Category: business

Ahhh…the indie life, so summed up by sitting here in the first class British Airways lounge at the airport eating unlimited free m&ms. (I don’t fly first class, but I looked very British, and there was no hot water for tea…so they bumped me up).

Another year, another GDC. Let me muse on what I have learned. Because of the way my mind works, lets put the lessons in list form…

1) GDC is big. Bigger than ever I suspect. There are a lot of developers out there. If ever you start to worry about all those releases of new games on steam, wait until you physically see all those developers in one city. There is a LOT of competition out there. A crazy amount. My personal theory is that at least 20% of the indie devs at the show are burning through savings and losing money. For ones doing mobile games, I’d guess 50%. There are too many games, not enough *paying* players, especially on mobile.

2) GDC and its ilk are still a bit of a stressful nightmare if you are shy and introverted or don’t know many other developers yet. By any objective standard I failed at networking. I met 2 journalists for interviews, that’s it. I didn’t hustle, I didn’t introduce myself to loads of people, I totally forgot peoples names, I didn’t tell anyone about my game. I did drink lots of wine and ate sushi, so that was good.

3) Giving talks is great, but you feel like jumping under a bus just before you speak. The good thing is people then know who you are and have something to say to you, which fixes 2) slightly.

4) Big companies have more money than they can count and are throwing it at attempts to hire new developers. This is strange, as to me it is the flipside of the struggling smaller devs. There seem to be huge companies earning crazy money, and lots of indies eating noodles, and maybe just a handful in-between the two. The phrase ‘get big or go home’ comes to mind, alongside ‘arggghhhhh’.

5) I am so behind on graphics tech. I went to some directx12 talks and Vulkan (GL) talks and didn’t understand half the terminology, let lone what was being revealed. I should probably jump from dx9 to 12, or to vulkan eventually. Still, I prefer being l33t at DX9 than a n00b at dx12. The talks really made me want to jump into optimizing and expanding on the GSB2 tech once it’s had its initial release.

6) There is a limit to how many m&ms a man can eat before feeling sick, and it really does sneak up on you.

So…I’ve given my two mini-talks, at the indie soapbox and the AAA to indie thing, plus a podcast thing. I only have one official meeting to go, and thats me done for GDC 2015. So here are some early thoughts and memories.

I was SO nervous before the soapbox. I was dreading it. I really wished I hadn’t agreed to it. It felt mega stressful, but it looks like it went really well. I did worry about it being badly misinterpreted and taken the wrong way, but it seems not to be the case, which is a relief. The fact that the talks ‘went well‘ means I feel justified in coming to GDC. I guess it is good for PR, and I can make a ‘business case’ to myself for being here.

One of the best things about GDC is meeting up with people you know online but hardly ever see. I won’t namecheck people, but there are a bunch of cool, nice, talented developers who I only ever see at GDC or similar events and its great to shake hands again, have a coffee or a meal or a drink and chat to people who do what I do.

My hearing in large groups of people is *so bad* combined with what I suspect is a very mild case of face-blindness, that I worry that I spend a lot of time apologizing to people I don’t recognize combined with a lot of intense tom-cruise style staring at people as they talk (mostly as I’m lip-reading). I suspect some people think I am much stranger/arrogant/forgetful/grumpy than I actually am, because they only know me from loud parties at industry events…

GDC is HUGE. There are literally *whole buildings* full of talks, events, people and booths that I didn’t even know existed until today, and they are packed to the rafters with *other game developers*, which just freaks me out. We are not a bunch of nerds typing and being ignored any more, there is clearly a LOT of money in games, And some companies are obviously growing like mad, Wargaming.net had a big booth which more or less screamed “PLEASE WORK FOR US” in an attempt to match headcount to ambition and revenue. Crazy times.

On the flipside, no way can the industry support so many indie devs with prices so low and sales so all-consuming. I’m curious to know what percentage of attendees are burning through savings with no break-even point on the horizon. Terrifying.

And holy crap I’m tired. If you are the worlds biggest ‘glitch mob’ fan (whoever that is), hate me now, because I have tickets to the glitch mob thing, but I’m on a hotel bed typing instead. Sorry!

Gah…

The first time I attended GDC I wrote an article about how it can be good *if* you are a sociable networking type, and it can probably suck if you aren’t, and if you are randomly one or the other (like me), then it can be a mixed bag.

That kinda hits home right now. I’ve been to two talks, and they were ok, and chatted to a few people at the show, but not many, and I am just not someone who is going to introduce themselves to strangers. To quote mr darcy…

“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess, of conversing easily with those I have never seen before.”

Of course that’s just one of many ways in which I am like Mr Darcy. But anyway… I’m really glad I’ve arranged to go along to some indie meal tonight, because I know at least *one* person there, and if I sit down and order food I”ll *have* to talk to people, which is probably what I should be doing, and with any luck I can tag along with someone who goes to the other party afterwards. Maybe I should drink some wine :D

I find it quite difficult to write about stuff like this, which is kind of why I do it. I’m sure there are hundreds of blog posts and tweets right now from happy outgoing game developers about how cool it is to hook up with so many like-minded individuals, and thats awesome, I just realize I’m the shy, slightly awkward british dude sat in his hotel room networking with nobody, typing and eating some pretty gross cheese snacks and wishing there was a bloody kettle.

 

Want to see a GRATUITOUS graph of some sales stats for one of my games? I bet you do. People love info-graphics, especially those really long vertical things with lots of numbers. I’m not going to do one of those, but I will present to you for your delight the following sales graph showing two weeks of income on an un-named website…

If you sell games online, you may well have seen similar looking graphs when looking at your own data. The thing is, just staring at a graph doesn’t help you much unless you can tie it in to the events that have influenced that data. After all, people like me are always talking about return on investment, marketing, publicity, and how to get attention, and how to convert visitors into buyers and all that kind of stuff. In other words, sales data is USELESS. What you need is sales data with context. So lets add that in the version below…

Now this is actually something useful, because we can use the sales data, in combination with our recent marketing efforts to deduce what is working, what is not, and how best to approach marketing and business stuff as we continue to promote and sell this indie game. You can tell immediately that the blog post where we mentioned the game resulted in a notable spike in sales, that the ad campaign had a big, but very short-lived boost, and that a new lets play that someone did had actually only a pretty small impact on our sales, ditto a new steam curator that listed the game.

From this we conclude that we should put more effort into blogging, probably keep up the ad spending, but not be too bothered about encouraging lets plays and steam curators, as they have less of an impact on our bottom line.

Except no, hold on.

That’s all bullshit.

Lets look at the real graph, through the lens of realizing that the top point on those spikes was about $1k a day, and that the game has been out a while now. We could zoom out and look not at two weeks data, but at a years data, and then with that context taken into account we can re-formulate the data for those two weeks as follows:

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scroll down…

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… keep going

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…

Basically fuck-all happened in those two weeks. Did I blog about the game? Probably. Did we get a new lets play. Maybe. Did we get some new steam curators. I think we might of, I’m really not sure. But regardless what happened, it made absolutely sod all difference to our sales.

Do not fall into the trap of over-extrapolating information from noise. It is VERY VERY tempting to do so, especially when you are a new developer because you desperately want to know how sales for your game will be, and you desperately want them to be good. The problem is, as a new developer your ability to analyze this data is very very low, simply because (unless you made banished) your sales are likely, with your first game, to be low enough that any change in them is statistically irrelevant.

If you sell 5 games a week, and then suddenly one week you sell 7, thats a huge percentage boost in sales. Sales have SKYROCKETED. Sales are ‘up in a big way’. There has been a ‘boost’ in sales! But really there has not. Really, one of the people who bought last week told 2 of his friends how good the game was. This is a trivial thing you cannot analyze and cannot benefit from analyzing.

If you sell 5,000 games a week, and then suddenly sell 7,000 that IS actually significant, despite being exactly the same variation. You absolutely should draw conclusions from it.

That seems counter-intuitive, so keep re-reading it. The margin of error is basically lower with a big sample size. This is why pollsters try to have a decent sample size, so one or two outliers don’t skew the result. In our 5 sales example, we lucked out and one of the 5 had lots of similarly minded gamer friends. The thing is, we could have gone entirely the other way, we might havebeen unlucky, and sold to 5 people with even less friends than normal, and this might actual dent the next days sales as our ‘virality’ collapses. A single customers sociability can skew our popularity up or down hugely.

With 5,000 customers, we are going to get lots of sociable customers, AND lost of unsociable ones. They cancel each other out, and we get a steady stream of recommendations, and non-recommendations. Unless one of the buyers is notch or stephen fry, them tweeting about our cool game will make zero difference, in the grand scheme of things.

The vast majority of indie game post-mortems over analyze events in their sales curve. It’s absolutely worth reading them for the ‘we made a game about chickens and it was a hit’ or ‘we made a mobile game and then we ended up living off noodles’. That’s ‘big picture’ stuff. But buying an advert or releasing a  trailer and seeing your sales go from 5 to 7, or 7 to 5, is a total irrelevance. Ignore it.

Tell me if I’m wrong :D