Indie Development & The Economy of Favors

[Music] so my name is Teresa duringer and I'm going to be talking to you guys today about um Indie development and the economy of favors and some of the risks challenges and rewards of our participating in this economy so I've got my contact details up here feel free to take a note if you want to get in touch with me after the presentation they're also going to be on the last slide so so I am an indie developer I've been doing this for about 3 years and I've most recently made an game called Canon brawl and this is something that I've just shipped on Linux PC and Mac on Steam it's something that I worked on with one other person Pete angat who's right there and together the two of us formed a tiny Indie team called turtle sandbox so this is a 2d artillery game um it's an RTS kind of worms meet

Starcraft um it's a lot of fun you should play it and during development of this game my picture of what Indie development is has fundamentally shifted so my background is in AAA um I've worked on a lot of games at a couple different companies mostly a Maxis and some of these games include Zoom beanies which is not Maxis um The Godfather The Sims Spore some expansions for Spore dark Spore and most recently Sim City oh I'll actually talk about one more thing there so when I was at Maxis I sort of a gel of all trades U I had a lot of roles I started as a tester I became a community manager I was a producer and by the time I left I was doing programming and graphic design on the online team so it really was a natural fit for me to go Indie and um while I was making all these big games at these companies um I actually got a chance to make something really small by myself so

on Spore we released the Spore API so that players could make their own games using um any subset of the over 200 million Creations that were uploaded by um players into the sport pedia and when we release this API I wanted to create a example application to just show here's something that you can do with these creations so this is psych expore and what it would do is show a bunch of Creations on the screen they all have a common tag word and the players guess what that tag word is and while the um style of this game is grounded in the visual language that was established by the UI team on Spore and the Creations came from the community it was the first game I felt like I had a lot of ownership over and I just I made the whole thing by myself it gave me a lot of creative freedom it was the impetus for me to break out and go Indie so when I embarked on this Indie Adventure I thought it was going to be like this I thought I would be a Lone Ranger and when you think of the word indie some phrases are evoked like

self-made self-reliant and um pulling yourself up by your Boost drops but as I've been an indie developer I think that this common model of Indie development as a solo venture has become less and less valid the word Indie is short for independent but I think that's a misnomer because right now Indie development is actually more interdependent so I thought this is what was going to happen I thought I was going to be going into my home office or my bedroom with my pajamas and emerging a year later with this beautiful Opus of personal magnitude and I think I thought that because there's this pervasive hero narrative out there um about the lone Dev against the world who is single-handedly crafting a beautiful Masterpiece and they're never relying on any connections this idea has been romanticized by the Press um if you hear a story about this you'll probably hear about a garage involved somewhere in the anecdote

and it's very easy to digest it's popular but it's not representative of what Indie development is so why is Indie development interdependent right now I would argue it's because the bar has been raised and the bar has been raised because indie game consumption has gone mainstream so you guys might have heard a game called Minecraft pretty much everyone I know who has kids U those kids are playing Minecraft right now and there are games like braid that really sort of broke out indie games from being these sort of Niche consumer um gems into the mainstream because they're mainstream the demand is higher than ever and so that means that the developer Community has risen to met meet that demand and more and more games have been churned out which actually just makes it harder and harder to stand out from the crowd so here's an example from IGN this is their website and they show the top games of 2014 and amongst the AAA games that are shown here you'll see indie games like

Shovel Knight and transistor these games have massively different budgets um but that's not immediately obvious to the consumer this really blurs the line between what is seen as an indie game and what is seen as AAA and it drives the pressure to deliver up higher than ever as Indie developers we're competing with AAA companies um who have teams of people at their disposal to get things done and if indeed developers try to do all of these things themselves they'll flail what's happening in my opinion is that tribes are forming um to create layers of support which help them to accomplish the same tasks that AAA teams are doing with u Massive Internal organizations some of the tribes here in California include places like West Indies in the Bay Area there's glitch City down in La uh there's game Nest which just popped up in San Francisco there's also hacker Dojo which is not necessarily game specific but um does

support Indies in the tech space so this is what I'm talking about when I say the economy of favors it's a quidd proquo exchange of services to help Indies be competitive against aaa's so if you're an indie developer you probably went Indie because you're good at one of these four core disciplines programming art audio maybe um or design definitely um but there are a lot of other disciplines that you have to tackle in order to bring a game successfully to Market these things are like legal financing um marketing events there's a zillion and actually a lot of Indie developers have gone Indie to avoid some of these peripheral disciplines the irony is that they become personally saddled with them even though they may not be very good at them so these tribes are forming to establish um pools of shared resources that can help Indie developers tackle some of these

peripherals so one example that I've seen where this is happening is um I go to this group called West Indies and there's a guy Tim conkling from anti-hero and he said that what he does with his tribe and he didn't use that word um is that they do a weekly standup and that's not just with Indie developers that are on his team or working on his game that's people who are working on other games but it Fosters an accountability and it Fosters a productiveness um that can be really uh helpful uh to them keeps them motivated so he's really stepping into this production manager role which is not something that Indies usually have the luxury of hiring a production manager because you just don't necessarily have the budget um and in that way he's kind of helping share resources and establishing this tribe so at a high level I would say that um the benefits of these tribes is that they carry each other to the top you want your fellow tribe members to S

succeed because success gets success if you have a fellow tribe member who has a really successful game you may have access to better workspaces yourself just by your connections with them you may have more legitimacy with the Press Etc so how do you find out about these tribes it's true that some of them are secretive and very exclusive but there's some points of Entry that I can suggest so show your game at conventions we're at GDC um there's PS there's indic there's gamerx there's a lot more um this is going to be one of the highest concentrations of talented developers that you're going to have access to um there are limited slots to show your game at these conventions but I think you can sort of Leverage the economy of favors to have a little bit more success so one thing I I've done is I've sort of sometimes if I don't get my game shown at a convention I'll email the the organizers and ask if I can fill in for

someone who is a no- show or cancellation and that sort of switches from I'm asking them for something to I'm offering them something and I've never actually had that not work out when you're at these conventions I think one other thing that's kind of counterintuitive is that you funnel traffic from people who are play done playing your game to another game that's similar to yours they might seem like your competitor and the reason I think that's a good idea is that in general it builds excit for your genre but also it extends to Goodwill to a developer who's probably tackling they're probably the one person in the world who's tackling the same problems that you're tackling and so if you can build a relationship with them you can be um helping each other in the future so one example of um how to be a little bit Scrappy at a convention that I've done is um I went to Indie Presse at uh GDC a few years ago and I went early and I stayed late and I cleaned up and they didn't ask me to do that but

because I did that I was able to establish a rapport with the organizer of this event who then invited me to show in the future who then invited me to host the twitch stream that was on the front page of twitch you know on Monday at IGN so it was a great opportunity for me to plug my game so that's sort of that favors um paying off another place that you can find out about these tribes are at shared workspaces so these can be tribes in and of themselves at these shared workspaces you can exchange feedback um and really importantly you can sort of fill the role of QA testers because IND developers don't have QA teams um but it's something you can do for each other as QA each other's games these shared workspaces act as watering holes where people can exchange information about things like contests conventions press events because Indie development really relies on this word of mouth underground to get things going so it's really important to plug into that so

some of the shared spaces I know about in San Francisco are um at Double fine there's hacker Dojo there's Indie openhouse at IGN and game Nest recently open in the city so if you find these tribes how do you how do you get your foot in the door I think the best thing you can do is establish yourself as a fixture so participate in game jams so there's a global game Jam that just happened ludar is a quarterly game Jam some of these game jams are at physical spaces so this is a game that I made it's called math grams for the CFO and this was here in San Francisco I also do lotar this is the be beneath the surface uh 29 and I made this game called platform hero and this is an app I made for the pebble it's yoga um it was part of the Facebook webl hackathon the important thing is just to show up and show what you're excited about working on because you'll meet people who are going to be excited about those same things and you'll be able to connect something a little bit more Grassroots that I've done is establish a game night I do this at my house once a

month these are jello shots they're d20s that I made for game night um and I wasn't really expecting this P to pay off in my life the way it has but I basically collect interdisciplinary people from across the industry so some of the people who come to this include lawyers um press people some of them are other game developers and it's a great way to mix people who might not necessarily mix on their own especially as an indie where you're not meeting these people from across in disciplines on a regular basis it also gives me something a little bit more personal to connect with people after meeting them at a convention so I don't just have to say hey let's connect on LinkedIn um I think that this establishes a little bit more meaningful relationship if you're not into board games some other things you can do are uh host a Kleenex test to exchange uh sort of fresh eyes perspectives on your games my buddy Justin put together a press event and so he he get a lot of

the different Indie developers in his area into one space and when you have that big momentum you can start attracting press but you can do things just as informal as um Ultimate Frisbee I play Ultimate Frisbee with some of my other Indie developer friends and I have a cooking club so there are more and more uh people in Indie development than ever before and so these tribes are popping up more and more and part of that is because there has been an exodus from AAA the reason I think that is is because AAA games have exploded budgets they're so huge they cannot afford to take the same risks um because they just have to make a game that they know is going to sell and this has created a space for Indies to occupy on the creative fringes this has been really attractive to a lot of people who have become dis um disillusioned with uh AAA development and so there's been this injection of people with a lot of expertise coming from triaa which is driving up the talent in the indie game Space this

is something you can take advantage of by participating in these tribes but it's something you'll have to fight against if you don't in the last 10 years there's been an explosion in digital distribution with things like steam the PlayStation Store Xbox Marketplace local tribes of Indies are actually competing for a global market which is not saturated so never before have two kids from San Francisco been able to bring a game to Market in Russia um and I say that because for some reason we always have dedicated communities in Russia and the games that we're making are creative products they're generative games are not a finite resource so it's not like we're oil Miners And if someone else takes more of the oil there's less for me in many Industries when you ate a rival you make them stronger and um they can take more of the pie but our in our case our product is not a finite resource and the pie is huge so while AAA companies need to sell millions of

copies to support their development Studios Indies only need to sell a fraction of a fraction of that amount to be viable and I would say that this lack of competition between local Indies relative to the global markets disrupts typ typical models of scarcity in supply and demand and actually pushes us towards collaboration because the benefits of collaboration outweigh the cost in competition a kind of tribal economics takes over and I think of this metaphor as a b Barn raising so you can raise your own Barn yourself but it's probably inefficient it would be better if other people help you out and the incentive for those other people to help you is that when they need to raise their Barn you'll probably be willing to pitch in so for Indies our biggest risk is discoverability there's so many games that are coming out it's really hard to get noticed and i' I've noticed that in the tribes I participate in people will rally around one person's launch and just get on social Med media and get out there and hype that game and the reason

that people are doing that is they know that when they're going to launch their own game they'll have that um Word of Mouth that they can rely on so asking for help can feel really bad can feel like a burden people don't go Indie because they want help from other people I've become convinced it's always good to ask for help because it lets people know what you're excited about working on and it opens the dialogue for exchange so one little random example where asking for help paid off big time for me was I was at this event in San Francisco called The Showdown at The Foundry it's a place you can have a beer play some Esports play some board games I missed my last train and I asked one of the organizers if he would be willing to give me a ride which he did cuz he's a nice guy on the ride I was able to talk about my game canon brawl and develop a little bit of a rapport with him which led him to inviting me to show my game in the future and that wasn't just cool because I got to particip in his event and have my game

on a big screen and get to talk to a lot of players and sell a lot of copies of my game it was also cool because they do events like um the extra Life kickoff where I got to participate in charity that also helped me get to the front page of twitch again and get some really popular and talented streamers who are on um twitch and YouTube including L Rene nay gassie Mexican and I am spoon to bring their talent and entertainment value to talking about my game but favors don't have to be freebies they don't have to be like really random little events like that um you can also do things like Revenue share with people to avoid having to raise Advanced Capital based on trust for example at my shared office there's this guy he's pretty great his name is Todd and when I needed to bring Canon um to more platforms because I had a relationship with Todd from that shared workspace um he was willing to port to Linux and Mech and it was great I didn't have to raise Advanced capital

when you're exchanging these favors often times it's not a zero sum game there's mutual benefits so for example if you're approaching a press person to try and get some coverage for your game you're offering them content to write about and more importantly if you're approaching someone who's maybe a let's play host or a twitch streamer um you're giving them an opportunity to springboard off of your success so there are people like Northern lion who does Let's Plays and he found Binding of Isaac and that game really catapulted him into the Limelight now he makes his living off of uh his streams so one example of a mutually beneficial exchange another kind of random one I go to a lot of board game conventions cuz I really like board games in case you guys haven't noticed so I went to this game convention called kuon and I met a lot of people there who were super duper nice but they were complaining about their hotel so I offered next time if they wanted a couch surf at my place they could one person who took me up on the offer happen to to be a lawyer and so when it was time for

me to trademark my game I tapped him and asked him if he would help me with legal stuff and I could avoid paying some really expensive loyal lawyer fees and he did it was great I got my trademark and also in the future I've had a lot of people approach me about how I did legal work for Canon braw and I make sure to reference that person who was super nice to me so I think a few things are happening when there's a transaction of favors first of all the task gets done and that's the most important thing but second of all the passion for your project spreads as people take ownership over its success and thirdly it makes people happy to help which just Fosters relationships it's also important to ask for favors um in places you might not necessarily think they think a lot of people think of their Community as something they have a responsibility to Foster but they don't necessarily tap it for talent um but one thing that I did with Canal as it's a a super intense RTS that very reliant on very um on the

balance is we have some of our top players like chess kitten come on Skypes with us and they break down the things that they think we need to fix and they have a level of expertise that we can't have access to on the development side coming from the players you can also get um players to post about content ideas like we have a a thread where people post about the buildings that they want to see and these are things that we've built in the game and they've been some of our most popular buildings cuz the buildings are kind of the units in our game so there are a couple of unintuitive characteristics of the EB and flow of the economy of favors that I've noticed first of all the asynchronicity it's not turn-based it's not like I'm going to help you and then you're going to help me and back and forth forever so new Indies are uh absorbing favors at a higher rate and uh their capacity to give back might be limited by their time reach and their experience there's also an asymmetry it's really predictable who's going to be returning

favors it's a Gamble and so um just help a 100 people out because you never know who's going to pay off in a big payback in a big way for example last year I came to GDC and I saw a talk at Lost Levels where I met Marie laner who talked about explosion effects I invited him to come back to my office like I invite a lot of people to come just to do Dev Jam but he ended up doing a critique of the explosions in my game what helped me bring up the Polish to a better level it's really valuable so a lot of these things I've been talking about are a little bit crunchy granola it's sort of Kumbaya like let's all help each other but there are some real risks when you're participating in this economy of favors first of all there are finite resources so while games are not a finite resource there are things like iTune features um Humble Bundle inclusion or the steam top 10 list I mean there's 10 slots on the steam top 10 list that's pretty finite and we're all competing for them globally you can mitigate risks with this by doing things for example Le staggering release dates with your tribe

members so you're not stomping on each other also work life balance you might not notice but this is a ven diagram so it's really hard to maintain a work work life balance if you're engaging in this because you're doing business with your friends um I had one thing happen to me that was sort of unfortunate my game launched right around the time of gamergate and what happened was I had press people I had reached out to who had um actually committed to doing reviews at Major Publications about my game but after gamergate they said you know I think we're too close I'm not going to review your game and I get it as an indie your game is an expression of yourself and it can feel very personal but it also felt like I damned if you do damned if you don't situation because either they don't know about you or they think you're too close so that can be tricky also you'll have to relax control when you're engaging in favor exchange with people who don't have equity your company and are not getting paid you can't expect the same kind of

work you're not making the same choices that you would make if you had a million-dollar budget um but part of that Scrappy charm um that's part of an indie indie game can come from that and the final risk I want to touch on is the risk of homogeneity so I keep saying the word tribes it's a really positive word but tribes are also clicks and clicks can be clicky there's a real threat of uh Guild ification so if you're on the outside you feel like you're looking in can't get anywhere also I think as game developers we have a responsibility to represent a broad spectrum of perspectives in the games that we're making so just be mindful to be inclusive with your tribes and I see that the future of Indie development is going to get more and more into this inter interdependent dynamic because as there's an injection of Veteran wisdom and capital with things like Indie fund um it's going to raise the bar on what Indies can accomplish but it also encourages inter

Reliance because it's again uh raising that pressure on what an indie can deliver so that puts more tension on the pressure between uh interdependent and independent game development so today I've shared some of my resources with you guys and I hope that one day you will return the favor or help someone else um and establish an exchange of favors with them that is my talk does anyone have [Applause] questions question time okay uh is mic try again hello okay okay if you have a close friend who makes a bad game and ask you to promote it what do you do oh man that's a tough one um

well I think you can always scale how much you do promote like I think it's really important to be genuine you don't want to promote something that you're not excited about because you're going to sort of burn Bridges with your personal connections the people who pay attention to you um but in the interest of Goodwill I think it's good to unless it's something you're absolutely against like maybe it's got something horrible like racism or sexism involved I I think you could lift a finger and do something um but maybe not go completely all out thanks yes hello uh I just um a lot of the things you mentioned are San Francisco is a great area because youall have a lot of these resources like the venues and things like that yeah do you have any suggestions for uh people who are in communities that don't really have those kind of like shared workspaces or Esports bars and stuff like that yeah at San Francisco we are prettyy lucky to

have a lot a lot of this going on I think it is really valuable for people like yourself who want to get involved in something like that to start it um this stuff is all really Grassroots there aren't big organizations who are forming it it's all people like you who are saying oh there's a need for this in my community I'm going to step up and do it I know it can seem daunting because it can seem like look I'm not here to build a tribe I'm here to make a game but I really do think that the payoff is going to make it worth it um to yourself and to the people in your area thank you mhm yes um what if your greatest stream happens and your game is like the next you know Angry Birds or something and uh it makes a lot of money and you had a lot of volunteers working on your game uh there's going be questions of ownership and uh rev share I mean as soon as big money gets in the mix um how do you how do you plan on that I mean what's the best way to protect yourself

and your intellectual property from you know legal claims later if you have a huge hit H um I think that while Indie developers are probably not super Savvy legally um establishing um a business model and having you know a basic contract with anyone you're you're working with on that who's going to be making money is really important um and that way it can help you distinguish between who's going to make money and and who's not and and be really upfront with people like when I'm talking about these exchanges of favor like there I'm not talking about any kind of like unclear situation as to whether someone's going to make money or not CU I think that could be really immoral um so yeah just be really UPF friend about it I think that if someone hasn't agreed to give you money you shouldn't expect money for the things you do and and like you know in

writing yes hi uh great talk no thank you up until which point do you think that that you can say okay this person is someone I trust how how do you how do you measure that how do you how you how do you realize that okay I can trust this person with my my my sweat and blood you know like I can trust him with my project so okay here is because it's not just something of asking for favor because you're actually giving them a lot of what you have been doing and encouraging them to do something with that so how to which point can you say these guys are my friends or right um that's a good question so I think that um when you're forming a company as an indie um figuring out who's actually an employee is a a culling process where you're going to figure out who do I super duper Trust because this is you know this is basically my money because

my time is my money in the project we're working on I think there are situations where you're not going to have enough knowledge in advance when someone's offering to help you um I did have a scenario where someone offered to do some promotional video work for Canon brawl and um I said great you know that sounds awesome thank you and the videos were um not something that I would necessarily want to put out out there professionally um but because I hadn't made any promises and I had just been encouraging I think it was okay to dial back the level of sort of publicity that I was willing to give those videos um so I think you can do things like that where um if if if there's an unknown as to how much you can trust someone um just um either be upfront about it and say we'll see how this goes and if if it's great material I I'll use it if it's not give yourself give yourself a way to exit don't Corner yourself in if that

makes sense to people thank you yes go ahead thank you thanks for your uh presentation did um for people who are starting their first startups is there any books or resources that you'd suggest for um things that we might not think about or not know that we don't know I don't know of any particular books and I think the reason for that is partially because it's such a new thing um at least as far as the volume of people in the Indie space um so really your best resources are going to be other Indie developers or other startup developers okay and how about on this subject of gift sharing Economy based I just had someone actually I just had someone recommend uh some material to me but I haven't read it and it was um you know what I'll try and put it in my slide note not afterwards so if you want to download because I'm not I don't

want to say the wrong name right now all good thank you yeah well that's basically it so thank you guys so much for attending