Free Fall ~ 17th December 2009

There were many reasons I elected to publish my games as boxed products towards the end of 2002. One was that the increasingly sophisticated games were becoming too big to toss around a 56k Internet connection and fared better on a disc. That sounds ridiculous now, but it’s only recently that broadband became standard and made concerns about file sizes a thing of the past! An accompanying reason was that published products enjoy a more respectable status, and ironically end up reaching more people. Publish books are a prime example of this. How much would you prefer to thumb through one of those rather than read a 300-page essay online?! But above all else, selling the games – in any available format – was of course a means of funding their existence in the first place. By the time I was creating 3D epics in 2003, making games was a full-time gig for me. I either did it for a living or I couldn’t do it at all – at least not to that standard. So thanks to those of you who did see fit to purchase the games. Your contributions truly were the bricks that built an empire. As for those who justified “pirating” my independent efforts in increasingly grotesque ways, you’re the reason there won’t be a Wrestling MPire 2010. All you people do is hit the pause button on a piece of entertainment you’ve discovered. “Destroying the thing you claim to love,” as Oscar Wilde would have put it. It’s nothing to be proud of or smug about. Nonetheless, all of the above reasons are no longer justified now that I don’t make games for a living and the projects can now be made available for free. I no longer need to release them physically, I no longer need to promote them, and I no longer need the revenue from them. That there was “revenue” you can be sure, for those of you who would attribute this development to “failure” of some kind. My definition of “failure” is still clocking up more downloads and selling more copies than most other independents! What we have here is a scenario where the games are better off being played by as many people as possible, as effortlessly as possible, rather than accumulating small change. I’m interested in making my life less complicated at this point in time, so it’s with some relief that I put business concerns to one side. That said, the compilation CD will still be available to purchase (at an insignificant price) for those who wish to own the full body of work at its best and in a convenient format. Hopefully, the wisdom of my decision to go freeware will become clear throughout 2010 as people come to the games in a new way. Like a butterfly emerging from the corpse of a caterpillar, my professional career has to “die” so that something else might “live” more vibrantly. Watch this space. This is not the beginning of the end so much as the end of the beginning…

For the full listing of MDickie’s freeware games refer to the downloads section of MDickie.com