How (and When) to Not Give up on Your Game

foreign [Music] just to say at the beginning remember to rate all the talks and things especially this one and uh turn off your cell phones make them quiet um I'm Brandon Sheffield from necrosoft games I also am the person who runs this career seminar thing so if you I appreciate all the ratings that you give because it helps me know what you like and don't and leave comments in there and just feel free to tell me anything about what you like and don't so we can improve for next year so this talk is called how and when to not give up on your game because I believe that if you have a game of any type that is good you can get money from it not necessarily from selling it to people because that's incredibly difficult but perhaps more easily through selling to platform so

it's all about our kind of uh weird production model and business model that we have um because we make games that are not that popular we've never had a hit um but we've survived for five years anyway um so I mean that it's got to stand for something um so yeah essentially the thing that we're talking about is getting new platforms to pay us for a small version of our game than another new platform to pay for a slightly larger version of that game than another until the game is finished this is how we get finished games that we own 100 with no publisher even if the games themselves don't necessarily sell like gangbusters because they're on these small platforms then eventually we can put them on a wider platform and hopefully do well so with a little luck I will be able to teach you to scam platforms out of their

hard-earned cash in order to fund your own games how'd that get there um how it works is this new platforms need new games when they're new they'll give you money because they need games to attract players and users and that's the thing that makes them popular because no developers don't want to release games on new platforms usually because they're unproven and it's less likely you will be able to get revenue on the back end so they have to pay for the first games they get and this is when we try to swoop in because uh once they're popular they don't need you anymore and that's it for you um they don't need to fund games if they have a popular platform like imagine if you went to valve and was like hey can you give me money to release my game on your platform they're gonna say no

um but yeah look look at Sony for example they at the start of every console cycle they're like Yay Indies look at all these amazing Indies that we have funded and put on our platform and then as the console gets more mature they're like Yay Call of Duty it's here um so like I said we take a small uh amount of money make a small version of this game idea that we have we build the core of a game that is fun and good as it is but isn't huge or expansive it's not it's it's like uh the very center of our idea because these platforms don't really care if you've got the longest game in the world they care that it's fun and good and most importantly there um so then what do you do with that game next after you've made that core and it's released on this small obscure platform then you find another and you get a little more money and you release it there and you keep doing that

until you uh have it in the state where it has matched your vision um so the traditional way to sell make money off of your games is to sell them but it's incredibly hard to sell things now especially if nobody knows who you are and what your game is about from you know having previous hit games or something like a bajillion games or at least every five minutes so it's impossible to um get noticed practically but by selling to platforms you can expect about twenty to thirty thousand dollars per one of these deals and if you can make that work for yourself then there's something you might be able to do there oh hey okay okay um most companies do the the Top Model by the way my girlfriend did these these Graphics here which is why some slides look way better than other slides

I can't do anything but write terrible text so on the top there most traditional companies will do a prototype then they'll try to get funding then they will finish the game and then they release version 1.0 or in the case of free to play they'll update it forever or as long as they're getting money what we do is first two steps are the same prototype get funding and then initial sometimes rough version 1.0 is on a small platform 1.25 on a different small platform 1.5 on yet another and then we get to version 2.0 which we can release on a big platform and our version 2.0 is kind of close to the traditional models 1.0 except we've had a lot of iterative releases and so we're sometimes able to iron out more of the bugs that way so let's look oh right also just in both models of course once you've released it on a larger platform you can also then

curate down again like say you go to PC as your big platform you're going to after that you can go to console and then like a handheld console or something like that and so options continue to exist I see so many people who they have a game they put it out doesn't really go anywhere and they're like well I guess that's it I guess I lose I guess that's what happened to me but I believe you can keep injecting life into a game that you know is good so I'm going to show you talk about a couple of our games for example um that's a little note for me uh there we are okay so I'm gonna play a trailer a little echoey so um this is gun house gun house is a puzzle Tower Defense hybrid thing that we first released on Playstation Mobile

in 2014 Sony paid for the development of that game because they needed games on PlayStation Mobile at the time so then Microsoft needed games on Windows phone so they gave us a grant to bring that game over to Windows phone and in the process we were able to Port the game from PlayStation Mobile's rather obscure SDK over to Unity now that it was in unity we could put it wherever we wanted and so we were able to do something like my programmer needed a new phone so I was like I bet we could get a phone from Amazon if we put the game on their platform so we did and we got a new phone for him and it only took us two weeks uh um so yeah we and we killed a bunch of bugs in the process as we kept iterating on it and then we finally self-funded the port to IOS and Android did a whole bunch of more work to make sure that this was like the best version of this game that we could make

at the time uh oh wow I made it almost the end of the trailer well too bad we're going to the next one um this right here is oh dear oh I didn't even maximize it last time sorry um uh oh dear is a pseudo 3D driving game about drifting your way to grandma's while hitting or avoiding as many deer as possible uh for this one we also got Sony funding at the beginning for a Playstation mobile version which released in 2015. but later we pitched humble on bringing the game to their humble subscription and we released that just a few weeks ago so it our beta is now out for people to buy on humble and so now we're awaiting the final version funding to make this happen so one thing that's interesting about both of these games is the first platform was PlayStation Mobile which is now a dead platform and in a way this doesn't hurt

us because they can't really compare this game to the one that came before uh okay that's done goodbye yep Dumbo uh so here are some things that are good about this model first you get money to make your own game um like it's rare that you can come from a place of not being super known but be given the opportunity to make your own game on someone else's money and continue to own that so that's great um you can keep improving it on each platform as I said iteratively make it better um you're also building expertise at launching games which is really important because each platform has its idiosyncrasies and frankly even just knowing that is important but having gone through the process many times going through you know ESRB rating and

Peggy rating and you know figuring out how what you have to do to get your game released in Portuguese speaking countries which is slightly different you know this stuff is all really important and it gives you great experience for when you finally do launch it on a big platform you're gonna be better at it uh it's also better than contract work because it's yours a lot of people do contract work early on to try to make ends meet but if you can work on your own thing that's better it also gives you a kind of like a bunch of games that you can put on different platforms which helps you with this model so we've got an we've got a touch screen game and we've got a controller game controller keyboard game so if a new platform arises that has touch we can put that on it if a controller thingy happens we can put that on it um you can also use funding if you wind up making a game for some obscure

technology that doesn't exist elsewhere you can use future funding to Port it to a more Universal Universal platform a lot of releases having a lot of releases also gives you a lot to talk about it makes you look more active as a company and it hasn't harmed Us in very many ways because like I said when you know in gun house and oh dear get new versions very few people actually know that it has existed on a small platform before because those platforms were small they never saw them and then after that you kind of have something really good to show Publishers if you want to get more money because uh like to make the final version because you have built the core of your game and it's there and you can just be like do you like this here it is wow look at those tough Buddies tough as heck uh so here's some things that you need

in order to make this model work you have to own your your own IP if if you don't work that into your deal then uh none of it works so that's that's number one it obviously it always has to be good it's stupid to say but if if you half-ass it it's not going to go anywhere and don't expect these platforms to last necessarily it doesn't really matter if they do what matters is you're you're getting your game out there it also only works if you've got a very small team thirty thousand dollars is good if you're three people if you're 10 people it's basic basically worthless so um you also need someone on the team who can like me spend time thinking about business and chasing down leads and doing this stuff because otherwise you'll just get overwhelmed um with making the game and not thinking about what's next and how to sell it again you also have to be reliable because uh if you're delivering quality

at a good Pace then people are going to know that and they're going to come back to you and be like we need another thing and you must plan for not making any additional money on those platforms because it's going to be a small platform and like you you you make it and then it's not going to be Tower fall because nothing is going to be towerful ever again probably this guy he needs a hug um there's some things that can go wrong with this as well you can definitely get some potentially lean times there we like I said we've survived for five years doing this and that's great but um at the beginning of December of 2016 we had two hundred thousand dollars in handshake definitely gonna do this deals it was looking fantastic for 2017. we had it all laid out um by mid-February that went down to zero thousand dollars zero K that is not

enough K to make anything so it's rough also Publishers may not understand what you're doing we have talked to Publishers who looking at the the beta of odir they're like why would we fund this it's out it's like yeah it's out but it's not finished it's kind of like Early Access we're building it but not everybody understands that it also takes a lot of work to get this going you have to do a lot of leg work to figure out what these platforms are because sometimes they're obscure and not everybody knows about them and it's because not everybody knows about them that you can kind of make this thing work but it's a double-edged sword there oh look who's back that's weird um so how do you identify these platforms uh new platforms you should look for new platforms that fit what you're already

making first and foremost that's the best thing and right now VR is a good place for that the the VR Funny Money where they were just like dumping barrels of it uh that's kind of over but all the major VR platforms are still funding projects not maybe for a huge amount but they are funding them and I believe that even at this stage if you're making a VR game you should not be spending your own money on it at least past the Proto prototype phase you should be getting paid for it by a platform look also for new business models subscriptions are cool there's some subscription things coming to iOS there are already some in other countries and bundles are good The Humble subscription was good for us well don't do bundles until you're absolutely desperate and out of money though by the way because um after that it's really it really gets devalued and it's hard to come back and

bring it back up a new technology that you can easily support is cool like a new physics thing or a new weird haptics thing if you can easily integrate that into your game they I mean you want to talk to them about this first but they may fund you to have an example of like here's our technology working in a video game and it's good and then you just put their logo at the front and then you get a bunch of money uh look for stores in New and Emerging Markets sometimes this requires localization but sometimes they'll do it for you if you've ever released a game on Android it is highly likely that you have been contacted by some publisher in China asking if they can release your game over there and you know if they're legit give it a try I like that chipmunk guy so much that I made a comic about him um so people have been doing some

version of this sort of thing for many years so think about companies like Capcom or SNK or Konami they have this huge backlog of titles which most of us don't have of course but they're essentially you know not giving up on on their game by saying okay we released this game on the Genesis that's 20 years old you know they're putting it on Virtual Console and steam and stuff like this and they're just continually getting revenue from it um the costs are really low on that obviously most of us can't do that though um but let's look at Sega as an example they have done some interesting weird things that's Vegeta from Dragon Ball in um Streets of Rage 2 that is an official selling product on Steam because Sega has opened up their platform essentially

to ROM hackers on Steam you can release a rom hack say you get some money and you get some money it's weird but they're doing that and it's great I was trying to get some more information about this I couldn't get much but a representative said to me we are Keen to offer the back catalog onto as many relevant platforms as possible and also embrace all Community created content we're legally viable to do so fan made modified ROMs are hugely appealing to the PC community in particular archiving is therefore taken very seriously so we'll never give up on our games uh double fine is another good example they kept the PC rights in Publisher deals for Brutal Legend Costume Quest and stacking and then eventually they wound up getting the PC rights back to Psychonauts and iron Brigade they self-funded PC ports of all of those titles and they have all made them continuous income streams that they've been able to use to partially fund every

other game that they've made pretty much these PC releases also allowed them to spin up their publishing division because like I was saying before constant releases give you a lot of experience launching games and that's a lot of what a publisher does is launch your game talk about it and put all that stuff out there um like every time you release a game you get some learning from it then they did remasters of those classic LucasArts games like Grim Fandango and day of the tentacle and they broke even for the studio in just a few days and have both gone on to earn more Revenue than their original versions but then on the flip side Broken Age and Graham Fandango both got Android ports that were paid for by Hardware manufacturers and that money didn't totally cover the cost of the port and then they didn't sell super well on the Android platform so they've basically stopped supporting Android

devices but if double fine were five people instead of 30 people or whatever they are those Hardware deals might actually have been really useful for them another kind of my company size example is Adam Rippon from mateki who released Dragon Fantasy self-funded for iOS first then they got an advance from Sony for Vita and PS3 and then they released the Vita version like the third Revenue stream from this was a thing called limited run which if you don't know releases boxed versions of Vita and PS4 games because that's something that Sony has set up that you can do but limited run has like a store and shop for it and so when he released the limited run version it was actually the most lucrative version that he released he said it was roughly 1 million times the return of our steam version I might be exaggerating that number but not by much

so for him once the game is done he actually thinks that the more highly curated the market is that is to say closed the easier it is for traditionally built games to succeed which is genre titles built without Kickstarter funding so for him he said each time we did a new release we aimed for more and more curated markets uh he also said Android was a waste of time so sorry Android here's some more advice uh keep your code base up to date we had a big problem when we ported oh dear to PC because the previous coder hadn't documented anything and there's you know magic numbers in there and and like Sprites were named with numbers instead of names and so you had to figure out retroactively it was a big archive work um so don't do that to yourself

and also don't spend time chasing money that you're not sure will ever exist we spent some time trying to get I was really thinking we could get one of those unreal grants that they were giving out a while ago but the thing we were making was 2D and it wasn't really the kind of thing that they were signing and we wound up spending like a month and a half making trying to put a square peg in a round hole sort of thing so don't don't but I mean do Chase award shows but not grants unless they're easy keep up relationships with publishers we continually talk to Publishers all the time even if they're sick of us even if they've seen our things already because just having continuing those relationships eventually maybe they're going to want something from you and just don't don't just give up because

they don't like what you're doing right now and then you know selling your game is still going to be super hard I mean streamers are tougher than ever to get hold of and they're also oh look at that they're also um way more important than ever before I'm just gonna get my slide back yeah cool I'm good at this uh yeah we we spent actually a lot of time trying to get streamers to talk about oh dear and we mailed 25 people and of them one replied with a maybe we'll look at it maybe we'll look at it I found people respond better on Twitter I'm not sure that's true across the board but um one little trick that I've been using lately for that is I ask my friends on Twitter like who would you like to see stream this game and then my friends wind up

adding a streamer and being like this person and so then I reply and then we're already two replies deep into a conversation and it's more likely to actually pop up on their feet and just as a final word I called the platforms suckers they're not really suckers they need a thing that you can provide to them and they're paying you for a reason and if you're making original games that people like in the process like what could be better than that so thanks and if you have any questions please come up to the mic [Applause] [Music] yeah hi uh thanks for the talk um I have a question about when you're putting a pitch deck together and you know you're doing this multi uh platform targeting how do you make considerations for that and change it up um when I'm doing a pitch I do Target it

for that platform uh if like if I know that I'm pitching a new platform I'm probably not gonna include like how much it's gonna cost because I know that they're just going to give me this smallish chunk of money and I know that that's there but then I of course change it when I'm going to talk to a publisher and I'm like we need a hundred thousand dollars to finish this um and just as a little piece of advice definitely overestimate how much you need because I've underestimated it so many times just so many times and I keep thinking this time this time I'm going to do it but then then you get Publishers being like Oh it's a little too much money I don't know about that and then you want to bring that cost down and then it can it can wind up screwing you I don't know if that answered enough of your question but yeah thanks okay thanks over there hey I just wanted to know uh when you got started and you got started with

your team how did you guys decide what you were going to do first and then assign roles and basically go through your iterative design process until you felt satisfied oh yeah well it was a little easier for me to start that process because I am not a coder and I'm not an artist so who was I going to be but the design Biz production person and so that meant that I was naturally going to be defining the roles of the team um but in general I find that a really for me anyway if you can find someone who's good at a thing and then you let them do that thing but you also keep them in the loop on all of these decisions you're transparent about like you make this money off of this deal I make this money off of this deal here's how much revenue share split we're gonna have after this and this is what the actual amount of money is that's coming in like I think transparency is really good and just keep talking about it with your with your teammates because they

may have ideas you can think of and so I don't know if I went on a tangent but that's yeah um okay so how much of the non-design work did you have to do and then how did you keep your teammates around even though you guys weren't generating any Revenue at the time right so I did I would say that about half of my work is not design um and it obviously fluctuates like when oh dear needs to get done I'm like making tracks and that's all I'm doing but um in between those times I'm doing a lot of Biz stuff and basically I always make sure that I have some money in the bank first and that can be really hard to do I got it by just when I left my old job I didn't ever claim vacation days and in California they have to give you that money back and so I got like

I started with that but sorry I am out of time um if you want to talk to me you can get at me here my emails on my website or I can go to the I'll go outside or to the wrap-up room bye