Category: business

This is a tough call. When I was a newcomer to indie game development, making smaller budget games with fewer sales, I used to think we had a huge advantage over the AAA guys. A triple A game (in almost *all* circumstances) HAS to ship in a specific month. They do this because the ad-buy has been scheduled, the contracts for PR people have been written, the availability of release slots for portals and platform holders is agreed, the finances are in place to pay everyone assuming that is the ship date, and so on… So what happens if the game is not fun two months before release?

TOUGH

Tough Tough Tough. Maybe everyone could work evenings and weekends (like they hadn’t secretly allowed for that anyway?) and maybe everyone can put in some extra effort…but it’s a really BIG DEAL in financial and PR terms if you push back the ship date.

As an indie, this is not the case, so we can be a bit smug and say ‘it’s done when it’s done’.

Except increasingly… this gets hard to do. The problem isn’t so much financial – luckily I could work another year on the current game and not be short of money to buy food, but one of scheduling. If you want the PR people, the guy making a trailer, and so on to be available towards the end of a project (when everything is nailed down and won’t change) you need to book them early. More relevantly to me, I only want to appear at trade shows showing off a close to release game, not an early alpha. If redshirt and Democracy3 were June 2014 releases, I doubt I’d show them at rezzed or anywhere else yet. Not because it’s ‘too early’, but because doing shows is EXPENSIVE and you want to pick your battles. Promoting a game you can buy next month or NOW makes more sense to me.

I’m fussy enough to be able to throw my arms in the air and say “We must wait another year dammit!” on my games, although luckily both are coming along nicely, but it’s something as an indie you have to keep an eye on. You don’t just need to make sure you have cashflow to pay the bills until the ship date, you need to have a release date in mind for lots of reasons.

Right, never done one before so I don’t know what to expect but the developers with games in our nifty little sale we are running here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/sales.php

(Only 3 days left!)

are now running a collective AMA today on reddit! check it out here:

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?

…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…