe positive mutually beneficial interactions like resource trades in Settlers of Catan or action selection in Puerto Rico and Race for the Galaxy. The concept of "active agents" is somewhat subjective as well, as he himself admits, but it can be a useful model.

Costikyan builds on this in I Have No Words & I Must Design, he declares decision-making to be the key characteristic of games; defining them as "a form of art in which participants make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal."

Burgun's attempt owes much to the previous two, so I take issue with his claim that his definition is "new"; it's an attempt to codify a folk definition that's been in use for decades, and while his exact wording may be different he exalts decision-making just as Costikyan does. The claim of novelty suggests unfamiliarity with the work of prior authors (as do the claims that the craft of game design has not matured - we've seen incredible progress in board games in particular across the last couple of decades). However, it's a worthwhile attempt; the phrasing of "ambiguous decisions" is clear and evocative, and more flexible than Costikyan's discussion of "resources".

I will not attempt to provide a definition of my own, but I will suggest strong replayability as another characteristic of games with which a definition could be crafted (possibly rendering my earlier tweet tautological).

This class of "games" is by no means the only one worth looking at. Let's explore the entire world of play in all its variety! Kanaga presents one interesting framework for examining playspaces in general: Played Meaning (Concerning the Spiritual in Games).
But when the systems we create do fit into an established category, games or otherwise, it's useful to draw upon the body of knowledge accumulated about that category. And if we're not certain how to proceed with a design, whether it fits into an established category or not, it can be helpful to abstract out its salient features and reason logically about them - possibly inventing a new category as we go. As in Science, we must confirm our ideas through experiment, but a sound theoretical framework helps to point out interesting directions to experiment in.

So this may not be an approach that you find personally useful - whether because of how your mind works, or because you're not working within any conveniently structured class of objects - but it is not without value at all. I find it useful, and some of my work I'm most proud of has been inspired by this type of approach.

Because We May results

Following up from previous post:

Sos had a similar idea to me; he raised the price of Super Office Stress to $99.99. Which is pretty great; I was too timid to go off the scale like that and I'm stoked that someone else did. His writeup is here. Between us we provoked some discussion and provided some entertainment, so I definitely count it as a success. I enjoyed browsing various forum threads about the sale and seeing people have a bit of a chuckle when they noticed what we'd done (or in some cases freaking out, getting angry, or assuming it was an error).

To clarify some things: I'm not stupid, and I know how sales usually work. I know sales do work - Vertex Dispenser was in the Indie Royale bundle recently and that was easily the most profitable thing I've done in game-selling, I'm very grateful to them for that opportunity. I know that not everyone has a huge amount of money - I don't - and I love that sales can make things (legitimately) available to people who simply can't afford to purchase them at full price. I certainly don't think that sales are something we should never do.

But it worries me if massive discounts become the only way to sell games at all, because that's an environment in which only those selling a huge number of copies can survive. I'm way more interested - both as a creator and a consumer - in weird obscure stuff that doesn't tend to appeal to a mass audience, so I'd like to encourage a system where that sort of thing is viable.

So here are some numbers:

Glitch Tank
Week before the sale: 14 copies.
During the sale: 7 copies.
Week after the sale: 25 copies.

Zaga-33
Week before the sale: 27 copies.
During the sale: 3 copies.
Week after the sale: 90 copies.

So my total income from those games those weeks was about $40, $50, $100.
(It's fiddly to work out the exact numbers for this because appstore prices vary between regions, and they don't tell you directly.)

Thank you to everyone who bought my games - at either price.