More than a Bundle: Sportsfriends and Compendium as a Business Strategy

[Music] thank you yep so let's start with some quick and shins so I'm Douglas Wilson I'm a lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne where I teach and research games I'm also the co-owner of Degutis for breivik small studio based in Copenhagen Denmark making indie games we're currently working on an adventure game called mutasa ona this is not this talk is about but hopefully we'll have news about this game in the near future and so today I want to give a business talk about one of my previous projects called sports friends I have a lot to share about this project so I'm going to try to cram in as many slides as I can into the next hour just as a quick overview of the project in case you've never heard of this before a sports friends is a compendium of four different local multiplayer games all by different designers who were based in New York City at the time by local multiplayer I

mean multiplayer video games you play together in the same room like as opposed to online the four games include a super pole riders a physics-based pole vaulting game by Bennett fatty okra a minimalist 2v2 sports game by Ramiro Claire betta barabara ball a mix of volleyball and Super Smash Brothers by Noah Sasso and jsj a physical face-to-face motion control game that I designed while living in Copenhagen as I graduate student actually there are also a couple of secret games by Bennett fatty but I'll let you discover those yourself and so when I say compendium I mean that all four games were bounded together in the same commercial product as one executable glued together with the same main menu flow in May of 2014 we released sports friends for PlayStation 3 PlayStation 4 on PlayStation Network and so that puts us

very late in the ps3 life cycle but quite early in the ps4 life cycle then in December of 2014 we released sports friends for PC Mac Linux via Steam and at the humble store the game received strong reviews which we're really proud of and the project was actually profitable which I'll talk more about later today I want to give a business talk about how we marketed and made sports friends and why that matters so why talk about a project that's like four years old at this point you know admittedly the games industry has changed significantly since this game was released but what's important about this talk I think is not sports Prinze itself but more general takeaways I'm about in video game compendiums and other possible forms of cross game collaboration so this talk is not me suggesting do what we did but rather I think Indies could take some of the lessons and run with them in their own

way in a matter specific to their cultural context the time period genre and so on okay so here's what I'm gonna cover today first review of how the project came about then how we raised funds to make the project and built an audience how we made the thing once we were funded and then a whole bunch of our financials so the budget the legal contracts that we signed our profit sharing mechanism and in some sales data and finally and maybe more interesting I want to think through a little bit about the future of sports friends like companions and what that could look like moving forward and then I'll crystallize some takeaways at the end of the talk I don't want this talk to just to be like a post mortem I mean obviously it is kind of a post mortem of sports friends but I do want it to say something a little bit more one of the key points I'm gonna emphasize is why a compendium

like sports friends is something more than just a bundle I want you to come away from this talk understanding why that distinction matters more generally I want to convince you to consider broader cultural narratives beyond just your one game so recently there have been a lot of articles about how to market your indie game and how to design marketing friendly moments into the the very fabric of your in this talk I want to question the unit of analysis that's so often assumed by these articles that the goal is just to market your one-game singular the argument I want to make is that thinking about just your one game might not actually be ambitious enough to this point I hope sports friends can provide one example of thinking more broadly also before I get into it I do want to mention one big caveat for this entire talk I don't mean to suggest that commercial success should be like necessarily your goal it is 100 percent absolutely fine and great to make a

video game as a hobby or artistic practice beyond the demands of the market actually on this topic I recommend Robert Yang's recent post on reassessing what success means independent games and anyway I hope this talk will be relevant to anyone trying to build an audience for their work commercial or not okay project origins I don't think I can talk about the business of sports friends without telling you about the cultural context in which it was conceived so let's go back to 2011 at the beginning of this decade as new ideas about indie games were coalescing there was a growing wave of public video game exhibitions organized by festivals and game collectives just to name a few examples I'm thinking of events like in decade in Los Angeles the Gama showcases run by Montreal collective Kokoro Me Baby castles a games and DIY art collective in New York City and lots more I won't have time to talk about today these public events gave indie

devs like me opportunities to show games to live audiences and motivated us to make new exhibition friendly work suited to spectatorship in some cases these events directly commissioned and funded great funded game prototypes an example here is NYU's annual no quarter exhibition which still continues today in fact to the games and sports friends okra and Barbary ball were originally commissioned by no quarter hooker was commissioned in 2011 and Barbary Ball was commissioned in 2012 there's a much longer history I could tell here but what I do want to convey is that in 2011 it felt like local multiplayer was important that it was being recognized that it was on the rise so why all of this is happening I was living in Copenhagen as a grad student making my own local multiplayer games inspired by my work with the Copenhagen game collective I went to the North 2011 Nordic game jam and prototypes what

would become Johann Sebastian Jeff's after showing the game in the streets of Copenhagen in June 2011 I knew I was onto something really really fun I submitted the game to festivals and was fortunate enough to be able to show it at events like IndieCade wild rumpus and the independent Games Festival but I had no idea how I could like ever release this game commercially for one thing it only ran on Mac and needed multiple PlayStation Move controllers like this weird controller that not many people owned let alone have like six of them meanwhile in spring of 2011 I played tested an early build of okra that Ramiro had emailed to me I had met Ramiro the year before in my travels exhibiting my games and baby castles in New York immediately I loved okra like the minute I played it it was kind of like Nintendo ice hockey but for the 21st century and with a nice to be too dynamic and despite the difficult path

to market indie designers we knew kept making weird sports games and in September of 2011 I met Bennet Fadi the maker of coop at an exhibition we curated at baby castles in New York at the event we debuted Bennett's new 1v1 pole vaulting game pole riders the game that would go on to become super pole riders we had this growing feeling that there might somehow be a commercial path for our games even if we didn't yet see how also we saw a commercial release as a way to reach new audiences and that was always the main goal anyway getting more people to enjoy our games in 2012 after a lot of brainstorming we decided to take some inspiration from sports games compendiums like epics summer games and Wii Sports the hope is that if we could combine a handful of games into one package we'd have a enough critical mass to motivate a full commercial release three games felt like too small a number so eventually we recruited Noah Sasso and his sports like

fighting game barabara ball and that was that we had a team we had an idea and we'd eventually called a project sports friends inspired by the German word sports ofrenda which is a real world real word which is kind of great fundraising so I want to talk a bit about the project logistics to give you an idea of what making this kind of compendium might entail early on we decided it would be important to release sports friends on console getting controllers to work on home computers as a real pain especially the Move controllers and anyway getting on console would expose us to a much larger audience throughout 2011 and 2012 I had already been talking to Sony America about jsj of my game which they had played at IndieCade 2011 and some other events I took the idea of sports friends to my contacts at Sony and eventually we ended up signing a pub fund deal with them the pub fund program at least our

deal back in 2012 isn't really upfront publishing money from Sony it's more a guaranteed on a guarantee on a certain number of sales so for example let's say you get $150,000 of pub fund grant from Sony in like 2012 era of these grants that means you've got 150,000 from Sony right when you finish the game then the first hundred fifty thousand dollars you may go straight to Sony that arrangement means even if your game bombs and like fails to sell a single copy you still make 150 thousand guaranteed and Sony eats the loss for us that guarantee was enough to reduce the risk of making the project for console um also I think importantly pub fund is a commitment from Sony to help market your game both explicitly and implicitly this kind of deal gives them an incentive to earn their money back pub fun decide that we still needed to raise funds up front to make the game so

we went to Kickstarter in late 2012 we eventually met our goal of $150,000 with over 4000 backers of course that simple summary doesn't really tell the full story both Kickstarter and social media I want a caveat have changed a lot like a lot a lot over the last four years so I don't think I can give you specific crowdfunding advice that's still relevant in 2018 what I can tell you though is that even in 2012 $150,000 was a big task why did we set it at 150,000 well the four of us got together spent a long time figuring out what we needed to make the game and we calculated we could get by with a minimum of $150,000 we asked for what we needed because the only thing worse than failing to hit your target is just barely hitting a target that's actually too low for you to finish the game we actually barely made this target squeaking by on the final day as you can see from this graph

here in retrospect we did like a lot of things wrong despite significant effort we had trouble explaining such a complex project with with so many moving parts but we did have a few key advantages going for us advantages that would serve as well not just during the Kickstarter but also upon release first and foremost we owned a strong narrative about reclaiming local multiplayer and ushering in a new golden age of in-person play all four sports runs games whether motion controlled or screen based excel at getting people together in the same room facilitating an enjoyable social experience for both players and spectators this angle really resonated not just with players but also the press the narrative capitalized on latent interest in local multiplayer experiences that people had growing up in the arcade and in the home like for player games on the Nintendo 64 in fact we really doubled down on this narrative

we made it clear that sports friends would be local multiplayer and local multiplayer only we deliberately said we wouldn't be adding any single-player mode or networked multiplayer or a iron thing here's an editorial Bennett wrote for polygon on the topic at the time this choice was partly for technical reasons a networked multiplayer wouldn't have worked with most of the four games we also limited scope for budget reasons writing for different AI systems would have been too expensive and networked multiplayer would be even worse mostly though we just weren't like interested in those features we wanted to get to the heart of the genre playing with other people in the same room and cut all the cruft one big advantage we had or another big advantage we had was that the four of us had accumulated different fan bases while touring our games around in 2011 and 2012 for example I had generated a passionate fan base for jeaious just after having shown the game at events

like pax here's a clip of the special 18 player version I ran at PAX Prime 2012 Noah by contrast was able to build some interest in the fighting games community and had shown barabara ball at events like Evo in in Las Vegas by coming together the four of us were able to attract audiences we couldn't have reached on our own in a sense then this section title of fundraising is looking a little misleading what I'm really talking about here is something like cultural legitimation that's to say we didn't just raise money for a project we wanted to make we also built a fan base and reassured ourselves that there was indeed enough public interest to justify investing our time and our money into such a project in the first place also importantly the project benefited greatly from the renown of Bennett's virally infamous browser game co-op with our Kickstarter campaign sagging and just days to go we tried doing a reddit AMA in a last-ditch effort and Bennett

who understands Reddit pretty well was clever enough to frame the AMA in terms of coop that game everyone loves to hate Thank You Bennett the AMA was a big success and in fact you can see on this graph you can actually see the slope of the contributions to our Kickstarter changing that same day that we do the AMA of course this data doesn't like prove that correlation is causation but my guess is that the AMA helps drum up a significant amount of awareness the broader more useful lesson here is that sports friends didn't just arrive like out of nowhere it was a project that built on years of prior games experience and brand building okay so the project was funded and now we actually had to make the thing in late 2012 right as the Kickstarter happened I moved from Copenhagen to New York that was partly for family reasons but I also wanted to be near the other sports friends during the production even though I was technically the lead producer all four of us were extremely involved throughout the entire process each of us retained

final say over our own games but when the entire product was concerned we tried to make all our decisions unanimous of course that meant a lot more discussion time but I think in the end it was almost always worth it in retrospect I think sports friends only worked because the four of us got along so well that meant working on the game was usually enjoyable like even the more bureaucratic meetings I don't think we could have achieved such a coherent final product if we all hadn't been so invested there's a huge potential for big disagreements to sink a project like sports friends I think knowing that we were each the king of our own little domain like our own component games made it easier to listen to each other when we were discussing the larger product the Compendium brought with it a natural structure just I think a really key point we hired two full programmers partly because console development was too much for the four of us to handle our lead programmer was jonathon whiting based in Oxford England Oxford made sense because that's where Bennet was

living before he moved to New York in 2013 Jonathan worked on the core PS encode the menus and was responsible for the PC Mac and Linux ports he also did the super pole riders and J's Geoff supports our second programmer Edie came recommended by Ramiro who had worked with him at a previous job it was based in New Jersey which meant that we could take the train down to work with him in person when we needed to had worked on the core PSN code alongside Jonathan and took the lead on the ps4 specific code he also did the ports of Pokhara and Bob are both now one of our major tasks is porting the four games into the same codebase I'm kind of hilariously all four of our prototypes were made using different technologies so Flash XNA game maker and unity which is a little brutal at the time unity didn't seem quite so ready for console ports and anyway we didn't know when the unity team would support ps4 so we ended up going with a proprietary C++ engine licensed to us by

our friends had choice provisions beyond Jonathan and Ed we had like a large team of contractors and collaborators helping us with different aspects of the project in different capacities to start with each of the four of us had our own small team helping us with our game which I won't detail fully here we did hire a visual artist Florian Sanger to lead the visual design of the menus and the branding and we hired Goethe for Beeks composer Alessandro Coronas to do the sound and music for the menus and here's a mock-up from Florian for a tournament mode that never made it into the game as I see it the most important work we did during the production was the menus and the branding bringing together all the games into one cohesive package the menus took up a huge amount of our time and effort way more than porting of the games themselves it's one thing to make like a local multiplayer game that's fun but it's another thing entirely to make the whole experience feel smooth and

professional to make it easy for players to enter in exit games create their own arenas like like they can in the final version of Pokhara change settings and all that other stuff we also felt like we needed to distinguish ourselves from the many bundles that have flooded the marketplace don't get me wrong I really liked the humble store and I think their bundles serve an important role in the marketplace in fact sports friends has actually been a few humble bundles but often bundle themes are like loose at best we were worried about people thinking that the sports friends games were low value or that the quantity was making up for low quality somehow so in contrast to bundles we wanted to create a more coherent narrative about what sportsman's was as like a single product to that end we hope that the menus would give the project both a visual identity and a conceptual identity a whole greater than the sum of its proverbial parts this isn't something we can easily like measure but I do think the new visual identity helped address some of the problems we had explaining

the game during our Kickstarter campaign now with the final menus you could see visually that sports friends was one product immediately it was tangible we also put in this great Danielle button very quote in the startup sequence to emphasize our local multiplayer a narrative here we were basically arguing that the absence of single-player or online play isn't a bug it's a feature ok so here's some of the gory financial details about the the project the project cost us approximately two hundred thousand US dollars to make our Kickstarter budget calculations actually turned out to be pretty accurate but Midway during production we decided to take on some extra costs to add ps4 support so when we had originally budgeted the game we thought we were only doing ps3 so that that explains the extra fifty thousand dollars roughly I do want to note that this two hundred thousand number is kind of artificially

low because none of the four main sports friends took any money during the production myself included we were only paid in profit share and after the release all four of us worked on the game in some kind of part-time capacity I was the most full-time of the four of us but even I took a couple of contract jobs during the production beyond that I subsisted on savings for my previous job and the other three sports friends had their own contract work or day jobs here's a budget visualization I spat out from Google Docs the text is a little too small but to summarize about two-thirds of our budget went to our hired programs by far our biggest cost the second biggest cost was the visual design and sound which also covered the new redesign of Jay s chest which now features a beautiful graphics by Dom 2d a Canadian artist for the legal entity behind the game we use the studio I co-own D Goethe Fabrique and specifically we use a New York LLC

that's a branch of Fabrique note that the other three sports friends are not actually parts of gouda Fabrique so because goethe Fabrique took on the legal risk and because i did so much production work leading the project we split the profit shares five ways where me and the three sports friends each took 20% and the company Goethe for break took the extra 50 share it was important for all of us to feel like equals a while still recognizing all the additional work me and Goethe fabrica did actually it's a little bit more complicated than that we also gave shares to our programmers Jonathan and Edie although we paid them for their work up front we thought it was only fair for them to have some share of the profits especially given how much time they'd be spending on the project they spend a lot of time on the project okay contracts we knew there was a big potential for this kind of project to go really wrong um thankfully it didn't but there was always that potential so we

wrote up a lengthy contract and even paid lawyers to look over it this is gonna be a little oversimplified obviously but here's an overview of some of the general terms of our contract just as a suggestion of what it might look like to destructure one of these kinds of compendiums so Bennett Romero and Noah all retained the IP to their games so Goethe free big does not own okra or super pole writers or bar bar evolved they did grant you defer break a license to sell specific versions of their IP in perpetuity so I'm we're allowed Goethe for Greek is allowed to keep sports friends on the marketplace as long as they want and they agreed to one year of exclusivity of their IP following the initial PSN release so a year after that 2014 release for example if Noah wanted to go on and make bar bar by bar a bar a ball to UM he could have done that they agreed to a pretty specific schedule and feature set

we all agreed to that profit sharing scheme that we spelled out in extensive detail and in the contracts and they were also given a minor financial stake in the sports friends brand so if Goethe Fabrique was ever to use it again in some new project like a sports friends to or say I made gun friends or whatever it would have had a small stake that's a joke I'm absolutely not gonna make gun friends just to be really clear the contract also covered some failure cases so like what would it mean for the designers like the other sports friends to breach the agreement what would mean for a gu24 Brik or me to breach the agreements and what would happen to the profit shares if the agreement was somehow terminated luckily we haven't had to deal with any of this stuff but it was really important for us to set all this kind of stuff in stone if you're going to do this kind of project I think it is really important to have all the legal contracts set pretty cleanly um by the way if there's any interest I can look into releasing this contract someday so feel free to email

me I'll put some of my contact information at the end of the talk okay sales so when we undertook sports friends we didn't know how much money we'd make and that's why the pub fund guarantee on sales was so important for us like this was a really weird and risky project it was quite possible in our minds that we would make hardly any money so in the end like to date we've made roughly like nine hundred thousand US dollars in net revenue like that's the money that has come into our bank account not in gross revenue which is like a little bit more complicated for me to try to calculate so I did ends this amount hugely exceeds our expectations so we're obviously really kind of happy and proud about that but so you think about the budget was 200,000 so in reality that's something like seven hundred thousand in profit so far so figuring out figuring like my for example eighteen point five percent split over two years of unpaid work

that's about like sixty five thousand dollars per year before taxes which is great I personally also took some of the Buddha Fabrique share and then put the rest back into our future company projects again to be clear we're like super happy with this amount but you should note that all four of us are still doing day jobs right it's a lot of money but split a whole bunch of different ways by the way this amount includes the Kickstarter money we earned and a ps+ deal that we did a vast majority of the sales were on ps4 as opposed to on home computers like the vast majority of the sales and we still enjoy a pretty long tail of sales which is which is great I think two things that probably helped us a lot was one buy-in from Sony America who were invested in featuring our game and two we were pretty early in the ps4 lifecycle which I think counted for quite a lot okay so making this compendium worked out

pretty well for us and clearly I'm a big believer in the whole idea of compendiums as a way to do deep collaboration sports brands succeeded because it wasn't just a collection of random multiplayer games it was a project very visibly on the forefront of bringing back local multiplayer but thinking beyond sports friends itself I want to offer a little provocation about what the future of collaboration could look like in video games I've been talking about building something bigger than just your one game or even your one studio but in some ways that idea is kind of already well explored for example I'm pretty inspired by the rusty lake studio it's a Dutch duo who makes a realistic adventure puzzle games all orbiting the same fictional universe I really recommend taking a look at these the series began in 2015 and already includes nine free-to-play games which are called the cube escape games and three larger premium games of the

rusty lake games I also want to clarify these games are not the same things of as episodes like episodic releases of one larger story arc each game is playable on its own apart from the rest of the series and yet all the games connect in direct and indirect ways in an interview with the itch IO blog the series creators talked about the inspiration behind the series I mean I want to read this one quote from that interview so they say we were inspired by Twin Peaks and wanted to create a similar surreal world where our games could take place and connect with each other it was back in April 2015 when we launched Cube escaped the lake and seasons the first two entries in the rusty lake universe both games were connected and with a code you could use in one of the games that gave a different ending it made people feel like these games were part of something bigger and so what I find so inspiring about this is that rusty Lake isn't just a studio like making

multiple games they're making games in service of a larger coherent experience with multiple entry points such that each game leads players to all the other entries so the twist I'm suggesting and this talk is that that kind of multiple entry points or larger narrative can also be built more heterogeneous leave across in different Studios different designers different projects you see sports friends on the screen here for years I've called myself an independent game developer but we might reassess how independent we really even want to be barring a term from Bart Simon and the research he and his team have done studying the economics of the indie mega booth maybe we could pivot from the more familiar indie game design label to a kind of interdependence game design okay like maybe not such a catchy term but hopefully you get what I mean by the way that research project about the indie mega booth called indie interfaces is a really useful sociological book at

collaboration and culture building in indie games it was one of the inspirations behind this talk and you can check out their research on their website which I recommend back to thinking about sports friends and what future sports friends like projects might look like something I think about all the time is what are the record labels of video games and what could they be in music well one of my personal favorite labels is more records in the 90s work became almost synonymous with a certain ilk of electronic music if you bought a warp album back then you knew you'd get an album of heady high quality electronic music even if you'd never heard of the particular artists before now when I talk about this with colleagues they often suggest that indie publisher is like devolver are already providing the record labels of video games and I think this is like partially right clearly devolver has a coherent stetic identity I strong social media presence and a dedicated fan base but we might also

imagine a more bottom-up structure where fellow creators come together and more complicated artists run our arrangements as opposed to the more familiar top-down paradigm of a publisher giving money and/or marketing support so in that sense maybe traditional record labels like warp aren't actually the best example of here maybe we can find more cooperative models one useful example that blurs the line between indie publisher and developer is wage at I games in New York who make old-school adventure games and also use their expertise and fan base to publish similar games made by other developers old-school adventure games aren't so mainstream these days sure but they don't need to be super trendy as long as logic I can establish a niche and find their fans I'd also point to artists own studios and game collectives who bring together like-minded work with similar aesthetics a good example here is co-op in Montreal so they work on their own

games like a ps4 game nog but they also produce other people's games like garden area check out their website which I think does a nice job conveying the creative identity that binds their games together so let's think about sports friends again I sometimes wonder what it would mean to give the project to give a project like sports friends more life beyond just the initial release so imagine if you will turning sports friend into its owns platform or releasing a steady stream of weird new sports games through the same application over time say one or two new games a year my ideas are still like a little half-baked but let me at least propose two different approaches we might take so the first approach is more ambitious and requires more coordination so we'd add new games to the existing sports forensics acute able and charge something like in-app purchases or a yearly subscription the main menu would

feature a news feed announcing new additions to sports friends so possibly maybe we'd even like help pay for the porting and console release and offer our expect our expertise working through recertification and depending on the business model we'd have to figure out some kind of new fare Reb split between all the games designers acknowledging the value that the new games are bringing to the project and really importantly I think all new inductees would then become official sports friends and would get an equal say in deciding which games were added in the future so okay a second approach which is a little less coordinated so maybe also a bit more feasible all the new games would be separate downloads separate purchases and whatever technology so they wouldn't require any porting maybe we'd specify some platform constraints like all the games must be for ps4 and or Steam or whatever all the sports Friends games would include some kind of visual logo on their name menu and link to the other sports brands

games like ideally in-app may be through some standardized menu in this arrangement maybe we don't even need to give funding or financial support at all the onus would be on the developer themselves to release their game but the appeal is that they'd still get to join a tightly curated collection with an existing fan base you'd stand of course you'd solve the new inductees join the sports Friends Council and help decide which games get added in the future in either case the strategic logic of that sport trends as a platform idea is something like this importantly we'd commit to a coherent communicable idea so in this case local multiplayer and weird alternative sports games we'd be pretty choosy about which games we'd add and release only say one game a year at a regular time the hope here is that we would be able to set regular expectations you'd want the fanbase to look forward to the new sports brands game of the calendar year and of course we develop a coherent online and social

media presence a place for fans to stay updated about the platform finally as I suggested in approach number two a cooperative might not even need liquid financial capital to make this idea work all you really need is a group of friends and colleagues coordinating their different releases in a smart branded well-planned way I'm not sure if this is a good by the way for sports friends specifically and to be clear none of the four of us were interested in pursuing such a project but I suspect that other compendiums could really make this general idea work cross promotion is certainly not a new idea but I'd love to see more Indies running with it taking it in new more tightly coordinated directions actually maybe promotion is too limited of a noun here what I'm talking about is creating a narrative becoming part of something larger than yourself in the current attention economy I think there's something really valuable to be

gained by thinking bigger than trying to build just one great game I know this sounds like a little over the top but it's worth considering how you might build a larger cultural movement the question here is how can your one isolated game be connected to something larger for us making sports friends this was pushing the zeitgeist of local multiplayer for you this will almost certainly be something totally different now I wish I could give you like a recipe for how to build that movement or collaboration but the power in this idea is precisely in charting new terrain and trying new arrangements I do think sports friends offers some valuable hints and inspirations but any structure you try to build will need to be tailored to your context moments and John rrah finally beyond business concerns there are also political reasons to pursue radical collaborations one thing that's a little obvious from all the photos I've been showing is how all four of us sports friends and all of our main collaborators were men but it

doesn't have to be that way just like how sports friends gave the four of us access to a commercial platform we couldn't have feasibly reached on our own I think these kinds of collaborative structures could also be used to give professional opportunities and visibility to more marginalized voices just as one small recent example local to me I'd point to the all-women Australian collective blush box who make and promote games about sex and romance it isn't easy to get your game on console especially for newcomers to the industry but as we learned making sports friends there is definitely a power and number for example I don't think I would have been able to launch jsj us to by itself on ps4 even with one-fourth of the sports France budget it was the larger scale of the Sportsman's project the four games together that made the funding and logistics possible applying collaborative structures more broadly we might wonder what other non-traditional games and whose games might be be able

to get on to highly visible platforms okay so let's end this thing some final takeaways I want to emphasize take away one a sports Prince wasn't just an idea that we pulled out of thin air and it tapped into particular trends so right place right time sports Franz was very much a product of it's like I just said of its place in time it was conceived somewhat organically gradually over a period of two years again I think the trick here is to shift the unit of your thinking from just your one video game to broader cultural narratives I don't think anyone can force a cultural movement as I guys to something you identify feed off of and amplify that takes time it isn't the same thing as just trying to cash in on a hot new trend takeaway number two as much as possible we try to go all-in on our central narrative again think about the

danielle button barry quote and our boot sequence rather than shy away from the shortcoming of having no single-player or online play we fully embrace that identity take away three narratives aren't just for the public and your potential consumers they're also for publishers and platform holders so here's a photo me and Nik sutnar who was then one of the main indie dev outreach guys at Sony America sports friends could not have happened without his enthusiasm or without the help of other Sony folks like Bryan Silva or at boys the fact that Knicks so enthusiastically bought into the idea of local multiplayer was a good sign that we were onto something and that the project was worth pursuing on console takeaway number four crafting new narratives is actually hard and describing complex projects like this is pretty tricky again think about our Kickstarter campaign and the trouble we had packaging the idea of the project it's easy for me to stand here

and sing the praises of radically collaborative projects but they often come with a huge amount of work nailing your narrative and explaining the project to the public this takes time sometimes the public just has to sit with the concept for a while before they really get it that said it's precisely that difficulty that makes such an idea worth pursuing if the narrative were easy someone probably would have done it before it take away five team chemistry is everything I've been talking a lot about the narrative of local multiplayer and how sports friends with the right project at the right time but all of that was only possible because the four of us got along so well and we're so excited to work with each other and that's not just true of the core team but also of our programmers Jonathan and Ed and all of our other collaborators all that is to say I'd be careful not to force a collaboration but if you can find a great group of people who are all hungry to work together you're definitely on the right path takeaway

number six get involved put yourself out there and these kinds of collaborations don't happen overnight they happen gradually here's a screenshot actually from the time we video called Ramiro right after trying Hoecker for the first time Thank You Brandon Boyer for this screenshot if I hadn't exhibited my games at baby castles in New York in 2010 I don't think I would have ever met Ramiro and sports friends probably would never have happened and it's not like we came up with the idea for sports friends the first time I met Ramiro that happened slowly over time as I got to know him and his work and and the other sports friends okay so final caveat um yeah listen this game is pretty old at this point so this this talk is not a how-to guide I'm 2018 it's a very different climate for local multiplayer and this is not a project that we could easily do today at least not in the same form still if you're feeling alone in the world of game dev or intimidated by the torrent

of new releases on Steam or upper platform I might suggest consider finding new forms of collaborations collaborations that make sense for you and try to build something bigger than just your one studio or your one game yeah that's about it thank you and I I thought I'd go longer but so we do have time for questions so if you do have any questions great um if not that's okay too hey thanks for the talk I just wanted to know like because everything seemed to come together quite organically how did you manage once you sort of kicked it into a gear and realized what you were trying to do how did you manage everybody's time and the differences of where people were up to with their projects and deadlines and just communication in general between the team I think we were lucky and that

all the games were already really playable and like we knew all four games were good they were playable when we started the project so in that sense managing like yet we all had to polish our games but it wasn't that much polish so the like the managing the four main sports friends finishing their games was never really a big concern it was more just the like polish and the porting details which is kind of them like managing a regular project so I think I think this would be much harder if the games were in like various different states of completion so in that sense we were already had the momentum of four games that were like showable playable that answers your question yes been asked this before but why were the secret games kept secret conversations it did and so actually the the profit-sharing slide I showed he's a little bit of a lie um we gave Bennett a

few more private representatives for the secret games and I think this is I in fact I Bennett's in the audience and he could probably tell you but you know for us I think it was like a labor of love like it was never even planned like one it was like if you I want to make the secret game and so I think that spoke to the kind of like enthusiasm in the project like people just doing stuff for fun because they were geeked about local multiplayer so though those two secret games kind of came about like weirdly and and surprisingly but yeah we did I didn't want to get into the extra detail but yep the profit sharing scheme is a little bit more complicated and we did we did comments a bit a little bit more for that yeah well thanks hi those great can you just talk a little bit more about you mentioned that like 20 18 is really different right now yep so can you talk a little bit more about how sort of local multiplayer how you think about that right now versus when you started yeah so I had this discussion a

lot with that actually with the house house guys who are here in the audience he made a great local multiplayer game push-me pull-you and I think local multiplayer is a tricky Beast because people find you know their one local multiplayer game that they love playing with their friends like and their other ones out there in the same era right like towerfall samurai gun gang beasts whatever and it's something about the replayability of those games where you'll keep coming back to them so you might have less space in your kind of social time for new things to try so that potentially I worry like crowds out the kind of like ecosystem of local multiplayer so to some extent I think again right time right place now in terms of co-located play and video games more generally in 2018 I'm really excited by cooperative games so overcooked is a super good example of this and this that is a deeply underserved genre someone should absolutely go make cooperative friends or whatever you want to call it they

would slam it out of the park for sure so I think not that like I don't mean to glorify like cooperation over competition and games like that's often a false binary that's evoked but right now I think that particular mode of co-located catch play is a little underrepresented so I would absolutely love to see cooperation friends or whatever it is yeah appreciate it's great you say that cuz a bunch of friends of mine are working on a bunch of similar co-op games yes and I floated to them a similar kind of compendium ideal and a lot you know a lot of us have a couple irons in the fire very few of us released games before so it's pretty difficult to as much as everyone loves the idea yeah to commit to giving up your potential to one quarter or one fraction of a potential so when you guys were putting this together it's gone organically but where was that moment where everybody kind of got the full sort of like okay this is the way this will take rather than me continuing to develop and releasing on my own like was a difficult

conversation no and it almost the opposite where like me and Ramiro had no idea we were just like we're never gonna be able to sell our games it's gonna be impossible hooker requires four controllers you can't sell that Chaves so for us it was more like even convincing ourselves that we could sell it in the first place and I'm sure I think of what else I would say I think it helped a lot that all four of us had showed our games at festivals and so like you mentioned you know being somewhat more of an unknown and that gets to my point where this took time it wasn't like we had our games and then just did it overnight we were lucky enough to get our games into smaller large festivals and so into someone for example making coopera friends or whatever like if those individual games can speak for themselves at whatever local or global events I think that's the kind of sign okay we're onto something this is worth pursuing further so that's

I think maybe and also there was like maybe some amount of like equitable attention on the for games like all four of them had kind of made it to cool festivals so we didn't feel like necessarily one of the games was like way less popular than the other three and that wasn't fair to the four of us so it was like also and like I guess that's also what I mean by don't force collaborations like we found for people who were kind of in the same place in their career and that made it feel really fair to split the profits equally so yeah and you'd said that like you don't think you could have released your engine just on its own No seems like you found that right balance almost by happenstance with the form yeah I believed in your projects we also believed you couldn't sell them on on their own yeah but but okay so I think that's a special case I think even if you believed you could sell you it lets us a cooperative game but overcook like whatever undercooked that I don't know that you maybe could sell it on your own I still think there's something to be said for like momentum of scale

and that like unless your game is as like right time right place as overcooked there's probably some other conceptual addition there that you would have to work out so if not just like yep we made for co-op games I guess you can get them and like what is there's like some other special spice like whether that's all games for romantic pairs right like that's suddenly like a more coherent or you know all weird 3d it's almost NX style that binds sincere though so I don't know but I think I think all four people have to kind of sniff out that like the momentum we can generate together is gonna outweigh my game just being lost in the bajillion games that are released on Steam every single minute or whatever yeah next yeah we have one more question hey just a historical question like were any of the sports friends sold separately at

any point like in their lifetimes either before or after the game and two did the releases Sports friends and their festival circuits like was that kind of capped on showing them publicly great questions the games were never sold but it's a little bit more complicated than that so jess jess was part in 2011 of a Kickstarter reward for Brandon boy is Venus patrol Kickstarter which is actually ended up working pretty well because it was like a little bit of guerilla marketing there was just like crew the Select crew people enthusiasts who had funded Brandon's Kickstarter who then got the build of Jesse oust so there was it with some of these games were like a leaking out into like indie circles which I think like start that but so it was kind of like an organic but organic lifting off process but know that we didn't we weren't selling them well Bennett's Bennett's game the original

version of pole riders which is a little different than super pole riders was available in flash free on his website so that like again is this kind of like leaking out into the world but then again super pole riders totally changes the graphics ads for players and makes the game quite different the second question is that you're saying when we when we were funded my Kickstarter when we released the game okay so the question is do we still show it festivals now we've released the game um kind of I'm Jay s house will still appear for example at Magfest in DC they show it every winter I try to go when I can to run it you know I've heard of some of these other games being played like not in the same way and we're not paying for example for a PACs booth anymore if we were to do sports friends the platform I think we probably actually still could be running like Barbara ball tournaments at a booth at

PAX along with whatever the new Sports friends game is of the year so I think if we were to do that platform we could keep digging back into our back catalogue in interesting ways in concert with the new games I think in a very productive relationship but all four of us have day jobs that I think we like so that's that's why it hasn't happened but I do think we could have done something like that and in that case we would be still going to packs every year to to show both and get games on the old games it's not a specific question but I was wondering if you could talk more towards this idea of using the compendium to kind of boost more marginalized voices yeah because it's incredibly interesting I think yeah necessary right a little bit of a leading question thank you um yeah I know I not sure how much there is to say but there's definitely for example I live in Melbourne and there's

a of us who are interested in exploring some of these ideas so what does it mean to get a whole local community making games together and I think there's something powerful in fact I was just answering another question in the case of sports friends all four of us were kind of like in a similar stage in our professional careers but I think you could also do it some way where you were mixing like old experienced voices with less experienced voices whether that was on different games or potentially working together on the same game so you know that kind of knowledge transferred social capital transfers so I think there are totally different ways to do it and that could be everything from a community art project to really commercially focus the title that's funded by an indie publisher whatever right but it's it's something I personally I'm looking to continue working on in the future when I'm kind of done with my current projects what it what is that next version of sports

friends that's appropriate for 2019 or 20 or whatever the year it is and unlike sports friends how can we bring in more people and interesting ways to put people on ps4 who have never been on ps4 before get an artist who's never you know working on a video game before and I think there's something also about the compendium structure to where it's easy to slot in heterogeneous lis different mini games of different visual styles so that like that's the structure itself of the compendium or the metagame or the party game is kind of naturally I feels like is a kind of like plurality of heterogeneous voices in it of itself so I think it like almost naturally lends itself to that kind of political art project so fingers crossed that that we'll see more of this whether that's for me or somebody else but yeah for sure that's this still remains one of my main interests which is why I'm talking about it so many years later yeah I think we're wrapping up but thank you

everyone for attending I'll be out in the hall if you want to talk more thank you