Category: business

There is a tension as an indie dev between these forces.

if I rely entirely on middleware and someone else’s engine (Unity + EZ-GUI + some sound stuff + whatever) I can be extremely productive. I don’t waste any time wondering about correct vertex buffer creation flags or optimising sprite rendering, i can just work on the game.

But then when there is a bug in EZ-GUI or a feature missing from Unity, I am totally screwed. Suddenly I’m coding what they support, not what I want to create.

Similarly in business, if I rely entirely on steam for my sales, I don’t waste any time worrying about website design, visitor numbers, bounce-rates, chargebacks or coupon/discount processing, no worries about web server stability, demo download speeds, CDNs and other fluff. I can just work on the game.

But then when steam turn down a game, say they don’t have a slot for a promotion, or change a royalty rate, or screw up a payment (this has NEVER happened to me with steam), then suddenly I am screwed. I become entirely financially dependent on another company, and in that case the term ‘indie’ becomes somewhat shaky.

It’s a constant war between which is more important, and the answer depends on your circumstances, your skills and your attitude, not to mention your free time and team size.

As a lone indie, obviously I have pursued the totally insane route of complete independence in all areas. Even energy independence. Ahahahaha!!! I code my own engine for GSB and GTB, and all my games. I use 3rd party sound libraries just because I frankly find sound coding dull, but everything else is pure me. It’s a big concession to even resort to using phpbb and wordpress, I can tell you…

But something has to give. I am possibly taking on too much and maybe not doing the best job of everything. I need to give way in some direction. Shockingly, and maybe surprisingly, I find myself thinking of giving way more on the business side than the technical side. The thought of abandoning direct sales is madness, but the thought of obsessing less about them, and spending less time on trying to eek out every last bit of direct sales profitability certainly appeals. It also appeals regarding PR. GTB *may* be the last game I handle my own PR for exclusively. (pls don’t email me offering to be my PR guy. The best PR people are already known to me, and frankly if you’re not, then you possibly aren’t that good… :D)

I think I need to spend more time on design, and less on code and less on business. The code side is slimmed back easily by just picking less insanely complex projects for a bit. I also need to spend more time actually relaxing and maybe even enjoying life. A close relative of mine is unwell, and it makes me realise how important it is to enjoy life while you can. I may even manage to sneak in a trip to a nice sunny beach soon.

The only *wrong* decision for me at this point would be to bumble along as I am. I think cracks are starting to show.

Hands up everyone who knows about code-signing certificates!!!! anyone?

Well they are quite dull, but you have all seen evidence of them, or their non-existence. Code-signing has been around a long time, but for most of the time it’s been a topic that indie game devs could ignore. Essentially, as I understand it, code signing is a way for people to know that the exe file they are downloading is the same exe file it claims to be, and that it doesn’t have any malware in it (not really…but…read on).

If you download an .exe file from the internet using internet explorer, you get scary message windows popup and warn you that your house is about to explode and that swarms of locusts will descend and kill you. However, if that exe file is code-signed, the message is marginally less scary, and you are told the locusts are probably not deadly, and that the explosion will only cause collateral damage.

Some poor sods who have the misfortune to have malware called ‘norton internet security’ probably don’t even get that far. This malware just deletes any exes it doesn’t personally like the look of, regardless of content or publisher… sigh.

Anyway, the get your code signed (and thus scare your potential customers/demo downloaders) a *bit* less, you need to pay an exorbitant sum of money to some supposedly trustworthy company that will verify who you are. I paid $99 and got a few emails asking to see bill or bank statement scans (like they can’t be forged in 10 minutes in photoshop), hand-wavey claims that my identity will be verified in ways unmentioned, and a 1 minute phonecall from a very bored guy in an indian call center checking that I knew all about my submission.

In other words, rigorous FBI-level security clearing stuff that mafia-funded russian hackers could not even begin to circumvent. Oh no…

And then you get a special URL that plonks something somewhere in your copy of internet explorer (it HAS to be IE, what irony!) and are left to fend for yourself.

A bit of experimenting showed that you can ‘export’ the certificate from IE onto your hard drive, at which point you pick a password for it. The next bit it easier, because if you use inno setup, there are simple instructions of enabling it to auto-sign your installers, once you’ve downloaded a ‘signing tool’ from some third party.

And then lo! You have code-signed installers. This means Internet Explorer and Norton Internet Stupidity are very very very slightly less suspicious of my games and demos. Hurrah! Thanks to crass stupidity at the highest levels, they still spout warnings like ‘This file is not commonly downloaded, and therefore must be a virus’ (which are never ever downloaded, clearly). But, it’s a slight step in the right direction.

People are getting more and more used to using clients like steam to get games, and more and more wary of random internet exes. I thought I should at least do my tiny bit to stem the tide of the total extinction of a free, open internet where people can sell games direct, by actually signing my exes and making them seem safer to the wary. Pity that the entire code-signing system was exposed as totally insecure, but I don’t make the rules…

I bought a new blu-ray movie DVD and sat through three long, boring unskippable anti-piracy notices at the start of the movie.

Lets assume every person who watches DVDs / Blurays puts up with a similar inconvenience approximately once a week on average

Assume a total therefore of twenty seconds of time wasted per week, per viewer. 52 weeks a year is 17 minutes of wasted time per year, per consumer.

Assume 200 million US consumers + 200 million more from Europe, Japan, Australia etc, as a conservative figure.

That’s 56 million hours wasted per year by people watching this stuff. (6,392 man years)

at an average wage of say $16 an hour (src: http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=773)

that means pointless unskippable copyright notices cost the global economy $896,000,000 a year, enough to create maybe 18,000 decent paying full time jobs.

Looked at another way, the lost time equates to (assuming average life expectancy of  78.1 yearts according to google) the lives of 81 people.

I hate piracy, but I hate stupidity too. And unskippable piracy warnings are not only stupid, they are wasting the best part of a billion dollars a year.

Pass it on… :D

Ok, I admit it, I wanted an excuse to type war inside my head. But there really is one.

There is half of me that looks at the games industry, and Positech, and Gratuitous Tank Battles, and reads books on how big big companies (google, amazon etc) got where they are, and thinks:

“We are literally INSANE if we aren’t taking at the very least a third of our profits and throwing them madly into expanding the business by way of advertising spending, promotional activities (conference appearances and promo stands etc), stuff like T-shirts and posters and hiring a proper PR agent to grow the public awareness of the company,

The other half of me thinks:

“Those ads are not converting at a rate that makes any economic sense. It’s money burned. Plus this partnership with X or Y is not as profitable as if I did it myself, plus I can do all my own PR, plus we live in turbulent economic times. If we have $X in the bank, we should definitely leave it there, as an insurance policy against having a really bad year. better safe than sorry”.

It’s a constant battle, which means that my google adwords budget can swing madly from £150 a day (first half of brain is victorious) to zero (second half is winning).

My pet theory is that a lot of entrepreneurs I admire (Jeff Bezos, Duncan Bannatyne) just don’t have the second part of the brain at all. They see no downside, no need for caution, no possibility of failure, and never consider the companies money to be for anything other than growing the company.

Maybe that last sentence is the true key. is positech’s income mine? In a legal and practical sense, it is. But should I stop thinking that it is, and think of it as positech’s? Maybe if I did, I’d be free-er with promotional stuff, and spending in general. I could tell you amusing, fairly embarrassing tales of the stuff I’ve done on my own (badly) because I was too cautious to pay what amounts to quite small amounts of money to get other people to do it.

I may experiment with the idea of thinking that positech and me are different things. Ommmmmmmmmmm……

If you are a lone-wolf indie game dev, you probably don’t spend ANY time thinking about grand strategy when it comes to advertising. Don’t worry, I think about it enough for both of us :D

Which strategy works best for you, really does depend on your game and your overall business model (paid-app, DLC, micro-trans, subscriptions…). However, there might be some benefit to brainstorming different approaches…

#1 SCATTERGUN

You advertise EVERYWHERE, on different ad networks, with different ad types (text / image / video…) you try print ads and newsletter-mentions, sponsored blog posts, etc etc. Then, you look at the data and pick the one which converts the best. Problem is, with 20 different advertising approaches, you need to spend at least $20,000 to get anything vaguely usable in terms of stats.

#2 CHERRY PICKING

You set up your ad campaign to exclude almost everyone. Nobody above a certain age, nobody from countries that aren’t buyers, nobody on a platform that isn’t your target, nobody at the end of the month (broke) or when they are at work (9-5), nobody that isn’t on one of the hand picked websites that you think best represent the people who will buy your game. You then bid some silly amount like $1 a click, to make sure you get those high-converting visitors.

#3 PRODUCT PROFILE

You don’t care about clicks. You engineer things to get the lowest CPM (impression cost) you can. You definitely let google show the same ad to the same visitor ajn infinite number of times. Your ads don’t even really say much, they just have your logo as big and as bold as possible. Nobody will click them, and you don’t care. You just want name recognition for when your game is in a list on steam, or mentioned on kotaku, that makes people pay attention.

#4 THE SUBSTITUTE_REVIEW

You realise that nobody has a clue what sort fo game your’s is, or what you do, or how much it is, or that it’s on sale, so you concentrate on fitting all this information into BIG ads and plaster them all over the place. It doesn’t matter if sites won’t cover your game, because you can force your name onto their front page using your ad dollars. For added effect, you set up streaming ads to play video of your game.

#5 BARREL SCRAPAGE

You bid hilariously low on a huge number of ads, knowing that now and them, you are the only bidder. Your ads run for some laughable price like $0.01, and the traffic isn’t targeted at all, but given the amount of visits they generate. you figure that you are playing the law of big numbers and all will work out. When you are selling a cheap game, this may work for you, because you can’t pay $1 for a visit when your game is $2.99.

#6 COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

You don’t advertise your game, but your site, with all 10 games you have made. For added impact, you affiliate some other indie devs games and suddenly your website looks like steam. An ad may well bring a disinterested clicker, but now he has ten opportunities to be interested, and you might suddenly be able to afford a higher cost per click. (This is the basic principle behind when I’ve run ad campaigns for www.showmethegames.com).

amusing ad break…

I don’t know which of these strategies is overall the best, but they are all worth considering, if not necessarily gambling $20k on :D