Move or Die: Why It's Worth It to Chase Your Tail

[Music] cool hi my name is Nikolai barber chair I'm a self-proclaimed game designer but I actually use a Microsoft Surface instead of a Mac and I founded a company called those awesome guys which is like a super small team from all over the world and we made a game called move or die and I'm here today to talk about the success of move or die and in order to do that again I have to go back a few years really quickly move or Die is a four-player competitive friendship ruining party game that looks something like this it's a very fast paced and people react to it like this so 2010 I used to make a lot of flash games a lot of weird flash games like I made a game where you play with two players at the same time I made a flash game where you have to literally punch your keyboard a competitive drinking game where you play as a vulture and a fighting game where you slap microphones and one particular

flash game was called concerned Joe and it was a single-player narration based puzzle platformer which is quite unusual for a flash game and players liked it a lot and because they liked it a lot I wasn't really happy with it because it wasn't performing as well as I wanted it to be and I basically wanted to do a reimagining of that game so a game from scratch with new art new graphics new soundtrack everything from scratch a real game not a flash game and in order to do that we started looking into what languages we could use our frameworks and back then unity didn't have a dedicated to the option if I'm not mistaking and unreal was way too complicated for what we needed so we tried C++ for a while and after about three weeks of development we had this and we basically said no thank you and we stumbled upon a loved 2d and loved to tease this super cool open-source framework running in Lua and not only the scripting parts are running

in Lua the whole damn thing is running in Rolla so concerned ro was running in Lua as a whole so we started development and we made a lot of bad decisions in the process like because we weren't on Steam we decided oh we're gonna make our own distribution system where you would log in with your credentials and the passwords were properly salted by the way and we stored the build on our server as raw files and whenever you would get an update you would basically make an HTTP request for every single file so we were ddossing ourselves but concerned Joe was a single-player puzzle game and one night I was like what happens if we had three more players and we did that and we added a party mode to the game where you basically had some minigames or you like avoid falling blocks or pass bombs and I showed this version to friends and friends really liked it and that was very interesting because it was the kind of game you could enjoy with a crowd of people so what I thought was I would take this party mode from concerned Joe and I would release it as a standalone

title called move or die and my reasoning to doing this was minigames are not remembered and this would allow him overnight to grow on its own and it would also give us some practice of releasing a game before we release concerned Joe the big game spoiler alert concerned Joe never got released and the focus completely went on mover died but yeah the year is 2015 and after four years of working on it we went through greenlight it took us around three weeks and in early 2015 in January we hit early access and I've been told that you only get one release so this means that you either get a huge explosion during early access and then a smaller one when the game actually comes out or the other the opposite you are quite quiet during early access and then a big explosion during the final release so I picked the second option and I priced the early access version of the game higher than the final release which was quite an unusual thing but I wanted to keep the

entire early access period under a low profile I didn't want to yell about it too much and I wanted to make it very clear that it's an unfinished game so as a result this was the main promotional video and I said things like this if you want to play the game when it's polished and done wait until it comes out of early access do not buy it now check out the next video for some gameplay footage I'm putting in the right way and all the videos literally told you do not buy it now which again quite unusual but yeah it was in early access and I want to make it clear that it's unfinished so the first thing you would see when you open the game was this screen and on this screen you would see the best contributors there were basically players who submitted a lot of bugs and we put their name on the splash screen recent changes we made in the last patch what we're working on and my personal favorite a progress until a release bar which was a bar that I would manually update with each patch to give you like an idea of how close you are to getting

the final game and it's a cool visual representation of a release date but during early access we released two updates the workshop update and the sugar rush update and the workshop update was all about mods and user-generated content so we released a level editor that was very user friendly and we encouraged mods so I made the whole process of making the new character super easy with trailers and all that and even in the game when you finish a match the game recommends you a mod like hey check out this cool thing because I think that's a cool thing to do I also had a GDC talk about the polish in Moe verdi around that time and I think that kind of helped with getting spreading the word and we also started showcasing the game at various events and because we did that we went at PAX East in Boston and there we ran into Richard hammer who played the game on the show floor and then later that night we ended up in his car going to his Airbnb where we made a temporary live-streaming setup where he played

move or Die live Northern Line played the game on the show floor and then he followed up with several videos about move or Die that kind of totaled in around 400,000 views and Jesse Cox also played the game on the show floor and during the co optional podcast he kind of nodded his head integration yeah also the Giant Bomb guys play the game and then they mentioned us on their panel that was us but yeah and also during during events we gave out like promotional cards and some guys tried to sell those on eBay for $28 so it's kind of a compliment but yeah the released they came around and we released the game in early 2016 so we spent one year in early access and for those of you who haven't experienced this yet this is how

it feels to release your game so yeah version 1.0 it went live we added a lot of future features to make kind of a build up we added a leveling up system new game modes new characters and we ended up on the front page of Steam which was mind-blowing and we also got assigned a Metacritic score now for those of you who don't know Metacritic score is kind of an average of like some reviews out there and in order to get a medic rating score you need a minimum amount of reviews and that minimum amount is 4 which is exactly the number we got and because most of them were positive we ended up with a score of 80 that makes us as good as elite dangerous and better than Kingdom Come deliverance based on what Metacritic says and that's how the sales chart looked during release I don't have to point out where the game came out it was very obvious

but even though the game was doing quite well I wasn't happy because the game was kind of rushed and it still lacked in certain aspects so I had these four pillars that I wanted to fix about the game which was content replay value online game play and marketing and so the updates era started and I wanted to maintain the game with updates with the no paid DLC mentality and I wanted to really stick to that so back then I was looking at what team fortress was doing and they had these very cool updates that had their own logo their own website the tiny trailer and all the features were presented super nicely on that website so we started working on the first update who which was focused on fixing the replay value problems of the game and so the mutaters update was released in March and the mutaters update was all about adding mutators that add new mechanics to the game as you're playing and the game was kind of getting popular

with youtubers back then I also ended up on local television for some reason and a lot of youtubers play the game so what I figured I could do for the trailer was to get snippets from their gameplay videos and kind of match those snippets up to the game's soundtrack so I'm going to just play you that trailer new textures change the way the game is played jet blind deadly ghosts so yeah I also think it's important to show how players react to your game not only gameplay footage also in terms of content we added like new game modes new characters and in terms of online we added the ability to join ongoing matches more local players in online games and a

friends list and in terms of marketing we managed to get some announcers for the game like the youtuber critical brutal Muse and a random Japanese guy and those were quite fun because these updates kind of covered all the those pillars not just one and I also wanted to make every trailer and kind of in the same way so I'm just gonna show you that [Music] so I wanted to make it very clear that this update is completely foreign it's already in your Steam library and so we started working on the next update which was the viewers versus streamers update and this was all about marketing again I'm just gonna play the trailer aren't you tired of just watching streamers play games on Twitch what if you could actually influence their game while they are playing it like everything time shows up in the game what game

we'll play so while I was working on this update I saw what Troy's chamber was doing which was I think the first game that did this thing and I kind of combined that with that flash game I mentioned where you punch her keyboard so I took the keyboard layout and I mapped it on the screen and I made a game mode where a twitch viewer if he presses a key he would drop a bomb on that spot on the screen and we tested that for the first time during pax live on the twitch stage with like 10,000 live viewers and it looks something like this yeah that was fun and he didn't catch on fire so that was good we also reached out to some other developers and we managed to get cameo characters like shovel knight a twitch logo and the Newgrounds character we managed to get egoraptor as an announcer in the game

and we added a new mutator and also I was playing heavy bullets which is a really cool game and I really liked the mechanic of it and I asked the developer if I can adapt that mechanic in a move or Die game mode and he said yes and so the heavy bullets game mode was introduced also around this time I sent Justin roiland the creator of Rick and Morty an email asking if we can use their characters in the game and we started working on the next update which was the Toxic update and this one was all about the online so we added an online chat emotes so you can taunt your fellow players hast Migration afk AI BOTS we basically made the whole online experience much better in terms of content and replay value we had new characters new game modes mutaters and all that stuff and around this time Vodafone reached out to us asking if we're interested in being featured in one of their ads we're like a kid would play move or die on his tablet and the parents came in the room and we were trying to explain to them that move or dies not on tablets and they ended up

going with Pokemon go in the end so yeah that was a thing I don't know but after this my personal favorite update came out called the best value update so we were really stupid and we decided to make an update with an infomercial theme to it so is the trailer are you tired of waiting around for a new mover die update don't you wish there would be a new update announcement with a thematically mocking trailer well it's your lucky day we have exactly what you need and what you need is the best value update just to understand what you saw there it was stock footage that I paid money for to remove the watermark and re add my own watermark saying stock footage so yeah in terms of content and replay value we added a lot of mutaters and some game modes including the vvvvv mutator again with approval in terms of online we added an abandoned cooldown various improvements and in terms of marketing we got Lily Picchu as a voice actor and even though the other updates

were completely free this one was free 99 and we did a really stupid thing where I went on Google and I found a service where I could buy a hotline so I bought a hotline and it sounds like this when you actually call it and a lot of players called that hotline and they left us very interesting voice messages and I'm just gonna play some of them I love the fact that you can move or die go yourself by far the best ad for a game I just bought the four pack because of this hey so uh I think you should give me this game for free my name in weight one number why why did you guys

feel that this was a good idea so we we still don't know why that was a good idea but it's my favorite thing also around this time we were contacted by a random Chinese company basically asking us if we're interested in in selling them the move or Die IP so they can add it as some sort of loading screen to their game because their game is very stressful and they wanted their players to play like a relaxing during the loading screens yeah okay and finally the last update for 2016 was the nondenominational winter holiday update which was very inclusive and this was all about replay value we added teams you can finally play like 2v2 in terms of content we added a lot of game modes and one of my personal favorites the superhot game mode again with approval a lot of characters meat eaters and around this time we found out that at twitchcon Shaq played move or die on stage while Snoop Dogg was watching that was the

thing so that was 2016 for mover die all those updates in one year and then in early 2017 we hit the first year anniversary update so this was we even made some cool cute art with the characters going on an adventure and during this time we had a hundred and five thousand crashes hundred thousand crashes we pushed 106 patches we got around 300 key requests on email and the game was pirated by 44 point seven percent of players which is perfectly fine I made the game so people can play it so I'm perfectly okay with that so that was our one-year anniversary and around this time Justin replied to my email and he basically said okay you can do this you can use Rick and Morty as character and an important thing that I did that I think is very important to get these things was I showed them how Rick would look in the game with that initial email so they can basically trust us with their IP and I also showed him that we handle other IPs like travel life so he said we can use it but only if we

release on the 28th of June they were basically building hype for their season 3 and the problem was that the steam summer sale started on June 22nd so this would mean that the game would go on sale and we wouldn't have any content to show so we said yes we did that we can already the Rick and Morty update was released and it was obviously all about marketing we made a really quick video with a cool splash screen showcasing how the characters would look like and a lot of press picked up on this apparently we were doing the same thing with other games like gang and rocket League and because of that we had the only cool video about this so we kind of ended up being the focus of those press releases and a lot of press websites cover that so just to give you an idea usually when you go on sale during the summer or the winter sale you get one big spike at the beginning and then another spike at the end when people remember that they should buy the

game because it's on a discount this is how that graph looked with the Rick and Morty update the we managed to create an even bigger spike in the middle of the sales who this was super important later that year we released the discord update which we basically partnered with the guys over at discord it was all about marketing we added some cool features where you can invite friends through discord and we also added their characters as playable characters in worte and they're adorable and after that in December of 2017 we released the green and gold update and this was basically the biggest update that we've ever made form over died it was all about online and replay and yet the theme was kind of greed and we made the trailer into a sort of a Christmas Carol thing old man Nick's face did not seem that frightened death sounds pretty good he said with excitement without any doubt or sense of remorse he started to make a new update

of course and yes I am writing code on a piece of paper but yeah we added our own in-game currency and our own in-game store and because we don't have any micro transactions we called it not a store and the currency is called not coins and to make it very clear to the players that we don't take real money the first time you open the store this video plays in the game this means there's no way for you to pay real world money to unlock any kind of content in the game and we intend to keep it that way because just like you we in hate microtransaction and that's why the design of the game hasn't been changed at all by this new addition I don't have the drop rates when you actually level up that's why we like to call this section not a store and the in-game currency not coin so yeah that was the thing and we also allowed mods online to

encourage more content user-generated content and in terms of content we added game modes mutaters characters and that was 2017 less action than 2016 but still we maintained some updates and now 2018 came around and we got our second year anniversary and this time I made a really quick trailer showcasing the entire evolution of move or Die apparently you can do a thing where you can map all the files that you change in real time if you use some sort of source control and I did that and it looks super interesting everything you see there every blue dot is like a file that we're changing and we also added some consumables where players could basically it's kind of the endgame you can get some cool cosmetic stuff on your characters like set them on fire and I recorded the sound effect for that in my basement not a good idea but yeah during our two year journey we managed to get over 500,000 players the game crashed

two hundred and forty one hundred yeah a lot of a lot of times and the piracy rate dropped from forty four percent to thirty seven point three percent I don't know why but it did and this is how the overall sales graph looked from the game hitting early access to the basically today and during this period of two years we released a lot of con la two updates and all of them completely free and some interesting things happened in this period like players play the game in cinemas which is still quite unusual we ended up being featured in the blue air magazine still don't know why and some weird French quiz website stole our character as a loading page that's still a thing so I can finally say that I managed to dress those pillars that bothered me when the game came out and after two years of development I was finally happy with the game and it was in a place

where I could be proud of it and I could show it to people but I'm still not sure why the game was popular and why the game did as well as it did so I asked people I made a youtube video asking people why they bought mover died or why they think that the game was successful and we got a lot of replies some of them said that it's the concept others said that it's because we don't have microtransactions or because we have mods or the art or all these things and some players even made videos answering that question I think the successfulness of mover die came from how you advertised it all of your videos ride they're incredibly hilarious or showed people actually having fun there wasn't any Nintendo cand family fun on the counter and I saw work before and I was like hey that's pretty good and then I I bought the game I like those little details in the game like the characters face is changing depending on their life path little splashes when you die which don't necessarily add something to the gameplay I love to develop was closeness to the community and for the PC it

pretty much became dstean party game so we got all these reasons that are more or less valid but I noticed one specific trend in those comments which was that a lot of players mentioned that it was basically because of us because the developers some said is because the way we treat our players or because how funny we are or the videos we make and yeah it's not one thing I realized that it's not one thing that I can pinpoint it's like the collection of a million tiny things and it's scary because I have to recreate the success of move or die for my next projects and I'm still not a hundred percent sure how to do that especially because there's also some non-trivial amount of luck involved in making a successful game so after all those comments and after this entire journey the conclusion I reached and I guess the takeaway would be that both you and me we should be the developers that we would support as gamers thank you

so even though I had 180 slides I managed to make it on time do we have time for questions yes so if there are any questions now is the time are there any mutators that you had to just throw away that just is interesting enough to talk about I had so because Moe Verdi is kind of a platform where I can just throw ideas because it has this format of random minigames I had a lot of stupid ideas that would only work in specific scenarios for example I really wanted to make a mutator where you would

get swapped what can what the character you're controlling and you would have to steal someone else's controller and figure out if that's your character or not but this was only work in a local game it wouldn't work online so I kind of had to give that up so yes hello hi I'm like I'm wondering if you could tell us about online versus local co-op earned multiple Aaron right that impacted your sales are here so it's tricky because I released move or die with an online multiplayer mode and I don't have a frame of reference of how the game would do without it so I feel like it's very important to have online in your party game because otherwise there are so many local games out there and I think this online aspect brings a very valuable element to your game work not a lot of people have friends to invite over so yeah I think that's very important in our case we made our own engine so adding online was a pain in

the ass but I think it was worth it so I say yes definitely go for online if you can when you talk about getting things like superhot mutator or vvv mutator what is the process that you went through to get those and like how is that different from like Rick and Morty and Ryan it's no different at all I literally send people an email it's people I look up to and I like what they're doing and I want to collaborate in a way or another and I think an important part of getting those collaborations is to show people that they can trust you with their work with their baby basically because that was their game and their ideas so that's why I showed Justin how Rick would look in the game even so I spent the time of developing that character before I send that email so basically they can understand that okay these guys maybe know what they're doing it's not a guaranteed yes but I feel like it skyrockets your chances of of getting

that done so literally an email thank you thank you hi hello so obviously you made a you know a stand about how you're gonna sell your game with all free updates and no paid content except for the initial purchase could you would you be willing to elaborate like how you think that worked out for you financially like Joe's that a good investment for two years or so I would say yes the game surprisingly it's still selling and it's still doing well it's doing almost as well as it did when it came out initially I mean there's no obvious out I don't know it's not getting worse over time or if it is it's not obvious enough and the majority of sales happen during discounts like summer sale winter sale you get huge spikes but I think it helped to keep those updates going because players get that feeling that the game is still being worked on and it's not a dead

thing they just buy and then throw away after a few hours so again I cannot quantify the importance of the update I can only go by gut feel and tell you that I think it's worth it I did it part because I wanted to keep the game updated but also because I wasn't happy with the games I wanted to bring it to a point where I'm happy with it but I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with any future game I'm still not a fan of microtransactions yeah thank you so being independent and mostly by yourself how did you find you kind of kept yourself motivated during the initial development especially doing things like online or things that aren't necessarily as interested in has other parts of it right that was the tricky part because we are a super small team from all over the world and in the beginning it was just me and a friend of mine working on the game so we were a lot of hats and when you're working remotely with people online you start questioning yourself and asking yourself like hey is it worth it what I'm doing

here so a huge source of motivation for me was going to events and showcasing the game and see people play the game and having fun and smiling and that was mind-blowing because that told me that yes I should keep going I should keep developing the game and release it at one point because people enjoy it and it's that question that are you doing it for yourself are you doing it for the players so yeah it was one of the trickiest thing keeping myself motivated and I think it would help a lot working with other people in the same room and be able to bounce ideas off of each other so yeah thank you Hey hello so as a developer how do you decide when your game is ready yeah especially as the developer you will never think that your game is ready you will always know that you have to keep adding things and you basically either have to have a lot of I don't know self

control and understand that you have to release this thing because like it's a financial decision or have someone from the outside come in and look at your game someone who doesn't know all the tiny cracks and problems that only you can see and basically have them tell you that okay this is good enough to get out there in our case we went with early access not because I wanted to but it was a financial decision we needed that extra money to keep developing the game otherwise I wouldn't do that again but yeah from my point of view you can put out a game any time especially with early access now as long as you make it clear that it's unfinished and you're still working on it players understand and people at conventions understood that the game was crashing because we're still working on it so yeah the sooner the better thank you thank you any plans to move to other platforms yes not I don't know if with move or die with move away right now we're porting it on consoles it's kind

of weird that it's a party game on PC and it's doing well it's kind of counterintuitive and we want to bring you to consoles because that's the natural place for a party game I wouldn't see it on mobile because personally I'm not a fan of games that are adapted to another platform that was designed for a different kind of gameplay so I definitely want to explore different platforms but with different projects for example I'm a fan of games where the gameplay happens outside the screen so I would be curious to make a mobile game where the gameplay happens like socially with the people around you so yes absolutely but I'm not a fan of adapting stuff and like forcing them I love the marketing did you do this by yourself or did you have an agency or other people who it was part myself and later in development I teamed up with other people like that guy there Rick he did most of the logos for the updates and I think that's important because I kind of go in like one direction

style-wise so it was helpful to team up with someone else who can handle this thing these other marketing tasks so I can focus on actual development but it was all done by my team service speak I had a publisher that was in charge of putting out press releases but I made all the trailers we did all the stupid ideas like the hotline yeah thank you thank you hello how did you financially stay afloat until the game hit early access noodles I made a lot of flash games as I mentioned and back then there was this weird business model where you would make a weird flash game you would put it on a website and sponsor with sponsors would come in and bid on your game and they would basically would throw a bunch of money at you so you could put their logo at the beginning of the game and that's why most players think that armor games made so many games when realistically

they didn't they just sponsored those games so I got a bunch of flash games made by me sponsored and that brought me some pocket money that I invested in future flash games and kind of snowballed and finally I managed to get enough money that I could invest like in a real dot exe game and that game was move or die so it was a very slow and tedious process that took a lot of time and it wasn't something that happened overnight cool thank you thank you I guess that's it thank you again for coming here if you have any other questions the guy in the weird yellow jacket