This week on the Perceptive Podcast, I had a chance to talk with owner of Positech Games: Cliff Harris, about his studio, game design and what it means to take on the role of a publisher as well as a game designer.
We started as always with introductions and talking about Cliff’s time in the industry before forming Positech Games. After that, I continued my chat about management sim and city builders titles with Cliff that I started with Tim from Twice Circled on the previous cast. From there, we talked about the challenges of programming a game for the PC market and what that meant for the failure of the port of Batman Arkham Night a few months ago. That led into a tangent talking about the quality of the games we’re seeing from the Indie market and what that means when compared to some of the issues with major developers porting titles over.
Given Cliff’s experience as a developer and now publisher, our next topic was talking about Kickstarter and his thoughts on crowd-funding in today’s market. He’s not a fan of the crowd-funding model due to what it means for game development and how it impacts the developer’s control on the project. Continuing with new models, we then spent some time on Early Access and Cliff’s thoughts on that as well. Our next topic was talking more about the game market as a whole and what this means for mobile, indie and AAA development.
Our next topic was talking more about Positech and Cliff’s thoughts on game design. This led into talking about our playing habits and how I’ve started playing multiple games instead of one at a time these days. Our final topic was an interesting one, talking about Cliff’s role as a publisher now and what that means for his perception of game design and development. I haven’t talked to anyone before who went the publisher route and this was a great topic and definitely one that developers and enthusiasts should listen to about selling a game to someone. We also reiterated the importance of having someone who understands PR on your side when it comes to making games or being at a studio.
- For more from Cliff, here is the Positech Games site
- For my conversation with Tim from Twice Circled and our talk on Big Pharma, here is the podcast
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS
