Category: business

When steam started doing early-access, I was not a big fan. I disliked the whole idea. To be honest, it sounded like everything I hate about kickstarter, in the ‘selling future promises’ style. There is a common phrase among older, grizzled game devs, that goes something like this:

“I’ve finished the first 90% of the game. Only the last 90% to go”.

In other words, getting something that looks ‘ok’ and plays ‘ok’ and runs ‘ok’ is fairly easy. Finishing something that is reliable, bug-free, polished, and high-performance is MUCH harder. There are a LOT of unfinished games out there. To make my concerns even stronger, it came around the same time as unity became widespread and everyone and their dog was releasing their first unity game. Behold, a huge swathe of ‘early access’ games that are basically a stock terrain engine, some stock 3D Models, some stock sound effects and a lack of anything new but its ok…amazing new features have been promised and will show up one day! In the meantime, we want your money…

I dislike anything that promotes making promises you can’t keep, or that makes game development look dishonest. We are already plagued by gamers talking about ‘greedy devs’ despite the fact that 75% of us are struggling or in debt:

The last thing we need is more excuses to tarnish game development as a field full of broken promises.

But…

Over time I have re-evaluated things. A case that stands out to me is prison architect. I think they handled early access superbly. In the early days I thought ‘how the fuck can they get away with charging so much for an unfinished game?’ and yet they did, and they developed a core fan base. And as the weeks and months and eventually years, decades and aeons went on, I’d regularly bump into the introversion crew, tease them gently about the game *still* being in early access. Every time we met I was selling a different game, they were continuing to promote and sell the every expanding, ever growing Prison Architect. Eventually it made its way to release, and has proven to be a well known commercial hit.

High sales figures and vast piles of cash are great, but hardly the main motivation for most devs. What encouraged me more about the PA story is the way their relationship with the buyers seemed so close, and so good. I was slightly nudging in this direction when I took pre-orders and offered beta play for a few of my games, but nothing like on the same scale. I’d offer beta copies in the last month (or two) before release. That was nothing like early access. As a result, I’ve shipped games that had bugs, and far far worse, poor design decisions.

The truth of the matter is this. I am not a particularly good low-level game designer. By low-level I mean the stuff about how each mechanic is implemented, what level design looks like, what the cost of each unit is, or how many options of X and Y the player has. I’m probably about average at it. Nothing remarkable, nothing clever. I’m good (it has taken me about twenty years to realize) at two things:

1. Coding really complicated bespoke engines and simulations from scratch and
2. Top level ‘big picture’ ideas for how a game will work, and feel.

Given this slow realization, I reckon early access might be awesome for me. I know what my next game will be called, what its about, and generally what the art style will be. Its ‘sort of playable’ right now. I think its shaping up really well. But should there be X options or Y options? should feature A be prominent or optional? Does it need procedural maps? does it need difficulty options? does it need a minimap or a ‘schematic’ view? how much should tech-trees be part of the game? how much focus should there be on the money side?

I’m not sure yet.

And this is why I intend to do something ‘like’ early access. More like introversions model than the normal steam system. I’d like to keep things small and community-like before appearing on steam, at least until a lot of the early stuff is worked out. I may even start my whole early access thing with some *shudder* coder art in there (as placeholder). There probably wont be music, and placeholder SFX. When a game goes into Early Access on steam, too many journalists and gamers treat it as ‘released’ and start to form judgements about the final game. I’d like to spend a lot of time with me coding and implementing stuff whilst having an honest open dialog (probably through this blog) with the kind of gamers who would be interested in the game, to work out how it should develop. I quite enjoy video blogs now and would enjoy doing regular video progress reports on the game as it develops.

Part of me is even thinking about making the game a negligible cost during EA. There is nothera part of me considering making it free, and supported by DLC. Everything is up for re-evaluation. Whatever happens, it should prove interesting.

Have you watched The Bridge?

Its an excellent TV series. Its a Danish/Swedish crime series, with some fairly creepy storylines, thats likely either dubbed or subtitled for you. That means that it contains NOBODY you have heard of. Its complex, and not trivially easy to get into. You have to pay attention ALL the time. You have to read all the time. It can be a bit dark. It has a low budget, and doesn’t make any effort to be accessible. It’s fucking amazing. Plus commercially very successful. Almost 2 million people in the UK (note: no Danish or Swedish speaking) watched each episode, despite being hidden on BBC4.

Why? Because if you like serious foreign-language drama series about serial killers with a clearly autistic female protagonist and don’t mind reading subtitles it is THE BEST. Also because… there isn’t a hell of a lot of competition there.

Have you tried Holopoint?  It’s an archery training game for the Vive. It uses the proper room-scale setup. You need an $800 vive plus a $1500 PC to play it, plus some space to swing your arms around in. It has apparently, according to steamspy sold 31,000 at $15. Assume only $10 for discounts and thats $300k. I hope the makers won’t mind me guessing that it cost a LOT less to make. It is not Call of Duty, it is not No Mans Sky, it is not <insert name of blockbuster game here>. For the majority of the time your ‘enemies’ are blue cubes. Yup, Blue cubes. Sometimes you get orange cubes. Later you get an animated soldier. Its not exactly Elder Scrolls. BTW the game is AWESOME and you should buy it.

What links these two (and many other examples)?

They are the best X that money can buy, where X is something extremely specific.

I happen to own the IP of the best political strategy game you can buy (there are many election games, but few actual government ones). It is VERY profitable. This means two things:

1. I have a very nice car and
2. You would be nuts trying to make a political strategy game to compete directly with it.

OK, maybe not *nuts* but you are making things hard for yourself. In short, there is a lot more low hanging fruit out there. In the past, people were annoyed that those ‘Deer Hunter’ games made money despite looking dreadful. The target market didn’t care, they were the only Deer hunting games, they aren’t comparing it to Call Of Duty because COD is not about deer hunting. The same is true of Farming Simulator, or Street-Cleaning Simulator, or <WEIRD FUCKING THING> simulator. Those games can be ‘the best’ in their niche without spending 10 years, the unreal engine and a ton of features/polish/cool stuff.

Developers tend to commodify games in their mind and treat them as substitute goods, but they rarely are, unless they are complete clones. Nobody who has just added Democracy 3 to their shopping basket will remove it for Death Bastard Knife Massacre IX because they notice its cheaper. Nobody is going to swap Holopoint for Prison Architect, or The Bridge for The Waltons. If you make something that serves a specific niche (VR archery game or nordic noir with autistic crime fighting), then there is no competition. You get to sell to them merely by saying ‘Look, a game about this thing’ (which is cheaper than traditional marketing) PLUS you get to charge more for them.

If you want to make a successful game, think about the very specific niche thing you REALLY like, and make a game about that. Trust me, there are 10,000 people out there who WILL be looking for it and WILL buy it. maybe even 100,000. There are currently 35 million active users on steam. If your niche is so fucking obscure only one in 1,000 of them will like your premise, you potentially have a commercially viable game with zero competition. Thats just on steam.

One of the questions about your game that you SHOULD struggle to answer is ‘what is the direct competition?’

When you are the only person taking a salary from game development, the simple question of whether or not a game has made a profit becomes a bit fuzzy. Normally everyone takes their salary, and after other costs are paid, if money is left over, there is profit. The thing is, as the company owner, you normally take a tiny salary and thus working out if ‘game x’ made a profit is not as simple as it seems. Do you consider a game profitable if it makes more than the bare minimum salary you pay yourself? or if it makes ANY money at all? or if it earns more than the average salary you would get in a comparable job elsewhere? and WTF is a comparable job anyway?

Democracy 3:Electioneering is new DLC for my political strategy game Democracy 3. It was released just over a month ago. So far, total revenue from all sources for this DLC is $18,600.  The total development and marketing cost of the DLC stands at $21,500 so I have (so far) lost $2,900. Thats a ROI of -13%.

Ouch.

But that’s kinda nonsense. Firstly, that’s for 1 month. if I look at the one month sales for Democracy 3:Clones & Drones, then compare it to the one month of D3:Electioneering and project to a year out, I should earn a net of $87,042 from the DLC. YAY!

But again, that’s nonsense because it doesn’t take into account my work. I put roughly 3 months full time work into the DLC (over a longer period), so how much should I be charging myself for the purposes of working out if this DLC was a good move? This brings us back to the whole ‘what do I pay myself question.

Looking at game developer salary surveys, it looks like a typical ‘lead coder’ earns around £47,000. I also run the studio, so lets assume I am a ‘development director’ and earn £59k. A salaried employee would have a pension too, plus sick pay and so-on, so lets add another £6k to that and say a reasonable salary for me is £65,000 a year. I’m 45, been coding on and off since age 11. I’m worth it :D. So 3 months at that rate costs me £16,250. Given exchange rates right now at about 1.3 £/$, lets plug it in…

Whoah thats more like it.  Of course that assumes that the sales of D3:E are the same curve as D3:C&D over time, which they may not be. On the other hand, this is a US election year, and a fairly crazy one, people might be really into a game about election strategy. Or they might be fed up with politics entirely. who knows.

Now before you all quit your jobs to ‘go indie’, its really not this simple. I also released Democracy 3:Africa recently and that game LOST money (so far). It’s close to breaking even, but right now, that cost me money, even assuming I personally earned zero from doing any work on it. Gratuitous Space Battles 2 DID make me a five figure profit (yay!) assuming I worked for free (boo!). Luckily other games, notable Democracy 3 and Big Pharma, are big hits and continue to bring in money, so it all kind of evens out.

The two takeaways from this are:

1. its VERY RISKY to be dependent on just one game. It really is a hit driven business.
2. If you have a contract with someone that mentions ‘profit’ relating to bonuses etc, make SURE you know how they are defining their costs. It really is open to interpretation.