March 4th, 2010 @ Sway Bar, London
UK studios converge to battle over who's the cleverest - have you booked your place yet?
Thursday April 22nd, 2009 @ The Brewery, London
The countdown to the MCV Awards 2010 has begun – with date, venue and categories announced.
July 14th, 2010 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
Studios ‘left in the dark’ on sales data cannot plan accordingly, says Doublesix
UK-based indie dev Doublesix has launched criticisms against the widespread secrecy surrounding digital sales data, claiming that the the “lack of transparency” is ultimately hurting the industry.
Doublesix studio head James Brooksby said that he wants platform owners to make digital sales data public, saying that concealment of such information “is hindering the development of [digital] channels.”
Brooksby went on to reveal why developers should be privy to digital sales data:
“As a developer trying to decide which platforms to develop for, as well as what type of games to make, we’re currently in the dark regarding real sales performance for digital platforms and that makes it increasingly difficult to make realistic plans.
“I’d like to see some kind of verified sales charts on all digital systems to encourage more developers to support these channels and to help make sensible investment decisions."
Advertisement
Brooksby was happy to provide sales figures for Doublesix's only digital title; the PSN-bound Burn Zombie Burn. The game has been purchased over 70,000 times since its release back in March.
I can only agree with this statement. Some platform holders are much better with encouraging developers to build games on their platform than with sharing sales results. Usually, the main reason to keep everyone is the dark... is that the numbers are not glorious. They're quite forced to keep that gap unfortunately for a rather long period of time until some interesting and more shiny numbers can be shared.
I do understand some reasons why the numbers are not out there from the standpoint of platform. However this is causing a great deal of pain in the digital sector. (PS) we are now near 80k!
They won't tell you because they ask developers to spend a lot of money on digital games, while the sales are far from being as good as games with physical support.
I believe the sales numbers are one issue, the other issue is the visibility of your game and all the difficulties you will encounter to get it on a store (e.g. try to convince Microsoft to get your game with a correct cut, try to go to the end of the submission with Sony, and then have a look at the small print detail with Wiiware).
Not all developers may want their sales numbers published. By treating the sales data as propritary business information belonging to the developers the publishers are leaving the choice to the developers. If the developers want to publish the info, nothing is stopping them.
