Greenhouse: Penny Arcade's New Indie Portal
There's another non-casual indie game portal in town, this one from the Penny Arcade crew. Considering how these guys managed to turn PAX into a major event that threatens to rival E3 in its salad days, I'd say they've got the potential to pull it off, where Manifesto (whom I still root for!) has had trouble gaining traction.

According to Mike "Gabe" Krahulik: "We developed Greenhouse along with Hothead originally because we needed a way to deliver our game to you guys. what we needed was a platform agnostic digital distibution portal. Once it was done we realised that it could actually be super useful to other independent developers. At first Greenhouse will be the place to get our game but eventually we'd like to use it as a way of promoting great independent games that might otherwise slide under the radar. Like PAX and Child's Play and all the other stuff we do we're starting out simple. We've got big ideas though and I'm excited about building Greenhouse into something really special."

We'll see how things turn out. They won't be selling any other games besides their own at launch, but they are already talking about the kinds of titles they'd like to put up... things like Kloonigames' Crayon Physics Deluxe. They've got a million readers, so I'd have to say this sort of thing has potential out the wazoo.

Here's an interview at Wired:
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/04/exclusive-inter.html

Here's an excerpt from the interview that really steams me up a bit, and demonstrates just how screwed up the entrenched brick-and-mortar biz really is:

We had a meeting with GameStop to talk about selling a boxed version of the game. Once we had a bunch of episodes together, we would collect them and put them in a box, you know? And GameStop said, oh, that's fantastic. We'd love to do it, we'd love to carry the game... but it's not going to be available anywhere else, is it?

And Robert said, well, we're going to digitally distribute it first.

They got really upset. And they said, no, you can't do that. We can't have it in our store if it's coming out digitally first. And he said, well, I'm sorry, that's the way it works. We're publishing our game and we can say where it goes. And so the deal that they tried to strike with Robert was okay, well, listen: If you cut us in on the profits from online distribution, and XBLA, and everything it comes out on, then we'll think about carrying it in the store. Just, what assholes.

I guess if you are new to the indie games scene, or to the games business in general, you might find this shocking. Me? I really can't claim to be surprised. The guys along the distribution channel really do think this way. It pisses me off, but it doesn't surprise me anymore.

For your amusement (since it's not live yet), here's the beta Greenhouse site:
http://www.playgreenhouse.com/

Have Fun!

Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

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