There’s a striking contrast to the diametrically opposed concepts of ‘the free marketplace of ideas’ and ‘cancel culture’. Both are phrases used by free speech advocate types, yet sub-textually they couldn’t be further apart. ‘Free marketplace’ invokes the cold, hard, quantifiable logic of markets, commerce, and capitalism (it’s probably no coincidence this marketplace metaphor originates…

Over the span of 2022 I have been steadily engaged in the process of ‘degoogleifying’ myself, that is, removing or reducing my dependence on cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc. and instead relying on self-hosted alternatives to these services. Like many others I have a very ‘online’ life and that typically means depending…

We released The Signal State 1 year ago today! “Graphics are the first thing finished in a video game”. Here’s how the game looked 1 year before release. It’s sold really well. It’s been well received by its players. We got some cool coverage from major press sites. More coverage came from youtubers and streamers.…

In these 2 pages, the personified 19th and 20th centuries, represented by the distinct typography, debate their relative merits. There is an idea from opera, the Gesamtkunstwerk, of an art form that is a synthesis of all other art forms. Opera was meant to be it though these days perhaps video games are the Gesamtkunstwerk.…

That’s a 6 word alliteration! The Steam Summer Sale just concluded, so here’s another look at the sales stats for The Signal State: We had our biggest discount of 30% for this sale, but it didn’t translate to a particularly large sales bump compared to prior discounts. I suspect there’s 2 reasons for this. The…

I finished playing Citizen Sleeper recently and a thought occurred to me. Several years back the phrase ‘the daddification of games’ emerged to describe the trend of games with fatherhood as a primary theme. Telltale’s The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, Bioshock, etc. It feels like we are seeing a ‘leftication of games’ with…

https://aaa24.a24films.com Kinda interesting how A24 has built a brand/audience relationship more akin to that of a youtuber or twitch streamer, even though they’re a pretty major film studio. Now they even have a quasi-patreon membership thing. Makes sense since their films largely target millennials. Within games, Annapurna Interactive could probably pull off something similar. If…

It’s been a month(ish) since the release of The Signal State on GOG, so it might be interesting to look at the sales data and compare it to our Steam sales data. The total number of copies sold through GOG is approximately 1% of the total number of copies sold through Steam, with the vast…

The Signal State’s daily deal promo will be over soon, and the sales from that have actually exceeded my expectations. With the exception of release day, the daily deal has resulted in the highest single day sales ever, with nearly 14% of all copies sold having occurred during this promo, nearly exceeding the copies sold…

Its been a few hours into our Steam Daily Deal promo, here’s what the sales figures look like: Getting onto the Daily Deal requires manual selection by the Steam team, which probably involves some invisible metrics your game must fulfill. Given its short promo time its probably not going to be as lucrative as say…