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If you take the example of someone like Big Fish, who put out a game a week, they know more about who buys and who plays their games [as well as what works for that audience] then any mainstream developer bar perhaps Ea [in house] and Valve.

So when somebody like Sweet Tooth Games [who are part of Big Wig Media who run casual game behemoth 2dplay.com] decides to use a year to put what they know into a game like The Scruffs it is a resounding success.

I’m really looking forward to what you guys come out with next btw; I loved naked war.

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Kind of related is the fact the devs are often quite isolated from the publishing and selling process. It might be different at publishers’ internal dev studios, but I’ve only ever worked at independent developers working with publishers as clients. Typically we’d receive very little feedback about sales (publishers were always cagey about numbers, in case they had to pay us royalties) or any customer feedback. We weren’t really in the loop once we’d delivered the final version, so it was difficult to respond to any reactions to your previous game except in the most blunt and obvious ways (it was a flop or it got bad reviews, or this year all the publishers want platform games because there was a successful platform game last year).

I guess this is another way that publishers kept developers ‘artificially juvenile’.

Self publishing, even on the micro scale of something like Naked War, has taught me more about player reactions to a game than years of development.

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While the quality of the episodes has arguably gone up compared to previous full-length titles, I don’t think that’s been caused by tighter feedback loops; at least not as much as episodic proponents would hope. I think they’re just able to spend more time polishing the shorter games, and don’t have to expend as much energy on technology development.

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What we’re finding with casual games is that because we are making so many and at such a fast rate we are evolving the games and learning from them exponentially.

We could have 2 games almost exactly the same but cause one emphasises ‘this’ over the other’s ‘that’ people will take to it [or the other] a lot more.

With mainstream [heh] dev companies only making 1-2 games before going under and dispersing their work force [1 or 2 games representing anything from 3 to 8 years of work] games are not evolving as much as they should.

They’re kept artificially juvenile.

Look at Valve, it took the time [and took it's money and invested] into looking at what works and what doesn’t over the course of a few ‘quicker’ developed games [it's mods and episodic content] and the results are pretty obvious.

Minter with Space Giraffe was out of touch with who plays [and will pay for] games on Xbox Live.
If he learns anything from Space Giraffe it would be to look at his delivery systems and make his games fit that and to make them A LOT more accessible to get involved in.

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