Indie Sustainability with Jake Birkett | GduX.me

[Music] so yeah I'm Jake Burkett and I'm from graylien Games and I formed my company in 2005 I used to make business software but my sort of dream was always to make games and I did that as a hobby for 20 plus years and then I eventually set up my own company has started to make games and I've been doing that for 14 years this summer and I've made 11 games working on my 12th one now so that's kind of cool and that means I've been sustainable to a certain extent but though there have been many ups and downs and we can sort of delve into that as well as my tactics for being sustainable in this talk I do need to probably switch twitch back on to make sure I can hear hear you guys if you

have another question okay well we've we've pulled our mics down to let you talk and then we can we'll come in as soon as we do have a question that we want to ask for you so it'll be interview style and I'll be running it while you talk so but mainly be me and you primarily right now okay all right so first question for me is you said you've been you this was a part-time hobby that has now become your full-time gig can you talk about that moment where you had to make the jump where you knew like you know what I'm gonna do this full-time when did that come and what were their circumstances at that period of time that you were faced with okay so yeah I mean I was making business software full-time but I was making a game in my spare time and I was staying up super late every night coding to like 4:00 a.m. and I felt like a zombie and I realized that I couldn't continue to make games like a zombie every night and I wanted to just really do it full-time so I decided to make this switch over to

full-time dev the issue there being that you you know I sort of assumed I'd make loads of money and it would be great but of course it took a long time to make money and it was a big struggle but I I wanted to do it anyway because it had been my dream many years and I spoke to my wife about it and she you know was supportive of that and I did need to support myself find many different other sort of income streams at the beginning whilst I sort of worked on my first few games and what was the first game that you decide to go with once you like after you had made the jump you're like okay now I'm doing this professionally what was the first game that you put your time and efforts into to start developing okay sure so I was actually making a game called iron fist at the time which was a sort of platform game where you were come through expert and you go around and just beat people up and this was great fun and I was having good fun making this game but I realized that the time

there wasn't a market for that because Steam didn't really exist then and nor did or it did but it wasn't open to other Indies and there wasn't really a market for this game believe it or not so I switched over to making casual games because big-fish games and real arcade and all these other sites were big at a time and you could make some kind of cool puzzle games on there and make money if you made the right sort of one so that's kind of what I switched over and did and my first one was a Christmas theme match 3 game which if anyone seen my GDC talk I've mentioned that on there but it wasn't a big success at all unfortunately it you know only made a couple of thousand dollars over what 12 years or something so it wasn't a big success at all but it had sold more than one unit and I went on and and sold made more games and kept going from there not really it was kind of encouraging that somebody bought my game at least yeah I know that feeling uh having done like a couple of indie

iPhone games myself but a question that we do want to ask especially since you have so much experience here is roughly because we have a lot of people on Twitch YouTube who are probably looking to get into this or hobbyists themselves how long would you say you should spend you know kind of developing or making your indie games like what do you have like a cut-off point or what's your strategy for kind of identifying like the proper scope okay show a good question so when I first started making these games they were very sure actually some of them only took me three months long some of them sort of six months long and the ones that were successful made a good amount of profit per hour I mean I tracked at the time that I work on all of my games so you know I logged the hours I look at the money that comes in and just do a simple sum to see how much I'm earning but I did a survey on Twitter a while ago and what I found out was many devs had been working on their game for more than a year but some of

them like more than three years and I was like I'm really dubious about how profitable a game that you you know you spent three plus years on can be the longest game I've worked almost two and a half years and it was too long it was too over scoped there was too much in it and it's made me quite a lower amount per hour that I worked on it compared to games that I worked on a lot quicker you know and I've got some sort of examples I can give if that would be helpful of course I mean we'd love to hear do you have extra materials that you need to share it can you just rec recite just let us know so we can prepare on our own oh yes okay I've got notes on a side screen here so I prepared so for example if you were to spend a year making a game and it was and it was you and you hired say an artist or two and some sound people whatever and you spent maybe about $35,000 on contractors okay

and your game if it grossed a hundred thousand dollars on Steam you would lose thirty five thousand dollars to steam for their cut and for things like sales tax and refunds and so on then you'd have to take $35,000 off for the contractors and that leaves you with only $30,000 for you right on that regard and if you spent a year on it and you divide up the average amount of forty hours per week you end up with $14 an hour for a year's worth of work and okay that's more than maybe in that game you know your dollars per hour would be seven which is definitely a problem and if your game didn't make a hundred thousand only made ten thousand like many indie games don't even make that much then you've worked for one dollar fourteen hour so this is the kind of mathematics which you people need to

be realistic about if they're full-time indie it's different if you're hobbyist or if you've got funding and we can sort of go into that in a minute okay so I'm assuming you did the same kind of conversion on your first project especially the one you said it didn't end up being super profitable but you you know you did make it you follow through and you were a professional on it I guess you don't have to tell me the number but what was your reaction to like seeing maybe the initial sales of your first product after being professional be like okay we did it here's our game and then three months later you check back in and you do the formula and you say ho oh boy my hourly rate how did you feel and can you take us through well it's funny because it was mixed because I was genuinely happy that it had sold anything you know somebody bought my game great is something I could build upon that was the positive aspect but the dollars per hour over 12 years is something like six

or seven dollars an hour so it's terrible right twelve years of sales you know but at the beginning it was like $1 an hour or something what I hate was it was wrong it was not a viable business at all so that was obviously very disappointing because I was naive and I thought back in 2005 yeah I can make video games and sell them on the Internet that make money and it'll be awesome and that just turned out not to be the reality it took 18 months before my first game that actually made me any kind of decent money so that was a lot of practice learning the market working with the distributors and a publisher and all that kind of stuff alright so my next question and this was a little selfish but like I'm always looking for those motivating moments where it's like okay this wasn't the ideal scenario after I've try very hard to make something but how do I collect myself how do i reorganize and then say but I'm a business so here's the next product here's the next effort and we're gonna do it again but

we're gonna do it better I guess so transitioning away from the first product to the second game that you developed I guess can you take us through and give our audience advice on on doing that okay sure with the second product to be honest wasn't a lot better than the first one it didn't sell very well either that was actually because I had a mismatch with the audience I hired a guy who made some pixel art for a match-three game but the audience didn't want pixel art they wanted either nice painted R or 3d art but the better transition would be the game after that we hired some decent artists and made some really nice backgrounds a decent UI some nice-looking shapes that were 3d rendered span around and we hired a musician who did really great classical music we've got some decent sound effects in so the whole game was just a whole level of polish above the first few game so I think that was my mistake

with the first few games is they were like 1990 shareware sort of level of quality and it wasn't good enough for the market but as soon as I up the quality suddenly people paid interest and started to buy the games and then I just double down on that really keeping upping the quality but but within a certain cost bracket because within that market if you spend too much you wouldn't make the money back but if you spent a certain amount you could do and that I think that's the same even on Steam you know a lot of people I see them spending money on sort of voice actors and going to shows and spending it on you know all sorts of things hiring orchestras and stuff like this and it's like unless you're a big studio and you've got some guaranteed hit which there's no such thing you you shouldn't be wasting your money on all this stuff you do need enough to hit a certain quality bar but you need to analyze are you spending the money in the right areas and are you going to get a return

on that that's if you're doing it from a business point of view it's very different if you're a hobbyist or you're trying to have you've got some grant or money and you can just do whatever but but it's very rare to be in that situation I do have a loaded question though we wrote down a question that we wanted to ask you specifically the viceroy of all game data we wanted to know you're well-known for sharing detailed data collected from your Indies can you tell us about that and why you're so forthcoming with performance and metrics and things for the community sure so well I've always shared stuff just because I find it interesting and when you share stuff you get other people chime in with their own data and thoughts and helps the analysis really I mean not everyone likes to share their data but I've always liked to be open about it and one of the big things that I did last year was I worked out this kind of magic number which is if you have a certain amount of wish list

before your game launches on Steam and you multiply it by 0.5 or you know divide it by two that gives you these sales you are likely to make in your first week on Steam I like that though that's not always certain you know some people get double and some people get hard but it feels like a good like it's a good it's a good ratio and a hell of a lot of people have used that since then to gauge the possible success of their game yeah so if I can make a title that gets me to million wish lists yes that should be a million sales first week I'm excited no but I I totally understand the ratio because it's hard to turn an intangible idea into some sort of an expectation but you'd be foolish to at least not think about some sort of way of trying to at least gauge what you can anticipate coming in you know so what have you found to be some of the best tools I guess in helping you sustain as an indie developer outside of game development software right like I don't

know sure you might say something like a QuickBooks but maybe there's like a third party thing that you use that helps you on the day-to-day that other developers actually don't know about yet that helps you specifically like with asset management or with time management or scheduling okay sure to be honest I'm a bit of an Excel nerd so I use Excel for my accounts I do most of my accounts and then send them off at the end of the year to get them stamped by an official accountant I use Excel for my game design documents and numbers and charts and obviously track all my sales and stuff like that so Excel is your friend or a Google equivalent I guess also I use just notepad a lot or notepad plus plus which is pretty awesome just mostly really to manage my sort of day-to-day tasks I mean I put everything in a sort of big spreadsheet for the project but I like to sort of

split out from that a small a bunch of tasks that I'm working on now I used to use a notepad and pen but now I prefer using something digital because I can edit it shuffle it round so those are the sort of main two tools I use and then I used to use Dropbox now this will make a lot of people out there cringe but instead of using source control because it's just me I just have my stuff on Dropbox and I can roll back if I need to and I also back it up regularly anyway and that that seems to work for me I use Photoshop a lot which isn't exactly a programming tool but I am having to constantly fiddle around with art or take screenshots for marketing and i use obs to capture video and stick it online you know for to get wishlists basically so I'm not sure there's any magic bullets there just kind of standard stuff well you know it's worth digging sometimes you do find treasure yeah I do have a question now like the indie landscape right now is is

very fruitful but also people can say it's very saturated and so if if anything that epic game store has created somewhat of a ruffle at least providing another avenue for developers out there but there is this oncoming fear of the indie oculus we're a lot of indie developers are having a hard time with so many choices for consumers now what is your opinion on that being on the front lines doing this for over ten years now I would definitely say the the apocalypse is real some people say it is and and it's actually been going on for a long time it's like a slow event not really a sudden thing that's occurred just you know there are so many more games on Steam and and it used to be a curated store and now it's it's not really so

you you are competing with a lot of other games now a lot of them don't always get shelf space because they're just not even selling enough to register with the valve algorithms but they did change things last year and made it so that really the algorithm only shows pretty popular games so a lot of Indies found their games less visible and their sales dropped a lot accordingly and mine were unfortunately in that batch so yeah it is very difficult and that is why I've been thinking more about what why you shouldn't spend long making your game got to keep your costs down and so on but there are other things like you said about the epic store unfortunately the only people who are making money off that at the moment are devs who are already sort of multi millionaires who've got famous games which then epic come to them and say do you want to put your next game on our store I totally get why they're doing that and great to the people who've done that but that

doesn't help me either right let them come to me so but but you know it does put pressure on on Steam - hopefully lower their rev share especially for Indies or for a sir amount like up to the first hundred thousand dollars we will see what happens there and also epic may open up to people like me later on and I hope it does and it's another avenue and then there's still stuff like okay should I be porting my games not to mobile because I think that's really really difficult due to all the free-to-play games I mean it is way worse than Steam console yes on switch a lot of people are finding that to be profitable more profitable than the steam but PlayStation 4 and Xbox you you know one aren't really selling as many copies of games as on switch but may still be viable and there may be new platforms coming up we've got Google streaming things apple arcade who

knows what sort of around the corner' PS 5 so there's always an opportunity when new platforms come along and I think it's worth trying to get in on those but it of course it always helped if you're established and you've got a game to your name if you still do me so anyway there are other ways to make money by the way which is some countries have grants or tax relief and they have those in this country the UK they do in Canada some other places and you can try to get investment or you know publish your funding stuff like that but again you need a track record and where to do that all one hell of a good idea so were they I had to pull down the audio on the microphone so I could adjust my chair but I do have a quick when it comes to it's very popular obviously it may be cost-effective to create your own engine right

with the onslaught of new engines like unity and unreal making it more and more making more and more easier for the indie developer what is your opinion on developers out there looking to make their own engine versus using something like unity right off the bat okay sure so well I did make my own engine but it was in a language called blitz Mac's which no one's really ever heard of but it handled some low-level stuff like drawing and sound and so on but I wrote a whole game engine on top with sprites and particles and menus and everything you need for a game really and that taught me absolutely loads about all aspects of making a game really so I think making your own engine is super valuable but it's also quite difficult for a lot of people like they would have to use C++ or something like that and so there's a certain sort of skill

gate to do that and you can also get stuck in the weeds like many people spend years and years making an engine and never actually ship anything what I did is I spent three months building the engine then shipped my first game and then every game I enhance the engine a bit more and kept making games so that was the case of the engine was properly used it wasn't just a sort of project which I could spend years on but of course these days you know we've got unity unreal game maker I mean there's so many so many things which is great for people who want to make games but it also means that more people aren't making games so you've got that sort of thing and the other thing that I think is a bit dangerous is unity makes it very easy to make 3d games and so the problem is all kind of 3d games need more complex assets and animation and so on and it takes longer to program 3d

games and quite a lot of Indies I know I've fallen into the trap of making 3d games and their project Lex's has expanded and of course that means ultimately if it doesn't sell more then less dollars per hour at the end so that's why I just personally stuck to 2d I know some people disagree with that because they're very fast at 3d and they've got the right sort of tools and pipeline and a skill to date okay great but it it can be a problematic area for some people so that's kind of my feeling on engines so on the topic of you know sustainability for the audience sake asking on their behalf what would you say would be your most common problem that you encounter all the time in every project is something that you like like for example I think marketing could be something that I would say is my most common problem that we encounter with whatever we do like trying to find a way to make noise and get reception what would you say is the most common problem that you find that you have to encounter as an indie developer with a long track record

well definitely marketing is difficult and we'll we are gaining experience in that and you can obviously spend money to get people to help with that as well if you if you have the money so that's a big problem that's a whole big area but in fact I think the biggest problem is over scoping your game okay so that's like you've got all these ideas you want to make the game be like this you start work on it and you discover that everything takes at least twice as long as you thought and all these cool ideas you've got you know you need to start accessing them or slimming them down and like for example I made this card game recently and I'm working on another one now good ancient enemy and every card in the game requires graphics text sound effects some kind of code and rules if I localize it in his localization and it's testing in these balancing and that's just for a single card right and each of those things can take hours and hours each so when you've got many of those in

a game I'll just add another ten items here ten items there you're adding weeks of weeks of development time so over scoping is the real issue for many including myself what way I help with that is I make a big list of all the tasks that I need to do and I constantly review it and reevaluate whether those things are still important in the game and also if I come up with new ideas midway through which is often the case I put them on a separate list but a Polish list and then I kind of ignore them really and unless they're amazing and need to be done right now because they obviously make everything better they stay on this list and then when I ship the game you can then listen to what players say and find out they only really want 5% of your polish this then you can implement those and then ship them in an update whereas if you'd put the other 95% in you've spent months and months more on the project so yeah over scoping is the main issue and it's something that everybody needs to learn to do better including myself and I'm on my 12th game you got me the Exile I

thought marketing was mine but I agree feature creep over scope getting to 80% then discovering that I need an additional 40% just because I think I need it like oh man this other game did this oh we gotta had that we're competing with them like I I see that that over scope that feature creep also being prevalent across a lot of the student projects that we've seen that across a lot of the other fellow indie devs when they're working on stuff blow attacks us all it does so I'm gonna switch to here once again all right so my next question for you is looking at the landscape of where players can or where developers can place their games right we talked about steam we talked about you said the epic game store now is entered the frame you have places like its die oh and like all these different outlets where games can be released but I do kind of want to focus on steam for a moment because steam kind of pioneered through as a PC juggernaut replacing like pretty much all of PC

sales brick-and-mortar style everyone goes to steam if they're getting PC games more or less like I'm speaking very generally here but now I'm starting to see because of how much trash and garbage exists on Steam and trying to compete and find a window on Steam like it almost feels like if you're a small person or you're making an indie why like what's the benefit of Union going this team unless their charity procedure space-like you think I can't lock in like 20 minutes or two days on the front screen like hey this game is on Steam now if you don't get that it almost feels like it's useless to go to steam and they still take such a heavy cut even if they don't promote your game yeah well I think you're right about that [Music] basically the difficulty is that there isn't anywhere else to go right so if you're making games on PC you can't go on gog or Humble unless they invite you or you know you can send them your game

but they they may turn it down because they are curated stores so they aren't turning away trash but also you know maybe quite good games so you can't really do that you can put your game on edge but the problem there is your sales are going to be way too small so if you don't put your your game on Steam on PC then you're not going to be able to make a profit and be a full-time business system is kind of like your only option at the moment unless epic changes things up so you have to work within their system and that's not very easy and to be honest I think only 1% of games are the type of games that make enough money that the devs get sort of super wealthy and that's great and maybe only five percent or ten percent maximum make the money back that the dev can carry on I think most games are not making enough money to sustain full-time development but then again there's a lot of hobbyist putting games on there too and if you can do this as a hobby in and get someone else to you know pay the bills for your your your house you know or

maybe you've got a job and it's your part-time then that's fine right but the full-time I'm afraid you've got to work with steam and just do your best to analyze the market reduce your scope try not to spend too much get the marketing right get the game out there you've got to make the right game before the market and part the problem these days is like I'm an established dev and people I've got a following on Twitter Facebook newsletter all this sort of stuff and if I wasn't and I had to start scratch I think it would be incredibly difficult - you know get a following and build up those wish lists and launch your game on Steam to make money so absolutely people shouldn't really jump in full-time I think that they should test the water to you know make some games as a hobby try to build up a sort of cult following get on Twitter and other places Reddit and so on start building up awareness for themselves in their games and keep going at that before making the leap to full full-time Indian you should only do that one you've got enough money saved up to

fur for twice the length that you think the project will take because it's always gonna take longer right so it's kind of like you've got to work with steam and I'm trying to work with them on my current game and there's good people there trying to make the platform better and so on it's just there's a lot of content on it so it is hard to stand out you are dead right all right a follow-up question for me then is now admitting that like you know a Larry no you should go to steam right like that it's a necessity regardless of the difficulties it's an essential part of your business as an indie dev for PC I want to create a scenario for you and let's just let's just see if this could be really fun or it could be very difficult so this might be a reality for a lot of people watching and listening right now you finished your game right you have $1,000 as a marketing budget so how would you market your next game if all you had was $1,000 to spend to market it what would your strategy be thousand dollars yeah that is much but

it's more than zero so there's a thing called key mailer and I think that's $150 to sign up to and I would use that to make sure you send out keys to streamers and I think they can also request them through there so it's a kind of central repository to handle that so key mailers $150 and then of all the different kinds of ads cliff Harris is very experienced with doing ads as an indie and he and other people I've heard have said that Facebook Ads generate the best sort of clicks through and give you the best control really so you would you would drive Facebook ads to your steam page to get wish lists before you launch and then you you've got to still do all the sort of grassroots stuff like getting on Twitter and posting stuff on it girl however you say that Instagram you know read it wherever the hell you can you've got a sort of keep putting the word out though that's not enough money to go to a show

of course so you can't do that so it would be ads and keep mainly if you had a bit more you might be to work with a marketing company and pay them a certain fee how much would you say is a bit more mm it's pretty tricky 3,000 oh yes how I say that again okay so I was saying you said if you had a bit more you could work with a marketing company so just to paint that picture how much would you say that bit more is like a $3,000 marketing budget maybe 5,000 or oh well for example there's a company called evolve PR based in Vancouver and they've got a particular I think you package you can sign up to four sort of 1500 bucks or more I mean that's like an entry level there are the marketing companies that may charge you less but it's like what are they doing for them for the money if they're just sending

that bunch of emails it's not really worth it but they've got to have good contacts and be able to get your game in front of those contacts to stream basically or press well Jake I definitely have a question [Music] when it comes to putting your games out there and talking to all this press and like always opening yourself up to different avenues and looking at like epic game store even though you pointed out like these are for the big hitters obviously their strategy over there is very clear they want to make a lot of noise so they're gonna go with the big hitters that are already doing well what has been the key strategy despite of all the changes with steam and everything how do you separate yourself from that so that you as a marketer as a person that's branding your own game is always going to be set up for success no matter what everyone else is doing what is the

key way to kind of keep you in line to to to make yourself successful well it's I think it's to be adaptable and to adapt to the market so you know I used to make casual game to sell my big fish and so on and as those markets declined I started looking at steam too late actually I should have moved to steam a lot earlier but then figuring out how that works and building up on that and maybe if something else comes along I will move to that in fact I've already got things in the pipeline that I don't want to talk about yet but there aren't steam related so you know you've got to be adaptable and you've got to try new things out and in order to do that you need to either have a game that you can make fairly quickly or do what I've done which is I've got a game that I reuse the engine and then I modify the gameplay I add new stuff in and put new assets in so it's not the same development time as making something

from scratch so a lot of developers don't reuse stuff they just want to make something brand new each time and I get that but you can do that in game jams if you want that sort of vibe if you're running a business you've also got other sort of reuse what you've already got and adapt it to the market so that's why my latest game ancient enemy is like my past game shadow had except it's got a more kind of I would say grim dark the suitable for steam and we've altered the mechanics based on the way people are sort of have given us feedback from the first one and stuff like that so it is be adaptable yeah I definitely agree with that being adaptable I mean it doesn't have to just stay within the indie indie landscape obviously we're talking to a lot of mobile development talk to a lot of uh to Triple A developers being adaptable is the key thing I feel that makes anybody a

survivor because as soon as we get comfortable is when we start wavering off we start losing our edge we start being aware of what's going on around us and I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of developers get caught off guard when the employers don't want to employ them anymore so I think that type of mentality is true for pretty much anything not just games but any industry I do have a question from the twitch audience and I just want to remind anybody that are wanting to ask questions to Jake you can YouTube wherever you're watching you can go ahead and ask them because we will be asking them live so here here it goes Jake all right I'm ready to HS Kimpton asked how many games did it take before you started to earn profit for your game development so it was my third game which well actually it did make some money but it took many years to make

that money so do you know what my fifth game is more accurate five games well I did make a lot of them very quickly and that was two years after I started and that was actually contract work so I proved that I could make games and I got hired to make a game and I got paid contract work to do that with a with a revenue share on the end so and then after that each one has made okay from either okay to pretty good money all right so I've got one coming from it looks like Sal here oh and they're saying in twitch how feasible of a business model is it to the assets from your game while a still in development to generate income during development I've never done that and I probably wouldn't want to do it because I want my game to have unique assets sound wave normally you can't sell sound anyway due to the license agreements

with the musicians or audio people the artwork hopefully you own for your game but you don't really want out on another game in my opinion that's also why I wouldn't buy an asset pack from the unity store and use it on one of my games it wouldn't be unique it's okay for prototyping but it's never gonna have all the assets you want in the same style for your game so I've never done it I mean maybe some people have and great if that's work for them but I personally wouldn't do it I thought about doing something like that after my game is sold so ie like you sell the game and then let's say your tails start to go back down two to three copies a day or less I'll say hey here's the asset pack I used or here's the sound pack or the animations but that's after the initial sale spike I would probably do something like that personally yeah like sense one thing I did do years ago was I sold my game engine for 50 bucks a pop and I sold 200 of those for $10,000

and then I sold a license on it to big fish game for some more money so and was worth more property than assets was that the Blitz engine that you then wrote over that engine or you did like another unique ground-up engine yes it was that same yeah gotcha next question I have comes to you from it looks like Freddy yeah I hope I pronounced that right on Twitch is it viable to release your game by yourself like on your own site versus you know going through a marketplace for games the discord store or the Unreal epic game store unity store or what's the steam yeah that funny portal cool steam yeah games on my own site all of them oh yeah all my games are based on my own site but is it viable absolutely not I mean I made like fifty dollars last month from games on my own site right so

I've got a patreon now and it's making more money than that it used to be sort of viable so a lot of Indies who've been around as long as I have used to sell direct before Steam and some of them did pretty good some of them even got to sort of six figures a month but that revenues been slowly dropping off why because everyone goes to steam they want their games on Steam in that library and we've had mobile and other platforms and consoles so people's money is spread out and people aren't sort of as trusting to go to a dev site and get it from there even if it's DRM free because there are no achievements or whatever you know other aspects so it's not viable but you can do it and I always do it because I think that's I'm in Indy so you know that's what I do I sell the games myself on my own website I yeah I mean I do have a question regarding to that like you were mentioning before how you were using your website you were using

different avenues patreon being a crowdfunding source so you don't have to go all-in with Kickstarter all or nothing I see a lot of developers an indie crowd that are using patreon as always like pay as I go type of way it's it's kind of like fund me as I go as I kind of build this like internal testing group to to to test my ideas but at the same time have an actual steady revenue stream like is that something that is starting to blossom and in your opinion what Kickstarter I saw some stats a while ago Kickstarter sort of leveled off in terms of the amount of game dev projects on there but yeah some people do that very successfully we're trying with patreon but most people I know don't get more than several hundred dollars a month so that's not really enough to live off it's useful nice the only ones that make thousands are sort

of like you know pornographic content basically so and I'm not making that at the moment you know who knows so you know it's definitely you've got to look at all kind of avenues to make money and I've got my eggs in many different baskets I've got 10 games out there making money on casual games portals and lots of them on Steam I'm publishing someone else's game we've got the patreon I sell direct I used to make money from ads on my website but I've got rid of most of them now so it's kind of like whatever you can do this not too time-consuming but you have to evaluate everything and see is it going to generate a decent return like some sites generate virtually no money at all and others generate a lot more so you can't be wasting your time too much you want to ask around and find out is it worth is it worth your time all right so I think you've offered a lot of key information here and I've even tried to like throw some curveballs

your way so I'm gonna ask you now for just like a general like hey if you're really gonna do this indie thing you know make sure you get your money in order like you said you know make sure your games are across portals make sure you have you know an expectancy of like your wish list to actual sales ratio but here's my key question you did this for a reason like you love video games you love making indie games you left one career to make this jump and now you're doing it full-time when things don't go well when things look dark when things look like men I might not be able to push on right I'm not asking for any sort of like practical advice here just maybe it's like some sort of emotional pick-me-up to all the people who are in the I might need to give this up or I don't think I have it in me like what it what is your what what well wishing do you think you would offer to somebody or even to yourself who was in a time where like man they were at the valley and not the peak you know what I mean because there's definitely a lot of stress and emotional strain in being completely

dependent for all of your revenue not having a steady paycheck not having set expected work that you need to complete and because a variety of things lead to you being successful in India and so there's it's a lot for somebody's mind to have to deal with all the time so I guess what you know pat on the back support could you offer our audience who might be in their position okay well let's have a think about that so you're dead right in that when you run a business you don't have certain money coming in you know you don't have no I think it's worse for you poor Americans who have to pay you know all this health insurance stuff as well that's another big big worry that I don't have to worry about in my you know socialist UK country right so that's good but you know it's not just the games like all games have a sort of life cycle where you're excited about them and this is gray and then there's this dip and you feel you are my god I'm never going to finish thing and then eventually you

push out the other end and that can be combined with life events like maybe you get ill yeah you injure yourself or your partner has a problem or you have a bereavement in the family so ah there's any number of different things which can you know cause you some kind of Downers but ultimately I remember that you know I love making games and I've got into this because it's my hobby that I love and I've been doing it my whole life and sometimes you have to accept okay you're having a down patch or downtime and then you need to sort of basically get outside get some nature you know parks and walks and that kind of stuff and also I do things like play other video games that get me inspired again and then I want to get back to making my own game I also do stuff like listening to chip shoes and and trance music and stuff that uplifts my spirit right you know but it's okay to have off days but you always try to stay in a routine that's one of the things I do is I have

a routine I get up I know what I'm doing I start and I keep this list of tasks like I've said before but I have a load of easy tasks at the top of it so when I'm feeling low energy I can just tackle an easy task and feel good about doing something anything even a five-minute task and that normally motivates me to carry on and I try not to worry about the work as a whole ahead of me the mountain I sort of take each small step at a time and try to visualize a positive outcome of me shipping gave me being very happy with it so it's a whole bunch of things but it's a it that is as hard as making games yourself staying motivated it's something that I work on every day and I don't always succeed but I keep working on it yeah one of the the major things I've seen is that the the runway being able to build that for yourself having the confidence to keep on that path through the ups and downs with that being said

you know Larry and I are but guys because I buffering all no worries as you are getting us I was talking about the runway how indie development is all about staying on that path and being sustainable right and in working the issues out and it's not about hitting home runs but it's a marathon right so with that being said Larry and I have both finally are working for ourselves and we are on that runway and there are times that we look at that is like that's a really far so how do you keep yourself motivated is it all about financially you know keeping yourself stable enough to kind of save up for those rainy days or is it something more mentally comprehensive

than that yeah what's your big carrot I think he's getting our feet slowly okay I kind of missed some of that guys because of some buffering but I think you were saying how do you save up for rainy days and keep your stuff going is that right yes that is correct basically yes how do you get through all the rough patches even though you feel like you're at the end in most days okay cool so when I first started I mean I did some other work on the side like I did some IT consultancy so I went out and got rid of viruses off people's computers and installed networks and businesses My partner my wife she was earning some money which helped out as well and also we just lived very frugally at first you know we didn't spend much money I even

borrowed money to make it through tough patches and then I topped up my income with contract work and stuff to survive so I just did whatever I could do basically to survive until sort of Finance just got better and even still you know I have ups and downs I get some money in the bank and you've got to be careful not to blow it all like don't get a big studio and spend all your money on that only spend a proportion of your income on the next project so you've got something in the bank you've always got to have a runway and that's why you know working with other people who can perhaps help fund you or you can get a grant it's very useful as well you just got to do whatever you can do if you believe in it enough I don't want to have success and that sounds like you guys are on that path that I wish you the very best of luck with it thank you and you're helping us on that path by being one of our featured guests in the game dev Unchained Expo first one so we want to thank you very much for your time and your consideration for being here to help us even though you know a lot of people know what you do and a lot

of people are here to see you we still appreciate that you know every now and then you're like you know if those gamedev lynching guys there alright I'll do a podcast I'll do a speech so what good on you man we appreciate your support and with this we really do and the platform is yours we are at the end anything that you want to promote of course we do have to your Twitter handle no worries yeah and anything else you promote go for it okay sure well I just want to thank you too actually for putting this conference up because having a free online conference of people packed full of epic speakers is brilliant so massive thanks to you two for organizing this and for all the other speakers and for everyone watching I've got to go and teach Aikido now that's something I do by the way that keeps my brain working in different ways when I'm not at the computer but you

know I've got a game called ancient enemy which is on Steam we're I'm actually collecting wish lists for that game at the moment and it's due out later this summer I'm going to post a link into the twitch treatment perhaps if you could all take a look and click that and share that round I'd really appreciate it but just thanks again and and all the best always man thanks again to you as well and good luck in class [Music] you [Music]