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

2017 in statistical review

Posted on January 6, 2018

IMHO learning from past endeavours is pretty much what life is all about, so what happened to positech games in 2017?

Steam revenue: DOWN 18%

Total Game revenue:  UP 3.95%

Income from democracy 3 (incl DLC): DOWN 20%

Expenditure (game dev, marketing, everything): UP 61%

Investment income: UP 95%

Share of total games revenue from 3rd party* (published) titles: 17% (down from 21%)

*total income, not positech’s share.

Net profit after tax:  UP 27%

Steam revenue from OSX: DOWN from 10% to 8%

Steam revenue from Linux: DOWN from 1% to 0.8%

Revenue from itunes: DOWN 39%

Share of income from game development: 82%

Share of steam income from China: 2% (3% in last month)

Share of Steam income from Russia: 1%

A surprisingly good year, considering Production Line (my main new earner) is in Early Access still, and shadowhand released so late. Democracy 3 and Big Pharma made hefty contributions, and my whizz-bang stock market investments have done amazingly well. OSX continues to be fairly minor, and linux is practically irrelevant. I can’t see me bothering with itunes any more, and likely doing very little (if any) publishing of 3rd party stuff in future. I’m concentrating on my core business, with a healthy side order of stock investment and long-term investment in green energy and infrastructure projects.

Looking at reviews, and play times for production Line & shadowhand gives me a lot of optimism for 2018, plus I have a secret thing I’ll announce in about 6 months which is likely to do well (I hope!). Onwards and upwards.

2018 and I’m not running an energy business.

Posted on January 3, 2018

I’ve been making games for 20 years this year, which means the phrase ‘listen sunshine, I was making games before you woz even born’ is something I can smugly tell more and more people at GDC this year. This is definitely an achievement unlocked. However, milestones are always times for reflection, and after 20 years I am forced to reflect that my non-games ‘business goals’ are still missing an important piece.

I am someone cursed by a drive to work hard at something I know nothing about, have no skills in, and do not understand. Before you crack jokes about my games being ‘not that bad’, I’m not talking about games development, but something else entirely. For about 30 years I’ve been an environmentalist, and have long desired to do something concrete and tangible about the threat of climate change. My fantasy for a long time has been to own a wind farm (not a single turbine, I think big), and although they can be expensive (a 5MW turbine is about $5million), its not that which puts me off. What puts me off, is my complete lack of knowledge about engineering, energy production, and the entire marketplace. I would be like one of those well-meaning but completely doomed idealistic dreamers who opens a restaurant because ‘they really like food’.

Still, I got further than most. I’ve met with 2 people who ran a turbine installation company and talked about the options, although TBH it was just depressing. Despite the UK public having overwhelming support for onshore wind, the idiots in the current government pander to those who bizarrely hate it, and would rather spend TWICE the money per KWH on the most expensive white elephant in human history.

That power station will never be finished, and never generate power. it. is. doomed.

But anyway…

I’ve managed to still ‘make a difference’ as a hands-off investor in renewable energy, by investing in a whole bunch of projects through abundance. I have chunks of solar farms, wind turbines, anaerobic digesters, tidal power stations, and rooftop solar installs. The only problem with this is that it doesn’t ‘feel’ real. I cant go out there and see ‘my’ wind turbine, and for all I know, all of this would have happened without me.

What compounds this feeling of frustration is working on production line (which is all about building real tangible things efficiently), and the long tedious opera-in-waiting that is trying to get fiber optic internet for my home. I won’t bore you with the details, but even being prepared to put down £17,000 and wait a year was insufficient for engineers from BT Openreach to lay a single tiny cable to my house. Yes really. The sheer dumb, mindless incompetence of that just flattens me, and is compounded by the fact that it looks like we are going to get it now anyway for free. Incompetence squared.

The real nail-in-the-coffin is that this fiber link will be delivered on overhead cables, ie: ‘telegraph poles’ as we call them in the UK. Essentially the wooden posts that they would have used in downton abbey times. Have I mentioned that its now 2018 and this is the best that modern Britain can do? This INFURIATES ME. I have total sympathy with Elon Musk when he was stuck in traffic and said ‘I’m going to just buy a machine and start digging’. We urgently need that attitude here, and probably all over the world. It pains me massively to see how pathetic the UK policy on climate change and energy independence is. New houses get built without any solar power, solar thermal or even rain water harvesting. Its like we are stuck in the 1970s. We still dont have smart meters. I had to specifically request a water meter. Madness.

But what can I do? I’m 48, I’m not about to retrain as a civil engineer, and getting into a business you do not understand the basics of is a recipe for disaster. Thus I remain on the sidelines, doing a job that I love, and enjoy, but to be honest, I get pangs of thinking ‘shouldn’t I be doing something more socially useful’?

I read a book on ‘doing good well’, and there is definitely a serious argument in there for ‘earning to give’. In other words, do what you are good at, make money, and use that money to pay others to do what you wish you were good at. I’ve definitely made big investments in green energy, and have vague plans to build a super-eco house to retire in, with a little (maybe 100 panels) solar array next door to it. It wouldn’t make me Elon Musk, but its still something to aim for.

Trying hard to embrace change

Posted on December 28, 2017

Change is hard. And change gets way harder the older you get. There is probably a lot of research about brain plasticity or neuron replacement or other clever ways to explain why older people are often less accepting of change, but I think it comes down to basic maths. For example if you are 65 years old right now, for probably 63 of those 65 years, the idea of school children wanting to change gender was laughable, just not a thing. Basically 96.9% of your experience of the world is that kids stick to the same gender they were born with. Changing an assumption you have held for 96.9% of your life is HARD. Our brains seem hard wired to work with ‘common sense’ and believing what we have known to be true for a long time.

For someone aged 18, those 2 years are 11% of their life, and if we ignore the first five years of both parties, we get 3% versus 15%.  In other words, there is a simple mathematical basis for the fact that its harder to accept (or notice) change as we age. This is also probably partly the cause of Brexit. If you are 18-24 Britain doesn’t seem to have changed much socially in your life. Aged 65? its changed a LOT.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that what’s true in life in general is also true in game development. Gaming changes, rapidly, ALL THE DARNED TIME, and as indie developers get older and more experienced, we have to be absolutely sure we see change coming, and we change with it.

I started this blog over a decade ago using ‘blogger’. Then it changed to ‘wordpress’, then it became my own hosted wordpress install on my site, then it got a custom theme. I wonder if in the future, this blog will exist, and if it should eventually just become a place to post blog videos, of the type I do for Production Line. Youtube, and video content in general is HUGE, and increasingly I get the view that young people (the next gen of gamers) would rather watch and listen than read, sadly. (by any reckoning reading is better. You read at your own pace, and can copy and paste text into messages and so on).

A 2017 study showed that:

“The 25-34 (millennial) age group watches the most online videos and men spend 40% more time watching videos on the internet than women. ” 

That demographic is pretty much my audience, and my games do tend to skew slightly male. Video is not ‘the future’ video is now, and last year, and the last few years.

So video is king. Why do I even type stuff any more? Am I being resistant to change. Here is another study conclusion:

“Blog posts incorporating video attract 3x as many inbound links as blog posts without video.”

Also.. who is the audience. I make games that appeal to people in the UK,USA,Canada and Australia/NZ and to a growing extent Germany. This is not by design, its just that I’m English and I tend to translate my games after release, not on the day of release. I’ve never sent out a Chinese Press release, or hired a Chinese PR firm. but maybe I should? The most popular language on steam is now Chinese. I am, restricting my games to a small niche because I am targeting a niche language (English). Does anyone reading this really think that this will swing back the other way in their lifetime?

The future is doing blog posts as videos by fluent mandarin speakers. Thats just undeniable.

We are still ironing out some technical issues, but even with some annoying bugs, the % of revenue for Democracy 3 that comes from China each month has risen from 1% to 8%, because we now have a Chinese translation and unicode support. It also looks pretty cool:

As an established indie in his late forties, I can pretty much ride the current wave and retire (just about). If you are 18-24 and starting to work on a career as an indie game dev, your future is a mandarin video about your game. Get learning.

War Child armistice 2017: Raising money for Children affected by war

Posted on December 19, 2017

Long time blog readers will remember that we did this last year too. Basically Democracy 3 was in the armistice sale on steam, so over that period in November, 100% of the money positech earned from steam during the armistice is donated to war child. I just got Novembers sale reports and it looks like we raised $10,167.51 for the charity. if you bought the game or any of its DLC from 6-13th November, all your money (well, our cut of it anyway) went to helping refugees and victims of war.

Here is a video from war child aimed at gamers that shows why they are needed:

Last year we earned $15,166, so its lower this year, but then Democracy 3 is an older game now, and there are a lot more games on steam. Next year I challenge games like PUBG to join us. If a solo indie dev can do this, so can the big names. 7 days income is not going to put them out of business, but it can make an enormous difference to people who really need it.

 

Post-release shadowhand thoughts…

Posted on December 11, 2017

So we did it at last! Positech & Grey Alien Games managed to push the gargantuan project that is shadowhand through the big shiny gates labelled ‘release’ and put shadowhand on sale a few days ago on steam, humble store and GoG. Plus of course direct from us, although the percentage of people willing to buy a game from a developer is depressingly small, even though my own website has been around longer than…hmmm..let me see….steam, gog or the humble store. I guess they are worried I might immediately go bust (nope).

ANYWAY…

Shadowhand had a pretty strong initial release, it rapidly piled up the positive user reviews, and as I type this, the store page shows 60 reviews and a score of 95% positive. We also got a special ‘recommended’ badge in an extremely positive review in Eurogamer, and we have other big name reviews that will hit the interwebs this week. We spent some money to promote the game on launch, mostly through PCGamesN, and through Facebook, but didn’t go completely bananas. We are still spending a bit of money on ads, but not *that* much, and I think the very high review score, and addictive nature of the game should give us a decent likelihood of getting a lot of word-of-mouth recommendations.

Right as we launched the game, being able to directly contact curators became a thing, and we duly did our bit, but it proved totally pointless, as invariably, every indie developer on steam seems to have spammed every curator they can find with copies of their game, regardless of genre or suitability. TBH pretty much any system that is available at zero cost to every indie developer becomes useless, as there are so many desperate indies, and so many indie games on steam now, that such methods get immediately swamped and rendered useless.

Yup, I’m one of those (many) devs who thinks that the opening of steam submissions to absolutely everyone has…not worked as well as it should.

I have no control over that, so its best to focus on what I do have control of, which is getting eyeballs on shadowhand, and making sure those eyeballs are the right ones, and that they are going to like the game. One theory I have is that our main steam capsule art may be putting some players off. here is the capsule in question:

In purely aesthetic terms I think this works pretty well. The main character is there, a prominent face (good), and a recognizable and legible logo. Colors look nice, its high quality etc. The only concern I have is that because it focuses on one character, the character is female, and we already list the game as being part visual novel, given the impression many people have of visual novels, the image *may* be giving the impression that its more of a dress-up/romance game than a strategy/rpg affair. Because 99% of steam browsing potential customers have not heard of the game, if that is the impression they get from the image, they will not investigate further if they are looking for something a bit more strategic and complex (which the game actually is).

I wonder if something like this would have a higher click through:

And we are debating whether to give this a try. Annoyingly steam does not support A/B testing on such images. The character in this new image looks more angry and threatening, whereas our current image, she looks a little bit like she is posing for a vogue magazine cover, rather than holding up a stagecoach… hmm…

Anyway, thats just one approach. The second is to double down on game-awareness through facebook promotion. Essentially the whole decision is based on two numbers.

X, which is the probability of someone buying the game once they have clicked through to read a glowing article about it and…

Y which is the revenue that we as developers get from the sale of that game at whatever price they end up buying it. For example, lets say that to get someone to read that eurogamer review that is so glowing will cost us $1.10 in ads.  Our profit from doing so is essentially

profit = (X*Y) – $1.10.

I’m guessing that in the super-long term, the average sale price of a game is 50% off, so given $14.99, * 0.6 (for steam cut, refunds, sales tax, chargebacks), the developer earns approx $4.50 per copy sold. At a purchase probability of 10%, we lose money ($11.10 to earn $4.50), At a purchase probability of 50%, we double our money.

Of course we have zero control over the conversion rate form that article, it is what it is, but what we can manipulate is that $1.10 value. At a (I think reasonable) 10% lifetime conversion, we are getting $0.45 per click. if we can pay less than $0.45 we should promote that article more.

This is the kind of calculation I do FOR FUN.

Anyway…shadowhand is awesome, and if you want to know how it plays, here is me fumbling my way through a duel fairly early on in chapter 6: