Category: business

I’ve been reading this book:

Which is a bit old, but kinda interesting. I’ve always been impressed by the guy’s marmite theory of middle east peace. Anyway, part of the reason for this was for me to challenge my own thinking, and led to be scrawling all kinds of stuff over that big blackboard in my office. I was trying to re-evaluate all kinds of stuff. In some ways, F2P is the absolute perfect example of lateral thinking. It’s a totally different way of running a games business, as is pay what you want and kickstarter. All massively successful. Sadly, I did not reach a similar epiphany. However, it does open my mind.

I recently, out of curiosity, found myself adding up the total development cost (excluding my time) of Democracy 3. I then compared it to my proposed marketing budget for the game, and got a figure of 33.96%. In other words, for every dollar I spent on artwork/music/other stuff for the game, I was planning on spending $0.33 promoting it. This is lower than games like Call of Duty, where historically the marketing budget has dwarfed the mere development cost, but I can’t bring myself to do that :D.

However, with my lateral thinking-expanded mind, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a sensible way to analyze the optimum marketing spend anyway. In the back of my mind, if I’m thinking about what would be a suitable ROI, and looking at my costs, that’s probably the wrong metric. If I assume (conservatively) that D3 sells as well as D2, shouldn’t I really be looking at the marketing budget as a percentage of the projected revenue? not the costs? If so, then that 33% figure shrinks dramatically. As a result, what in my mind I can consider a reasonable marketing budget rises dramatically, because if I’m being rational, and I was happy to spend 33% I still should be, but of the larger (revenue) figure.

Now I know what you are thinking. In a perfect world the marketing budget expands infinitely as long as the ROI on each marketing dollar spent is positive, but that’s in a theoretical world with perfect information. If I spend $100 today, I might not see the ROI for six months, so do I halt my spending entirely tomorrow? Obviously you have to guess what’s going to happen and budget accordingly.

I find analyzing and managing this stuff fascinating, but am not aware of any games built around it. Gratuitous Marketing Battles here we come!

I was watching a video of a talk by an indie game dev recently, where they outlined all of the huge mistakes they made with their first indie game. They were very clever, very capable programmers with a huge amount of mainstream industry experience, and this was their first indie game. They made pretty much every mistake in the book. They picked a vastly complex and huge project without testing the code gameplay first, they aimed it at consoles instead of the (much easier, open market) PC, they took YEARS to make it, got burned out, kept re-designing it…

All the stuff that old and grizzled indie devs like me keep telling people not to do. Why do new indies do this? My theories:

1. They thought they were not NEW to this. They confused being part of a AAA team to being a sole coder/designer/artist/businessperson in an indie team. In other words, they thought they had experience in something they did not.
2. They were arrogant, and thought they were better than the devs such advice is aimed at. This isn’t as critical as it sounds. I’m pretty arrogant too. Most people who think they can design whole worlds to entertain others are arrogant. It’s important to at least *know* you have this trait, so you can check it now and then.
3. They were stuck in AAA development habits. In their experience, games take years, they take big teams, they are done for console, they are done with crunch. Why would it occur to them to work any other way?
4. They think people only buy AAA games, so they aim to compete with the games they are used to working on. Not true. Just ask notch :D

I don’t think anyone can change all this. Those reasons all seem pretty *real* to me. I fumbled and made mistakes and screwed up as a new indie dev myself. The good news was I did that as a hobby, with a secure job, and I never spent years on a game to learn that lesson. I probably shouldn’t expect anyone to take a more considered approach to seeking advice than I did (although to be fair there were VERY few indies back then. these days we are swamped with experienced devs offering advice).

Still… It does make me cringe when I see first-time indies outlining their 3D MMO ideas on the day they quit their jobs. Don’t do that :D

With steam announcing that they are greenlighting 100 new games today, it seems that ‘securing distribution on big name portals‘ is a task for new and upcoming indies which just got a bit easier. That’s good news, but there is only so much scope for people to sell games, it probably just means that the things indie devs might need help with haven’t reduced, but just changed. This has got me thinking about the medium term future of Positech, and what I’d like to do, and what maybe I *could* do for indies. If I’d made the list a few years ago it might be this:

1. Provide web-hosting
2. Process payments
3. Handle mailing list stuff
4. Take care of PR
5. Provide funding for development
6. Sort out contracts and admin/businessy stuff like contracts with artists/sound/music people
7. Provide general business advice
8. Take care of advertising

Some of these are maybe less of a need now than they used to be. I know it’s possible to do *all* of this yourself. I do. But I’ve been doing this for decades. if you are 18 years old and programming your first game, do you want to do those 7 things too? Aren’t you busy debugging? :D. For some people, no doubt the answer is yes. And of course some people could do it all, but may choose not to. I quite like looking at sales charts and advertising stats, but few game designers really do.

Certainly 2) is something that has been kinda dealt a blow if it’s easy to get on steam. But has it really? Firstly not everyone gets on steam, even now, and secondly, they take their cut of the sales, which is a non trivial amount. You can use a payment provider and sell direct, but you need an account with them, and need to learn how they work, and then handle currency conversions etc etc. Maybe that is still something people would rather not do?

5) Would normally be a HUGE big deal, but now we have kickstarter. Had this made funding for indies easier? or just for established indies? Something that has not got any easier is likely to be 7) and maybe 8). I’ve been around a while, and know a bit about the games market. I might be able to provide some value there perhaps.

So I guess what I’m thinking about is whether I should be looking for the classic ‘first time indie’, that has great programming skills, great game design skills, but doesn’t know where to go from there. Could positech.co.uk turn into a storefront for games not just made by me, but also games developed (like redshirt) by other developers but published by me? I think it’s definitely something worth considering, in the medium term. I just wonder how many developers fall into that category. if you are working on your first game, would you pay a cut to someone to handle all this?