Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Legacy Business

cliffski

Having a long established business brings benefits (FWIW Positech was formed in 1998, as I recall). You get tons of experiences, and contacts yada yada. It also has a negative side.

British Airways used to be a really major force in UK aviation, but got hammered badly by ‘low-cost’ airlines and is struggling to compete. One of the many reasons it finds it hard is that BA has been around long enough that it has a bunch of retired pilots 0n decent pensions. Thats a considerable cost that its new upstart challengers do not have, and its just one example of the negative side of legacy business.

Having been around for so long and shipped so many games, I have a lot of legacy crap to deal with too. I get emails (often) from people who have lost their Kudos or Kudos 2 download link. Its a 1 or 2 minute distraction at best, but it involves mental context switching that is expensive for a coder. I even get the odd request from someone to buy/re-register their shareware demo of Asteroid Miner/Star Miner (my first commercial game). FWIW, don’t email me, the serial code for every copy is the same (what a n00b huh?) its the serial number of the trash compactor in star wars, if that helps…

Emails about long dead games are one thing, but it also means you have communications about long dead publisher deals and other biz stuff. I am owed tiny amounts of money by at least 4 different publishers and payment providers which are below the threshold for paying out, yet spam me each month with an automatic royalty report. (RealGames, I can guess I’m not selling any copies next month, so lets give it a rest shall we?). This sort of stuff is long redundant and could probably be spam filtered out, but actually its not the ‘really’ old stuff that is the biggest legacy distraction.

Believe it or not, Democracy 3, a game which still generates comfortably enough for me to live on, and for which we will soon release a Unicode update with exciting new language support… is now considered legacy in my mind. This is partly because Jeff now deals with it, but mostly because I have moved on to do other stuff. We did D3:Africa, then Political Animals, and Shadowhand is coming, and of course I code Production Line. Frankly, in my mind, Democracy 3 is history, at least in terms of day to day concerns.

Yet to loads of people, it absolutely is not history, but a current, new game. I get emails from publishers wanting to discount it in sales, I get more requests to do academic stuff around it than you would ever guess, I get a bunch of interesting emails about modding it, I get requests to bundle it, requests to list it on new stores, obviously I get some tech support (not much now, happily), and so-on and so-on.

I know this sounds a little ‘first world problems’ but actually, you don’t realize how much this stuff builds up. If you are working on your first indie game, or have just released it, you have 100% focus. When you get an email about ‘your game’ you KNOW which one. You never get confused as to whether its Democracy 3 or Production Line that has a fix for certain sound card bugs. You never forget which game you are running an ad campaign on, or confuse which one is in a sale this week. (FWIW several of my games are likely in this weeks GoG sale. Off the top of my head…no idea which ones).

I am beginning to think there is a very good argument for restricting the game output for a single-dev studio to below my current level. Make a few games, make them long-form hits. There is definitely a diseconomy of scale when it comes to multiple projects over time.

 

 

9 thoughts on Legacy Business

  2. Our indie company has only been around since 2008 and we’re feeling this too, I can’t imagine what an additional ten years worth of games would do. When I add up all the little day-to-day things, the occasional email, the legacy support, the fan-service gains, and — perhaps most importantly, the opportunity costs of all the context switching — hiring someone is *definitely* going to pay for itself.

    Once you start rolling in some extra duties – attending conventions, putting on booths, organizing interviews, doing PR stuff, organizing localization companies, restocking cookies in the fridge, etc… You can make them an “operations manager” or a “studio producer” or some such. It’s a more attractive job posting than “maintain old shit!” and frees you up to do the much more important things.

    1. indeed. I REALLY need to hire someone, its just that its so hard to find someone good enough, trustworthy enoguh, available, and who will do the job as well as me. I’m a bit of a control freak :D I am managing at last to outsource coding properly, which is definitely a new thing for me :D

      1. Learning to let go and let someone else do work their way rather than yours is a skill that takes time to learn.

        And it’s a difficult one to pick up as it does mean relinquishing control.

        But think of the benefits and find someone you like and perhaps you can train them to do it the way you want over time rather than expecting them to do it ‘just so’ within a week of starting.

        It’s an extra investment but one that pays off in the long term. Hire someone with potential and a good attitude and start your learning as well as theirs! :)

  3. Well that really is a ‘first world problem’, unfortunately there is only a single plausible solution, fortunately that solution is quite easy: get an assistant :)

  4. You’ve answered it yourself when you say you need to hire someone.

    You don’t have to go cheap on this if you think it might need to be a full-time position then hire accordingly. To me it sounds like someone needs to be taking in all the email for a day and putting it into notes which you then allocate half an hour per day to go over with them to work out what you’re going to do the following morning for the first hour before you start on your current project.

    Multiple emails for a single bug are condensed into a report that x feature is bugged and needs a fix. You fix it and they communicate it to the forums, steam etc and then upload the patch to the company website etc.

    Requests for discounts or bundles are straight yes/no answers which are then translated by employee as polite refusals to the requesting company.

    In reality, employee just needs access to update appropriate part of the web server, like download links and the company email that’s piping in to addresses like support@positech. You could get them to filter mail addressed straight to you but that’d be a decision you could make after they worked for a while.

    And, of course, you have the extra benefit of all the jobs they can do which you don’t realise you could use the help for as yet. Assist at shows talking to the public, for example. Hand out promotional material. Feed the cats.

    If you hired locally then it’s even less of a risk for your business if they work at home with you, just in a different room where you can keep an eye on what they actually do as well as what you request.

    1. thats the problem, I don’t have enough to justify a full time assistant, and I wouldn’t want an employee in my home anyway, so I’m naturally restricting myself to an online virtual assistant, which makes finding/working with them tricky.

      1. But you’re in the perfect position to find somebody who doesn’t want full time employment. There are lots of indies that would welcome an income boost and the chance to gain insight into a successful indie business.

  5. Youv’e just made an argument for your games to go public domain. AKA at some point you no longer have the knowledge or want anything to do with said game. It’s too bad copyright/IP laws are out of control however.

    Basically old games would fall into public ownership so people could modify/repair/do what they want with them. Which was the original purpose of copyright/IP law, so that cultural works could go into libraries and serve some public good. At the current moment it’s totally serving corporations.

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