I think if you are going to commercially release games then you have to have commercial goals too, otherwise there is absolutely no point releasing a game commercially, and anyway have you really released a game commercially if it only sells 125 units ?
All indie games have very slow sales to start with, ask anyone who's done it and they all say pretty much the same thing, internet delivery is a slow take up market. The advantage is that the shelf life is longer than 3 months so if something isn't right it can be fixed and sales can pick up.
If you are really lucky and a little shrewd when your big advertising hits you'll have no 90%'s in your ordering processing and you'll convert your demo's into a lot of sales.
Whilst I think looking at AA objectively I believe that there is a limit to what you could commercially achieve with it, I think on the whole if you've got a game that has the potential to be a hit you still need commercial drive and ambition in order to make it achieve it's potential and that really should be one of the lessons you take out of that project.
Just getting a game onto XBox doesn't isn't a sensible goal. If your going to make just 100 sales you may aswell write freeware, and if your doing it for bragging rights there is nothing so inconsequential as an unknown indie shareware game.
There are no bragging rights if nobody can remember it in 2 months time. Bragging rights are what you get in 10 years time when somebody posts on a games forum "It's a bit like Flight Sim 2004 with a hint of Aerial Antics"...
Let's be honest, if your selling games for money then you are hoping that you can make or suplement your living on games - your next project market research group suggests that it has the potential to be a sucess. You've work on it for ages adding polish. You're heart, your soul, and your commercial future have been put into all it's 30,000 lines of source code...
Don't waste it by launching with ambiguous targets.
All indie games have very slow sales to start with, ask anyone who's done it and they all say pretty much the same thing, internet delivery is a slow take up market. The advantage is that the shelf life is longer than 3 months so if something isn't right it can be fixed and sales can pick up.
If you are really lucky and a little shrewd when your big advertising hits you'll have no 90%'s in your ordering processing and you'll convert your demo's into a lot of sales.
Whilst I think looking at AA objectively I believe that there is a limit to what you could commercially achieve with it, I think on the whole if you've got a game that has the potential to be a hit you still need commercial drive and ambition in order to make it achieve it's potential and that really should be one of the lessons you take out of that project.
Just getting a game onto XBox doesn't isn't a sensible goal. If your going to make just 100 sales you may aswell write freeware, and if your doing it for bragging rights there is nothing so inconsequential as an unknown indie shareware game.
There are no bragging rights if nobody can remember it in 2 months time. Bragging rights are what you get in 10 years time when somebody posts on a games forum "It's a bit like Flight Sim 2004 with a hint of Aerial Antics"...
Let's be honest, if your selling games for money then you are hoping that you can make or suplement your living on games - your next project market research group suggests that it has the potential to be a sucess. You've work on it for ages adding polish. You're heart, your soul, and your commercial future have been put into all it's 30,000 lines of source code...
Don't waste it by launching with ambiguous targets.