Or otherwise titled, “Nine Things I Wish I Knew (Before I Went Indie and Made Two Hit Games).”

There was a day, four years ago, when I was not a media whore.

I’ve been indie for almost four years now.  As the sole full-time member of Pocketwatch Games, I tend to do a little bit of everything.  I regularly have to code in C++, PHP, HTML, TorqueScript, Javascript, and Actionscript.  I build games and social media with the Torque Game Engine, Flash, the Wordpress platform, and a PHPBB forum.  I am an Executive Producer, Lead Programmer, Art Director, Customer Support Specialist, Community Manager, Marketer, and Media Whore.

Four years ago, I was an AI Programmer.  That’s it.  I coded in C++.

There’s a whole ‘nother side to selling games beyond development that I wish I could have zapped into my brain before I went indie (bzzzt… I know Kung Fu).  Here’s what I wish I understood when I was just starting out.
The Landscape

When I got started at the end of 2004, the casual games industry was just starting to heat up.  I designed my first game, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, around a popular niche (Tycoon games) and prevailing trends in digital distribution (small download size, low barrier-to-entry gameplay).  In this way I wanted to satisfy an underserved niche while building my own place in the gaming world with “Discovery Channel” style games.

These days, the landscape for indie game developers is a bit broader.  Small indie teams can make a living – even a fortune – through these distribution channels:
•    Downloadable Console Games
•    Casual Portals
•    Hardcore Portals (Steam, Greenhouse)
•    Direct Sales (Your own website)
•    Flash games (Revenue from Mochi ads, sponsorship by portals like FlashGameLicense)
•    Community-based games (MMOs, virtual worlds)

I believe that it’s important to have an idea of your distribution platform before you begin to design your game.  It will define your limitations, help you to describe your audience, and most importantly, help you to nail down your marketing strategy.

Marketing – The Demo

Ahh, the all-important demo.  For any digitally-distributed game, the demo is the core of the marketing strategy.  More than that, it’s also a way for people to test out system requirements, thereby reducing the number of support requests you’ll get.

The design of the demo should be core to the design of the game.  If you expect that you can get away with simply limiting content and play time, your game will sell a tenth of what it should.  Instead, if you focus on what the customer actually gets to touch before they buy the game, you will be more likely to get them to pull out their credit card.  This means scaling that tutorial WAAAYYY back and focusing on the first 30 minutes to provide quick progression, fun gameplay, and flashy graphics.  I made the “explain everything in the tutorial up front” mistake on my second game, Venture Arctic, and it really hurt sales.  People lost interest before they got to the fun parts.

I have not found that you need to promise a huge amount of gameplay AFTER the demo in order to sell games.  Consider World of Goo, which only takes about 5 hours to finish and features something like a fifth of their gameplay in the demo itself.

It should be noted that some distribution channels don’t use demos, WiiWare being the obvious example.  WiiWare sales depend entirely on word-of-mouth.  Studies have also been done to show that in some circumstances, a gameplay video is more effective than a demo at converting customers, though I suspect this only applies to games with big traditional marketing budgets.

Retail also doesn’t rely on demos.  People buy games in retail for one of two reasons – they’ve heard of it and want to buy it, or the box looks great.  Make sure your box looks like the type of game your typical ignoramus customer would be willing to shell out cash for.  It should be obvious what type of game it is – that’s why my first game had the unwieldy moniker, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa.

Schedule

I like to make a strict schedule for development because it forces me to make decisions and I need to be able to pipeline my contractors.

Like most developers, my instinct was to schedule aggressively because as an employee I always liked to over-perform.  When I began running the business, I had to change gears and act in the role of producer.  I had to learn an entirely different, more conservative way to think about how long tasks would take.  Not only do I schedule all tasks in terms of worst-case-scenario, but I only schedule 4 days of coding/development per week.  Since I generally work a 6 day week, this leaves me two days a week for customer support on my previous games, developing my web presence, doing marketing, and managing contractors.

Also, I believe it’s a good idea to schedule 6 months at the end of a project to take time off, patch any bugs, deal with support requests, build a community, build alternate SKUs for retail or portals, and do your marketing.

In some cases, all this time away from development isn’t feasible –– if you are making casual games your business plan may revolve around frequent releases of small games.  Consider how this limits your ability to market your games and take that into account in your planning.

Employees

When my dad started his geophysical consulting business 20 years ago, he retained his former employer as a client.  He didn’t have to build his business “from the ground up” because he started with the foundation already in place.  This is also the best strategy for building a game development team.

If you don’t know anyone that can help you make your game, you probably will struggle to get it done at the quality you want.  Go get a job where you can meet like-minded fellows.  You can’t do this on your own.

If you build your team remotely, which is perfectly feasible and possibly the easiest way to go, you need to make sure your life is set up such that you’ve got plenty of personal connection to REAL PEOPLE.  Maybe rent out some cheap office space with another small business.  Game development requires long hours and you will be driven crazy if your only human contact for six days a week is via AIM.  A couple years in, I hired a full-time employee perhaps a bit impulsively because I was desperate for human contact.  In the end, it didn’t work out, which cost me the significant investment I made in that employee.

That said, I highly recommend having a core team of 2 and then contracting out the rest of the work.  I wish I had a full-time Art Director but it just hasn’t been in the cards yet.  I contract out Modeling, Animation, Sound/Music, Writing, and Graphic Design, all to separate people.  I knew some of them from previous jobs, and some I met through internet communities like GarageGames.com and indiegamer.com.

Community Relations

This leads me to your relationship to the game development community.  The indie community, centered around such sites as TigSource.com and indiegamer.com, can be incredibly helpful in getting the word out about your game, providing feedback, acting as a talent pool for potential contractors, and giving advice and connections that you can’t get on your own.  Develop a respectable presence amongst your peers and you will gain rewards that are otherwise unattainable.

Of course a smile, a handshake, and the traditional exchange of business cards can add an element to your business relationships that you can’t get online.  Go to GDC and attend any local indie events.  If there aren’t any, organize them yourself.  Before I had anything resembling a positive reputation, I started organizing an indie dinner in San Diego because the previous organizer ran out of time to do it himself.

Lastly, if there are any game-related colleges in your area, volunteer to work with them.  Game colleges are always eager to have contacts in professional game development and can hand you interns from their most choice candidates.  Interns are cheap and fun!

Buy vs. Build

If you come from the game development world, your instinct is probably to always build everything yourself.  Even though you aren’t paying yourself anything, as an indie, your time is actually MORE valuable than it was as an employee.  Think about it.  If you plan to build a successful business, you will eventually make more money than you did as an employee.  The question is, how fast can you get there?

Even if you are capable of building something yourself, you have more work on your plat than you can handle.  Contract the work out, leverage open source systems, or buy royalty-free media.

Music is a great example.  Maybe you can compose some music.  But you are probably best off finding one of the myriad audio guys out there that’s desperate for work.  You also might be able to find some royalty free music from one of these sites for EXTREMELY cheap:
•    http://www.sounddogs.com/
•    http://soundrangers.com/
•    http://audiojungle.net/
•    http://www.opuzz.com/
•    http://www.shockwave-sound.com/

But maybe you can save even more time having your audio guy dig through those sites it and pick your music out for you.  How do you maximize your dollars and minimize your involvement?  The answer of the Buy vs. Build question is almost always “Buy”.

Building a Website

Your primary sales for your first game will likely not come from your own website.  But eventually you should aim to own your customers instead of handing them over to Yahoo or Microsoft or Valve.  Direct sales are the holy grail of indie games because that direct conduit you have to paying customers is worth a lot more than the twenty dollars they shell out for an individual game.  Owning the email addresses of these paying customers is how you build long-term value in your company.

I’m not going to get into “How to Build a Successful Website” – I’m not qualified and there are tons of resources out there on the subject.  But in terms of game specific stuff, here are some numbers I have learned that might be useful:
•    On a decent game website, 25-40% of visitors will download your demo.
•    For a decent game, 1-5% of demo users will convert to paying customers.
•    5-30% of newsletter recipients will buy a new game.
•    20-50% of paying customers will buy more than one game.

What does this mean?  Allow people to sign up for newsletters – they are basically telling you they want to buy your games when new ones come out.  Do everything you can to increase your download rate (build gigantic download buttons that funnel your customers to your demo).  And try to sell more than one game from your site – every paying customer is worth more than the revenue from one game, you just need to get them to realize their buying potential.

Doing Business with Publishers/Distributors

The first thing to understand here is what the different business entities are:
•    Retail Publisher – Creates the packaging for you game deals with the stores directly.  The quality of the publisher is directly related to their clout with the retailers.  Your publisher may help with localization and Q&A, but don’t expect them to do any marketing for you, even if they promise.
•    Distributor – Someone who aggregates a bunch of games into a catalog, which can be sold by affiliates
•    Portal/Affiliate – An individual site, often pulling games from a distributor.  In a few cases, you may want to deal directly with the portal so you can cut out the middle man, but sales will only be significant from the top ten portals.  Don’t do individual deals with small portals, it’s a waste of time.

With publishers, ask for an advance.  If they aren’t willing to give it to you, ask someone else.  The only thing worth trusting from a publisher is the number they write on a check made out to you.  If you can’t find anyone willing to give you an advance, get a sales guarantee.  Don’t give up your distribution rights if you can help it, and make sure you have a way to get your retail rights back if they are no longer selling the game.

While it’s good to develop friendly, personal relationships with publishers, distributors, and portals (we’re all sleeping in the same bed), in the back of your mind you should expect them to act like vending machines for your games.  If you expect them to attract potential customers rather than simply dispense games, you’re likely to be disappointed.

That said, wider distribution is better.  The more eyeballs that see your game, the more units you will sell.  Distribute as widely as you can, and don’t get greedy about royalty rates.  Moving 50% more units matters much more than squeaking out an extra 2% of revenue.  And the more people that see your game, the more people that will search for your game on the web, thereby landing on your website and generating direct sales.  Think of the cut of revenue you give up to portals as your advertising budget.  And that is advertising  that will ALWAYS turn a profit.

Develop Press Contacts

Lastly, Kelly Heckman, the editor of GamersInfo.net, once gave a talk where she encouraged indie developers to send physical copies of their games to press contacts.  This is 100% true.  A link to your game in an email or press release can be easily ignored at best, or even seem shady at worst.  After hearing that talk, I sent Kelly a copy of my first game burned onto a CD with a cheap pack of plastic animals from a 99 cent store.  I’ve received positive and prompt coverage on GamersInfo.net ever since.

There are three things an indie developer can do to advertise his game: use Google Adwords (only worth it if your game converts well or you sell more than one game), distribute your demo far and wide, and get press coverage in the form of previews and reviews.  Treat the press like the girl you really want to go to the prom with.  Be bold.  Be confident.  Be sexy.  But be honest, genuine, and personal.  To all of them.  Be a media whore.

I’ve started a lot of game development “companies” in my life, starting when I was 7.  I’ve finally found a way to make a living with this one at 30.  The difference between then and now is not that my game ideas are better.  I’m not even that much better of a programmer.  I just spent the intervening years developing a broad set of skills to successfully handle the diverse chores of running a small company.

Besides, my 7 year old self would have been far too embarrassed to ask Kelly Heckman to the proverbial prom.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Design, INSPIRATION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.