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Markets and You - 2015-08-27

(This is a reproduction from my old blog.)


What Games Are Not

Games, as @retroremakes paraphrases my mini Twitter rant, are not commodities. This is a good thing because commodities are goods or services that have substantial fungibility - that is they can easily be substituted.

Copper is a commodity. Crude oil is a commodity. Tea leaves, coffee beans, and sugar are commodities.

There is only one Diablo 3. There are similar games, but the fungibility is low; Torchlight 2 is not a proper substitute.

You can absolutely have games that act as commodities, such as high accuracy clones within a mobile market, but we're not going to discuss those here, because you weren't so foolish as to try and make and sell one of those, right?


Why Does This Matter?

Within the last few months I've been distressed at an appalling spate of poor analyses within (indie) game development. They range from urges to aim for small games that earn 1,000% profit, citing indie game development bubbles, and more recently suggesting game developers are in dire straits because of an impending "indie mass extinction event".

I've already addressed most of the doomsaying in previous posts - I'm not interested in lending any more page space to that stuff. Instead I will talk about what you can do if you want to sell commercial indie games successfully.

Aside: The insufferable phrase "it depends" is implicit throughout most of this. Anyone telling you they have a hard and fast process to strike indie game oil 100% of the time is pissing in your sugary breakfast cereal. This doesn't mean it's all up to the roll of some dice, it just means you need to focus your attention and time and effort on elements you can actually control. You know, like most of life's endeavors.


Understand the What and the Who

I've said that obscurity is the biggest obstacle to indie devs and this is still true. The key to this is knowing, very deeply and assuredly, what you are making. The lock is who you are making this thing for.

There are a myriad of ways to fail:

Having a poor trailer (e.g. 10 seconds of your pointless company logo, 10 seconds of buildup, you get the idea.) Technical issues like crashing or corrupt save files. Uninteresting game loops. Inappropriate pricing. Marketing/PR issues. Poor launch due to timing or other factors. Your payment processor/distribution platform went AWOL. You can't sell your game because your cat chewed through your website server cables. Et cetera. Warner Bros. sure did underestimate how negatively PC gamers would react to all those technical issues - the backlash with Steam refunds and Batman: Arkham Knight was sincerely astounding to see unfold.

So understand what your product and/or service is, first and foremost. I don't mean in broad strokes. Don't tell me your game is "A pixel art platformer." Tell me your game is, "A cooperative precision platformer with backstabbing elements in a rich, colorful water-moon world." Or something like that. If you can't even excite yourself with your game description go back to the drawing board.

I really mean this because you're eventually going to try to sell someone with the concept of what your product is. Nothing will kill your sales faster than a description no one has any interest in (aside from no one knowing about your game!)


Move and Shoot Game

That's what my game Steam Marines 1 is, and what Steam Marines 2 will be. Sure, there's window dressing: Oh, you're controlling steampunk marines on a spaceship fighting robots and aliens! Oh, there are roleplaying elements and you have character portraits and stats and armor and weapons and, and, and...

But at the end of the day the game is about moving and shooting. If someone does not enjoy moving and shooting, they will not enjoy either Steam Marines game.

Aside: You'll note that shooting already implies a bit of narrative sugar on top of the game mechanics. Shooty games are different from point-and-click adventure games although you're generally still placing a cursor on a thing and clicking.

It's important to sell directly to your audience if you're an indie developer. This is why we should be happy games are not a commodity. You will spend your time explaining in loving, but concise, detail why your game is not SPACE MARINES IN SPACE 6: THE SPACENING. You will explain this one awesome core mechanic that binds the game together. You can sell the narrative - steady progress as enemies close in all around you, or a procedural world to explore and burrow and build, or everyone is playing mind games with your character and you have to escape a web of lies.

And it's more important than ever that you sell them on, and deliver, a real idea. Not some carbon copied anemic version of an idea. Forget Steam refunds - if you want to do this long term you should want to cultivate 1) a core user base, and 2) a reputation for producing quality.

Aside: When I say quality, I mean quality to the people who understand and want and are willing to pay for your product. You can't please everyone, but there are definitely some people you should want to please.

Find a niche, a specialty, and fill it while ringing a bell. You are not selling salt for fifty cents a pound, you are selling BEST F%$^ING GAME OF THE YEAR 2016 FOR $9.99 USD, COME ONE, COME ALL.


Effervescent Effects

There are market realities to face. It is unlikely your zombie survival simulator is going to stand out from the crowd of other zombie survival simulators. Yes, even if it's a Souls-like. This does not mean the games market is over saturated, or that you can't sell zombie survival simulators. I'm just saying you're going to run into some competition in that market.

I promise you one thing: you are not anywhere near market saturation for your tiny indie game. Your problem is the exact opposite - you haven't got anywhere near the sets of eyeballs to glaze over your game. Now there is a cost to getting more eyeballs on your game, and if your potential market is too small this can mean it's not cost effective to try and market more.

Aside: Early on when I was developing Steam Marines many people (other developers!) remarked on my amazing incompetence for trying to make a commercial roguelike. These days commercial roguelikes are thriving and those sorts of people now call me a sellout. What-the-fuck-ever.

But as Simon Roth says, it's way cheaper to market a game a bit more than to make a whole new game. Also, you can probably use the practice.

There are many ways to stand out, and from my last five years of observations most indie developers do next to none of them (including myself when I first started, I might add.)

Aside 1: You may ask how I could possibly know that last bit, and it's because sometimes I'll just straight up ask them what they did for marketing/PR. The short version is tweeting a few times and posting to Screenshot Saturday is not a good marketing plan. Sometimes you get sad public accounts of developers basically admitting they did nothing.

(Edit: Raigan Burns, a developer of N++ and author of the above linked Neogaf post, emailed me and explained that the N++ team actually spent "about $50k and 3 months on marketing through the course of the project". So perhaps N++ is more an example of marketing gone wrong as opposed to zero effort.)

Aside 2: "Build it and they will come" is bullshit. That's no kind of business strategy.


The Devil's in the Details

Marketing is not a dirty word. It means communicating the value of your game to potential customers. That's it. However you do it, be it social media or gaming websites or good old fashioned feet on the ground knocking on doors, you're trying to say "Hey, look at this great thing you may be interested in!"

Things you can do to market and promote your games:

Those are just some of the more generic resources and options. In my case I physically went to board game meetups because Steam Marines had intrinsic appeal to those people. You can go to genre or device (iOS/Android) specific podcasts or streaming channels on Twitch or YouTube.

Not every platform is going to dump your game in front of hundreds of thousands or millions of eyeballs - you should probably hit as many as you reasonably can. There are many postmortems of successful Kickstarter campaigns and you can learn a lot from those - there's a ton of overlap!

Ignore Greenlight postmortems - Greenlight is a seriously low barrier to entry these days.

If this sounds like it'd be an awful lot of work... it is. The bottom line is if no one knows about your game no one will buy it. That's a bit of an irreducible problem.


Holy Moly, Batman!

You don't have to do all of these. In fact you most likely do not have the time to do so, particularly if you are a one person shop. There are lots and lots of resources on indie game development, the business and marketing angles, and so on. The internet is a vast and wonderful resource - use it to your advantage.

Thanks for reading,
Mister Bums


Mistakes, Problems, and Solutions (Part 1) - 2014-12-29

(This is a reproduction from my old blog.)

(This is the first of probably two posts and is primarily from a developer standpoint.)

 

I Have No Idea What I Am Doing

My first commercial game, Ignition Impulse, was an almost completely unmitigated disaster in terms of profit, scope, design, and whatever else you can think of to measure success of a video game.

It was intended to be similar to a childhood game I played incessantly, Escape Velocity, with space combat, trading, and exploration. Simple! 2D! What could go wrong? I picked up a small commercial game engine and set to work.

I want to be clear I wasn’t quite that naive, but if you asked me circa 2010 if I thought Ignition Impulse would have been a commercial success I probably would have given it even odds. The hard reality was that after a year in development it was done in the sense that it was playable. It had no polish and my trailer was embarrassing, I released it as Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) on the now defunct site IndieVania and grossed under $2,000 USD.

Aside: It did not help my morale that Space Pirates and Zombies (S.P.A.Z.) – an example of a non-terrible game made in the exact same game engine – was light years ahead in terms of everything that makes a video game good. And it was being developed alongside my own pale imitation of a game. Ouch! I should have taken notes – but for some asinine reason I did not.

 

Aside #2: PWYW as a game selling model is unworkable. Look to the mobile market for models that actually work. In this aspect at least I was incredibly naive. This wasn’t shareware in the 90s and I suspect this wouldn’t have worked well even if it was.

 

Tangible and Intangible

There was very little real value obtained from the development of Ignition Impulse. I made basically no money, I had developed mostly in a bubble, and my company name seemed very apt. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of mistakes I made:

Perhaps oddly only two things I did not completely fail at was projecting the development schedule and the budgeting for the project. The only +1 for my prior programming experience, apparently. Still, a very clear disaster.

If I’m hard on newer game developers it’s probably due in no small part to recognizing them making the exact same mistakes I made. Not everyone has the stubbornness and financial buffer to recover from blowing up a project like I did.

Aside: This is how green I was – I almost named the game White Hole. I am not joking. I wish I was joking. I think I still have an image of the game with that title. No, I won’t dig it out and show you.

 

So It Goes

Mistakes were clearly made. The obvious thing to do after failing all over yourself is to examine why you failed. I no longer have the note, but I remember scratching out the basic problems with creating a financially successful video game circa 2011:

These are the four main areas where I stumbled and fell. The problems are now outlined. Solutions?

 

“Never Tell Me The Odds”

By this point I had collected myself and gorged on the various literature on the topic of game development. It was clear that I was in over my head. I had never seriously used a mobile device and I had no understanding of that market. I was a desktop coder through-and-through. Stick with what I know, I’m sure I thought.

You can dig through my other blog posts for hard numbers, but the short version is game developers as an industry are not compensated well. Lots of people want to be developers, fewer start, and fewer still succeed. The odds are stacked against you unless you have serious financial backing for development costs and a hard marketing push.

But, being the stubborn fellow that I am, I outlined the problems and came up with some solutions. I made a company website. I made a game website with forums. I started, almost on day one, to post about my game on various sites. I released screenshots, gifs, developer thoughts, mingled with other developers online and a few in-person, and gave and accepted advice from hard-earned experience.

The nice thing about failure is that it loves company. Developers, as a group, are great people to commiserate with – the pain is real and shared. They are also, unfortunately, a bad bunch to look toward for career advice. Here is some advice I have been given by other developers who failed around the same time I did, some also having much longer strings of failures:

The short version is that my second game pretty much puts all four bits to bed. This does not mean that PC gaming is inherently better or good compared to other markets, that you might have an easier time targeting a mass market, or that there is no luck involved – but to suggest such extremes is clearly demotivating and inaccurate.

Survivorship bias is a hell of a thing. I could nod to a lot of postmortems and quotes from bigger, successful indie developers to try and affirm what I currently believe. Instead I’ll simply point out two salient points:

You can extrapolate a lot from just those two bits of information. The first is that if you do what the average developer does you should expect to have average performance which is not good – so aim higher.

Observation #1: Don’t necessarily reinvent the wheel (unless you have a really cool wheel), but do consider what you can do differently from others in your field. It will not only help you stand out, but will also give you and others a different perspective – you might find your intended audience isn’t but another is!

The second thing you should notice is that there are only a small handful of successes, but they span many genres. Excluding perhaps outliers like Papers, Please these games can be categorized into fairly broad groups.

Observation #2: Genre originality is not required for success. Do not be dissuaded from doing “another X” simply because there are other Xs; there are other Xs because Xs have succeeded!

Did you look at the survivorship bias Wikipedia link I posted above? In the article it describes quite an illuminating story:

“During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. Researchers from the Center for Naval Analyses had conducted a study of the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions, and had recommended that armor be added to the areas that showed the most damage. Wald noted that the study only considered the aircraft that had survived their missions — the bombers that had been shot down were not present for the damage assessment. The holes in the returning aircraft, then, represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still return home safely. Wald proposed that the Navy instead reinforce the areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, since those were the areas that, if hit, would cause the plane to be lost.”

But hmm – we don’t have access to much data on the characteristics or development processes of failed game projects – do we? You have a little information from the Ignition Impulse project and some few others, but not nearly as much about the standout successes.

Well we can almost certainly determine that finding common traits in successful games will, over all the data, have some applicable relevance to making your own game succeed. It’s just the questions of which information is actually salient and what other information you have but overlooked.

The WWII bomber story should have automatically drawn your attention to a big red flag, namely that you’ve probably never heard of the vast majority of failed games. There are plenty of games – but you’ve never heard of most of them. In all likelihood you know about more successful games than unsuccessful games – especially if you are just a gamer and not also a developer.

Observation #3: People need to know about your game in order to become players. It doesn’t matter if you’re pushing that new-fangled-X-killer or a tiny nation border crossing simulator. What I’m trying to say is that marketing and word-of-mouth is an unarmored weak spot. So armor it.

It is frequently the third and fourth mentalities in combination, “luck = success” and “build it and they will come”, that conspire to ruin so many developers. Don’t be like those developers – you need to do more than just build your game otherwise you really are just relying on luck!

Which brings us to our final observation.

Observation #4: Failed developers and failed projects may not explicitly tell you how to succeed, but there is value and data there. We can’t know for sure what all the common elements are between all failed developers and failed projects, and maybe there aren’t any, but we can identify patterns. Thought experiments: What if you discovered that the vast majority of failed game projects were released more than 100% behind their original schedules? Or 75% were over budget? Or the average size of the teams was 1.3? Or if 90% of the games were in 2D? Or 3D? Or if 99% were never localized? Or if 87% were only on Windows?

What about combinations? Not too many successful games about 11th century South America… but also not too many unsuccessful games about 11th century South America. Sometimes knowing what you don’t know is also useful.

There are an infinite number of ways to succeed and fail. Don’t just rely on your past experience – seek out others’. This is just the good old fashioned advice to learn from other people’s mistakes. None of us can fail or succeed as broadly as all of us.

 

These All Seem Like Really Basic Failures, Bums

Yeah, I know. But we see them over and over again, and not just from new developers. If you’re a programmer ask yourself how many times you make the same silly syntax error. If you’re an artist ask how many times you lose work because you forgot to save your file (or imagine something else because I’m not an artist.)

They’re basic, but people forget or are tired or are stressed or it’s passed to someone who is and the accountability chain breaks – you get the idea. These aren’t even nitty-gritty details that you might never even think of. Occasionally I tweet about old screenshots of your games existing forever (because the Internet) and whenever I do I usually get a few seasoned developers checking and going, “Oh, shit!”

For empirical reasons I’m a big fan of going over the basics and checklists. Unless you’ve never forgotten anything I suggest you write it down. Actually, even then. You’re not always working alone after all.

 

That’s the end of Part 1.

Thanks for reading,
Mister Bums

You can contact me at yjseow@worthlessbums.com, Twitter, or leave a comment below.