How To Launch An Indie Game

[Music] well what's your personality like dude are you the guy that stresses out and can't sleep at night or are you the guy who's got it all together and tells everybody to calm down I think I'm a bit of both I think like you know internally I'll be like kind of very stressed out and then there are other things that don't faze me and I kind of go oh my god I should be worrying about this I think there's like a part of my brain that isn't totally like moochmore in terms of some risks but other yeah up at night yes it's very difficult and I think it's really hard to maintain that like sense of strength which it is for me like I need someone when I talk to someone with a problem I need them to be strong for me and I then when they have a problem I need to be strong for them but if I'm if I'm flapping and panicked about the thing and they're not there for me I can't be there for them so it's it's really difficult but I think like overall it

all went pretty pretty smoothly we had a long kind of window to get everything together and it was just kind of I I think every launch of a game is probably madness in its own way well I think I think a lot of people don't fully understand why a launch is stressful especially if you're not involved like you're just like well just just patch it if it breaks right you know and like I had a lot of people close friends and family just say like this was like two years before I launched Pinstripe they were like just launched launch the game and I had been working on it three years at that point and I was like no no no like it's not perfect like I can't launch it and they're like why can't you just launch it and patch it later and I said cuz it's like the Titanic like if you're if you're setting sail you better hope that there are no holes because this is your one shot and that's how important launch is you have to have a good launch week now things are I think things are a little bit different like then like maybe a little different than they were like a decade ago because you could you

like if you launch that's for example like a PS what was ps2 or ps3 a decade ago I don't know or maybe even Playstation if you launched a PlayStation game you better make sure that it was perfect but now you can patch things but there still is that sense of wanting to make sure that it's absolutely perfect because you have to make a splash in the ocean of steam you know you've got like 7,000 games released in a year I think that's what the number was so you better make sure that your game is perfect when you launch it cuz this is your one shot to make a splash I think that number has gone up pretty significantly now as well so I absolutely agree with you and you know you see friends and their games come out and they get like a few bad reviews and that puts off so many people it does it really does mmm how did you kind of how did you find yours cuz you I mean you like your reviews are pretty universally positive as they should be but with did you were you kind of launching and then patching

like every few hours cuz I would say that I kind of had that first patch up within a few hours yeah rolling out so this might sound like what narcissistic but I didn't patch any I didn't need to patch anything the reason was because I'm not like you dude like I'm really anxious like I get like I had like pretty bad anxiety for like three years this was this before Pinstripe launch for some reason I got it under control in the most stressful time of my life but that my anxiety would make me over prepare so I I did so much QA outsource a ton of QA so everything was like we basically had a soft launch with beta testers we had like a couple hundred beta testers test the game and every little glitch that that was showed up I fixed so when we launched the game I wasn't really nervous about glitches I was i did get a crash report and that

freaked me out cuz when you get a crash report in beta testing you're like okay what percentage you know what percentage of the market is this crash is it all pcs or is all Macs what is it so I got a crash report but fortunately that didn't affect the launch so yeah like we launched and everything was really solid but you you're still like if you're still anxious because when you launch a game you you've been dreaming you know you've been dreaming about this moment for years right right and and you hit that launch button and you and you're not getting reviews in like you get you have like one review in you're like what the hell like is nobody playing my game and like by the end of the first week you you only have like 20 reviews and that really freaked me out fortunately like I think I think pinstripe is performing better than most indie games it's not it's not like a Toby Fox game it's not undertale or anything but it's it's performing pretty good and it's got a 9

out of 10 which I noticed you have a 9 out of 10 as well on Steam which congratulations that's a huge achievement well thank you yeah so but yeah that first week is is that was the hardest week of my life the experience of launching and that roller coaster that you have couple days after we launched and actually I'm sounding very down I'm really happy actually with the way adventure paths is doing and compared to that later but yeah you reached out to me and just went hey man are you okay and I just like Unleashed like all this stuff that I've been holding on like I feel this way and what was it like for you is this normal like what you know and that was really powerful of you to do and actually since then I've done that to a couple of other developers oh yeah and I've had its similar responses so it's like it's it's almost like a club like oh you've been through that too I know what you're about to go through yeah I know what you're gonna go through I'll be waiting and I'll have a shoulder for you to cry on kind of thing you know and I think I think it has to do with really setting

expectations because some of the indie developers including myself they're there there's still for some reason they're riding high off of the indie game documentary you know and they're like this is gonna happen and this is gonna yeah you're still like like you said you like that won't happen to me but deep down you're like that's gonna happen to me right right and and so you're just you're waiting and waiting and you don't know what to expect and I think it's important for any developers to know what to expect you should expect $100,000 in sales perhaps in a year and you're not gonna get all that and if you have a publisher they're gonna take some of it and that's that's the it's kind of depressing because it's like well how on earth do you survive and the way that you survive and that wasn't the case for me I'm just throwing out a random number but the way like you said the way that you survive is you keep making games right so like the shelf-life of a game is I've heard it's like three years on Steam they can stay greener you know for

longer but but I think three years is probably the shelf-life of an indie game where it's giving you consistent like sales numbers that you can predict now if you can release a game every two years then eventually you're gonna stack up enough games right but if you release a game every three years you're only gonna have one game released every three years you know and that's not gonna work so the question is how on earth do you hire somebody and pay them a salary to help you release more games that's the conundrum I guess that's the conundrum for any business owners how do you afford to pay somebody like a legit salary like a game developer how do you afford to pay them a salary so I think you need to either put them on points or put them on like a project basis where it's like I'm gonna hire you for three months for this project yeah you know but like just a rolling salary I think once you're in a position to do that then you are you're doing you're doing

pretty well you're up there we're chuckle fissures in the place of this work which wouldn't that be wonderful oh yeah but so you're saying so you're saying the work that you've hired out for adventure pals it was contracted yeah absolutely so so yeah so we would say like oh we need help getting these backgrounds done in time we know just the person to go to or we look for people and then we get in touch more like this is the work we'd like to do we'd like to pay you this much and they'd come usually come back like yeah that's great and then they do it and it's just like hiring like musicians to write this theme tune but we've we've um we've done that with like a lot of a lot of the kind of animation and the sorry background artwork and a lot of the elements to the pocket um very good we haven't actually done any kind of like you know we'll give you 5% if you do X Y Zed because I think that is quite hard particularly with indie games like I think you could either it's almost a bit irresponsible because you might lead people to believe oh this is gonna make

five million dollars and now I want five percent of five million okay great so I think I think it's that is kind of dangerous things but all they or they've been there and they've seen it and they're like five percent of nothing