GBGamesThe itch.io Black Friday Creator Day is over, but the Black Friday sale continues until November 28th.
So you can still name your price for my family-friendly game Toy Factory Fixer:
And the educational, family-friendly leaf raking business simulation Toytles: Leaf Raking is still on reverse sale:
itch.io is a very indie-friendly platform, featuring a “collection of some of the most unique, interesting, and independent creations you’ll find on the web.”
Today is itch.io’s 2023 Black Friday Creator Day, which kicks off their Black Friday sale this weekend.
It’s not the first Creator Day they had this year, but each time they hold one, it’s a helpful boost to the indie game developers who sell their games on the site since itch.io will take no cut of all sales for 24 hours.
That extra cash translates into more support towards the indie game developers. Unlike major game publishers and developers, indie game developers are usually not flush with cash, and taking home just a bit more on each sale is significant for the indie.
It could mean as much as allowing that indie game developer to have a better chance at a sustainable business, and also as much as perhaps just paying for some of their groceries this week.
Personally, as an indie game developer myself, I am definitely not flush with cash nor am I making a sustainable living with my game development efforts, but itch.io’s Creator Day sales do give me an opportunity to talk about the games I sell on there, and so far most of my very few sales this year have come from Creator Day sales on their platform.
Here’s my shameless plug for my own games:
Here’s Toytles: Leaf Raking, which is on reverse sale:
And you can name your own price for Toy Factory Fixer:
And I would strongly encourage you to check out other games, too.
So if you are planning on getting any games, either for yourself or your loved ones, get them today at itch.io. You can find some very unique games and make a major difference in the lives of those who make them.
It’s Black Friday, the indie-friendly platform itch.io is having a Creator Day sale, and if you want to find family-friendly indie games, let me recommend some to you!
Here are five games you can get today:
Yes, this is my own game. Inspired by games such as Lemonade Stand and The Oregon Trail, Toytles: Leaf Raking puts you in the role of a young turtle who wants to earn enough money to get The Ultimate Item(tm).
You’ll run your own leaf-raking business, and during the 90 days before winter, you’ll:
It features NO ADS, NO IN-APP PURCHASES, AND NO VIOLENCE, so you can have peace of mind with an ad-free, safe game.
Get it at https://gbgamesllc.itch.io/toytles-leaf-raking.
If you’re familiar with the Where’s Waldo? series of books, this is a much richer, interactive experience in the same vein.
Search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes. Unfurl tent flaps, cut through bushes, slam doors, and poke some crocodiles! Rooooaaaarrrr!!!!!
A strip of targets shows you what to look for. Click on a target for a hint, and find enough to unlock the next area.
It features:
– 32 hand-drawn areas.
– 300+ targets to find.
– 2000+ mouth-originated sound effects.
– 500+ unique interactions.
– 3 color modes: normal, sepia, and night mode.
– 22 languages (translated by the community).
– supports mouse and keyboard, controller, and touch input.
Get it at https://adriaan.itch.io/hidden-folks.
If you like puzzle games, Round Ogre is here for you. It has simple controls, yet fiendishly challenging puzzles to solve.
500 puzzles across 31 worlds will entertain you for hours!
Start of a new world? A brand new mechanic to explore! This makes the game easy to learn, yet varied and challenging.
Solving a complete world grants you an optional bonus world, with the toughest testing puzzles.
Guide her to the cave exit to reunite her with Square Ogre. But to do so, you’ll have to think creatively and always see all the possibilities …
Get it at https://pandaqi.itch.io/round-ogre.
The toy factory had an accident after one of the worker elves tried to automate the assembly of toys.
Now all of the toys are put together wrong, and you need to put the toys together correctly in time for the delivery deadline!
This is another of my own games. For this Black Friday sale, you can pay what you want, name your own price, and get this toy factory worker management game for yourself or a loved one.
Features:
Plus:
Get it at https://gbgamesllc.itch.io/toy-factory-fixer.
This calm and surreal simulation puts you in the role of a mountain floating in space.
You don’t really seem to have any agency, but there is something soothing about the music, the visuals, and the periodic messages that seem to be meditative in nature.
Time passes, and things crash into you from space. Many of these things are bizarre.
It’s quite the experience.
Get it at https://davidoreilly.itch.io/mountain.
Do any of these games catch your eye? What game are you looking forward to playing? Or who do you plan on gifting a game to this holiday season? Let me know by commenting below.
From now until November 28th, you can get my leaf-raking business simulation game, Toytles: Leaf Raking for Windows, Mac, and Linux and pay 50% more than usual. And you can pay-what-you-want for my toy factory worker management game Toy Factory Fixer.
In either case, if you are going to do so, please do so within the next 24 hours!
The indie-friendly platform itch.io is having another Creator Day, so for the next 24 hours, they won’t take a cut of any sales that occur. That means the creators get to keep more of the proceeds.
While many developers are having a sale to celebrate, and you should definitely check them out, as usual I’m holding a reverse sale instead.
I think the game’s original price is more than generous, and a temporary increase still puts it under the cost for a movie ticket or a monthly subscription to a streaming service.
Also, you can get my first Freshly Squeezed Game, the turn-based toy factory management game Toy Factory Fixer, at itch.io. Pay what you want for it (even $0!), and for the next 24 hours, I will be able to keep the full amount of anything you contribute.
If you do end up paying for access to Toytles: Leaf Raking or Toy Factory Fixer, know that I appreciate it, and I appreciate all of the itch.io creators who make itch.io amazing!
Between November 24th and November 28th, I’ll be increasing the price of my family-friendly game Toytles: Leaf Raking by 50% to take part in itch.io’s Black Friday Creator Day sale.
I think the game’s original price is more than generous, and a temporary increase still puts it under the cost for a movie ticket or a monthly subscription to a streaming service.
But if you would rather not spend more, then think of today as your last chance for a sale price. Pretend this normal price is actually a discount, and know that tomorrow the game will cost 50% more. Buy now!
Tomorrow is also a Creator Day at itch.io, which means all sales go straight to the creators of the games, and itch.io will not take a cut. So if you REALLY want to support indie game developers such as myself, then save your money for tomorrow.
Either way, know that I am thankful for your support!
On this day in 2004, a very famous livejournal post appeared, sharing insight into the real ways that major game company record profits come at the cost of worker bodies and blood.
Each year as winter comes, and the ground outside is quiet and white, I like to curl up and reread Blankets by Craig Thompson.
There’s no snow yet (and I worry one year soon there won’t ever be again), but I realized that I could add EA: The Human Story by ea_spouse to my annual reread for the winter.
It’s a relatively short post, but it is worth rereading to remind ourselves of what is at stake when it comes to how gross, inhumane, and exploitive a company can be.
Despite game companies not being smokestack-covered manufacturing mills from the late 1800s, despite much of the white-collar work done in what would be seen as cushy office jobs, with nice ergonomic chairs, fancy monitors, delicious snacks, other niceties, working conditions can be pretty dire.
Game developers have done 12+ hour days, working through weekends, and barely having any time off, all to meet deadlines set by leadership. Sleep deprivation and a lack of movement for many hours at a time isn’t good for the human body. People get burnt out, their mental health suffers, and their bodies start to fail. To someone who worked in mines or did other back-breaking labor, it might seem from the outside that it isn’t so bad to sit at a desk all day, but literally sitting at a desk all day is killing us, as much research has shown.
Yet the companies they work for either mandate this kind of “crunch time” or the work culture is such that not doing crunch is seen as not doing enough to earn a place on the team, potentially costing opportunities, rewards, and even the job.
So in the 19 years since EA: The Human Story, what has really changed? While much talk has been generated after this post, and many companies claimed to have tackled it, it still happens.
And way too often.
Way too often for it to be an accident.
Games such as Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, which sold 3.2 million copies within a few weeks of its release, which sounds great for the TT Games, the company that made it, but who paid the price to make it happen?
From Polygon’s report on crunch at TT Games:
“It was a very soft-spoken blackmail,” one former employee says. “‘If people don’t start doing overtime, there’s going to be problems,’” although the problems were never specified.
That article highlights working conditions that sound very similar to what was happening at EA.
And TT Games isn’t a one-off. Expectations of 80-100 hour weeks, and that employees need to literally sacrifice their lives to help the owners make a nice profit, are still way too normal in this industry.
I used to think that crunch was an indication of poor management at a company. If management decides that they need to crunch, then they aren’t being smart, because they are fooling themselves into thinking that they can pay the same amount of money and get more value out of the labor of their workers, ignoring the very real costs.
But I then read an insightful post somewhere that said something along the lines of “No, they know what they are doing. They know the costs. They just know they don’t have to pay those costs, so it is actually very smart of them to squeeze their employees dry.”
Crunch isn’t an accident. It has this reputation as an emergency measure a company might use to try to deliver a late project sooner, used only in small doses in strategic ways. But too often crunch is just normalized as something you do in the game industry, because game developers have “passion” and it is a dream job you’re lucky to have. “If they don’t like it, they can work someplace else” as ea_spouse wrote quoting multiple managers at EA.
And to add insult to injury, employees often don’t get rewarded for their sacrifices. ea_spouse mentioned EA taking way comp time, which means all of the overtime everyone was working didn’t translate into paid time off later. It just disappeared, which worked well for EA’s side of the equation. They paid nothing in exchange for their employees giving everything to the job.
This year, rereading ea_spouse’s words might be especially appropriate. 2023 was a big year for major game releases, with the game market expected to be growing even larger than it already is in terms of real dollars, but it is also a major year for layoffs. Over 6,000 game developers found themselves out of a job this year so far from over 100 companies, with EA, Take Two, Unity, Epic, Twitch, and many more game development, game media, and other game-related companies all involved.
EA laid off hundreds of employees this year. EA also reported higher profits than they originally anticipated a few days ago.
While Bethesda (which had employees included in Microsoft’s 10,000 person layoff reported in January in many places) claims they don’t do crunch anymore, it’s still such a pervasive thing in the industry as a whole that I find it hard to believe, especially since no one can cite any actions taken to eliminate crunch at a company that has had crunch reported for many years.
Now, I don’t have a lot of direct insight into any of these companies or how they operate, and it sounds like some companies probably do not crunch anymore, but I’ve seen quite a lot of people posting about being laid off recently, and I know a lot of the companies they worked for are making a ton of money off of the value that those workers created.
The game industry has a reputation for being a youthful one, and it is easy to think that the reason is that it is due to innovation driving the market and so old ideas (and old people having those ideas) get replaced naturally.
But it is sobering to know that the reason why the industry skews young is more horrible. We don’t have a lot of older talent, people with long memories and the ability to mentor others, because many of them get too sick, too tired, and too disabled. The lucky ones leave the industry to avoid dealing with toxic work places and all of the associated health costs.
The only ones left to do the work are the young people, who don’t yet have the experience of false promises and who have the optimism that their “passion” for games is what separated them from others to get their job, when “passion” on a job posting is just code for “we expect you to always go above and beyond at your own cost.”
So, today, curl up in a blanket, make yourself some hot cocoa, and make it a point to reread ea_spouse’s EA: The Human Story on the anniversary of its posting. It’s not comforting, granted, but it is eye-opening, and having open eyes in the game industry is potentially life-saving.
And if you work at a game company, join a union. It’s your best weapon and shield upgrade to fight back against exploitation. Learn more at Game Workers Unite
I hope you’re having a spooky yet safe Halloween!
If you are into tycoon games, business management games, or economic simulator games, know that there are only a few days left in the Halloween Reverse Sale I’m holding for my leaf-raking business simulation game Toytles: Leaf Raking.
In Toytles: Leaf Raking, you play the role of a young turtle who wants the Ultimate Item(tm), and to earn the money for it, you’ll need to talk to neighbors, gain clients, purchase yard bags and upgraded rakes, watch the weather and the clock, and ensure you get enough rest to be able to do the work of raking leaves.
It is available for desktop computers above, or you can get it for your iPhone or iPad or Android device below:
Before winter arrives, can you earn enough to get the Ultimate Item(tm)?
Get the game today and find out!
Learn more about Toytles: Leaf Raking at https://www.gbgames.com/toytles-leaf-raking/.
From today until November 2nd, you can get my leaf-raking business simulation game, Toytles: Leaf Raking for Windows, Mac, and Linux and pay 50% more than usual.
While many developers are having a sale to celebrate, and you should definitely check them out, as usual I’m holding a reverse sale instead.
I think the game’s original price is more than generous, and a temporary increase still puts it under the cost for a movie ticket or a monthly subscription to a streaming service.
Also, you can get my first Freshly Squeezed Game, Toy Factory Fixer, at itch.io. It is always free to download and play, but itch.io does allow for an optional donation.
Both games are also available in the Google Play and Apple App stores, but know that there is no sale there.
If you do end up paying for access to Toytles: Leaf Raking or Toy Factory Fixer, know that I appreciate it, and I appreciate all of the itch.io creators who make itch.io amazing!
For the next three days, you can get my leaf-raking business simulation game, Toytles: Leaf Raking for Windows, Mac, and Linux and pay 50% more than usual. And if you are going to do so, please do so within the next 24 hours!
The indie-friendly platform itch.io is having another Creator Day, so for the next 24 hours, they won’t take a cut of any sales that occur. That means the creators get to keep more of the proceeds.
While many developers are having a sale to celebrate, and you should definitely check them out, as usual I’m holding a reverse sale instead.
I think the game’s original price is more than generous, and a temporary increase still puts it under the cost for a movie ticket or a monthly subscription to a streaming service.
Also, you can get my first Freshly Squeezed Game, Toy Factory Fixer, at itch.io. It is always free to download and play, but itch.io does allow for an optional donation, and for the next 24 hours, I will be able to keep the full amount of anything you contribute.
Both games are also available in the Google Play and Apple App stores, but know that there is no sale there.
If you do end up paying for access to Toytles: Leaf Raking or Toy Factory Fixer, know that I appreciate it, and I appreciate all of the itch.io creators who make itch.io amazing!
itch.io is a very indie-friendly platform for game developers, writers, musicians, and artists in general, and they are having a summer sale.
And I decided to participate with another reverse sale.
You can pay 50% more than usual for Toytles: Leaf Raking, my leaf-raking business simulation game about responsibility and strategic thinking.
I think the game’s original price is more than generous, and a temporary increase still puts it under the cost for a movie ticket or a monthly subscription to a streaming service.
If you want to get Toytles: Leaf Raking for Windows, Mac, and Linux, for the next week you get to support me even more by paying a bit extra.
Play Toytles: Leaf Raking Today!