Featured games on SAGD
Hi Everyone
I am currently busy adding featured SA games on sagd and want to add a game every single work day, until we run out of games to feature lol
You may submit completed and/or work in progress games.
So if you want to see your game on sagd do not hesitate to forward to me the following details:
In game Screenshot of size 1920x1080, or as near as possible.
Twitter name
Game Name, Developer Name, Developer URL, URL where people can play,download,get more info on the game.
We won't discriminate and if we get too many submission we will simply randomize, yeh.
This is only for a limited time while we get all functionality in place. Also, developers that submit their works will receive an early invitation to the game developer/worker area when it becomes available.
I am currently busy adding featured SA games on sagd and want to add a game every single work day, until we run out of games to feature lol
You may submit completed and/or work in progress games.
So if you want to see your game on sagd do not hesitate to forward to me the following details:
In game Screenshot of size 1920x1080, or as near as possible.
Twitter name
Game Name, Developer Name, Developer URL, URL where people can play,download,get more info on the game.
We won't discriminate and if we get too many submission we will simply randomize, yeh.
This is only for a limited time while we get all functionality in place. Also, developers that submit their works will receive an early invitation to the game developer/worker area when it becomes available.
Comments
I'm a little confused still as to what SAGD is meant to be, and what services it provides.
Is it kind of a wiki, a bit like the old SAGD site, to provide information about the community?
Or is it a publishing portal? If so is it a semi-charitable venture promoting the visibility/sales of all SA games (thereby also improving the sales/visibility of the SAGD creators)? Or is it specifically for profit with the creators of SAGD recovering their costs by pocketing a percentage of the sales?
Or is SAGD more like a developer support site, with the goal of pooling developer resources (like publishing contacts or facilitating overcoming common technical problems)?
I know it's in super caveman state right now. But there is little indication (certainly on the site) as to what SAGD's goals are.
@bevis Ideas are meant to be used and featured items is not really a new idea ;)
@dislekcia initial ownership of SAGD comes with certain restrictions given the fallout in the south african gamedev community. Perhaps we can discuss this privately?
We use the Standard Party Model where you have Parties with certain Roles. E.g. A game developer is an organisation or person that works on a project with team members that can be seen as workers because they work to produce a game. See my reply to BSFS below.
@BlackShipsFilltheSky
Things might look a bit vague at the moment but it should become clearer as we implement and announce features and allow people to play with what we've done.
We have a model on how to recover our costs and there will be a free version available to everyone that develops/work on games. There will also be a premium version.
As for features.
We have our internal road map and for competitive reasons I am not going to tell people what it is until such time that it gets implemented. I would say this is standard practice.
Yes, the main focus is visibility of all SA games, and yes it might be seen as just another avenue to market your game in. But there are a bit more to it than just this.
What I can tell you is that we are implementing standards such as an Information Framework. You can have a look at the Party Management Facility Spec as found at http://www.omg.org/spec/PARTY to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Now think in terms of games. The scope is big and we will be implementing phase by phase.
As for the featured games going on at the moment on SAGD. I am not going to publish people's games on there if they do not give me permission to do so. However I will contact people that I know of if they do not submit their games here, but I will only do it once.
I hope you can understand though that it is also fairly standard not to get involved in portals/publishing websites until their goals and benefits have been described clearly.
There are an awful lot of publishing websites out there that take many forms, some of which are quite predatory. I think it's fair to be concerned about that.
Though I'm just speaking for myself.
In any case, I feel that when there are more clarity publicly available or when you get into 1-on-1 discussion with the developers, there may be moving forward. Right now the general vagueness is not inductive to engaging with you guys, just like the other guys in the other thread who also seem to be expressing a similar sentiment.
@Tuism We will not publish or feature anything without permission from the game owner.
The "feature" at the moment is a placeholder while we work on the more complex functionality. SAGD will publish name of the game, part of the screenshot and the URLs provided, i.e. the developer, the game urls and announce the feature on twitter.
On the clarity I guess it can be agreed that it is still vague for you guys and I will address that as soon as invitations start to go out. We have not invited anyone yet.
If it's a publisher, what do I get from having my game on it? What marketing is it doing and what awareness can it provide? I am told by IndieFund mentors that I respect that all website publishing negotiations are about figuring out what people are getting out of the deal: The easiest way to do this is to ask for cash up front, if the publisher/distributor/portal is not willing to give you, say, $5-10K from the get go, then they're not going to put any effort into making your game visible (because they don't believe that they'll make enough to counteract that off their cut).
If it's a site about some sort of "who's working on what" system (I have no idea what the point of the PARTY jargon is), then what does it give me as a business to help me make more games faster and cheaper? I'm not having this sold particularly well to me right now... Sorry. ... Seriously? That's some bullshit, right there.
I have no problem in negotiating.
We have our business model and the way we want move forward. I just think everyone has their own idea of what we want to do and therefore assume allot of stuff.
There were certain terms in the transfer of ownership that I have to abide by for the first year at least, especially so because the domains was donated to me. No way around that, sorry.
The party jargon is technical stuff. I have to understand it in order to implement a proper web service. Any information framework has allot of processes which is standard and proven. I always work by proven standards so that is what it was, a small example of a small part of the standard. :)
Look, we are just starting so I value your inputs so far, many thanks for that.
If I am not welcome here then say so.
Again, that comes from people not understanding what you want to do, so people are questioning what you want to do, which you may perceive as hostility. But it's not - it's people trying to understand what it is you want to do :)
So, yeah. Clarity would help everyone.
It's the not linking MGSA to assuage Korax's ego that's bullshit. I'm sick and tired of this kind of petty crap, so I'm calling it out when I see it... I'm quite sure that the association does little to help you. Personally I wouldn't risk building any business processes around or putting any of my sensitive information on a site that had been shut down because its owner's delicate sensibilities were offended in the past.
I'm uncomfortable enough relying on Paypal, given their history of authoritarian and downright batshit crazy decisions, which is why we have multiple payment providers.
I understand. I'll go work on that pitch a little bit.
I also assume I am free to use the #makegames tag on twitter then as well? Because I did a test with that for the Toxic Bunny HD announcement.
It could be seen as being in bad taste if you're running a service that benefits from MGSA without being reciprocal to the community, but it's not like anyone would try to stop you.
P. S. The latter would be really cool
So, just like SAA, I'm having a hard time thinking of why it would be actually beneficial to buy games from a so-called SA store as opposed to, say, Steam. Besides the ooooh it's made-in-SA factor, which to me has neither practical nor financial advantages.
I don't go to Steam because it's made in USA, I don't go to the iTune store cos of where it came from. I don't buy from Indie Royale bundle cos it was made in somewhere. In fact I can't think of a single "it's profitable cos it's made in X" store, unless you factor in the language barrier, which South African games typically don't have. Unless anyone is dead set on making some Xhoza games.
Regarding the mental pride factor of a possible SA games store. I'd expect Luma won't be represented there because they have an exclusive publishing agreement (I believe). There is a reasonable chance that Free Lives will have a publishing agreement that covers the PC market when we release Broforce. QCF are unlikely to use such a marketplace, they've been selling fine through their own site and the opportunity of major portal sales awaits them still (I believe). Tasty Poison are releasing games on mobile and so won't be there. ect. As such I'm a little afraid about what such a store will look like and whether it'd make us proud.
Though I don't really think SAGameDev.com is going to be a store. ZAGames is actually trying to be a marketplace for South African games so if you think that's a cool idea I suggest supporting them.
Though I don't claim to know what's going on. At this moment SAGameDev is a banner on a website (and 25 twitter followers) with an option on the website add your game to the list of banners, and very little other information.
There might be cool stuff in the pipeline (stuff that'd benefit South African Game Developers). I'd love a little more information about it if that is the case.
So, I remain unconvinced at what I see SAGD trying to do right now. A strictly South African market feels like a bad idea, it's a classic example of the isolation tendency here in SA that I frequently rail against. The answer to not being able to compete internationally isn't to run and hide in a local-only store, it's to make better games. We can help each other do that, but a local store only encourages mediocrity by "rewarding" poor games with trickles of what amounts to pity income. "Damning with faint praise" indeed...
Services?
I'm also not certain that building services to support local developers is a winning model either. It's certainly never going to make sense as a business - elementary maths should illustrate why you want to target a subscription at as large a group of people as possible, and say what you want about local game devs, we're certainly not numerous. SAGD also has a history of trying to build services (in the past it was blogs, newsfeeds, image galleries and the like) that never really achieved much. They were always things that weren't absolutely essential to game development, or if they were, turned out to be available elsewhere easily enough with better integration possibilities... The service that's been spoken about in this incarnation of SAGD, project management, is both of those things: Not super essential to game development teams starting out; As well as being easy enough to find elsewhere, so much so that every studio locally that needs project management tools already has their own installed.
Now, it could be that SAGD is building some sort of revolutionary project management system, but if that's the case, why the hell aren't they targeting IT startups as a whole? This approach of building oddly non-essential services to support local game development feels kinda like a land-grab: Play in our walled garden, please, it would make us relevant without having to build games.
So what would I like to see instead?
I sound pretty negative, but it's obvious that the people behind SAGD are at least listening to what people are saying a little bit. The messages on the site have been changing and the bullet points in the game submission area are nothing if not directly responding to the crits people have had here. That's cool, but it's not enough to convince me, here's what I'd love to see SAGD do:
Get good at PR
If there's a service that SA games studios and teams need that's difficult to deliver and tricky to learn, it's PR. SAGD kinda takes a PR-centric stance with their current message of "showcasing Southern African game development work", but let's be honest: A website with a splash image, a single link to your game's page and a twitter mention on an account with 25 followers (that's more of an announcement that benefits SAGD at the moment anyway) isn't really worth anything in terms of PR. And don't rag me for going after someone when they're "small", the target audience for SAGD has never been random gameplaying public, it's people who are interested in game development itself, it's in the URL for crying out loud. So you're essentially getting a placebo PR message echoed back at yourself if you're into game dev in SA right now.
But there are totally things you can do that are awesome for game PR: Focus on establishing relationships with review sites to help bring local games to their attention; Chat to event organisers and make sure they're looking at local games, offer your crowd management and press-wrangling skills to local event crews (there is a ton to be learned from how IndieCade hires external PR for all their events, they're amazing to work with); Help local teams with marketing material like trailers or promotions; Get cosy with local grant-funding institutions and help local developers get overseas to large events...
Generate content
Submitting your game's image so that you can be graciously featured by the gatekeepers of Southern African game development goodness is not creating content for anyone. Why aren't SAGD reviewing local games (with the potential to farm out those reviews to local publications, so they can stop writing the same "OMG, you can make games in SA, where's our Angry Car-Guards ROFL!" story). Why aren't they doing Let's Plays of local games, flooding Youtube with rad videos of SA games? Why aren't they doing game design postmortems of SA games, creating street cred for Southern Africa on places like Gamasutra? All of those things don't need developer permission or special rights granted, so there's no conflicts with overseas distributors/publishers. Win!
Sure, all of that stuff is a lot more recurring work than writing random PHP and then being annoyed that people aren't using your glorious systems, but it's the best way to grow SAGD's viewership over time so that their PR angle has the highest number of reachable eyeballs.
Bottom line:
Why isn't SAGD learning from it's own past? They've always had some random glorious website system in the pipeline and it's never really worked. The best thing they had was all the content @Xyber made for them around local companies... Surely I'm not the only person that thinks this is a weird thing not to learn?
They're also going to have to drop this stupid issue with not supporting MakeGames, but that was always going to be a thing that needed getting over.
The things you're looking to do could easily be integrated on the makegames homepage, and as a makegames subdomain. We also wouldn't place any childish restrictions on who can and cannot be featured on it.
How would you feel about moving your entire operation to makegames? Not only would it be better for the South African game developer community as a whole to have one central site, but I think all the things you're talking about doing would benefit from solid integration with makegames.
And if they would move into makegamessa then we could all have cool fields to type into :)
I guess the confusion came in with the word publish that was used... I sincerely apologize for that confusion.
@dislekcia that's some awesome feedback... and I take it to heart.
@Aequitas SAGD fell into my lap and I am trying to do something with it since I have been a member on sagd for many years and hate to see it die. It was like family and I have allot of fond memories of it, and all the previous incarnations of the site (Also if anyone knows where the frack Deux is I would appreciate it if you let me know). This is my attempt to try and keep it alive for now.
It is a very tempting offer to join under makegames and I agree we have similar objectives and ideas. At this stage I will not say no or yes. Lets first see where this goes during the next 3 months?
@tuism the Klingon Empire fears no one :P
Just because the Klingon empire does not fear, does not mean it will not be assimilated. :P
I enjoyed the different opinions people share here.
P. S. I forgot that MakegamesSa came from the SAGD
http://makegamessa.com/wiki/index.php?title=Get_Started_with_Game_Development#How_do_I_get_into_.22X.22_market_or_platform.3F
I wish I knew how to format it better though.
It's awareness, even if it's not a moustache or removing bras :P