Jeff Vogel Soapbox Thread

[Contagium]

I don't have that much cash on hand. Nowhere near. To launch this project, I need to take a bank loan or raid my retirement fund. Then, if I don't break even, I'm in big trouble.

What was the point of the kickstarter then?

I'm convinced Jeff just pocketed most of the Kickstarter money to ensure that he was taking risk out of the equation because he was so paranoid about making a new IP. This is coming from a guy who has read all of his blogs and listened to his talks. He would have been very aware of the possibility that more Kickstarter money = less sales, since the Kickstarter already gave copies of the game for pledges above $20.

I promise my Vogel obsession will end soon but here's some further evidence.
Steam fee = 30%
Kickstarter fee = 5%
Both give you the game after pledging the game's release cost. But one gives Vogel a larger percentage of the money.
Vogel is using Kickstarter to sell his games, not to fund them.

That's truly a savvy veteran move.

 

[baud]

I don't have that much cash on hand. Nowhere near. To launch this project, I need to take a bank loan or raid my retirement fund. Then, if I don't break even, I'm in big trouble.

What was the point of the kickstarter then?

I'm convinced Jeff just pocketed most of the Kickstarter money to ensure that he was taking risk out of the equation because he was so paranoid about making a new IP. This is coming from a guy who has read all of his blogs and listened to his talks. He would have been very aware of the possibility that more Kickstarter money = less sales, since the Kickstarter already gave copies of the game for pledges above $20.

I promise my Vogel obsession will end soon but here's some further evidence.
Steam fee = 30%
Kickstarter fee = 5%
Both give you the game after pledging the game's release cost. But one gives Vogel a larger percentage of the money.
Vogel is using Kickstarter to sell his games, not to fund them.

on the other hand, it might also hurt the game on Steam: his most dedicated fan base would have pre-ordered via Kickstarter so won't buy it on release (considering how important those early sales are, that's something) and any review they write won't be taken into account by most Steam metrics (because the copy won't have been bought on Steam)

 

[Average Manatee]

on the other hand, it might also hurt the game on Steam: his most dedicated fan base would have pre-ordered via Kickstarter so won't buy it on release (considering how important those early sales are, that's something) and any review they write won't be taken into account by most Steam metrics (because the copy won't have been bought on Steam)

Does it work that way even if he gives them steam keys?

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

on the other hand, it might also hurt the game on Steam: his most dedicated fan base would have pre-ordered via Kickstarter so won't buy it on release (considering how important those early sales are, that's something) and any review they write won't be taken into account by most Steam metrics (because the copy won't have been bought on Steam)

Does it work that way even if he gives them steam keys?

It should work if they got a Steam key, yeah. When you post a review on Steam you as the reviewer get to decide if you say you got a copy for free or not, as in you were given the game to review. Kickstarting a game and getting a Steam key for it obviously doesn't count for that even though Steam isn't seeing any of the money so your review counts just as much as someone who bought it from Steam. Even if you're given a copy by the developer and you self report that you got a free copy your review is treated the same, it just has a little "This person received the game for free" tag on the review. People adding keys wouldn't be totted up for the storefront top sellers list and shit like that but their reviews would count just as much, total number of players, etc etc etc.

Where reviews can get fucky on Steam is the developer can censor (Not fully remove) negative (Or positive, but realistically they're only doing it to cover their asses) reviews in the case of review bombing and shit like that. An asterisk is added to the review total indicating that's happened, and by default the review scores and review totals are shown to people in that edited state. People can toggle a setting in their profile so they see the unmolested review score and reviews themselves, but you have to know to do that and most people won't even know what the little * by the reviews means.

Steam fee = 30%
Kickstarter fee = 5%

Doesn't Paypal take a slice of the pie too? Not super convinced that the Kickstarter thing is a scheme to wring a few more dollars out of his fans but I guess it could be. If his primary audience are the Spiderweb hardcore that want to buy every game at release then Kickstarter and Paypal fees probably still put him ahead of Steam since he can generate Steam keys and give them to backers, then he'd get the normal trickle of sales on stores and later on tossing it into bundles.

 

[J1M]

If I remember correctly, Kickstarter passes on currency conversion and processing fees so your actual take is closer to 90%.

 

[OneManArmyGames]

It should work if they got a Steam key, yeah. When you post a review on Steam you as the reviewer get to decide if you say you got a copy for free or not, as in you were given the game to review. Kickstarting a game and getting a Steam key for it obviously doesn't count for that even though Steam isn't seeing any of the money so your review counts just as much as someone who bought it from Steam. Even if you're given a copy by the developer and you self report that you got a free copy your review is treated the same, it just has a little "This person received the game for free" tag on the review. People adding keys wouldn't be totted up for the storefront top sellers list and shit like that but their reviews would count just as much, total number of players, etc etc etc.

Nope, reviews from steam purchased products are first class citizens, as they are the only ones that count towards the review score. Reviews from key activated products are merely listed in the reviews section; see the last bullet point under "How Reviews Are Displayed".

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Nope, reviews from steam purchased products are first class citizens, as they are the only ones that count towards the review score. Reviews from key activated products are merely listed in the reviews section; see the last bullet point under "How Reviews Are Displayed".

I'll be goddamned, that's really bizarre. I suppose that's a minor tradeoff given that developers can spit out Steam keys and sell them elsewhere without any fees or cuts from Valve, but in the case of smallish games like Vogel and especially doing something like Kickstarter it could bite him in the ass a little. Thanks for the heads up on it though, that's interesting.

 

[OneManArmyGames]

I'll be goddamned, that's really bizarre. I suppose that's a minor tradeoff given that developers can spit out Steam keys and sell them elsewhere without any fees or cuts from Valve, but in the case of smallish games like Vogel and especially doing something like Kickstarter it could bite him in the ass a little. Thanks for the heads up on it though, that's interesting.

You're welcome. I think the idea is to make it harder for unscrupulous devs/publishers to manipulate review scores, since otherwise it costs them nothing to give keys to their mates or to the hundreds of "curators" offering to write positive reviews in exchange for free game copies.

 

[baud]

OneManArmyGames had already explained, but since I had prepared a collage showing how it worked. Here (for Queen's Wish), we can see that the review score at the top of the page is based on 202 reviews from Steam purchases and the 80 others aren't taken into account

 

[baud]

https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/six-truths-about-video-game-stories

Six Truths About Video Game Stories
I shouldn't care, but I do.

We sell words. We’re in the word-selling business.​

Our tiny company has been earning (well, "earning") a good living making indie computer games for 27 years now. This is an extremely tough, competitive business, and we've been workin' it for a longer continuous period than just about everyone.

We write super-retro, super-low-budget games that don't look great. Never have. Never will. So how do we succeed?

The answer is: Writing. Our game design is quite solid, but the stories we tell is what keeps us in business. Our games are highly interactive novels with settings, characters, and stories that get people to actually give us real money.

Now let's be clear. I'm not a great fantasy writer. If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore. Still, as a writer I'm simply competent. Which, by video games standards, makes me awesome. Overall, I'm good enough that people give me money, and that is sufficient.

I really care about video game storytelling. More than I should. Because video game storytelling is usually pretty lousy. I cherish the games that do it well, sigh at the games that don't, and quietly pull my hair out when a game with really shaky writing gets hailed as high art.

So, although nobody asked, I would like to make six observations about video game writing. These are all things I've said in the past, but I'm collecting them in one place. Then you can bask in my wisdom, yell at me, or both.

A really solid story in an indie game. The secret: They kept it simple. Not too many moving parts.​

Spoiler

Observation 1: When people say a video game has a good story, they mean that it has a story.

Gamers have a reputation for being intolerant, perpetually angry complainers. This isn't true. Gamers are the most forgiving, tolerant audience of any media.

If your game is barely functional, somewhat coherent, and gives you a sufficiently satisfying way to grind away your time, gamers will give you a billion dollars. Games that ship in a buggy, non-function state rocket to the top of the sales charts all the time. That's how tolerant gamers are. They don't even require your product to WORK!

So, if your game has a story that coherently gets from the start to the end, has a couple memorable characters and lines of dialogue, and doesn't waste a ton of time, the world's most forgiving audience will hail it as great.

But it doesn't really matter, because ...

Observation 2: Players will forgive you for having a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it.

Gamers don't generally care about your game's story. They want the adrenaline spikes of shooty-bang-bang, or the sweet dopamine hits from filling up status bars.

If you are in the mood for good storytelling, you can watch a movie. Or a TV show. Or (shudder) read a book. Each of these is a thousand miles beyond the best video game in terms of storytelling. Whether your tastes run toward Raiders of the Lost Ark or Hamlet or Guardians of the Galaxy or Breaking Bad, video games have worse stories. Sorry.

Doesn't matter, because the vast majority of players just tune out the story. As long as you let them skip past it, it's fine. There are a lot of people out there who have put hundreds of hours into World of Warcraft, myself included. If you quizzed us all on World of Warcraft lore, 99% of us would get an F-, guaranteed.

Good story isn't what gamers are after. Which is good, because they ain't gettin' it.

One of the cleverest inventions in all of video game writing. Simple. Clear. Dark. Funny. One little idea can do so much.​

Observation 3: The default video game plot is, 'See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy.' If your plot is anything different, you're 99% of the way to having a better story.

One of the most influential computer RPGs ever written was 1985's Ultima IV. Why? Because it was the first big RPG to have a different story.

Now? Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2 are hailed as two of the best-written games ever, and they both have this plot. They have some nice bits of dialogue and some very funny and interesting settings to leap around on, but they're still just, "Let's punch a linear sequence of plot tickets until we finally get to hit a big guy in the face." Persona 5 is a cool game with a bunch of really engaging individual chapters and I loved it, but the big ending is just punching a big glowy thing a bunch of times.

Oh sure, there are ways to spice up the pattern. You can give the bad jerk a sad backstory. You can have three bad jerks, and you kill them one at a time. You can kill the bad jerk, but then his chest opens up and a God flies out and the God is the new bad jerk and you beat it up too. (Also known as the JRPG option.)

Still the same thing. And all the tricks you can use to disguise it are getting a little threadbare ...

All you need to get huge buzz for your story is to make an effort. It doesn’t have to make sense, and your characters don’t have to act in plausible and consistent ways!​

Observation 4: The three plagues of video game storytelling are wacky trick endings, smug ironic dialogue, and meme humor.

One of the biggest problems the industry has as a whole is that it is miserable to work in, so almost every worker bails after a decade or so. Alas, it takes many years to become a good writer. Video games are a tough medium for writing, so it takes a lot of practice to become good at it, practice most workers never get.

Thus, they have to resort to cheap tricks.

Every game writer saw The Sixth Sense and thought, "Wow! I want to do my own wacky trick ending!" Unfortunately, this almost always results in something less engaging than just telling the story in a straight-forward, honest way. Don't cheat.

Joss Whedon mastered the art of mixing serious events with wacky dialogue. In the 20th century, this was fresh. Now this is everywhere. (Borderlands is a particularly gruesome offender.) Making everything wacky and funny means that it becomes very hard to be serious, emotional, and sincere. And that is a mode you need to be in sometimes to create good writing. If everything is a joke, why care?

And meme humor is instantly dated and cringe. Portal and Portal 2 have very solid, funny writing because they made up new stuff. Every game that cribbed off of them ("Oh. The cake is a lie? You don't say.) is now dated and bears the eternal mark of lameness. Seriously, make up your own jokes! It's more fun that way!

Utterly standard gameplay. A cop-out trick ending. But people still talk about this game because of its clever writing tricks.​

Observation 5: It costs as much to make a good story as a bad one, and a good story can help your game sell. So why not have one?

Portal and Portal 2 were adequate, competent puzzle games elevated into hit classics by good writing. The Last of Us has decent gameplay but became a phenomenon by having a story as good as a medium-quality zombie movie. Why is Borderlands 2 the most loved, best-selling game in the series, even though the gameplay is basically the same as the others? Writing.

Observation 6: Good writing comes from a distinctive, individual, human voice. Thus, you'll mainly get it in indie games.

When you're working on a AAA game with a $300000000 budget, all executive decisions will be aimed toward one goal: Sand down any odd edges or quirky details. For a AAA game to have a unique authorial voice, it has to have someone VERY famous or influential working on it. Which doesn't happen much.

But me? I'm just a big weirdo sitting alone in a room. I can do whatever the hell I want.

The great super-power of indie developers is that we can fill in all the spaces in the market the big fish can't. No matter how low your budget is, you can always make a good story.

Ten years later, the Borderlands series is still eating out on the reputation earned by this character.
​

"Oh, so you're the judge of everyone now? What makes you so great?"

Look, making video games is difficult and expensive. Graphics, sound, coding, testing, it's an enormous effort. Compared to that, the act of putting words on paper is tiny.

So do it right! It takes so little, a clever scene, a cool character, a really fresh, funny idea, to elevate a so-so game to something great. In this context, "great" means "gets lots of free PR and sales".

Or not. If I had to compete with real, talented writers instead of middle-of-the-road AAA gray goo, I'd go out of business sooooo fast. I'll take what I can get.

He also wrote a few other articles, but since they're about the stock market, Las Vegas and the coof, I don't think you'd care

 

[Viata]

How is Jeff doing now? Enjoying the money from all those remakes?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I don't care that he remakes them but don't make them less than they were with just slightly better graphics.

More gear? Fine
More abilities? Fine
More monsters? Fine
Better crafting? Fine
More Quests/areas to explore? Very fine

I don't need lots of romance and bullox but building armies, selling slaves, selling corpses, destroying buildings/terrain, building shit etc is ok. In the end, I just want to map out the game and explore to the end.

 

[Viata]

If you think this looks acceptable, you have no eye for art.

After WarWizard everything is acceptable.

I have a hard on for this kind of game. A small window for the game world and the rest of the screen is just the hud.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Gamers have a reputation for being intolerant, perpetually angry complainers. This isn't true. Gamers are the most forgiving, tolerant audience of any media.

If your game is barely functional, somewhat coherent, and gives you a sufficiently satisfying way to grind away your time, gamers will give you a billion dollars. Games that ship in a buggy, non-function state rocket to the top of the sales charts all the time. That's how tolerant gamers are. They don't even require your product to WORK!

It's funny how true this is but devs will still cry about gamers. Imagine the reaction moviegoers would have to a film that just abruptly ends halfway through after a plethora of technical issues. There's no way e.g., the Marvel Movies would have done anywhere near as well with the production value of The Avengers video game

Spoiler

Overall, I agree with most of what he posted. Especially things like e.g.,

Observation 6: Good writing comes from a distinctive, individual, human voice. Thus, you'll mainly get it in indie games.

When you're working on a AAA game with a $300000000 budget, all executive decisions will be aimed toward one goal: Sand down any odd edges or quirky details. For a AAA game to have a unique authorial voice, it has to have someone VERY famous or influential working on it. Which doesn't happen much.

One of the major differences between big-budget cRPGs of yesteryear and current ones is the number of writers. Many of them definitely suffer from an unfocused story and a schizophrenic setting.
Consider e.g., Underrail. It doesn't have the best story or setting, but it has one that generally makes sense and isn't being pulled in multiple directions which puts it far ahead of the pack. Now compare it to any of the bigger IE-style games of the kickstarter-era -- numanuma, pillows, etc.,

 

[Tyranicon]

People vastly underestimate how hard it is to even get to "decent" writing. Good writing is not something that is remotely encouraged in the video game industry, and when something like The Outer Worlds is considered "decent," then you know why most people would rather have no-story sandboxes.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Geneforge is still one of my favorite fictional world out there. too bad his writing quality actually went downhill the past decade, for all his clamoring of his writing.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

The answer is: Writing.

This isn't true. Vogel's writing is good enough, and in the case of the Geneforge series is very good (it's my favorite RPG series behind Dark Souls for a reason). However, the reason Vogel has been able to make a living at this for nearly 30 years comes down to:

1. Getting into the indie scene when there were very few competitors. If Vogel was a 20 year old who released "Escape from the Pit" today, he'd never in a million years make enough money to live off of the procedes.
2. Living modestly. For the first decade or so of its existence, people were estimating that he was likely making about $60,000 per game. Which is a very solid middle class income, especially in the 90s, but probably an amount that some would panic over and try to do something else, especially given that making that money was exclusively tied to having to churn out one game per year.
3. Still being around to make fuckloads of money in the early days of Steam when the platform was still limiting the games that could be on it and anything "indie" was selling like hotcakes. It's very possible that he's made half a million on Avadon sales alone. And I also have zero doubt that his subsequent games have sold better, although I suspect that at the moment he's settled back to a core group of fans buying every release (albeit, that group is likely larger than it was in the 90s or 2000s).
4. Most importantly (and this is the biggest): Work ethic. Vogel has an insane work ethic. He's somehow able to produce massive games with a huge amount of quests all by himself. How? Because he's boiled it down to a formula, yet he's also good at making that formula interesting, so it never feels overly formulaic. You can look at a game like the Kickstarter funded PoE and think, "Where the fuck did all that money go? Why does it take so many people to produce so little when Vogel can church out an entire game all by himself in 2 years?" I think it helps that he's never been a perfectionist. Rather than fussing with a specific game to get it perfect, he'll merely iterate on it in the sequel. And he's very good at doing a mix of interesting quests, with more generic filler shit that probably takes less time to design. He's also great at painting details with broad strokes, so you feel like he writes more after playing a game than he actually does. Spiderweb is kind of the video game equivelant of pulp novels, in that Vogel churns shit out like he's getting paid by the word, and he always follows a very strict formula, yet he's somehow able to do interesting things within the confines of that formula.
5. Being fucking cheap. Any game designer with any level of self-respect would not be re-using the same fucking boat sprite for a decade straight, but Vogel has always been shameless about being cheap, likely because he knows that....
6. He has a loyal fanbase who will buy everything he releases, regardless of quality. Which, duh. Any indie developer would kill for his fans, as the indie scene today is such that it's difficult to generate that sort of loyal following.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Doesn't Paypal take a slice of the pie too? Not super convinced that the Kickstarter thing is a scheme to wring a few more dollars out of his fans but I guess it could be. If his primary audience are the Spiderweb hardcore that want to buy every game at release then Kickstarter and Paypal fees probably still put him ahead of Steam since he can generate Steam keys and give them to backers, then he'd get the normal trickle of sales on stores and later on tossing it into bundles.

He sucks at kickstarter, though. I am the biggest most obsessive Spiderweb fan in the world. I would pay him $200+ for anything physical and autographed. Yet all of his kickstarters only have digital shit I don't want, so I've never contributed to one. I know that physical merchandise is a pain in the ass as you have to contract for it and ship it yourself, so he probably wants to avoid it. Still. I think he could make more if he did it.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Has anyone made their own physical merchandise of the games and manuals. I mean it is possible to customize your own but time consuming. I've noticed companies that will even make board and card games from submitted files. Card games are probably the easiest.

https://www.boardgamesmaker.com/customized/custom-game-boxes.html

manuals... cds... figurines... dice. Might just have to make your own.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Has anyone made their own physical merchandise of the games and manuals. I mean it is possible to customize your own but time consuming. I've noticed companies that will even make board and card games from submitted files. Card games are probably the easiest.

https://www.boardgamesmaker.com/customized/custom-game-boxes.html

manuals... cds... figurines... dice. Might just have to make your own.

Well, he could just go to Kinkos and maybe print out a game poster in high-rez on glossy paper and autograph it. That'd be cheap and easy and I'd buy it.

 

[fantadomat]

old stuff

Who was the third employ ?

 

[Haba]

People vastly underestimate how hard it is to even get to "decent" writing. Good writing is not something that is remotely encouraged in the video game industry, and when something like The Outer Worlds is considered "decent," then you know why most people would rather have no-story sandboxes.

The problem is that they are trying to put a square peg through a round hole.

Write less and say more.

I've recently been playing nuDOOM. It has fucking audio logs and lore tidbits. Cool, right? More writing!

WRONG!

It is a fucking action game where you go around killing shit. The action itself should be the story teller.

RPGs are one of the worst offenders here. In a desperate attempt to make the story better, they add more writing and more writers.

When every sword has a backstory and a name, every sword with a name is just another sword.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

old stuff

Who was the third employ ?

I'm guessing here, but probably someone to help with the art. As minimilistic as the art is, it's probably asking too much for Jeff to improve on both his programming and the ever-increasing amount of tiles and icons appearing in his games.

 

[JarlFrank]

People vastly underestimate how hard it is to even get to "decent" writing. Good writing is not something that is remotely encouraged in the video game industry, and when something like The Outer Worlds is considered "decent," then you know why most people would rather have no-story sandboxes.

The question is also, what is good writing?

Is it about the style of prose, the flow of the sentences?
Nah, not really. I don't care about that. I can even live with wonky Slav grammar that can't use articles as long as the storytelling is good.

It's all about the quality of the storytelling: interesting characters, worldbuilding, quest concepts, player choices, etc etc. Make that shit engaging.

All I want from RPG writing is the computer game equivalent of a 1930s Weird Tales issue. Exciting plots that twist and turn with colorful characters that have an agenda.

What I get instead is "Lol please deliver this package to my sister" and "I need some herbs for my potion, care to collect them for me?"
That's bad writing because it's just rote repetition of what has been done a thousand times before. And they're not even good tropes, they're boring.

Make my characters go through a dozen Conan short story plots instead. THAT would be good and appropriate RPG writing.

 

[Viata]

What I get instead is

3 hours of background story that doesn't interest you at all because you are just visiting some random village.