Superstar Session:Ten ways that No More Robots Makes its Games Sell (that You're Probably not Doing)

I should say to begin with as Chris sort of alluded to we are no more robots is a PC and console publisher so if anybody is waiting for sort of mobile tips I think a lot of what I'm about to talk about can kind of cross over somewhere well but there'll be certain points as well where you'll kind of think to yourself this is nothing to do with mobile so apologies for that you'll just have to sort of work out which is useful to you so essentially the situation right now is that especially in again in in PC and console games are simply not selling as they were before they it was already

difficult to sell games if we're honest it's always been a tricky business but particularly now it is becoming just near impossible or so it seems there are plenty of people who are still having success don't get me wrong but in general it's is you know the murmurings are that people are finding it's harder and harder actually finally success so essentially what I'm gonna try to do here is no more robots has been doing decently we've been managing to make games sell especially on PC so I kind of been invited along to throw a whole ton of knowledge at you regarding what exactly is that we're doing right so hopefully at least some of this is gonna be useful to you I hope hopefully you gonna be able to cook some of this out

and apply it to what you're doing quickly before I start just so you know who the heck I am my name is Mike rose I run a publishing label no more robots we have published a whole bunch of games over the past three years and done pretty well for ourselves we've done this mountain bike game descenders we've done a alternate reality nineties internet simulator call him pase outlaw we've done a sort of kingdom management sim called yes your grace we've done a papers please inspired bricks simulator called not tonight a big a big sort of reason why I think we've done as well as we have comes down to two main things we use a lot of data and add numbers to make our games sell and I'm gonna kind of go more into that soon but the other thing as well is that we tend not to do what I think a lot of other kind of developers and publishers

do which is follow trends and try to say oh well this Shawn was doing well right now maybe we should make a game in that genre as you just heard all of our games are weird and either don't have a genre or or kind of break from the mold I think that's kind of really important when it's come to why we have done as well as we have because our games are just different again I'm gonna go into this in a second so essentially I have tried to distill down what we do into ten key points now I've got sort of 20 minutes to do this so I'm gonna have to blast through these a lot of the points I'm about to make I have talked about publicly in other places so I'll mention that as well wherever but there's a point that I'm kind of bringing to you there will be other resources that I've done where you can delve deep it into that point all right let's let's do this so the number one

thing that I always scream at people and this works on mobile as well is what is the hook of your game I feel like a lot of people say but a lot of people just kind of don't understand or don't realize how important this is with every single normal robot's game we always have a distinct what is that game about it so as I just described you know if someone says oh I was playing that downhill mountain biking game there's a good chance they're talking about descenders if someone says oh I was playing that anti brexit game there's a good chance we're talking about know about not tonight at each of our games has a very distinct thing about it so that when we describe it publicly its very easy to get across what it is and to distinctly say yes that must be that game from no more robots I think if you are finding that you are talking about your game when you're saying oh it's a twin stick shooter and it's and and and

it's a roguelike as well you've just described a million games if we're honest there's a million games which are exactly that description and that is an issue if you can't distinctly describe what your game is it's an issue for so many reasons how are you going to get that across in marketing so that it's distinctly different from everything else even when you're talking to platform holders how are you going to get Xbox or Playstation excited about your game if they've just seen two other games that are literally your game the elevator pitch for your game bat morning so yeah this is honestly i-i feel like ice cream this the most and that's why I put this is number one this is so important you need to think about this so hard what is the hook is they exciting enough is it distinct enough I honestly cannot stress is enough as simple as it sounds now this is the other this is the the slightly lower down but still as

important thing that ice cream that game developers as well I get pitched games dozens of games every single day at London's my email and I go through and you know I find them once I find interesting and then I go to their I go to their pitch deck and I find that the amount of time that they're planning to spend on the game is is quite frankly ludicrous and I've talked to a lot of developers who who genuinely believe that a game being longer in development means it's going to be a better game I've had I've had arguments with people about this where they've said I'm gonna spend an extra year on my game to polish it and make you better uh and it God it's just not true it's just not true the all I the horror stories I have heard where people spend five years on their game even even for me personally even sort of two to three years in a game if you were planning to spend

that amount of time making a game that's okay that's fair enough if you really really feel like that's what you need to do but at least work out what the logistics of that are if you are going to spend that amount of time how much is it gonna cost you and if your game genuinely going to make that back and that kind of leads into point three about being realistic about how your game is going to do there are so many resources now online showing showing sales especially on Steam but you can also get a lot of data about how games are selling on console as well I imagine it's the same for mobile as well you need to be just crazy realistic with yourself when you and this is this is sort of for this could be applied for when you're starting to make a game even in the middle of development where you're kind of at a crossroads and you're deciding how much more time you need to put into this thing you need to be realistic with yourself if you are spending X amount of time and you are

burning through Y amount of money during that time are you making that money back when the game comes out you know how many copies you can you can pretty much work out roughly the the exact amount of copies that you would need to spend to break-even in a lot of these situations so work like maths I work out are you actually going to break even I see so many developers just going into it blind just saying well we're gonna spend this amount of time we're gonna spend the smart money and then hopefully we'll just make that money back you can work out exactly how much how many copies you need to sell how much money you need to spend for this to be okay and this is what we do constantly every time we sign a game and the developer says I need X amount of funding we then work out with that developer okay if you need this amount of funding it's going to take this amount of time to earn this money back are you going to be okay with that are you going to be okay with if it sells this many copies or it sells this many copies work all of this dates are

out for yourself because it'll honestly it will it will kind of paint you the big picture and make you realize you know maybe how much time and money you should be spending on this thing so now kind of past all of that to get more into thee you've started making the game so you know this is this is more like when no more robots will come along you know this is when we've kind of started to fund the game and we're now starting sorts of developer about getting that thing out there I've see developers announcing that title kind of making it public well too early over and over again and the problem with doing that is that unfortunately there are sort of algorithms and there are think invisible things that are things like I like to call the height factor that you can kind of really come a cropper if you don't think about this kind of stuff think about how many games

you've seen where they've announced and then two years later they're still not out and kind of no one kind of cares anymore you hear brings every now and again but people and by the time they do come out then people like world passing actually come out because because they've just kind of they've lost that height factor entirely people have now moved on to other stuff and have become bored of the thing that you originally talked about two years ago typically we will announce games roughly four to eight months before they come out I found that that is the right amount of time to be able to you know kind of do things like gather your steam wish list talk to console platforms etc but also keep the keep the public kind of hyped about the thing some most of our most popular games you know we we just launched this game yes your grace in March and that's done pretty dang well for us and we announced that we we originally signed it about a year and a

half ago and started funding it then and then we we announced it in October last year so six months before and then the games come out and kind of exploded so you see that you don't need to announce it any earlier than that there's just no reason we held on to it secretly for nearly a year before then did not hinder the game at all it meant that the developers could just focus on the game because again as I say at the bottom there the earlier you announce that the longer you have to be thinking about the marketing and the longer you've kind of got stress of people asking is it oh yeah is it oh yeah so you really don't need you don't don't feel pressured you need to get this thing that you're working on out there when you do do the announcement please understand and this might sound obvious but a lot of people don't don't kind of get this the announcement itself and putting that thing public is so important because this is the moment

when all of those various internet algorithms start to pull data about your thing so as simple as as google spotting it you know that if you can nail that announcement and get loads of buzz around it immediately and shoots the top of Google but automatically means more people are finding your thing similarly on Steam no one knows how the Blessed Holy steam algorithm works exactly but it has been shown time and time again that if you can funnel a ton of people into your steam page at the kind of at the birth of the steam page then it will automatically force more eyeballs into that game it'll show in the discovery queue etc on Steam so we we really we go very hard on the announcements for our games we'll spend weeks putting stuff together you know the trailers for the games will will honestly kind of go through sort of at least a dozen revisions of these of these trailers we we really go hard on announcements and

and of everything this is your this is your kind of jumping-off point everything obviously it kind of goes down from there and then you've hoped boost back up again when the game comes out but this is the point where you want to build a peak of interest all in one go kind of throw it all together at the same time once we do that one of the one of the biggest secret weapons for us is what we call the community beta we essentially do a closed beta where we invite whole bunch of people from the community to to come play the game it it works incredibly for us on especially with a PC game you if you if you kind of do PC games you'll know that everyone kind of screams all the time about collecting steam wish lists getting wish lists out of this has been amazing for us you know you get thousands of people you invite thousands of people to this data they all play it you kind of begged them to please wishlist the game and and

it works here people will do that and you get boosted numbers and again as I've kind of mentioned this wholly steam algorithm it notices that so if you kind of announced your game and a month or two later do this beta it kind of by the time the algorithms started to drop you off again since your announcement it boots you back up again and all the sudden you're getting more organic views from Steam so it really really helps to run the spacer and you know other than on the marketing side of it you get a ton of feedback as well it really hate helps to to shape what's you know kind of the the final game is gonna look like now this is this is what I live by just in my life generally and again I think it's the reason why everything that no robots does is is honestly so cheap and and sometimes when I'm working with helpers I see them saying like oh but if we're not spending loads of money on this thing and that thing yes that's

what everyone else is doing right it must be it must be the way that it's meant to be done and I can honestly tell you it is not at all we spend barely any money on anything we we don't wait I've started doing some paid ads recently but barely any and only on reddit we have never done paid ads before that and we we have been going to shows as well but I decided recently well we can't go to shows right now only because of what's kind of going on in the world but I've kind of decided that I think we're probably not going to do that many extra shows I think a lot of indie developers especially think they need to be going to shows having a booth etc and I I cannot tell you how much money is funneled into doing that you know flying over to flying a team to show buying all the stuff buying the monitors and the laptops etc they're so expensive to go to and do you really see anything from them in the end a lot of the time

the answer is no that's not to say they're not useful for everybody but these kind of questions are the kind of things you should be asking yourself because at the end of the day it's coming out at the end you know at the end when the game comes out everything that you spend needs to then come back out you need to make that back so you really need to be thinking to yourself is is it worth me doing this because a lot of the time the answer is no on its it's what we live by and it's been working for us a lot of what I've been talking about has been trying to kind of build stats you know you we have a lot of different stats that we follow and they can help to determine they can help to show you before your game comes out how it's going to do again wishlist on Steam everyone talks about them they help so much because you have you get an actual idea of you're not just hoping you're not just hoping that it's gonna do okay you kind of get there you gotta get to your launch and you can we can always roughly guess how our games are gonna do because of wishlist on on Twitch

you know we've started to put towels on switch and it's become increasingly obvious to me that's pre-orders before a switch launch are incredibly important because when you launch pre-order pre-orders on switch count towards day one sales which boost you up the charts it's things like this finding out there's so much data online about what are the important numbers and working out what these fats are so you have a goal to work towards can can really sort of inform everything that you do especially kind of marketing and publishing wise now a big thing that I see happening is that once again in launches they're kind of regardless of how it does whether it does well or maybe not so a lot of developers kind of gets the end they kind of do a big a big you know big sigh big breathe out and then they kind of don't do the things

that need to happen after then the right after the launch I would argue is one of the most critical times because that's the time again I know I keep saying it but it's the time when algorithms are caring deciding to care about you or not it's it's when on steam the the kind of the client is trying to decide whether or not people care about your game the more that you push and push and push in the weeks that follow it might not feel like it's doing anything but a lot of the time it is you know sort of asking begging people for user reviews going on the steam forums and trying to answer through as many kind of support questions as possible just sending codes out to youtubers you know even if you send out 200 codes add to youtubers play the game off of that it's a ton of work but it can be useful you know we we see youtuber spikes all the time these days so yeah this is this is a crucial time and it's a time when you really need to

be trying to you take a deep sigh but then also then get back straight on it because it's just so important and and the main thing through all of this and especially after the game is launched is to just try to it the the thing that happens to every single person involved in games not just the developer happens to me as well after we publish a game is that you will feel like crap it happens to everybody i I have honestly not met single developer who straight after they've launched a game regardless of how well it's done is like well that was great I'm so happy that happened I'm really happy now most people feel like death straight afterwards the the thing to remember is that everyone feels like that and to remember that you now have a game out there and that is amazing and there are so many things that you can now do with that once you have your game out there

there's just so many potential things you can do we've had games where you know they're on on PC they've done fine but the developer kind of wished that they'd done better and then months later we've then gone and put console ports out and those console ports do do just as well as the PC version and all of a sudden developers in position where they're like wow this is crept up on me a bit but I'm really happy with how this is Kannan when I kind of look back over it just getting that game out is such an achievement and I feel like we kind of don't talk about it enough it's amazing to do that and there's just once you've done that there's so many ways you can go with it so you need to have have a little cry do you release the game but then kind of remember this it's it's it's it's something that you're gonna be able to kind of push for the for the rest of your life at that point right well I just busted through ten points as quickly as I could

hopefully that was hopefully at least some of that was useful and that's it thanks Chris no completely useless Mike it was really good really good Mike loads of stuff first crammed in there it's my favorite sword presentation so it's great um well try and keep getting a couple of questions we're late but it's not really your fault in many ways it's more my fault did I go over explaining Biggs no you were perfect I by starred you late so a couple questions here so I'm with for a couple questions for the audience and I've got one so um there's a question here I don't know if this is what backends or back-end software do you to collect date so when it comes to data actually with PC games the steam back-end is amazing I don't think enough people talk about it there's there's so much stuff in the steam back-end you can see up to date

kind of just you know people viewing I we do use things like Google Analytics so we've locked all the Google Analytics stuff in and we kind of do to use that but in general a combination of those two for PC really helps on on console that kind of various backends have been getting a lot better as well the the Xbox back-end in particular they've got some greats that's going on next box live right now but yeah we otherwise we don't hook anything else crazy into it it's literally just a case of of kind of Google Analytics and the steam back-end essentially so hello I'm back back again we've been doing this don't worry I've got this okay I just suddenly disappear

everything when I'm fine it's fine it's a live show folks that's good but I think you sound what you got at the end of the answer there so well done yes good question I still get you some more people to ask questions are they should the developers be interacting the audience in order to have a better success rate during launch I think you mentioned you talked about starring to talk about when your games like six or twelve months before yeah that's that's roughly and the thing to kind of go deeper on that is it's a tricky question because it does the unfortunate answer is it does kind of depend on the game there's some games were it felt like like I was kind of saying you you know we we announced four to six months before but then there are all the games where you can afford to launch kind of a year before and sometimes it actually makes sense to do that where it's a game that you know perhaps does need feedback from from the

audience a bit more a kind of a kind of example is what we did with descenders we announced that six to eight months before we launched it but we did launch it into early access a big reason why we did that is because we knew we had this cool downhill mountain biking thing but if we were honest we didn't 100% know what people were gonna do with it yeah so by going and using early access it allowed us to very early on see what people like for example you know predictably people started screaming for multiplayer so we we eventually ended up adding map but yeah early access in particular I think is a is something that can be used incredibly well for that kind of purpose okay I wrote a couple of questions here to a formats one is deuce imitation launched all platforms or staggered Lawrence and the other is do you emotionally focus on steam or of any of the PC platforms that you care yeah

so we 100% stagger the launch the reason we do that is because we will die otherwise trying to launch on multiple platforms at the same time I don't know what it's like on mobile but on PC and console is that is the worst the only time that we would launch on console at the same times PC is if we have some kind of deal with a console platform there and that might well happen very soon but but but without some kind of monetary deal yeah we go PC first to be honest I think it's the best idea or anyway because you put it out on PC you get to see some of the feedback you get to fix some things up you know any any bugs that you can't that a kind of found can be fixed up so that then when you do put it out on console so you know four to six months later it's the kind of perfect version of the game that console players are getting okay I'm final

question for me you took obviously most were doing these days isn't it in the PC space it's quite a lot of money in mobile as well it's quite a big audience you have had some experience in mobile see that's the past and you've you work with a tiny builder we do mobile yes have you ever considered looking back to my bond what you know it's a particularly anything you could bring back from your interesting PC console launch it into into Mobile's yeah it's the tricky one I've been asked this a few times and I've had so many conversations about this a mobile for someone like was is it's tricky said can you Amy Oh have you still got me oh I don't know if Chris has just died I'll keep talking oh can you hear me um is it just Chris let's go can we all hear Mike oh we can hear me okay good maybe we just lost Chris so yeah basically we we have looked into

mobile the problem with mobile for for a publisher like us is that we do paid games you know and and I'm very much aware that that's free-to-play is kind of the King on mobile we we wouldn't really want to do free-to-play partially because our games don't match that and partially because I don't have the expertise in free supply now if we were gonna do paid on mobile there's obviously issues there as well so for example the the lower prices on mobile you know we charge sort of $20 on PC for our games no one's gonna buy our games for $20 on mobile so we have to do sort of you know between five to eight dollars I guess on mobile which is horrible and also be values our titles but also you know it's not a secret as well that paid games don't particularly

do great on on mobile so this is kind of a poor four reasons they are I think the only thing we would do is is Apple arcade and we've talked to Apple a little bit about doing something like that that makes more sense for us we already do sort of space to say that Mike Cadiz don't see well you know we we do an excellent pass and that's gone well for us a big reason why Xbox game past has gone so well is because the the number of players it drives into the game then leaks into the other platforms as well you know people play they M on X books and then they want to pick up the game on PC is well they want it they want to pay for it on PC so so there is the possibility I was doing Apple arcade in the future but in terms of just doing

a straight up you know kind of mobile ports for for five to eight dollars I can't imagine we're gonna be doing that anytime soon to be honest fair enough okay well anyway hopefully there was definitely some general general general information that's useful whatever platform you on thank you so much might do very well in your first patient so and yeah and so easy as you can do your conference which denotes thank you for it so additional round of applause it has be in your head because we don't there's always there's always digital round of applause okay a particularly big crescendo as you leave the stage thank you very much you