Making a good living from games without superstar success

[Music] so before I get into it a small disclaimer I've noticed from the meetings I've had in the past couple of days and the other talks that I've seen that it's very business focused what's been going on here at PGC this talk is not so much business focused it's really more of my experience as a indie developer I still think it's valuable for anyone to have a listen because a lot of people like me are out there and a lot of people like me are for a lot of you declines that you want to get so the quiet middle or how I stop worrying and learn to do pretty okay as an independent developer making mobile games I'm former Kelley I've been making games since late 2012 starting with

flash games when that was still a thing and over time I moved on to mobile game mobile games almost exclusively so I run a studio called sets and settings where I release stuff that is 100% my own I do design arts music code and all the practical stuff that comes along with making mobile games so we're talking writing App Store descriptions doing the trailers all those kind of things last game that I released was published by Nitro and it's called magic mansion and it came out last week I also have I release games with friend and fellow indie Colin Lane who does not have accompaniment name at all so I thought it was only fair that I would screenshot a tweet of him talking about poop emojis so that's not really company structure

we call it an ongoing collaboration because we both like to do our own things as well so essentially I run one and a half mobile studios and the most recent game we did together was called dunkers which came out about six weeks ago so a lot of you probably don't know who I am and you probably don't know my games and I make a pretty decent living so I've been traveling around Lots this year going to Parker gamer events I was at Gamescom I go to indie meetups as much as possible I just try to meet Indies talk about their games share experiences what I found interesting this year is that mmm excuse me a lot of people have a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to mobile games whenever I tell people I make mobile games I get a lot of

misconceptions and assumptions that people tell me and I'm like that is completely not my experience which means that a lot of these conversations end up as me talking about what mobile games are really about in my experience anyway so I thought I'm going to have that conversation with as many people as possible which I'm doing right now so there are a couple of things I hear when I have these conversations one of them being I thought you needed to spend millions on marketing to compete on the App Store and usually dad is backed up by the idea that because there are thousands of games coming out every day you need to spend the money on the marketing to compete at all the second one is kind of insulting to me and I thought you have to get lucky or I thought you have to go viral to compete on the App Store so basically people

have this idea that there is no middle ground people think that you either have these gigantic mega hits or like the big company stuff or the really viral flappy bird kind of things that just happen or you have complete failures and that's pretty much why I call this the quiet middle because we don't really have this conversation so often so why I think that these misconceptions happen is it's just not very sexy talking about being okay if people want to hear about really big successes people want to know about crossing the allure Crossy Road and how many millions they made or people want to hear about the huge failure is like that's always a fun post mortem when you see it at someone worked for five years on a game and then they made like $8.00 hashtag not wall so here's a screenshot

from an article about the indie pocalypse which I'm sure we've all heard about so I just googled apocalypse for this one I took the first article I found which was an article about decline in steam sales and steam visibility and this was one tiny paragraph somewhere in the middle I have no idea why that needed to be there it's an entire article about PC gaming and then they throw in as an aside also a mobile gaming is completely screwed so you can't make it there so that's one of the reasons I think that I get these perceptions from people so in my experience is none of those things are really true like my experience is completely different so what I'm gonna do now is gamma I'm gonna run through my history in the App Store and note this

will mostly be about the Apple App Store I do release on Android as well but it's only recently that it started to get a little more successful in that market so I don't feel I have enough experience to really talk about that with any authority and note that I will keeping the floor open for questions afterwards so Game one is the first one we released it's called wheelie legend it did nothing yet no features whatsoever it didn't have any downloads I think it was like maybe a thousand at most some reason it still does okay in Finland Thank You Finland it that was the only thing that it actually did well it ended in free sports racing number one slot in Finland for a while so thanks a lot for that but despite the failure that this was it

was important for us because we learned a lot from it we learned what not to do we learned how to App Store works because keep in mind were two people and sometimes on one person we don't have people employed who know specifically how to deal with all these things we don't have it please at all so we have to figure this out by doing and that's going to be a recurring theme in the rest of this presentation so after that it released a game called golf is hard which is where we started to figure out what kind of niche we wanted to mess with which is essentially what we now call wacky physics there are extremely silly games and they are very much physics based they're free to play and they're easy for people to get into so this is where we started to figure out okay that's the kind of thing that's going to work so that was featured for three days so what happened was this is

where we learned about timing and that the App Store is an organic thing is what happened was every December tap store closes and we had no idea about this they freeze the store and you can't release any new games they don't change the features and then when that is over they depending on how two dates fall for the next year you get half week of features and then they switch it over again so that's what happened to us and that's where we learned that the app store is also something that you have to keep in mind so that's another lesson after that came our baby this is wrastling it's our favorite game ever it's a wacky physics wrastling game and we actually thought that it was kinda too retro and too weird to do anything but they got featured an actual feature it is time and I with a

little too fast enough and this is where we really started hitting our stride we figured out these are the kind of games that we want to make we also figured out how we want to deal with them how we want to monetize them how we want to present ourselves to players and this is when we figured we started making a somewhat sustainable studio if you would keep going with this so at this point third game in we started seeing actual real revenue I started making like three thousand dollars a month or something which for one person is pretty good so this is what we want to keep iterating on and eight weeks later release battle golf which did really well it got the best in games feature and it still pops up in a lot of sub feature categories that Apple tends to do have a lot of party games it's probably on there right now a party

game feature local multiplayer feature and this is when we started realizing that we can really do something sustainable if we keep going with the things that we love and what we know that works so after that we decided well that's all great in theory but let's do something else completely now so we did really - which is a sequel to wheelie legend their first game I guess we wanted to vindicate ourselves with the failure of that game and for once we decided not to use pixel art which was a mistake I feel in the end no it did get a feature and one really important thing is this is where we learned about cross promotion within our apps so what happened was it did okay but it didn't do as good as our previous game battle golf it didn't even do as good as wrastling even though that was a super weird game but it did okay but the most

important part was we started putting cross promotion links in that game - or other apps and from that point on every time we really something or if we release an update even all the other ones they get a revenue boost as well and is for sustainability that's really important so then after quite a break because in between here and start working on a couple of my own projects we did dunkers which came out fairly recently and that sort of hits all of the notes that I've been talking about before it did the chrome-promo it monetized the way that we wanted to which feel is respectful to our players and it did really well I got the feature we actually got a banner feature they got editors notes estate on the front page for three weeks straight which was total luck I must admit because what happened was there was some sort of

Olympics feature thing going on and there were some basketball week NBA maybe I don't know going on so it stayed there for a long time and we ended up doing 2 million downloads actually in a week and sewed up what's quite nice and one week ago I released a game through a publisher magic mansion which also did quite well got the feature I got the banner feature and because a lot of this was my publishers work I didn't I don't have that much to say about it except what's interesting for me and what maybe is interesting for other people is that the way that this collaboration happened is I tweeted about the game Milo was working on it and they were interested and they looked at my previous work all the games I just showed you and that got them interested enough to reach out and so we made a deal

and editors NAL's so in conclusion there is face for Indies on the App Store you're not competing with like a thousand releases a day because nine hundred and ninety of them are garbage it's just not a thing that's like yeah you don't have to compete with the big companies because they invest millions and they make millions but you know if you're a small indie if you make you know like a couple thousand today you're pretty good and the one that is still extremely insulting to me whenever I hear it it's not about luck you just have to know what you're doing why you're doing it you have to see what works so essentially experience and trial and error are your best friends in creating sustainable indie studio overtime I cannot stress that enough I'm gonna end

it there thank you very much do we have any questions there's one over here Elspeth hi so as a fan of wrestling and battle golf yes yeah thank you and I would like to ask you that how exactly did you monetize it because I don't actually remember seeing anything that you know I should or could have paid for well the thing about it is and that's actually that is my bad I kind of glanced over that so what we started learning was you know a lot of people do rewarded video ads and we do those as well except that we're extremely generous with them so what you see in a lot of games is you watch an ad you get like 20 coins or whatever I guess cross the road started out friend what we do is we have

unlockable characters actually in wrestling it was HAP's and we just say like you watch a video you get a hat and that everyone told us actually not to do that because it's way too generous and not gonna retain people yadda yadda but it turns out the people who like our games like playing our weirdness they really appreciate that kind of simple monetization is not confusing so we started doing that at subsequent games as well it works really well in dunkers where you can allow characters through finishing achievements or just watch one video you get the whole character forever good question thank you [Music] you