Making indie game money in the midst of this virus...

hey hey this video is brought to you by Squarespace thanks Squarespace yay Hey Wow hi how's it going my name is Thomas brush I'm the creator of a game called pinstripe also a game called never song which we'll be releasing soon those games are on pretty much every platform you can think of so if you guys want to check them out click the link in the description that would really mean a lot to me so in all of this craziness with this virus that I can't say on YouTube the market is kind of tumbling a little bit at least in the United States I don't know how it's doing across the world the whole concept of money is a scary one we don't really know what anything is gonna look like in the future but what I can say is indie game development I can imagine is pretty much kind of safe because we're all gonna play video games while we we're all gonna play video games while we quarantine ourselves so the video game industry I can imagine is totally fine anything digital you can't spread a virus with something digital so I think the indie game industry will be okay

it'll be okay and I don't know exactly what it will be but I think it'll be okay but I got this email basically about indie game funding and so I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you guys in my experience what indie game funding looks like where does the money come from how much money is it and maybe maybe break down a couple misconceptions about funding for the indie game industry so let's take a look okay guys before we get started this video is brought to you by Squarespace believe it or not I've been wanting Squarespace as a sponsor for so long mainly because Squarespace is awesome I've been using Squarespace for I think six years both my websites Thomas brush calm and at most games calm where I host my games in my portfolio my resume all that cool stuff is hosted on Squarespace it was created with Squarespace Squarespace is cool because you can look amazing you can have custom designs and pretty much do anything you

need to do for your business or your own personal brand all with Squarespace and you don't have to know how to code so if you guys are interested in creating a website with Squarespace click the link below squarespace.com slash thomas brush and use the promo code thomas brush for 10% off yay yay I love Squarespace I really do thank Squarespace so the email is from this wonderful dude named John and he says dear Thomas hope you and at most games are well but blah blah blah blah blah a couple general questions his his question is regarding video game financing were you able to fund Pinstripe yourself or did you require publisher to fund fund it well that's a great question and in his email continues but I'm gonna answer that really quick Pinstripe was funded by a community and by a publisher and that

might sound excessive but it's not when you get funding at the start of your game whether it's from Kickstarter or like I don't know some other fundraising platform you feel amazing right you make like a hundred grand and you think this is all I need to make my game but in reality it always ends up being a little bit more expensive to make your game I can't really remember how much total Pinstripe cost I know it took five years to make that game the never song Kickstarter campaign which that was actually originally called Once Upon a coma that raised around $80,000 eighty six thousand dollars I think total that game cost way more than eighty six thousand dollars to make it was not just funded by Kickstarter and you know that's that might be upsetting to you guys and it might scare you a little bit it definitely would have scared me five

years ago or was it I think four years ago when I did my first Kickstarter campaign it would have scared me cuz I'm like oh my goodness I need more than what I raised on Kickstarter but the truth is is that if you just keep working and keep taking baby steps towards your goal you'll find that the money kind of flows in and you almost don't even realize how much money you're spending on your project and it kind of just works itself out I know that that that's probably not really encouraging is it you'll figure it out it's hard to explain once you get into something like that like funding your indie game it becomes second nature to be always looking for funding and so I guess answering your question John it's not it wasn't only funded by Kickstarter Pinstripe was not only funded by a Kickstarter it was also funded by a publisher who provided in advance I can't say how much the advance

was but it was less I believe it was less than the Kickstarter campaigns funding itself and you'll find that that's true for a lot of indie games they'll do a Kickstarter campaign but they also will be able to achieve some sort of advance or lump sum payment from a publisher in exchange for like 30% of the revenue of the game John continues I know many successful indie games were actually made by one person such as minecraft start a valley and Breit I'm gonna answer this some early question but it's a statement I've been given advice by people in the past they've said Thomas you should self you know self publish your game you know it was done with with Minecraft or it was done by Jonathan Blow who made braid or Edmund McMillen and he made a super meatboy they always give these examples of why you should

self publish your game based on these one-off instances of people who did it now I'm not saying you shouldn't self publish your game but what I am saying is it's kind of like saying someone won a million dollars so you should go buy a lottery ticket it's kind of like that because the truth is is that there are plenty of games game developers who are very successful who have publishers and I like to think I'm one of those people I like to work with publishers the reason I like it is because they provide funding upfront and they also can almost my favorite thing about a publishers they act is kind of an agent meaning they they find opportunities for you while you can focus on what you're good at what I'm good at is is writing music and doing atmosphere and telling stories right I don't really want to focus on looking for opportunities as well so that's a quick statement about these few

games that are self-published so you you said you know that many successful indie games were made by one person minecraft star devaluing braid did you make pinstripe by yourself or did it require paying a development team so this is a weird thing pinstripe yes was made completely alone I ended up the for the port of Xbox and ps4 I ended up paying someone to port it but when it comes to the Steam version that was completely made alone now when it comes to never song my game that's about to release on on pretty much every platform that game was done by me and also serenity Forge which is my publisher but publisher isn't really a good word because nowadays things are a little bit different with indie games because you can you could partner up in very interesting ways because everyone can work remote and with slack or discord

and all of these different systems online you can collaborate in ways you couldn't maybe ten years ago so serenity Forge is my publisher but they kind of act as my agent and also my like a development team they offered up a few developers to help with the game so I can do what I do best and and they could help do the code in the development John finally concludes with a final question which is if an indie game developer is seeking investment capital where should he or she go to obtain this funding I've definitely answered this question a lot on my channel but I guess it definitely bears repeating it comes from all over the place and as an indie game developer we we all need to be okay with the idea of money coming from all different directions a lot of you have watched youtube videos from indie game developers who say how much did my game

make and they tell you how much how many games sales they sold on Steam this is it's kind of a it's not the full picture of how indie game developers make money not in the slightest now maybe it's just me but my my funding comes from all over the place and I remember I bought a whiteboard two years ago and hung it up in my office just so I could write out where my funding comes from in like a pie chart so that I didn't go crazy because it was it was it was coming from all over the place but I can break it down for you really quickly here I can't give you exact numbers I'm sorry based on NDA's and contracts and all that I can't give you the exact numbers the majority comes from a company in California that's all it's a publisher in California the majority comes from licensing agreements licensing my games so that they can sell

them so the majority comes from that another chunk of a good chunk of change comes from Nintendo switch and steam so game sales from Nintendo switch in steam another good chunk of funding comes from publishers so publishers across the United States who have worked with me in the past and royalty payments so that's kind of mixed with the Nintendo switch and steam sales its royalty payments but also advance payments like lump sum payments where they say hey we want thirty to forty percent of your game sales here's a big chunk of cash well I guess it's relative to what's big big to you but here's a here's a chunk of cash and then a little piece of us it's kind of a bigger piece comes from like crowdfunding like Kickstarter preorder sales those kinds of things and then another chunk of check cash comes from

YouTube revenue from these kind of videos so ad revenue sponsorships for videos which isn't really game sales but it kind of is because my studio is kind of interconnected with YouTube so you you basically were asking about venture capital I don't really do I don't know I don't do that but getting investment from companies or from publishers to license your product which is basically investment right that happens often as well so as you can see like there's a lot of money coming from all over the place and there's also patreon money comes in from patreon as well so it's uh it's kind of hard to balance it all right it's not just game sales that's if that's your entire

paradigm is just game sales if you get lucky you're gonna be fine or if you're really talented you have an awesome game you're gonna be fine like stardew valley obviously their funding comes for their revenue comes from a lot of different sources but I'm sure the primary is just from game sales for the majority of game developers they're gonna need to learn how to to sniff out funding all over the place you you need to learn to always be looking for funding from a variety of different sources so John that that's as best as I can answer your question I hope I hope I did a good job guys if you like this video please leave a comment leave a like and subscribe it would really mean a lot to me and ultimately guys just take this advice give it a shot and see what happens bye guys

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