44: A Game of Automatic Fear, by Matt Snyder - Free!
Matt Snyder (author of Dust Devils, Nine Worlds, and various other awesome things) has published his new game, 44: A Game of Automatic Fear, for free from his site. As a bit of backstory, Matt initially started 44 as a design challenge. The game has surfaced before as a playtest ashcan - and a very pretty one - and Matt has taken the feedback garnered from that to polish off the game. Instead of selling the thing, though, he’s giving it away for free.
You can download the game from the 44 page of Stories You Play. Free registration is required; it’ll take you thirty seconds. The game is well worth it, if only for seeing the Clever Dice Tricks. The color is expertly embedded into the text; as I read it, I could see the rainy streets, 50s-era city blocks, and classic cars. This game will definitely get added to my game bag, and I suspect will make an appearance on my convention play list.
Thus ends the review portion; the game itself is very neat and you should download it. What interests me the most, though, over and above the actual (and very well-done) game, is its status as Free.
Matt is not spouting off a deluge of justifications for this decision (at least, not that I’m aware of), but I suspect he’s gone the Free route for a lot of the same reasons I’ve been eyeing it, myself. There is something very appealing about simply contributing to the community rather than wading into the marketplace. You can focus on making the product the best it can be, divorced from profit-driven marketing (which is not the same as no marketing at all). You don’t have to worry about making your investment back. You don’t have to remind yourself to pimp your game over and over and over again. You can just design and publish the best game you can make, and then release it into the wide, wild world.
The question is: how does Free publishing connect the publisher with an audience?
Which sounds all nice and pretty, but there are of course a slew of caveats attached. Free is not simple.
I do have a few misgivings about how microfame garnered from previous retail sales contributes to adoption rates of free games. Or in other words, Matt can do this because he’s Matt Snyder; same with John Harper, and certainly the same for the game snippets that Vincent Baker occasionally throws off just to illustrate a thesis. I’m not sure if just anybody can walk into our schism-riddled “community” with a free product and have anybody take notice.
Because, let’s be frank, the only reason to publish is if you’re offering it to other folks. That’s sort of the definition. Otherwise it could remain a set of notes on your googledoc that you and your friends reference. If a designer goes through the effort to publish a game and there’s no splash, the effort to publish is (mostly) a failure. So the question is: how does Free publishing connect the publisher with an audience? Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. Not yet.
I am intrigued by this Free thing. I would like to see more Free games - I suspect that would actually do some good for the broader community of players. I think, once properly harnessed and practiced, it could help develop the state of design. I’m just not sure what functional Free publishing looks like - but I’d like to find out.
Mirrored from Kallisti Press.