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

Category: business

Game Clue #7 plus decision making

I was shopping for cakes today and bought 2 cakes. There were 2 of us, and we wanted one each, and the guy says “You can get a third cake for the price of 2, which cake do you want?” and although that’s a good deal, it kind of bugged me, and (in my obsessive analytical way) I realised it bugged me because I had lost control of my decision making right then. I had strode into the cake shop, confident of my wants, my decisions, my choices and my needs, and suddenly my whole world view (I want 2 cakes) was reversed at someone else’s decision.I thought I knew what I wanted, and someone else had taken over and was making me operate on their terms (they want to sell more cakes).

I mention it because it reminded me of ‘the social network’ which I watched last night. The harvard guy talks about how harvard encourages students to create their own job, rather than just take a job. I thought this was an incredibly good attitude and should be drilled into ALL students, not just ones at elitist super-expensive universities.

You almost certainly don’t have the job you want. You might *like* your job, but that’s different. You didn’t *really* choose your job. Someone else had an idea, and wanted to make/do/build something. They then worked out they needed some people do do parts X and Y (probably the annoying, boring bits) and they posted a job ad, or asked a headhunter for someone to do it. They then wrote a contract, on their terms, and offered it to you. They will tell you what to do, and keep you doing it as long as it is useful to them.

Employment is a very one-sided situation for most people. Imagine showing up at a job interview with your own contract and asking the employer to sign it. Laughable isn’t it?

Working for yourself is not just different in minor job security and tax and quality-of-life ways. It is a fundamental re-arrangement of the terms upon which you carry out a good third of your existence. Even if you are 80% sure you prefer employment to self employment, I strongly recommend trying it before you hit 40ish, and you become too risk averse. I don’t know many people who tried it and went back to a regular job.

Here is another clue alluding to my next game. The last three were a bit hard. I would have thought trench art and stormtrooper helmets were pretty easy to spot, but I’m impressed how rapidly someone can spot a tiger tank gun barrel, especially when it’s a photo of one I took myself :D. Enjoy:

Clue #7

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We need an open, simpleapp store built into windows

Like most people selling software, I occasionally get people who say the download link is broken (it isn’t) or the file didn’t download properly (it did) or that it’s the wrong version for their O/S (maybe, but they bought the wrong thing in that case) or they lost the file they downloaded etc etc…

Obviously this sort of stuff is fixed by ‘client’ app stores such as impulse or steam. the problem is, those stores are run by third parties which

1) Take a cut of the sales

2) Retain all the customer details and never share them with you

3) Don’t accept all products for sale, so act as gatekeepers.

Ideally, windows would have a built-in bare-bones app-store. Not a microsoft store where you pay microsoft, but some system whereby you could pay anyone, and they could trivially build a back end system to provide you with the file. Maybe the app-store simply acts as a front end web browser client to your existing BMTMicro / paypal / plimus store.

Given all the shovelware crap that windows ships with anyway (photo editing, movie making, a calculator, a paint program, games…) it seems crazy that something people do all the time (buy stuff online) has virtually zero API support built into the O/S.

Time for another ‘next-game clue’:

clue#6

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Avoiding confirmation bias in business

I occasionally read a fairly insane and crappy web blog about investments in silicon valley. It’s quite amusing in some ways, the way people think everyone on earth has an ipad and a smartphone, and is a venture capitalist or runs a dotcom startup. Businesses are either the next google, or totally doomed, and that can flip completely from one day to the next.

It’s silly, but the flipside is, if acts to put my own world in perspective. I hang out (virtaully) with quite a few indie developers like me. I’ve met a lot of them, and we tend to agree on a lot of stuff. Selling direct is good, finding reliable artists is a pain, selling games too cheap is bad etc…The problem with just hanging out with people who think like you, and are like you, is that it narrows your focus and you suffer from serious confirmation bias. If everyone you know charges $20 for their games, is a sole employee and all make $50k a year, you are very likely to conclude that ‘this is what people do’, and follow suit, in both strategy and outcome.

I try very hard to avoid this. This is why I sometimes to chat to guys like Nicholas Lovell, who disagrees with almost every aspect of my business strategy :D. It’s why I take a huge interest in the economics of MMOs and facebook games, despite not making one. I was always interested in the business side of gaming. I would LOVE to be able to look through the bank statements of zynga, or activision :D

One business decision that I really struggle with is the idea of re-investment in my ongoing business. It makes sense for me to spend a huge chunk of the profits from GSB into growing the business. I should probably have 1 or 2 full time employees right now, and I don’t. I have (at the moment)  3 contractors working on my next game, plus me. There will be at least 2 others working on it before it ships. But this is small fry. I could make a legit business case for a much bigger investment.

To that end, I *do* have a little side project in development, which I won’t talk about for a while, and I am also trying to persuade myself that I should invest a whole months profits in advertising one month. I’ve never, EVER done that. Jeff Bezos would think I’m an idiot. In the last year, my google adwords budget was £27,000. It sounds a lot, but it should probably have been a lot higher, given that it’s such a major chunk of my expenses.

Anyone who thinks it’s easy to know the correct business strategy for making indie games hasn’t really thought about it.

Indie Game pricing pressures

Just looking at the last 10 new indie releases on steam:

  1. Fortix2  £5.39
  2. Beeo £5.39
  3. Dwarfs £7.19
  4. Universe Sandbox £6.99
  5. Capsized £5.99
  6. Your doodles are bugged £6.99
  7. The Tiny Bang Story £11.99
  8. Sanctum £9.99
  9. Anomaly £8.99
  10. Hoard £6.99

Thats scary there is only ONE game there over £10, and these are new release, presumably full price games. What will they be in a sale? £2? £1? £0.01? How on earth are these games expected to make a profit at these prices? In direct sales, 20% of it is probably payment costs. It’s insane. Plus, my next game is unsustainable at £10. I can’t make my money back at that price. It has to be more expensive. People who hate DLC will have to accept that it’s the only way devs can make money if the core game is sold at these prices. If you can sell portal 2 exclusively from your site with no discount, at £29.99, and have an item store on top, then things probably seem much better.

Artists, programmers, software are not getting cheaper each year.

There seems to be an unwritten rule developing that indie games must be under £10, preferably under $10. This is MAD. Harry Potter was written by ONE person. just ONE. It’s production costs were tiny. Does that mean you saw the harry potter books on sale for a third the price of other books? Of course not. Nobody slots books or plays into an ‘indie’ category and tries to get them cheap, ditto music. Do you pay less for an Adele album than a Queen album, because Queen had more members? That would be silly.

I speak to a lot of indie developers privately. They are overwhelmingly worried about the pressure being put on them to sell cheaper, cheaper cheaper. In the end, you get what you pay for. I know quite a few devs who are cutting back the ambition of their games, making them shorters, cheaper to make and mroe casual, because they fear that nobody will ‘allow’ them to sell for >$10.

Is there not a market for a $26 indie game? Should I stop saying I’m indie now?

More next-game clues soon…

Indie retail… why bother?

I came to the conclusion a while ago that retail selling of indie games was a total waste of effort. I have a bookcase to the right of me with a big pile of boxes of published games on it, I can see Kudos 2 (lovely box), Democracy 1 in English and German, Oval Office, and the e-games ‘Space Arcade Collection’. However, I have concluded that the long term utility of these deals is thus:

People who aren’t in the industry who visit my home-office are very slightly impressed.

As that number of people is somewhere between 0 and 2 people a year, and as I never care what they think, I wonder what the point is. Oh the money? Well… in theory yes, but the problems with retail are huge:

  1. You need to spend 4 hours reading the 30 page contract 3 times, to spot the bit where they say they can deduct whatever they like as expenses from your royalties.
  2. You do a ton of work up front doing stupid crap like animating publisher logos at the start of the game, and it only sells 6 copies.
  3. You don’t get paid for retail until long after the end of the sales quarter. If at all. If the company doesn’t go bankrupt and then re-incorporate the next day owing you nothing (commonplace).
  4. You have NO IDEA how many copies were sold. you have to trust a person you never met, in another country. He trusts the distributor, who is in a third country, in the developing world. Yeah right…
  5. Your game is pirated immediately, as 50% of the staff in the packaging warehouse think they are ‘l33t’ because they are in some childish warez ‘scene’. *sigh*
  6. You are now commited to providing tech support to peole for whom you have NO IDEA if they bought the game or pirated it.
  7. People who bought the game through the Swedish branch of a French-owned store selling copies of your game made by the Belgian distributor for the Canadian publisher you signed a deal with through your agent in Los Angeles now email you saying they want a refund. They think it’s your fault.
  8. Once a quarter, for the next 10 years you get mailed a $3 royalty check it costs $20 to cash.
  9. Half the boxed copies you sell sold ‘second-hand’ on online sites turn out to be copies manufactured by some dodgy CD-replicator who pocket 100% of the cash.

When I get email from someone that says “greetings, we are a retail publisher of high quality…” I just bin it. I don’t care who it is. Retail blew it big time. I no longer care. I have enough boxes now. They are fab, but if you want to own Gratuitous Space Battles, buy it online :D. I had a poster made for my office instead.