One of the big themes of this week’s Develop conference was freemium games, and one of the biggest issues that kept coming up was how much you should actually give away for free.
This is an enormous subject, and we’re going to try and tackle it in bits and pieces whenever it crops up. I’m mentioning it here, though, because Eugene Evans, who seems extremely clever and once owned a fancy sports car, said something interesting in his keynote. Now a rather important man over at BioWare Mythic, he suggested that the cheaper a game is, the better it should be.
Nice thought! I like it, and I certainly agree that my favourite freemium games are the ones where you feel you just have to give the developer some money after an hour or two because they’ve already given you such pleasure.
Fitting, then, that after coming out of Evans’ talk, I saw Seedling over on the ever-brilliant Indiegames site. Seedling is 2D Zelda in a browser, basically: it’s massive, it’s lovingly crafted, and it will cost you nothing.
Sword swiping, block pushing, the endless appeal of staircases leading down into the ground. Play it for a few hours this weekend, maybe. That Connor Ullmann’s not bad, eh?
Seedling from Connor Ullmann on Vimeo.
