The Frozenbyte Bundle Hasn't Breached $1M USD

[Veerappan]

The fact that they decided that the bundle was selling well enough to give us the Trine level editor tells us that Frozenbyte is probably satisfied with the sales so far.

Personally, I've only started playing Trine, but I plan on trying out the Shadowgrounds games at some point. I do like Trine so far, although the enemies themselves are pretty easy to defeat. I often find myself getting hurt by the terrain more than the enemy AI.

I do seem to remember there being some weirdness with the licensing of the Jack Claw source which prevents people from doing a *nix/OpenGL port of the code (not that it's a complete game anyway).

[KameZero]

Well, of those games:

• One doesn't exist yet (Splot.)
• One can only be played on Windows with an Xbox 360 controller (Jack Claw.)
• One of them is, let's be honest, not a very good game (Shadowgrounds.)
• One of them is genuinely excellent (Trine.)

I haven't played Shadowgrounds: Survivor yet, but if we're charitable and assume it's a good game, then you're really getting two games here.

The last bundle, you got four playable games and a dud, and it reached 1.8 million. So I'd expect this one to only reach 600,000. The fact that this is so much higher means, in my opinion, that this one did better than the last one.

This is pretty much all on how you look at it. I enjoyed both Shadow grounds, the splot demo was fun enough and will be released in a month or two. And jack claw SHOULD be done ported sooner than that (it already runs with keyboard and mouse by the way). Which makes it 3 playable games, a soon to be playable game, and a soon to be community driven game.

Do people not have patience anymore?

[JoelFB]

Hi guys,

Yeah we're happy about the sales, no question about it. There's a lot of ifs one can throw around but at the end of the day we have got enough to cover the remainder of Trine 2 development. So that's good.

Just to set some facts straight:

- Jack Claw can be played on keyboard & mouse now (v2, F1 toggles between kb/mouse and the gamepad)

- Jack Claw Linux/Mac ports are coming very soon - Mac is already up and running but has some crash issues and doesn't look as good, and Linux isn't far behind

- There's a playable teaser flash of Splot available from the bundle download page (but of course not the same thing as an actual game)

The source codes use a custom license, as these are our first source code releases ever and we weren't quite sure about how to do it, so we went the route we thought was safest for now. We may move Jack Claw to GPL later (SGs maybe not, but who knows).

I hope this helps. Also a big thanks to everyone who's supported this.

- Joel, Frozenbyte

[Again617]

No Intel support

Another point that you want to remember is that none of the games will run on Intel graphic cards. I'm one of the people that bought the bundle but can't play any of the games.

I'm not complaining too much though. I expect that I will buy myself a new desktop relatively soon and the I'll play the games at that time then. But I think that no Intel support shows in the drop in interest.

[xir_]

Hi guys,

Yeah we're happy about the sales, no question about it. There's a lot of ifs one can throw around but at the end of the day we have got enough to cover the remainder of Trine 2 development. So that's good.

Just to set some facts straight:

- Jack Claw can be played on keyboard & mouse now (v2, F1 toggles between kb/mouse and the gamepad)

- Jack Claw Linux/Mac ports are coming very soon - Mac is already up and running but has some crash issues and doesn't look as good, and Linux isn't far behind

- There's a playable teaser flash of Splot available from the bundle download page (but of course not the same thing as an actual game)

The source codes use a custom license, as these are our first source code releases ever and we weren't quite sure about how to do it, so we went the route we thought was safest for now. We may move Jack Claw to GPL later (SGs maybe not, but who knows).

I hope this helps. Also a big thanks to everyone who's supported this.

- Joel, Frozenbyte

Thanks for the reply, i paid around ?20 for the pack and whilst trine is a fine game, this bundle really doesn't stand up to the first as there are only three working games.

And to be fair the games of the second bundle haven't been finished yet like cortex command. I think that the bundle guys are burning out the good will they generated.

Also seeing as you have sourced the games will you consider putting them into the ubuntu software centre?

[allquixotic]

The source codes use a custom license, as these are our first source code releases ever and we weren't quite sure about how to do it, so we went the route we thought was safest for now. We may move Jack Claw to GPL later (SGs maybe not, but who knows).

I hope this helps. Also a big thanks to everyone who's supported this.

- Joel, Frozenbyte

It's a mistake to think that your particular situation requires a custom license. This type of thinking is very common in the corporate world, but it's just misguided. If you're going to open source it, use a license that is already approved by the OSI (or better yet, the FSF).

You really only need to pick between about five licenses: LGPL 2.1, LGPL 3, GPL 2, GPL 3, and Apache/X11/BSD liberal licenses. If you can't stomach licensing your code under any of those licenses, then you need to re-evaluate what exactly is your goal with releasing the code.

License proliferation is a huge problem, because new licenses cause a lot of uncertainty. A license is a legal document, so an ordinary person trying to understand it is basically like a typical consumer trying to read x86 assembler. The words don't mean what you think they would mean, because it's written in "legalese", not English. So before we can understand what your custom license really means, we have to ask a lawyer.

The licenses I mentioned above don't have that problem, because they've existed for years (some of them for over a decade) and in that time they've been looked at by countless lawyers in countless countries, and some have even been tested in court. So the safe bet is really to go with those licenses.

And your custom license's problems aren't limited exclusively to your customers, either: it may turn out to be a problem for you, too, if your license's legal interpretation is not what you expected it to be. Using one of the widely-used licenses, copyleft or not, would make it much easier to certainly interpret the document. Using a well-understood and widely accepted license is better than using a license custom-tailored to your organization, in my opinion.

You can still recoup from this mistake by selecting one of the FSF-approved free software licenses for all your current and future source releases, and just relicense Shadowgrounds and Jack Claw as such. I'd personally opt for a copyleft license, but I really don't care whether you go with copyleft or not, as long as it qualifies as free software (respecting the four freedoms).

[MaxToTheMax]

Hi guys,

Yeah we're happy about the sales, no question about it. There's a lot of ifs one can throw around but at the end of the day we have got enough to cover the remainder of Trine 2 development. So that's good.

Excellent, the gameplay video I've seen for T2 looks really good. I'd hate to see that project fail.

- Jack Claw can be played on keyboard & mouse now (v2, F1 toggles between kb/mouse and the gamepad)

- Jack Claw Linux/Mac ports are coming very soon - Mac is already up and running but has some crash issues and doesn't look as good, and Linux isn't far behind

Well that's good news.

- There's a playable teaser flash of Splot available from the bundle download page (but of course not the same thing as an actual game)

Yeah, I played it. But it's just a flash game, I've got to assume that the real game will be much more polished.

The source codes use a custom license, as these are our first source code releases ever and we weren't quite sure about how to do it, so we went the route we thought was safest for now. We may move Jack Claw to GPL later (SGs maybe not, but who knows).

I don't think you need to worry about preventing commercial use of SG anyway. I've looked at the engine code, and (as you yourselves noted in the documentation) it is quite messy. It seems to have been written with the attitude that no one is going to see it anyway.

I don't think it's worse than other Bundle code releases in the past (except maybe Aquaria,) so don't think I'm bashing you specifically, but code drops get widely used only if the code is specifically designed for easy adoption, and yours really wasn't.

In other words, the only hacking people will do on this source code is specifically to support the Shadowgrounds games; someone looking to start his own game project will look elsewhere. That's not a bad thing, because even that kind of work will help ensure the longevity and continued improvement of your game. I know I personally would be interested in doing those AI improvements. And as soon as there is Linux code available, I certainly want to fix some sound bugs I've noticed.

I believe that the best way to make that kind of stuff easy is to use a GPL-compatible license for the code. That's what the community is used to, and that's what the community is set up for.

[JoelFB]

Yes I think we'll get the games to the Ubuntu Software Center soon after the bundle. There's a gazillion things to take of first, but hopefully in a month or two we'll have them up there.

From our side I can say that we will deliver on our promises - the Mac/Linux of Jack Claw will be out soon and Splot should be out in 2-3 months. Of course schedules can always get messed up and we don't want to sacrifice quality for deadlines, but in any case we are not talking about too many months here. We've been doing this for a while (10 years actually) and I think we're professional enough to make it happen - and that was probably one problem for many purchasers. Some could say we're not as indie as the other companies/teams in the previous bundles, and maybe they're right - but I like to think that we very much have that same spirit here, despite being bigger and perhaps focusing on more "traditional" story-driven games.

The Intel situation is also a factor and has indeed prevented many people from enjoying the games (you can always get a refund from the Humble guys btw). This is something we most likely will never be able to fix unfortunately.

I think we'll be posting our "postmortem" on the bundle sometime this week on our blog, will be interesting.

[tuke81]

Anyone downloaded it? How big are the installers, just wondering because I could buy it and download it from university network at 100Mbits againts homes 512kbits. And my laptop has limited capacity of storage(approx 10gigs free).

[JoelFB]

allquixotic, thanks. I see your point (and read it earlier on our forums - thanks for all your insight there btw!). However the problem at the moment is that we have not yet familiarized ourselves with the GPL license or others, so it would be a much bigger risk at this point to go with that than with our custom one (at least we think we know what it allows, but yes I do see the point you make). I'd also say that if there's any license confusion, we are just an email away. Anyhow I hope to be able to talk more about this near the end of the week.

MaxToTheMax, yeah the code is messy, I've been listening to our programmers go off about it for years. It's hack upon hack, and all goes back to 2000/2001 and our RTS strategy game concept ("we don't need multiplayer right? Let's save a few months of work and write singleplayer only code.").

Let's see how the license evolves - hopefully I'll have some news on that later this week or early next week.