Flopping Successfully: Running a Studio Without a Huge Hit

[Music] thank you my name is ingvel and I run a small studio called henchman and goon out of Bergen which is a very wet City in the western part of Norway I'm first and foremost a visual artist and I originally come from traditional art but I ended up in games because games are cool uh I'm still an artist though and I went and got myself a degree in concept art a bunch of years ago the main difference now is that I work in a team which I really enjoy 11ish years ago I co-founded henchmen and goon with a fairly large group of friends the mostly right out of uni since then we've launched three games Flem which is a small 2D platformer for PC pod which is the biggest and most

ambitious game we've launched so far for PC and console and podkids which is an activity app for children which we launched on Google Play Last Summer we're also currently uh we have three games in progress at different stages but I'm not going to talk about any of those I'm going to talk a little bit about code we started working on code in 2015 roughly three years after we founded henchman goon and we spent three years making it for most of the time we were about four people working on it uh with the addition of one or two people from time to time until the last six months of development when we were fortunate enough to be able to grow our team to seven people for the remaining development plus audio and music people pod launched on Nintendo switch in June of 2018 and it Tanked we were so disappointed and fair to say that summer wasn't particularly fun for

any of us but things ended up turning around and I'm going to get back to that a little bit later before I continue I want to go back a little and tell you a bit about where I come from I grew up in a family of artists musicians actors and all sorts of creative people I have been making art for as long as I can remember and the idea of artistic success has been present in my life just as long I decided very early that I wanted to live off my art and as soon as that becomes an option you also start looking at what it means to be a successful or a failed artist and you get sort of competitive and protective of your art your style and your idea of what a successful artist might be I'm no different from anyone else so I certainly went through that whole phase of being a young arrogant pretentious artist I identified myself with the idea of what I thought an artist should be and to be honest when we're young we often

get those ideas by looking at the cliches one of those cliches is the notion that you should suffer for your art for all of yourself into your art don't let regular life come in the way of artistic greatness and all that nonsense and when someone suggests that you may need to pay attention to something other than the art like getting a paying job sometimes we can kind of get a little bit defensive why should I have to do anything but create art from the depths of my soul right my mom never had the patience for any of that so she simply told me English artists to need to eat now you can take that statement literally we all need to eat we know this but in the context that this was said it meant a lot more than that it meant that I wasn't different from anyone else and we all need to do what it takes to function as humans both were regards to our physical needs

and as part of the society that society that we live in we can't simply decide to be something and claim the privilege to be to be released from all other responsibilities so artists too need to eat that statement from my mom kind of pulled me down to earth at a time where I needed that to happen it stuck with me and I brought that with me into everything I've done since including starting off henchman and goon which becomes important later in the story so fast forward again to the founding of henchmen and goon like I mentioned we were mostly right out of uni when we started henchman and guten some of us had been freelancing for a bit and we knew a little bit about running a small business but for the most part we were kind of oblivious to what setting off on this adventure would mean we had a bunch of reasons why we wanted to run over our own Studio we wanted creative freedom we all had

our own ideas that we wanted to see realized we wanted to keep working with each other with our friends and we wanted to build something for ourselves however first and foremost we wanted to make games and there were no local jobs available not just jobs there were hardly any Studios where I come from so starting our own Studio was basically our only choice if we wanted to to stay in our hometown without giving up on our dreams so there we were a whole bunch of really inexperienced game developers deciding to go pro where do you begin with something like that well making a plan seems like a good way to start and the first thing on this plan is to survive making arts making games takes time so in order to do that we needed to survive in the meantime

we spent the first three years doing contract work and having jobs on the side and by contract work I mean stuff like designing menus for local restaurants and making book covers and stuff like that all the while making a tiny little game for ourselves in the moments between we were okay with this because we knew we had a plan we were working towards a goal and the ultimate goal was no contract work all in-house games all the way anyway we finally launched phlegm almost three years after we found attention goon we sort of expected there to be some profit here we made the calculations and based on the tiny budget that we spent we figured that it wouldn't take many sales for us to recoup and make a little bit extra that didn't happen of course but it wasn't a huge disappointment we made and we shipped something and that felt good uh it had also been a bit of an experiment to make something for

ourselves so we took it like a learned as a learning experience and kept moving forward however we were no longer in the honeymoon phase so we had to start thinking of what direction to take people were getting a bit tired of having to work on the side we'd started some other projects that didn't pan out it was difficult getting Project funding and there was an increasing disagreement of where to focus our energy in the studio we'd started to build a pretty good customer base with all the contract work we had been doing and some of the founders discovered that they were more interested in moving towards software development than game development we'd gotten some bigger more serious clients over the years and there was the prospect of delivering some quite interesting solutions to the offshore sector which can be quite lucrative business to be in so at this point we decided that we would be better better off splitting the company in half instead of having two groups within the company pulling in different directions

and that's what we did no drama it was all very friendly we even stayed in the same offices sharing people and projects when we needed to those who stayed started working on pod while continuing doing commissions and having jobs on the side and we just kept working towards that end goal that was still no commissions all full-time in-house work we'd been working on finding external funding for various projects since starting henchman and goon it was about four years since we founded the company and we were still doing all the things that we thought we wouldn't we wouldn't do anymore commissions jobs on the side and all that stuff that wasn't making games we were still living hand to mouth and still had to Pro had no profit to show for it but we didn't have nothing we had built some value we built a solid team of people who cared about each other and worked well together we had proof we could finish and ship projects we had spent a lot of time building a

large network of people who supported and believed in US and all that hard work resulted in Project funding that enabled us to finish code we still had to do some work on the side and hustle for more funding from time to time but we got to spend three years mostly focusing on finishing our project they were three years of Joy tears stress and excitement and that feeling when you ship something you've agonized over for years is indescribable so when it doesn't turn out the way you expect it's absolutely heartbreakingly devastating the story that we're often told as developers is that a game has to sell more than ten thousand twenty thousand or whatever number of copies at launch to be a success and by success we of course mean recouping and making a profit so much time and resources and love had gone into this project compared to any other we'd done and the feeling of failure was on a whole other level

we told ourselves that this would be the thing that pushed us over the hill everything would get easier if we just got to that launch date but it wasn't just that this project included a lot more people than just ourselves we had employees and investors and partners with royalty agreements who all depended on us so the feeling of failure was accompanied by the feeling of letting all these people down and it's almost like it's almost like dealing with a loss you you put all your love and energy into creating something beautiful and then it dies the moment it comes into the world so you start second guessing yourself and wonder whether there's any points to continue you know are we really supposed to suffer this much for our art however we'd been doing this for six years at this point and while we contemplated whether or not we had a future we did what we knew we went back to doing commissions we

started a new project we took jobs on the side we just went back to surviving and while we survived something peculiar started to happen the expectations when you launch a game is that you'll sell a lot in the first few weeks or maybe months and then you'll see a large drop off so when you have bad numbers in those first few weeks you expect it to drop to nothing and that recoup is a far gone dream what we saw happening with pod was hardly any drop-off at all and after some time we figured that if this continued we might just hit that recoup Milestone yet so now we kind of had to regroup and figure out the way forward again but we also shifted our perspective a

bit and we started thinking in way of priorities instead of plants we've been doing the same thing over and over for years and it wasn't working well it was sort of working we were still alive but the question was do we want to spend all our time chasing some idea of success while surviving disappointment after disappointment so we got a little introspective and looked at what we had instead we had a team of friends who cared about each other we had a community that believed in us and wanted to support us we had a company and project we cared about and we had the desire to make games together and we came up with this new list of priorities so this sounds very clear-cut of course which it wasn't it's not a shift from one day to another but there was a shift in perspective that gradually led to a clearer and clearer way to prioritize however for simplicity's sake we came up with a new list of priorities

we needed to survive of course uh you can't make anything if your basic needs aren't met most importantly we wanted to enjoy every day of our work life while making beautiful art and fun and interesting games and we didn't want to chase an imaginary thing that might come true sometime in the future so let me break down what this list means for us survival to survive means to love and care for each other it means that every person in the group Works to create an environment where we all feel safe and happy to feel safe and happy people need a few basic things they need a decent salary food and shelter they need time for a social life family and friends they need time for themselves and they need time need to feel heard and valued sometimes that means slowing down development if it's taking a toll it means we need to allow people to be unproductive sometimes we're all down and uninspired

and we need room to get through that so we can bounce back instead of burning out and it means creating a space for people to be inspired and give their best when they can in other words it means putting people first and project second enjoy life and make art you've probably all heard the saying life is what happens when you're busy making plans and that's kind of what this point represents the reason we got into game development in the first place was because we are creative people who like making things it's what we spend our free time doing before we made it our jobs if the work becomes nothing more the time press tasks on the way to finishing a product and the bright spots of your career are the days you finish something what's the point however if you love the thing you make and enjoy the process of making it you look back and feel happy and accomplished

another side of this is that all the work that comes after you you launch something will be much easier if you have this relationship with your work reporting to new platforms cultivating a community marketing and PR you'll be able to have fun doing that stuff too and lastly let's see what happens the thing about disappointment is that it's really just a result of reality not living off to your up to your expectations if you manage your expectations you're less likely to get disappointed this doesn't mean that you shouldn't do what you can to have a successful launch or that you should be a pessimist about everything it means you should have a plan for how to proceed if that launch doesn't bring in the cash to solve all your problems have a plan for how to survive if everything fails for how to keep your people and yourself happy and safe in the face of disappointment so while we focused on what we needed to do to survive and try to get better at

just enjoying the work in the process pod numbers kept getting better and 2021 we had the best summer since launch 2022 was even better and we came back from summer vacation uh discovering that we had recouped ahead of our estimations for reference the first few years we saw about a 20 20 drop in sales from year to year in 2022 we had a 26.5 percent increase compared to 2021 and this trend it looks like it's continuing into 2023. so now we're getting kind of confused right this isn't what's supposed to happen it's it's not how things work right uh so why why are the numbers behaving this way um there are of course a number of things that we did to try to affect the numbers um we kept launching on new platforms we set up community events we were present at conventions and conferences we set up

discounts as often as we could and we tried to be generally active and responsive with regards to our online community nothing really groundbreaking though basically just maintaining our product so we tried to figure out what was happening here because if there is a recipe for reproduction that would be great right the conclusion we came to is that we actually did make a good product which almost sounds kind of sounds kind of dumb and self-congratulatory but I'm building to a point I promise so poet has a good Metascore good reviews good ratings good feedback and an absolutely lovely community the thing is that all of this is incredibly easy to overlook if you measure your success by copy sold and money made it's easy to give up and to stop maintaining something that you think has failed and I think there are a lot of good games out there that fall into that

category we all work in in an industry that is notorious for pushing people to the brink we are often so focused on these milestones and launch dates and sales numbers that we forget where people choose to work in this industry in the first place and one of the reasons we're so good at pushing ourselves is because we're also incredibly passionate about what we do we want to keep doing it we want to get better at it we want to deliver we want to have a work out there we want our art to be recognized and we're a bit too ready to suffer for it and this is where I come back to what my mom told me artists to need to eat and what it represents for me it helps me it helps me take a step back and remember that reaching these goals isn't work anything if I don't survive or if it takes away the joy of the process the way we try to implement this and how we run our studio and what I hope that you'll be able to take away from this

talk is set goals for your life not your products enjoy the work take care of yourself and the people around you and this one is the most important one plan for a way to fail comfortably so you don't feel like giving up just to be because things don't turn out the way you want you hope to and give yourself some slack because you really really really do not have to be number one to be a success thank you all so much for coming I think we have time for questions if there are any [Applause] don't be shy okay I'm moving on to okay one question here right yeah yes uh thank you for the inspiring talk and uh now with all these lessons so like what what are you doing now like what's what's happening in the

future with these takeaways uh what's happening with our studio in the future well we're like I said we're different projects right now and we and with our kind of main main thing that we're we're trying to uh finish and get funded right now I think what the way these uh things kind of affect that is that this project has it's taken a lot longer for us to finish than we wanted it to because we've been very conscious every step of the way not to put too much pressure on the team and try to kind of take that step back and look at okay if if if things are moving too fast if things are getting too difficult then we need to put put a break on things and figure out what we need to do before we move forward yeah uh I guess I don't have a question I just want to say congrats on being a success thank you so much

yeah um given what you know now about how pods uh sales kind of graph goes would you have done anything different or what would you have done differently leading up to the launch of it is that um so we this we were a very young Studio making this game and it was our first really big project and we decided to self-publish so we had we did everything ourselves and of course doing that not knowing how to do things uh you're bound to make some mistakes so I think I think what we would have done different now is to try to find we would have probably have tried to find a publisher even if it's someone that doesn't put money into the project but finding someone who knows how to do a game launch and how to get visibility because of course if we'd

had better numbers at launch and imagining that the the Curve was the same we still would have done better than what we actually did I I think yeah you're next congratulations on your success and thank you um you mentioned that one of your greatest assets that you didn't realize you had what you do now is your community that supported you how did you build that community um we've well stuff like this we've always been very it's been important to us to be kind of present at Community event s so we've we've been working very hard to just get to know everybody in the Norwegian game community and also like going to conferences and conventions and and I think it's easy to to when you when you come to the point that you are a developer you've released something you've done something it's easy to kind of ignore people who you who you look at at as uh kind of not not

as skilled or that haven't accomplished these things and for us it's always always been very important to like not ignore anyone because you never know where where like uh wisdom comes from basically so so like welcome everybody uh who wants to be part of it and and try to kind of just like be there for everyone for your fans for the players and just for students for whoever like let everybody be part of that journey I think hey uh thanks so much for the talk uh my question is regarding kind of the Dual uh priorities of wanting to maintain this really kind of uh healthy workspace where you can kind of take things at the pace that you're able to in the moment but then also still the continued goal of like no Contracting no commissions uh I guess how what's been your experience in kind of trying to balance those two goals for like satisfaction um

doing more and more contract work we've been getting more and more interesting jobs so right now we're working with other game studios on really cool projects we're working with like uh orchestras to create visuals for their concerts and so we get to do more interesting stuff so I think that goal has changed uh to just like it's not no more contracts but just like let's let's find the coolest most interesting contracts we can get and let's do awesome projects with awesome awesome people thank you um congrats on pushing over and keep at it thank you because I know it is very hard um how do you approach um Publishers to to be able to like fun

or picture game so how we approach Publishers uh to get our our Games published um reach out however you can send them emails uh talk to them on uh like events like this we just try to put ourselves out there and don't be like not be shy not be afraid of getting a no because I think that's something that a lot of people they they're afraid uh that they're going to get a negative answer and then they don't try and and that's what kind of the biggest thing that you need to overcome I think thank you hi what was your paid advertising strategy for POD at launch and now that you've recouped and made some profit have you been reinvesting in that sort of user acquisition and how has that strategy changed oh a lot of questions so uh what was our our budget and

strategy for marketing yeah um we had we got an investor in um that was like six months before we launched and they put in a marketing budget so we were able to hire uh a PR Studio to do uh the marketing for us help us with uh press Outreach and uh do do create press releases and stuff like that we we got we got kind of the help that we needed on that front uh which was very helpful because we definitely wouldn't have been able to reach out to the press the way that we did if we hadn't used a studio for that and are you still marketing the game today sorry are you still marketing the game today um yeah so we we do like I said we do a lot of uh not necessarily High budget stuff but we we do discounts we do events we we we launch on platforms when we can we kind of try to always be relevant and be be present on social

media and stuff like that and from time to time we do uh paid advertisements but it all usually very low budget stuff but it's it seems to be enough to kind of just keep things rolling and and just like get to the critical mass where stuff uh starts Happening by itself thank you uh congratulations it's really cool to hear um you mentioned how when you started there was basically no game industry in Norway and that was my experience as well when I moved away like 10 years ago there were basically I need nothing and there's uh but there's always been a lot more in for example Denmark and Sweden I think so two questions one like what do you think that is that where is that difference come from and is it different today uh why is the Swedish and danish industry so much bigger and

if it's still like that today um it is definitely still like that today the Norwegian industry is very small and I'm not I don't know if I have a good answer for why it's like that but there has definitely been um a lot of work from the Swedish and danish governments to kind of push those Industries forward and there is a lot of interesting stuff happening in Norway as well we have we have gotten a lot more uh um attention from the government in the later years and there's definitely we're seeing kind of the fruits of that now there is there is growth definitely and there is a lot more interesting stuff coming out of Norway as well so hopefully it's going to kind of level out a bit a little bit but yeah I think it's going to be difficult to come to the level of especially the Swedish industry cool thank you all right congratulations by the way um thank you I'm I have a question actually very much along the same lines I'm also from a part of Canada that is not where

the bulk of the industry is um most people would tell me just move to Montreal if you want to continue to try to do business and games in Canada and I really want to try and grow games in my little you know similar to Bergen but in Canada you know it's not where the Hub is I wonder if you have any if you've had any challenges or had people you know suggest the same to you that you shouldn't try to you shouldn't try to make it work in Bergen or have you done anything locally to try and help grow games there as well yeah there definitely was in the beginning uh kind of people who like well why don't you just like help build the industry in Oslo because it's already bigger there's you know closer to the government all that stuff um but I think so people from Bergen are pretty stubborn so when somebody tells them to not do something we definitely do it um but we we did we did uh so first of all we we started very early to just like have Gatherings with everyone in Bergen who wanted to work in

the games industry and we've built like uh we started the the uh Norwegian uh game developers Guild from Bergen we have started a conference in Bergen so we have kind of this history of creating a community like actively creating a community to make it happen and and that has definitely helped kind of bring more interest to Virgin and more people want to come to Bergen because we've we kind of have that community so so I think the best place to start is just like gather people create a community and and and just do cool stuff together basically cool thank you yeah okay hi I'm Joshua I'm from the East Asia soft we are a publisher we publish about 150 games a year between PC and consoles uh and one of the most rewarding things about my job is reaching out to Indies who might not uh be able to reach certain platforms on their own or certain regions on their own but you

didn't do that you apparently ended up doing all of it yourself so I know you had to to come up against some challenges with that what was how did you approach it getting access to the platforms and the dev kits and everything that you needed to come to consoles I mean I've like chased down people from from Sony and it's it's I mean it's just like being a past basically that's that's I think that's my best answer I'm being determined to take care of a ways all right thank you thank you okay I think we need to get out I think uh we're out of time but I'll move on to the uh the Arcos I think it's just around the corner here and if anyone wants to chat further we can do it right there okay thank you foreign [Music]