the game. We jumped in and provided a bunch of feedback for NBA Live Mobile Coins them. But we didn?t have to hand-hold them -- there is some strong professional experience in the team. Their role was to be the developer, to bring the game up to a full releasable standard. We helped them with the preparation of PR materials, packaging and handling all the distribution chains -- the digital channels and the physical distribution in the US and Europe. All of that gets pretty time-consuming.Had you heard of The
before it won some top prizes in Epic's "Make Something Unreal" contest?No, we hadn?t. That is one of the joys of things like "Make Something Unreal" -- it brings the best out into the spotlight. It is really hard to look through hundreds of MUT 18 Coins mods and find the gems in there, so the contest helps in that process, effectively "pre-selecting" those mods that are genuinely worth looking at and that are being done by teams that can actually complete work. What kind of input did Valve provide
regards to The Ball?Valve make the point that they aren?t a publisher -- they provided odd tidbits of feedback, but they don?t go into vast rampages, saying, "change this, do that, we don?t like this." They mostly provided some useful feedback on the presentation of the game to the press and public.What lessons from previous Steam-distributed Tripwire games were implemented with respect to The Ball's development, marketing, and publishing?The key for us was to play to the Steam market
make sure the game made best use of the Steamworks functionality, with achievements and so on MMOGO.What lessons did you learn from publishing The Ball?With The Ball, we were reminded about the state of the retail market, for one. That is a hard market right now, with retailers looking for bigger margins as the volumes have dropped. It makes a $20 game a difficult prospect at retail in the U.S., while a $10 game becomes very marginal. On the digital side, the point we keep making to people is: