#172168 - ritz - Wed Jan 20, 2010 10:04 pm
I'm reading through this guy's stuff about making games and it seems pretty good (mind you, I know nothing about making games myself). Thought I'd share it in case others are interested: http://gamedevlessons.com/?page=free
#172171 - sgeos - Fri Jan 22, 2010 2:48 am
Thanks for the link. This guy knows what he is talking about, and the material is very good.
#172184 - keldon - Sat Jan 23, 2010 2:05 pm
I like it, especially the fact that he gives free lessons to all!
#172188 - sgeos - Sun Jan 24, 2010 12:31 am
| keldon wrote: |
| I like it, especially the fact that he gives free lessons to all! |
The freemium business model works well on the net. He is trying to sell his services. The better the free content, the easier it is to get paying customers.
#172229 - ChrisDeLeon - Tue Jan 26, 2010 1:16 am
Hi, and thanks all!
In case anyone's curious, I found this post through my web analytics (I use StatCounter's free services to know who's finding my site). Hopefully it's not too strange or out of place for me to chime in.
I don't really follow a freemium business model, since I don't have any premium, advanced, or special services to charge for. All of my assistance to beginning game developers - including 1:1 e-mail correspondence about challenges on personal projects - is completely free. I briefly tried charging in early 2009 (a couple of my older Text Lessons files reflect this), but only because putting a price on something seemed to raise how seriously people took the material, like the difference between paying $150 for a college textbook (which led me to read it) or getting it for free (when I'd only open it for problem sets). I quit charging when I realized that keeping anything behind an artificial wall that could help improve someone's future was just plain counter to my objectives, and I had other ways to pay my bills.
Speaking of which: the only thing I charge for is outright project development, and those are multi-month deals with businesses/publishers. My hobby of helping beginning game developers doesn't help me land business with publishers though; they're more interested in my commercial game projects.
That, and for better or for worse, I've found considerably more credibility with the first-time developers that I'm trying to help due to my track record of commercial game work than I ever did from a decade of developing freeware. "I spent 11 months working at EA" goes a lot further with many strangers than "I've spent half my lifetime making videogames as a hobby." I keep the Alice in Bomberland ads up, for example, because they demonstrate that I'm still an active commercial developer, and that I'm tying my personal research interests into my latest work - I honestly don't see much money from sales of it, but I have to demonstrate that I'm still in touch with with modern videogame platforms and audiences.
In summary: Freemium is about using free content to draw people to paid content/services. By contrast, my way of life for the past year or so has been about developing paid content for businesses, just to enable me to keep producing my free content for individuals.
(Sorry for the verbosity - I'm used to responding to public topics a few ways at once, since I'm never quite sure which angle might make the most sense to a given reader.)
Cheers,
Chris
PS (To anyone reading this!) If anything in the Text Lessons seems inadequately covered, please e-mail me at Chris@GameDevLessons.com letting me know which part, and I'll gladly revisit it to clarify. It helps other readers, too.
#172285 - ScottLininger - Fri Jan 29, 2010 1:13 am
Chris,
Welcome to the forums. I was one of the guys who followed the link to your site. Great stuff! Thanks for sharing.
-Scott L
_________________
Some of my GBA projects
#172371 - ChrisDeLeon - Wed Feb 03, 2010 7:45 am
Thanks Scott!
Don't hesitate to let me know if you have ideas as to how I can make the resources there (present and future) more useful to folks.