Who Handed Garage Games The Crack Pipe?

The reason my answer has been consistently "Torque" is;

Simple engine - it's pretty easy for someone who doesn't know a lot yet to get started. Sure, you won't be doing the most advanced game development the first day, but it's fast to get up to speed for "little things" and ideas.

Lots of power - Once you kick off the training wheels and get away from the tutorials, there's a buttload of power behind the Torque engine!

Low Cost Entry - An indie license for Torque is dirt cheap. This has the advantage of, well, just being cheap, but it also means that if anyone wants to try and play around outside of the defined boundaries of successful established game styles you're not out much.

No Per-Title Fees - Which means even if you only got a small following for your nitche game, hey, turning around and doing it again isn't going to cost you anything more.

Focus On Getting A Game Done - Rather than tie yourself up dealing with thing like engine development, focus on what's important - getting a game completed. I didn't always agree with Jeff Tunnell on a number of things, but he had one thing right - finish a game and release it.

There's actually quite a few other reasons why I'm a fan, but, that's the big reasons why I pimp the engine, and have since, what? 2001? 2002? And I've had a very "Gotta Buy 'Em All!" attitude too - grudgingly, I've bought TGE, T2D (er, TGB), Torque Lighting Kit, The TGE Upgrade, and... well, just about anything except the console engines, and TGEA (mainly because at the time good Shader support wasn't that important.)

I've been fielding a few questions from people lately that included iPhone - and I had heard of Garage Games adding iPhone support, so I continued to throw people at the Torque setup.

I own an iPhone, love my iPhone, and I'm wanting to do a little bit of "experimental" game development - see what cool ass stuff I could do with accelerometer + multitouch + Torque. In particular, I had this wicked idea for transforming my old Boulder Panic! titles into something completely new - but it's experemental because the game could very easily become WAY too hard to play. But I already own the various Torque licenses, know the tech, and, well, I've been a bit of a fanboy of the engine for quite a while.

So I stop by here, and check out how much I'll be shelling out for yet another GG engine. I already own my iPhone dev license, so, this shouldn't be too bad.

Torque Game Builder for iPhone (iTGB) Indie End User License Agreement (EULA) $500 Per Seat, Per Project License

Are You FUCKING shitting me?

$500 wasn't too steep - that I expected. $500 PER PROJECT? Uh, no. Actually, let me take that a little further. Not no, but HELL NO.

This is the first time I've seen full-on greed coming from Garage Games. Things have previously showed a good ballance between "We gotta make money" and "We gotta consider the interests of the Indies" (lets face it, for bigger corporate customers, $1000+ licensing fees for a title is almost nothing quite often) But this time? It's more like "OOOohhhh - the iPhone is HOT! I bet we can really bend 'em over the table for this!"

$500 per title is not Indie development anymore. It's no longer accessible to anyone who's looking to "break into it", or try experimental stuff. Now it's just another engine, and there are now a lot of those about. Oddly enough, there's already a couple of other engines that are iPhone ready that don't charge per title, so that can't be the excuse. Actually, there's no real excuse for the pricing, just a case of trying to suck as much money out of customers as possible. They see the iPhone, and the Garage Games customer base that might use it as a gold rush for quick cash.

Please, someone take the crack pipe outta the hands of the GG marketing guys, look back at where GG came from, and the folks who advocated the engine, and the community who became built around that engine. Then ask - is the pricing right for that community? I maintain the answer is a solid NO. Drop per project bit - flat fee that sucker.

Heck, give the guys who've already licensed nearly everything a big ol' price break while you're at it! (OK, it was my turn to puff on the crack pipe a bit - sorry about that.)

Now, having said a few very inflammatory things there, and insulting at least a few people in management :-), I do have a couple of good things to say:

Ya know, looking back - good God, it's amazing that Torque is still kickin', Garage Games is still around, and while part of the community has moved on, there's still a lot of faces here, and some of them are still "good ol' days" faces. I think my first license was in 2001, though I'm not positive - for an engine and a company to be viable for this long? Well, dispite my cursing and distain for the iPhone licensing solution they chose, it's pretty damned impressive. And the tech hasn't gone completely stale. Ya'lls still get kudos and all that for makin' a company about supporting Indie game development last this long!

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
Midnight Ryder Technologies
(Oh, check out my new blog / podcast if ya' want ;-)

Author,
[url=http://www.gamerzonecenters.com]The Story of Gamer Zone[url]
(BTW - the book formatted version, which has a LOT of cleaned up content is about to be released. I'll be posting on here when it is, along with all the old World of Gamer Zone TV series DVD's :-)