Category: business

Should you make a game about X? is it worth pricing your game at $Y or $Z. Should you do a mobile port? Should you develop in unity? How many people will buy the game if we spend an extra $35k on art?

Most of the answers to these questions are useless, partly because the correct answers are truly unknowable, partly because most people you ask will lack the experience to have any real insight into the topic (for example asking me if your mobile game will sell is pointless. I have ZERO insight), and also partly because people generally tell you what you want to hear.

The first 2 problems can be solved by taking *all* answers with a pinch of salt along with only asking people who actually know about the topic. For example if you want to know what makes a political strategy game, you could ask 100 random developers, or you could just ask me & brad wardell. The latter would be a much better idea.

The last problem, has an actual technical solution, but it wont work with everyone. its worth discussion though. The solution is called a decision market, or a prediction market (same thing).

Basically with a prediction market, instead of saying ‘cliff, do you think my game will make sales of $50,000 dollars’, you say ‘cliff, if I was prepared to sell all the income from my game to you, what would you pay?’. Obviously that assumes I have $50k I’m willing to risk, so a more nuanced version would be ‘What would you pay me for 1% of my sales revenue?’ to which you presumably want me to say ‘$500’ or maybe more.

Because such markets include an actual financial incentive, it skirts immediately around the ‘not wanting to hurt your feelings’ problem. I’m happy to tell you that your game is a sure fire hit, to make you feel good, and not be mr doom-and-gloom. I’m less happy for that politeness to cost me $100.

I definitely think that the whole idea of markets, predictions, shared equity, and kickstarter / down-payments is something under-utilized by creative industries. Kickstarter gets close with the whole ‘would you buy this thing now? before I make it?’ idea. Greenlight surprisingly uses no incentives whatsoever. I would LOVE to see the discrepancy between current greenlight votes versus a system where voting on greenlight costs you $1, recoup-able against the cost of the actual game. I’d also like to see that at $0.10. (I suspect the difference between them would be negligible.)

To some extent, I am doing this with production line. It’s in alpha now. Will the finished game be worth more than $11? About 8,000 people so far have said yes, and not with mouseclicks, but with actual proper money. That information is not just good, its a whole order of magnitude better that any opinion poll or greenlight style system.

The problem with all this, is that kickstarter (the best public decision market) has become perceived (helped in no small part by its name) as a way for ‘people without money to get a project off the ground’. Ideally it would be perceived as ‘A way for anyone to test the market value of a proposal.’  For example, say I went to kickstarter for ‘Democracy 4’, I’m sure I’d get grief along the lines of ‘he doesn’t need the money that way…kickstarter isn’t for people in his position’. And that’s nuts, because we already have decision markets for REALLY wealthy companies, and we call them futures markets, options and to an extent shares themselves. All a share price really represents is the public consensus on the market success of a companies projects in future. This is REALLY helpful information.

Positech shares will not dip (or jump) if I tease Democracy 4 tomorrow. Nobody is able to short-sell (or buy options in) my stock. Somehow, there is an opportunity to ‘fix’ this with clever tools. In practice, legal hassle involved with gambling makes actually doing it probably nonviable.

Probably the nearest we can get is something like this site.

Five dollars twenty cents. Thats the price of the medium size latte in the hotel lobby. The hotel room has a coffee machine, but I don’t like the coffee. I sell lots of games, I can treat myself. I buy the coffee. I forget to pick up the cardboard surround for the heat. I could go back and ask for one, but I’m done with interaction today. I’ll get hot, I’ll burn my hand.

Day one of GDC is over, at least for me, at just 9.20PM. I was awake at 5PM but thats no excuse. My real excuse is I’m like crocodile dundee here. Most people in the village back home seem to know me. Cars are rare, we walk in the road. Trees are everywhere.

I am on floor twenty seven and I see no trees, just skyscrapers, glass and concrete. The aura of business, of finance, of money, of work, of technology. This should be my world, I’m in silicon valley, I’m actually HERE.

Breakfast is with fellow coders. I miss a lunch with friends because collectively me and google suck at calendars.  I miss another meeting for the same reason, but meet up with old friends and grab food and a coffee, then later there is more food, then drinks. I’ve met new people, an alarming percentage of whom know who I am and read my blog. This always feels weird, flattering but weird. I’ve met people whose games I admire. I don’t mention this. Do they think I’m being shy? or arrogant?

Most people are here to get press, or learn about new technology, or hear the tales of success (and increasingly…failure) from fellow developers. People come here to network, to make contact with people known only as disembodied twitter and facebook avatars. If you ask me why I am here, I have no answer. Is it to get press? maybe a bit, but that won’t happen. Will I learn much from the 5% of talks I am allowed into for $300? not really. Am I here just to go to parties? me in bed at 9.30PM?

GDC is weird, and I am weird when I am here. I sport a brilliant white (practically glowing) jacket festooned with Production Line logos. I am a walking billboard, happy to say hello, but terrified of not knowing what to say after that. Everyone seems confident, but most of us are shy introvert geeks. Fully alive when discussing multi-threading, never happier when swapping stories about memory management, awkward to the point of terror when meeting new people. I still notice the accents. Not clique but ‘click’ not ‘mobile’ but ‘mow-bill’.

So far its been really nice, great to see old friends, interesting to chat about the industry, yet still tiring and in some ways scary. So different to a life of quiet coding and the occasional meow.  GDC is great (nowhere near as good as steam dev days…but great), but I’m glad its only an annual event. My inner introvert couldn’t take anything more.

Every day I think about giving some money to some homeless people, whose continue presence in the land of billionaires never ceases to shock. I spent five dollars twenty on a coffee. Should I have given it away? Maybe I should but even that social interaction is overwhelming when I’m thousands of miles from home and surrounded by people, so many people, confidently talking about monetization strategies as they stride down the street.

I’m not in kansas any more.

On Sunday I start my trek to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. I’ve been many years now, and can pretty much find my way around SF without a map. As usual I’m only buying an indie pass, because frankly, I’;m not a billionaire, or gullible, so I will only be attending a few talks. (its not like there are secret talks that tell you how to make 3x the sales which nobody ever leaks details from…). For me, the real ‘worth’ of GDC is taking the pulse of the industry, and meeting other devs to both socialize and to share information.

I’ve written in the past about whether or not GDC is worth it as an indie, and I stand by my assertion that it depends on your personality. Even though some drugs are now legal in SF which are inexplicably illegal in the UK, that is not going to make me gregarious enough to march up to ‘influential’ journalists, and start giving them an elevator pitch about my game. (seriously, we are happy for the tens of thousands of alcohol and tobacco related deaths each year, but we still ban cookies that make you giggle and eat chocolate bars? wtf?). If my only motivation for GDC was press, frankly I wouldn’t go. I am trying to compensate for not actually being gregarious by wearing a VERY WHITE jacket with a production line logo splashed all over it, in the hope that this subconsciously ‘raises my brand awareness’. Hmmm.

As of writing this, I have ten ‘appointments’ at GDC. None of them are with press, and none of them are likely to in any crucial way result in higher sales or anything like that. The vast majority are just meals with friends, and parties where I can make new friends. There is something cool about being at a party with 200+ people and you know all of them know what ‘indie developer’ means and you don’t have to feel like you do some weird made-up job nobody understands…

With shadowhand heading for a release in a short while, and production line already in alpha, I know a lot of devs would spend the time schmoozing and trying to make press contacts, but I really have decided that the whole ‘schmooze’ side of the business is not really for me. If I make even half the sales that I currently do, and that allows me to just code, design and run the odd ad campaign, then thats cool with me. Increasingly it seems that games get the majority of their real ‘buzz’ from being high quality, and from engaging with the community, rather than knowing the right people.

Of course YMMV, maybe I’m doing it wrong, I often think that I am, which is why I often change my approach to development to see if I’m wrong. I used to think Early-Access was nuts, but am trying it to make sure, and decided I like it. Ditto with youtube. If you think going to shows is nuts, or absolutely a pre-requisite, then it really is worth trying the exact opposite one year to check your hypothesis. And if you think that having a booth at a show is something you MUST do because everyone else does it, don’t forget that it can be very expensive and sometimes it does not help.

See you at GDC. I’m the one in the WHITE jacket.

I really don’t get how indies put so much time and effort into their first game. The ones who get into debt amaze me even more. the ones who mortgage/sell their house scare the crap out of me. Don’t do this.
I’ve made lots of games, here is how they went:

• Asteroid Miner: Meh…sold a few hundred copies, was exciting to see it in a box.
• Starship Tycoon…sold a few hundred copies, also some retail deals, tempted to quit day job… and does! That was a mistake!
• Rocky Racers… mediocre flop.
• Kombat kars… mediocre flop.
• Planetary Defense…not bad considering development time was super short (a few months).
• Kudos…surprise hit. did really well. 3rd party publishing deals that paid actual royalties!
• Kudos 2… even better. Seriously good sales. hit $20k in one month. unbelievable.
• Democracy…not bad, not enough to quit job, but really not bad.
• Democracy 2: Really good, enough to quit job. *quits job AGAIN*. pays off mortgage.
• Gratuitous Space Battles: OMG teh fountain of money. Buys new house.
• Gratuitous Tank Battles. Meh: pretty good, but nowhere near as good as GSB.
• Democracy 3: LOLLERSKATES. Orders brand new car & stupidly expensive laptop. Starts flying business class. Eventually buys stupidly flash electric car.
• GSB2: Yikes, that didn’t go down well. Ouch. what did I do wrong?
• Democracy 3:Africa. Fuck. Americans REALLY don’t care about Africa then? Barely breaks even.
• Production Line: LOL. Almost physically crushed by stampede of pre-orders.

My point is…holy crap you never know what will happen next. Your next game could flop, it could be huge. I *really* think that GSB2 is underappreciated and am surprised it flopped. I’m still amazed at how many people like political strategy games. YOU NEVER KNOW. So be cautious, and experiment a bit. if I’d bet my house on Asteroid Miner, I’d be renting a bedsit whilst still working in IT support trying to pay off debts. I’ve never borrowed money to make a game, I’ve never remortgaged, I’ve never worked for more than 18 months on a single game before putting it on sale.

That might be a bit clinical and unromantic, but its worked for me. Your life is not a feel-good Hollywood movie starring Tom Cruise. Don’t get stuck in confirmation bias. Many indie games fail. Some fail HARD.