Indie developers speak!

As part of a short series that has absolutely nothing to do with having received far too many responses for a feature that is set to appear in X360 issue 48, we speak to Indie Games (formally Community Games) developers about life in zeroes and ones…

Julian Kantor – developer, Groov

What prompted you to get involved with Community Games – the earning potential, career prospects, fun or something else?
I’ve always wanted to get involved in the game industry as a career, so getting experience creating games of my own was definitely a part of that goal. The biggest factor in my decision to start making games, though, was that I had what I thought was a pretty cool idea for a game, and really wanted to find out if I could see it through to completion.

Are you surprised to see so many Community Games developers struggling to recoup the costs they’ve sunk into their titles?
I’m a little disappointed by the lack of marketing Microsoft has done for Community Games, and that as a result not many gamers know about the service or buy games on it. Hopefully the name change to “Indie Games” will signify a renewed push from Microsoft to market the service more extensively. Ultimately though, no one should have expected sales of the magnitude of Live Arcade games, and all things considered, I’m very happy with the sales I got for my game, and I expect a lot of developers feel the same way about their sales.

Have the reported sales figures had any impact on your motivation to continue developing games for the channel?
Not really, except the concept that I have now been paid for making a game is awesome, and is definitely a motivation to keep making games!

Do you think Microsoft’s user ratings system will be the ‘silver bullet’ for poor CG sales?
No. It will do a good job of informing those who already check out Community Games on a regular basis which games are worth downloading, which is definitely a good thing, but it won’t drive more people to the service, which I think is the main problem.