Category: business

I used to work at Elixir, famous for ‘Evil genius’ but also famous because two of the founders went off to start DeepMind, and become world famous AI gods. Anyway… when I was recruited there, I was surrounded by maths experts, people with AI phds and generally people smarter academically than me. I am pretty sure the reason i was hired was because unlike the majority of the coders there, I had finished a bunch of games already. Back then, most games got canned, or went on forever. Nobody shipped anything. Knowing how to ship was helpful.

Welcome to 2016, and its no different.

The development schedules of most indie games amaze and astound me. Admittedly, I’ve been working on games a long time (I started coding 35 years ago) so I am pretty experienced, and probably work at a faster rate than most, but even so, I read about some indie games and find myself thinking ‘seriously, it still hasn’t shipped?’.

I’m not talking about those cunning indie hits like Prison Architect, which was such a dam-bursting vortex of sales in Early Access, that it made practical sense to keep it in development. I’m generally talking about the smaller games, and almost always peoples ‘first game’.

There are many reasons someones first game goes on forever, some of them technical, just a lack of experience meaning everything is being done for the first time and thus there are no shortcuts, you have to learn it all, and naturally your efficiency is lower. You may also be doing it (if you are sensible) part time with a day job paying the bills (not to mention the development cost), so you don’t have enough time to dedicate to it, and there is an inefficiency that creeps in when you work an hour a day, in short bursts. However, fundamentally, I think the problems tend to be psychological.

One reason is that people are terrified of criticism. When you are ‘working on’ your game, you can deflect all criticism with ‘thats placeholder’ ‘its not finished’ ‘this is just alpha’ and so on. Once you metaphorically stick it in a box on a shelf, you are saying ‘I made that, what do you think?’. Its kind of like standing naked and asking people to hold up score cards (I’m guessing…). Releasing a game means you run out of excuses and have to stand by your decisions. Thats scary. Especially if you have never worked alone before, and have NOBODY to shift blame onto.

Another reason is the inability to compromise on quality. This is the big one. All games are imperfect upon release. All of them. Its a fact, deal with it. So are all books, all plays, all movies, and everything ever made. Star Wars was the most successful film ever made, and was so flawed on release the director famously kept tweaking it decades later. ‘Revised and updated’ often appears in text books, and I lose track of how many ‘directors cuts’ and ‘special editions’ there are of Lord of the Rings.

Ultimately you make commercial games to entertain people and to pay the bills. An unreleased game achieves neither. The worst, crappiest, half-assed bug-ridden unoriginal games released on PC are more successful than all those indie games that are stuck in perpetual development, because they are actually out there, being enjoyed. I’ve never once shipped a game and thought ‘this is absolute perfection’, because that way lies madness.

Now don’t get me wrong, some games definitely ship too early. Some games are unplayable on release with game breaking bugs, and gameplay flaws, and other inexcusable crap. This isn’t what I advocate AT ALL. Your game should be finished, polished, balanced and tested before release, obviously. But that doesn’t mean it contains every feature imaginable. It doesn’t mean that you change engine three times during development because you absolutely *MUST* have that latest shader tech.

I honestly believe that there is an optimum development length for games, which will vary based on the game genre and the team, but I’m guessing its 18 months or less. For eighteen months you can retain your excitement at the original idea. The same team can tolerate working together. Tech will not advance *too* much. Press who cover the game’s announcement will still be vaguely interested when it releases. Game tastes will not change *that* much, and the temptation to completely rewrite the design or art style is lessened because there simply isn’t time. If you are making an indie game full-time and you are beyond 18 months development, ask yourself if you are really doing this as a sensible, managed project with a ship date, or just indulging yourself and putting off opening up your creative heart to the world.

Something I put together for fun…(Click to enlarge)

Take a look at this:

Thats a gold bar currently selling for £330,000. Thats roughly $475,000. Thats also roughly the price of an average house in Bath, UK.

Apple recently posted their profits. They made 18 billion dollars in a quarter and have $142 billion in cash reserves. 18 billion dollars in 3 months is $200,000,000 a DAY. Thats 421 gold bars, or roughly 17 an hour. A gold bar or average house every 3 and a half minutes. Like they are on a conveyor belt. Someone, somewhere is feeding the conveyor belt. And if you are entering the unwinnable war of trying to get in the app store charts its probably you.

How many app store games haven’t even sold enough copies to justify apple making a payout? How many have made less than the unjustified yearly fee apple charge just to even play the game? The app store is a casino where they charge you just to walk in the door.

There are HUGE profits to be made with a hit game on the app store, especially in the F2P business. We never bore of hearing stories about the fabulous riches to be won. The problem is, with all the apps chasing the same users (basically ‘everyman’), your chances of getting a decent return with your sub-one-million marketing budget are zero. Why are you still playing?

Democracy 3 is on the app store and does nicely. I make a few thousand pounds here and there, and thats great. I price it at $5 and there are 3 optional DLC purchases. The thing is, the whole dev cost was paid for by the PC build anyway, so the sales only have to cover porting and marketing.

Forget the app store. Lets look at PC.

I said about a year ago that we were going to hit some indie meltdown when everyone realized they can’t be notch. Its happening right now, but indies don’t admit it, because most people don’t like to admit failure, so lets look for third party evidence. How many bundles have you seen selling 10 games for $1? I’ve seen loads. TEN games. Those games are getting ‘their cut’ of $0.10. Lets be honest, thats insane. There is no point in putting a decent game in such a bundle, its silly.

If you really think shovelware works as a strategy, ask yourself who the shovelware billionaires are. Anyone? Whereas Activision Blizzard seem to do VERY nicely with their policy of extreme polish and high quality. I don’t see any blizzard games selling for a dollar.

The shovelware billionaires are not the people making the products, they are the stores. Like The Dollar Store or PoundLand. Selling stuff other people have inexplicably made for a dollar is very profitable, just ensure you are the store, not the producer.

Niche games command higher prices. That is a fact. So why is everyone trying to sell the same product, and then getting knocked down to $0.10 a copy? because….  It is SO MUCH EASIER to make a bad game now. You don’t have to learn C++ or DirectX or how to code a web store, and you get an asset store, and simple exposure through steam, so everyone’s first game looks AMAZING and they assume it will make money. So they sell it, and it makes fuck-all, so they discount it. And again, and again…and again. Note: Some of these people are kids, with zero living expenses. Some live in the developing world, with VERY low costs of living. You CANNOT compete.

The real problem only comes when actual talented  and experienced game designers who made something cool, interesting, original and special see all those cheap games and think they have to compete on price.

You don’t. Those games are nothing like yours. Ignore that price war, don’t commodify your game. Right now the steam sale is on, and this game of mine:

Is sat there selling very nicely without even being in this sale. I bet there are lots of 95% off games in that sale earning a LOT less per day even today.

TL;DR: If you sell your game to a generic audience at commodity prices you are making someone rich. Its just not you.