Category: business

I recently bought a new domain, to point to a folder on my server. Sounds simple right? But SIX PEOPLE over the course of four days at my host (Liquidweb) clearly had absolutely no clue how domains worked (despite selling me one), and totally failed to achieve this trivial, laughably simple task for which I pay them monthly. I got about a dozen emails to suggest various ways in which they didn’t understand, or had no idea, or couldn’t do it. They wasted hours of my time.

I fixed it myself in 40 minutes, giving up all hope that anybody at liquidweb had a clue on how to do their job.

And today I discover that 9 months ago they just put my price up 50% without bothering to email me. What utter assholes. I do not understand how people running businesses think that this is the way to treat your customers.

I am actually considering shutting down this blog, my forums and website and just only being on X.

Do not, under any circumstances, ever, ever consider using liquidweb. They are a complete trainwreck.

I had a chat today with a very knowledgeable fellow indie game dev. He asserts that it is way harder for a game dev to sell a game on steam in 2023 than it was in the past. My gut feeling was that he was wrong, but who needs guts when you have data and analysis? lets find out.

I dug around to find out what I could. There are various sites listing the number of games on steam, but the most interesting data I found was listing the games released on steam, but also breaking down the more recent years into games that have certain community features enabled, and games that did not. Steam requires a certain amount of sales and interest in a game before you can do things like have trading cards. I suspect this is a good proxy for what games are serious commercial releases as compared to student games, hobby games, and the sort of games that are made part-time on a low budget. The question I am interested in was whether or not there is more ‘genuine competition’ for full time indie game devs now. With this is mind, I think its far to ignore games that don’t meet the trading card threshold.

This required some stats mangling by me, because it took a while for steam to realize it needed to introduce this measure, so unless you fade-in the effect of the threshold sensibly, there would be a sudden peak and then dip. I did my best, and ended up with a chart that looks like this, for games released:

This goes from 2006 to 2023. I’m too useless on a laptop with office365 to get the horizontal axis right :D. This definitely shows a huge jump in the number of games, but this is clearly not the whole story. Steam launched just in English, with just valves own games. It took a while to add ANY new games, and in that time the number of users shot up. People might not remember but I recall how much everyone HATED steam initially. People really resented having to install it.

Over time, obviously steam has become huge, and more global. I dug out some stats that gave me the peak concurrent users for each year. Not perfect, but an interesting proxy for steam usage, and must be vaguely related to how many active users the platform had… Anyway, adding that to my chart allows me to then calculate the ratio of peak concurrent users to games released, which gave me a new chart:

I think this is more interesting. That peak is around 2012, and the low point to the right is 2017-2019. This data is far from perfect, because obviously people can continue to play games from previous years, and the accumulation of games is definitely a factor. However, I would argue that the tendency for people to buy games released a few years ago is also good news for developers, as it means your game will have a long tail and continue to generate revenue.

So a very rough hacky analysis suggests that peak-time to release a game on steam may have been 2012. It got a fair bit harder since then, but has been getting easier for the last few years. Obviously this is only a tiny bit of the picture though, as there is so much more to consider.

Steam sales changed a few years ago, due to laws regarding refunds. Because steam was forced to offer a refund in the event that a recently purchased game was suddenly cheaper, the whole concept of flash-sales and one-day spikes during steam sales became history. Gone are the days where you would have your game 90% off just for one day. That may have influenced how gamers value and buy games. I do wonder if the average price of ‘professional’ games has gone up since those days? Gamers like the refund policy, but it also made steam sales more muted, and more predictable, with less crazy discounting.

I do think its VASTLY easier to make games now. There is Unity and Unreal. There is also Twitch, Twitter and YouTube. Streaming is a huge promotional opportunity for game devs, Steam now has reviews, and video uploads, and trading cards and achievements. These have not been around for ever! Plus steam supports a ton of languages, payment providers and currencies. The available market for your PC indie game is now colossal. Big hits are now HUGE hits, because there are just so many more people available to see your game if it is good. I do not have concrete data for just how much money the first 100 indie games on steam made, but I’d wager its not much by modern standards.

I’m guessing Factorio made a LOT more than Rag Doll Kung Fu. Ditto Dyson Sphere Program, Prison Architect and RimWorld. It may seem insane that there was a time when just releasing a game on steam got you front page coverage for DAYS, but there actually were not that many people seeing that page! For one thing, not everyone had broadband, and certainly not uncapped broadband.

On balance, I think making a game in 2024 is hilariously easier than making a game in 2008, because of the tech, the price of tools, the ubiquity of tutorials and communities. When I started, I had to buy physical books about C++ and game engines. I followed the blogs of every indie game dev online, because there were really not that many of us.

The flip-side is that it is much harder to get noticed as a developer in 2024. I accept that. But this is just a change, not a deterioration. All that time you save not having to work out how to code a particle system in 2024 needs to be put into promoting your game to people. Its the same amount of hours for the same reward, you just have to work differently. Maybe. YMMV.

Some food for thought: 14.43% of Steam users are from the United States. There are more than 30 million Steam users in China. If you are making a puzzle-platform game or visual novel, and its only in English, then yes, you might struggle a bit. I find that ‘indie dev twitter’ (which I mostly ignore because its all identity politics), is overwhelmingly made up of US or UK game devs making a small unity game in English. They generalize massively from that experience, but I don’t think its the whole story.

I’ve had the misfortune recently of having to deal with two gargantuan and completely terribly run clusterfucks of inefficiency recently here in moving my mothers TV network from one company to the other. I will not bore you with the details, but the process of quitting company A and enabling company B was, at a conservative estimation, 100x as difficult, and costly (to them) as it should be assuming a simple baseline of a competently run company.

At the same time, I am also running my little one man games business, AND overseeing the construction of a solar farm, which involves at least 5 different companies including mine. Having all this happen at once makes for an interesting comparison, and its even more interesting to do this while I’m also reading the Elon Musk biography, with lots of discussion of Twitter/SpaceX/Tesla etc.

Its no great revelation that big companies are often run badly. I think the situation has got worse, especially in the UK (or is that just the western world in general?) in recent years. We seem to have completely forgotten about free markets and competition, and the role of governments in ensuring that oligopolies and monopolies do not exploit their market position, and this has made things much much worse.

Having dealt directly with both google and facebook, I can tell you both companies are incredibly obtuse, bureaucratic disasters with absolutely no idea how to do anything any more. Its impossible to communicate with them, or get anything fixed. From the point of view of a customer (in this case for ads), both companies seem 100% computer-run, with no humans at all. At any level.

Running a company is about efficient communication. Companies that cannot communicate with their employees, or customers degenerate into inefficiency. The most obvious example is when something is fundamentally broken, but you, as the CEO of a company do not know about it. With my mothers TV, there was a simple mistake on their part. They had set a limit of phone call costs at which point the TV and phone would be disconnected. You could pay the costs to re-enable the account, but their website failed if you tried to pay in the first month, before the first bill. So there was an infinite loop on non payment, and non-connection.

In any sane organization, there would be actual humans who would respond, understand the problem, and fix it immediately. Instead it took 3 days and about 6 hours of my time, numerous furious phone calls, dozens of emails, a complaint to the government regulator, you name it. I was not a happy customer… But me being an extremely angry customer, and therefore the complete destruction of any potential goodwill is only 1% of the cost to the company. They now have to respond to, and deal with an official complaint with a government regulator. They have tried to call me to apologize 6 times, and left messages and sent emails. This has taken them time, effort, money. In theory the regulator could fine them, costing even more time, effort, money.

The fix is obvious, but unfashionable. You simply hire staff to deal with complaints. The obvious rebuttal is that this would cost money, but the cost of NOT dealing with a complaint will always be higher than the cost of dealing with one.

The compounding error for large organizations is that even when their staff do communicate with customers, they are not empowered to do anything. Nobody you ever speak to on a phone call to a large company has any discretion, authority or power to do anything. They have to fob you off with excuses or use tools like long wait times, annoying hold music and no ringback, and infuriating AI chatbots pretending to be typing… all to hide the fact that even if you get to talk to a human, they cant fix the problem.

My email address is cliff at positech dot co dot uk. I make no secret of it, and give it freely to people who ask. I don’t put ANY barriers between me and people who want to talk to me. Its my decision whether I reply, and some emails I do decide not to respond to, but the idea of making it hard for customers and potential customers to contact you, when you SELL things, is just insane. Amazingly, I am not overwhelmed by email, nor annoyed by it. Many, many times, I have got emails that have been VERY helpful, or profitable, that I may never have got if I tried to screen my contact with the general gaming public.

One of the best sizes for a company is one person. This doesn’t just mean ‘smaller than 2’, its an actual qualitative difference. There is something special about a company where every role is handled by the same person. My game designer and game programmer and engine programmer and QA lead are all me. That means we can have a 4 way meeting to evaluate the potential of a idea while I’m making coffee. We communicate between us at the speed of thought, and there are no egos. Sometimes the game designer gets their way, sometimes the QA dude. Its all me.

This is absolutely fundamental, and something very few people seem to really understand. Going from a one person team to a two-person team not only doesn’t make things much faster, it may actually make everything slower. Maybe much slower. Even if there are no egos and both people get along, and they never interrupt each other and never disagree, communication moved from the speed of thought to the speed of speech, or typing. Incredibly slow.

Communication between everyone working towards a common goal is absolutely vital. The idea that people in dept A cannot talk to people in dept B is lunacy. Strict unskippable hierarchies and org-charts are nuts. In so many companies, barriers to internal and external communication are put up by managers who want to be left alone. The impact on the company’s success is colossal, but individual managers in huge megacorps are not invested in the success of the business so rarely care.

It should, in theory be absolutely impossible for a single individual like me to commercially survive making and selling video games when huge companies like blizzard and epic exist. And yet here I am. I think a huge part of this is due to the huge huge gains in efficiency when a company is basically a single individual. It MIGHT be possible to replicate it with an extremely driven, loyal team of super-like-minded people led by someone who is super-inspiring, but thats amazingly rare. Maybe space/tesla are one example.

So whats the conclusion? Corporate communication is critical. Its almost impossible for it to work in large companies, unless you fight hard to ensure information flows freely. If you are thinking of growing your company think very hard if thats the right decision. And communication with customers is vital. You want to hear when there is a problem immediately, so its fixed immediately. Putting barriers between you and your customers is insane.