Category: business

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.

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).

For a long time I’ve been painfully aware about how much my purchase tracking sucks, due to the following reasons:

• Google analytics tracking across domains (buy page site and main site) sucks.
• A lot of people buy from steam, or elsewhere anyway, and I can’t edit those buy pages to add tracking.

I’ve finally started basic attempts to put in place a more robust system, which much more accurately tracks ad-clicks (or other link data, theoretically) to confirmed sales. The procedure is essentially this:

• Direct adverts to a php version of the page, not html
• Have that ad pass in a url variable to indicate the source (or theoretically just grab the referrer)
• The php then stores that data in a cookie

When a purchased copy of the game runs for the first time, it finds the cookie (this bit is tricky) and then pings my server to say ‘advert #3323 just resulted in a sale’. This is all done anonymously, so there is no user tracking, just an indication that there was a confirmed sale, rather than just crossing my fingers. If the customer blocks the game from contacting the server, that no big deal, but my last 2 games have some online features, so it’s unlikely.

It will be a while before I have any actual  data to show for this, but it should make for less random marketing decisions once I have some, and I’ll share what I have learned. Many thanks to cas for prompting me to do this stuff :D

So here I am, post-GDC, from my point-of-view (I was only there for two days), reflecting on what I thought of my first ever trip there. I made a deliberate decision to only spend two days there, to attend the indie talks, meet some people, and then combine the trip with a short holiday, so I’m in a hotel room typing this up. If GDC has erupted into major scandal, I have no idea, so imagine this was written yesterday :D

First up, I met some really cool people at GDC. Finally met Ichiro, Andy and Keith, and many other people whose names I know well but have never seen in real life. Dave Gilbert, James C Smith, Russel, too many to mention frankly. That side of things was really cool. I also attended quite a few talks, some of which were awesome, some of which were rambling incoherent waffle, but on the whole the good outweighed the bad.
Do I think attending GDC was worth it? For me, I’d say yes, mostly on a personal and inspirational note. Was it worth it in terms of making a business case for me going? Maybe.

To answer the hypothetical question ‘is it worth attending GDC’ question, takes a lot of thought. On the the one hand, you hear some great talks and meet a lot of people, on the other hand, those talks get posted online, and everyone has email and skype anyway. On balance, I’d say the decision to go is based on a combination of money and personality.

Attending GDC for me is relatively expensive. It involves a return transatlantic plane trip, and a long UK car journey, airport parking, a hotel in san francisco and general expenses, plus obviously the GDC ticket. How much you can cut that cost down (easy if you live in the US), and how much cash you have to spend on this sort of thing is a huge factor. Is it worth more to you than the same spend on middleware licenses, advertising placements or contracted art/music? Maybe, maybe not.
The second factor is personality. GDC seems to be perfect for those charismatic young indies brimming with american confidence and the ability to go up to strangers, shake hands and say ‘I’m joe and this is my game!’. That is not me. I am sometimes very loud and shouty and full of enthusiasm in groups of people. I am sometimes quiet, shy and very serious, even miserable. I don’t get to choose how those times line up. I wouldn’t bet my career on winning people over with my charm on some fixed date.
A lot of indies talk very confidently about how advertising for indies is useless, and the way to get your name out there is to attend PAX and GDC and E3 and lots of shows I don’t even know, and meet people and go to parties. Most of the time you hear people talk about the benefits of shows is when they are talking about it at shows. In other words, this is a very self-selecting group. It’s only half of the story.
I know indies that have earned over a million dollars and never met another indie developer. These people exist, but you won’t (by definition) hear them talk at shows.
So in conclusion… GDC is great as a self promotion and networking tool for a certain personality type. If that’s you, then cool. But don’t panic if you are an introvert, and all this shaking hands sounds awful. There is another side to the coin, and you can do well without becoming a ‘face’ on the indie circuit. Will I go next year? I think maybe I will. I’m not sure. As usual, my ever-so-helpful answer is ‘it depends’.

Yeah I know…Everyone and their cats has been to GDC before, but I haven’t, partly due to distance, and partly because I prefer not to fly (for eco, not fear reasons), but it’s getting a bit ridiculous to not go any more.
The thing is I’m not really going for any specific promotional purpose this time. Democracy 3 is coming along nicely, but it’s not the sort of game that is easily shown off on a noisy show floor to a journalist who is distracted by booth babes and exploding airplanes. That isn’t to say I’ll never promote games of mine at shows, but as I’ve not been to GDC before, this is more of a social/checking it out trip than a promotional one.
There are a whole bunch of indies that I chat to online that I’ve never met, some of them might read this! and it will be cool to bump into some of them. I’m going to one big indie meetup thing on Monday night, and a meal on Tuesday night, and apart from that I’ll probably be dithering around on Monday/Tuesday wearing a gratuitous space battles t-shirt and trying to look like I fit in :D. If you see someone in a GSB t-shirt, you can probably assume it’s me.
I’m only going to be at the conference for Monday/Tuesday, I’m then heading off for five days of sightseeing somewhere with more trees and bears and less traffic. I think I’ll get the vibe of GDC in two days.
In the old days, indies would be clamoring for meetings with publishers, but in 95% of cases, they are now more trouble than they are worth. However if anyone has a good reason they want to meet up with me regarding press/pr or stuff like that, then I’ll be in San Francisco for two days, so best to contact me now if you are around.
I might even check my email daily while I’m there!

Well it should be immediately obvious to anybody reading this, that I finally got a proper design for my blog sorted out. It’s been a long time coming, and the blog gets more and more popular over the years, so I thought it was about time I invested in having a theme properly designed and implemented. I admit that I am way too busy with other stuff these days to learn the finer points of CSS and HTML, let alone javascript and flash. it makes much more sense to do what I’m good at, and use the profits from being more productive to hire someone else. That’s just good old fashioned division of labour. If I ever go the extra mile and employ people to write my blog too, you know I’ve sold out. (yes…some people DO so that…)

Quite a few indie devs write blogs these days, and I find a lot of them very interesting and readable. it surprises me that the big companies can’t see through the legal paranoia and allow their lead designers and coders to keep a regular blog. I’d love to read a blog by the lead coder or designer at Maxis. I don’t mean a once-a-month update that has been vetted by three different marketing departments and lawyers, but a real blog, with regular updates on what it’s like to do that kind of stuff.

Anyway I digress… I will have lots of very technical explanations of the inner workings of Democracy 3 coming up. if I ever start suggesting I’ll code Democracy 4, just tell me to have a lie down, and remember how involved this one was…