How the Hell Do You Make Money!?

[Music] okay hello and welcome to this talk uh how the hell do you make money on video games which is inspired by the extreme difficulty of actually selling your game here in 2021 uh i was thinking about this topic because there were some 10 000 games released on steam in and as you can imagine most of these games do not rise to the top they're not all sales blockbusters in fact most of them i see stories all the time about people whose games have completely failed in their estimation but i don't believe that has to be the end um you've got to make money somewhere there are a lot of avenues other than sales direct to con consumer that you can make money with um either during production or afterward and so that's based on my experience hello i'm

brandon sheffield of necrosoft games we have put out three games and every single one of them has been funded multiple times by completely different entities and uh each time we incrementally improved the game with each release and none of them have been huge sales successes i'm willing to admit that but they have all contributed to the company continuing to go along um we've always been able to do our own original ip and we've we continue to exist and continue to make new games and uh i'm not the only person with this experience uh so that's why this panel is assembled um so in general we're going to be talking about the types of money things you can get from types of different types of platforms publishers crowdfunding whatever other stuff to fund development for your games or also to make money once the game is already released uh independent of selling it to consumers

and so yeah that's um without further ado i would like to introduce everybody else that is on this panel or rather have them introduce themselves uh just a brief re-intro myself i'm brandon sheffield creative director of microsoft games and uh we have never made more money on sales than we have selling to platforms and that's where we're coming from so uh let us have everyone introduce themselves let's start with justin yeah my name is justin woodward i'm the co-founder and creative director of interrobang entertainment independent game development team and as well as um the co-founder of the mix the media indie exchange a platform used to to get visibility um and uh partnerships for game developers around the world i'm also the um one of the lead advisors on the humble black game developer fund so i helped select titles and get prototype funding

for black game developers great and let's next talk to ava hi my name is eva carr i'm the founder and ceo at glitch focused primarily on designing systems and also strategy a lot of my work is really around you know forming deep connections through play and also building a better and more inclusive creative economy i think for this talk um i've probably tried every single source or type of funding except for taking out a loan so i'm excited for the conversation i'm really focused on co-creating what i would consider the future of play through you know 100 to 250 000 equity checks through moonrise and also 10k grants through the galaxy fund for prototypes for people who are really making games that um you know are doing something a little different i'm trying to think some of the other stuff that you may have seen before before last year we when we had started

moonrise and galaxy we shipped hyperdot in partnership with charles mcgregor of tribe games focused on player insights mostly usability progression things like information architecture plus business development and you may have seen that hyperdot was recognized for his innovation and accessibility through the game awards um and we're really proud of it played over by you know half a million people worldwide we like to think that we made uh good money and also made history which we think is pretty dope [Music] some other projects you may have seen around the internet that i worked on game dev salaries it's an open data project i really love the idea of open data with nearly a thousand entries worldwide the goal is really to like help people get paid what they really deserve and i'm excited to be here with you all thank you uh mike let's have you go next uh hey everyone my name is mike tucker i'm a independent developer based in the south of england i've been doing this for 13 years

but formed bitmap bureau uh our latest studio about five years ago now and uh yeah our first game was asia heroes which was a traditional steam title really but we also brought it physically to the switch and playstation 4 as well but since then we've gone on to create xeno crisis which was kick-started a couple of years ago and we've produced retro versions of that game for the mega drive or genesis if you prefer uh dreamcast and neo geo but we've also pushed the other physical aspects as well so we have like a vinyl soundtrack and cd soundtrack t-shirts and so on and uh yeah we're getting more and more into physical physical now and we've realized that uh there's still a well there's a growing demand for it it seems over um digital products yeah um megan yeah i'm megan fox i run found it et cetera glass bottom games we are currently working on skateboard which you might have heard of and previously

we've made the games jones on fire hot tin roof and spartan fist uh kind of like microsoft we have never made much money by selling our games but also we've never really made much money selling our games to platforms until skateboard up until this point we mostly survived on weird combination of grants in certain cases and work for hire and this one really weird contract with a games adjacent company that whole process though with skateboard we've since found a lot of cool things that you know are more in keeping with something a reasonable business would do and we've been doing this for like a decade i think my ten year was last month or something so yeah we've been at it for a while nice uh robert hello my name is robert muguski i am founder of blackmoon design a studio which is three people basically uh and we are making games since 2005 and

we haven't we've made around 100 games and we've never sell uh those directly to consumers all our money comes from uh business deals licensing advertising and like all different uh types of of uh b2b uh deals so uh yeah for for our players the games are free which is kind of fun uh for us and for them as well as i guess yeah so as you can see there's a lot of different pathways to actually continuing to succeed in this business everybody here has been in it for a while and uh um very few of us have had big sales successes um so it is possible you can do it so we're gonna start we're gonna start talking about uh grants with ava first because

i mean so just just to start off a little bit there are a lot of grants that you can get if you're in europe like the indiana and canada and a lot of good grants but in the united states it's basically garbage except for what ava's doing so um so yeah uh get us started talking about that and let's see where we get to yeah um i feel like two of the biggest sources that we just don't simply talk about enough in games in terms of financing is equity financing and grant financing um i feel like grants really play a big role in our ecosystem from financing you know experimental projects to leadership training um a lot of people get their first injection of cash through grants like um you know i think grace bruxner with frog detective like literally so many people who are especially in canada through you know the canada media fund or australia through film victoria or europe

i don't even well like the uk i suppose with yuki um but to be considered a grant i i really think that you know funding is oftentimes not recoupable and is or charitable or matching dollars don't need to really be repaid or anything of sorts um so i like we started our whole entire journey with um starting with grants i got my first grant at 19 with 50k and then it just kept going from there each year and i think that it's really important to to be able to find not only find grants but also um apply for them get them and that's usually oftentimes a lot of studios get their first kind of injection of capital there um how do you find them um that is a good question uh it depends on where you're at i actually so brandon you had asked for um you'd asked for some metrics and i actually have a lot of these stored

because we love insights over at glitch clinch so i there's a bunch of them that actually um are based in different areas so i'm just gonna focus on the u.s for now because it's the saddest one of all of them really grants are actually very rare in north america specifically in the us not so much in canada but um if you take a look at for example um you know where i'm at and where i'm based minnesota actually has the highest grant budget per capita in the us due to a lot of the specific trust that we currently have right now it's like six dollars per capita compared to the national average from you know say organizations like the national endowment of the arts or national endowment of the sciences or whatever that is at like 50 cents um per capita uh folks over in canada australia europe have it better when you look at orgs like again canada media fund yuki film victoria

they all sit at actually like 25 to 35 usd per capita so to show you like where we're currently at um there's different areas so i'd say like arts organizations are one of them and oftentimes those are actually funded by the nea which is the national endowment of the arts and then there's a whole segment of people who receive funding from say foundations and foundations have very like specific things that they focus on um but for example i am currently um i currently have like a two-year grant for a leadership grant and that's through a foundation um so depending on what you're looking for what type of project you have whether it's a game or just focused on you as developing as an artist or you developing as a leader whatever that is there's most likely a grant for them but look for local arts organizations look for foundations that are doing some really cool things in this space and

be in a state that cares uh because not very many states do i think there's really only like the most grant dollars in the united states really are either in minnesota or new york city just to jump in to i think that a lot of it's networking like yeah you gotta you have to know other people who know about the grants especially in the united states like the cmf is very much you know prevalent or the victoria uh is it victoria victoria meets like the they have one yeah yeah film victoria has one i received a few grants i received one from you know the covid fund from playstation i've also received one from the chamber of commerce from um for uh you know their diversity funds uh another this is all covet and also um yeah but you're in california so that's like just just to give people some hope

that they're occasionally you can get some money regardless of where you are yeah yeah you just have to and yeah california is tough you got you just have to hustle it and like figure out where things are and and some folks in the industry have told like kind of put me up on game as to where to sign up for these funds and they're very very timely the the black chamber of commerce fund came from california that was in alameda county up in you know in the bay area and if i didn't know that within 10 days this fund would have been depleted i wouldn't have known so one of my friends who owns a sound studio down from me and is like a really good friend was like apply now apply now but i wouldn't know that unless i had this connection or the also the playstation fun luckily i'm you know connected with um some of the biz dev folks there and they kind of told me hey you should apply within this given time but i would say in the states that's one of the big things like of course look for them but also help other

people out like if you see one that's for asian americans or indigenous native americans tell the people that you know because then you know it'll just reciprocate yeah and i think we can we might be able to uh have like some resource guide by the time you're all looking at this so that you can see some of the stuff we're talking about but uh like justin said it a lot of this stuff comes up real fast and goes away real fast and there is some certainly some hustling involved i wanted to talk justin more about some of the ways that you've tried to get production money because you've done some some interesting things and some interesting partnerships that are very uh hustle oriented i would say so like i'm always looking for opportunities because i'm like i'm a super hustler so so i'm trying to figure out any ways to flip in a you know in a way that's like beneficial to everybody right like i

just want to make cool stuff and cool games and help other people make cool stuff so i'm i try to figure that out um so i've done you know i've done kickstarters before i used to uh i was at double fine for a few years and when fig spun out of double fine i was the curator and i helped them with publishing and i ended up funding my jay and sila bob game through fig while i was working at fig so when i was working at fig all of my money that i got from being a consultant went back into my games like i didn't really you know what i mean use that money i didn't i wasn't like balling off of that right um and i'm trying to think of other ways like uh talk about that that chocolate chop partnership i was fascinated by that what uh you tried to back in the days you tried to um partner with like a chocolate company for like in-game advertising stuff wasn't that right

i try to try you know cream the ice cream right they have in berkeley there's an ice cream uh cookie ice cream company so i went over there to do some this is so ridiculous for super combo man i was trying to find any way to make money yeah or to to fund our projects so i went over there and i pitched to them hey this character could be your you know uh he eats cookies in the game he loves cookies he's got a little gut and like it would be perfect um and so like i went over to the storefront i talked to the owner and i said hey how about we like package a key of our game or demo in your every time you purchase a uh ice cream cookie um snack or whatever and they were they were down for it but it just didn't allow me to it didn't make sense but i figured out other ways to do that later on i was in the ign indy open house which was a an accelerator that gamespy started and

when i was there they really liked what we were doing because we had like the game has like very fluid animations very colorful and at that time they were trying to figure they were owned by fox so they were trying to figure out ways to get into indie game development and in-game advertising and that type of thing so i i like hustled away to like get them to put production engineers on super combo man to build out the features that i wanted and that was like that was probably like a hundred thousand dollars worth of engineering help they helped me set up my pipeline for development when i was because i'm not an engineer i'm an artist and a producer uh and you know a director creatively so like i didn't understand all the pipelines for like let's say git source tree those type of things but since production is my background that was very important to me they helped me set up the whole foundation for the pipeline for our team um and then i was able to kind of lock that out and build upon

that and they had put a lot of man-hours on our game which was it's not dollars dollars but it was something that i couldn't afford at the time yeah and when you did um i mean you're still doing jay and silent bob was that a license that came with money or a license you had to approach or how how did like how have you leveraged that into uh additional visibility and success that was very serendipitous in in that when i was at ign i spent very long hours and i really got to know everything to me everything is networking i i believe if you're a good you know if you're a good person and you're helping other people so when i was at ign ign had this thing called ipl which was their pro league uh and they had um you know they they threw tournaments i got i was working there all the time so i got to meet all and become friends with all the video producers and then when they broke off i was still friends with them and one of the video producers was working at wb and he said i have this friend who wants

to make an indie game uh which was trevor furman he's friends with kevin smith and so he was like he asked kevin years ago can i use your ipv for a game and so then we we connected and he's out here in berkeley we just hit it off and and we talked about it we i started creating design documents for the game what i thought would be really cool and then kevin hit us up and he the funny thing about that was he it was not a licensing licensing type of situation and i've dealt with those but it was more like a handshake thing he in a matter of fact when we went to kevin smith's house and i was with justin from um uh uh from fig at the time he's like kevin's like don't [ __ ] this up like i don't know if i could curse my bad you gotta have to take that out but i think it's i think it's allowed yeah he said he said don't [ __ ] this up don't talk business you got it you could do we can do it for this small percentage and we're good we just want you to be creative and to utilize this in a game

and it was a handshake and then we we did all the paperwork but it was a very serendipitous easy thing to do so it wasn't like and i'm never going to do personally i'm never going to do a cash in you know like this isn't like i'm not just trying to make money i want to do something cool i believe in in view in the usq universe and all that stuff but yeah i stack stuff i tell developers to stack stuff so i'll say i know mike you you work with adult swim games when i was working on super combo man i was struggling i did the cookie thing i was working with ign i was trying to figure out ways to fund our game i didn't know how to do it like adult swim said no all the publishers said no i just kept making making the game and getting like a bunch of uh you know press around the game i did a kickstarter the kickstarter was you know uh successful i took that kickstarter i hit back every publisher that i talked to previously that oh you got a successful kickstarter hell yeah we'll jump in oh yeah i showed oh we got adult swim hey investor we got adult swim games

they put in 40 grand oh i got an investor and adult swim and look at the articles then i was able to leverage that and just stack and then now since i'm like you know we have all this coverage and that's what i that's what i did with with chronic blunt punch and i don't want to steal any more time no it's like ultimately it's i think it's really important to talk about how uh like the hustling is really like it's something you gotta actively do and and that's one of the hardest things with this is that you know people put out games and they're like the game didn't do well there's nothing else i can do but you you have to have someone on your team who is dedicating some of their time to doing this kind of hustling if like unless you have some kind of crazy breakout hit there's like it's it's a lot of it's a lot of work and i think that that's the main like one of the important things that i

take away from what you're saying justin is is like it's not just you can't just apply for for some grants and then like hope that it happens you got to be applying to grants and like talking to all your friends and find like for me we we got a publishing deal recently to bring a console version of one of our games um out and in order to do that i looked at a list of 350 publishers i went down that entire list checked is it is are any of these applicable to what we're doing i mailed i put together like a press kit essential or like a pitch kit that would hopefully answer all their questions in advance i mailed it to 40 publishers three of them got back and one of them signed a deal with us and like you you just have to you have to be able to do that um like because your game may not sell that's what you have to be able to do can i add one thing to this real quick last like so i'll just tell you from

this call when i jump in the call immediately how can i connect someone with someone how can i help that person or how how yeah what do they connect them so ava was talking about all of her stuff my my brain is firing you know what i mean like oh my god mike is in here i wanted to talk to mike for so long seven years ago yeah yeah megan's a super hustler i see you're like on all the shows and like he's always hitting people true i just thought i was like any situation my brain is firing how can i help this person how can i how can how can i how can we help each other really exactly because it's a lot of time when we talk about networking it winds up being like it's not like networking isn't actually a slimy thing unless you're a slimy person like it's ultimately just like how you know when i was doing my 300 going through my 300 publisher list i told other people that didn't know that that list existed and i was also like oh

these people came back to me about you know with a no but they told me this other thing that they're interested in which is more along the lines of what you my friend are doing so like you gotta be paying it forward as well as absorbing it um but i want to talk more about licensing stuff because robert you've got uh really i would say unique experience in that compared to most traditional game developers because you're you're making game games for dumb phones uh like old brick phones you're making uh the how the web game market is still there uh tell tell me about what you're doing uh i would say like my story is not uh unique i would say it's very it was very common back in in 2007-8 everybody was doing flash games and and publishing them somewhere on web on some portals anywhere and we basically

uh we tried to go out of it because we started as a flash flash game uh developers uh tried to to to follow the the herd and do the steam pc uh huge game that will like bring us money and fame and everybody will love it and uh it didn't work out surprisingly and yeah and we basically went back to to uh doing small silly web games uh that people still love play it's uh and there are there is there are a lot of places where uh there's demand from for small silly games that that can just be played anywhere on anything and uh and what does that market look like right now in in because you're you're looking at increasingly shrinking markets but they're expanding maybe in

other countries or the platforms are forgotten and so there's not as much competition yes there is like uh a lot we are doing with games for for uh developing countries like the whole africa uh india like a lot of countries where were uh like access to very new devices like top of the shelf iphones is not really possible so people are playing on what what they have basically which which are basically lower end devices and they can't play new games because demands technical requirements are too too too much so uh yeah we try to be there and offer them our games which are uh playable on on such uh such devices and how do you wind up partnering with

um licenses and what what does revenue actually look like for you because you're not you're not making money on individual sales you're doing yeah these kind of bulk skills in most cases uh we find channels portals uh some kind of like places where where uh the owner of those places all of those portals of those like uh carrier stores and such uh would like some content for their users right they have a lot of users and there's no content for them they ask us to deliver the games and we know that like advertising is not really an option because in most of those countries uh the the the rates for for advertising is is not really uh high so we we engage in deals that's that basically uh we get some fixed amount of money just

because we publish the title on this specific platform and for users of this platform the game is free and the usually the portal owner or the the platform owner earns money on web traffic usually those are like in most cases right now we deal with carrier operators so they charge users for for data and the the game itself is is free after you download it or right right so you get some kind of small kind of minimum guarantee buyouts uh or maybe large ones i don't know yeah we work on scale so we have a lot of games and uh the the fees are are not high uh but it's like not even current minimal guarantee it's like though we get this money

and that's it it's we don't there's there's no more revenue coming uh coming in so uh so yes i mean we have to make new games and and publish them yeah so you're making games just grinding them out real fast as far as licensing is concerned i've been i've been working with viacom and some other companies recently and what's interesting is that i'm hitting console in the pc market uh and retro and what's really interesting and fascinating about that is they have these large companies doing their aaa releases so for these smaller releases they're willing to work with you on minimum guarantees and so they're not exuberant they understand and their licensing teams understand kind of the indie struggle and not struggle hustle i don't want to say struggle yeah it's both they're intertwined sometimes but they their teams want to do creative stuff they don't always want to do like these big games and like deal with all

of the uh you know walls that they have to break down in order to make those deals work so they're willing to work with you on that as far as long as it's not you're not competing with their direct you know huge large licensing deals that they're doing with you know aaa companies um so if you if you like kind of hit those blue waters with something that's maybe more obscure but has its own fan base that's kind of what i'm going after because like just working with on the kevin smith chance on bob stuff like i'm not looking to be a multimodal i mean i would love it i'm not looking to be a super multi-millionaire but i know it has a built-in fan base yeah i could build upon that if i have like from our mall brawl cartridge that we released with limited run games i have the data now i can go and take that to investors and other people and other publishers and again i'm stacking it it's like look this made a million dollars this grossed a million dollars just for this particular game

like this is what i could do if i had more uh you know more things to work with and on the you know on the on the scale of things and and building like for for our game gun house we have gotten five different funding partners for that and each time we made the game incrementally better and so we were able to like we could essentially sell it to a company for even a small amount of money uh like 10 000 bucks or whatever as we will give you uh like this new feature and it's a feature that we want to finish anyway and so each like each time we get the game a little better and a little better with these small tiny buyouts and then by the time we've done all those buyouts now we have a game that is much more console worthy than than before on the backs of these small buyouts and that's something else

you can kind of do um i wanted to talk a little bit about crowdfunding crowdfunding is pretty you know we there there are whole conversations we can have about that but i'm particularly interested in um uh using crowdfunding to fun to fuel further success um i know that justin's talked about a little bit let's let's let's hear uh megan you've done some pretty good work leveraging uh skatebird into like some pretty serious into a really good space even before release yeah so it kind of all started with the like skateboard whenever i build whenever i build a project i tend to build three different versions in my head there's the one that if it goes nowhere and i just have to kick it out unfinished there's the one if it does moderately well and then there's that moonshot i guess it could get this big if i needed to and so what i did was i announced skatebird with the minimum

viable product looking as good as it could look and it started to get traction so then i did a kickstarter which was the following six months later which happened to be around e3 kickstarter snowballed and oh and before the kickstarter we are actually in talks with humble amongst other people they said no we were okay we moved on did the kickstarter and the kickstarter leveraged uh it was a not kentucky fried gaming show it was uh i don't know one of the one of the not e3 conferences in 2019 that started springing up it was like e3 in the van across the street kind of thing but it worked it was fun um and that got huge really fast the kickstarter went to 3x over fund it just did really well that got the interest of xbox and we were able to sign a game pass deal within a month i'd been kind of priming that for a while and hoping i could get something and then after that everything broke it's like oh hey you want this and then humble comes back

and says something like you know there's more chips in your court now oh it's like thanks yeah boat already kind of sailed on that one sorry but still that like justin was talking about that kind of stacking of possibilities and properties things that you can come back to later ends up being really useful like maybe we go with humble for a next game or whatever now we have a hot lead there that'll make that a lot easier xbox will probably make connections on future games a lot easier because of oh and the kickstarter and the e3 and all of that then led to the um enough interest that that december i think it was was the first um video game show uh video game awards that had the game festival concept that jeff put together and jeff keely and we were one of the 13 games that they chose to tap to be in the first ever giant steam festival and that made our numbers go ridiculously vertical and then that again primed future things so

yeah the kickstarter we like to run all of our games with a kickstarter at this point just because it creates a community nexus once you've got some kind of community built around something you've got something to build off of you've got directions you can go and again like justin was saying that once you have the core you can then take that to people and say look this is getting pretty good for us among the small audience if you would just give us an introduction or access to your larger audience or larger funding or et cetera we can grow this at scales et cetera i really like building for that and also um working from a kickstarter means that i am controlling my audience and i'm growing an audience around in my studio or me or my games if you go with a publisher like devolver is great but whenever it becomes a devolver game yeah it's not like your game anymore so they pay well they're easy to work with but you don't like come out of that with that audience you like get a tiny share of the devolver audience maybe but really it's their game whereas the kickstarter approach less money but over time you can grow something large

out of that and mike i'm curious to hear about your experience because uh xenocrisis had and then you've also done battle acts since then um i would say more of a like a modest kickstarter success which then you were able to turn into a lot of physical release success um but across more platforms than most people would consider yeah it's a bit crazy really and i wouldn't recommend it to everyone but um for us it's meant [Music] a different stream of revenue other than just steam and you know the eshop and so on uh but yeah kickstarter worked really well for us it was our first kickstarter so we had to do a bit of research and just see what you know what element she needed on the page and so on um we didn't really really release it too much fanfare but i think because we were producing a genesis game that generated quite a bit of excitement straight straight away so yeah we uh like megan we were three times uh funded

so that was great and uh even beyond kickstarter you know you can start an indiegogo page after that and then you can set up a backup page so you can still make you know keep the revenue stream coming in um and then after that we opened our own uh online store as well and yeah we've pretty much exploited every physical aspect we could we found that yeah there's a growing demand for for physical it seems especially with certain storefronts closing and certain consoles now not being supported yeah i think the playstation 3 and the playstation vita are both on the brink of uh closing down uh so yeah um yeah we you know we've got i don't know if you can see it's a bit dark here now yeah we've got the twitch version uh dreamcast uh recently did a deal for the vita version with east asiasoft they're great guys uh there's the evacade version which uh all right yep which is essentially the mega drive version uh yeah we've got our own mega drive version we've got a new seo

so yeah we really went for it and um yeah i think people just loving love having cool games on the shelves you know and uh do you have some maybe breakdown of uh even just generally of like digital sales because it did come out on the regular game consoles versus physical sales in terms of how that did for you um i think i think if you talk to any indie developer these days it's it's all about switch really um the switch just has uh such a following now and yeah we did a deal for the physical switch version was strictly limited which uh sold out right away so that that was a real nice bonus for us uh as for metrics i can't go into too much detail but yeah i would say switch is the big one really um steam kind of disappointed but we did get a game pass deal with microsoft which was

a great injection of cash which we weren't expecting um but yeah we we continue to produce the physical mega drive and dreamcast versions there are a lot of work though you know we have to have to get the pcbs uh designed in china um and then we have to get all the plastics molded uh various things printed we have to assemble the cartridges ourselves uh deal with manufacturing assembly and shipping there's a higher warehouse so it's um it's not something i recommend for everyone but it's it's just cool making a game for you know your favorite childhood console and straight away you have a community there a real hardcore community who just really interested in whatever you're going to do in the future so uh yeah it's worked out well for us certainly yeah i can say that for us even though we've only done physical on playstation 4 and vita and it was just for one release that in terms of like revenue from sales i would say that physical was roughly 50

of our total revenue despite the game being on like eight digital platforms or something like that physical physical revenue from just two platforms was about fifty percent of our revenue justin what was your experience releasing for uh man i wish i had all my stuff let me see if i can grab some stuff let me grab yeah so we did i don't have all my stuff right here you know what i mean but yeah we did the the actual the cartridge for the nes version yeah for mall brawl and we actually developed and this is the switch deluxe version uh version we work with limited run games on that but we did we released vinyl as well which was awesome um because it was all you know chiptune but that was a great experience because of the limit i like the limitations of developing in assembly um you know partnering with with uh with thomas to create that experience because we were able to develop the game in nine months and this

was a bigger piece of our like the chronic punch like lore and we put it out there kind of like curse of the moon did like kind of as a piece to give away for for our larger crowdfunding um uh uh you know backers and stuff like that but having something physical was was quite amazing and and to to kind of basically um reflect what you said brandon it was like that was a huge injection of of money to help us with our studio move forward that's those physical releases we so we released on switch um playstation 4 5 xbox one s and x and we did get some revenue in there i think it also that's another stacking thing look we're look at what we did we created this pipeline to develop all these other things but the nes and the physical switch did did pretty well and we just released the we just did a ps4 uh physical release too and those were really good because of the collectors

and then the game is retro so like having a cart people wanting new carts is is is pretty awesome so yeah yeah it's a it's an it's an interesting like you know we're talking about post release revenue streams now at this point and it's it's interesting that there are multiple niches for releasing games after re-releasing games after they already exist basically and you know like in in the case of xenocrysis um with mike there you all have you know like is is there a limit to the number of platforms that you can release i mean of course like in terms of the power of the consoles there is but uh do you see like an end to that or is or is this going to be a good thing going forward or and will you like put it on the ds or something in ten years i mean we'd love to get it on as many

platforms as possible but there's only so many hours in the day um and there's just two of us here and my colleague matt does all the technical stuff you know he's a real genius so i leave all the assembly and stuff to him right uh but yeah i mean really it's down to resolution you know the mega drive version is 320 by 224 pixels and that ports over perfectly to neo geo but if you want to put it on the snares for example that's 256 pixels wide so then the arc really has to be redrawn quite heavily and the yeah the room generation as well that takes a hit because uh yeah there's fewer tiles uh that you have to squeeze everything into so uh yeah we could we've thought about jaguar and amiga but um yeah we also like to you know start on new projects as well so um yeah it might be something that we go back to uh a playstation one version could be quite viable but you have to be careful not to trade on so on these toes of course you know you can't just slap playstation on your box or sega on your box um so

but yeah um with the way things the way we have things set up yeah other platforms are definitely a possibility and that's that's another good point because what like especially if you're a small developer when you are continuing development of your existing game that may not be that successful uh like not saying you all but us for example um then you're not making new games and so you sort of need to almost have that be a separate pipeline if you can um in our case we have we've been working more and more with one one programmer on our team becoming like the porting person so when we're putting stuff onto new platforms we will have them do it and have them develop the new features and do the um the the ports and all this stuff because otherwise you wind up kind of just like cycling in in one space and you can't

move forward and and it it can be really tempting to just stay there because it's like oh we could squeeze a little bit more money out of this but then you you can wind up getting into a situation like we were in earlier this year where we had three unfinished games that we were trying to pitch around and figure out how to get through and it's like we gotta we gotta prioritize and like just go and go in one direction for a while but then we got the supporting person to help out and she's been great in terms of us being like okay we could just put this over there she can keep doing that it will we will get some revenue out of this later and then we can continue making new products at the same time it's a tough balance um i wanted to talk a bit about some more post release revenue stuff uh the big obvious ones are platform buyouts for subscriptions like playstation plus xbox game pass epic game store

um all these other kinds of things we've done really small ones we've done decently large ones we won't talk about whether subscriptions are healthy for the industry that's another conversation i think they probably aren't really but um we gotta get money to survive so let's talk about it um ava do you wanna talk a bit about like using platform subscription buyouts and stuff and turning that into more success later yeah honestly my logic around all this is the more the merrier and the better that you can stack revenue especially with like buyout revenue at the right time or utilize some of the platforms to bring in players and or increase wish list numbers those are all huge wins it just depends on kind of your goal for hyperdot our entire strategy was actually buyouts because we didn't have a pre-existing set of players that we knew were going to be really excited quite yet about hyperdot so we were pretty much all in on

trying to figure out which ways and how we could stack different buyouts whether it was with xbox or epic etc so what we ended up doing was really focusing on okay well can we do like a timed exclusive or something of sorts with um xbox which we ended up doing and then we followed that up with game pass primarily to kind of test out the waters on what it would look like to do a timed exclusive how long that would be what the players are like how many people are actually buying the game and what is the kind of uptake in terms of like cross promo on steam and then when we entered game pass we had really planned out that there would be essentially like leaderboards and a couple of like online um ways to play especially with um the introduction of uh more levels that people can actually design so custom levels were actually entered in at that time so we saw a really huge lift of players during that time as well

and then we ended up really thinking about like okay whether it was bundles or sales or any other platform buyouts what does that really look like and how much are we actually selling the game for when we're looking at the actual numbers of who's playing um so our team is really focused on insights so again on our back end we were really tracking like how many how many players were actually um you know playing the game till completion how many players were actually turning on the game and coming back to it over time um we just wanted to kind of know what that looked like and what the end of the day what we were actually selling our game for because to me when i'm looking at buyouts it's not actually development dollars it's cash advanced sales so what it really looks like is that you're you're looking at how much did you actually sell your game for with the number of downloads that you actually got and the amount of players that actually played your game so again i think it really depends on

how you want to stack and the goals that you have when you're stacking but i often say again like the more the merrier i think it's really smart if you have a couple of goals in mind and can talk to a bunch of different platforms i know we ended up on like an amazon buyout towards the end and then we really talked a lot about like pricing after it came out of game pass and even during game pass which maybe we'll go to a little bit later in like the bundles and sales section but um i think it's really important and i think it's uh it's a really viable way to to think about it yeah i wanted to talk about a couple of numbers there that that i thought of when you were uh talking about like how many people have actually downloaded it and whatever for our game gun house it's we you know we've we've been in some some bundles which we'll get into but because of those bundles and because of buyouts and other things we have had

we don't actually know the total number of people that own the game it's it's basically impossible for us to know how many people own it um but we know it's over a million uh then in terms of number of people that have downloaded it it's around 250 000. and then in terms of the number of people that have actually paid for it that's a much smaller number like paid for it individually that's probably in the i don't actually know the real number but it's probably in the 30 40 000 range um and that is and that was through like pushing it on every platform that's across like eight or nine platforms that we were able to sell 30 40 000 and then i also wanted to say like some numbers for what those buyouts can look like um for us without saying specific platforms we've had them as small as ten thousand dollars and that was just like from our minds it was like okay it's gonna take us two weeks to port this we get ten thousand dollars that gives us like a little like another

month or something of uh for for one or two programmers uh and then we've gotten up to like 250 000 as well and uh other deals can be in the 500 000 range even for an indie then when you get up into like aaa you're talking about millions and and that's different different sphere than we may be involved in but those those are some of the kinds of numbers that you can think about it and they can all be viable as long as it's worth it like in my opinion if you take a buyout it's got to pay you much more at least twice as much as it will cost you to make the thing if you're doing it in advance and if you're doing it after the fact it's got to be like i've sold as much as i want to on this platform and now i will take whatever other money i can get from you um megan do you have some uh things to say about this zone yeah my take is i'm less concerned about maximizing

revenue like that's important to me but the important thing for me is to make sure that my my ass is covered so when i'm looking at back end deals uh platform deals buyout deals almost all back in some aren't though we actually got some advances too i'm looking less at well how much is this going to uh go for versus my theoretical sales on this platform i'm looking more at okay if i take this deal does this mean that the game doesn't have to sell any copies on any other platform and i'm still 2x profitable if i can get a deal like that those deals do exist i take it because come on it's worth it i tend to view so uh switch aside switch is a special case both of the remaining platforms the sony and xbox have weird sales behavior like depending on what indie you talk to a lot of them will find that one of them sold really well and one of them sold like 10 units it's not that bad but it's significantly terrible it

really random and hard to account for so if i can find something that says i get big chunk of money and i don't have to worry about guarantee yeah the guarantee is huge now the big problem you went into with that though is great now you get you know hundreds of thousands of dollars at launch but you you don't have any money right now since most of those are going to be um post release yeah they're post like i i believe xbox deals they're they're post and uh just because a game just because a deal you sign is like at launch date is when it pays out well most consoles have some kind of billing that's 90 net 180. it's kind of hard to tell so you might not see that money until six months after lunch or after uh hustle that too you know hopefully yeah yeah you gotta have a plan for how to survive not just through launch or through pre-launch and development also through that so

we ended up stacking a combination of deals that some of them we negotiated for half a front half back end some of them were back ends some of them were other stuff that we can't actually get into but suffice it to say we stacked enough deals that by launch we were going to be between two and three x profitable no matter what which was nice and we also had just enough money to make it through the launch and that actually ran out and i had to pull from savings which is getting to the other point which if you're going to try and work this strategy it really helps if you have some revenue some portion of money that it doesn't have to be money that you're meant to spend like it can be money that you need to put back within a year and that's okay because you've got all these guarantees that say it will be put back in a year but if you've got at least something to draw on a lot of these deals become a lot more accessible whereas without that i mean sure uh a lot of the platforms are offering really good indie deals with back end pay well how many indies can afford to

development a game without money now so how accessible are they really and ah yeah yeah we're in our last five minutes here so i want to get through um kind of combine a couple things and talk about uh just additional i did all kinds of additional places where you can get money um that i quick story that i have always enjoyed is um amanita games who make uh you know like imaginarium and and a bunch of these high-end adventure games they found that in the czech republic it was hard for their customers to buy or for like older people and a lot of folks to to buy the game because they didn't have credit cards they didn't have steam and so they wound up partnering with like a friend who ran a series of newsstands to like print cds and sell it for like two euro in like a little pla paper hang tag

thing in a in a a newsstand and i love that kind of hustling stuff so um we'll talk about bundles here as well but i want to start with uh with robert to hear about you know some of the different kinds of platforms that you've put games on like you put games on planes have you done cruise ships i just want to hear about this kind of stuff and what those deals look like a little bit so um basically i i don't have a a a like scenario how to get to those deals but yeah like uh at some point in time uh we were asked if if we would like to uh partner with a company who has like those uh tablets installed in in airplanes but also on buses on trains say they do old kind of transportation and we said yeah sure and basically there are planes flying somewhere around europe with our games

like pre-installed on those uh seats uh and yeah and people are playing them and they buy like in number of seats right is that how they buy because when i was trying to talk to some cruise ships about selling games they're like we'll buy 20 000 units of this or whatever so yeah we are actually we uh we have like a fixed amount per year just because we license those games to be used within the system right and so so um like and uh like i think everybody here said uh said that and i'll repeat that like if you have a game and even if that's that game uh it's not for everybody there's 400 chance that there is somebody out there some some platform out there that they would like your content yeah and it's just about finding them

and and just discussing the deal and and it will happen if you'll put a lot of work in it it is a lot of work every i i believe every game will find their audience eventually totally yeah i think good uh and [Music] like i said there's no there's no guarantee way of achieving that so like uh you can go to to a lot of conferences do a lot of like formal networking go to meetings uh cold mailing everybody but in the end uh it just happens after some time if you if you're a little bit lucky and you put a lot of work in it one thing about the networking uh a lot if you're watching this you've heard a lot about networking and a lot about getting in with important people and yada yada

try not to think of it like talking to the head of sony or whatever you don't network by cold calling the head of sony india or whatever you network by working with your peers and over time your peers become the head of sony or whatever so absolutely work within your local spheres local communities first and then over time you'll find those people tend to get better and better jobs and then oh hey you just know them words of wisdom yeah so we got we got we got 20 seconds left here we were going to talk about bundles now we can't but i'm just gonna say one great thing you can do if your game just can't make money at all is put it into charity bundles and it just becomes one more thing that can be like in the bundle for racial justice or for uh palestinian aid and it just at least your game is doing some work thanks everybody bye thank you cheers bye bye