Developer Super Icon has shared a post-mortem for their recent Vita release Indoor Pub Games Sports World, revealing increasing difficulties indies, and also AAAs, face in the current game development environment.
At the onset, Super Icon’s Richard Hill-Whitehall minces no words, saying working on the game has financially ruined them. They spent many months working just on this game without any other sources of income, and realized in hindsight that this would be a financially dangerous decision.
The post-mortem is not completely negative. Richard does not regret the work they put into the game’s graphics, 3D details, or the rich amount of game modes and rulesets. These decisions helped raise the game’s quality and kept it competitive against similar games in the system.
Now, regarding the company’s regrets, they do feel trying to build their own engine from scratch and making the game too big were serious mistakes. These choices made the game unnecessarily riskier and also kept them preoccupied in development for too long. They also regret not putting more testing into the game, and thereby calibrating the difficulty all wrong.
However, most notably, Sony itself gets part of the blame for making that road to publishing that much rougher. Their TRC (Technical Requirements Checklist) was filled with ‘extreme levels of pedantry’. Sony’s QAs also became a source of frustration when they found MF (Must Fix) bugs for Super Icon to fix after 10 day testing periods twice over. Again, Richard’s honesty is remarkable, detailing the bad vibes and near distrust they felt towards Sony .
To sum up, Richard says these were his key learnings from the experience: not to develop their own tech, to allocate more time for testing, not to make another sports title (which are harder to make than they appear), and most sensibly, to make sure they keep making money while making games.
As others have noted, Super Icon has had bad experiences working with Sony before. Their game Life of Pixel, an early highlight for Playstation Mobile, failed to make enough money back on the platform, and faced difficulties in their Kickstarter for multiplatform ports. As a final kick in the teeth, their hopes to get Sony to publish the game’s sequel was turned down by Sony themselves.
This is nothing less than a horror story for Sony development, and the last thing I’m sure Sony wants to hear from their partners. It is worth noting they have no complaints about the quality of the Vita’s hardware, and really, they are veterans at making games for Sony’s platforms.
We hope that all of the big three make note of this story and that it informs their future work with indie game developers. Indies are more than capable of adapting to different platforms, but if they face difficult scenarios to make games and profit from them, you can rest assured they will be taking their business elsewhere.
