hi I''m a curious newbie. whats wrong with the following path? 1)create a simple but fun puzzle style game 2)use shareware to distribute the game and make a few $$$ 3)use the few dollars from shareware and some of your own cash to hire people to help you spruce up the game, nothing too major 4)pitch your game to lets say the xbox incubator program. 5)spruce it up a little more 6)sell the xbox game for $29.99 or so remember its a simple style puzzle game. Theres alot of smart people on this board, Im just curious THX

good plan, if its an adictive puzzle game, it would definitely work.

my game plan was also like that, but its a disco sim..
i too need the money before hiring people to work on it. but i will stick with the pc platform ..



Its my duty, to please that booty ! - John Shaft

That is exactly the business plan I mentioned I was pursuing in another thread somewhere around here. I've been developing the game for almost a year and a half. Everything was 100% out of pocket. Everything (sounds, music, textures, models) were made from scratch myself (except for a house model, a skybox model, and the fonts I use in the game, all of which were free on the web). The only real costs I took on were for development tools (almost all of which I already owned anyway) and time.

I'm finishing the game and releasing it in July. Then I will spend approx 6 month doing promotion of the game, bugfixes (which, from my extensive testing already, should be few), and working on an expansion pack for the game (several new levels, and a few new features). After I release the expansion pack, I hope to have enough money in pocket and coming in that I can hire some people to spruce up the art and music (hey, my art is pretty decent, but lets face it...I'm a programmer) and pitch it to a console publisher. The only thing I really would expect from the publisher is for them to provide the dev console free of charge, and to help me with additonal quality control and then to cover the manufacturing, distribution, and advertising.

By releasing the game before approaching the publish, I hope I will be able to have some promising sales figures to show them too. This will show them the game has good potential, and I will be asking them to take on minimal risk.

Now, thats all good in theory, but the one tricky part is that you have to make sure the game is capable of being good enough for a nex-gen console. Unfortunately, I dont know if 2D falls into this category or not (is there even a single 2D game for any of the 3 current consoles?). Not that 2D is wrong (I think its great) but I'm not sure what the publisher interest level would be for publishing a 2D game.

Link to my site for the game, if you are interested:
http://www.kronos-software.com
not much there, but there will be a lot more middle of next month.

Ron Frazier

[edited by - LordKronos on May 31, 2002 8:03:42 AM]

I doubt Microsoft would approve such games on the XBox, so that may not work at all. They want diversity, but titles should look good next to the action titles they''ve got. Can you make that kind of quality? Its not that easy. If they start releasing shareware quality, they may as well sell out to Sony now.

Just because the XBox is easier to develop for, this doesn''t mean you can sell any PC game for it.

Mark