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

Category: business

Show Me The Bundle

You know that little side-project website ShowMeTheGames that I talk about now and then? Well guessy what? Go on…  nah…You’ll never guess.

We are running a bundle of indie games through SMTG. It’s basically five high quality indie games for $28.50, which save you $81.33 You have probably heard of some, or all of them. They are (in no particular order)…

Gratuitous Space Battles

This is my latest game. It’s a space strategy affair, where you design spaceships and put together big space fleets, but the battles are stratengely hands-off. :D

Castle Vox

This is by Sillysoft. You remember they made Lux right? It’s influenced by games like Risk. It’s a conquer the world strategy game, and great fun

Evochron: Mercenary

By StarWraith. They have been making excellent space games like this for a while. Watch some videos of it and then tell me you don’t want to own it. I dare you. Awesome graphics, and reminds me of the days of Elite. Ahhhh….

Fate Of The World

By Red Redemption. This is the climate-change game. Save the world from Jeremy Clarkson and Exxon. You know you want to. I do my bit by not flying long-haul, but it’s easier to just buy this game instead.

Smugglers IV

Another space strategy game that evokes memories of Elite. This one is by Niels bauer who has been making indie PC games as long, or maybe even longer than moi.

This isn’t a humble bundle, but  it’s a self-confident and proud one. In fact, as bundles go, it has has en-suite bathrooms and 24 hour porterage, and a helpful concierge called Gerald.  The main bonus is that all the money goes to the developers (BMTMicro take a tiny fee for processing payments). SMTG doesn’t make anything from it, and I only make my share of it (from GSB).

There is a webpage with a video about the bundle here. Which is also where you can buy it. Video embedded below. PLEASE retweet, or facebook it, or write witty forum comments over the interwebs about it. The bundle lasts until the 12th June. Forget all that crap about E3, that’s only for shoddy console ports that will cost $100 and have DRM in anyway. Buy this instead :D

 

Grind-free for the time-poor gamer!

I guess it’s generally considered desirable to promote a product for what it *has* not what it does not have. This is unfortunate because I can see a lot of ‘features’ that would enhance a product purely by their removal. My pet hate is the new squeezy nozzle on heinz ketchup, but putting my personal table-sauce related jihad to one side, and thinking purely about games, I can imagine several features, whose omission that would pique my interest…

  • Now featuring absolutely NO startup movies or publisher logos!
  • Now featuring a total lack of cheesy voice acting and macho quips!
  • 100% free from sexist and racist stereotypes!
  • Absolutely no grinding or filler!

All of these would get my thumbs up, yet nobody ever markets a product that way, even though I’m sure there are games that omit all these annoyances. There must be something about good marketing practice that means it’s a bad idea to promote a negative? (although ‘non-bio’ and ‘no sugar’ come close)

Take a game like portal. It is apparently short. I’ve never played it to the end, so I don’t know. I’m sure a lot of people would panic if a game was announced proudly as being short, but I also suspect a lot of people (middle aged, with kids especially) would welcome a game that was high quality fun, condensed into a reasonable length of time. I don’t care about ‘finishing’ games, but I find myself losing patience with any movie over 2 hours long. My time is limited, get to the point.

I spent a day playing Halo in the office at Elixir once (I was ‘on call’, not there to do work…) and was enjoying it right up until a bit where the next mission involved backtracking the last 15 minutes. This was clearly filler, to make the game feel longer. It was like a really tedious scene that any decent editor would crop from a movie.

Even from the Fellowship Of The Ring.

And yet, big budget games are full of that stuff.

I make sandbox games, so they don’t lend themselves to being marketed this way, but it would be great if some games did seek out the ‘time-poor’ gamer. I know there are lots of us. Aren’t there?

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.