Identifying Indie: A Study of Who Plays What and Why

[Music] well welcome everyone and thank you for joining on the Friday of GDC No Easy Task uh I actually wasn't sure how many folks were going to make it but uh then I started thinking maybe this is kind of like when a grocery store puts the important stuff all the way in the back and you have to like navigate your way so I'm hoping this is the important part of GDC and uh yeah hopefully you're able to take away some cool insights from it so uh identifying Indie a study of who plays what and why so I'm Phil from Humble games which is the publishing arm of a Humble Bundle which some of you may be familiar with and a little while back we did a study alongside our partners at interpret

about Indie Gamers that we think it's pretty cool and we think it's worth sharing um whether you are designing a game or pitching your game here at GDC or thinking about how you want to talk about and Market your game hopefully there are some good nuggets in here that you can take away and um yeah I think it's also really nice to be able to put some data behind the voice of Indie Gamers um and really be able to continue to deliver experiences that surprise and Delight them so before we get into the findings themselves a little bit about the research that we did we did both both quantitative and qualitative research so surveys and focus groups and we surveyed over 4,800 respondents across ages 18 to 45 across six countries including the US Germany and Brazil amongst others and all of this was with the goal of understanding Indie Gamers and

specifically people that buy indie games and so you might be thinking well how did you define indie games which is an excellent question and actually a question that we asked as well and it could probably be its own entire separate talk um we saw a lot of responses ranging from uh size of the team to budget of the game uh to whether or not you have a publisher for our purposes we found at least for premium titles that price point was a pretty good proxy for a lot of those things and we also provided examples to survey respondents as well but Indie buyers we wanted to learn more about them and specifically who they are what is their ideal Indie experience and then how do they buy and so we started out with who they are and while we did collect demographic information I think the more interesting piece of it is more about their habits their attitudes their motivations so that's kind of where we started this whole journey and to dig

into it more we actually separated our respondents into three different segments and this is a really important slide because I'm going to reference this uh throughout the entire rest of the presentation so good one to focus on but uh we segmented our respondents into three groups first regular Indie buyers were folks that had purchased five or more Indie title titles within the prior 12 months from when the study was run light Indie buyers had purchased one to four Indie titles within the prior 12 months and then traditional game buyers bought no Indie titles in the prior 12 months but they did purchase at least one double A or AAA title in the prior 12 months and right off the bat we saw that uh actually 40% of the respondents had purchased at least one Indie title within the prior 12 months which I thought was really cool to see it's a a pretty significant audience and I don't know that I would have guess that

beforehand so that was really nice to see but um actually want to dive into uh the habits of each of these Gamers and we're going to start with traditional Gamers just so we can set a foundation and compare and contrast against Indie buyers so looking at traditional game buyers um they play both PC and console and I should mention that this study is largely PC and console Focus so not a lot of mobile reference throughout the rest of this talk so just a good note to have um they game for about 12 hours per week and on the right hand side you can see some of their top genres including things like Shooters open world action action adventure sports Battle Royale and then on the bottom right you can see how they index uh any genres where they may over index when compared to indie game buyers so in this case Sports being a genre where they over index anything over 100 means they over index if it's over 120 that was statistically

significant now let's take a look at light Indie buyers so again these were one to four Indie titles in the prior 12 months this group is heavier PC players we still do see they play console as well but skew a bit more towards PC they gain for about 20% more per week when compared to traditional Gamers and then top genres are actually really similar to what you saw on the last slide uh with one exception we do see that RPG these creep into the top five here coming in at the third most popular genre or most uh played recently and then on the bottom right you see a lot of genres that are kind of typically more associated with Indie titles things like Rog likes Metroid venas collectible card games um this group is way more likely to play those games and those genres than traditional game buyers uh they still don't make it to the top five of their overall genres played but definitely way more likely

than traditional Gamers and then lastly regular Indie buyers these were folks who had purchased five or more Indie titles in the prior 12 months this is the heaviest PC playing group of the entire audience they game about 50% more per week when compared to traditional Gamers and again on the right hand side you can see top genres played really similar uh with the exception RPGs jumping to their number number one U most played recent genre and then on the bottom right you can see very similar to the last slide just kind of on steroids they're way more likely to play a lot of these genres that I mentioned previously so what we did then was we took each of those three groups and we asked okay how many AAA games do you buy how many double A games do you buy and how many indie games do you buy so going into it we kind of had this thought that maybe Indie gamer are only playing indie games or mostly

playing indie games and they're not really playing a lot of triple or double A stuff um turns out that this data says at least in western territories that's not the case these folks are Avid Gamers across the board they actually buy more AAA games than traditional Gamers they buy more double A games than traditional Gamers and they also buy quite a few indie games which I think if you've seen a lot of people's steam libraries you can attest to this fact but um also looking at light Indie buyers it was a similar case but a lot less pronounced than those regular Indie buyers they do play AAA games they also play double A games again just a lower quantity than those regular Indie buyers and then traditional Gamers buying both AAA and able a titles and by definition they're not buying any indie games and we did ask about that and we'll talk about it more in a couple of slides but kind of the short answer there is they view AAA

and double A as higher quality and better value than Indie titles and they generally like playing big franchises okay so this is an ey chart uh I will try and break it down for you a little bit um so we asked a bunch of questions about the attitudes of each of these Gamers and you can see on the bottom there's a few questions where uh the respondents or or the three segments are really close together so they have very similar revews on some of these questions that we asked so for example gaming is a laid-back activity that I use for unwinding um preferring games where I can explore areas in the order that I want these were common things amongst all of our respondents so they're actually are a decent amount of sim similarities but let's jump into or or drill into uh some of the differences so the the first three items on here gaming as a key part of my identity regular IND buyers were more likely to

view gaming as a key part of their identity whereas traditional Gamers kind of view it as just one of the things that they do and light Indie buyers kind of splitting the difference there in between uh having a preference for playing a variety of genres and franchises all three groups had a preference for that but you can see it's it's much more pronounced with regular Indie buyers as compared to those traditional buyers and then lastly in this section um playing with friends so regular Indie buyers were more likely to be okay playing games that their friends are not playing whereas traditional gamers are more likely to be playing games that their friends are playing again with light Indie buyers kind of splitting that difference in between and then last slide in this section is we asked how each of these three groups would describe indie games so Indie Games specifically and you can see regular and light Indie buyers really similar across the board maybe a

little more pronounced for regular Indie buyers but uh very likely to describe Indie Games as things like unique experimental Innovative passionate uh and then you can contrast that to traditional Gamers uh who are much more muted in their responses across the board on kind of all of these descriptors and while it wasn't super common you do see some traditional game buyers that tend to view Indie Games as lower quality and again this speaks to the fact uh that I mentioned earlier that they're not purchasing any NY titles so that's a little bit about who these gamers are um this next section is is kind of the bulk of the talk here what is their ideal in the experience and I do want to caveat before we go into this section that there's a lot of information here and I I don't want the takeaway to be that my game needs to have all of these elements or all of these aspects to succeed because I I think that's very much not the takeaway

I would argue it's actually should be more about trying something different and Innovative and unique um but this is a good glimpse into General preferences for Indie Gamers so keep that in mind when we're going through this section so this slide is looking at gaming aspect priorities and in the blue we asked Indie Gamers why they play all games and in the red we asked traditional gamers why they play all games so the this is all games this is not specific to IND games basically why are you playing these games and right off the bat you can see there's some similarities across these groups um story and narrative is first and foremost the number one driver this is something that we've seen across the board uh with a lot of studies that we've done it's pretty consistent result uh we'll talk about how it might actually be different for Indie Games in a little bit but story and narrative important to both groups gameplay controls and feel also really

important and then amount of content is also important to both groups although again we'll we'll talk about that a little bit more uh when we look at Indie Games specifically a couple key differences so Indie gamers are more likely to focus on Innovation and uniqueness when they're playing all games and again when we talk about Indie Games specifically you'll see that number jump quite a bit and then graphics and art it's important to both groups but traditional Gamers put a much heavier emphasis on graphics and art than indie game buyers do okay so this slide is taking indie game buyers specifically and in the blue we're still looking at why they play all games but now in the yellow we're actually looking at why they play Indie Games specifically and so there there's a couple things that kind of remain the same story and narrative still important

gameplay controls and feel um but I want to point out a couple of the differences so Innovation and uniqueness it was important before but now it actually skyrockets to be the number two driver for gaming aspects in terms of Indie Gamers when they play Indie Games similarly expression and creativity that jumps quite a bit and then the the third one I want to call out is amount of content which I I thought was a little interesting so um it's still important but it actually is deemphasized in importance when these gamers are playing indie games and I think these three sections kind of tell a little bit of a story when gamers are playing or when Indie gamers are playing indie games they're not necessarily there because they want an endless experience they're there for something that's different and unique and remembering back to that earlier slide they play a ton of games they're probably playing multiple games at the same time so having the ability

to kind of beat a game and check it off your list that was actually something that we found Indie Gamers found satisfying we also looked at a bunch of theme preferences and going back to my earlier caveat this is not saying if you have a theme in a certain area that uh is one way or the other it's a good or bad thing this is not predictive but this is General preferences um so we asked each of the three cohorts which themes are your favorite which themes do you find overused and I won't go through all these CU you'll be able to reference them online later but just a couple call outs so fantasy and sci-fi those were the top uh themes across all the cohorts uh but you can see it's more pronounced again with regular and light Indie buyers and then in terms of overused themes post-apocalyptic and warfare Indie buyers were more likely to say

those themes were overused as compared to traditional Gamers again I can think of many successful Warfare themed titles so this is not uh prescriptive about purchase behaviors but rather kind of stated preferences and then there's a bunch more here I won't go through all of them I did highlight superhero because that is pretty prevalent in today's media um but you can see regular and light Indie buyers is more likely to view this category as overused whereas traditional gamers are more likely to kind of see it as their favorite as compared to Indie buyers all right this is the last slide in this section um it is a pretty dense slide so I'm going to try and break it down and keep it digestible but we asked Indie buyers what are your ideal features when playing an indie game and um this also goes back to what I stated earlier this doesn't mean that your game

has to have all these features otherwise it's doomed to failure that's not the case so story and narrative um we talked about how important that is uh Indie Gamers like seeing original Ip with deep storylines and they also like this idea of nonlinear storytelling so it doesn't have to be a cinematic or traditional kind of cutscene style of Storytelling it can be nonlinear World building maybe something you might see in some of those genres I mentioned earlier for example metroidvania the ability to tell a story in a different way goes a long way with this audience Innovation and uniqueness they really like the idea that designers took a risk and even if it doesn't 100% pay off just the fact that you took a risk is really important I will say it's better if the risk pays off but um just the idea that you took a risk will go a long way and the other thing here is that taking

a risk doesn't mean trying an entirely new genre necessarily or kind of revolutionizing uh a particular uh genre of theme but it can be taking one unique aspect of the game whether it's a mechanic or storytelling and putting your own spin trying something a little different uh we've seen that just even the fact that you're trying something uh really goes a long way with these games in terms of controls and modes there was a preference for third person third person perspective uh and also a slower Pace that allows for time to kind of plan things out as opposed to traditional Gamers who did have a bit more of a preference for that kind of fast twitch reflex um again single player over multiplayer this does not mean that if you have a multiplayer game it can't do well uh of course that's not the case but just a general preference again for Indie Gamers towards single

player if you do go multiplayer the mode that popped the most was online co-op uh that was more so than things like Online PVP or local co-op in terms of graphics and art uh there was a preference for stylized art styles with bright and bold colors 2D or 3D were both good in these Gamers books if you do go 2D the idea of it being hand drawn was compelling to this audience and then in terms of audio we saw that the music and the soundtrack can be a really big differentiator was probably the most important thing over things like vo vo or sound effects creativity and expression we saw in an earlier slide was something that popped when these Gamers came to Indie Games specifically so any opportunities to build in expression things like character customization will go along with way and then also having the

ability to develop a unique play style and maybe approach a problem in a different way uh not only a a one-sized fits-all solution but having the ability to figure things out in different ways resonates with this audience and then lastly amount of content so uh we talked about it a little bit before there was a preference for a vast world to explore and longer play sessions as compared to Shorter ones and then I realized there's a little bit of dissonance with this last point because I I said earlier amount of content is less important when you play indie games and now here we're saying yeah but can we have 2 to 100 hours of content um so I am aware of the dissonance there uh to me the way I read that is more content is always going to be a good thing no one's ever going to complain that your game is too long um I think just the idea that um it's not it doesn't have to be an

endless experience they want to focus on those creativity those Innovative aspects that's okay so content still important but it's not going to be the top determinant of someone playing your game all right and the last section here is diving into a little bit more about how do they buy so purchase habits and behaviors of uh Indie buyers in each of the three groups so we did look at monetization models uh lots of different monetization models probably even more than we have listed here but we did look at some of the more popular monetization models over the course of the last several years and gaming and not a huge surprise here but people kind of had a preference for fully paid upfront games uh that preference was more pronounced with regular and light Indie buyers um but then freeo play uh we actually do

see that the Indie audience is okay with freeo play especially if it is cosmetic only MTX or even uh battle pass or season pass uh where you start to see a little bit more aversion is where you get into free toplay either with advertisements or with gameplay affecting microtransactions in the game and then purchase timing so I just stated that Indie Gamers do have a preference for fully paid games upfront this is looking at when in the life cycle of your game they are likely to purchase and you can see uh between regular and light Indie buyers they're actually less likely to purchase right at release as compared to traditional Gamers and they're more likely to purchase during a future sale whether it's an initial sale or a deep sale later on and I think there's a couple of reasons for that so first goes back to how many games they're playing they have

a ton of stuff and they physically can't play all of them at the same time so they're okay waiting a little bit more and then I think the second thing is price sensitivity we actually uh also asked about kind of if there's a sweet spot for pricing your game and um certainly there are exceptions but we did see between 15 and $25 us was kind of a a sweet spot when you go below there can be questions about quality of the game although again there's games priced below that that have done really well and are great games uh and then if you go above 25 we do see a little bit more of a focus on content so you're starting to compete with some of those double and AAA titles and so expectations around amount of content will go up as that price point does go up the last thing I want to mention on this slide is uh you know traditionally in the industry and certainly it uh jobs that I've had there's been a lot of emphasis on launch and very

understandably so you want to do the best you can come out of the gates as strong as possible I think this is nice to see this data because it does say that you know even if you come out of the gates a little bit slower than you had initially anticipated there are still opportunities down the road to gain a bigger audience especially if you're updating your game or uh you know continuing to improve your game having that in conjunction with a sale can bring a lot of people in down the road and then lastly I kind of want to look at a sample path to purchase this would be for an indie gamer buying on PC I know a lot of folks uh are are PC first or or Centric so we wanted to look at how do Gamers discover games how do they research them and ultimately what makes them pull the trigger in terms of a purchase decision so first where do you hear about a game uh YouTube super

influential we see Steam and family and friends and the one thing to call out to with steam or or really any first-party platform is uh there was a lot of discoverability when you partake in a platform sale so if it's a platform wide sale or a theme sale there's actually a lot of discovery that happens because players will kind of be uh looking for a specific genre and may stumble upon your game and then conducting research so I think anecdotally a lot of us might have guessed that Gamers like to see gameplay and it's nice to put a little data behind that but our research did kind of confirm that game playay is really important when it comes to conducting research as well as things like screenshots and official trailers and then lastly when they actually decide to make the purchase what is really impacting them again it goes back to gameplay I think if you're thinking about where you want to spend

marketing dollars uh focusing on gameplay videos is always going to be a good choice to consider um sales and discounts we talked about on the last slide but uh that's another great way to kind of convert people and get them over the hump and then lastly player reviews I I haven't mentioned it a ton yet but quality is still really important and we did find that um having evangelists and other players ERS who are uh supporting your game and reviewing it highly that can be a really influential factor for a purchase decision so those are kind of the big takeaways I do want to just quickly recap each of the three areas that we talked about just so you can kind of see the big points but Indie buyers um who are they so gaming is a key part of their identity but they don't only play indie games they actually play a ton of games and when they come to play indie

games they are looking for a different experience than what they might be looking for with AAA or double A they're looking for something that's more Innovative more more creative maybe takes more risks than you might typically see with those bigger titles and so to that point don't be afraid to take a risk doesn't have to be Reinventing the wheel or revolutionizing an entire genre but it could be focusing on one specific aspect trying something new putting your own twist on it creative storytelling goes a really long way and it again does not have to be a super expensive cinematic or cut scene it can be building the world and lore in different unique Styles and then lastly those artistic touches can go a long way we talked about some of the different art style choices as well as that music and sound sound trck that can really elevate a game and kind of tie the experience

together for gamers and then purchase habits so Back to Basics fully paid upfront games was the preference um freeo playay was is becoming more and more acceptable if done right and um even though fully paid is is kind of the gold standard for these folks patience is still a virtue because uh they're playing lots of games and you still have the ability to get people into the funnel uh after your initial launce with discounts and then lastly gameplay super super important always a good place to think about when you're prioritizing your spends so that's all I had for you thank you everyone for making it on a Friday I know it's been a long week but uh hope everyone has safe travels and just couple housekeeping things so one I think you should have had your badge scanned on the in um please let them know what you thought if it was terrible

and you never want me to come back that's okay you can tell them uh if it was good you can also tell them that too so uh thanks everyone I I don't think I have time for questions right now but I will stick around outside in case anyone wants to [Applause] [Music] chat