Category: business

…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…

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’.