I’m curious what the non-professional PC/Mac devs are doing in terms of shipping their games with an installer, if anything. My assumption is that the pros budget for an installer. I’ve noticed most Unity games I encounter in places like itch.io are nothing more than a zip.
That screams “amateur” to me about a thousand times louder than any “Personal Edition” splash screen.
Obviously it’s a non-issue on the mobile and console walled-gardens, and I know nothing about how this typically works on the Mac side of the fence, but VS gives you this capability for Windows out of the box (even the freebie Community Edition has a plugin available).
So – do you ship an MSI or do you find that gamers just don’t seem to care?
(Actually I’m also curious about how it works on Xbone, not sure if that would violate NDAs…)
For Macs I don’t do anything more than make a simple DMG with a shortcut to the applications folder. For Windows, I absolutely build an MSI since I don’t trust the end user to not somehow balls the entire process up on Windows.
I prefer to see it as “portable” rather than a lack of professionalism. Being able to extract the game onto a USB flash drive and take it with me to different systems without being dependent on the system allowing installations.
That is because you’re not a casual. Casual’s are more familiar with ‘do it for me’ installers and less familiar with ‘let me handle this’ zip archives.
I plan to do a setup installer/launcher when near beta…but in alpha and testing builds I just put a zip out… honestly if those who might test your game don’t know how to extract and use that, I doubt they’d have much feedback anyway.
Tthen again doing a webgl build is probably the easiest way to allow the less tech savy test things out… which i have sadly encountered… younger gamers these days brought up on steam etc, often seem clueless on installers or manual extracting things… where do i put this? i got a big scary warning error what do I do? it won’t let me run this etc… such things are seen as dangerous and less safe… especially with windows uac, and crapware anti virus programs scaring audiences into the ‘ease’ of walled garden markets.
Also it’s not like you need an installer as they were mainly used before to make sure directx sort of system libraries were infested onto the system or any other third party software needed. So really just a launcher is what you might go with making now not so much an installer. So yeh I don’t see it as unprofessional for places like itch.io just offering a zip for each platform… I mean hey its better than going to some shiity google drive/dropbox type crap where just getting a fking direct link isn’t possible unless they can get the visitor to go through half a dozen tracking hooks.
I blame it far less on being a technical user and far more on having easy access to computers in school. Very few of my fellow students would be considered more than casual users but after the technical kids showed them the processes necessary they kept doing it themselves.
With Windows now supporting ZIP files natively the only people who aren’t able to do this are basically the older adults.
Getting back to the original question my limited experience with creating installers has been with NSIS.
…I think that needlessly wrapping a game into an installer it doesn’t need in some cases screams “amateur”.
The point of setup is to handle dependencies so user wouldn’t need to install them. If there are little to no dependencies, setup frequently isn’t needed. Typical standalone installer on windows platform also writes garbage into registry, registers uninstaller and creates restore points. All of this is frequently unnecessary in case of a (unity) computer game, and tends to require administrator privilegies.
So, basically, instead of convenience it is a pointless annoyance. Zip or *.7z archive is a better idea. If developer is afraid that some users might lack intelligence to handle .zip/.7z archive, they can provide both versions.
Absolutely. If your target audience is a casual user then you may want to create an installer for them. At that point though you might be better off with a distribution service like Steam because the majority of casuals are not going to download a game from a website. They’ll be playing on consoles, on distribution services like Steam, on mobile devices, and within the browser.
I think Installers also provide benefit in allowing you to do things for the user like create desktop shortcuts. Society is becoming more and more technical, but really, outside of technical circles most people are not. Ryiah, most of my social circle is actually non-technical or only semi-technical. Some of them are avid gamers but they’re not going to want to figure out how to unzip a file to some location, then create a shortcut to it.
A zip distro is no guarantee that running the EXE inside isn’t going to do any of those things, and besides, I wouldn’t expect a non-developer gamer to necessarily know that. In fact, your assumption may not even be accurate:
Nope, not always. The user will be prompted if the installer requires elevated privledges. In the case of a Unity game, you’re not needing to make system level changes and thus the installer would not be run with elevated privledges.
No, not always, but you have to run it to find out. And when it asks for them, you have to say yes, or the installer will fail.
You need a certain level of trust before I will run your installer. And if you’re not going through an established platform, you probably don’t have it.
An installer can demand administrator privilegies, and once those are granted, it’ll be free to write garbage into HKLM (which is system wide), put stuff into system folders, wreck your fonts and codecs, etc.
Basically, a game that is delivered as a standalone installer is less trustworthy by default, because you never know what kind of “helpful” option maker of the installer could utilize. Without the installer at the very least the program will be restricted to making a mess in current user’s accoutn only.
A better option is either existing delivery system like Steam or Gog. Even though those service may run an installation script behind the scene, they are perceived as more trustworthy.
I mean hey its better than going to some shiity google drive/dropbox type crap where just getting a fking direct link isn’t possible unless they can get the visitor to go through half a dozen tracking hooks.