“I just create games I think people will love until they’re done and sell them for a normal price. Sometimes on Steam, sometimes on my own. Why are you interviewing me for this?” said the smug bastard at the recent Game Developers Conference. According to Richmond, he even makes a decent living doing this and has many fans that follow his work and buy the outrageously priced desktop games at $40 and the unbelievably greedy $2 mobile games he also develops.
The games he creates (if you can call them games) don’t even have a way to purchase upgrades or speed up tokens that you can buy for $5.99 each. Instead, the player is required to spend dozens of hours wading through a brilliantly crafted world, using never-before-seen game mechanics to acquire upgrades and unlock new places to explore. Frankly, it’s bullshit. When we tested one of his most popular titles, an adventure game with an in-depth character creation and overworld rivaling the likes of Skyrim, we couldn’t even find anywhere to put our credit card number. We tried the character name box, the save file name, shouting it at the Kinect, and even just shoving the card into the Xbox One disc slot, but nothing worked.
Other developers that attended GDC expressed concern that he may be ruining the gaming industry and video games as a whole with his gunslinger mentality. Some have even considered banning him from the conference so others don’t follow in his path.
“We’d all love to have the luxury of creating games to completion and selling them to consumers,” said another indie developer during his ‘Payment Systems Toddlers Can Use’ talk at the conference, “but sometimes we as developers need to create half a game, release it for early access at a small fee, then forget about it and move onto something else. It’s called being professional.”
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