Is The Indie Game Dream Dead?

if it's not obvious the game industry is changing fast really fast so naturally I get this question a lot is the Indie Game Dev dream dead see in the past game developers could use crowdfunding or Kickstarter to quickly gather up enough money in like 30 days and go full-time Indie I know I did that multiple times but these days even I start to wonder if Kickstarter is still a viable option to go full-time Indie in this video I discuss this exact question with my buddy Josh Chambers who lost his job and scrambled to try and raise a full-time salary for his indie game layers deep he tried to use crowdfunding and well at the end of this video we're going to answer that looming question is crowdfunding is it still viable for you if you want to make Indie Games full-time let's go about seven or 8 months ago the animation industry shut down I had a little game I was working

on and I had about 6 months of savings so I was like the I'm not going to get hired for an animation job I have no choice but to try something new so uh me and my co-developer Eric we got together and we scrapped the game I was making and we started fresh and we said in 6 months we're going to have a finished demo and we're going to try and secure funding somehow and that was the plan we laid out and then we just worked like dogs to make it happen and we we overshot by a a few months two months to be exact and we were unable to get the demo ready but it's like it didn't matter that it wasn't perfect because in the end we hit the launch button on the kickstarter and we said hey you know what we tried we had a plan we tried our best we tried our darnest and uh what's going to happen from here is going to happen because I'm out of money so there's no there's no more Dev time here we have no choice but to press the launch button and we did 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 in 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 you didn't just click launch right you did something you you you had a strategy in mind tell us about the strategy so the strategy was to have at least like 500 to 1,000 people following the page before launching also to set a goal that is doable and not shoot for the moon cuz uh if you clear a goal people are more confident in your project rather than if you're struggling to meet it people are less likely to back because they're they're not as confident in your game next is to have a really strong brand so branding is way more important than I thought like I thought like oh if we had a good a good game trailer like that's all that needs to happen but that's not

true at all you need to have a really strong identity and a Kickstarter is a really good way to build a brand and an identity and it kind of uh is a good way to give people faith in your game okay so let's let's let's let's figure this out you said how many how many followers of the the kickstarter page did you recommend 500 to a th000 and that was for the goal of reaching $30,000 okay so I like to try and turn guest advice into a framework that can really be applied okay so let's let's figure this out 500 to 1,000 followers before launching your Kickstarter campaign correct yes yeah correct okay let's quickly give people listening how do they follow you what what is that you need to set up a pre-launch page on your Kickstarter and when you link that out people can click the notify me on launch button for everybody listening everything at the end of the day comes down to an email list email mail lists

are what Jeff Walker he's a marketing Guru he calls him a money printing machine and what people don't understand is is that whether it's following a Kickstarter campaign or wishlisting a game on Steam everybody thinks those are unique like no that's not an email list no that's that's literally just an email list and the reason why is because all it does is once they follow you Kickstarter emails them when they when it's live that's it so it's an email list everything comes down to classic 1990s marketing I mean it's the same freaking thing my entire business model for this YouTube channel is based on an email list my business model for my games is partly based on email lists AKA steam wish lists so that's what you're saying when you say people followed you correct ultimately they're just going to get an email notification yeah totally and people recommend making your own email lists like you said apparently it's a lot stronger to just have your own email list than to use kickstarters cuz then they're your contacts so you

can email whenever sure you can you can build a strategy around when you contact them the same is true with steam side note the the thing about getting steam wish lists is yes it would be wonderful if you owned your own list as well the problem is is you you want to prioritize steam wish list because the steam algorithm loves that and so if you purely focused on building your own email list for your game Steam would know about that and so steam wouldn't know to push your game more because it doesn't have those wish lists so that's a side note as it relates to steam I'm curious if that's the same with Kickstarter I'm sure the kickstarter back end looks at your followers and knows if they're going to push your game more because one of the benefits of Kickstarter I'm not sure if you got a front page feature did you oh yeah yeah yeah you got a front page feature I would say in part because it knew to do that before you even hit launch because you had a th followers or whatever okay so we've got we've got followers we understand that how did you actually drive them to subscribe though

okay so Reddit and Twitter were my main social medias that I was kind of pushing it on but also I emailed every single influencer and person in contact that I had and uh one of the people that got back to me Alana Pierce who's a pretty big gaming influencer and and host agreed to sign posters of a character that she's playing in the game now whoa for backers and then promoted it on her social media and YouTube and stuff and that drove a lot of people to the campaign as well as like I had some of my old connects from like new grounds that are now doing like TV shows and stuff retweet all my posts so I definitely this was prior to launching the campaign yeah this was prior to launching the campaign so you got Alana to participate in a pre-launch sort of campaign is that what you're saying yeah yeah exactly okay what you did is you you did exactly what any PR agency would do which is hit all of your content tax

hard and then if if 5% of them bite you've won the game you know tell me about the strategy of putting her in the game What's really cool is this is actually her idea like I just was asking people to maybe promote the game kind of horribly um and she was like that's not going to work like she's been doing this for a while so she's really smart she came in and she's like here's what will get you backers let me play a character in your game do like a painting of the character or whatever make a poster of this character and I will sign it and give it to backers it was all her idea and I was like holy crap that's the nicest thing anyone has ever done so tell me about how the campaign felt it was crazy cuz we were going from like like sprinting development to now sprinting marketing and it's like you said it's a completely different part of your brain it was a complete mental shift and I had to reset from game developer to marketer and it was really weird and J starting at first

because you know like you say in your videos it's a skill that you need to develop and I hadn't developed this skill so I was developing it on the Fly and it just felt like I was making every mistake in the book and it was crazy a lot of like lucky breaks and and tough moments but it's like if you're willing to push through and email people like crazy and like actually treat marketing with the same fervor that you treat game development it's doable did you feel sleazy did you feel gross did you feel guilty you know what I don't I don't think I did I never let it get to that point I don't think it is I don't think it's gross or sleazy to message people and to Market your Market your game um I don't either I don't either but a lot of people feel that way and I was curious yeah was it was it scary stressful it was really stressful I think we got like uh 20K on like the first two days so it's like a lot of game developers I'd been talking to was like oh yeah you're going to be fine Chris from squid W shock actually I

would talk to him a lot cuz he had done his Kickstarter and he was there to be like dude you're fine you're doing good just relax like you don't need to stress out your game is going to get funded you're doing okay every single shot in your trailer that I watched it it says we decided specifically to do this kind of visual for the viewer so that it's Unique and different everything has a precise tone and a precise imagery did that come naturally or did you have to plan that out in some kind of like game design document so the ideas came naturally like the stuff we wanted to do it all came naturally but like dude we were we got to a point we only had like 6 months to essentially make this game so a lot of our development was for the trailer we wanted to make a vertical slice we have one now that we're essentially rebuilding but we got to a point where we were like we're not going to have a demo ready for the kickstarter

so yeah in order to show people that we have some variety in our game let's just kind of skip ahead to some levels and just start kind of building for the trailer which I learned afterwards is something a lot of game companies do is they kind of Dev for trailers in the beginning 100% 100% it's the best way to Dev it really is in in today's era of trying to stand out on Steam I think the best way to make a game is to think about the trailer because what like in in the development world like I was in web design what they say is mobile first like build with Mobile in mind mobile is always sort of the foundation of everything else that you build you want it to look great on mobile at least that's what they were saying six seven years ago when I was in it the same is true with games I my my opinion is build your game with the trailer in mind because then it def like all what it does is it hyper focuses you on what's really important and you could focus on those things especially in indie game develop it because you have a limited

budget and you've got to be effective with every little thing you create needs to be super duper effective and I'm glad you said that cuz I kind of thought we were doing something crazy and unique there only to find out it's like common practice I wouldn't say it's common I would say I learned it from Gavin at two star games who create created choo choo Charles oh okay well there there it is the viral man himself that's right he thinks he thinks about the trailer I mean I wouldn't say he builds with the trailer in mind but what he does is he's hyper hyper focused on creating elements in his game that look meme worthy mhm and I would say trailer worthy and so that's I think you definitely are on the right path when it comes to thinking about how how you can put together a trailer and I wouldn't even worry about not having a demo for Kickstarter the idea is what matters and you can figure out how to make the idea happen later once you get the money on Kickstarter you know yeah yeah totally I think there needs to be a good foundation but yeah I I think like if there wasn't a good

foundation people would see that I think it'd be obvious well the big question Josh is is Kickstarter still viable it it is very much still viable at the end of the day your Kickstarter raised I think it was 40 35,000 I uh 48,000 wow 48,000 yeah it was a long shot and it only took eight months and now I'm a full-time game developer [Music] 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 in 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