Why I Don’t Like GarageGames
I was recently asked why I’m not fond of GarageGames. Here is my reply:
My limited experience with GarageGames has left me with a sour taste in my mouth.
They “prey” on new game developers by locking them in to proprietary development with sub par tools. Since they provide a path from initial experimentation to publishing, with development conferences on the way, they incubate developers in a vacuum: Developers are frequently unaware of development and publishing alternatives. Of course, it’s their prerogative as a business to maximize their profits. But, this wouldn’t be a problem if they cared about the community above viewing them as cattle.
Their reliance on the community to provide support to itself is unhealthy, especially considering their widely known documentation problems. (Yes, I’m aware of the documentation project — it should have been done years ago.) They offer just enough support to sustain their community at a level that is self-sufficient. And then they try to capitalize on the successful developers by publishing their games, often when the developer isn’t aware of alternatives.
I’d like to point to a recent blog post by GarageGames’ Jeff Tunnell:
In the six years since we started GarageGames, we have found that simply sitting back and waiting for games to be made is not bringing them in fast enough or good enough for us to keep up with the market needs. Six years ago, I would have guessed that we would be looking at hundreds of games by now, but that has turned out not to be the case. Actually, in the course of a year, we do get several hundred submissions, but most of those are not worth looking at. In order for the GarageGames to be significant as a publisher, we need to be turning out at least 10 great games per year.
[Emphasis is mine.]
He’s realized that their lack of support for the community isn’t fostering enough publishing deals with GarageGames; they need more. At least they’ve identified the need for more support. Are they’re on their way to mending the mess that is the GarageGames community? Perhaps. Only time will tell.
Disclaimer: This is based off my very limited experience with GarageGames, and is primarily a thought borne from hearsay and personal exploration in the company and its practices. I could be off by a mile.
October 22nd, 2005 at 8:30 pm
You’ve never used our tools, and claim they are subpar. Tell that to NASA, Level 3 Communications, Sandia Labs, NCSoft, 21-6, MaxGaming, Bravetree (whom we acquired), Large Animal, or an one of hundreds of other companies using our technology to make their LIVING.
We are not preying on anybody. GarageGames makes great tools and we provide them at a price that is affordable. Why is that a crime? There is ABSOLUTELY no link between buying our technology and publishing on our site. GG has a games publishing arm that will help good developers bring their products to market.
-Jeff Tunnell, GarageGames.
October 22nd, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Thank you for your thoughtful response, Jeff. Like I said, I’m largely unfamiliar with the innards of GarageGames, and have a highly biased opinion based on the words of my peers who have experience with GG; I appreciate you clearing this up for any readers of this site. Also, I admit I was out of my element commenting on the quality of the tools — without hands-on experience, I have no place to judge. You got me!
It was certainly not my intention to burn any bridges, nor was this a public call against GarageGames. I’m clearly unfamiliar with GarageGames and the products it offers, and simply responded to a reader’s question why I wasn’t fond of the group. It’s good to hear you defending GarageGames, as there couldn’t have been a better person to do that. I’ll be interested to look deeper in to your company to further shape my opinion, and any help you’d like to offer would be greatly appreciated.
I thank you for reading this blog and look forward to many more thoughtful comments from you in the time to come. (BTW, I was a huge fan of Dynamix. Sad to see it go.)
October 23rd, 2005 at 3:05 am
If you are going to make such harsh arguments you should at least have the courage to stand by them, not just speak out loud feeling powerful and when Jeff himself wastes his time to post on your blog start crying out like it was never what you meant and you actually would like to try GG.
Script: “sorry that’s not what I meant, I mean I love you, I don’t know how i said that, now sodomize me please”
Just to illustrate a bit what I mean. If you don’t like GG’s publishing ideas, fine, use the tools make your game and give getting a publisher interested in your indie game a try, if you don’t like the tools, great!, go and look for something else. Most of us, developers, in the GG community are well aware of other technologies and, personally, I’ve got to work with a 15,000 U$S dollar engine and I still stick with Torque. GG never relied it’s support on the community, but that’s why communities exist, as a source of possible help and information for those seeking it. You might have not noticed either that a good % of the helping posts on the GG.com site are made by GG employees, so you can’t say they don’t support their community.
Conclusion? If you are going to bash someone or something, at least take a look at it first, not without even looking at it (which is the impression you left in your second post). GG is a great company, the provide the best technology/price combination in the market, they provide a flexible and very generous publishing deal and they have a passion for games. I’m not saying they are perfect, I’m aware of many deficiencies myself, but they are always working to make it better, investing, expanding. They are not just sitting crossed in arms with some old and buggy technology just making income from the engine sales. If that were the case we would only have V12, and not TGE, TSE, TNL, T2D, and so on.
Please, don’t jump to conclusions again like that if you want to save you from irrelevant and unneeded bashing.
As for further expanding on your comment about “developers not knowing other possibilites”, If it wasn’t for GG they wouldn’t know any at all.
Best regards,
Xavier.
October 23rd, 2005 at 3:09 am
Oh, and I forgot to mention, what Jeff made in that .plan you quoted, was that they are now, after havign a solid company foundation, going to start to INVEST in the games they see promising, instead of sitting back and letting the team doing it themselves. From now on they will be helping them, helping with art, code, web site, marketing, etc. From your post it sounded like you had the impression that only now they are going to start paying attention to the community.
Regards, again,
Xavier.
October 23rd, 2005 at 1:40 pm
Thank you for your comments, Xavier. However, I think you misunderstood that I, “[started] crying out like it was never what [I] meant and [I] actually would like to try GG.” The post indicates that I have little experience with GarageGames and my opinions of them were formed under such conditions. I only further reiterated that in my response to Jeff.
I am glad that you are satisfied with GarageGames. However, there are many who are not. I am one of them. I am also aware that there is much about GarageGames I am unfamiliar with, and have willingness to recognize and admit that. I am firm in my opinion about GarageGames (sans the tools), but am clearly willing to be further enlightened about the company in order to more maturely form my opinion.
If I didn’t have the courage to stand up for my beliefs, I wouldn’t have approved Jeff’s comments, or yours, for publication — I would have simply avoided the issue altogether. I am sure you can see that.
October 24th, 2005 at 1:57 am
My experience regarding GG in bullet point form:
-In January I decided I wanted to make a 3d downloadable sim/tycoon game. Torque seemed to be the only complete 3d game engine (not just graphics engine) that fit my specs.
-In March I had a complete prototype.
-In April I starting looking into security and payment technology, so I posted on their forums, I received responses pointing me in the direction of Trymedia
-Trymedia and I negotiated a distribution contract at E3
-In May I contacted a musician and an artist through the GG community. The musician turned out to be a great contributor, and the artist was hired full-time by the GG staff but was allowed and even encouraged to continue working on my project, even during work hours.
-In June I went beta
-In July GameTunnel selected my game in their mid-year round up as the “most anticipated” in the Sim category. I never contacted GameTunnel, in fact I didn’t even know my game was selected till I read the article. They found my game simply by reading my blog — which I post on the GG website.
-GG posted a news item regarding the GameTunnel article on their website, which got picked up everywhere and subsequently got me coverage at Gamespot and print coverage in MacAddict.
-In September I was found by MumboJumbo because of the GameTunnel article and we negotiated a deal for worldwide retail
-I attended IGC and was invited to be part of an exclusive press event by GG, at which my game was able to get a lot of attention from the press (meriting the BusinessWeek article, and mentions on gamasutra and more)
-At IGC I met folks from a number of other distribution/publishing companies, including Microsoft, Oberon, PopCap, and more.
-Last night I finished up my release candidate for the game. That’s 10 months from start to finish, all the while relying on the GG community for technical and business help and staffing help and the GG staff to help me with press.
No question, at times the documentation is lacking. Also, much of the product coming out of the GG community is really disappointing and unpolished/uninspired. Partly I think the reason for that is that the engine is quite massive for an indie sized undertaking — so most people never end up doing anything very fresh or polished. I think (hope?) they are addressing this with Torque2D. We’ll see if the products coming out of the community improve with this new, distilled engine.
As for the Torque community “trapping” newbs — well, unfortunately there’s very few products that have gotten to the state of polish that would allow them to go elsewhere. But they certainly didn’t trap me - the only trapping that occurs is that many people within the community get so enamored of GG they they become blind to other opportunities. That’s not really GG’s fault.
I definitely prefer the IndieGamer.com forums for figuring out the business aspect of things — the primary contributors have found ways to make a living out of their work, which is something I intend to do (hopefully starting in less than a week). There are people that make a living on games in the GG community as well, but there is far less “chatter” regarding business issues on their forums so it is less informative in those regards.
If GG has one problem it is that the technology that they provide is bigger than themselves — it started out as the engine used by a bigger company, and it’s been built even bigger by the community. This is a problem because it may have gotten too big for them to document and polish everything. Providing support to the size of community that they’ve got (with the generally low level of expertise of many people trying to use the engine) is not an easy thing. Perhaps it’s a bit presumptuous to expect that the community that enjoys writing code for the engine will also enjoy writing documentation for the engine, but it’s worth a shot. If the community is willing and capable, more power to them.
In short:
-I now have my own game, developed in 10 months on technology that I own (I owe them no royalties).
-I have been given a plethora of press opportunities through GG.
-I was able to branch out outside of GG with the help of the GG community — others fail to do so at their own fault
I’m not a GG fanboy — in fact I’ve gotten in arguments on their forums with some who would prefer if I put more effort into promoting projects from the GG community. But I do think they are an incredible company, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. I would either be making flash games or hell-crunching at Sony. The verdict is not yet in whether I’ll make a decent living off my first product, but hell, at least I got here.
-Andy Schatz (Dr. Willoughby)
October 24th, 2005 at 2:18 am
Andy, thank you so much for your comments! It is good to see someone shooting up the ranks taking the time to thoughtfully and patiently enumerate both the good and the bad of their GarageGames experience. You have inspired me to seriously reconsider my opinion of GarageGames. I wish you the best with Wildlife Tycoon!
October 24th, 2005 at 4:51 pm
For what it’s worth, I’m one of the programmers over at NCsoft that was using TGE/TSE.
Sadly, that project is now cancelled but I enjoyed working with the developers at GG and their suite of tools was far superior to anything I’ve worked with in the 6+ years that I’ve been a professional game developer. We’re a company that can afford pretty much any toolkit, SDK, or graphics engine under the sun and we purposely chose Torque after a very rigorous testing phase.
Independent developers should be thrilled that they have such a cost-effective solution at their disposal.
soniCron, you just aren’t off by a mile. You’re on the wrong planet.
October 24th, 2005 at 5:52 pm
Well, when you hear so much bad about something, you really start to believe it. It’s good to hear successful developers valuing their experience with GarageGames!
October 25th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
You guys need to know the diference between bashing and pointing out reasonable opinions.
I think it’s very useful that people like soniCron give his opinion against GG. He gave us reasonable ARGUMENTS. And then Jeff came and gave us his counter-arguments, wich is all very healthy.
Thanks to soniCron i have this very enlightening about GG. And it helps whoever reads this to know more about reality.
October 31st, 2005 at 5:31 pm
GarageGames was a very good idea but it did not turn out well. It seems like everything is being controlled by a very narrow minded marketing plan and little thought has gone into actually making great games or a healthy community.
If someone comes with any criticism they are usually attacked by members of the staff or other users. Personal attacks on the forum or the chat room are not unheard of. That is not a sign of a healthy company or community.
Jeff Tunnell is often running around trying to defend everything in the most powerful way he can. My advice is, be honest to yourself and everyone else and repair the flaws instead of defending them until it is too late.
Just to make it clear, I have nothing against the tools they provide. It is GarageGames itself that left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Hi,
I realize that I’m beating a dead horse since this topic and the horse died late last year. But I feel like I must defend GG a bit. I am unsure as to what Bjorn expected GG to provide. They give you tools and a community that is very supportive. the lack of a dedicated on-call support staff doesnt mean that Garage Games is lacking in support. I have a learned a lot since I’ve started using Torque and 3d gamestudio which I also use. I do not feel that GG misleads developers into thinking that Torque is a magic bullet that will answer all of thier questions. Further I believe that GG is very good about supporting the indie game industry. Like it or not, they’re one of the few indie publishers that isn’t a major portal. I have also seen several games that have been made with torque that are not published by GG as well. When I first started with torque i thought that GG would be my only option but thanks to its forums and forums like indiegamer.com i see that i have several other options. Sonicron stated his opinion and I respect that. My opinions are based on my own personal experience with GG. I think every developer has his own path to follow with regard to what works for his/her game.
August 26th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Dave
Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future