Iceland. It's where all the cool kids go to have a summit. Reagan and Gorbachev rapped about nukes there in 1985; 20 years later, the Supreme Metal Council condemned the overuse of the devil horns hand-signal. And now something billing itself as EVE Online's democratically elected government will meet there, probably because it's too far for Something Awful to show up and grief the shit out of it.

Positech's Cliff Harris On Making the Indie Model Work

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a great interview up with Cliff Harris of Positech Games (Democracy, Kudos, Rock Legend, etc.); it's chock full of interesting bits on his games, the makeup of the indie side of the industry, and how you can make money with indie development (the horror!):

I'm unusual because I'm genuinely interested in the business side of being an indie gamer. I love the whole entrepreneur thing, the setting the right price, getting expenses down and sales up, etc. My fave TV show is Dragon's Den for fucks sake. The vast majority of indie devs are programmers, and the C++ DNA seems to interfere with the DNA that makes people enjoy marketing or business. Most indies who make no money do very little marketing or promotion, because it terrifies them ... Marketing is a big deal. I know that Introversion put a lot of effort into marketing, and you can see the results there too. If you really are the typical shy semi-autistic sunlight-hating game coder, you need to get an outgoing biz/marketing guy to work with.

It's an interesting (and sensible) look at indie development; it's refreshing to read people being bluntly honest and not going off about the moral superiority of those who develop games for purely altruistic reasons.

Deserved Kudos: Positech's Cliff Harris Interview [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Indie Developers Say - Copy Protection Matters

UK-based independent game developer Cliffski, formerly at Lionhead, and best known for his slightly twisted life sims such as Democracy and Rock Legends, has been discussing the thorny issue of copy protection on his weblog.

Clffski explains: "I don't live in a box, i know about warez, and I know when my games get posted. Sadly, I need to do something to prevent the rampant casual piracy that is becoming the norm in PC gaming."

So, he sighs: "Democracy 2 will need to be validated on-line. It should be very quick, and very painless, and there's no spyware or rootkits or other nonsense... I wish I didn't have to take time away from game development to do that crap, but as usual in life 1% of people are screwing it up for the other 99%."

So, yikes - if even small independent PC developers are feeling like they have to include some kind of piracy protection, what's the future of PC gaming looking like? Or has Cliffski missed the point?

Copy Protection [Cliffski's Mumblings]