Full Steam Ahead

Thanks to everyone who helped test and spread the word of BigPEmu's iOS release, we managed to break into the top 100 paid games list on the App Store! It was short lived, but we made it up to 250 or so copies sold over the first week or so, which is about where I had my more optimistic expectations set. Not enough to translate into a reasonable rate of labor compensation, but at least enough to pay for the hardware/material costs that went toward making the port. After settling on the bottom of the stats cliff, the app actually made a rather unexpected leap past 300 copies more recently, probably at least partly thanks to BigPEmu being part of MVG's selection of 2024's best emulators!

I've decided to put BigPEmu up on Steam next, and of course it will be free on there. I mainly expect to benefit from getting NAT hole-punching for free as part of the service, as well as the friends/matchmaking/etc. functionality. People might actually start using the emulator's multiplayer component this way, which I've noticed seems to be a rather under-used component of BigPEmu. The net code has held up pretty well in my simple friend tests, but the fact that I haven't heard any complaints from anyone leads to me to believe that people aren't using it! It's also possible that my years as a network programmer on Quake 3 engine games passively evolved to make all of my future network implementations completely flawless. Yes, I'm sure that's exactly it.

But anyway, once I have a Steam build up and running (waiting on the approval process at the moment, then I'll get started on the actual implementation, so I'd roughly guess a couple of weeks if no major medical incidents occur), I'd like to get people together for a giant game of AvP multiplayer. I'm assembling a Discord channel for everyone interested (apologies to those who don't use and/or detest Discord, it's the most practical means at my disposal for trying to coordinate a bunch of people in drastically different time zones), so if you'd like to be invited to test the Steam build and participate in the AvP Game of Ultimate Madness, please come join:

https://discord.gg/mahu8qUVQZ

Once you're there, just ping me to tell me you're interested in the Steam test, and I'll give you the tester-role so that you have access to the channel where I'll start annoyingly pinging everyone to coordinate once the time comes.

Anyway, thanks again for a successful BigPEmu iOS launch! I know 300ish copies isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but for a paid app that emulates a relatively lesser-known console with no publisher/marketing power behind it, we did pretty damn good! I attribute that success entirely to everyone who helped put the word out there on/around release day, and to all of you who are giving me money on here; the iOS port wouldn't exist to begin with if it weren't for you, and neither would the upcoming Steam integration!

Although BigPEmu is still the main focus of all of this work, I'm also starting to incorporate the PSX stuff in the background, and this port work is part of that too. This is all common platform/engine work, as I've basically built a whole new, rather versatile, efficient, cross-platform game engine around the emulator at this point. All of that scripting functionality that's been creeping in, along with all the more sophisticated graphics features and underlying framework stuff. It quietly became a functional engine right before our eyes! So even once I've shifted the emulation-level focus to other targets, BigPEmu is going to continue to benefit, as the Jaguar continues to chart new territories all the way up to my dying day. When that day comes, please reserve at least a couple legs of me to be turned into nutritious jerky and distributed among the global jaguar population.