Puppy Dog Tales
Caspian Prince on Steam and Humble Bundle sales, working on the Panasonic Jungle and his hand in Minecraft
That's actually quite probable, yeah. I cry myself to sleep every night thinking about the money I could have made on the library if I'd only released it under a royalty license. Although I'm not so bothered, because you've probably guessed by now that my plans have finally come to fruition after all these years.
It was actually the Humble Bundle. I spend a lot of time networking - my girlfriend describes it as nerding on forums - but I actually meet a lot of people a lot of the time, and I go to things like the World of Love conference, and I've been talking to Cliff Harris [from Positech] for years, and other name-drop people like that. So I got to know Jeffrey Rosen [from Humble Bundle creator Wolfire Games], who was planning this Humble Indie Bundle 2. He said "can we chuck Droid Assault in as a freebie?" and I said "what do you want that old crappy game for? Nobody likes it. How about you put our brand new game, Revenge of the Titans, in. We can release it in the Humble Indie Bundle." He did somersaults and was ecstatic, and it turned out to have been a fantastically good move.
At least Steam said no - I don't think they even do that these days, they send a robot to reply to you.
You may or not know the numbers, but essentially the Humble Indie Bundle made $1.8 million in about ten days, and we took home 10 per cent of that in the end. $180,000 - and that set us up for maybe a year or so. It also got us on a few radars here and there, but we'd already managed to get in on the Steam thing before the Humble Indie Bundle even took off, thanks to another friend of ours called Brian Kramer. He wrote Fairy Solitaire, which is very popular.
Yeah, we went "hey Steam, here's all our games" and they went "no." At least they said no - I don't think they even do that these days, they send a robot to reply to you. There is some possibility I'll get the ultra-bundle on Steam once they see how well we did with Revenge of the Titans, because there's been a lot of people asking for it.
There is a method to the madness. Revenge of the Titans last January was not the game you see today by any means. It looked very much like our old games, little mini square window things, pretty uninteresting looking. It was at that point that Brian Kramer said "look, you've got to try and get this on Steam" and I said "ok, what do we need to do to it?" So we thrashed it out for six months or something, bringing the game up to the level that we thought Steam was going to require. So we were specifically targeting Steam at this point - we thought "this is where we're going to make our mint now." And it paid off. We aimed at Steam, and we hit them bullseye, I think. The style of game - it's not cute, and it's not really retro. It's quite modern in a lot of ways. What the modern gamer wants but it's also relatively forgiving.
It actually exceeded our expectations. We've been on Steam for three weeks now. If you want to know some numbers, it's over $100,000 and nearly 10,000 sales. It's great. That's bought us approximately another year of development - so we've got approximately two years of development in the bank now.
Well, I wasn't actually planning to become independent. At the time, when I agreed anything with Steam, I was still working at Sony as a contract programmer. And making a mint, as you do when you're a contract java programmer. So I didn't have any plans to quit Sony or anything like that, and then Panasonic sneakily turned up with an interesting project that they wanted me to work on. I thought "what the hell, I've been at Sony for a year" so I went off to do this Panasonic project - which then immediately folded, leaving me without any work.
It was. I have one in fact behind me in a box, which they want me to post back. It was actually a pretty reasonable piece of kit - it was an NVIDIA TEGRA with half a gig of RAM in it and a posh little screen, running Linux. About the size, I'd say, of a Motorola Android phone, the screen is. It would have been a good piece of kit, and it ran Java and Flash as well as native stuff.