Category: business

This is really hard for a single developer, because we do not have much regular reason to return. I’d wager that if you are a regular visit to one of my sites you are either:

1) A reader of this blog. Hello!

2) A poster on my forums.

The problem is, you are never going to pop back to www.positech.co.uk in case there is a new game released, because it’s a 2 year release cycle these days. Eeek.

Because I am a wimp who prefers semi-regular income to sudden spikes followed by two years of silence punctuated by tumbelweed, I am happier if I get regular income from sales over time. Obviously that means I need a regular flow of new potential customers, and an ongoing healthy conversion of potential to actual customers. What ways exist to get this regular traffic?

1) Regular releases of new games. The problem here is you either have to make easy-to-make, small casual games that you can churn out regularly, or you have to expand big time and fund the creation of multiple big games with intertwined release cycles. I much prefer the latter, but it will be a few months before you are likely to hear me talk about that. And I have no experience of doing this yet.

2) Cross-sell affiliate games from other devs. I used to do this a lot, but in the end launched showmethegames.com instead. The problem is, it makes your website looks just like every other casual affiliate site and it stops reflecting your indieness. This is why I stopped it.

3) Build a community. Either through the game itself (MMO’s are a big win) or somehow through other means. Obviously a blog is a great help here, along with facebook and twitter. Youtube can even be a blogging site in some ways. The problem here is it all takes time away from game development. You can hire a PR guy, but the whole point of being indie is that you are close to your customers, so why hire someone to wreck that relationship? I screwed up a bit here on facebook. I didn’t know if I wanted my facebook page to be businessy or personal. I still don’t know, and I hardly ever bother using it now anyway, and almost feel like closing it. I do tweet a lot though @cliffski. Another win for me was the modding scene for all my games, expressed through the forums. Again, the trouble here is it takes time to support and encourage.

4) Spend advertising money. This is something I tend to default to. The main gain here is that it involves money but not time, and I am atrociously time poor. The downside is that it produces very marginal gains in profit. I feel it necessary to remind you that revenue is for ego, profit is where it’s at. If I quadruple the ad budge for democracy 2, I get an increase in profit of 6%. That’s still worth doing, obviously, but it’s also within the margin for error. There is little point in having huge sales, and admin hassles, and support costs, if you actually don’t end up making any more profit from doing so.

So what should the struggling indie do? Well it’s very very difficult. It depends on your strengths. The time-poor should maybe go with ads. people who like shorter smaller games should go with 1) people who love being online chatting 24/7 should maybe go with 3). I don’t have all the answers, I just know how I’ve muddled though this problem over the years.

The other solution is of course the ‘introversion’ strategy. You release games in sudden awe-inspriing bursts of sales-success that means you can finance effectively disappearing for years at a time. This is, after all the strategy of many AAA developers. I just find it a bit scary :D

I regularly read the ‘silicon alley insider’ web site. I have a love hate relationship with it. I do it partly to remind me how inward looking and narrow peoples focus can be. To the writers on SAI, the only big thing happening in the world is the battle between smartphone companies, and the biggest news in the universe is if a silicon valley startup orders new office chairs. It is incredibly inward-looking. As someone who doesn’t even own a ‘smart phone’ (my phone doesn’t even have a camera) and isn’t even sure where his phone is  right now, I feel like I’m watching aliens through a telescope.

What I find most awkward about that silcon-valley-mania, is the obsession with venture capital and startups. it seems there is only one possible way to be in business:

1. Start up a new company. Must be NEW! nothing older than a week, or you are yesterdays news!
2. Employ young people. They must be young. The younger the better. Nobody with any experience at all. if they are good looking, much the better!
3. Spend a fortune on flash offices and furniture. Have ‘zany’ stuff such as slides and table football in the office to show just how totally crazy you are! (Also helps scare off older people).
4. Don’t worry about making a profit. profits are for losers. Spend any money that would have been profits on a superbowl ad, especially a hip one that doesn’t even mention your product.
5. Smooth talk venture capitalists into lending you hundreds of millions of dollars, which you will spend on bonuses for the CEO and CTO, despite not earning a cent in profit yet.
6. Sell to google or facebook, and then goto 1).

This is probably a smart move, if all you want from life is money, but there is only so much money can buy. once your strategy earned you $10million, whats the point? what are you doing?I have a strategy for what to do with my life if I ever have $10 million, and it’s not about making more.

Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur schmuck because I run my company this way:

1. Make a game, using savings to finance it.
2. Make profit from sales of the game
3. Stash some aside for a rainy day
4. Make the next game, financed by last games profits.

Schmuck or not… I sleep safely at night knowing positech is 100% privately owned and 100% debt free and influence-free. No bank, no investor, no business partner can turn the lights off tomorrow. In an increasingly debt-laden world, with every possibility of future economic wobbles and debt-financing squeezes, maybe I’m not the dumb schmuck plodding along, but the wiley old tortoise who will still be here after the startup kids are locked out the office because the creditors demand their money back?

Ha! who am I kidding, I bet lots of them sleep on a pile of gold on their own private islands already :D

Today marks the launch of the first Show Me The Sales promotion. This is a big bunch of high quality indie games all being sold at a discount. it’s not like a normal games bundle, where there is a central seller taking a cut, and you have all-or-nothing. It’s essentially a collection of indie games sold direct by the developer, which are all on sale at the same time. Plus every one has handy videos:

http://www.showmethegames.com/sales.php

This is my little side project, and is a way to encourage indie pc devs to sell direct, and for gamers to remember what it’s like to buy direct. It’s really no hassle at all, and you get the satisfaction of ALL of the money going to the developer.

Anyone who is suspicious and thinks I must be making money from it somehow, I’m not. I see it as being in my long term indirect self-interest to maintain a healthy direct sales channel for indie developers. That’s all.

Please tell your friends, there are some great games there at great prices, and it’s only lasting 14 days.

A recent conversation with a fellow indie about their first game, and it’s (relatively) low sales led me to think about how best a small games company should break out of a ‘cheap games and low sales’ rut.

GSB took way more effort to make than any of my earlier games. It was a bit of a big gamble for me, but it paid off. I don’t have exact figures to hand, but I’m pretty sure that the return-on-investment per hour of dev time for GSB is higher than for my earlier games. That makes me think if this might generally be a good rule to follow.

It’s easy to get stuck into an assumption that there is simple  linear mapping between effort and reward, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true in game development. Very big smart companies don’t seem that keen to work on lots of small projects. Call of Duty X is always a huge stupidly expensive project, and the profits from it are always staggering. Nobody ever thinks ‘hey maybe spending >$30,000,000 on a game is a bit crazy, why not do two $15,000,000 games?’. I suspect that is because the profit on the one 30mill game is bigger than the profit on two 15mill games.

So for indies, I’m wondering if we should take a leaf out of valves book. Team Fortress 2 took 7 years to make. Half life 2 cost a fortune (at the time) but then sold 12 million copies. Maybe indies should be spending more in time, money and effort and taking much bigger risks in scope if they want to make a decent return.

GTB will definitely have higher production values than GSB. I thought GSB seemed pretty good, but some bits could have been better. I’m aiming for more polish, and a more impressive initial release. If that means it takes an extra 3-6 months, then I’ll do it, but I still hope to release in 2011, if I knuckle down to it :D