Hemisphere Games Forum

Oh. Hello.

You people making commercial games or free ones?

Or in other words: will Osmos be free?

Other than that, sweet demo there. Inspired me to pick up a game experiment thing that I started a while ago and let sort of fade away some time later. It's got red triangle-shaped zombies in it.

Except I haven't exactly picked it up yet.

But I intend to.

Maybe.


Shut up.

Aah, good question that. Free sounds beautiful! But if it is going to be commercial, could you please give any ball-park figure of the price perhaps?

Love the game, by the way. Absolutely. Adore. It. Thanks for providing the experience...

It *is* a good question. <looks around.> well, here goes...

at first, osmos was going to be free. (i mainly make games for the love of it.) but at one point it got "good enough" and i/we had put enough work into it that it started seeming like "hey, maybe we can start a game company on this!" so, the hope is that we can sell it for a reasonable price, and get the ball rolling. we do have a few ideas waiting in the wings...

so the question is: what's a reasonable price? the answer: i'm not sure yet. we're still figuring out the bizz side of things. but i'll let you know once we do!

cheers,
eddy

and thanks a lot for the positive feedback - it definitely helps our morale to keep things going!

I'll buy one.

And that's coming from a lifelong (but gradually reforming) software pirate.

A reasonable price would be between 10 and 20$, because the game is really well done. The demo has a low longevity, so if the game has a similar longevity 10$ would be a right choice. But that's yours!

Many indie companies are pushing games, which are then ranged from $15 - $20 normally. This also depends on whether it is purely download only, or you look to make a CD (perhaps a CD with 3 of your games on it, who knows, what you could plan)

If you write all the zones yourselves, with just enough repetition so players still miss a feature, but are happy to move on, order the levels well (or better, as tree-order them, as you appear to be doing), and total up 10 hours of play, that's $20 well spent on a download. It's hard to tell from the demo, but the chaotic nature of the game may give it some replayability - it which case 5-6 hours may suffice for the first playthrough.

If you'd rather go the pay of user-generated content, please do something to filter out all the me-too dross. I wouldn't compare Osmos to the over-hyped Spore, but it's a good example of lots of pretty user-generated content... that does nothing for gameplay. The best filter for dross is to make it harder to make content (but powerful).

Eddy has just posted on price to the Hemisphere Games blog:

http://www.hemispheregames.com/2009/08/new-trailer-interview-and-the-price/

Dave

Awesome!

Don't worry, even though $10 is a low price for such a great game, there will be MILLIONS of customers
Even very picky customers will be glad to have Osmos in their collection, so - don't worry

THANK YOU!

Got the day marked in my calendar already. So make that "MILLIONS plus one".