Indie Game Business with Jay Powell | Game Dev Unchained Episode 0197

[Music] ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome back to the number one podcast about video game developers and the lifestyle of game developers my name is Larry Charles on one half of the team bringing you this wonderful podcast and the guy to my right the first person to ever say kid tested mother approved for kick cereal mr. Brandon fan what's a fan of kicks and a fan of this podcast our next guest joining us J pal how are you doing over there I'm gonna unmute you and you are on how's it going J I'm happy interesting couple of days this week but it's all good it's just completely unexpected and it's it's a wonderful thing so how about y'all so you hit the lotto right that's that's what that means unexpected but completely good congratulations man awesome I hit the

business lottery does that count it song I seen it better I feel like if you hit the business out of weed less people come looking for money then when you hit the lotto a lot on with family this way yeah just a quick intro I've been on the business out of this industry for 20 years out of this the person who landed some of the first deals for people like people can fly high moment star breeze paradox studios and I go way back to the 90s when we put stuff in boxes and shoved it on the shelf and then nine years ago I started a consulting firm when we do just wish to have marketing licensing consulting we help developers and publishers and conferences and service providers because we track over 600 publishers another 4,000 plus developers and so we

can quickly go okay you need a team that can do an iOS game you know a runner on iOS and we can sort through our tag system and all this backend and spit on a list of it and then one of the things that's always bugged me and I know you know we're talking about this the other week is there's no way for developers to learn business I mean we have all of these colleges and universities that send people to school and they're like we're gonna give you a game designed to green and those of the industry are looking at it going yeah let us tell you what that's worth when you come out maybe aren't producing and and but they don't do business and so we started our twitch show out of year a little over a year ago and it's a whole initiative it's under indie game business but basically to share these knowledge that a lot of people can't get because they can't afford to go to GDC and all this other stuff so we go

through how to find a publisher how to qualify that publisher how to you know build a community for your game all the stuff that you don't learn except when you learn it the hard way and we're trying to help people not learn it the hard way I said let me jump in this let me click Oh while it's hot what is the name of that show again one more time because I need to go follow it indie game business on Twitter on Twitch ok survey that YouTube page for it as well and we are just now getting it moved over to podcast too so I can send you the links I'll put them in this interview thing Jeff is that gonna help Robin twitch chat that'll help and we'll also put in the show notes for everybody else but that content sounds like gold especially on a regular basis and it's free hell yeah I want it absolutely free started laying it's I Jack the podcast for my own that's pretty much what it's

it's wonderful and that's sort of a thing just like I know how to market games and I know how to pitch Studios but I don't know the first thing about marketing a twit show and so it's been just what were those ok we'll get the word out here and there so the second half of that initiative was you know we can't we looked at it was ok so we've solved what we haven't solved we're doing our would apart to solve the problem of you know studios can't get you know the education that they need yeah we're doing that with the twig show in the podcast the other half of that is developers can't go you know get these business meetings with publishers or with marketing firms or the service providers because you know they're half way across you know GDC is out in San Francisco if you're there all week you're probably gonna drop five ten thousand dollars between flights hotels passes to the show all food uber all of us or something you

know then you've got games coming over in Germany you've got III in LA these shows are expensive and so we said why don't we just take the travel a lot of that and so we partnered up with me to match and they do the matchmaking for calm and Nordic game conference and they had area over at GDC this year but when you sign in to me to match you can basically look at everybody else that's registered and if it's a publisher they're like okay we are so and so publisher this type of game that we're looking for and these are the kind of meetings I want to have so you don't need to cold call anyone you don't need to wonder if that publisher wants to you know is interested in your game you can immediately see it you send them a meeting request done and so and I'm sure that works out where that meeting request and this is okay here's where you're gonna meet well we just simplified it and then so you send that meeting request and it says here's the video link yeah so you know it's time

for your meeting you just click the link and go to get a voice chat like so that's the long version Friday afternoon actually it was more like Friday night I had the brilliant idea of making a post on LinkedIn and saying hey look we've got we track all these publishers we've got a list of 500 publishers drop a link in the cotton we drop a comment under this and I'll send it to you oh that's it okay it's Friday it's LinkedIn nobody goes a LinkedIn in the you know on the weekend anyway as of this morning it's got 80,000 views and we've had over 700 requests for this document so another than one because I'm gonna add my as soon as we're done I have been doing nothing over the weekend and yesterday and up until now today except copying

email addresses and putting them in the list of commas gonna go to and so it's it's wonderful and I just get up in the morning and start chuckling because my pot I have boring business post you know I have you know maybe some tips here and there along the way my posts on LinkedIn get 200 300 years and now it's 80 thousand it's crazy it's ridiculous it's some but it's good I mean that's what we want to do we want to get the word out about this thing I'm it so I can't I'll send you guys the list as well I'll tell you the cheat sheet if you just go to our website and okay WWL group consulting.com a pop-up will come up and say you know give us your email and we'll send it to you and that will automatically do it so unless you need it like right now or you need it those of you who are listening later and I'm not following I'm not on that thread and LinkedIn anymore

just go to our site can you do you mind spelling it really quick just for the people who are driving powa group consulting okay so powell group consulting at powell group calm no it's just WWF powell group consulting calm voice i do consulting as well there you go pal group consulting calm perfect well you're bringing up we get a very important subject that I think all developers would always want and lend their ears to is because you come from a marketing background but this whole social media influence type of behavior type of like market share right is something that every developer is trying to get into slowly but surely asking and just trying to break it through to create an audience so that you know it's easier to get their message across what has been the hardest thing about it besides the commitment time

but what has been the toughest nut to crack about this since you have a marketing diploma like you actually have the chops but this whole thing is like a different like you got to get like the from the 12 year olds to the 30 year olds tic somehow tuned in more than two minutes and kind of listen to your message are you talking about all the podcasts out yeah just the social media part because that is completely new in the last few years and of course the young uns have a better handle than us yeah how big a deal it was so before we started doing the show and obviously this event and by the way I'll send you all a link for a discount for your viewers for the show as well yep Oh graduations listeners okay but that's why we're doing this it's like you know it doesn't do me any good if I tell all these developers we're gonna

help you and then none of them show up you know so we did before we started doing the show me being the business guy I'm like okay so how do people consume knowledge well white papers people like white papers right we wrote all of these white papers nobody read but we gave them away we you know did all this other stuff nobody rhythm and then we did a big about once a year we'll do a big survey to the industry mainly developers and publishers find out what they're looking for what their concerns are you know if it's changed in terms of the games that they're publishing it's a publisher all of that sort of stuff and so one of the questions that we put on there was how do you prefer to consume knowledge and it was like overwhelming wholeness a was like 60% or maybe even higher said video and I'm like I'm 42 I didn't grow up on the YouTube world and I'm like are you serious people like sit down out of their day and they take time to you know to start watching this

stuff and so I kind of just dismissed it for a little while but then like okay what's the where how are we gonna get this stuff out there I guess we're gonna do video so it's you know we don't have a big shall media marketing team over here the folks over at vicarious PR have been fantastic in helping us with the event but I basically use you know tweet deck and a thing called crowdfire to do our social media and it is I mean it's it's it's been very tough to get the word out because there are so many podcasts and there are so many twitch channels but you know we're sitting over here going we're doing something new the ones doing this and it you know falls on deaf ears most of the time so that's the biggest thing you know in terms of getting the information out there you know it's just simply a matter of you know letting people know it exists in the first place yeah now we definitely share yeah we

know that we know because we didn't do video until like like a month and a half ago because we did the audio podcast for three years to build up that kind of just reputation but also the style like just figuring out that the patterns that we click in with our audience the format's and once we were comfortable and a lot of it was us being in same location like obviously we're working at different studios at the time different parts of California and then finally doing this full time saying placing has allowed us to be consistent with the daily shows and everything that we've always wanted to do but now honestly I think it happened at the right time right the consistency was enough there we're just frequently doing more now and I think those three years was good practice for us to come to this point because we're late a lot more comfortable now than before but uh yeah

we're right there with you man we're having to go through and figuring this out yeah and and just just being consistent and being okay with no one watching as long as is out there people who are looking for it will eventually find you yes I guess me personally that helps me save some graces like if you know you've put an hour into something that no one is gonna see at the time that you've done it yeah but you at least get some sleep knowing that yeah now it exists on a platform where it will always be and people can find it through SEO I can share it things like that so it's not an immediate waste of time if you consider the long tail of the long tail for sure yeah the sea I had no idea and I had watched twitch like actually every now and then and you know when I woke up that morning I'm like well do it twit show I wasn't having no idea how to do it so I called Dan long who goes he's in D on Twitch and I had met him several months before and I said look I have an idea for this

thing but I have no idea how to do it will you help and he's like yeah absolutely and you know without his help on the technical producing side I would have never been telling we price to be regulators he set out to dance do you know things he told me he was like don't watch the viewercount but I'm like okay because whether you have a lot of people or you have nobody you just want to act like there's a lot of people there that works that's a good thing no tough trying to find that that groove but I think we've got it now as well but that's the I admire the fact that you're doing this full-time now because these shows in this podcast you know I tell a lot of our guests I'm like this is the most fun I've had in a decade oh yeah definitely for sure like yeah like the ability to do anything not just these shows like the ability to kind of call the shot with a hundred percent of the

failures and success is pelvis it's on your shoulders I mean I love that type of risk taking but a lot of percentage of people don't they just like to just clock and clock out and and and live their life after the fact which is fine too so it does take like a particular breed the to shoulder this and be okay with everything that comes with it yeah we need more people like that within the game industry for sure it's once you make that step the first time and the power group is my second company and it's it just turned nine this year but for three years before that I started another startup with three friends of mine but we all worked together at the first place I worked for nearly a decade or decade once you take that step the first time and you understand that you know your days of a regular paycheck are shot and here in

the US anyway you're probably either not going to have insurance or you're gonna have crappy health insurance then because you're you're running a company it gets a lot easier after that you know once you get through that first phase of you know realizing that you're doing a start-up and that it is on you because I'm like I'm like you guys it's like I like that weight on my shoulder if you know we don't have food on the table and that's my fault you know and if we got the same for for our team as well and you know I started worrying a whole lot more about the business when I started you know we started bringing people on and it's like okay it's not just me anymore it's you know there's other families that are relying on us you know you get this done now but it's I wouldn't trade it for the world it's I love it especially when you hit the lotto we're gonna make something monetizes out of that first but in the meantime you know I'm still like copy

paste and copy paste and copy pasting email addresses it's okay man so okay what are I'm gonna flip it around and ask you a holler because issues that you see with developers in the industry and what kind of barriers to their success are you hearing Larry can't oh sure first where I sit as a developer myself who's also in the industry but I'm on the indie side now I'll say is like discoverability is always my biggest fear of like all right I have this great thing but so does everyone else and we're all yelling in the same room as lucky and trying to get the hot girl attention or trying to get just the people in the room to give us the attention and not the other people's attention or support us all or whatever but now knowing that like I need to find a way to make a boom fast for cheap and be proud get as many people as possible who could like my product to find my product discoverability is always that like even

if I have everything else right if I don't have a way to get the word out to the people who should be hearing it it might have all been for nothing and so I think that more than anything I think that that's the thing that stays in my mind the most right now even more than like making a quality product and it's like even if I had a [ __ ] product I still want to know what I can do to try to boost my skills and getting people to pay attention to what I'm doing yeah like I tell Larry a lot of time I've seen rough I see it I'll tell you we're past that now you can sell no products all right fire festival all right but we don't want to encourage that type of behavior but that that proves of anything as long as you have a good marketing and enough people to believe in to this false product you can make money and be successful at it as long as you don't get caught right of course we're not we're we're brushing for people to actually deliver the product he's not suggesting I'm not suggesting just making an observation I'm making obviously exactly so yeah I agree with

well first you need to get some friends yeah but I agree I sign off with what Larry is saying I think developers their biggest problem right now is their so I think if they're not any developers they're most likely working in a company and working on a company most likely they're becoming more more pigeon-holed and specialized that they're slowly becoming unaware of the opportunities that are happening around them everything and everybody outside of the game industry wants game developers right now it's a booming huge business what we are offering on the real-time front is everybody that is utilizing technology wanting a piece of it and they are completely from the ground know nothing about real-time development and

so I see that issue has been building up the last few years it's like we're a very hot commodity yeah but we have no idea how to spread our skills to other industries and and know even anything about it right and I I feel a lot of those times developers are just screwing themselves by kind of being closed off from the from the world I mean what do you think email message phone call that I get but I can't help with is the developer that calls me and says our game is launching next week and we have no budget can you help us market it no nothing may God have mercy on your soul there's nothing I can do for you there's nothing anyone can do for you now the good news is one that that hasn't changed in 20 years that's about the same issue that I

saw when I first started its its developers don't have the mentality of this is actually a business but you don't make money on your game you're gonna have to go get another job while you make your next game and you know we've had several guests on the shows that have emphasized over and over so the minute your game has a screenshot to show you need to start you know building that audience you don't need to start buying ads on Facebook and you know Twitter and Instagram or anything but you need to start building that audience and Justin French had a great article on Gamasutra a few weeks ago talking about how to you know especially early on drive everybody to your discord and use discord as your you know community hub service being of marketing so I agree it's it's getting developers to

understand that you can't just make a great game you have to make a great game and tell everybody about it no I you I would even add on to that and say before you even finish making that Creek tell people about it like it's insane that yeah yeah how many people would just completely I think it is exactly what you're saying it's like financially irresponsible for people for creatives to go in a room and just make that dream project they've always wanted to make and believe that once it's out in the world people will come like Noah's Ark or something right it's so irresponsible and I hope that a lot of those guys or women are providing for their family because it's in its it's so irresponsible to think that that way about business I guess what bothers me when I think about it now is it feels like people aren't on the pulse yeah but

they call themselves businessman or businessman or business people right to say that like all we got to do whenever I hear all we got to do yeah I like um in my mind I've already folded my arms and I'm like all right here it comes yeah it's like I hate when people get out of touch or are out of touch and don't know it or don't try to do anything about being out of touch right like aren't surveying the market and seeing like wow it's very difficult or the cost to acquire each customer is like super high right now what creatively can we do to try to mitigate that like like we started a podcast three years ago and this is this is true facts we want to make and sell games and we're like well let's start this podcast and build a community who get to know who we are we'll even give them value by interviewing guests by offering our opinion by doing all this great stuff who knows when the game part will actually come through but like by the time we get to that point imagine where the audience will be yeah we were making the bed before we lay yeah we

because we've seen three years we've been through the trenches right we know how it works we've seen our friends go we've seen our friends go gave and we're like jealous at first and then about a year later we're not so jealous because they completely [ __ ] up right but we've seen even with the podcast being kind of like the it's not even children horse it was seriously us like paving a way for building a community but asking the experts such as yourself to like kind of how do we dodge these these areas without fully committing to it first and learning from that and people who've done it right and I feel a lot of developers just completely skip that step and let's say if we start at the same time they are starting to finish their game and have not told anybody about it and it's it's crazy it's crazy to think that they would be able to come out with something and everybody would buy or pay

any attention to it that's why I really want to highlight your twitch show because and all the content that you're involved in because when I think about it like you have a team of creatives no matter how talented they are if the goal is to be creative and be lucrative at the same time who on that creative side actually has chops in business business development marketing social media advertising or any of the other half of the release plan right you can't just have the team of juggernauts that are like artist designer engineer the sound guy you know whatever producer we have this Titan team not one of them has any idea how to where to or how much to get information out there that will actually bring people in that are interested in buying that thing it's you may as well show yourself probably good then I won't have a job he's like are you talking about mice people yeah that's it it's

it's we are as an industry tuned to think of what we do is art I'm gonna say it's not I'm just saying that's the mentality that we have and with that comes the whole if I make something pretty or I make something engaging and fun people will automatically come to it and it's not true and it gets back to the fact that no one teaches and reinforces this early on in the industry I mean when they're coming in for the first time I was very fortunate I've got a job where I was you know I intern for a little bit at this company and then you know we were an agency back in the day and so we represented developers you needed publishers or you know back then publishers who needed distribution outside of North America or whatever their country was that's how I ended up working with Patrick soderlund and dice like back when III was in

Atlanta I mean I don't even remember how far but if if there was some education along the way and now I'm on the advisory board for one of our local you know community colleges that has a small game development program and not what's the first thing when when they sent over the curriculum they're like this is what we teach what are you thinking I'm like I can't comment on the art and coding side because I don't know art and coding but I can comment on the fact that you don't have a single business thing in there a marketing thing or even producers you know so it's learning how to effectively manage a team and produce a title is extremely important as well and we do see that tall not as much as the code in the art side mm-hmm but infinitely more than the business side yeah it's I find myself as I mature as a developer that I've I'm deeper and

deeper excited about the business and marketing size of game development because of how much I think that I can see that it directly affects the success of what I do I feel competent in my design skills I feel incompetent and where I should be in my business skills and so yeah like Brandon was saying like a lot of this podcast helps us leverage our own career paths by saying like hey we're gonna bring on an expert who knows about law who's gonna help us avoid some pitfalls that we may encounter when we start our business hey we're bringing on an expert now who knows about business marketing business development who's going to help us avoid some pitfalls when we try to grow the business that we plan on starting you know and I I know that our school prepared us to be content creators yeah did not prepare us whatsoever to ever think about even taking the step into studio owner yeah you know Coco founder you know or you know a partner executive even on sort of publishing end or anything like that anything to do with Excel that never never went through how sleeping

with you don't worry I hate Excel what we tell people is you know we can't prevent activision EA you know what happened to telltale last year there's nothing we can do to prevent that that's going to always happen what we can do is give those developers who you know lost their jobs and we're laid off give them the tools that they need to not be reliant on that predatory triple-a industry and so that's all but you know it's like that's all we can do but we're gonna help you right there you know we can't keep you from getting laid off because EA stock dropped three points last week but you know we can help you yeah well there's one thing that I know about game developers right is that like there's never a challenge too great and

there's so many things that come our way when we try to go on the business end you know what I mean things that are just unexpected things that just kind of pop up out of nowhere that you have to be prepared to handle and so one of the ways that I kind of gut check the guests that we bring on the show is I ask them if they want to play this game called the Fast Five it's where I ask you five rapid-fire questions and you give me five rapid-fire answers and you know it's just a great little way for us to like break up the podcast a little bit but also get to know you on a different level than the main topic that we're talking about so you're up against some heavy hitters yourself but would you like to play the Fast Five absolutely oh hell yeah I love the enthusiasm you already get two points for that all right question number one what was the first video game you ever remember playing Jupiter lander on the Commodore 64 alright question number two if you could be any fictional character for Halloween this year with the perfect costume who would you be Oh Thor from in-game I'm like I've

already got the body style it's likely I just need the hammer man the beard me tail but that's it question number four if you were to pick one of your favorite books and had to remove it from your memory all together just to make sure that you could preserve the memory of every other book that you've read which book would have to go one of our a saboteurs dripped Drizzt Do'Urden books just simply because I've read so many of them and they're so good that I wouldn't mind reading it again okay question number four if there was a fictional universe that you could exist in for a day I love s in this one which one would it be part of me wants to go fantasy because I've always you know I'm much more into the swords in the magic side but at the

same time they don't have things like toilets so I'm gonna go Safa star wars universe I was never much of a Star Trek kid so I'll go Star Wars all right then question number five would you or would you not drink the blue milk trust me when I was in college I drank worse and that's a good time it was a good time hold on let me check the stat sheet yeah oh that's impressive even with the little ad-libs that we had you had a top 20 time so congratulations yeah we're gonna legitimize this segment we're video now we are gonna throw in like a counter up we're gonna make I'm gonna add a transitional we go legitimize you know we're gonna go have some five on our twitch channel so people can keep up but yeah I think it is one of her faster time yeah that was

pretty good and thanks for playing I've never been in town I could have been quicker wanna see that clock I wanna see the sweat stage half of it constantly I it's I totally ripped off the like Drew Carey points but no points from whose line is it anyway then you know the time is like me basically thinking like a human by memory you're about there so you know you work with big what sorry the show that Clarkson that we're on before they went to Amazon top gear top gear when they just like randomly put cars in the in the slots and the cold pot that's what we're doing that's good well so you've been obviously doing this for a long time and now you're helping into developers trying to catch up right yeah what are you seeing from the bigger companies that that are kind of

stumbling right now like we've been seeing a lot of full pause oh yeah yes yes good box we've been seeing all these like fumbles major PR fumbles from big companies who are trying to save face yeah exactly instead of do good business so there's probably like three four questions that we're gonna have from you out of this box but let's just start with the I mean what do you do is it better to do good business or is it better to just save face that and once a [ __ ] happens yeah yeah show us some can you tell us behind closed door what is up in your exact yeah like the dig is up how do we spend like give us like a little like front row seat to like what's going on behind closer because to us it feels so obvious yeah but it seems like it's more complicated than that it absolutely staggers me how save some of these companies don't realize the basics and so what we just thought with

EA yeah they you know battlefront 2 ended up going so poorly that you know Bob Iger the CEO of Disney calls the CEO of EA I mean yeah because hold on a second I need to call these guys yeah they you know they do know how much we pay their Star Wars almost as much as they paid for minecraft yeah it's it absolutely it just it shocks me and I think part of it is because these companies get they get tunnel vision they get an understanding of what they're used to what they're you know customers want and what fits in their game it's not my EA doesn't understand microtransactions their FIFA World Team card game in the FIFA game makes them millions of dollars dude but

they diamond Ronaldo - yeah I mean they can't seem to move that and understand that okay maybe this game has a different audience and they don't want that and so I was I was so impressed when you know respawn launched apex legends just like out of the blue it's like hey here's this um you know battle royale game and I'm like and I don't have to build anything this is awesome I'm gonna plan but they're you know within a week you know I had a post on somewhere and I was like do not expect apex legends to monetize like fun like fortnight because they missed the boat you know they there was with the skins and the covers and all the stuff that you could buy there was no way to actually flown it and that's why people buy skins and dances at 49 it's like when you're looking at somebody 200 yards out playing for tonight you can tell that that dudes dressed up like mr. Dubourg er when somebody's 200 yards out

in Apex you don't know what skin they have you don't really care because they're shooting issue and the game's much faster so you know when we see these big Studios completely miss the ball on things like this you know I just kind of like sit back and I'm like who's in charge over there and that's one of the reasons why you know I get so angry too when I'm watching like live streams on e3 and launches and all these fans are like oh I can't believe they're showing casual indie stuff this is crap I mean either Call of Duty 41 or whatever we're on then these may be teams doing this they're the ones that innovate this stuff you know they're the ones that you know come up with these new gameplay modes and you know all of these new mechanics and things like that they're the ones that get it you know the you don't talk about that you want talk about fallout 76 the game don't ya let's just go lighter all right yeah you like

Fossum we're gonna go through these so you like fallout 79 salting the game I'm just confirming is that what you say okay okay right so you've been playing it let me let me guess all right let me guess and this is not who install anything you played every single fallout oh yeah really you skipped all that you just really live 76 night before now you know if I ever have time I want to go back and play some villains but I didn't get into it until four okay so part of the ease and me enjoying it is it's pretty much for people in it so what went wrong with that game I'd love that

cuz you being a seasoned player I am thoroughly intrigued in your opinions on this game cuz I'd written it off like I was like what it did what and then don't you can't and what a lot of people do yeah all right oh I get a free copy like all right that lets me know you guys are like praying for people to play it did and I think it all comes down to their launch and the fact that their beta like didn't exist you know they did a beta for two weeks in the back of my head I'm like you know but this has been around a long time they've been running it's not like you know the trepidation you would have it's like okay this company does you know huge open world RPG single-player games and now they're gonna do a multiplayer MMO that should throw up on the Fred flags on a lot of people you know any time but you know

they have been managing and running Elder Scrolls online for years and if you remember Elder Scrolls online had the same issues when it launched everybody was like this is stupid this is notice girls we're not gonna do it we're not gonna play it and it's still going strong today and if you haven't played fallout 76 since you know last October give it a try even if you already own it it's like of cautioning us to play it anyway but they're enough they haven't proved a lot of stuff in it but you know even today in the patch I was reading some patch notes maybe last night and you know they're talking about how they're gonna ease players into the world a little more by you know you're not gonna catch diseases until like level 15 and and your foods going to you know Road and decay slower and every I'm sitting there looking at that list going and every single thing in here should have been caught in a real beta you know

if they did look at how long blizzard runs you know closed beta soap and betas on Warcraft and while classic is gonna beta it feels like a month and a half maybe two months now something like that just wants to eat something eight twenty seven or something like that but you know they didn't do it with fallout it was like okay let's get this thing out here you know October basically let's be Thanksgiving you know yeah which comes to my icing rules of purchasing games never ever buy a game during the last two weeks of a quarter and think really hard before you buy a game in November or December because there's a high probability you know one they're coming from triple-a studios but a high probability it may not quite be done but you know somebody over an accounting goes we need to ship this thing yesterday to hit our quarterly numbers then you know you end up with stuff like

this but you know they they didn't do a good job on the community management side they they should have cooked it a little longer basically because it is and its core it's a good game it's it's follow-up or you know it's it's that kind of the graphics are there you can even use mods in it which you know how often do you see that come out of a multiplayer game yeah yeah when it first came out it was a dumpster fire and well I'm actually happy to hear that last week GTA we just finished talking about that games we can't we love to know your opinions about that if you okay so you and including the emails that went out yesterday yeah we just looked at that like what is going on like is this just literally one guy just like thinking that this is the best move is it a committee of people that thought these were the best news like what would

be happening but that's at that level let me check my little secret database here we don't deal with with GTA yeah they're not on the list the closest 500 publishers although today they are actually classified as a distributor yeah yeah I'm just saying they we don't have a single contact over there so I was wondering how big it might be but you know g2a has has been an issue in the industry for years and you know Larry talked about things to tell developers you know up front and and it's one of the things that we you know preach constantly you can't and I had a developer do this to me the other week you know I guess they were just like searching game development Twitter twitch shows and about once every three

months this happened somebody sends me an email completely cold and it says I hope you'll play our game on your stream here's a code for it and I'm like okay one you've never seen our stream there because we don't play games on it we may every now and then we have a guest on that has just released a game and Andy will play it in the background while you know we're talking to them but we're not a a let's play dude let's sit down and do this channel but to when you blank it you know codes out like that that's how they end up on the black market but I wanted gray market whatever you want to call it that's how it happens so we're constantly tell Oliver's you know don't send a code out you know unless you're using something like key mailer or wove it or I will see a third one there's another one you know

that does this too and you'll see PR people talk about how you should go and double check their emails and you know make sure that the email matches up exactly to what's on their YouTube side and that's good advice but that gets time-consuming that gets very very time-consuming it's just easier to use move it or key mailer or one of these services to manage that for you because yes it's gonna cost you a little bit of money but it's going to save you a lot of time and so you know the all of these codes end up over there and so it's causing problems far beyond what you see in the news so all these indie companies are you know ranting to reject you g2a to take them off their server they're nice of one they're not going to do it then they're they have no incentive to do it they can they've gotten bad press for a decade they're

not on a custom through that because there's keep going through it and buying it because it's there and it's cheaper than buying something straight on Steam or that's how people and then you know you have this thing like yesterday and I up in the morning and I checked Twitter and I just started laughing there's no way in hell this actually happened and I'm like looking for the tweet or somebody's like yeah be funny if that actually happened there no is plain print we've written a they say we've written a unbiased honest about how our system works would you run it on your on your web page but not a sponsor for promoted content we wanted to look like an editorial and I'm like I sit around and watch you know read the news you know the real world news it's not art yeah and politicians are the worst about it you know it's like how do you not understand social media how do you not understand the internet how if you said

something into a camera last year and then you say something completely different this year people are going to catch that you know and what you put on the Internet is forever why are you gonna be hell would you a mail that you know that letter to anyone because you have to know it's gonna get put on the Internet it's in you know you're not gonna be able to get away that scot-free you know they're they're corporates like oh it was a rogue employee but it is possible if anything is shown it is possible that the this person did not think that anybody he must have emailed it to 20 outlets the first I can't I can't it's a special type of person yeah it's a special type of person to not think the second step through that if I send

this email there's a possibility that the media the 20 media outlets that I sent a check to would turn this into a story right yeah but like do you really think this was a rogue really any chance of rogue employee just going above his paycheck to do this on his own I think it was a regular employee that was doing what they've always done and they thought it was normal and it would be okay you know it was look at who they deal with so you know we as developers have issues dealing with steam because you know steam is as big as they are and they're do things that way that they want to do it and that's kind of like the end game you know that's now we're starting to see changes in that since epic came in and started you know chunking $40,000,000 wrenches and everything but g2a they don't deal with developers as much their main line of communication is to their

to their users you know to to the people they're constantly the people that come there and purchase so it doesn't shock me at all that they don't have that internal knowledge base of oh wait we probably shouldn't ask people to do this because somebody is going to turn around and you know bust us on it if what you if you know somebody that would do what she wanted them to do you pick up the phone and you call them and you ask them you don't put it in writing you know that's that that's it that's the end of it you can always Dena something that you said in a phone call you can't deny it when the email is sitting there you know on the screenshot mm-hmm oh the good old deny deny it wasn't me let's me sobbing emailing Kotaku it wasn't me so where are you all on the epic tour I'm all for it I love competition and I it

boils back down to Pepsi coke for me you know as long as they're in competition with each other the consumer wins regardless which one that I actually prefer because there's somebody else for them to compete against it creates a check in the balance in the free market yeah so yeah epic it's doing what they're supposed to be doing I don't think there's anything wrong yeah I think the the the part and they actually made good do with fixing a problem that wasn't even theirs like the Shenmue people the backers complaining about how it's not available in C that's the developers so somehow the developers are yeah completely just like out of the equation the city developers just like backtracking a little dition mode and pry because you know you promised me on Kickstarter Sen let's run a quick list of things that were promised and kicks it over that but you know to when when Tim came out and said okay alright whatever if you didn't want it on you know you absolutely had to have it on steam and nowhere else we'll

refund your money that is like the biggest you know million dollar bluff call that I have seen in a long time it's it's like okay now what now what you have to complain about the fact that you know steam isn't paying to get these things yeah people made y'all been doing this for long time people forget that platform exclusives are what move units you know this is when was the last time you played Mario Cart on your Playstation 4 yeah never never you know it's it's you know people they own that there's no difference yeah you know if you want something to if you want to stand out from the crowd you've got to have engaging exclusive content and that's why you know we see all the stuff about subscription and services and I'm not bullish on Google's stay Diaz did it know who's gonna play a hundred and fifty dollars for something that they

can play on their existing PC or console they don't have that engaging exclusive content if they do that changes yeah but they want nobody I don't think nobody buys Netflix that subscribes the you know Netflix so they can watch friends they can so they can watch you know normal shows or are just gonna be black and all that sort of stuff so it's I get I get a kick out of people you know complaining about the epic story yes always right back to the Google thing though like Google to me always has like this idealistic announcement that gets people excited and you just slowly weeks after towards the launch just see them killing their baby it sound like a great idea first they're like suffocating it and then like

letting it breathe for a second yeah yeah it's for them to come out with $150 hardware to buy into a system it was is so dumb now they're you're coming out with a console which is the one thing that you were trying to avoid the whole time it's like let me go on my PC and play on your system there was no reason to own anything must much less than a controller yeah something like that has to hit mass market to do well yeah mass market isn't gonna pay a hundred fifty bucks you know the early adopter that when they're gonna sell hardware they already have people there are people that are going to buy you know that hundred fifty dollar hardware but what I think is going to happen is not enough of them are gonna buy it know they're not gonna get a good you know base to start building from and then somebody in Google's office is gonna go well nobody's using this thing let's just shut it down yeah well what about the games we exclusively are turning into oh wait they're taking five plus years and it's [ __ ] because that's how game business

works they're not gonna figure out how to make good games all of a sudden it takes a while but we got G dream and she's been making all types of game no she hasn't she's as one person I know exactly people ask me about boys like yeah just look at Amazon they have infinite money and they're closing shop slowly so yeah they haven't shipped a product that remotely did well they can't retain talent and there's absolutely I'm sorry there's absolutely no excuse for one of the biggest websites you know for purchases in the world to still be a blip on steams radar yeah you should absolutely be owning this market you've had ten years to do it and so yeah I'm not I'm not bullish on stated I I want the idea of why stadia exists to be successful because I know that it's an

inevitability that we're gonna see a shift in gaming and entertainment go towards accessibility and be less about platform exclusivity and more about just portal exclusivity right like how I get to my content is the part that Sony owns or Microsoft or Google it's gonna be game past games yeah yeah so I mean I'm just excited to see that future I have I mean I still don't have an Xbox one I've got the ps4 and I got a switching but I've always been a PC gamer anyway I just haven't got around to buying the Xbox and but when they announced the game pass for PC a NASA III it's like I bought it during the time you know genius do you have exclusive content and you know I still pay EA you know $5.00 a month or whatever it is or I'm sorry I don't do the premiere access but I do the access thing because there are original games there yes things that I can't where else yes it's very smart don't sit down and

try to charge me $20 a month when I can play the same games somewhere else what I'm already paying mm-hmm yeah Xbox is making such a great pivot for their business and finally realizing yo our PC market and console market are the same types of people let's not double charge oh it's like the the best move I've seen from a console maker for a long time and that's where I feel Google stay is just completely not understanding the consumer market I mean their goal is pretty straightforward just trying to get the the marketing details from us just long enough that they can they can sell that off but their pricing points everything about it have been just poor consumer marketing studies it's like it's not who you're selling this to hey I'm not showing $150 to an on console market to buy a console guys I thought

your whole thing is not to have consoles one of my behind for $150 you idiots you like your hypocritical within your first marketing sentence dude oh it is democracy yeah my main business laptop is a Chromebook and I love chrome and I've had them for 10 years now because I can do virtually everything on them except play games you know that I need to get done from the business standpoint so absolutely I want them to get this going right so you know I can play wherever I go because I mean that's how I got into this industry I didn't honey the first thing about business yeah when I started I was a gamer I could sit down a good that games good that was not that sort of stuff but you know that's still why I do this I love this industry after I have tried to get out or felt seriously and had job interviews about getting out of the industry twice in my career and it usually lasts like one job interview and

I'm like oh god I'll be miserable on this you know what I'll go figure it out on the game side again because it's you know I don't think you do this as long as this I've been doing this and as long as you two been doing this if you don't love what we do yeah you know you gotta have a reason to come back for the abuse only you need that drive that motivator that pushes you through the dark times yeah because the the ups are actually very enjoyable yeah they'd be happy reasons why I make games that talking to the fans are reading the comments that are positive or seeing the people's engagement or the tattoos of your game logo on their body like that's like wow we made something that touched people like this is awesome mmm so and that's how I feel about this podcast well it lets me know that they probably don't make the best long-term decisions but I get ready for their for their fandom like if I was rocking a halo 4 that's right bro that's gonna be updated well I

will say this I have another surprise for you but this is a much better surprise than a random encounter free game we've been podcasting for over an hour sir so that means that bran and I are gonna take a moment to just get away from the microphones and we're gonna let you talk directly to our audience to shout out to promote or raise awareness or just bring some additional to anything you're involved in something you care about just anything that you feel currently needs more spotlight than it has so without further ado the floor is yours Oh scary yeah that's a lot of trust you're throwing your day there's a lot of an hour off them off the bat here so you know one for the developers that are out there I highly encourage you to learn more about the business side of all this stuff you know because it is

very important it is something that you know like we said earlier I don't care how passionate you are about the industry if you want to do this as your full-time job you're gonna have to look at it as a business it is a business whether you want it to be or not you know so you know start your marketing ASAP you know build that disk or community because that's the other thing that I get people coming to us it's like well I'm gonna do a Kickstarter for our game and I'm like do you already have a community of thousands of people because if you don't then Kickstarter isn't going to go that well you build that from the get-go and you know start cultivating that audience you know and then build it you know grow it from there and you're gonna have a lot more success along the way you know learn how to be smart with your key codes when you're sending them out you know we've got folks over at move it and key mailer that we know that you know we can put you in touch with if you want to know

more about what we do I'm not even worried about the Powell group side you know that's you know you can go there that's our consulting firm but on the mvgame business side our discord if you just go discord GG / indie game business and this game business with no s your that pops you know discord we've got several hundred people in their most our developers streamers and publishers and if you have questions about how to contact influencers or you know how you should do a press release and how you know all of this sort of stuff it's a wonderfully safe place to ask it because everyone is there for the same thing you know for our show that's coming up next week I'm just trying to like run through all the marketing points in my head you can go the easy way to get there it's only that bright but if you go to indie game dot business no WWJ indie game business that'll take you to the main page from that points where you

can buy a a ticket and you know for you guys I just like in the last 10 minutes set up a code so if you use the code game dev Unchained all maps then you're gonna get a 15% discount on the ticket you know it's one of those things that we want to do what we can you know to help the developers and so we've got the event next week we do these things roughly every three months we've got the discord you know feel free you know hit me up I'm on there that's actually one of the easiest ways to get ahold of me and you know we've got the podcast over on anchor dot F M slash indie game business and I saw y'all talking about the other week about the expensive you know how expensive podcasting hosting is I anchor FM is free like 100% free there's I don't pay anything but you know I'd say remember how I found it but

you know it's there and it's you know it's all it's distributed on comfortable of Apple and stitcher where is it a podcast breaker obvious Spotify overcast pocket cast radio public and stitcher so you know it's out there and just bear with us we're getting as many of the episodes up to the podcast as we can but it's just one of those things that it's something else to do during the day um what else we got if you woke that list of publishers you can either find this ungodly mega thread on LinkedIn you know now or you can just go if you go to either one of those sites I gave you the power group consulting.com or the indie game business a nice little pop-up will show up on your screen says hey sign up for you know put in your email address almost this list it's the same list it's exactly the sort of perfect that's the best way to get it quick what else is

there if you're putting I'm just thinking like random nuggets of wisdom to throw out there if you're doing a steam game make sure you get your wish list option up there just as soon as humanly possible I am sure it effects something on stains you know algorithm but more importantly despite all the move and all the growth in social media email lists are still a really really really good way to market you know people just look at them like they're you know that's old news but they're not I mean it's think about it you know I got an email the other week that said 28 games in your wish list are on sale you know that paycheck but you know it's every time you update your pricing you know there you go and it's going to automatically send something to

everybody that's you know on your wish list everybody has your name wish list and it's free so you know do that what else forget when you're doing your distribution don't simply count on Steam or you know steam and Gog or whatever get your game out there on as many platforms as you possibly can because everybody's got a different audience you know there's get copies that you can sell on you know Green Man gaming maybe or you know Amazon store that you may not have sold on on Steam so build your distribution as deep as possible okay mmm-hmm let's do Jack my head and you got one last thing or not I'm sure I've got like 50 last things but they're all rattling around in there at some point how far along is your game Larry we have trailer that we cut and August is the playable demo goal so that's

where we are in the process and that's great it's game arenas game also it's both oh all right Oh y'all aren't working on the same game yeah we aren't yeah we're on the same game okay all right cool so are you self-publishing or finding a publisher both looking into those options yes that's why we're excited I think we're just like ready to because that's the part of the business that we ourselves you know we've been in the trenches and specializing and we're talking you know doing the podcast or finding that art but going through the rounds being in front of publishers we have no experience with that yet and so this is our kind of testing miss so we have to have something in prototype form to finally go out there and like go through it and maybe that's why when you talk to you about obviously let's show you we won't send you a code okay absolutely demo before you go to that publisher

because that's what they're gonna ask for anyway exactly yeah and you know the other piece of advice for developers whenever you go to a conference every publisher is going to tell you that your game looks great and they want to see more mmm whether it does or not I mean because unless you're going in with something that's like so off of what their usual customers buy that they're like I don't even know why you're here but you know no publisher wants to be that that you know team that sat down and went yeah we didn't publish fortnight because we didn't think it was gonna be good you know they want to see everything that they can so don't get tunnel vision you know if you're talking to 1520 publishers until that contract is signed and the money is actually in your bank don't stop talking to the other 14 or 19 publishers awesome advice that's created thank you for that lesson oh yeah that's that helps us for sure and I appreciate that mindset shift it's a lot of people yeah they said they want to see more

it's in the bag yeah everybody says they want to see everyone system but it's alright well thank you so much for joining us on this podcast today I had a wonderful time interviewing with you and you know shooting the [ __ ] it's been a great hour but I do have to say judging by the time of day that I can see by the light I'm Larry Charles and I'm saying good night this is Brandon Pham thank you for joining us this week and thank you everyone see you guys next week alright this is where jaysis by Oh [Music] you [Music]