Running a Post-Apocalyptic Indie Studio

[Music] and also I was reminded to remind everybody to please fill out the evaluation forms at the end because that's what makes these talks possible so thank you for that all right so we're gonna get this started thank you for coming here on a 10:00 a.m. on 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday we'll realize that getting people to be getting them develop game developers to do anything at 10:00 a.m. is difficult much less to come to a talk so thank you for being here and we promise to make it worth your while so I'm Rob Zubat this is Matt VI we are the founders of some awesome a indie studio in Chicago and this is our talk about running a post-apocalyptic games in the studio or should I say running a post-apocalyptic indie studio so what this means we're gonna unpack in just a little bit but generally speaking this is going to be a talk about the stuff we learned in the

process of developing our latest game called hilarious it's released in September 2016 so last fall but when we started working on it several years ago the market was very different right so we started with different assumptions and we ended in the market that was quite different and this is going to be talked about what the kind of stuff we've learned in the process of doing this and the process of doing the business side of it and it's going to be a talk about the actually the business and running a studio kind of things and not so much about design or programming although those will show up a little bit later so what do I mean by the situation has changed right so what happened was as we know what you know the the market changing and so on we're going to illustrate with just a few numbers pulled off from the PC market we're going to talk about the PC market because that's traditionally been the most friendly one for Indies such as

ourselves and specifically I'm going to use numbers about from steam and from steam spy because they are publicly available and they are very easy to get but the the lessons are not going to be limited necessarily to steam similar things you can see in other kind of storefronts and so on so without further ado let's talk about how the situation has changed over the last few years before we get to the meat of the talk the first thing I want look at is the number of games being published and we've all seen the articles show up online about how this year we've seen you know the the number of games on released this year on Steam are the 30 percent of the total number of games and so on but let's put in perspective right as a timeline what happened over over the years if we look back 2010 11 and so on very few games released every year maybe a few hunters and then 2013 something happens right there's an inflection point at run that

time steam introduces green light and things change a little bit now we see thousands of games released every year this past year the estimate is about 4,700 which which is not unreasonable if we look at the shape of the curve it increases linearly and I was sort of extending it further trying to estimate where things will be if we keep the same velocity then we're looking at 6000 games a year this year you know before end of this year so that's a lot of games right and when we talk about the changing situation this is our competition right this is these are the kinds of markets situation that we have to look at so wil they will this velocity keep increasing who knows but what we've seen in other media whether it's music or ebooks or whatever is that once we have a electronic distribution system that doesn't have you know limitations on the number of cont the

amount of content increases right amount of music increases amount of ebooks increases there's no reason to think that we're going to see this curve slow down so that's one kind of set of numbers I wanted to look at another set of numbers is what happens with this once we start adding it over time which is the total number of density and the total number of years since we have this nice linear velocity so adding it up we get quadratic kind of a thing so it just keeps going up right and again there's no reason to think this will slow down and the reason to think about the total number of games is because that's a different kind of competition to the on the previous slide we saw the number of games being released concurrently and that's important because we compete with them for attention but the the bad catalog is what we compete against for sales so for example we released project Harrison September of 2016 when we released it that week I think there were 80 other games released just that week

plus DLCs and stuff so when we got onto the new releases list we dropped off immediately right I mean it was we got no traffic from that but the other the second consideration is the back catalog if the player is going to log into steam or GOG or whatever and they're gonna see our game are they gonna buy it or are they gonna look at their wish list and say you know what that game is new and it's out for 20 bucks but there's this game on my wish list that's 70% off that I've been dying to buy it for two years now I'm gonna buy that instead and wait for this one to do right who here hasn't done that right this is a totally normal it's to do and I apologize this my laughs seems to be going a little bit I'm going to move it right here so we're looking at the back catalogue as competition for sales and the one more thing that I want to look at is the demand side because we looked at the

supply side how many games are there out there the supply side what does that look like and I we don't have good numbers from Steam about the total number of accounts but what what they do publish is the number of concurrent players for example every Christmas or every New Year's and the the exact number doesn't matter so much as the shape of the curve right the total number of concurrent players every year grows linearly and if we use that as a standard for the total number of players then we can see that the demand side grows linearly and then the supply side grows like this and this gap right there is the new situation that were in so given these kinds of numbers that we looked at what does that mean for us well there's been a lot of talk about is the end apparel ups happening is that is it a really a thing it's not happening it's it doesn't matter right we're not going to necessarily talk about this kind of thing it doesn't matter the situation has changed numbers speak for

themselves right so in today what we're going to talk about is given that the situation has changed what can we do so if ourselves you guys all of us together to adjust to adapt ourselves to this new situation so just a little bit of background about us before we get too much further into it so we are as I mentioned some awesome we started our studio in 2013 and we are based out of Chicago and first so first of all 2030 knows probably not the right time to start a studio as as you as you might imagine we should have probably done this a few years earlier but hand side this 2020 as they say but nevertheless you know we made our first game it was a small city builder called 18-49 we shipped that in one year in 2014 we were also working on a second

game which we shipped last year called project high-rise we released that and you know knocking on wood this will allow us to make a third game and so on the and the point of this thing is that the numbers are showing that the market is changing it's a tough market it's tough for different reasons than it used to be but we're still working on this we're still trying to make this into a business and an opportunity for us to to make games and make a living off of it and so are you right I mean we are all in this sort of together we're all we all have the same goal of making this viable for us so let's figure out how can we together deal with this situation so the meat of the talk is going to be three sections I'm going start by talking about discoverability how things have changed and how we can adjust ourselves to that then I'm gonna hand this clicker over to Matt who's gonna talk about self-publishing and how

that is changing and then his mere talk about the effects on studio and team organization so without further ado I'm gonna jump right into it so discoverability is a sort of a perennial problem for for all of us and it has for a long time right and when I talk about this cover about discoverability it's the problem getting eyeballs on the game so how do we get players to find out about our game and to know that this is actually something that exists that they they want to play because we all know that we're making games for there are players out there who will want our games right we just need to find them no matter how small a game there are people who will want it but how do they find out about it and that that's been the the standard problem all along and this there are sort of two parts of it one is discovering from the outside you know bringing people into the into your webpage storefront whatever and then discoverability from the inside like once they're in a store again whether it's iTunes or steam or Google Play or

God or whatever how do they find out about this game once they're there and discoverability is always hard for Indies because all media follow a very like power law like distribution where the the big guys get all the attention and they get all the you know they get the players they get the money and so on and the smaller studios or smaller teams end up in the sort of long tail the idea of the long tail as you know is that given a electronic distribution media was cheap to distribute things hopefully the small players will be able to sell a smaller number of games but the people who are interested so for Indies you know we're if we're looking at this long tail we're somewhere somewhere on the floor over there right and the challenge for us is to find those players who will learn about us because we don't have the marketing budgets of the bed guys tradition so what we're gonna talk about pulling people from the outside a little bit now let's first talk about

getting people to discover the game once they're on the store page and traditionally this means getting featured in some way whether it's getting featured through a featuring slot that's hand curated or maybe something like a top-ten list or new releases list and so on and if you go and log into steam or another store you will see this kind of a long list of different things that the store is telling you about and a lot of the thinking is about how do we how do we get ourselves featured on this and what I'm gonna say is maybe that's that's not the the focus anymore because the amount of featuring that's actually likely to happen to us is relatively small if we look at what happens when the player logs into steam opens up their Steam client and they're going to go play a game but before they do that they want to look at their store and see what's there they're gonna see the stuff above

the fold first right and that's the sort of newspaper metaphor right like if you have a newspaper you see it in the store the stuff above the fold is the stuff right below the masthead and then the other stuff you don't see necessarily immediately so above the fold we have some featuring slots which is which is very good in fact right now there are 12 of them and a carousel that flips back and forth and that's the stuff that the player will see first these are the featured and recommended games or maybe manually curated and so on then if the player Scrolls further down and they're gonna see additional featuring slots so they might see a special offers section for example and this next range right some things go up some things go down in a section like this maybe there will be six games maybe there will be 12 games and so on then the question is if the player was to be scrolling further down and so on they would probably see more featuring slots right but what what I would actually say is that they want write those other ones don't really

matter so much because if a player is going to the store page to play a game they're just gonna play it they might see something about default but they're not okay exploring they will go explore it only that there's a sale or something special done' so what we're really talking about is the featuring slots that matter in any store are the top ones and there's a limited number of them very small finite number of them so what this means is that for featuring for bringing players in from inside the store into our page we're running into two sort of competing forces or two forces that are both working against us one the larger the stores grow the more players they get which means that each of those featuring slots becomes more valuable because there are more eyeballs looking at it therefore those featuring slots are gonna go to the best sellers obviously because that's that's how people that's how we make money right and then the second force is that the more games there are on stores the less

likely statistically each game is to get one of those featuring starts so these are two kinds of forces that work against small developers such as ourselves from from getting visibility inside a store so what happens in a situation like this is store fronts develop different strategies and we've seen this with any other store fronts that have a huge inventory of product digital products such as Amazon Netflix and so on they all end up going towards algorithmic recommendations and indeed steam has been doing the same so algorithmic recommendations do the sort of thing of they look at what you've played before and then they give you a recommendation based on that and this is very good as instead of human curation now we have an electronic system that tells you hey if you like this you might like that and here's an example right I was logging it into my steam plant the other day and it tells me right up front

hey there's this new game called stellar monarch you play strategy games and simulation games and Forex games and indie games why don't you try this one so I thought to myself why don't I try this one has a sense sounds good so even without doing any research just based on this I went and purchased it and loved it it was great I mean and I was so happy that the automated system gave recommendation right up top above the fold because otherwise I would never have discovered it and it's an indie game I think it's like a one or two person team and what are the chances that they would give they would have been selected by a human curation process probably fairly low but the automation system recommended that to me and I was very happy with the result and we see steam sort of going further with that right there they're sort of continuing with that and in fact right now look at the featuring slots above

the fold about half of them right now are algorithmically selected so what does this mean this has an effect on us right as we make games we have to think about all right if we're going to be looking for discoverability within a store how do we make life easier for ourselves to be discovered using these well through these algorithms how do we make ourselves algorithm friendly and here's the thing recommendation algorithms whether they're Steam's or Amazons or Netflix or whatever they based on some kind of similar similarity metrics right there's always a tension inside so Amazon might work on purchase history Netflix might work out stars steam might work on tags and purchase history etc in any case there's always this tension between on one hand looking at your history and giving you more of the same more of what you've already played and also on the other hand doing exploration right given

what you've played maybe you want to try something very different that you wouldn't think of trying out yourself and this is a tension that historically tends to swing towards giving you more of the same just because it's easier to know given your history you know given my history of strategy simulation Forex indie that I'm gonna like these kinds of games and sure enough I keep getting them over and over but who knows maybe there's a racing forming in the 2-d game out there that I would really love and chances are I would write because I like my racing games of run and I like my farming games a banana but it's hard for the algorithms to know that this is the combo for me so here's my postulate I think that what we're gonna see what the recommendation systems is that it's gonna be easier for niche games and genre games to get recommended to players it's going to be harder for esoteric games or games that spawn spend multiple genres and multiple

anisha's to get recommended we'll see how this plays out for sure but if this is the case then you know niches are starting to become more powerful in fact we have ourselves define ourselves as a genre studio and not because of this back in 2013 our thinking was you know we like simulation games we like strategy games we're gonna concentrate on those because we like them and we think we're good at them and you know it's even in the name so much same right but it's been an interesting kind of an experience to follow through with this and see how this gross so if you are if this is something that you are considering couple of thing couple words about targeting a niche one anisha's are sort of recapitulating the same difficulties of the larger market where you're still competing against a number of games that are kind of similar to each other and they're you're still competing for eyeballs just on a smaller scale and niches do get very a - they

get based on style right if you're if you're right now releasing a provision game you're great but if you're just starting working on a project problem open-world sandbox or something like that where will the market be when you finish this so this is something that we've sort of thought of through the process of development of our last game and it's something that that stays on our mind you always have to be several years ahead of the market and anisha's specifically like how are the fads going to go so always have to look at the future and also the other thing that was kind of surprising to us but in retrospect shouldn't have been is that niches are communities they have owner they have their own sets of expectations they have their own ideas about anything from UI convent two mechanics two systems and so on so you have to be aware of them because otherwise you're going to get very vocal feedback about that so it helps to be a player inside that nation alright so we

talked about a lot about recommendation systems and how how to look at discoverability inside the store and I'm gonna wrap up quickly looking at discoverability from the outside so the problem of bringing eyeballs from the the sort of outside world looking at your game and that's that's a problem that never went away right it's always been a problem word-of-mouth is obviously the best way to get to their recommendations but the thing that we've seen becoming very very very important has been YouTube and twitch and specifically things like again if we're looking at John Ross and and specific kind of styles of games looking at communities that's that orient around them for example project IRAs again before we release the game we send out keys to YouTube to YouTube versatile players and so on and we were very lucky to be picked up to catch the interest of a few players who specifically play

simulation strategy games and they had audiences who specifically looked for simulation strategy games so there was a sort of a match made in heaven we were lucky enough to attract their attention and from that players who look for these kinds of games learn about that we learned about our game so we got some some number of hundreds of thousands of views on these of these videos that they made and that's a huge number right like one just the number itself is bad and to the audience is looking for these kinds of games this is a different audience than a mass-market audience so this was very very interesting and very valuable so in summary of the section when we look at discoverability and getting our game out you know getting eyeballs on our game and so on I think the traditional ways of things like getting selected by curators is going to be less likely things like new releases lists are going to be much less

valuable just because of the velocity right we've seen the numbers new releases let's get showing up on those is no longer useful but what is going to be increasingly important I think is one becoming algorithm friendly so keeping this in our mind from the very beginning of the design process how do we make our game easier to be discovered for people and to bringing an outside traffic from genre specific audiences such as youtubers less players and so on who specialize in these kinds of games so that's that for my discoverability section and I'm gonna hand this over to Matt who's gonna talk about parts two and three thank you excellent wasn't rob great thanks Rob so Rob started to touch on how do you get traffic from outside of the stores into your site how do you start building up the number of eyeballs that you get

on your game and that's where I'd like to move next in my next section as we go the right way in the slide deck so I wanna talk about publishing about how the numbers that we've seen the 6000 games that are going to come up this year added on to the 12,000 games that are a on Steam how that impacts publishing and getting eyeballs on but before we look at 2017 I want to go back in time to the halcyon days of 2011 when there were a few hundred games that came out every year on Steam and back in those days who needs publishers were Indies we're just gonna put our game out there and we'll put it up on Steam on Indy DB on the syrup then we'll flog it to death on social media we'll get a lot of traffic people will buy our game it'll be awesome we'll make another one it's in deeper and I see a so that's not really a true anymore and I'm also would argue that in 2011 that wasn't really true either platforms like valve like iTunes like Google we're picking games that they liked as

curators they were putting them on permanent featuring slots they were doing a lot of promotion they were driving a lot of traffic there sounds like a publisher to me but that's just me so to come back 2017 we've changed things a lot valve is now acting like an online store there's a loose selection process that's getting looser and looser all the time and it's up to us as the developers as people who make the games to drive traffic to get the eyeballs in the game to do the work that they were sort of doing for us in 2011 and I'd like to take a break for a moment and talk about the future of steam because steam for us at least for us as PC developers is an important platform so let's look at where steam thinks they want to go in the future back in 2013 around the time we saw that inflection point where things began to change Gabe Newell said the following thing and I want to read this one verbatim if we're thinking about this correctly anybody should be able to publish anything through steam where steam is

just a whole bunch of servers and network bandwidth sync in sync in second okay so then the sort of came true last month or I guess it's still this month when steam announced steam direct so they're not getting rid of the green that process that we saw in 2013 or on that inflection point and now we see our goal is to provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with even more great content so basically steams vision of where their platform should be in the future is the exact opposite of where it was in 2011 they don't want to do the curation they don't want to do the selection they want to let the market do that the games that sell well will be the games that get the featuring so it's up to us to start to think about how we're going to get those sales how would they get those eyeballs on to our games and that becomes our job now so can you still do this kind of

self-publishing that was being done in 2011 you can put the game up on stores but you've got to remember there are going to be 6,000 other people who are going to release new games next year and that doesn't include things like DLCs and content packs and stripes pipe packs and everything else that junks up the front page and the release of pirate pig on Steam so there's that can you flog it on social media sure but you've been on social media lately right it's kind of a dumpster fire so good luck with that so what are you talking about what's the solution here we still need to do this real PR this real marketing that has to be done and again since valve is no longer limiting the number of games and they want to broaden them that becomes even more important it requires a great deal of skill it requires connections you need to have that person at valve at Apple at GOG that picks up your email that replies to you in order to help get that featuring going so what I'm saying is this becomes a full-time job this is

something that is really increasingly important but what if you're terrible at it like us it's dangerous out there so you should take some help with you so we think you should hire the right person for the job when we made 18:49 in 2013 our first game we decided we need to do audio let's go ahead and do audio we can do that ourselves I had never done a day before I have no idea how to do it Rob had never done audio before either he had no idea how to do it but we didn't let that stop us and we did it anyway and sure enough from the game went out there we've got a lot of replies in forum posts with things like those cows are terrible make the Cal stop why is there so much mooing why is the mixing like that so when we came time for us to do project high-rise I think the third thing we did was find somebody to do the audio for our game because we were not good at it it's not a skill set that we have native to our team and we think that you should hire the right person for the right job if that's audio if

that's art or if that's marketing and so am i talking about the return of the publisher because you know we're Indies like publishing and hiring a publisher sort of gives us all what creeps a little bit but those numbers that Rob went over those huge influx of games under the market they haven't just changed us as developers they've changed publishers too so publishers have also changed they've evolved back in the battle days of 2006 we had old-school publishers who did things like this and most of those things are fine but I'm an indie dev and I really hate those last two take the majority of the revs and own the IP I made the game I want the revs I made the game and want the IP we've seen a new wave of publishers come on the scene that are willing to do help for marketing that are really need to do help for PR that have twitch and YouTube connections that just took a cut of the revenues and don't only IP which sounds great and we've seen a lot of Indies begin to work with these kind of new-school publishers but how do we evaluate them like I know how to evaluate an artist a 3d artist a 2d

artist I know how to evaluate a sound person how to evaluate somebody to work with us to help code the game how do you evaluate a publishing partner like how do you know if they're right before your game so some things to consider does their target audience match yours did they put out 8/10 strategist emulation games in the past couple of years if so they have eight or ten games worth of players that are right in your niche right in your genre to tell your to market your game to that's one thing do they have good distributor relationships when you go on to Steam and there's like a they do the publishers weekends do you see them show up as one of them do you see the games be featured in those that means that they have an email they have a contact at the publisher that you can work and that is valuable for you do they have a good player reputation like when you go on to discussion boards do you see the publishers interacting in addition to the devs with players do players respond positively to their games when they come out what are the

reviews what are the what's the situation for the other games that they've published do they have a good game reputation within our community as game devs like when you come to a conference like GDC and you say hey we're thinking about working with these guys is the reaction oh yeah they're great people you should definitely work with them or is it ooh you should talk to rob that's not a good reaction that you get so what's the reputation like within the game dev community and do they look sorry do they fund games do you need the funding if so that's not a very important consideration so there are also some parasites out there so be careful and look out for these publishers who will take your game tweet about it eight times on release day send 20 keys to youtubers and say we published our game but I'll be your game but 20% you can do that yourself and keep the 20% so they also have a bad reputation among players players know who their shovelware publishers are so just avoid that the nail on the head so

just to summarize the section a little bit so if publishing is not as easy as it used to be anymore standing out in this crowded market where you have 6,000 games coming out next year is going to be even more difficult than it used to be so if you're not good at it outsource it it's what we would do for any other skill set that we don't possess natively to our team and we need to start thinking about these things like PR like marketing like how we're good at the eyeballs on the game as crucial parts of the game development process not things that we'll do later once we're done okay so that said I would like to talk about how we can work together better as developers how we can change the way that we relate to one another within our teams and how we can use that to help cut through this noise as well and how we can use it to increase the number of eyeballs what we're talking about getting people to pay attention to us to follow our games

people follow other people when I want to find a new piece of music or a new book or something like that I don't follow a publisher or a platform or a studio I follow a musician or an author or a group or a TV star I followed the people who are behind making the product who behind the creative voice so they stand out by emphasizing their own creative voice and we can stand out by emphasizing our creative voice and as indie developers we need to do a better job at this what I'm saying is we need to find our inner kubrick's you can always tell a Kubrick movie everybody knows that's the shining yes hope okay so this is sort of that iconic scene from The Shining where the he's racing down the hallway on the big wheel and the cameras right behind him and it's sharp corners the suspense builds until he runs into the creepy twins and they say come play with us the creepy scene it's a very Kubrick and if I tell you that a movie haven't seen before is a Kubrick movie you already know a lot about Geo Kubrick you already know a lot about that movie before you

even see the movie we recognize Kubrick in the work so how do players recognize you and me in our games so like if when cliff harris puts out a new puzzle tech game it comes out just by knowing that it's a cliff harris puzzle tech game I already know lots about it in fact when you put production line out for the author I bought it right away because I knew I would like it when a new Zack tronics game comes out know a lot about that already just because they've done a good job of establishing that creative voice in that creative style and I'm talking about like you and we as in the whole team of people not just us as the main developers but ourselves the people who did our audio people who did our sound they need credit they need recognition because giving that to them increases everybody's bandwidth increases the volume of our creative voice collectively and I want to take an example from a different area from restaurants we live in Chicago and there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of restaurants in Chicago with new

ones opening every week it's a crowded volatile market that should sound familiar to us and within Mexican restaurants it's an even deeper problem because there are lots and lots and lots of Mexican restaurants in Chicago so it's a crowded niche and that's chef Rick Bayless who you may know from his PBS cooking show and he does a really good job because he's a little Empire of Mexican restaurants in Chicago of cutting through the noise of a restaurants when he opened a new a tortilla restaurant we went there right away not because it was a new torta restaurant because it was Rick Bayless his restaurant and he also does a really good job of working with and encouraging people he works with that's on some moto meters whoo Rick Bayless calls the king of Molay he makes the best Mexican sauces I've ever had in my life so and he talks about it on his cooking shows in the media whenever he's asked questions like who are you following who are you working with he encourages and promotes the people that he works with so when chef Ramirez opened a new restaurant which is conveniently I'm on the corner from my house we couldn't get

in for three months so that kind of amplification of not just his own bandwidth but then helping his co-workers his people who works with is sort of a way of you can like you know the rising tide lifts all boats and that means that we need to think about providing an equal share and rewards as well so that people who contribute to your game to its success and everybody contributes to that voice gets to enjoy the fruits of the labor so if you're working on a contract if you're working for a company you're getting a paycheck but is it what you're passionate about not necessarily how does that increase your creative voice how does that get you going how does they get you talking and for us that means everyone we work with we work with on a rail share basis so that leads to a long tail of revenues that sort of lifts all of the boats and helps everyone become more independent with each game that comes out and that's abstract so here are some specifics this is the sales chart for our first game

1849 and we're gonna ignore that big bump at the beginning and look how we have the months of sales that come after that that's the long tail that helped us as developers but also our artists that worked with make project high-rise which came out and we have again and we're hopefully there's that big bump at the beginning and then we're seeing the beginning of a long tail show up that's going to let us the people we worked with our artists become more independent with each successive game that we release and more independence helps us develop our creative voice it helps us start to break through this noise together as a team so these rev-share teams that we're talking about like let's look into them a little bit more and how we do it all contributors participate in the spoils so we take the big chunk of money that comes in hopefully it's a big chunk of money and it's per title so per game that comes out and then it's done by proportional contribution so my hours worth the same as Rob's hour it's worth the same as our artists hour we total them number of hours that were done and

if I worked thirty five percent of the hours I get thirty five percent of the revenue and that's worked for us for two games so far and it was inspired by Randy Smith from Tiger style and you can go see his talk from 2013 from which I stole most of this slide so some challenges these things aren't really fish nor fowl it's not a traditional contracting relationship it's not a salary but it's somewhere in between so there's some challenges to this model how do you find the right people how do you find the person who's willing to you know work for two years and maybe get paid later it's risky like no one knows if the games gonna succeed like one way you could do that to help mitigate things is to offer some sort of a dance on royalties but then you need the money up front to do that and that's sometimes hard to find and they have to trust you have to trust that they can deliver what they say without the motivation the carrot of a salary to help drive their work and they have to trust that you're going to deliver and

that your game can make enough revenue to make it worth their awhile and that you pay them and stuff so we're really talking about a limited poll ex colleagues friends people you know people who can talk into taking the rupture plunge with you and that's kind of a problem that local pool we only find our collaborators locally when I start working on my next game I'll find my collaborators through people that I've worked with before at different jobs different games or through the network of Indies in Chicago but how can we sort of shift that to be more global in collaboration how can we like find that guy who's waiting to do art for our game that would be perfect for it in Sweden that can do rev-share why do I need to know about that artists they should know about me how do we shift these collaborations these networks to be more global and unfortunately there's not a slide with an answer coming up that's sort of a problem that I want to put out there for us as a community to think about how can we start to shift the way that we work from our local networks to more global

networks so that's something we'll leave you with today and hopefully start a conversation about that going forward so sort of to wrap up this section a little bit our players want our game hopefully not just any game they want the game that we're putting out next that we've been talking about that we've been encouraging our artists our audio people are a whole team to talk about and get passionate about and to really develop our next game and independence is what let us is what lets us to develop that creative voice being in these is our strength it's what's going to help us get through the noise it's not what's going to keep us from getting through it by emphasizing and maintaining our independence that's what's going to help us get to the noise that's what's going to help us cut through this 6000 games that are kind of next year we need to maintain that we need to strengthen it we need to reinforce it and again that distinct voice is what's gonna let us get through the noise so we're gonna wrap up with whatever that is and look at a few

conclusions before we jump to some questions which we hopefully left enough time for I think you can summarize our talk by the theme of the following noise changes everything the number of games that have come out last year and in the past few years and that we were going to see coming we can't stop they're going to add on to the games that already out there the noise level is going to increase dramatically in the coming years how do we deal with that hopefully we come up with some suggestions today that can help us a deal with that we need to develop to develop a unique voice that players will seek out structure your team so that everybody that you work with becomes a more independent structure your team so that we're all becoming more independent as we go forward and all developing that creative voice find partners to amplify your voice if you're bad at PR if you're bad at marketing if you're bad at those things like I am if those skillsets aren't native to your team find people who can help you find people who can do that it's an important core skill set in

this new world and finally we need to plan for how players are going to find our games from the very first commit of code to our game we need to know how they're going to get through the store how a player is going to find them how are we going to do that kind of discoverability not later on but as we're developing the game from those very early concept stages so hopefully we now know how we can survive this book post-apocalyptic world a little bit better and we'd welcome some questions and you should all come see us in Chicago [Applause] so if anyone has any questions please go to the mic in the center aisle hi hey so you mentioned following people as

opposed to following brands then you also mentioned collective voice of a studio as opposed to an individual voice how do you put those two together I mean I think we're looking at sort of whom the indie perspective like you know are this is this is our studio and I think we have to look at it more like a band like we're a band you know like we're people who have come together to make this album and that's our game so I think you know we're not talking about like a big studio like buzz or something like that like you know think of yourself more like a band and you know everybody knows the guitarist the drummer and stuff like that so I think we need to think more like that like there's the drummer there's the guitarist there's a lead singer and we're all sort of coming together as a band to make an album which is our game and actually if I can if I can throw up on that I think it works in both ways and there's a point about like what to focus on for some people it might be a single person who's sort of fronting

everything and they're developing their recognized recognition for teams like for example you know Zack Tronics came up before and that's one person who works with collaborators so that's the sort of it works behind a team name and I think these both work the the major distinction is that they have recognizable voice these are not teams that for example switch from genre to genre they don't sort of try a lot of you know they don't have an unrecognizable style they have a style and the style hides not hide but is represented either by a team name or by a person name and that's that the recognition of a style is the important part thank you all right so you'd so you talked about how new school publishers are not funding games in the same way that old school publishers were and you also talked about the Heather's on Steam at

least a linear increase in consumers versus a quadratic increase in the supply of games this seems to imply that market forces are going to squeeze out a lot of people who have less money and that it could happen in that most of the games that are gonna be able to achieve success or games they're gonna be made by people who are basically richer a lot of people cannot afford to work for two years on the promise of revenue some amount of capital is needed and if publishers are not providing it where can that capital come from in this current world there's been you know a lot of hand-wringing about the viability of crowdfunding and whatnot and in particular how it's not viable it's not something that you guys really touched on at all one of you had any thoughts yeah I mean it's in a certain sense it's a very similar situation to how it's been all along right that for Indies

it's really hard to to find funding and people end up self funding because they have to and sometimes when you have something sometimes you might be able to get something like PR marketing help and so on on a Retina rev-share basis for example you so you don't have to pay up front but the PR person will take a cut of the cost but the problem of getting funding for a game is always a hard one it used to be much easier to if you had a if you made a game to then release it without publishing and recoup the costs in an easier way but but now it's harder right now it's so I guess the answer to that is that like in any other small business right you need to have some kind of seed capital to start with and that's and I mean that ends up being somebody savings right whether it's savings being spent on a contractor or whether it's savings being spent rent while you're working your basement for two years right

I don't think there's a good way to get around that but also I don't think there's ever been a little bit around us unfortunately thank you all right I've got a two-part question for dr. Z so you would suggested that increasingly getting surface for algorithmic recommendation recommendations was an area focus and it's gonna be increasingly important on steam how do you know that you're succeeding on that do you get impression or funnel statistics from recommendation servicing the second part is you'd mentioned that it favors in each games it seems like a lot of a recent innovation has come from like genre mashups how do you succeed in getting a mashup recommended yeah so to answer the first question there are no numbers publicly available right now unfortunately so is we can't do against you yeah we can't really do analytics on that I would love it if there are numbers I mean they'll be so amazing so I think one thing that's gonna be useful

going forward is using a service like steam side for example you can collect for example data on how many games are tagged with different tags and how many what their sales were like and you could potentially do your own manual matchup of like you know hey games that our strategy simulation have been growing and gives that our strategy farming to the racing have been declining but that's not gonna be possible at least for another year because steam has only recently been getting really you know doubling down on the other with my recommendation and I apologize I forgot this other one sorry second question is like you'd mention that recommendations favor niche based games and it seems like that's counter to a lot of a recent innovation that's been really asset based like how do you build a mashup that can also get recommended I guess the question and yeah it's more rhetorical like it's hard yeah that's a

fine answer yeah I think you have to I think you have to start with the straw I start starting a niche that's already strong and then hopefully that it sort of broadens out like I think you start trying to target the needs to begin with and then hopefully that allows you to broaden out and as you know it gets more pickup and more word-of-mouth in other communities but hopefully you can leverage other community I think you'd be strongest by trying to focus on your coordination and then move to the neighboring one and start to it like you know take over then I take over the night the neighbors and thank you [Applause]