Category: business

There is a tradeoff every developer is making when it comes to spending money. You either spend it on the product, or marketing and promoting the product.

Now the romantically inclined might suggest that the best thing to do is just make the best possible game you can (100% product) and then the product will ‘sell itself’. Word of mouth news of your awesome game will do the work of the ad-men, and you will sell games by the bucketload.

The cynically inclined might suggest that the best thing to do is to market the hell out of your game. It doesn’t matter if the product istelf is a bit rough, because if 20,000,000 people get to hear about it, then you are bound to find enough of them who are bored enough to hand over the cash.

Obviously sanity lies somewhere in the middle. Finding out exactly where it lies, is not easy. To make a rational decision requires you to be able to measure the difference each dollar you spend actually makes. Clearly that is not easy.

With improvements to a games quality, you can sometimes tell that (for example) version 1.23 has a 22% higher conversion rate from the demo than version 1.22. This is assuming you have a clever enough order process to track that, are sure people aren’t trying an old, mirrored demo download and so on. Even then, this is completely useless, because it only works on the demo. Maybe version 1.23 full version is so awesome it encourages 18.34% more of your buyers to refer a friend to the game? Maybe screenshots from version 1.23 got featured on a website whereas 1.22 would not have, thus pulling in more eyeballs etc…

You might assume that it’s an easier thing to measure how effective marketing and promotion are. To a point this is true. I can tell you the CPC, CTR CPM and other boring acronyms for all my ads. I can plot very accurately the curve of CPC rising as total ad spend also climbs, and the  sales/ad spend is also very easily measured. Google Analytics even shows you the ROI for each individual site where your banner was shown. However, this leaves out an absolute ton of variables. Maybe someone saw an ad on their work PC, then bought it later on theirs (not tracked). Maybe someone saw an ad, told a friend, and the friend bought it (not tracked) and so on…

And that’s only for directly net-connected stuff like ad buys. I ran a competition where I gave away a hideously expensive plastic spaceship model. Did that get me any PR? any sales? any good word-of-mouth? VERY hard to tell. I spend quite a bit of time replying to emails from journalists, and seeking out websites to promote the game. Is the return on investment there better than coding? Who can tell…

For me, spending money on ads is quite an easy decision, because there is only one of me. Doubling my ad spend doesn’t require any more of my (overstretched) time at all. So I’m not having to do a weigh-up of time on marketing vs time on the game. it’s much harder to weigh up anything that takes actual time away from coding. There is still the decision as to weighing up money spent on contractors (art, web design, sound) vs money spent on ads. And then of course there is the tradeoff between employing an artist (product) vs employing a PR guy (marketing).

Personally, I’m wary of actually employing PR people. I’m a one man company. The ‘brand’ ‘story’ and ‘image’ of Positech games is just me. It would feel silly to have someone try and ‘re-brand’ me. That’s a level of corporateness which I don’t want to get into.

…of course, if I’m really good at PR, then I already employ a person to do all this, and he is the one typing this blog post. Cliff’s busy coding, as always

..or is he?

Disclaimer: I sell my games on all these portals, and am happy with them as a business.

So NPD think they have a list of the top 5 online games sales portals, but GamersGate and Impulse cry foul. Ok, fair enough.

With gamersgate, I can see why they are in the position they are in. They were late to the party, didn’t have a killer-app that people wanted to buy, had an abortive attempt with a client they abandoned… so maybe they have had a tough ride. They seem to be doing well though, no doubt tons better than lil old me.

Impulse is another story. I am surprised they haven’t been much more aggressive. I tend to assume they are the #2 seller, after steam. The interesting thing with Impulse is that stardock make money from Object Desktop, and presumably lots more  from games like GalCiv and SOASE, demigod etc. They literally do not need the profits from Impulse at all. So, assuming that, here is what I don’t get:

Why doesn’t stardock run impulse at a loss? Maybe only a small loss, but a loss nonetheless. Give developers 95% share of the royalties (totally crushing any other offer), or maybe 80% but 95% if its impulse-exclusive for 6 months.  Do not take a penny in profit for the next 2-3 years.  Maybe instead of cutting the royalty split, just discount the games big-time like steam are doing. Or maybe buy out the rights to some games entirely to make them 100% impulse-exclusive forever.

The prize at the end of this battle is market share. The web has 1 auction site, 1 book store, 1 video site and 1 social networking site. You know which ones I mean. It is close to having 1 PC games site, which is a license to print money. If I ran stardock, I’d sacrifice everything to fight for that slot. I’d probably run the whole business at a loss for those 2 years, taking every penny in profit from Object Desktop and throwing it at impulse to grab market share.

But….

The guy who runs stardock is a very clever guy. And no doubt rich. And no doubt he knows more about this than me, so I defer 100% to his greater knowledge of the issues.  Regardless of what happens, tragically they all do better than me. I’ll be under the table hoping for crumbs from whoever wins in the end :D

In unrelated news, if you like tower defence/defense games, then you might love revenge of the titans. I just added it to my site (it’s by a fellow indie). There is of course a free demo, and it’s 50% off right now. Give it a go, it’s excellent.

I’ve mulled over whether to say anything at all, but if you can’t say what you think about the games industry when you own your own company, when can you?

I was part of a panel yesterday at Develop, the games conference for developers in Brighton UK. I was speaking about ‘microstudios’ with Robin Lacey(Beatnik), Sean Murray(Hello Games) and Mark Morris(Introversion), all of whom are good guys. As a one-man outfit, I’m the real baby studio there, but at 13 years of experience, also the grandfather, so I guess that makes me middle aged. Anyway… all was cool, and there was much joking and mutual silliness. Apparently I am the Barry Manilow of game development, and a mug to spend £75 on jeans. And the topic then came up of how indies can respond directly to gamers on stuff like messageboards. Basically I started making the point, and mark was also agreeing about how someone can email you as an indie dev, and you can reply personally back to that potential customer, and hopefully, that way you have converted that guy to buying the game.

At this point, there was this derisive snort from this guy in the front row, who said something to the effect of ‘one guy? who cares, that’s a waste of time’. He then started to lecture us on how that’s a silly way to do it.  I’m 95% sure that all four of us on the panel thought ‘what the fuck?’ as well as ‘who is this guy’? compounded by Robin asking him if he worked in marketing.

Anyway… it turned out this guy was Mark Rein from Epic, although he seemed to assume everyone within earshot knew exactly who he was, and why he must obviously be right. I got the impression he was there to laugh at the little guys, or to just inform us how we are all wrong. Interestingly, it seemed there was someone from sports interactive (one time indies, as I recall) there, who seemed more on the indie wavelength than Mark. It would have been cool to chat with him.

So… I’ve given this a lot of thought, and weighed up the pros and cons of just putting this down to misinterpreting someone, and so on, and I have reached this conclusion.

Mark Rein is a jerk.

Now I suspect this is not groundbreaking news, although it is to me, because I’ve never met him or even seen him before. However, this experience seems to confirm my opinions on Epic and companies like them in general. Now Mark may well look down on humble indies like me. He may well think I’m doing it wrong. he may laugh when me and Mark discuss the pitiful money our companies make, and giggle at the fact that we reply to gamers on a one-on-one basis… But fuck him. I would rather earn minimum wage making indie strategy games for the PC, as my own boss, with an original game, satisfying a hardcore niche of friendly customers (the one-thousand-true-fans-philosophy), without a publisher telling me what to do, and without having to leave my house to go to work, without having to do ‘crunch time’ (because, dude… its like so macho to work until 3AM and never see your family)… Than I would work at epic for megabucks. The sheer overwhelming stench of testosterone would probably give me a headcahe, combined with the dizzy excitement of exactly what shade of grey our next game’s space-marine would wear as he kicked alien butt. (I feel bad working on Gratuitous Space Battles for almost 2 years, but it seems like that old ‘wisecracking space marine with big muscles and chisel-jaw’ idea has been stretched out longer than the hundred years war).

I have absolutely no doubt mark would just naturally assume me feeling like that is jealousy, which, as anyone who knows me personally would testify, is just fucking funny. I really don’t care about Epic, and their games, as they are way way too macho and ‘dude’ for my liking, and don’t have demos, so I just assume they haven’t changed since Unreal Tournament. I try not to comment on games I don’t like, as each to their own tastes etc.  The only reason I’m moved to give a damn enough to state my opinion, is that I resent having some triple-a studio jerk come and tell someone whose run a microstudio for thirteen years that he is doing it all wrong. If Mark from introversion suggests I’m doing it wrong, thats cool, he does what I do, and has some serious experience, ditto anyone on that panel, or anyone with long indie experience. And I listen carefully, often over lunch.

But Triple-A studio bosses trying to lecture me on how to communicate better with gamers? Fuck off.

Cliff Harris (cliff@positech.co.uk)