Minter halts dev blogging

Space Giraffe developer Jeff Minter has said he's going to stop writing about game development on his blog after taking a bit of a shoeing for a late-night post earlier in the week where he complained bitterly that the Xbox Live Arcade version of Frogger was outselling his latest game "by more than ten to one".

"Not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week," Minter had written. "OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga. ... We'll shut up trying to do anything new then."

Two days later, Minter, clearly upset by the reaction, wrote: "I'm not going to be writing about game development here any more after this. Yes, I had a bit of a rant the other night because frankly yes, it is a bit disappointing to see a repackaged MAME rom doing much better than original content, but hey, that's how it goes. People are more inclined to buy stuff they remember rather than stuff that's new.

"We're invested in XBLA now, and we need to re-use the [Space Giraffe] framework for a couple of reasonably quick games - I think that's the way to make it work out for us, we just need more games in the pipeline. I'm already halfway through the next one and I just want to get my head down and get on with it."

Seems like a shame to us. We always enjoyed hearing what he was up to. He adds: "from now on this will just be about sheep and plushies and other such non-work-related stuff". Hopefully in time he'll change his mind.

For more on Space Giraffe, check out its gamepage, where you'll find it divided opinion, but ultimately won quite a few of us and you over.