Is It Too Late To Make Indie Games?

I had the privilege of chatting with Julian ball the creator of lens Island a full-time game developer that has over 3,000 very positive reviews on Steam and it's not even fully released I asked Julian about the state of the indie game industry I wanted to know if it's too late for indie game developers who want to break into the market what he said was incredibly encouraging so stick around to the end do you agree that the indie game industry is struggling right now oh I would say no I don't agree okay see uh Gavin who made chooo Charles um he agree he agrees with you um he he's he's said as much as well that it's like it's not struggling what's struggling is Publishers in Triple A um I agree so do you agree next question is then do you agree that a good game can get buried and not see the not see uh any eyes on it on Steam just

because they didn't Market it well or is it do you think no if it's a if it truly is a good game it's just going to rise to the top I think like it really depends on your definition of good I think there's a lot of double A and AAA games that are making good games and good as a definition of like solid games like technically if you look at a whiteboard and you look at the feature lists you're like yep it's it's got the bones there like it's got everything it needs to be a good game but then a lot of them are quite uninspired not necessarily groundbreaking they don't have unique hooks like they don't actually have some sort of like value proposition outside of the fact of like this is a solid gameplay experience and it's like people don't want solid gameplay experiences they want like good games like they want a game um that provides them something they haven't been provided with before so I think in general like able a and AAA are taking less and less risks um

and it's sort of like a self-perpetuating cycle where it's like because the industry for that sector has been a little bit more Cutthroat big studios are try trying to do like take less risks so they're making more like wooded down Mame sort of just like solid games um and solid games like used to sort of cut it when there was 100 games launching every year but now there's like 30,000 games launching every year and um like that doesn't matter like your solid just standard run of the m game doesn't really uh like maybe before just due to the fact there was such little games it could have had a chance for sort of Medi mediocre success but now less so but I I just really think that like those games in general were never going to be truly successful they were almost just like filling a void in in um in like media consumption where it's like I got nothing else to do I just play this average game and I think like Indies um and just like you know people just out in the own uh they they

don't have like 100 mous feed of like a big Studio they don't have necessarily like shareholders and like this whole structure imposing all of this like Risk so they they take more risk and they they choose more unique Visions um they sort of like break the boundaries a little bit and create just more get like games with hooks like Indies are just better at creating games with stronger stronger hooks across the board um because they're low risk exactly it's like they don't even care about the risk it's if you just like quit your job at McDonald's to like make a game it's like what's the risk to you like you go back to McDonald's so like you try anything you can to just like make the craziest most amazing game possible but like if you're heading up a large studio the risk of like a game failing is like I'm going to ruin like hundreds of lives like I am going to cost millions and millions and millions of dollars like it is just like exponentially greater the risk so like I think it's all about just like Risk in the industry and what larger Studios Define as risk yeah um I just think like that mentality is what

is failing um it's more just like game design companies and game design culture and um game design as an art I would say like that is the mechanism that sort of is is bad and failing to a a degree at the moment in some studios and that's not really a mechanism that exists inside of Indies for the most part so okay yeah yeah that's really encouraging seriously and I I've because I'm part of the publisher world because you know all of my games get published um I I see how the sausage is made and I I experience the corporate uh the corporate it's like a it's like a just a a mess of communication sometimes and then you've got like se-l people and you've got shareholders who want changes in the game on the Indie side right so all of that corporate nonsense funnels down to the Indies that they're publishing and suddenly you you're in a situation where you've got a watered

down vision of an indie game which is like the worst possible thing yeah because an indie game's not going to make $100 million most likely or 50 million you know and so you've got this game where it's watered down and so it's not going to compete it's not going to be able to compete with the other indie games that are not watered down because those those games were willing or or able to take risk because they didn't have the corporate structure right so what I've discovered this year is that getting a publisher is a great thing if you need the money but right now in particular getting a publisher means that you might you're probably going to get uh bogged down with corporate nonsense that will then water down your vision thus in creating more risk for your game's launch does that make sense yeah yeah I totally agree yeah like um Publishers are like that

glue between the AAAA and the Indie scene like they're that that sort of like tear in the middle and sometimes it can really leak down and defect um and that just like all depends on the publisher right or like sometimes not even publish it sometimes it might even just be um there's also marketing firms that do sort of royalty based stuff and then you also just get investors and and stuff more like traditional business sort of model but either way it's like when there's a larger business imposing their uh risk assessments onto an indie then it's like boom like you you're like yeah you're being sort of controlled um by that sort of scene and by those decisions and it absolutely will affect the Indie um and that just comes down to like yeah like Publishers are like a tight rope I've always really um steered away from Publishers however um there are amazing Publishers out there like I have a lot of friends uh that have work of Publishers and you know the right ones like they have

nothing but amazing things to say about them um but there's also a lot of hor horror stories right so there are there are yeah yeah and you know for me I found that some of the maybe I'm trying to think here two two really crucial things it might just be one but two really crucial things here about picking a publisher is number one if the publisher is a big time publisher that could be a huge red flag because the big time Publishers are funded by these Huger companies like much bigger companies and so again that corporate structure funnels down into your project and it becomes a freaking nightmare um that's one side of it the second side is our second point I'd like to say is that just because a publisher is offering you a million dollars in funding that act like I would rather get offered $100,000 in funding at a really low royalty fee because as opposed to a million dollars

at a higher like a 50-50 split and the reason why is because with $100,000 you're you're not really going to be controlled that much because it's low risk for the publisher that's that's pennies to a publisher but the moment you go up to like a million bucks in funding or maybe a half a million dollars in funding suddenly that publisher is going to be much much more involved in your project and so all those beautiful hooks that you've got all those idiosyncrasies that make your game strange and unique they might be offensive to a publisher uh or not offensive but it might scare the publisher right because they're investing all this money so my my sort of advice to people listening now if they do want to get a publisher and based on what you've said as well is that steer clear uh or or be be very um Vigilant about Publishers who are throwing around big lump sums of cash because you're going to be become

kind of their slave and you don't want that not with an indie title you know yeah yeah I totally agree I think like Publishers in general they they feel like the Delta between what is possible for you to make on your own and then what is the ceiling of your potential success with that thing that you could potentially make so it's like if if for example like when I had started making lens Island and got traction by myself had a few hundred, wish lists the game was fun and I was like I think I have the potential to finish this game um I had an idea of what our future success could be like I could sort of extrapolate where I was now to like okay the the future version of lens Island released could sell half a million copies like it could it could do like really well in certain ways um and like that's what I'm playing with right now like my decision making isn't this game that hasn't been built yet that's earned 0 my decision- making is around like a game and an IP that's worth millions and

millions of dollars because like the future version of the release product is what actually matters here so um and then it's like can I get to that by myself and then if I can't get to it if I could get to like 50% of that Vision by myself then what does that future projection like sort of look like am I okay with that if I'm not okay with it would it be better to get a publisher to get to that top projection but then after minus what the publisher is going to take and it's sort just like what what you think like your potential for success is on as as an individual or as a team versus like the potential success and if you're like it's sort of like a sliding scale right um and like sometimes if you're lucky if you have a Kickstarter if you have sort of like alternate sort of income streams um you can go a lot further like completely on your own without a publisher so you can just like yeah that Delta is a lot smaller um but if you're trying to make a really big game with big team and you have nothing to back you then it's like yeah you basically don't know that game you know like you're giving a development team and an idea to a

publisher and you're getting a little bit of a little cut out of that dream game cuz guess what like you don't have a game studio built that has the money to back this so like that's just not how the real world Works um so it's all about like the assessment on that Delta is like the big thing cuz yeah like I was approached by a lot of big publish Publishers you know like like 505 games like like ones that were like oh like these make some of the biggest games in the world that like I've played and um and now they want to like own my game or publish it but um you just got to like take those rosecolor glasses off it's like the decision you're making that like it doesn't matter like you don't base it off what your current state is you base it on what the future state of the successful released product is like that's what you base your decision making on so by the way if you're like me and you always dreamt of making an indie game as a full-time job I have a free webinar below that goes into exactly how to make six figures with just a demo I was just like you for years I thought I had to make a game and its entirety before getting a paycheck

but there's actually three ways to make six figures before even finishing your game I've done this multiple times so check it out below if you do want to go full-time Indie and thanks for watching