Platforms Are People Too: The Importance of Finding Your Champion

[Music] as my dog platforms for people to the importance of finding your champion resumed timer okay thanks to GDC for having me here and thanks to you guys for spending your precious GDC time with me and I'm excited to have an opportunity to speak on this topic and share what I've learned in my time in the industry and I gave an earlier version of this talk at a couple places last year internationally but this is the fancy jazzed-up GDC version which was supposed to do a thing when I said that please hold or not next slide okay work that way all right so that's being recorded all right so I'm Knicks Lesnar I'm a writer designer consultant I'm gonna give you a decent bit of background on myself but

hopefully you'll see why that's important and how that leads into this topic so like a lot of people I started working in games in retail at around 2000 in around 2004 I had a lot of first hand customer experience there championing games and it felt that being in the front lines of the industry and sometimes I feel like I've sort of only gotten further from that in my career which is a weird feeling and I'll just highlight on the corner there that's you know I'm shadowed the Colossus that's the ps4 we make but back with the original release I got the most pre-orders of shet of the Colossus in my district because that was a champion for the game I love telling people about it and there was an interesting experience where people would come in and they'd say what what's cool what should I play especially people that didn't buy a lot of games and I had the opportunity to walk over to the shelf and grab something and see like you should play this thing and they would come back two weeks later and say oh that was awesome what else do you have which is a pretty rare experience and I really enjoyed that and that was maybe my first taste of being able to sort of recommend

things and I got a taste for it I also had a gaming blog at the time with my friend Tom McShea who's studying back there do heads nodding his face he's not in here but and that's what sort of helped get me to my first e3 and I more interested in it and moved out to California here in 2007 and got my first industry job writing for egm magazine which I'd grown up reading and writing for one up comm and this was my first cover story which also ended up being the last issue of egm so I guess I killed the magazine and while I was there though it had went up especially I reviewed a lot of games for those outlets especially some of the early seminal indie games on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network and I got comfortable championing smaller more interesting games and championing them came naturally to me and I'll make a note here of n+ and braid two of my favorite games and I'll bring those up again later if you're dying to read

these you can read them later on well I don't know if there's a lot line actually one up sort of comes and goes so I moved over to PlayStation in 2007 and I worked there for seven years started in product evaluation and work at big publishers like rockstar and Activision but I was always the happiest when I got to work with independent developers and that was vocal about the games I cared about and people got to know me as sort of a Content expert in that space as an N as an advocate for smaller games and I became the lead Account Manager in developer relations on that team I worked with hundreds of developers and help make indie games a part of the PlayStation culture in a bigger way especially leading up to the PlayStation 4 launch I signed a lot of games liaos at PlayStation all these ones and a bunch more and I worked with all of those Deb's to help them release their game and served as an advocate within Sony throughout the process and I spent tens of hours and sometimes hundreds of hours on each of these games of work so there's a lot of my time spent on this stuff and again here I'll call out the

witness and M + + + but sort of the sequels are spiritual sequels to things before that I champion in the press and so I'd sort of gotten to those developers and so those relationships were sort of mutually beneficial and then I moved over to oculus in 2016 I worked there for about 14 months again advocating for smaller more experimental games and found out that a lot of the same challenges exist for developers and the like visibility especially when most press aren't really covering ER in a meaningful way yet I also along the way wrote a couple books on the work of for meto Aveda while I was working those day jobs and if you remember when I was the champion shadowed the Colossus back in my eb games days well it became my favorite game and my book is basically a love letter to it so i used to have the champion games one by one to store and by this point i had a larger platform to speak from to champion something that i loved and now I'm a game developer I've actually been independent myself

for longer than I worked at oculus which is weird because I guess I wasn't there too long but this is a shot from the board game prototype I'm working on but I'm working as a writer in an editor I contributed to Celeste and guacamelee 2 and escaped I've done consulting work for a bunch of developers including several that I work with the PlayStation I'm also an advisor on untitled goose game it's one of the excuse to put a big goose in here and also working on a few of my own game projects and writing some upcoming games and doing busy for a few of them so you know a bit about my background I've been a champion across retail and in the press and a Playstation and at oculus and in print and there's really others like me at every big company there's people who care about interesting artful diverse games across PC and mobile and VR and console and if you only remember one thing from my talk it should probably be

this it's that companies don't care about your games people care about your games and you know you might ask why this distinction is really important and this is sort of the whole point of my talk developers often ask these questions they ask will Microsoft care about my game why is a Nintendo game about my game how can I get Sony to feature my game and I think the user really just fundamentally the wrong questions it really the right question you should be asking yourself is who will help fight for my game because really I believe that any promotion the support or funding of your game happens because somebody cares about it this is true of platforms publishers press people often refer to so like Indy program and there was never a program really nothing formalized we just people who cared about indie games and I should say too by the way this talk isn't about getting your game funded but I think finding your champion is also a critical first step towards funding and this talk also might feel sort of like video games 101 just to

someone who's released a successful game and seeing the results of the sort of thing but for everyone else I think it's important really can't be overstated and also I this was the best image I found when I looked for a video that video games 101 because I like the bold choice of inter capping video games and it's a kids YouTube channel so you probably should like and subscribe and comment on it and also though even I should say for experienced or successful Indies I think you can always use a reminder of this and your game probably sold well because you made a great game but somewhere along the way someone else had to fight for and show fight for it and chose to promote it and also this talk is not just for Indies triple-a needs their champions too they might have an easier sorting point but they still need someone to fight for them internally and I've seen this firsthand um so sustainable game development isn't just about making your game so many developers focus on making a great game and then don't spend time spend the time telling people about it oh by the way I forgot to tell you to silence your

phones and please fill out the evaluation afterwards but you're gonna do that anyways so sometimes developers don't even tell their launch platform about the game really and they just submit it to certification when it's done which seems crazy to me and a lot of developers just don't even upload a video with their game and you have to ask why a storefront would be excited to promote a game when people are gonna have a hard time finding out more about it I tweeted this recently I said if you don't have a trailer already to launch a longside your game on the storefront you're not ready to release your game full stop and I had a couple of people saying that they just didn't have time while they were finishing their game and to me you really shouldn't consider your game finish until you're ready to launch it properly that's all part of the process and you shouldn't really be committing your date to fans or a publisher because I think having all of this ready should dictate your date and not just release the based on when the game is going to be finished and games almost never do well purely organically sometimes people just don't show up to buy them and some developers feel like releasing a game on a console

is enough to have decent sales and I can tell you that that's not right and sometimes games go viral and word-of-mouth is enough but you can never count on that so you should never plan for it the rest of the time you really do need a champion to help connect a great game to its potential fans and once a game has a bad launch it's much harder to get future promotion and it makes sense because why would a storefront want to reap remote something that didn't make them any money the first time around that's really their their primary goal so I'm gonna talk about our platforms work my background is primarily on the platform side so that's going to be my focus and we'll touch a bit on publishers and press later but a lot of this is relevant to working with them as well and this is also relevant for finding champions I think who are streamers or youtubers and non-traditional marketing and PR channels but there'll be a different talk so I'm gonna give you sort of an overview how platforms are set up content teams are typically the game experts oh wait sorry I almost talked about those first yeah so we have prod

the sort of promotional teams and so we have our store teams and a platform marketing teams PR and social teams the events teams and then we have a Content group sort of separately and those people have the game experts basically across consoles PC mobile VR is true everywhere these are basically what you would call third-party or developer relations product evaluation and account management that's usually the same thing and that's where your champion is going to reside and promotion often goes those people go to the content people and they say ok what games are cool what should we be featuring what should we be talking about on the platform and the condom scenes team says well it's probably a pout because that's the amazing game and so that's what we should feature this we can talk about in all of our channels and people running digital storefronts tend to be experts at running storefronts but probably not at games and the people working for storefronts usually you know they're their goals or KPIs or to make the most money every day so they're going to default to promoting the most reliable

things and the biggest games that are already successful and already making money so it's up to the content people to sort of helps tear that and tell them about new stuff that they should consider from molting promoting as an alternate and every time there's an event at a GDC or an e3 or wherever the events team is gonna ask the content team what games they should feature so again that's kind of come back to that same champion helping feature your game at an event and these are also the same groups who are gonna promote your game out into the world and ideally they should be doing most of the work the caveat being that you can't really ever rely on any of these things so you still should plan on doing as much promotion as possible yourself and that platforms don't really tend to create promotions from scratch but they'll very often boost your signal you know Apple has a store editorial team as well you should submit great SS with your game they care a lot about how your games make their platform look I assume Google and stadia are also going to have some sort of storefront and if it does I can pretty much guarantee this is gonna hold true there as well steam

still makes editorial decisions about what to promote even though a lot of it ends up being algorithmic those first few hours of your launch can be you know make a huge difference and be really important and all these organizations are full of people everyone has their own tastes and likes and dislikes and their own priorities you know a caveat being there's different ranges of skills and empowerment and not everyone can help you as much as everyone else and sometimes you have to find the right person and some platforms are more automated than others and still ask you to you know email an alias instead of a person but there's always people at the other end of those aliases and you can still do your best to connect with someone so it briefly does for some context these were my priorities I felt like when I was working at the big platforms my first priority was to the players to share cool games to more people here and then to developers to have them have a good experience with the platform and then to myself really in my own career and what I sort of

wanted to make that into or how this all affected me and then really to my platform like I I didn't fundamentally care about Sony's bottom line why why would i I still I'm a huge you know I grew up with Playstation I'm a huge fan of the platform and I want to make this store for an awesome place but you know these were sort of roughly my priorities I really you know genuinely was more interested in a good experience for players and developers than maybe myself but the platform's being less and this is true everywhere I've gone and honestly I think this is what made me good at my job when I was at these places because I cared more about my work than the job itself and I think my point my point here is that your priorities probably align a lot more with bizdev people than you think they might because they really do genuinely care about your games and success often over their own platform and also I should say you don't really have to be a partner title to benefit from this you don't have to have a formalized agreement with the platform you know even if you come out first on PlayStation and later on Xbox or first on mobile and later on PC you know a champion still champion can still help

you with those things and typically yeah there's less reason to promote a later release on a platform and therefore this can be just as important if not more so you know if I'm more important on an eventual platform that might end up making you more money and I'll say to if a platform ever offers you money of any sort even if it's a small amount you should probably take it because the extra support there is gonna be you know that'll be the real win because that leads to so many more promotions and opportunities you know these platforms tend to have sort of buckets where any game that they're partnered with or funding even a small amount is that sort of the first priority and then everything else so even taking a small amount of money can make you much higher priority in the you know the long-term dividends of that can be much more important than the money that you took this is I didn't know quite how to do this and this is a late slide so I apologize for the awkwardness but a lot of people have asked me how to navigate sort of exclusivity and multi-platform launches and this is probably a good rough guide of a sort to sort of support that you'll get and it's basically the same for each platform but essentially if you self-publish with some

exclusivity on a platform you're likely going to get some degree of the support from the platform but that's your best chance of doing so if you put the game everywhere like you can see on the bottom maybe not as much or actually the fourth line I guess and if you work at the publisher then it really depends on that publishers relationship with the platform but coming out you know second on a platform again doesn't mean that they're not gonna give you any support it just means you need to find your champion there you know as I've said in the past like you only get one launch so you should nail that's [Music] but also that's not true when you get lots of launches across every platform over multiple years and if you do do that then you're going to need the best champion you can find for all of them you know you can have multiple champions and you should have multiple champions platforms largely understand that you need to make the most sustainable decisions for your business and that you should take the best deals offered and there were lots of occasions where I would tell a developer to go take a deal from someone else and if someone was

bitter about that I think you probably shouldn't be working with them anyways so weird that they give us milk to drink over this all right oh yeah that was my drinking milk break so let's go through the steps of this of how to find and maximize your champion you know what does this mean making the right game step one can you make the wrong game and I don't like that idea I don't like how it sounds because I believe that games are art first and products second and I really want you to make the game that you want to make however it's still good to understand what you're making and its implications on your potential champion and you know this could be a whole separate talk but we're just going to cover the basics of it so I think really the easiest types of games to get excited about generally are games that are either doing something fundamentally new so these you know these games are getting older at this point but I'd say all these that argue are doing something fundamentally new in games and not just in their genres or you could do

something that's sort of the best of its genre here's some other examples of things that are maybe not a radically new but did what they did really well and if you're not doing one or the other of these things you're gonna have a much tougher time and it's less Lafley probably that you're gonna make something that's the best of its genre just because that's a lot tougher but you can definitely make something new or you can try to make something new and it also say that one you know the one thing to me that all these games have in common is either great art or at least memorable art so visuals really you know really do matter and this past Saturday I was hanging out with my friends at gage and he said something else that I really liked about what sorts of games might have the best chances of success right now and then last night I was up pretty late and I started googling pictures of Zack to add to this talk and he's just such an impossible dream boat so let's just all enjoy all of these I was gonna hang it all all of these X DS X gage it's like Attorney General but so basically let's just put this really bad chest logo it's less distracting so Zack

was talking about making something you know making a game that people want to play now especially to be able to participate in the conversation around the game and if we go back and we look at those something new games that I pulled out I think there is a certain zeitgeist around them that's that's really true to that idea and they weren't known quantities and that's part of what made them really you know true discussion pieces and that can be a huge factor in success and again it all ties back to finding you know giving your champion reasons to want to fight for you I believe that a screenshot should you know sell your game this is inside of course by play dead beautiful evocative it makes me want to play it but not everyone has six years to polish a game and make you know an incredible lighting this is plug and play by at your studio and sometimes simpler things can be just as intriguing I don't know what it is but I want to play it this is prune by polyculture it's a sort of a Leslie example but this is you know simple beautiful colors intriguing makes me want to know more about it and if your game is hard for you to describe it's gonna be hard for your champion as

well and they probably won't be excited to be your champion not because they're not excited about the game but because it's gonna be too difficult and they're gonna run into too many roadblocks internally when they're trying to talk about your game salt and sanctuary so I don't think that the best game pitches are really it's this thing meets this other thing and I think and that usually means your game is not unique enough to stand out however it's a little better than being able to describe you know to not be describe it or talk about why it's unique insulting sanctuary really has an easy pitch start souls in 2d and I've done things actually over at least said that but that's what was clear from when I play that and it has a great demo and team a lore to work with it really it was a no-brainer for me to sign and work with and as a counterexample there was a lot of discussion about white Tacoma I didn't maybe sell as well as expectations have launched despite great reviews and being from the GaN home team and for me just in my opinion a big reason of that might have been that you to me you could never really tell what the experience of the game was when you were watching a trailer I didn't really know what sort of gameplay what sort of gameplay was gonna

be and I had to play it to appreciate the game and I loved the game but I had to play it to find that out and that actually also argued that where the water tastes like wine had the same issue it was hard to watch the trailer and really understand what the gameplay experience was gonna be so your champion really has to believe you're capable of making the games that you want to make I think you know if you say you're gonna make mixtape X legends then just not gonna go anywhere because you're probably not but if you say you're gonna make the next r2 valley you know with enough time maybe you can who knows it will be successful you can probably accomplish something of that scope and I think having examples is really important even if you haven't made a successful game yet just showing that you're able of making you know anything is much better than nothing and also I should know that your champion really only cares about the concept of your game not really how the game turns out I think that's usually true actually on people are funding things so I don't think you should feel pressure to deliver exactly the thing you're showing them up front and knowing when to show

your game I think is important too especially when you're pitching this is something actually that Tyler segments of Red Hook Studios who did darkest dungeon reminded me you know basically if you're making the Nick snowman sky then you're fine to show your game at an early concept stage but if it needs to be something that needs to be proven out further you should wait until you have a demo to showcase the game well and this is sort of a paradox because you might need publishers support earlier but you might be more likely to get it later if you can wait till when you show the game at the right point in time something else to consider maybe don't post program or placeholder art online before release if it's gonna change significantly it might come back to haunt you if you're gonna use placeholders make them obvious Chris hacker told me that the art director in Spore would put big pink triangles I mean screenshots to be clear that they weren't final and as much as people say they can look at something early and imagine that they're really visual by Nature everyone's visual and if this image to come out pre-release then this game would have been a lot less appealing when people were searching for

it and of course that went on to be braid and David's gorgeous art so thankfully when you look up raid you know online now you don't see those you see those so that was the first making the right game and sometimes your champion will find you entirely by themselves but you can have early count on that so we should talk about making yourself findable first thing go to events this is the great first step submit I talked to events if it will help get you there these are just a few of the ones that came to my mind first that I've gone to but there's tons all over the world all the time Aaron from flip fly who made race the Sun he told me a story about when I stopped by their booth at PAX in 2013 he said we felt that really made the trip worth it and those types of meetings may go in a GDC worthwhile as well we know that dev Relations people typically manage a lot of account a lot of accounts and so we put a lot of value in face time and we've always sort of assumed that by showing up at events like this and making time for meetings we're communicating commitment to the platform as well which I feel is totally the case

so just relax talk to everyone at these events they're not just an opportunity to meet you know fans and potential fans of your game but really with potential business partners too you can sell a few copies you know by like staffing a booth and hanging out with your game meeting the right business person having the right meeting can unlock selling tens of thousands of copies and I think it's important to talk to everyone at a platform or not you know specifically don't talk to people who aren't business people and not just the business people because even events to FPR other people can become your champion as well and if someone from like you know Nintendo PR alums it loves your game then your other Nintendo champion will have a lot less work to do when it comes to the PR stage I would always take it pretty seriously when someone from another department at Playstation would say hey have you checked out this game especially if I didn't know about it already because we can't possibly see everything so I would always put stock in that and other developers can be your champions too this is like not great pictures of the indie mega booth online somehow but you

know the community your community is very my community our community is very supportive and good things can come just from having casual conversations developers match up Restless with each other contacts other helpful connections and maybe you can even find someone else to collaborate with or connections with artists and musicians and also if a highly respected developer recommends another developer to a platform that can go a long way Adelman who used to do visited in Tendo he told me that I have this whole chain of people Kyle Gabler from World of Goo introduced at an epidemic milind made super meatboy to Dan and then Edmond introduced Derek you who made spunky so it's this whole chain where you know if you have a good relationship with a platform they'll take your advice seriously so this networking can have these great knock-on effects this is the JW Marriott hotel lobby during e3 also not great pictures but this is where a lot of the business gets done at e3 and you've I'm sure experienced some of this around GDC hotel lobbies bars coffee shops are all great places to meet people and have sort of more personal conversations and even if you can't

afford a pass to a show a lot of them are slow worth going to just for their networking like GDC obviously this is my old laptop from like a sheet of stickers that I peeled off from when I worked at PlayStation because I actually do believe in like you know if you meet a platform representative give them something small if you have it give them a little sticker a business card that has a code to download your game or your demo nothing big but I still have this and that's I'm as a nostalgic person but it's it's a cool thing and I don't know I'm weird and remember remember people's names it sounds obvious but you won't find a champion by seeming like you don't care and always reintroduce yourself with your game with the name of your game I should say it really helps your champion to associate the two because they're meeting a ton of people all the time and don't be offended if they forget your name because again they're meeting a lot of people and even better than an event is going and visiting in offices of a platform if you have a contact already I'd say offer to go visit them I think it's always worth it tell them you're

coming into town you'd like to come by and present your game I think they're often likely to accept it's it's nice just like say oh sorry I can't do my regular work I'm gonna go like have lunch with the developer this afternoon and it's a much better context to see a game in it'll be a lot more memorable for them as well hopefully you know about press kit something else that really helps with making your game findable press gets by Rami Ismail of slum beer and some other good folks you should really be using it this is going to help you get some basic facts up about your company if you have one in your game make sure you have your contact info listed online which sounds obvious but it you'd be surprised and a personal contact is better than a generic one so I think Nick at company comm is better than info at company comm it might feel more professional that way but you know it feels like screaming into a void otherwise and it really does drive me crazy like let's go drive me crazy how many games don't have websites or a trailer online don't make your game hard to find make sure you're in damn if your game is Google Bowl and if you're lucky someone

might be looking for you and I think being persistent is good in this case and you know as far as reaching out to your platform and sort of trying to stay on their radar dev relations folks gets hundreds of emails every day and so checking in often helps it keeps you near the top of their mind personalize your emails not just put people on a generic mailing list and keep your emails concise include a video or a gif something you know moving for them to see don't send email blasts to everybody that you know at a company this is a way you can maybe get a you know an important problem solve quickly which is important sometimes but it's not going to help you find your champion if you can't go to events or don't have a contact somewhere you can check on Twitter again everyone is just people they're probably gonna respond to you and if they can't help directly they're probably going to send you to whoever can or whomever can so we talked about making the right game making yourself findable and you need then you need to give your champion the best tools to

help you so for your game that's gonna get some more milk so we're gonna talk about arming your champion so a big part of this is sending soft 'full demos when you send a game somewhere I'd say that steam keys are ideal better than a standalone bill probably but not essential if you have a deaf kid already sending a build on their hardware shows that you're sort of serious about the platform and that helps a lot you know if it's the game is planned to have controller support you should have controller support in your demo the only game that I managed to not get funded at Sony that I really wanted to and fought for was because they didn't have controller support yet and their demo and so it was hard to extrapolate at the experience and don't make people have to read separate documents you know it's better to mock-up a simple control instruction screen and put at the front of your demo I'd also say a youtube link is always better than it - video it makes it easier for people to share around internally and if you provide a private youtube link you can track the views you can see if they shared it maybe you can like guilt them into watching it and I would say beware

if you're making like a multiplayer game you know a developer is making a multiplayer game but sometimes try to schedule me times to play their game online with them and it never really went quite well especially when you're trying to fill a room of people and it also means your champion might not be able to show it at events since it's gonna require multiple stations so again make multiplayer games but just be aware of those challenges when you're trying to find people to champion them ya can self come to end and something ii sure i've talked about those already so research their platforms as well be aware of any similarities to other first party games that are coming that they're developing themselves be familiar with their storefront just passingly familiar even you'd be surprised how many people that be in meetings with and would not really know how the PlayStation Store worked because they just hadn't used it and think about their priorities as well does the company have a new peripheral coming out can you support it in a cool way that's sort of the ultimate ammunition for your champion if that's something you can do of course without

shoehorning it into your your game and this is true of publishers as well you should know their lineup you shouldn't know their taste so you're not pitching them something that is just an not a good fit from the start your personal story can be just as important as your game knowing about your situation your team this will help people remember you do you have a unique development story unique background your champions are gonna tell your story for you when they talk about the game the story of actually emerged was a big part of why I was able to sign it the developer Tom Happ had a day job at bigger studio and worked on his his passion project at night one that he had in mind for years and we could have him help help him have a bit more freedom to focus on the game we knew the game was going to turn out great and I'd also say the story of her game don't confuse this point with the sort of the actual literal narrative story of the game the setting of your game is plenty people you know really won't care about the larger story of your game when you're pitching it and I you know I've said to say that as a writer but that's true and think about

really talking about why you're making this game you know openes can only fund so many games and you can only make so many games in your life why did you choose this game why are you the one to make it not your relevant experience but your personal motivation I think that's part of your story and what people will respond to and pay attention to when you talk about it a lot of developers you know have asked me this they say what are you looking for and I think again that's the wrong question if you think about everything we've discussed you know people are just looking for projects that get them excited it's just a personal thing if anything what aren't you looking for is an easier question to answer you know maybe they have a lot of one genre already or know that they have trouble getting certain types of games supported I think you know being specific is actually better than being a flexible when you're pitching I think providing you know you want to provide very specific budget and timeline breakdowns you don't want to give people a menu of options of different sort of compromised versions of the game you could make for this amount of money but I'd rather make this version of the game for this amount of money it might feel in counter intuitive but really I'd say

you should pitch the version of the game that you want to make I think that's the version that's most likely to get signed and funded I was actually just right before this talk I was meeting up with Matt Dixon who's a director of business development at EA and he said this verbatim without me prompting him he basically said yeah you should pitch you know the game you want to make because that's what's gonna get funded knows like oh that's I'm going to talk I'm gonna say your name think about shared goals every platform has their own goals for instance with mobile might you know how nice might your game make their hardware look a Nintendo has a strong heritage of platformers Microsoft of shooting games and racing games and Sony with art games and maybe there's an annual seasonal promotion you can align with maybe they need to launch a new feature you can support I think framing the conversation that way is good how can my game best support you know how can my game release best support PlayStation and for subsequent launch a second third you know distance launches you know adding new game content is helpful maybe there's a new game mode you can add maybe it's just some new

costumes maybe all the DLC is now included in the main game you know give give people a hook make them a new trailer for the new platform cut a new trailer and make new assets for them so I can feel special and unique for their platform consider platform specific features like we talked about if there's a way you can support that got too much work and treat them like your first lunch you don't wanna feel like a second-class citizen on a platform and you shouldn't make them feel that way either and the more serious you take subsequent launches the more seriously those platforms are gonna take you and then that release gap of time will start to metal matter less so we talked about making the right game making yourself findable arming your champion and really you want to keep your champion around for a long time from when you know when you put it on the radar to when it comes out and well beyond that and then on to your next game your champion should always have access to the latest major build of your game you know that has new features in Polish it doesn't need to be small area to builds and if it wasn't a steam update they didn't build that you can

push updates to I just give them a link to a folder where you can keep the latest build the latest assets you know trailers screenshots and all of your content info your beer you know your phone number you never know when someone wants to call you up with an opportunity I'd say trust your champion in my experience if they don't need to ask you permissions for small things more opportunity will you know opportunities will open up flexible and willing and trusted developers really get the most ubiquitous support and if you're sort of difficult to work with they're precious about your game so these opportunities people just skip you over to save time even if it's a great game they're just gonna want to work with the games that are easiest you know your champion might need to go argue with their legal team on a contract and I think that's okay because it's really again I think they're on your side most of the time and similarly don't you know you need to choose your battles so don't push back on things that your champion said it won't happen just accept it and move on to the next thing and think that they might genuinely have your best interest in mind learn the organization's and their tool sets don't just email your champion

about everything if they've introduced you to another department to work with then email that person and see see your champion for example well I've been gone long enough I don't know if it's true now but you know dev net used to be sort of the backend tech support message board stuff that Sony there's a learning curve upfront but that's the place to get your questions answered quickly and then just asking your champion who's gonna end up sending you back there don't announce anything without checking with your champion first you might be cited to share things publicly throughout development but always check in with your champion they might have an opportunity you without always give them the opportunity to debut the news or boost your signal because a lot of times they won't do it if you already have it sort of less exciting in their channels if it's old news and maybe even try talking to platforms before you announce the game it's sort of more fun for them to be able to announce than that unlocks bigger opportunities a lot of the time and that's a defer to your champion on your launch date think about that you know don't choose it release date and then ask them if they can support that date defer to whatever date they say is best because this is gonna make you

eligible for more promotions and support and they can often warn you away from bad dates even if they can't tell you why like hey there's a big game launching you know on that day you should probably push back a few weeks so you know this this one's sort of about saying thank you so consider sending them something nice when they help with big milestones I think it really is worth the cost like tenfold so axiom verge Tom Happ sent me a couple gift baskets when we signed the game and it release the star walls guys send me $100 Starbucks gift card that was really nice of them and I'll always remember those things and it meant a lot to me it doesn't need to be anything decadent and most companies have a gifting policies of what they can accept but even a small thing just I think he really goes a long way with them and helps maintaining that relationship long term a friend texted me this picture when you saw my name my friend Tom again on the back when you saw my name in the credits of guacamelee to give credit when it's appropriate it means a lot to the people who help you and it'll make people want to work with you again it's been really mutually beneficial for me

and having these connections is helping me now and the credits can also actually be a great place to find the names of platform or publisher people you want to work with if you you know and then hunt them down online if you don't have a contact otherwise so let's go on a journey together this is Jenny Jenny is the game Jenny goes to GDC maybe she gets into GDC in some way that she can show her game so then a person from a platform comes by let's check out that game so then Jenny can email them afterwards or maybe not and maybe she didn't show the GDC and maybe Jenny has to go on Twitter and hunt them down you know Jenny's going to send a bill to the game then maybe the platform person is gonna be able to send them a dev kit back and then Jenny's gonna keep them up to date with you know videos and screenshots and all the right ammunition we talked about and then the platform person is gonna help it you know release it into the world and this workflow is just how it works most of the time and I think it's important to recognize all these steps and have that you know have that

dialogue so oh yeah and then you should say thank you that's well that's important we're gonna do a little case study with my friend mr. Phil Tippett husky right here from young horses so yeah that's Phil and I love by the way how I like the red on your jacket lines up with the tie that's perfect you have too many arms though so thanks to him for helping me with this with the session I didn't know he was kind of come to this talk so I'm glad I got to see this in person um so back at GDC 2011 which is a long time ago the original aku dad was an IG F nominee in the student showcase some SS that Phil County some and didn't look quite as nice but it was still goofy and fun and I saw the team was from DePaul University in Chicago which is where I grew up and I approached the team about it there but I was sort of too early for them to consider doing something commercial with it so we decided we just keep in touch and then they showed the game later a couple years later at PAX

East and the indie Beca booth and you know everything looked a whole lot better as well and I started pursuing it as a commercial product and as young horses as a new team and the timing then meant that we could have early conversations with them about PlayStation 4 this is a nice quote that I can't see on either of these screens to read myself that was from a polygon article where Phil says some kind of thing is about just having this relationship where we could talk and I could help push for the game internally but you can probably read that so we sent them a ps4 development kit which no one was supposed to post pictures up online but somebody did and they got the builds running great you know in in four weeks which meant that we were able to showcase the game at you know in our e3 booth which which was huge and it was even on stage as part of this indie of eight in the eighth event that we announced which is a huge moment for Playstation and for the team and I think none of the big platforms really done anything like this before and there's actually not great screenshots of that somehow online out there and yeah there's acted right there

so you know we ended up bringing them to over 26 different events there's me and Phil and a ton boys the old BP from PlayStation and this costume that PlayStation made for them which ended up being sort of one of the earlier like ps4 mascots almost we had a private room for Octodad at the PlayStation for a launch event where press got to play the final PlayStation 4 hardware for the first time and Sony Japan you know they were champions as well they even helped localize the game and made a special logo for its and so these guys have sold I mean this is even how to date now but if you're five years old over two million units amazing let's give Phil a round of applause for that annual is to you know only 17% of those sales are on PlayStation and 28% of the revenue but I think that you know together we helped boost the profile of the game massively which helped it go on and have this great tale across multiple platforms so a lot of that was really important and I'll say sorry Phil I don't know if octo Dead is a great game maybe you don't know either and the team has had some fun with that themselves despite the

great sales but I thought it was a great game and it felt new to me and had a lot of charm and it made me want to fight for it and I think that had a big impact on the game and the team was always really easy to work with they were really responsive partner and that made me want to work with them and that you know the timing worked out in their favor and they didn't know that it would when they started talking to us but we just kept in touch and then an opportunity like this presented itself okay more milk so a quick note on publishers and we'll have some time for Q&A as well so there's a lot of different indie publishers this is an incomplete list all of them have different priorities different deal terms different expertise --is they also have different relationships with each of the big platforms so I'd say make that part of your research as the publisher you want to work with released multiple games on a platform you want to be on and they all have something in common is again they're comprised of a bunch of different people with different tastes and you should think about them the same way you do your platform champion because they're gonna have to fight for you as well and almost no one you talk to initially is going to be the

final decision-maker so there's always going to be the step of them fighting for your game internally so I'd say also identify our needs from them you know is it localization is it QA is that getting you know help getting Hardware is it just you know submitting the game and pressing the big red button is it marketing and PR or is it just money that you need it's just funding publishers tend to be very different from each other more so than platforms helping deciding so helping to decide exactly what you want beforehand is really helpful and with regards to funding you know is the money recoupable is it not did they recruit with different rates some recoup the marketing and events spend that they put towards it or want to write a first refusal or an IP and these are all different negotiating knobs tutor and usually when you have to turn one up you'll turn another one down and no one's gonna give you exactly what you want I'd say also in my experience you can usually tell from someone's response time how they're gonna be to work with they just cuz they're slow doesn't mean it's bad but it's a consideration of working with them and the same key elements are the same when you're

talking to potential publishers so the things we talked about making the right game making it find a bowl arming a champion and keeping your champion I reached out to my friend Brendan Sinclair from games industry tapas for some press tips he's been a journalist for over 15 years and he reminded me that press like to lurk and that you know if you post things with the game dev hashtag in other developer communities press are often watching and if a journalist has awareness of a game already it's gonna be a lot easier pitching them to cover it and think about what's interesting about your game is it you know in your pitch excuse me these are the game mechanics is that the topic or the theme is that your personal story is that the development method something non-traditional and targeted outreach is important to I think reaching out just totally broadly to press will get you the best results consider the audience for your game in which press outlets you know target that audience you know so Double Fine I've talked to them about how they targeted yeah influencers and streamers for gang biasts but you know for everything more

of an art Kay and they targeted polygon and Lienhard into both of those things and you can think about targeting press who've covered similar games so you know if you're making a game for like niche hobbyists maybe you don't want to target games press maybe you should find where your audience is you know maybe your game about quilting would be better targeted at a quilting magazine than GameInformer and you know do your research don't reach out to an outlet asking them to review your game if they don't do reviews just make their job easy you know don't just say here's my game want to interview me about it give them the news look so I'm this is the first quilting game developed in Australia that's really um and as a reminder you should use press kit at the bare minimum you can add a statement giving people permission to stream the game help them to share it and really every time someone needs to email you asking for something is a chance that they won't that press won't bother covering your game because they're busy people so give them all the assets they need up front so let's talk about the the wrong way to do it a little bit with press sending out big mass mailings you

know you should reach out to writers individually they're much less likely to cover your game from a mass mailing you know not being transparent it's not great if you've pitched to writers from the same site on a story you let someone know if the other person picks it up being negative Sox don't pitch your game as a solution to a problem that other games have find a more positive angle and don't be a jerk you know being willing to express a strong opinion on an industry issue can be refreshing because triple-a often can't do that but bad-mouthing other games is just not not a good luck so I'm gonna help you cheat a bit these are a couple of good starting points for these things one of them is a list of a thousand press people maintained by a employee from an EA employee from theis and another one is a list of people and outlets and influencers who have covered indie games before let's leave that up for a second I mean you can always tweet at me later if you want want those too so you know in closing I'd say make the game that

you want to make find someone to fight for it I'm Nick sutnar I'll be here throughout the rest of GDC so come talk to me and thank you guys for your time and don't forget to fill out the evaluations later online please and if anyone wants to ask some questions please come up to the mic or yell it out and then I'll repeat you I have a quick question cuz the mic on yeah how do you feel about I guess console or platform exclusives going forward do you think that play your community will be less annoyed oh sorry I missed the second half about well there's nobody less annoyed about people

going exclusive word will be happening more often sorry a little echo we will be a less annoyed sorry console and platform exclusives yeah oh the player less annoyed over time right how many more no I mean the players are always gonna be annoyed and this is just how the industry works people need to you know need to find sustainability for the studio and find funding and exclusivity is a part of that it's hard to say whether the sort of like you know I don't know entitled parts of game culture and people who you know are just the vocal minority fans yelling about stuff if that will change I would guess not anytime soon so people are gonna be angry about those decisions but you know I think there's there's some you should have some consideration about that but I think a lot of that for better or worse tends to be directed more at the platform I guess but I think you should do what's best for making your Studios sustainable your game sustainable that's a knock-on effect that hopefully will improve over time

but it's it's hard to say yeah alright I don't know if it was yesterday or earlier today outer worlds was announced to be on Epic instead of steam mm-hmm and based on his question about people being upset about exclusives on certain platforms I was wondering if it's on us to champion our champion say hey epic is helping us out a lot here we are working with them because they have helped us you know obviously I'm not part of sure yeah yeah I mean I think that particular issue with epics or stuff right now is probably pretty touchy so you have to be careful about getting yourself involved in and you know embroiled in that but but definitely generally I mean again Phil set some really nice stuff about working with Playstation and me personally over over the years and that made a difference to the platform and yes oh I think I think when when it makes sense to speak up for your champion and and defend them in some

cases or how it is to work with them like I think that just helps strengthen that relationship and makes them want to go to bat for you as well because you've gone to bat for them and then they know there's some you know some loyalty in terms of the relationship and yeah that seems positive to me so there's a lot of really good advice on how to find who you want your champion to be and what to do once you've recognized that they are now your champion but how do you know that they've become your champion that's a great question where's that moment where you can start emailing them regularly yes and you know you're not bothering them at that point yeah and you'd like the step five I think you know I think you can tell in talking to someone whether they are genuinely excited about your game and I think if they're excited about your game and you start to feel that through the process and things getting done and you know positive momentum towards release or promotions or whatever I think I think that's you know one of those things you'll you'll feel when you see it I think there's not ever really gonna be a moment when it's like oh you're my champion and in fact a lot of the times

I'd say a lot of dev successfully believes games and working with me a lot I never thought about this piece of the puzzle I never thought that oh actually again some cases I spent like hundreds of hours just working on your game but it's you know understandably from the outside it can be the black box of just things that happen for your game but it is always people fighting it for it so it's a good question I'll think about it more but I think yeah they'll you know if someone genuinely isn't excited about your game there that's not your champion like you need to find that person and if no one if you can't find anyone who's excited that's maybe a self-reflective moment if it's like okay maybe I'm maybe I'm not talking about my game the right way so yeah think about that and once you do find that person who's doing champion things for you and you've got a hunch that there it is it would they like to hear like hey you're my champion thank you or is it awkward to be given that label yes like that's a good question because I actually would I think that might be kind of charming to be told that by someone if I'm trying to help them but also might be a little bit awkward I mean thank yous are always

hugely appreciated I think you know if you can do it in a way without putting pressure because you don't want them to think oh now you think they're gonna go and do everything for you where maybe maybe it was a one-off thing or a smaller things so you know I think just I appreciate you being you know you going to bat for us I appreciate this opportunity I appreciate the things you've been helping me with like I think you can sort of say it without saying it and implied that you know you know that they're going to bat for you but maybe I think labeling it overly early on that relationship especially there might be like a weird pressure there and setting yourself up for some disappointment potentially so that's I don't know yeah sure oh my god yeah eight and a half minutes you guys can go enjoy GDC or come onto the stage and talk after or Phil do I think these relationships will change all with streaming services becoming more prevalent yeah that's the big part

of my talk I think I am missing because that you know the future is coming soon and I think it depends what the execution looks like on how on what the delivery method of games is there and the store fronts for subscriptions or whatever it is I think people are always gonna have to fight for your games in like I think that's just always gonna be true and what that means and how it looks on the consumer and will change but I think it's always going to be someone at a company caring about a game I mean if it goes fully you know fully other algorithm that can you submit your game and it gets sorted based on drama or genre or whatever it's like yes there's a scenario where it is taken out of the hands of people but I think even streaming services or or you know subscriptions or whatever it's like what games you see when you look at a platform like someone's got to choose what games to show there so I think that's always gonna stay true or not always never sit always cool well thank you guys for coming [Applause]