Hothead and Penny Arcade form Greenhouse - PAA their launch title.
Ross Mills
Mr.California, USARegistered User regular
Mr.California, USARegistered User regular
Link
Link to Greenhouse website
Hothead Games and Penny Arcade today announced the Greenhouse - a new distribution platform dedicated to supporting independent game development worldwide.
The digital distribution platform will be operated by the newly-formed company Greenhouse Interactive located in Vancouver.
Greenhouse's first game launch will be Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One - a shared project of the two companies.
"There are so many great games out there that you don't hear about," explained Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade.
"They're too niche or too risky in terms of game play for the top publishers to be comfortable with distributing. We want the Greenhouse to be an alternative for these developers."
"Digital distribution opens so many doors for independent game development, arguably just like the VCR and DVD players did for indie films," said Vlad Ceraldi of Hothead Games.
"We believe in the Greenhouse as an opportunity to support other indie developers and complement the platforms and services currently out there, ensuring that the environment for such development firmly takes root and continues to grow."
Weren't a lot of games like this being released on Steam? Just how "niche" are these games?
Link to Greenhouse website
Hothead Games and Penny Arcade today announced the Greenhouse - a new distribution platform dedicated to supporting independent game development worldwide.
The digital distribution platform will be operated by the newly-formed company Greenhouse Interactive located in Vancouver.
Greenhouse's first game launch will be Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One - a shared project of the two companies.
"There are so many great games out there that you don't hear about," explained Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade.
"They're too niche or too risky in terms of game play for the top publishers to be comfortable with distributing. We want the Greenhouse to be an alternative for these developers."
"Digital distribution opens so many doors for independent game development, arguably just like the VCR and DVD players did for indie films," said Vlad Ceraldi of Hothead Games.
"We believe in the Greenhouse as an opportunity to support other indie developers and complement the platforms and services currently out there, ensuring that the environment for such development firmly takes root and continues to grow."
Weren't a lot of games like this being released on Steam? Just how "niche" are these games?
Ross Mills on
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Posts
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/04/penny-arcade-la.html
and an accompanying interview with Mike and Jerry.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?p=5006723#post5006723
So does that mean that games already released elsewhere will not be released on this platform?
Is this more of a useful "stepping stone" to bigger and better things for the independent developer?
I applaud it. Just make sure you can handle the load. ^_^
Overall, awesome idea, guys!
As far as the download error - shoot an email to support@playgreenhouse.com. Should be live, but it's likely getting the crap beaten out of it from the frontpage link, which is exactly what we wanted. Thanks!
Forums should be working now.
(Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 14): 553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1))
Here's my error that I tried to send in:
I encountered an error on the Mac version of the downloader.
At 11% I received:
Error
Only part of file was Downloaded.
Connection may have been interrupted during transfer.
Error code: 18
This occurred while I was viewing various web pages so I don't think it was my connection.
edit: looks like I got another at 24%.
Ol' error 18, eh? You are not the only one. Looking into both issues.
More to the point, though: offering me prices in CAD? Khoo, me love you long time!
Greenhouse offers yet another avenue and alternative to that insurmountable hurdle and is a really uplifting creation on PA/HH's parts. Congrats guys and best of luck!
Hothead is CDN so only fair . . . eh? Americans will pay in USD and Canadians in loonies--digital loonies.
BTW, found the issue with error 18 and working on a fix. Please standby.
The only "problem" I've had so far is that the icon looks really bad on OS X. It's a really low resolution.
I knew HH was Canadian, I just didn't know who was running the pricing end of the whole business.
Even better that we can make the Yanks use our gloriously coloured money.
SE++ Map Steam
Fixed--may take a while to . . . propagate
Will Brits pay with sterling? Or will we be able to take advantage of the exchange rate?
Any idea what caused this?
I also had the same gmail problem.
On a different note: Will Greenhouse support pre-loading the way steam does, and just download the last 1-5% of the files on launch day? I've been trying to download the podcast since yesterday, and it dies every few minutes, and fluctuates between about 20kb/s and 500kb/s...mostly in the low range, though. Preloading will help a lot of that. As would an auto-resume feature, so I don't have to keep clicking "resume" all the time. Don't worry, I'm also sending that info to the support email.
Just downloaded now roughly 92 - 94 kb/s, maybe it's just not getting hit as hard
If I were on dialup this wouldn't be too shocking, but I'm sitting on a mostly unused T-1.
We are working on it and getting the system balanced. Continue to test if you can. Much appreciated. We have posted a new downloader that fixes a few bugs and are working on the other issues.
I'm in England.