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

Category: business

What a directx developer does in a steambox world

Elaborating on my last post. Valve have made it pretty clear they are heavily betting on Linux. Microsoft, you missed the ball. You didn’t get the hint. What action did you take to get valve back? Apparently not enough. Regardless… Linux will be big for gaming. It’s 2% of my sales right now. This is going to grow and grow fast.
This is no big deal to me, apart from the fact that Linux also means OpenGL. I currently have my own engine which uses DirectX. What should I do? Here are my options…

steambox1) Do nothing.
Just stick with it. 2%? Even if it goes up to 20% so what? My current system is me doing the directx version, then paying a contractor to handle the OSX & Linux ports by converting it all to OpenGL. This works fine so far. This option is easy, but it seems like I just go further down a dead end. I don’t want to be the last guy using DirectX.

2) Prepare my engine to be more cross-platform friendly
I could re-engineer my code so that it’s more modular and easier (re: cheaper, faster) to port to OSX/Linux. This way I still keep directx, but make things simpler for a future transition. This is appealing because it’s a hedge towards either direction, and frankly engines should be built like this anyway.

3) Learn OpenGL.
This is the hardest because it involves serious work. I know everyone will say ‘it’s really similar’, but being ‘familiar’ with OpenGL isn’t what I want. Being VERY sure I know the BEST way to use OpenGL for my purposes is what I need. I love optimizing. I love pushing to get as rich a 2D experience as the hardware allows. I don’t want to trade a really fast DirectX engine for a slow OpenGL one. This involves the most work, to do it right. There is huge opportunity cost for that time as a programmer. This is also by far the most future-proof.

4) Hire a full time Linux/OpenGL coder.
Not a sensible option for me. I couldn’t keep them busy, I still don’t learn anything, and this is effectively 1) but more expensive and with more admin. All it does is guarantee me availability, but at too high a price.

5) Switch to middleware.
An option for 95% of devs. I hate middleware in general, but I also do something very unusual. The engine for GSB 2 works in a very specific way. At it’s core, it is a heavily optimised, shader & post-processing based, lots of render-target flipping 2d engine that assumes a huge amount of 2D objects. I’m not aware of any engines designed specifically to do this except mine. Plus there are costs in terms of learning that new engine,  which represents investment in something I neither own or control. I don’t like this.

I’m thinking about this a lot. I’m currently favoring 2), Possibly 3). I have discounted 4) and 5). Doing 1) seems lazy. This is something I need to get right at some point this year.
Feel free to add your thoughts :D

Steam Dev Days afterthoughts

(I’ve never done this before, but I’m typing this on the plane, so I have time for some detailed thoughts. Long post ahead!)
I’m returning from the first steam dev days conference (they will surely become regular). By now you will have heard all about attendees getting steam boxes & controllers, and the major announcements. I bet journalists have that stuff covered. I’m going to write up more strategic thoughts, combined with some thoughts on business in general that have weighed on my mind.

Linux.
This is the big takeaway for me. I’m not a big Linux fan. Nothing ‘political’, I’m just so used to windows. I’ve used windows constantly since windows 3.11. I don’t know anything about Linux, and I now have to learn. Valve have made this clear. Not ‘Linux is growing’ more ‘learn Linux now… today…’. Personally, I’m not too bothered by this, especially now I have a steam box. What this really means for me is OpenGL. My hand-coded directx engine is now looking like a bit of a dead end. This is unfortunate…

Steam Boxes.
Actually not a big deal for me, this shores up the PC gaming market share against console erosion, which is great. Will PC’s migrate into the living room? maybe… but not for text-heavy strategy games that I make. I think the impact for me may me minor. Ditto the steam controller, although this might be worth using for GSB 2.

Virtual Reality.
I didn’t attend a demo. I should have, stupidly assuming that being stereo-blind would rule me out, but fellow stereo-blind devs assure me its still amazing. I don’t make first person games, I make totally abstract ones, so again, maybe not a big impact for me.

Micro-transactions/economies/user-generated content.
Fascinating stuff, brilliantly presented, and a bit of an eye opener for me in how to do this stuff in a *nice* way. I am hugely motivated about doing work in this area in future. These were the most interesting talks for me, although I hear that the marketing panel was also amazing :D

Deeper Thoughts.
This is kinda separate. I need to add a disclaimer here so I can put these thoughts into context… Positech Games in recent years has become very very successful. I used to publish sales figures back in the day, but I don’t do that now. Things have ramped up big time. I am still basically a one man company, but with an increasing army of contractors and also automated systems and methods to boost my efficiency. As a result, things have gone kind of huge. Not notch level, but damn good.
This isn’t meant to be bragging, this is to put this next section into context.

A lot of things are happening in games. A lot of people are getting into the industry. The industry is growing, but also changing. There is a lot at stake. A well-placed solo indie developer can make or lose a million dollars or more based on a good or bad call. This is high stakes poker, or in some cases roulette. We are playing with live ammunition now. I love metaphors.
I have decisions to make about company growth, platforms, investment, languages, genres. These decisions will make or lose those millions of dollars. The stress and pressure related to those decisions is massive.

Intuitively, I know that I’m fine. Positech has a great financial base. I’m not about to bet my house on a game release, or lose everything if I get things wrong. I have no employees I might have to fire. In many ways I’m lucky, and can relax… but frankly, I like to win. That doesn’t mean at the expense of anyone, I don’t need others to lose, if that makes sense? The most adrenaline-packed and rewarding strategy game I play is called ‘running positech games’. I want to make the right calls and win, it’s burned into me at some primeval level. As a result, I take these decisions incredibly seriously. This leads to intense pressure and stress, that is outwardly completely invisible. I take from this two things:

1) Company executives earn their money. It’s very easy to look at people who run a bank or huge company, in their chauffeured car and executive hotel suite and million+ dollar salary and think that life’s easy for them and anyone can do it. No. There is more to an easy life than having great food and a nice car. Those big salaries come with epic responsibilities and incredible pressure and stress. I cannot imagine how much worse it is at the billion-dollar 10,000 employee level. Get it wrong there and you can kill of thousands of jobs. Intense Pressure. I don’t begrudge anyone in that situation their big salary and aston-martin. I’m surprised there are not more CEO suicides, to be blunt.

2) This can’t be healthy. I’ve taken the opportunity in the last year to have my heart and blood pressure checked. Both were absolutely fine. I could maybe lose a little bit of weight, but generally I’m healthy. This is great, and also very surprising to me. It’s something I try to keep an eye on. I am acutely aware of the fact that high stress and pressure is bad, and I don’t want to be the guy with the highest sales figures in the morgue. So far I seem to be balancing it well, but it isn’t easy. I slept for just 3 hours last night, purely due to stress and pressure. Rare, but still bad. I guess I’m trying to max out all my Kudos 2 stats at once, I want to be healthy, happy and successful. Not easy :D

So there you go, my first post-steam conference thoughts. Maybe a bit scattergun, but I thought I’d jot them down while they are fresh. I have a lot more to say about Linux, but I’ll save that for the next post…

TL ;DR: Linux is coming, Positech is selling lots, This is stressful and creates pressure, but I’m somehow still healthy!

2013 a good year, start of investment, and some consolidation

So 2013 was very good for the business side of Positech Games. it’s definitely been my most profitable year yet. We spent more than ever making games, more than ever on marketing, and made more than ever back. In biz terms there were a lot of firsts…

  • First time I hired a PR agency was in 2013
  • First time I had a proper pro trailer made was 2013
  • First GDC attendance was 2013
  • First time I exhibited at trade shows was 2013.

First time I actually paid out for a site-takeover advert was 2013.

And on the non-biz, but development side…

  • First time I managed a foreign-language translation and…
  • First time I took Mac & Linux porting costs under positechs control, rather than splitting it.

These were all good decisions, everything seems to have gone pretty well. Plus, we released redshirt, the first name under the positech banner developed by someone else (Tiniest Shark).

Those were the exciting new, adventurous things. On the game design front I’ve been more cautious. I released Democracy 3 and started (very early) work on Gratuitous Space Battles 2, both sequels. I truly have become hollywood! My plans extend to a new IP by the tail end of 2014, so don’t think I’ve entirely run out of ideas (far from it!).

Because sales-wise the year went well, I’ve been doing some consolidation and investment for positech too. I’ve had a lot of popular games, but maybe I’ve been lucky. There is no magic rule that says I will earn a single penny in 2014, and given development costs, I *may* actually lose money. As a result, I’m starting to think longer term about investing in making positech a more ‘solid’ company to own. That means a bit of investing (it’s shocking what a terrible rate of return you can get right now, even if you are prepared to lock money away for a loooong time), and a bit of investing in the biz itself, stuff like equipment and improvements to infrastructure. I also see advertising as a long term investment. I know some people take 150+ days from clicking an ad to buying my games, and I suspect the real figure can be longer. A certain chunk of the democracy 3 ad budget will pay dividends in GSB 2.0 or New IP sales. I like to think long term.

2014 offers a lot to look forward to, I have some stuff coming up quite soon(ish) and of course I’m very keen to show off some proper GSB 2.0 screenshots when I finally have something to show :D

Happy new year all!

 

DEMOKRATIE 3

Ok, so after my fairly low key release on my own site, finally Democracy 3 was released in German to steam yesterday. It’s been trickier than I suspected it would be, mainly due to GUI annoyances and web page shenanigans, but it is on-sale now.

Sales to Germany have been pretty good, with 6% of revenue coming from there, in the English version 9and there are other countries that speak German, obviously). if I can boost sales to those countries by 25% then I have made money on the translation, so hopefully it will exceed that. It’s also cool to have more people play the game, and it’s interesting and exciting to have done something (funded and managed a pro translation) that I haven’t managed before. (Democracy 2 was translated, but on a revenue split basis).

As is typical, I’ve scheduled this for a stupid time (23rd December!) so I won’t get any press coverage, but just having the game come up with a German option has to boost sales in the long term. I can make German language copies available to any German gaming sites who only cover translated games, which is a bonus. I made a decision to go as far as I could in translation terms, so I translated the game text (obviously) and also the logo, got a new trailer done (twice!) translated the positech site page, and changed the steam screenshots and promo assets to have German text. I even have some German adwords ads I might experiment with a bit.

Anyway, if you have German speaking friends who have turned the game down until today, please point them at the games German website or at the steam page for the game. Danke!

Delegating and outsourcing as a study in comparative advantage

Delegating is hard. Getting someone else to do something instead of doing it yourself… there are a whole bunch of psychological, practical, economic and other issues to navigate when doing that sort of thing. There is definitely a point where you have to either accept that your company will never grow, or start delegating. I’m definitely there right now. If I wasn’t a workaholic, I’d have reached it 2 years ago.

So right now I’m in the situation where when I see something that I can possibly delegate, I jump at it. I guess when I say delegate, I mean outsource. Ideally, I’d have full time employees, but I don’t need an artist, or a web developer, or game designer or ad-manager or PR person. I need a little bit of all of them. Thats hard to find. As a result I end up employing a ton of people on short term piece-work contracts. Right now 3 people are working for me, a designer, a web developer and an artist. Oh and a trailer-producer, so that’s 4. The trouble is, it *always* involves some admin and management (I insist on a countersigned contract even if its $100 of work), and also it’s never 100% like you doing it yourself.

But I did recently come to a bit of a revelation. The fact that I could get the results I wanted quicker with me doing it, is irrelevant. It becomes a question of RELATIVE efficiency and not absolute. This is a bit of a mental trick, and it’s probably the one thing I recall from my economics degree, but check this out: (from wikipedia)

Comparative advantage

In economics, comparative advantage refers to the ability of a party to produce a particular good or service at a lower marginal and opportunity cost over another. Even if one country is more efficient in the production of all goods (absolute advantage in all goods) than the other, both countries will still gain by trading with each other, as long as they have different relative efficiencies.

On the surface it sounds like nonsense. If I can make bananas cheaper than you, and tractors cheaper than you too, why on earth would I trade bananas and tractors with you? Read the article if it isn’t obvious, it’s kinda magical.

There is a difference between reading that and really internalizing it. What it comes down to is this: If you can’t find an artist as efficient as you, or can’t find a designer as quick as you… it really doesn’t matter. It probably STILL makes sense for you to outsource. You aren’t paying someone to do a job more efficiently than you (of course that would be awesome) you are paying someone to do a job *so you can do something else*. Clearly, the solution is to make the *something else* the stuff that can never be outsourced.

I bet I’m explaining it badly, but I know what I mean! It’s a revelation to me. I suspect it also acts as a barrier to expansion for some small companies.