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

Category: business

UK banks, and international transfers

Like many UK indies, I get screwed quite badly by banks. I actually love my company account bank, but for arcane reasons, paying US dollars into them from the US is a bit of a pain, it doesn’t work for everyone, and I end up routing the payments through another bank, and even worse, the exchange rate that you get when you have the cheek to just pay dollars into a GBP bank account are frankly not funny.

In short, the banks are screwing us over.

Unfortunately, the process of getting around this is, to put it mildly ‘somewhat bureaucratic’. Now there are such things as UK banks that will let you have a $US balance in them, even if you run a business (and lets not even get started on the way that business accounts are hideously overcharged for and nickel-and-dimed compared to personal accounts). The big problem is, you can’t just go and open a $US business account. The only bank I could find that was happy to do that actually demanded I open a £ bank account with them, to which I could then ‘add on’ a $ bank account for free. Why? WHY? And for the privilege (ha!) of owning that account, I’d be charged a monthly fee. Thanks guys.

Now, after doing some simple maths, and working out how much I’d save over a month with a better exchange rate which I could manage using a proper (non ripoff) forex service to shuffle money from $US account to £UK account, I work out it is still massively worth doing. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last month or so… Of course, banks still seemingly operate in the seventeenth century, so it takes them 10 days to write to you (why? isn’t email a thing now?) to tell you the form needs changing, so you need to send it back, and that will take another ten days and so on… And they want to see your passport (yes really) and photocopies of six months of your bank statements (yes really) and also proof of your address, maybe a bank statement (err…aren’t these online now?).

I half expected them to ask for the squire of the village to send a letter impressed with his seal in red wax before they would open a bank account. And when they do, no doubt they will mail me (isn’t email a thing now? seriously?) a lot of patronizing crap about bank loans and financing, and maybe inviting me to get advice from a branch ‘business adviser’ half my age with a tenth of my experience. Arrgh Argggh ARRRGHHHH!

The real sadness is, this shouldn’t even be a thing. Banks should catch up. There are forex services that exist purely because banks screw you over. Paypal exists because banks international payments suck. Zopa and Funding circle exists because banks loan rates AND savings rates suck. There is a whole eco-system of businesses out there that exist purely because high street banks suck so much.

I’m sure eventually it will all prove worthwhile right?

Getting the development / PR balance right

…is a difficult thing for an indie game. I know of some companies where HALF the staff work full time on promoting the game. Doing nothing but making youtube videos, tweeting, replying to people on forums and facebook, emailing the press, looking for new indie game review sites, and generally building up a chatty online presence with lots of online friends so that they have an easier job of getting ‘viral’ PR for their game when it launches.

I totally understand why some indies work that way. it makes a lot of economic sense. I’ve also read about indies who spend six months making a game, then just promote, publicize and do SEO for the enxt two years to milk that game, and claim that it is a far better use of their time than merely making another game. This kinda saddens me.

there are of course, other indies who sit in a dark room churning out the most cool, original and fun games that nobody ever hears about because they hate / suck at doing PR and thus remain effectively ‘undiscovered’. This is a real shame.

So where is cliffski and positech games in all this. I know quite a few cynical whiny online ‘haters’ who think I’m in the 95% PR group. They tend to be the people who say GSB looks like it was done in flash in a weekend because it’s 2D. (*yawn*). Actually, I’m closer to the dark cavern guy than the ‘always promoting’ guy. I tweet a few times a day, but only half of that is about games. I rarely post to facebook, I post on the odd forum, but not enough to have a real ‘presence’ anywhere. I’ve only been to GDC once, never to PAX or Comicon, or any other non-UK trade event. I’ve given two public talks, and appeared on 2 panels. That’s it.

My biggest ‘PR’ is probably this blog, which isn’t a big time commitment at all. I also write for Custom PC magazine in a similar style.

Getting the balance right is extremely hard. I am probably not doing enough PR for Redshirt and Democracy 3 yet, although that will change in the next month or two. The problem I face is I never know how close a game of mine is to being done until it’s more or less done, so I always think I’ll be doing PR too early. An example of someone who has done well both on making a great game AND doing great PR for it is Andy Schatz’s Monaco. The problem is, that game took six hundred years to make, and that would drive me mad. I like to aim for a game a year / eighteen months at most.

This year, I am aiming to be a bit more committed to PR. I’ll be at rezzed, with a booth this time! A proper one with 4 screens and 2 games, which is a staggeringly expensive thing to do, if I’m honest. I even bought a video camera to take to stuff like this (only a cheap one) so I can have some ‘our game at rezzed’ footage to spice up some promotional videos, and to hopefully film people playing the games to see how they play them. I might put in an appearance at other shows too,  who knows.

Hardly anyone gets the balance right, and I think it’s an essential component of an indie games success. Even more so if you have to go through ‘greenlight’ to get on steam. That’s an extra, very targeted peice of PR you now need to do on top of everything else. Arrrgghhhh…

It’s all coming together…I think.

Sooo…there is a lot going on in positech land these days, partly because Redshirt and Democracy 3 are both coming together at the same time. At the weekend I also had a sudden revival of adding indie games to www.showmethegames.com, which is my much neglected side project.

A bit of stats crunching in google analytics persuaded me that my homepage was slightly slow loading, but thankfully there are tons of sites that will test and analyze this sort of thing, and free utilities to minify your javascript and losslessly compress png’s and jpgs, so hopefully that’s all much faster now.

In the land of actual game development, I’ve been working on both gameplay stuff for Democracy 3 (adding in new policies such as Fossil fuel subsidies, Privately run prisons, Mansion taxes, Foreign Investor Tax breaks,  Fuel efficiency standards…) and also some graphical stuff, which included importing all the art assets for the achievements, which are new to the game. That also meant I needed to actually code the achievements system (which is separate and independent from steam, but which I’ll link to steam if they accept the game).

I’ve also been doing a bunch of playtesting, which has shown that I’ve now made ministers actually *too* cynical and bitter and destructive, with most current test games descending into a wave of resignations and widespread public indignation at my incompetence :D

In other news… I have started up a very bare-bones for now, but nevertheless to-be-promoted facebook page for Democracy 3. Please go and ‘like’ it if you are interested in the game. (There will also obviously be a proper non facebook page in due course…) I’ll try and post more stuff there over the next few months. I’ve bought a video camera, which I’ll be carrying about to gaming events like Rezzed to film people trying my games, and also capture the magical ‘boothness’ for the first time. Plus I’ve grabbed a ticket to the ‘Bit Of Alright’ event in London next month, just as a visitor.

In between all this, I’m madly trying to open a high street business bank account, despite them all being idiots, and clueless, and annoying, because only a big name high street bank will give me a US dollar account that everyone in the US (publishers,portals) are happy to make payments into. The way I do things currently means I lose a chunk of cash on poor exchange rates, and I’m fed up with that. However, the bureaucracy so far is testing my will to continue with this process. bah!

On the topic of marketing spending

I know where I am with advertising. I can spend $X and get Y clicks. That works, in a sense, very simply. It’s true that working out if clicks translate to sales is incredibly complex and vague, but there is at least some vague connection there.

I am currently assessing the other side of the promotional coin: expenditure on marketing. This can come in many flavors, but some of the ones that immediately leap to mind are:

  1. Attending trade shows and Consumer shows like Develop/Rezzed/GDC and meeting people (press/fellow indies/other industry folk).
  2. Actually having a booth at shows, hiring the booth, and associated leaflety stuff maybe some T-shirts, other swag.
  3. Getting someone to do ‘professional quality’ trailers and ‘making of’ videos for upcoming games.
  4. Paying PR companies to chase coverage and reviews

I’m investigating all this stuff, and am definitely going to be doing a bit of 2). I’ve never had a ‘booth’ before and am nervous of doing it because my games are not vaguely typical ‘show games’, but I do wonder if there are people at shows who might really appreciate that, and take the time to give them a look. I’ve decided that it’s no good doing 2) in small measure. I always promised myself if I *did* do a ‘booth* I’d do it properly, with multiple PC’s and a proper printed pro-looking stand. This is all in the pipeline.

megabooth

3) Is something that I’m new to, and just considering. I have to wonder if it is worth it. I’ve done quite a few videos to promote my games (my youtube channel is here BTW), but I don’t have a huge amount of spare time, and it would kind of make sense to pay someone to make more. I own Sony Vegas HD 11, but I’m sure the pros use something cooler, or at least know vegas like the back of their hands. Is it worth paying for a pro trailer? I suspect it is.

I have toyed with the idea of buying a decent camcorder that captures HD video, and taking that to trade shows to film some footage of people playing the games for playtesting purposes, as well as some general ‘flavor’ footage for putting together videos about the games. Decent camcorders seem to be a pittance these days. Is it worth getting one? (I wouldn’t use it much otherwise).