Ken Masters
Banned
will this ever come to mac steam?
Super Meat Boy: 400k, 3DS (?), WiiWare version cancelled, retail edition and more
- Thread starter Kifimbo
- Start date
charlequin
Banned
Father_Brain said:
Haha. In my defense, their complaint boils down to the fact that they were promised precisely the kind of sweet deal I described and they felt like they didn't get what they signed on for!
(Also, I mean, it's not like they were signing away something valuable like the ability to release the game on Steam.)
charlequin
Banned
Jtyettis said:
It probably didn't bring in a tremendously greater amount of gross revenue on Steam, but given the best data we have access to their cut per sale ought to be almost twice as high on Steam as it is on XBLA.
Jtyettis said:
This story (or similar comments along the same lines) was reported earlier and it didn't mention any absolute claims of "the game never showed up on the dashboard," but more that the marketing side was extremely unsupportive and the Game Feast promotion as a whole was underpromoted (which I think is definitely accurate, compared to the Summers of Arcade.)
TheUnknownForce
Member
I think Game Feast was a poorly-timed XBLA event. It was only about two months after the much bigger Summer of Arcade promotion, and it was announced only weeks prior to existing. Summer of Arcade is great because it happens right before the huge blockbuster releases, but the fall and winter periods are full of competition, so that was probably a concern.
It feels like XBLA promotions are being too heavily used. It'll dilute the games in each promotion rather than benefit them. Of course, Summer of Arcade will still appear great, but I think a number of gamers are simply shrugging their shoulders until then.
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As for no Wii release, I saw this coming. WiiWare was their venue, Nintendo would not budge the size cap, but on the flip side, Team Meat got promotions from them and support when they wanted Aether and Meat Boy brought to WiiWare. I do feel that Nintendo might be a little peeved that they are not getting the game, though. I expect Team Meat is working on a 3DS title specifically right now to compensate. They did say they wanted to make a handheld game next (and not a touch-screen-only one, too). I somehow doubt SMB is coming to 3DS, but something unique instead. And frankly, I hope it is something different; I'm not going to finish either version I downloaded, so what's the point of buying another version of the game I'll get into a dead-end with?
The biggest hurdle for them now is trying to ensure Nintendo fans don't essentially turn their backs from them. They have done it before.
It feels like XBLA promotions are being too heavily used. It'll dilute the games in each promotion rather than benefit them. Of course, Summer of Arcade will still appear great, but I think a number of gamers are simply shrugging their shoulders until then.
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As for no Wii release, I saw this coming. WiiWare was their venue, Nintendo would not budge the size cap, but on the flip side, Team Meat got promotions from them and support when they wanted Aether and Meat Boy brought to WiiWare. I do feel that Nintendo might be a little peeved that they are not getting the game, though. I expect Team Meat is working on a 3DS title specifically right now to compensate. They did say they wanted to make a handheld game next (and not a touch-screen-only one, too). I somehow doubt SMB is coming to 3DS, but something unique instead. And frankly, I hope it is something different; I'm not going to finish either version I downloaded, so what's the point of buying another version of the game I'll get into a dead-end with?
The biggest hurdle for them now is trying to ensure Nintendo fans don't essentially turn their backs from them. They have done it before.
Heart Attack
Member
To all gaffers who think this game should had been 400-800 points... well you can actually buy it at gamestop for 800 points like i did 
Leon S. Kennedy
Member
nckillthegrimace said:
You can launch games directly from the SD card on the wii. They fixed that a couple of years ago
Ken Masters said:
Once the PC Level Editor comes out, that's when Team Meat will put all of their efforts on the Mac version. In the mean time, I've had almost no problems playing this in Windows 7 via VMware Fusion
http://twitter.com/mylescox/status/38443983592112128
http://twitter.com/SuperMeatBoy/status/38449917852651520
VGChampion
Member
I wasn't planning on getting the Wiiware version anymore but it's kind of sad. That's where I learned about the console ports and wanted it the most.
No, the system copies the file to the main memory and then launches from it. It's a retarded system and totally unnecessary, as homebrewers can launch multi-GB games from an SD card. As for the 3DS, seems to have 2GB of memory and is able to exe code directly from the SD card.Leon S. Kennedy said:
I AM JOHN!
Banned
Look at how you've predicated that statement, though - four years ago. In that time, Steam and even places like Impulse and Gamersgate have proven themselves to be equally strong alternatives to the console digital distribution, even when it comes to promotion (something PSN and XBLA have continued to shit the bed over). It makes no sense to me that with an indie market thriving on PC and the huge gap between the hits and the misses on XBLA that you continue to see many indie teams shunning that market. How do you continue to get scenarios where Twisted Pixel - easily the most prolific and qualitatively best XBLA-exclusive teams - struggles to sell 50,000 copies of their latest game when Splosion Man and The Maw did far bigger numbers, or where Costume Quest and Stacking were given conditions that they need to do well on consoles before a PC version can happen and then they only do okay? It seems like console DD only seems to be getting both worse and far more dangerous for developers, but no one either notices or cares.charlequin said:
They're going to do the Mac client as soon as they finish the level editor.Ken Masters said:
FourSerioux
Member
Super Meat Boy was easily my favourite game of last year, despite all the big name games that came out. My interest in the 3DS is pretty low, mainly due to the fact that there are no interesting games out there for it. If Super Meat Boy was adapted, or a sequel made, for the 3DS then I would easily pick the system up. Here's hoping!
charlequin said:
If MS is still getting 70/30 then yes that probably is the case. What kind of share does Steam get by the way? I have no clue myself. Still terrible they(MS) do get that much. As far as Game Feast yes it was lacking, but those adds went well beyond game feast and more importantly were the eye catching ads with the high review ratings with them in multiple places during the day. At 171k between now and it's release they probably could not have done much better unless an already established IP or part of the Summer of Arcade releases. I doubt anything new has outsold it during that time frame either.
I AM JOHN!
Banned
Isn't it the other way around - 30 for Microsoft and 70 for devs?Jtyettis said:
nincompoop
Banned
Is Super Meat Boy even going to work that well with the 3DS's pathetic 400x240 screen resolution? The camera was zoomed out pretty far in a lot of the game's levels.
TheFightingFish
Member
I AM JOHN! said:
Not sure how really true this is overall though. I happen to know some PC indie devs and man is that ever a competitive place right now. There are tons of really solid PC indie games that don't happen to get Valve's attention and make it into a Steam indie holiday pack that sell three figures worth of copies. If anything it seems a little more boom or bust than XBLA, at least XBLA seems to have a minimum number of sales that most games get. While in PC land you can go like Minecraft, or but you can also get totally passed over if you never get highlighted by one of the big DD services.
Of All Trades
Member
So did SMB actually underperform on XBLA in terms of sales or did the Gamefeast promotion underperform in relation to what was promised? Most of the quotes seem to indicate the latter.
charlequin
Banned
This writeup of the GDC panel goes into quite a bit more detail on some of these subjects, BTW.
Nope. You can launch games that are on the SD card, but they're actually copied to the built-in storage and launched from there.
In fairness, in the panel writeup it talks about "how well the game has done" in its XBLA sales, they just felt like it was no thanks to the Microsoft marketing people who sabotaged its performance.
I... agree? That was kind of my point? Steam is drinking XBLA's milkshake. It's just that it's really only in the last year or so that this new relationship has really been clear enough to say it's the new status quo.
Not confirmed anywhere, but widely rumored to be a 30% cut.
Hahaha, nope. They literally halved the developer royalty for games published by Microsoft (reportedly from 70% to 35%) several years ago; the developers of N+ gave a somewhat-drunken interview where they bitched about it.
Whatever one's feelings about Steam's inclusivity, they're far far more egalitarian with their promotions (and their inclusion of titles on the service to start with) than Microsoft.
Sooooo not true. Lots of XBLA games doing literally four digits in sales. Rlan's thread showed a few games like Path of Go with literally less than five hundred leaderboard entries.
Leon S. Kennedy said:
Nope. You can launch games that are on the SD card, but they're actually copied to the built-in storage and launched from there.
Letters said:
In fairness, in the panel writeup it talks about "how well the game has done" in its XBLA sales, they just felt like it was no thanks to the Microsoft marketing people who sabotaged its performance.
I AM JOHN! said:
I... agree? That was kind of my point? Steam is drinking XBLA's milkshake. It's just that it's really only in the last year or so that this new relationship has really been clear enough to say it's the new status quo.
Jtyettis said:
Not confirmed anywhere, but widely rumored to be a 30% cut.
I AM JOHN! said:
Hahaha, nope. They literally halved the developer royalty for games published by Microsoft (reportedly from 70% to 35%) several years ago; the developers of N+ gave a somewhat-drunken interview where they bitched about it.
TheFightingFish said:
Whatever one's feelings about Steam's inclusivity, they're far far more egalitarian with their promotions (and their inclusion of titles on the service to start with) than Microsoft.
Sooooo not true. Lots of XBLA games doing literally four digits in sales. Rlan's thread showed a few games like Path of Go with literally less than five hundred leaderboard entries.
I AM JOHN!
Banned
I don't want to sound like I think PC is some promise land of sales and money for indie devs whereas being on console is a recipe for disaster, but even in the last year it feels like the PC breakout success stories have been pretty numerous, be it Machinarium, Minecraft, Magicka, VVVVVV, or Reccetear. What was the last big breakout success on XBLA, PSN or Wiiware, a game that just came out of nowhere and did big numbers? Trials HD? It could have to do with a multitude of factors - maybe console dev teams don't like to talk about sales as much as PC devs; maybe they don't readily have the numbers available; maybe it's merely a product of PC gamers traditionally being far more tuned in to what's out there than console gamers are (something I've thought for years) - but it all seems to me like these teams essentially ignoring PC are just screwing themselves in the end.TheFightingFish said:
That's fucked up.charlequin said:
SciencePilot
Member
Well, I'm happy for them. It's a great game. I bought it on XBLA for full price... I would have liked to have it on Steam actually, but I didn't have a controller, so it was out of the question for me.
charlequin
Banned
Zeth said:
Again, the way they described it at the GDC panel was that it did well on XBLA but they said that performance was no thanks to Microsoft's marketing.
It was poorly promoted on XBLA. They sold it at 800 initially for a couple of weeks and then raised the price. It sold really well until they did that. I am not sure in what universe that sort of promotion makes sense. Hell it may have sold better if it started at 1200. At least it would have sold consistantly and not dropped off so hard.
InsaneLuchador
Member
The first 3DS game I could give a crap about was just hinted at. I'm listening.
InsaneLuchador said:
Just out of curiosity, what could 3DS do for this game other than portability? I can't imagine the actual 3D effect adding anything to the game, and it goes without saying (even though I'm saying it) that it'll look far inferior to the PC/360 versions.
charlequin
Banned
Kilrogg said:
Literally no one was willing to publish a retail Wii game for them.
ncsuDuncan
Member
Heh, I bought this on Steam for $3.75 and talked it up to all my friends.
Then I went to their houses and downloaded the XBLA demo to their 360s, showing off the awesomely hard game I had been talking about.
Convinced at least one of them to get it for $15.
Then I went to their houses and downloaded the XBLA demo to their 360s, showing off the awesomely hard game I had been talking about.
Convinced at least one of them to get it for $15.
MightyHedgehog
Member
Honestly, I'm super surprised that SMB sold as much as it has. I love it, though, with it easily being in my top five of last year. It's just not a game for most people, I think. Too many deaths for most people to take, and the challenge/frustration/intimidation level is very high later on. 400k is awesome for a small game and I think these guys deserve a lot more.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
C4Lukins said:
This kind of promotion works incredibly well on the iOS store, to the point that virtually every developer does it.
