At long last… it shall be available on PSN, Tuesday, October 21, in North America for $9.99.
At 11AM Pacific Time on launch day, be sure to drop by twitch.tv/doublefine for… something. Truthfully I don’t know what it’ll be yet. This time I will bring protective headgear though.
The last few weeks have been surreal for me. EMO ALERT: This is one of the most personal posts I’ve written here, not to mention rather disorganized and stream-of-consciousness, but it’s a story worth telling. I hope you find it interesting. Not many people get to experience what I have over the past few months, so I’d like to describe what the ride has been like.
Let’s start with a quick overview of my PAX experience:
Escape Goat 2 is going to be delayed.
I’ve deliberated this decision for the past week or so, and ultimately it’s the right move to make. I’m hoping this post will shed some light on things for those of you who’ve been waiting for the game and were hoping to get it just a week after PAX.
There was a point, a month ago, when it seemed feasible. Just about everything was in place, bugs were at a minimum, and it seemed like only level design and music composition were left on my plate. I’m pretty fast at making levels, so even with the inevitable redesigns (and 50% discard rate), it was totally doable.
There was just one thing that hadn’t quite been fully nailed down, and it lurked in the shadows undetected for months: the map system. (Read the next section if you want the grisly details.)
Preparing for PAX, and the day to day business stuff of running an indie game studio, also devoured whole days at a time this month. While I think it’s possible for me to sprint to the September 10 date, it’ll come at the cost of:
We’ve put 10 months into this project. As much as I want to release it to the world soon, I believe that delaying is the right move to make.
My apologies to everyone who preordered hoping to unwrap a shiny new Escape Goat 2 download on September 10. Please contact me if you want a refund. I’m hoping you stick around though, because this game is going to be a lot of fun.
As of now I’m hesitant to give another launch date. I’m going to save that until after PAX. It would be great to keep it within September, but that’s just an aspiration at this point, not a guarantee. If you’re at PAX this weekend, be sure to drop by and play the build. And if you are a preorderer, I can apologize to you in person, or try to bribe you with one of our shiny new 1.25″ buttons.
Last week I spent three days at CasualConnect in San Francisco showing Escape Goat 2, as part of their amazing Indie Prize event. Free demo space, lunches, snacks, and an open bar every day! I felt like royalty. I wish I had time to play more games and see more of the show, but I was pretty committed to demoing Escape Goat 2 the whole time. I hardly left my table during show hours.
The most common question I got was “So is this coming to mobile?” which has a lot to do with it being CasualConnect. Being a paid-up-front, download game on PC, I was definitely a fringe title for the event. I resisted the urge to give a flat “no” to the mobile port question, and instead explain how the game would need to be redesigned for touch input, and with a direct port it just wouldn’t be a high quality game. (Imagine: Virtual D-Pad) Pretty much everyone got it when I put it that way. Each platform has a cost of porting, and I have a limited amount of time… it comes down to prioritization.
The priority is a basic equation: Potential revenue divided by hours of work.
It’s tricky because both of these numbers are guesses. For something like Wii-U, I doubt I could even get in the ballpark for either figure, so I’d have to do more research. For Xbox Live Indie Games, I have already released three games there, so I have a much clearer picture.
For potential revenue, I could look at how much each of my games made in their first year. I wish I had kept all the reports, because I can only download the most recent ones. But from the data I managed to revive, here are some estimates:
| Game | Launch | First year revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Soulcaster | March 2010 | $8,000 |
| Soulcaster II | December 2010 | $4,500 |
| Escape Goat | November 2011 | $4,000 |
A lot of people are shocked when I tell them these figures. But that’s just XBLIG, only certain types of games really make viable revenue there. And as you can see, the trend is–though my games are getting objectively better–they make a little less money each time. It’s probably that the marketplace is getting more more crowded with high quality titles.
Compare those figures to what I made when these games launched on PC, in the Indie Royale bundle:
| Game | Launch | Bundle Revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Soulcaster I & II | February 2012 | $17,000 |
| Escape Goat | June 2012 | $15,000 |
This graph illustrates my 2012 revenue breakdown:
There’s a chance Escape Goat 2, with its higher production value, will make more money than any of my other games on XBLIG. Very true! There’s also a chance that when the Xbox One comes out, Microsoft puts the 360 into the federal witness protection program, like they did with the Xbox when the 360 came out. Maybe the One will have a great self publishing deal–I’m keen to learn more about this in the coming months. But my future is not with the 360.
On the subject of revenue, there’s also the issue of pricing. Do I really offer my $10 PC game on XBLIG for just $1? I bet it would make more money there, but does this help me in the long run on other platforms?
The other variable in the equation is the time it will take to port. Now being built from the Escape Goat code base, EG2 should be ready to rock on the 360, right? Not really. The new lighting engine required a new renderer, so we’re not 100% organic XNA anymore. It could take a couple weeks to get the code to compile for 360, not to mention time spent on optimization. The file system needs to change to use storage devices. I have to remove every instance of default paramters. I’ve got to do Evil Checklist testing, go through playtest and peer review. It could easily be a month-long project, and yield a separate code base in need of maintenance.
Escape Goat 2 has been chartered to make money. If I’m going to do this indie thing full time, I have to pick my battles wisely. I have a lot of fans on Xbox who don’t have a PC, or prefer to game on console (just like me!) and it bums me out that I have to snub them this time around. I wish it wasn’t like this, and I hope in reading this article you can see what went into the decision to avoid XBLIG.
But just so this article isn’t a total bummer, let me close by saying that Escape Goat 2 really works best as a console game, and it will be on a console. Couch and controller. I will be in contact with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft later this year to see what it’ll take to port and publish on Wii-U, PS4 and Xbox One. I hope to see you guys on one of those systems. I owe my indie career to XBLIG, and it will always be special to me.
I’ll see you on the PC in September, and we’ll take it from there as opportunities come up.