More on remodelling the games industry

Following on from my original post about Greg Costikyan's screed (long well-worded written rant) and new company...

Over at Edge Online:

'Costikyan says that even those already taking advantage of this space [distributing games over the internet] are chasing the wrong goal by offering casual games or publishers' back catalogue titles. This ends up selling games to people who aren't really interested in them. "We'd rather try to sell games to people who already buy them," he says.'

Um, wtf? People who want Valve's entire back catalogue aren't the people who are interested in games? Okay, man. Whatever you say. And "chasing the wrong goal"? How else are you going to "re-engineer the customer" into accepting that downloaded games are just as good as boxed versions, other than by demonstrating so? This guy may know his shit when it comes to game design but I'm not sure he really knows that much about changing mass-market behaviour. Somehow, I don't think slogans like "Corporate games suck" are going to cut it. We're not that much like sheep following the trendy revolution (I hope. Who am I kidding?) You need to prove your benefit to us first. Or get a giant corporation to back you and put the competition out of business (but that's a bit antithetical). Maybe get Valve to prove the benefit for you ;)

That being said, he's doing a hell of a job getting interest in his company. He's a bit of a viral marketing genius, getting a cheap logo and website design out of this recent attention. Nice work!

I can't find a point-by-point summary of the long boring screed, so I'll work on doing that over the weekend if I don't find one by then. Might be handy to refer back to in months to come and see how well he's doing with it.

Tagged: games