Race the Sun and Indie Whining

Race the Sun is a strange game I was told about last night so let me give you the story.

I was sat in my room playing Ultima 1 yesterday and while I was moving around the lands of Sosaria trying to vanquish Mondain and his orb of immortality, I heard my facebook chat go off.  I go to check it and it's a good friend of mine saying that he had discovered this game called Race the Sun and it was really good.

So I go and check the trailer and it's this cool looking infinite running game where you control a ship dodging all sorts of stuff at high speed, collecting power ups and trying to stay alive long enough to beat your high score.  The cool thing about this game though, at least the way I understand it, is that every 24 hours a world is randomly generated and the leader boards are reset.  From there you have 1 day to get really good at the stage and top the daily leader boards.  It's a cool idea and would definitely keep me coming back, factor in the hard mode that comes with the full version of the game and you've got something pretty good.  A little different from every other infinite running game on the market and a good way to try and kill some time during lazy afternoons by the sounds of things, right?

But then my friend messaged me again this morning telling me that Flippfly, the company who made the game are in a spot of bother.  They can't get green lit on Steam.  So while looking around the website for the game I came across this article written by one of the developers.

http://flippfly.com/news/race-the-sun-a-month-after-launch-losing-steam/

Now I get they are upset about their game not doing very well (2 copies sold last week) but there seems to be a lot of finger pointing and whining in this post.  Whining about how they can't share the same success as Mojang, whining about how the interest for it on Steam Greenlight isn't all that good and whining about how Indiecade basically dismissed it as a mobile game.

My problem with this article is they don't really have any place to whine like this; the lack of success of Race the Sun is entirely their own fault.  Yes, the game looks cool and yes, they managed to get me interested but just by watching the trailer and playing the demo on Kongregate, it's nothing more than a bog standard infinite runner.  The problem with your game being one of those is that there are already loads of those damn things on the mobile market and almost ALL of them are free.  So why would I throw down $10 for your game when I can just pick up my iPod and play Temple Run for nothing? 

Now judging from my friends reaction to the game, it's better than your standard mobile runner game, and I'm willing to believe him.  If it doesn't get a Steam release soon, I'll pick it up off their website and show some support, because it looks they have made something that's pretty fun, so show some love.

But really, drop that whiny "wahh, our game is so good why won't it sell?!" and re work your trailer and make sure people KNOW what sets it apart from every other game in the genre, because there are reasons to want this thing, just no one can tell from what you've put out already.

Go give them a thumbs up on Steam Greenlight too, I'd like to buy this using my steam credit.