One Year of Sokpop Games Subscription on Patreon

I welcome to our talk about our game subscription on patreon we're sock pop collective we're a video game collective slash game def moment we are for game makers based in interested in the Netherlands and pictured from left to right where Ruben was sitting over there Diamond who's standing next to me me who is standing over here and Tom who's sitting over there we we make a lot of small games in fact last year we released 26 games in total we released these as part of our subscription service on patreon what that means is that people can subscribe to get a new game made by us every two weeks we started this patreon to make money with releasing cool small games so that we can become sustainable in the long run in this talk we'll explain how we got started how we managed to release a new

game every two weeks how we combine it with working on other projects and how our patreon grew so quickly give you an idea what the 26 games are like will show them to you quickly in this video [Music]

alright alright background so for the patreon you get one game every two weeks for three dollars a month however the games are also available on our favorite website HD IO for three dollars each as well the patron roughly works similar to a magazine subscription where if you subscribe you only get the new games and the current games so you wouldn't get our entire backlog of 30 games most of the games are designed to be finished within a single playthrough taking roughly about 50 minutes to one hour to complete right now we have about a thousand patrons totaling for almost $4,000 a month however this is not our

only source of income we also do some freelance work and some commissioned work as well as releasing some bigger games that are not released for the picture we spent about half our time on the patreon right so this is a prize this should provide some context around the patreon and now we'll discuss how sir club was formed yeah yeah so we met each other roughly around 2014 as young game timers through mutual friends and Twitter and we often would do game jams at each other's places especially the lunamon or anyone and that's basically how we got to really know each other like the four of us and at the end of 2015 we wanted to take things more seriously and spend more time making games basically GoPro right so there was one big obstacle in the way which was that we saw that was getting recently harder for game makers and

games to stand out from the crowd as a lot of you must be familiar with so we decided to band together under the saw club name as a collective so not like a traditional studio what we would do we would basically function without being two hands involved with each other's game and would use our combined forces to be more visible and yeah like that we basically started making a bunch of small mostly jam games and releasing them under the sock hop name yeah and by making all these small games and posting gifts of it on Twitter we quickly gained the following on their tweets like this one and this one and Twitter became very important for us for a long time it was basically our main way to communicate and be visible to the people that liked their work and over time we actually started influencing each other as well

and developed a similar style I think with lots of procedural animations cute physics and funny interactions so yeah after if they're doing this sock popping quite casually for a couple of years mostly just running a Twitter account and sometimes doing showcases we were getting to a critical point we needed money maybe some of you recognize this problem so in order to cope with this problem we notice we had two things we had a dedicated albeit a small following and we were good at making small games fast but we had no real idea how to turn that into cold hard cash yeah so we try to figure out what maybe could work for

us the first thing we thought about was maybe turning our small projects into game def tutorials because that's something a lot of people asked asked us but yeah we've really quickly found that we don't really want to make tutorials with me games decided not to try this then another idea was to make remix versions of existing games so we would basically make them soccer versions but nobody really wanted to give us their source code so that didn't really work out yeah it's too bad then we decided maybe we can try making an album like a music album but instead of sound and music there is small games instead and we actually tried that we released bamboo EP which is a collection of small bamboo themed games and it really didn't work out too well it didn't really do sell enough to try something like that that was her first time really experimenting with selling a commercial game yeah well and then someone said to us well you're making all these games

why don't you just sell them and well we thought the games were a bit too small and generally they were unfinished as well so even consider selling them I guess we could see how we could just finish up some rough edges and maybe try to release them some way or another and then we found out about patreon so okay so for those of you who don't know what patreon is it's a platform where you can support artists on a monthly basis and when we saw this we realized that we could use this to create a subscription model by simply giving those supporters and games as a monthly thank-you gifts so we decided let's try out this patreon so yeah let's just do it and at this point we thought let's just set up a page really quickly and you know get started but we kind of underestimated all the work that goes into setting it all up in the end it took us about half

a year of part-time work and here's a short list of things that we needed to do we needed to set up an entire subscription page this has nothing in it so that was the that was still pretty easy then we needed to make a nice banner a cool introduction video a cool piece of introduction text goals for us all to achieve together those are in the bottom left and tears so you can get the game for three dollars but for example you can also get ten the pay ten dollars and then you also get the source code so you can really version of our games yeah we add a disc word integration which became an important tool for us to stay in touch with our community and then there was a bunch of different thank-you text epic use help files and finally we build an integration between HD IO and patreon so that all the patrons could actually download the keys they are eligible for yeah so that's a short recap of the

stuff that we needed to do right so another thing we realize this in order to make this work we kind of had to shift our focus from Twitter to patreon yeah and this was a hard decision for us to do because at this point we became somewhat addicted to retweets and getting followers yeah someone mentioned that we were a bit of a gif Factory at this point instead of it in games yeah yeah yeah but in order to do this we kind of had to guide everyone to the patreon is that so we did this by becoming sellouts and putting links in tweets and there's a big bubble on our website and in more tweets so when something really blew up there's our patreon yeah and then the final thing we did like the final final thing was the only thing we were actually good at which was make a bunch of games so we

made eight games as a buffer in case anything we would in case anything would happen where we couldn't make a game for the pitch and we would have these lined up yeah so everything was pretty much lined up and then the plan was that everyone makes one game every two months we work on it for around two weeks so it's like taking a jam game then polishing that up and then we have six weeks left to work on other stuff like bigger projects freelance work etc and it seems like a great plan so we decided let's go good plan so yeah we launched on January 17th with two games bambini which is a game about these and yet a game about trash and the launch was quite important for us because we think it can really set a tone so yeah we decided to give everyone these two games instead of one as a starter bonus and started to look more like a real deal and based on how other

patrons we're doing we expected to reach about $100 by the end of the month which was exceeded - yeah it was 500 dollars which was nice yeah it was really nice really I've decided let's start releasing more games so Timon made dr. uma boom School of Life I made new colony yeah Timon made another game called king of the sand castle where basically for the first time we found out how fun it is to let our patrons fight each other yeah then Tomac muros and Riven made the aptly named Dino games yeah they're dinosaurs yeah alright so then it was already April because time really kind of flies when you release a new game every two weeks and we noticed a couple of things the first thing being that we saw that the growth started to toing we had $500 in the first month than six hundred and fifty then nine hundred and

then a little bit less than nine hundred so the first patron started the patron started leaving and we were a bit worried that maybe the patron became old news and then it also turned out making the games didn't really take two weeks it took more like four weeks it wasn't just polishing up a damn game so things weren't looking too great at this point but we weren't gonna stop yeah speak some more games yeah just make some more games right so Aaron made different and I made hooker poker and then some a Thums cape which is an homage to runescape and then it's May and all of a sudden there is a polygon video made by Brian Gilbert is that person and the video really blew up for us yeah what happens is it basically double our patrons and income as you can see in this guy yeah this is kind of what happened and we thought that growth halted because

our patron became old news nobody talked about it anymore its few months in and but in reality there was still tons of people that haven't even heard about it and just needed a way to find out about us and next to that we think a lot of people were kind of skeptical like can they keep up with this breakneck schedule yeah we're five months in now and we I think we kind of proved that this was working and people started trusting yeah that they would get a new game every two weeks yeah so that was really cool and very motivating so yeah all right so we've been made camera I made huts Diamond meets zoo packs tommy botanique and then human-made spider ponds and then I made a game called llama Villa which the tagline was it's literally the Sims but with llamas yeah yeah yeah you left now but it was kind of annoying

because from this point forward patrons kept asking about everything but with llamas and we said no and then they took the source code and just replace sprites with llamas right so then there was quite an important game for us and it was a game made by time and called similans it's a card based god game where you fulfill mankind's wishes like brushing them with fish or spreading the plague yeah swimming lawns like we said we also sell the game separately on it so it's that IO and Simeon sold quite a lot here's a graph the the red one is a bad patron game and it's still separately on each i/o so it's about $50 then green it's like five is it a thousand that's a good game and then I guess seem long purple which makes it of 10 really good games yeah yeah so we it made about 10 10 K in one month use dollars which is pretty good for a game made in four weeks so we we were really happy so

let's talk a bit about our rules within sock-hop about splitting our income because that came very relevant at this point yeah so for the patreon games what we do if we just let the split the patron and HIO income equally so everybody gets 25% yeah after we spend it on office rents this is not our office by the way ours has more plants and then for non patreon games the rules are different there at least 5 percent goes to cyclops you can choose not to spend more of your own percentage and and we use that to spend on events debits and submission costs for events and nice hats and caps yeah that's our rules regarding splitting income let's make some more games let's do it Tom made hapa and soca loco which is a train simulator and then it's September

and at this point we looked back at some statistics and we found out that less than 50% of the patrons were actually downloading the games which is kind of weird yeah so we were looking up is is happening we found out there two reasons one of them is people were downloading the games in bursts so since the games were so short what a lot of the people were doing is just download a few of them and play all of them in one evening and the other reason is we may be a bit more interesting we found out they love and didn't support us for for the games but also for for us who and who we are and I think with the amazing amount of games that come out nowadays people start realizing that theater games are being being made by humans and not robots and maybe how people will follow their favorite musicians they will also start following their favorite game

designers found out if they have a nice dog or cat so inspired by that we started making videos with us in it so people could get to know us a little bit better and yeah we we talked about why we made the game what was their inspiration yeah cetera oh and another thing that happened is we reached our halfway go which made us very happy as you might be able to see we did a little livestream yeah and then came infamous game number 20 the game we don't talk about yes oh crap it was more like oh crap we have no more games to release so we ran out the buffer we talked about at the start so we had the eight games but because sometimes we restart it or sometimes making the games longer we basically had no games lying around and we had no time to make a new one because we were busy with other projects yes so so this was

the first time where we needed to figure out a solution really and we had this old game laying around called oh crab which we made together in 2017 and we decided well we basically have to release this we have nothing else we thought oh no the patrons are gonna be really mad and it turned out oh it's not too bad they understood that we didn't sleep for 8 months so it was ok it was actually a really interesting moment because yeah you realized yeah the next time this will happen we we were screwed yeah exactly yeah but we were basically forced to finish every game we started now which put a little bit more pressure on us but it's also nice because that would really make sure that we don't spend too much time making these patreon games and we also realized well maybe a bad idea always has something good like if you make a patreon game and about halfway through you're like I'm not sure what to do with this there's always something you can zoom in on that will make it fun yeah and even in the case

that people really didn't like one of the games they would realize what a bit about one dollar 50 for this and yeah I'll get a brand new different thing in two weeks which will probably not be oh crap probably not and they weren't this is made by Allah and then I made dollar Tom made frog struggles rock salt and then Aaron may skip luck which is a game about cycling very fast through City don't get it and then it's already December and the years almost gone by goes really fast and at this point some of the small games started to become big so what we did is a few of the patron games that we hand or the the people who play especially liked we started developing them into bigger versions and basically doing full releases of them and I think this is an interesting workflow since the the patron games are so they are

actually Minimum Viable products or we call them small versions and with this we create some basic income while doing this and we can test the game design of the game but also the commercial viability so for example with simulant eyelid it thought that the game sucked I didn't like it at all but then the people played it loved it and especially you tubers did which generated a lot of visibility for it so I knew that if I would make a bigger version yeah it would definitely do at least something so there wasn't a big leap of faith anymore for me to do this project yeah and while we were working big versions of course we released some more games human made Kraken scourge and then the final game of the year I made it's called clutch ball and yeah that's all before you know it we released 26 games

in one year yeah and I think our biggest accomplishment was not getting burned out we were really scared this would happen as releasing a game every two weeks creates a lot of pressure and but we try to take a rest in the evenings and weekends as much as we could and we helped each other really out by working in the same space and talking about the game games a lot we have a weekly meeting we try to be really professional bout everything but it's 9 out of 10 times it's just us chillin in the Sun and I think that's really nice like we really helped each other a lot that way and then we also tried to stick to our own rules like the first rule we had was like make the game in two weeks it turned out that really didn't work but once we had the four weeks rule yeah we really really get to that and make sure that you're not constantly in this sort of high-pressure mode of working and then you have these four weeks to know you know work a little bit more chill on your big project yeah so that that was

basically that now for some future and some challenges that were still facing with the patreon yeah so this is our graph at the moment so for the last couple of months we have a well quite steady increase of about $200 a month but I'm not sure if you can see this but every time there's this little spike it it starts declining after and right before that happens there's another spike and I try to drew it draw it I don't think you can read it as well but every time it has a big reason why that spike was there and every spike has a totally different event to it so we are not sure if these events will keep popping up or yeah we were basically out of control yeah a lot of these events always seemed like they were out of her control and we they just popped up yeah no we're yeah just random yeah and then

we want to reach the purple line which is $5,000 a month which will really cover almost all expenses that we have now at the moment yeah and then another thing we do is we release some break projects hopefully yeah so separately from the patreon Tom is working on burn bans I'm working on a bigger version of skit locks and a human is working on a bigger version of Sokka Loco and the question is will these games do well especially the patron games because if they do that would really establish this workflow for us where we have this sort of Minimum Viable Product and then work on more and then sell that so I think that would be really cool to see yeah and then yeah I think that's gonna be nice yeah at this point we've already released 32 games this is our latest one called Kart kids yeah we hope we've given you some insights about how we've

run our patreon and maybe even consider doing your own small game subscription I think we'd love to see more people do it yeah if you have any other questions feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or your email or in real life thank you for your attention Thank You Aaron and Timon we actually have time for one or two questions and there's mics over there so if you have any questions for time minute Aaron right now you can go up yeah hi thanks guys great talk do you have any advice for keeping small games like this narrowly scoped and not sort of getting lost even if you have a month I imagine that you could have an opportunity to really dig into mechanics or art or something deeper how do you maintain a consistent level of polish with what or without going overboard so the question was how do we keep our scope small so

that they don't the games don't become too big to make it in four weeks yeah well um in our case since we're this collective say you were having too big of a scope and we do this weekly weekly meeting outside in the Sun the other three of us will get angry at you no don't do that yeah yeah I think that's not to do it kinda how it goes and also we try to start yeah try to start with the base first and then just keep adding stuff that would make sense yeah some people like alright so you have one week left try to wrap it up wrap up the at least like the full game loop and then well you can always polish some things in the end here fine a week yeah hey I'm Tanner I really enjoyed the talk it was cool one thing I wanted to ask is that you guys mentioned not have burnout you also mentioned your four weeks cycles is that based on like a 40-hour workweek or do just kind of work until we get stuff gets done right so

the question was that if we work a 48 hour work 40-hour workweek basically yeah like pretty much I'd say most of us are at the office from then the six but not all the time it's been working so yeah I think that's based on that sometimes more sometimes Thanks hi I'm a Varrick great talk by the way oh sorry yes cool I was just wondering um if you guys set that guideline for once you come up with an idea and you start working on it you have to finish it how do you avoid getting stuck on those games and feeling kind of burnt out over them so how do we avoid getting stuck on the games when you have these guidelines I think actually it happens sometimes where with the game you're like after three weeks of working on it yeah then you're like

kind of done with it but at this point we basically don't have really any other option obviously have to finish it and then I think I think a lot of those cases where it happened then afterwards we were still pretty happy with those games yeah so like maybe like at that point you like for example this game and he says a couple weeks ago I won yeah this one hit so I was like not sure if it's any good but now I'm like that's pretty fun like people liked it well I think what we do is we play Fester's a lot with friends and then you'll notice all right so this thing is what would they like what this thing is fun and then the other thing which I thought was gonna be fun yeah it's stupid so I'll just kick it out yeah right the four of you mentioned that all four of your styles kind of converged into the sock pop style did each one of you brings something different like someone had the animation someone had the physics or was kind of like one present had it hmm so if our style was like that

the question is if this our style was to combine forces cannot watch my wife hurts yeah I don't know I think Tom really has always had super cool colors and it's kind of really inspired me yeah yeah I think we when you really look at it closely we all do have our own strengths but yeah it's there are so many things that we we've learned from each other and I think at some points Ruben and Tom we're talking about how you do needs procedural animation yeah and then legs yeah and I did that at the same point as well we're like yeah yeah thank you all right that's two questions uh yeah I'm curious how much of your guys's time is spent on like the boilerplate of like the game development

and the distribution and stuff in like the four weeks that you spend on a game right so the question is how much time do we spend in that four week cycle on promoting and marketing materials etc right yeah yeah and just sound like some of the like parts of like preparing a game to be launched and stuff rather than developing the game yeah I think the answer that's quite simple it just takes a one full day yeah it's like yeah we make them so the video takes like an afternoon and then making a video doing air see there's actually a long list in in our Trello board that explains everything you have to do yeah so yeah that's like a full name but it's yeah it's not very fun to talk about so I'm making mac and build make sure this is setting one more question hey one of the things I love that your guys games is like yeah that you have this like style that you have as a group and I'm curious how much of like a

reusable like codebase and like tool sentence and assets that you use from game to game like I am assuming because you have this like consistent style now you probably have some stuff that you can start with and not have to like build literally everything from scratch every time so how much of our asses are shared between different projects yeah and just like in general how much you reuse them from project to project I think it's less than you would think it was normally what I do is like I think about which game had a certain thing and then try to like find the script it doesn't really work well I don't know how you do it sometimes I share code with Rubin I think yeah yeah okay like I think it's mostly code because like yeah sometimes human takes ballots from other games right oh no what but no it's it's a lot lesson yeah yeah to some degree yeah obviously and there's a lot of stuff

yeah we do over and over again yeah it's mostly about I think the techniques that we reuse and then the takes techniques itself are not that much code or but the legs we always do the legs from scratch because you get this you get the unique walk side yeah exactly right I think that's it [Applause]