Squid Yes, Not So Octopus – Sales.

Well, blimey. You see, we at xnPlay don’t just sit on our arses all day long criticising games – oh no, sir. Sometimes we make games for others to criticise too*. Hence, no review here beyond xAD’s one line write up in the round up. Obviously, before I go any further I’m going to recommend that you buy the game and help feed me, because I’m worth it. And because SYNSO is worth it too. It’s only $1 after all.

Y’know, I’m not just bunging a post up here to plug it, mind you. Oh no sir. I’m here to share a little something too. The sales figures to date. Essentially, I know that there’s little data out there for people to have a gander at so I figured, why not? Let’s let folks know what they’re getting themselves into.

Now then, now then, now then. As Jimmy Saville was want to say (insert anecdote here about SYNSO2 being on display at Saville Hall in Leeds and me not cottoning on as to why there was a massive Jim’ll Fix It sign hanging on the wall, for someone usually bright I can be immensely stupid at times…). There’s a few caveats to bear in mind here when having a gander at the figures.

1. It’s a port of a 12 month old free PC game. Admittedly, it’s a lot shinier than the PC version and plays (in my mind at least) a lot better but still, the point remains. There’s a version of it for free floating out there.

2. It’s a short, simple game in an already crowded genre. Ah, the joys of the arena shooter revival. Good for me because y’know, I love a good arena shooter but I can understand that people want to pick and choose carefully.

3. I’ve plugged it for the first week and the first week alone. Essentially, I wanted to see what happened when it did very little other than sit there. Sure, it might not be the best plan for ringing up the dollars on the till but it made for an interesting experiment.

4. They may not be bank breakingly brilliant but I’m happy with the sales so far. Naturally, when you’re selling anything it’s daft not to want more but y’know, any journalists looking for a shock story of XBLIG developer decries Microsoft as evil and wrong and doing it all wrong blah blah blah, move along! Nothing to see here. Well, almost – there is one thing…

Ok, so without further ado, let’s get our graph on.

As you can see, the island in the sun is going to have to wait a little bit longer here. Ok, a lot longer unless it’s a tiny island made of paper or something. The one thing that’s really noticeable is there’s a massive nosedive after day 1 when you’re top of the new releases list. You can draw your own conclusions as to the rest. I don’t want to bore you with my own analysis, I’d sooner throw the figures out there for folks to read.

That one criticism then. The 50 free copy tokens thing. Yes, I know it’s better than last year when developers had no tokens at all but it’s still awful. It means a lot of needless juggling and careful consideration over where to use them when there should be absolutely none of that involved. The fact that once you’ve sent out 50 copies of your game, there’s no system in place to do any more is awful.

For those reading this who don’t know what I’m waffling about. When you get your game on the service you’re given 50 tokens to use as you see fit. Each of these tokens entitles the person cashing them in to a free copy of the game. As ideally you want people to play your game as it’s intended (ie – them sitting on a sofa chilling out with a controller in their hand), naturally you want to be able to give them that experience. And you also want to get your game out to as many people as you can. Sometimes this might involve offering review copies, sometimes you might want to, y’know, offer them out on a promotion. Thing is – if you run a promotion with the current 50 and 50 alone tokens system, you’re cutting into review copies, if you offer a review copy, you’re cutting into potential promotions.

It’s awkward and not very nice. Yes, it’s work-a-roundable to some extent with PC copies, some reviewers can take the .ccgame files but generally, it’s just a terrible restriction compounded by the fact that there’s no direct way of checking to see if a token has gone unused. I’m surely not the only person who thinks this is just stupid? I’m sure there’s technical reasons why there’s no system to get more tokens but honestly, 50 is no amount at all. By my normal standards of how I’d handle releasing something that’s a weeks worth y’know?

Enough with the griping though, as I said it’s just that one even if it is, to me at least, a major one.

Anyway, don’t forget, if you haven’t tried the game yet – give it a go. You might like it. If you did try it and like it, give it a rating! And just because I can…

*sort of, it’s actually ported by the ever wonderful Loafjaw who did all the hard work.

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