This leaves the most indie of indie devs able to only just about support each other. ‘Gamers’ as a whole can fixate on the idea that the cost of entry to a game should correlate to hours of playtime. There was nothing Emika Games could do about it, and this is the exact thing Baillie is talking about.
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This was because players took advantage of Steam’s refund policy, and refunded Emika Games' Summer Of ‘58 because it was under two hours long. Were|House by Sad Ghost Studios, from Issue #22Įarlier this year, solo developer Emika Games announced they would be leaving the games industry “indefinitely”. “You need to normalise paying people for smaller games,” they say. The reason Baillie is adamant about paying people is simple. Baillie is open about the fees and includes the details in the zine itself: $20 upon acceptance, then 5% of all sales before the issue breaks even, and 8% thereafter. Paying people for their work is something that’s incredibly important to Baillie, even if they can’t pay much. “The first couple issues I did have people email me saying ‘how do I pay you to be involved?’ and I was like ‘what, no, I pay you, that's not how it works.’” says Baillie. Festivals often require you to pay a fee for submitting your game, a standard that confused people early on with Indiepocalypse. Indiepocalypse wasn’t just born from wanting a home for off-kilter games, but also from a frustration with the industry at large, including games festivals. Apocalypses are chaos incarnate, and Indiepocalypse is no different. November’s issue features a visual novel where “a useless lesbian tries to get a girlfriend” (Yuki's Palpitating, Passionate, Phenomenal, and quite frankly Proficient quest for a (hot) girlfriend!!! by milkkylemon, seen in the header image), while another issue has a game where you play as a grandma trying to get her favourite book back from a 1000 year old skeleton (Astrid & The Witch by leusyth), and another is about a trans woman who’s just worried about whether she passes (Do I Pass by Taylor McCue). “That whenever you pick up an issue of Indiepocalypse you don't know what you're going to get.”īaillie's not wrong. “I want to be like chaos in a way,” says Baillie.
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There are no rules whatsoever about what the games have to be like, either. And then they thought, “Well, what if I just did it? And then I just started doing it.”Įvery month's issue has a unique cover that the artist can go wild with (“I just say ‘write Indiepocalypse on the cover, then literally do whatever else you want.’ I don't really care.”). It was frustrating that there wasn’t a way for shorter games to get the spotlight, and Baillie thought it would be great if someone could fund and support one. At one point they made short games they thought were good, but understood for the games to do well commercially they needed to be hours longer. But when you’re an indie developer who spent hundreds of hours on a game, only for no one to buy it because it’s too short or weird, then it might not exactly feel that way. Making a game is incredibly hard - so hard that even releasing it, whether or not it does well, is something of a success.