Well, the N+ XBLA launch party was last night, and it was a smashing success! Check out the pics here. The room was pretty well packed by the end, and it was difficult to pry the controllers from the crabbed and clawlike (read: N+ addicted) hands of our guests when it was time to close the event.
There were 4 Xbox360s set up at the party, and participants could play local multiplayer on each console, which meant we could accommodate lots of players — good thing, too! There was rarely a system free, which we take as a good sign.
We did a few interviews you should see shortly, and generally had a great time celebrating the hopefully really really soon launch of the game.
In other news, there’s a new IGN Developer blog post for you to enjoy: https://blogs.ign.com/Metanet/. This week we catalogue some of our favorite freeware and shareware games. Scintillating!
And we’re off for the Game Developers Conference next week. Yay! The GDC is always a good time. This year, both of us are doing talks at the Indie Games Summit. Raigan’s talking about how creating and tweaking your own system and parameters can lead to a more interesting game. Mare’s doing a postmortem on N+ XBLA with Nick from Slick Entertainment. We’re totally excited and can’t wait to get there. And who knows, next week might see the release of N+ XBLA, which would be super cool…More on that later!
WOOT WOOT 🙂
So It’s out now?
@ Jomon:
“[…] generally had a great time celebrating the hopefully really really soon launch of the game.”
Unfortunately, not yet. We wish!
we find out if my assumptions are right on monday
oh… darn i guess i missed that part
please tell me, as a gamer in japan who gets burned quite often with xbla releases (didn’t get commanders on the japanese marketplace last week for example..) will this game be hitting japan next week too? i hope so, i’ve been looking forward to it for months now.
it should be released worldwide at the same time.. at least, we asked about japan/europe and they said it would be on the same day as NA. hooray!
THANK YOU FOR THE GOOOOOOOD NEWS 🙂
your ocmments keep leading me to belive on a wensday release
Mare, I would pay lots of money if those faceplates hit ebay (or mysteriously landed on my door step and a parcel of cash landed on yours the same day)! Right now I have an eternal sonata one and although that is one fantastic game my xbox only has the N+ sticker on it as far as N swag goes.
I know I mentioned this to you guys at PAX, wanted to remind you, I feel like there would be a market for swag from Metanet. I’d buy a Metanet Software shirt, I’d buy an N+ shirt if I didn’t win one at PAX, I’d buy that poster that you guys put up there. I honestly think this is something you guys should look into!
@ maximo: aww, thanks. They totally didn’t turn out as well as I’d have liked, nor as amazing as I was planning. But, I only thought of this idea on…Sunday? giving me two days to get them done (and what with all the steps required, that was not much time). I think these prototypical faceplates will remain in the possession of the N+ team, but I’ll certainly consider making some more sometime.
@ Robber Tom: thanks! I’m with you, I love those damn posters. Yeah, we are still trying to figure out the best way to get Metanet merch to the masses. Places like cafepress’ prices are a little inflated, but on the other hand we don’t have enough space to store and handle selling/shipping ourselves. Maybe when we’re virtually rolling in N+ profits next year (ahaha) we’ll hire an intern and some storage space 😉
i’ve been doing my best to spread the n+ word to all those with 360s..
…even though i don’t get to own it, i REALLY want it to sell well.
…im afraid people are going to not even notice its release!
hopefully word of mouth will get around, and people will buy it like crazy.
…although part of me wants it to sell poorly, so microsoft wont throw another exclusivity deal at you! i am still hoping for that psn release in a few years!
Duh, forgot to mention faceplates. I’d buy those in a SECOND if they were available. Maybe you could do like a limited run, number them and sign them? Because I would pay some money for that.
I don’t think I’m the only one.
If you guys ever need some spare cash, put those faceplates up. I’d be in the market too (And I don’t even *have* an X-Box). o_O
robber tom has the right idea. If you made 100 of them and signed them I would gladly give you large sums of money for them.
one problem is that it took mare maybe 4-8 hours? 400 hours is ten weeks of painting face plates 😉
we definitely appreciate the support, and we _are_ keeping an eye out for solutions on how to make merchandise more feasible, but for right now we really need all of our time to go directly towards working on games! this is one problem with wanting to keep the company small i guess 🙁
also, about exclusivity — we recently learned that we could have negotiated our way out of that if we’d really pushed back. We think excellent sales, plus that sort of crucial knowledge, will help us get the deal we really want, next time!
I’ll be your intern/graphic design artist/merchandise handler! That job would be amazing on so many varying levels.
You could also go through some indie shirt suppliers like many webcomic artists do. The only one that I can think of is topatoco.com, which itself if owned by a webcomic creator and I know 5 other artists that go through them. They do the boxing and shipping, and your money doesn’t go to big corporations.
As far as the faceplates go, I’m pretty sure that they can be printed too. No idea where I’d go for that though.
I like the signed faceplate idea but there is no way i would be able to get one XD but i would definitly buy one thats just regular