When I was in high school working on the weekends, that would have been two weeks wages, which I had other stuff to spend on. And that's from a privileged background, I know plenty of folks who's weekend/summer jobs paid towards rent/bills for their families.
That said, Apple probably doesn't care about the teenagers or indie devs out there who want to make a little game for their platform. However I'd also say to those folks - if you're strapped for money, don't develop for Apple devices. Go make a doohickey on a windows or Linux box.
Agree. But this isn't some lost nobody. This person has a Wikipedia Page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_Lawhead], is an established game developer and artist, and lives in California. She's won multiple awards and she owns at least one Mac.
Like come on. The refusal to drop a hundred bucks on something that is apparently so important to her reeks of good old fashioned stubbornness, or at worst, entitlement, but even then, she has a significant audience. Crowdfund it, cough up and stop whining.
Like I don't entirely agree with the $100/year model being the only option from Apple, but we're all paying that particular piper. Why is she so special that hers shouldn't be subject to the same?
Also, some people may look up to Lawhead as a role model as a programmer/artist but not have awards and lots of $.
By this logic the cost of anything that you can't own and use ad-infinitum is $infinity.
> Also, some people may look up to Lawhead as a role model as a programmer/artist but not have awards and lots of $.
What does that have to do with her ability or willingness to pay?
And those communities succeeded, and produce interesting games/genres, primarily due to the lack of barrier to entry (in the sense that you eg bought doom & sc for the game, and then realized there was an editor attached that came free)
Annoyingly, they never learned to share their source code and assets, but otherwise.
Today indie gamedev has become more and more a minaturized version of the AAA industry, and that's a terrible shame.
Apple is not opposed to free games.
> Today indie gamedev has become more and more a minaturized version of the AAA industry, and that's a terrible shame.
I'm sorry but this comparison is ludicrously hyperbolic. Firstly because the Mac is hardly the platform for free and open gaming, relative to the topic at hand because the Mac itself has a high barrier to entry, being so damn expensive just for the hardware, and secondly because the total expenditure, if you wanted to publish, not develop because ANYONE can develop on a Mac for precisely no money, to publish a game for free is $100 for the dev license.
And, additionally, I see no reason the games couldn't be distributed as source code for free for people to build and run themselves. Is it as elegant as App Store? No, obviously, but that's what the $100 is paying for.
I'm sorry I just don't see why this is a problem. Mac has always been a bit of an exclusive platform, which makes it both of higher quality, but also does indeed introduce barriers to entry. If those barriers are too much for you, then don't do it, you're still spoiled for choice for distribution channels that aren't the Mac App Store.
This is kinda where I'm at with this. Surely anyone even remotely garnering an audience could raise this amount annually. It's a decent cost to an individual but to even a humble audience, it's peanuts.
If you can't raise even that, then IMO your game being lost is of little consequence. Not everything farted out by every indie developer is a lost masterpiece, sometimes stuff is lost because it lacks the traction to merit archival.