Surviving the Jump from AAA to Indie

[Music] all right that's close enough - one more minute so welcome to the session called surviving the jump from triple-a to Indy thank you for being here out of curiosity how many of you have heard of this session during the flash-forward this morning cool all right it worked right so welcome thank you for coming so the as I mentioned during flash-forward the idea is basically if you're either triple-a developer who's thinking of doing the leap into indie development or maybe you have already jumped into indie development you're sort of trying to figure out your next steps this session is for you we're going to share information sort of our learnings about our own adventures and switching to indie because you know it's it's it's hard it's hard to start out I can speak for the other speakers but myself when I

was starting an indie studio so I had no idea how much it didn't know and thankfully I had good advice from former co-workers and so on who were able to sort of tell me you don't do this do that and so on so that's what we're hoping to sort of do in this session because there is a lot of different things that work in a large studio maybe we don't necessarily learn things about business things about marketing that are very new and they have to be learned quickly so that's what we're going to do this session we're going to start with Sean Alexander Allen talking about the transition into being independent then Mike Bethel on community cliff Harrison business board Pfeiffer own publishers and me on multi-platform and we're gonna have a lot of material so we're gonna go fast and let's hold Q&A until the very end of the session so without much without further ado [Applause]

hi um so my name is Sean my name is Sean Alexander Ellen I go by that full name because if you google Sean Ellen you get a country music star but if you google Sean Alexander Ellen you pretty much only get me and a guy who's been arrested twice so I worked at Rockstar Games in New York City for about four and a half years before going independent in mid-2004 twelve so actually this is kind of interesting before I go on I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this it's kind of going on right now I was actually supposed to be demoing my game in and around GC and pax this week but so this game was my game treachery beatdown city was funded on Kickstarter last year I was unable to demo it this week because my programmer that I work with the one other person that I work with pretty much to build the game from the ground up had two near-death experiences one was dental

infection and the other one was he was nearly paralyzed by an anesthesia reaction so kind of just shows that when you work with one other person it's like working it's like building a wall made out of two bricks instead of hundreds you remove one in the whole wall fall so yeah last year I had this game funded it actually failed right before GDC last year and I hit the ground running I'd spent two weeks and talking about it which I really didn't do beforehand and then a month later so about two and a half months straight of running a Kickstarter and it was successful and I want to thank everyone who helped make that happen I wouldn't be here today without that and you know as the head of a tiny team like I do most of the work that isn't programming music and some of the production key art like I work with inverse faizon music man well marcano on he's a programmer and the game when it exists without him and Diana Santiago she does a some of the key are in

production art and some of the character design but I have a lot of things to look at create look listen to I have to pretty much sign off on everything but running a Kickstarter I couldn't actually do any of that so that pretty much held up the entire production on that site I had to look at builds but also have to figure out how to get people interested in the Kickstarter I had to like keep trying to contact press and do all these different things and it's interesting because you know I'm kind of we like the toll of this kick this toll of this on my life was super immense and it kind of made me think like do I actually want to do this like in such a small team anymore what I'm still doing it because I love working on my own projects for myself and you know much like in Birdman the idea of triple going back to triple-a goes run through my mind but at this point I don't think I could do it not on not on triple A's terms and my Kickstarter was necessary because I don't have that much family or friends that have any money or could help us bootstrap like other people and

we needed to cast a much wider net hence crowdfunding and you know Gainey fans going to events meeting people who believe in what you're doing is imperative so this slide is dedicated to another former Rockstar Games employee Kara Ellison who is gonna be on the GC micro talks roundtable tomorrow that you should be at full of amazing people it's at 11:30 so I worked on a lot of these games when I work to Rockstar and in terms of the career that I started kind of like drake like not actually from the bottom but from the middle i started at the bottom of the top you know rockstar has immense respect like you say you say hey I work at random dev animating like stuff for this game and people like whatever you say hey I worked on trailers at Rockstar they're like oh I love those trails that you meet immediately get this and it kind of makes people already interested in what you're doing but the problem is

like I didn't actually work on any of those games like I wasn't a game developer I made the trailers for them and it was very creative and was a lot of hard work and it was really great and I learned a lot at the company but I didn't make any games I learned editing I learned working with some of the best editors in the industry I got to write and dialogue and perform dialogue and most importantly I developed team leadership skills working with people of various different skill levels kind of around the game development scene and you know I learned what I learned because I was in an environment that could you know you could take some initiative and that's kind of a hidden prerequisite that if you're going to go on your own you actually have to take your own initiative to make your own like I had to become a leader among my small group of people in order to help them all out it helped me in the company but it also helped me when I got out of there to be able to work with a group of people who

all have different talents and you know at the same time much of my time in the games industry was very shielded from game development like I don't I didn't know what TC ours were I had to ask my job didn't hold up the game at all and in fact they often would they would optimize the game for our needs like if we were needing a gun or some part animation to look good they would fix that right then so I was actually pushing the game forward and if anything and our trailers actually made some of the devs really excited about the game we would get emails about it it was pretty cool so the in debug kind of bit me really hard you know seeing a lot of great games but has an artist and a writer and not a program or anything I began to think huge and started to work on creating a world and characters for a brawler and you know one day I had the realization that even this was still too big and I'm still at still intraplate and I finally like made some like pixel art and got it up and running a game

maker and I was starting to talk to Manny about working on this game and he was kind of going through a hard time in his life and when I finally got it up in game maker he was like oh I need to start helping out on this or else he's gonna strongly leave me behind so in order to get my first other team member on I had to show him that I was actually willing to make the game by myself so that's actually really good like having something tangible will get people to help you um it was still too big of a project though to be my first game because I I had no confidence as a designer because I was not a designer I was designing something hoping gonna be good so I turned to game jams the first one I attended was the global Game Jam 2012 at NYU Game Center and it went almost went too well I had a diverse team of five talented people we have three programmers two people do heart and two to our court sound you know we had a lot of overlap as you usually do and I was able to flex my you know art rapid concept in game design and team management muscles in the project in a very natural way and I also

got to see the cycle of where you think your game is terrible for 99% of the development time until your first play test that we after we had to finish and people actually liked it and then I was like I actually told people not to come to the play test session because we all we had was garbage and people actually liked it we won best overall at the at the game jam site the same one that a most mushroom 11 came out of that also won an award and the next day I went into work still working in triple-a and Evan Narcis had written about it on Kotaku and and then I ran and I actually went to my first GDC that year and I ran up to him and I thanked him for writing the article and that's another good lesson like make free stuff while you're in triple-a if someone writes about it keep in contact with them because they will be interested in your future career I mean I just just wrote we did a article called video games blackness problem that I was a part of and because I've known him for years we've been able to introduce other people to him to my

second game jam and subsequent prototyping projects were a lot less successful but that was kind of par for the course and it was actually good to just start off and keep working on things and finishing things and also your first games don't actually have to really really bet so I mean you know just try to do something so this is actually interesting so leaving a mediocre paying job with little savings and shifting the money and responsibilities balance in your family and living situation could be very tough I mean we talked about you know a lot of people have funding or whatever but like I worked check to check and but I was like not interested in doing this stuff anymore seeing all this creative work I was just like I can't stand this and you know but as the shadowy cabal nature of triple-a is I can't really talk about how I left but I left with minimal severance and some unemployment on New York State actually offered like a self-employment program that allowed me to use unemployment to fund self-employment and with this stuff

being set up it was interesting because I still had way less money than I had when I was in my job and even after you're having a conversation with her partner things can get difficult and gamedev takes a long time and unexpected delays and the like can happen and you have to stretch more you stretch what little you have more and you know this affected my everyday life and because of a personal nature I won't get too deep into this but you know the highs and lows of 2014 actually kind of ended in the dissolution of my marriage so in a way you could say he's part of me to not survive the jump from triple-a dandy we have only like one minute left so so I'm just going to jump to the end so in the end as in Indy you know it was like bittersweet happiness like well in triple-a I looked at India and it was like oh you're gonna be super happy and you want to make your own passion project but as an indie it's a bittersweet happiness you know my destiny is mine but my failures are mine as well I can't be too ambivalent about

all the criticism you receive but you also can't beat yourself up over making mistakes if you have a passion and you can get people to really if you have a passion you can get people to really care about what you're doing but it will take you throwing your own skin of the game success can feel like it's always over the next hill and after tumbling over much multiple Hills it can be exhausting but you have to keep pushing forward stay positive but also practical and also if you have zeal like even if you've never made games before that's something that you can do thank you [Applause] hey that's weird I'm Thomas was alone became famous because it was a free game which ever nasty throw about slits so meet him that's a tip I think on next I hope I'm next yes I am whew okay so I'm going to talk

a little bit about community I guess it's the thing that if I'm honest with myself I'm sort of best out I make good games like I'm not ashamed of my games but I think one thing that I've done quite well is is talking to a community about my games and interacting with them I'm illustrating some of these slides with fan art which is lovely and a little bit egotistical but it's pretty so that's fine so the first point is this is the first quote is this is how I I know I looked at it and a lot of people do if I make a good game I'll get a community that's like 10% true we'll come back to that point throughout but it's not that easy I wish it was basically the short version is there are about 10 indie devs in the world they're that good I'm not gonna embarrass myself by naming them because I'll miss someone out I'm not that good statistically it's unlikely any of you are um it was possible so we have to do the other

things which is what I'm gonna talk about the skills that made me a good lead designer in the traditional games industry and not the same skills I use now there's an overlap obviously though game bit um but there's a lot of stuff that I didn't know I was I was a cog I didn't really think about this stuff so I spent too long being afraid to assume I had fans now I don't know if this is a particularly British issue I I know we're kind of where I met my American friends have less trouble with this I find it really uncomfortable to say the word found and to use that word to describe the hundreds of thousands of people who've played my game um but I just boasted about my numbers so obviously I'm not the most person in the world it feels awkward but the problem with that is while that makes you a nice human being in conversations and makes people want to like invite you out for drinks a bit more often that humility actually can

stand in the way of a lot of stuff we're talking about I know my natural inclination is to assume the worst to assume no one's going to buy volume is genuinely something I still find myself saying when I'm talking to colleagues business partners potential partners in the platforms and platform world I say well of course you know if volumes are flop um and and that's fine and I think that actually helps us but at the same time it limits my thinking if I'm not if I'm prepared for being absolutely small and insignificant and it's dishonest because I know that I have an audience I know there are people have played my games I know that the chances are a lot of those wore and played my future games I know that you know X number Twitter followers this kind of thing but we have to fight that urge to downplay about conservative estimates basically get in the way we should consider them we should consider the number of people who are playing our stuff we should consider that they actually exist the chances are you make any game you're gonna have a few founds at the very least and that

number will only increase we just need to be realistic basically but not take them for granted which is where we go next it's a fun journey through these slides so the first thing I learned very quickly was to give something away it's it depends how you think about it I think again we're very we're very conservative and very limited in our thinking often that we go well I need the money now I was in a very fortunate position I had a day job which covered my rent and bills that's a massive privilege and one that a lot of deaths don't have but I'm assuming given the subject of this talk a lot of you're in that boat that you're kind of getting by the mortgage is getting paid this is something you're maybe thinking of doing in your spare time or at least kind of starting your spare time then and then moving over I know that some everyone who so one thing I did very early was everyone who bought the game before Steam so you knew thousand people so this was people who Boyd direct and on his zero I gave him a free key that's the email that I sent out to people kind of

thanking them for buying the game encouraging them to spend the money they would have spent buying on steam to go and buy another indie game which is the kind of saccharine that I enjoy writing it's it's true I am really that cheesy but it's but I'm not faking it um really I'm not um but it was something that immediately made I got loads of thank you emails it never really didn't make sense to me that I would get people to pay I did an interview earlier today about volume and one of the questions was is the game cross by if I buy the game on PlayStation B store I also get on ps4 and it just seems silly to me of course you do you've already given me your money I don't need more of your money I'd like more of your money and by all means you know but at the same time like it's it just struck me as very odd these random acts of kindness pay off with on the intended consequence they don't always pay off a great example I always go back to while I'm closing my notes by accent there there we go um is I saw unser on reddit someone tweeted an image of

Thomas was alone and steamed page with the with the caption my name is Tom and this just freaked me out because I'm alone in the dark in my house and it freaked me out so I wrote him and this was a bit fake I wrote him kind of a faux apology for upsetting him I wrote him kind of you know obviously it was not my intention to make you uncomfortable sitting in the dark alone um his freaky for the game that was on reddit the front page of Reddit for a day that email arm because funny stuff works and people got into it that doesn't mean that we all need to now target reddit by sending emails to everyone who posts about our game but sometimes these things work sometimes these these approaches work it's it's rare the point is you have to do a lot of silly things for one of them to work and you don't need to be in control so this is something that I think we and this is definitely something I'm aware of is I'm used to the way marketing works in triple-a because that was why I had the most awareness of so things like

you have to set up a forum why like seriously why do I have to like it for a big game I guess it's useful you can sell ads and you can localize stuff but with but the goals of a big company are very different to my goals it makes no sense at all for me to try and centralize my community or own my community or set up a website where my community gather because my community are million people who played a game for two hours they know they're not a community in that sense they're not I'm not going to create a facebook equivalent for the Thomas was alone fanbase now without thinking even even things like wiki pages so this is completely unlicensed wiki we're doing something similar with the same site for volume where I'm going to provide some help to them but ultimately it's not owned by me and it's the best thing ever I actually used this website now to check story details of Thomas was alone before doing interviews genuine they all went on stirring questions I actually check this page to get the spellings of some of the characters right not the main characters those are all you know first names I'm not a child but like the

other characters in the backstory it's useful and that's because I don't own it because I wouldn't have made a resource as good as this one it's also a way to put people off it's very children's TV presenter to want to kind of corral your audience and look after them and tell them where to go and what to do it's it's it's a bit creepy and it's especially creepy big companies can get away with it cuz it's a big company but when you're just Mike Bethel from London and you're sending emails to people asking them to go and sign up to a website so they can hang out with you it's creepy it's weird the the kind of unique kind of thing about Indies that we get to be individuals makes this stuff odd don't do it and look after those individuals so more that I love this fan art because this fan art is about the meta story that's kind of hidden in time not hidden but there in Thomas was alone that a lot of people don't notice that it's existing on a computer or I just I love that image it's beautiful I want to make that game next I'm not gonna make that do next that was not an announcement to any

journalists in the room please don't at the start with so yeah so at the start we can treat an audio as well so when you're first styling your games kind of going out there it's gonna be small unless you make something that just goes massive overnight but again those are so rare they're almost not worth discussing you're probably gonna start small which means you can really look after each user you can really like and I did like those first few thousand players of Thomas was alone I followed them all on Twitter we had chats they could send me questions about levels they was stuck with sake and I'd replied to them that was possible at that stage it quickly became impossible to actually maintain that and eat and live and hang out with people and sleep um that's the order of my priorities apparently I did that off-the-cuff and that's very telling that's very it's always useful to make psychological breakthroughs in front of an audience thank you very much um so as things got bigger that got harder and I had to learn to deal with that stuff what I found was basically I kept in touch with a lot of those early people I still follow a lot of them on Twitter and

shout to them it becomes a case of engaging more generally in a friendly way with your community I'm after a rush because I've over over ad-libbed here it's okay to be a name this is another thing I'm kind of annoyed like I'm wearing a thomas was alone t-shirt right now I'm someone who kind of puts myself out there and very visible very noisy I decided I had to do that because my games are not good enough for me not to do that like I said those those ten developers who can be shy because they're geniuses I'm not statistically you're not so therefore we have to actually be okay with putting ourselves out there now I wrote this slide about four months ago in one of times before a lot of the more obvious recent stuff that's been going on I don't wanna say the word it's weird it's like candy man um but basically it's horrible and this slide becomes harder to were convinced if you are someone who's worried about having negatives horrible stuff sent to you and you should be because that's human and usually it's not cowardly to be scared of that stuff there are always around it you can create a persona

that's what I do I'm not the same on Twitter as I am in real life I have separate areas of my life you can also create an alternative character there are at least I can think of one very specific game developer that doesn't exist is on Twitter has more followers than me but is a fake human being and this is the last note because all of that about all the marketing and stuff it's also important to have a good game bad games don't have fans you can do all of that if your game is not working it's not going to work the other guys will give you better advice than me on how to make good games though thank you very same I go run because I've overrun thank you [Applause] okay right here we go if you dislike wondering who on earth I am I'm basically the guy that made the Moxie and the gratuitous Baseball's tank battles games stuff like that and I have

a blog that a lot of people read and talk about half of this talk is very practically how it feels and what happens when you go from triple-a to indie the other half is kind of like general was like to be indie stuff and I have I've done the sort of like quit my job and go indie twice because the first time I ran out of money and had to get a job ironically that's the job I got put into play so I've kind of experienced it twice okay this is my is kind of like artist's impression as it were how it actually feels when you go indie you should be really panicked and scared because if you look around did you see you see how many other people are like making games and it is quite a tough business one of the big problems I had it kind of depends where you're from but I live in some tiny little village where I'm the young person believe it or not who like

understands computers so I don't have this like community of people to talk to about my game and if you work in triple-a you're used to talking about the game with everyone all the time if you then suddenly go to being indeed like literally working in your bedroom then you it kind of like depends on your circumstances but you may have no one to talk to about the game and that is suddenly very weird and very different it is it's perfectly natural for your parents to think that you you're wasting your life this is this is perfectly normal and it's also very natural for people that you used to work with to say that you're nuts and you're doomed they they don't do this this much since minecraft because there's there's like obvious cancer examples and they're not kind of being cool and they're not then they're not doing it maliciously it's just if you've decided to do it and

they have and obviously they want to feel good about their decision to kind of like stay within triple A's so you do kind of get a skewed opinion there it is very important to out there meet other Indies because like I say you don't have this support group anymore you have to accept the fact that you may fail and end up with no money and have to get a job flipping burgers I mean that just is the reality it's I would say probable actually and if you can't handle that then then don't do it frankly you also you have to realize that suddenly you're a small business man or woman and you may find it hard to identify with like the problems that your buddies in in triple-a have this this seems ridiculous but I think one of the most important things about going India is getting a good office chair nobody really thinks about it but if you had like a similar kind of job if you in terms of like your one-man band or door to band man or

whatever and you're a plumber or an electrician you wouldn't kind of bulk buying a decent van because like you know that's just the cost of doing business and having decent equipment and a decent office even if it's like a home office and a comfortable chair to sit in you know that's you need that and yes you can justify it it would have to be thousands but like not a $20 chair and if you're in your twenties you can shake it off but as you get older now you need a good chair yeah archery I know it sounds ridiculous but the sport for you is archery and I know that just sounds like some crazy English guy that lives in a field saying that I actually really love art too but they're one of those they're kind of like motivation for doing it is if you get into a tree you have to stand up absolutely straight you have to concentrate and you have to stare at something a long way away and that is a complete opposite of game development so it's just really good for you you know it gets you outside as well yeah this is

this is kind of the change that a lot of people kind of can't cope with they don't think about the money they get caught up in a very kind of like gdc+ I'm making a game and it's cool and I'm following my dreams and it's going to be so artistic but actually there's a load of kind of business stuff suddenly you need this and hard way and you need licenses I'm one of these smug people in England that doesn't have to you know pay for health care whoo but well I know we pay for it but yet suddenly you have to worry about that stuff and you know Breaking Bad teaches me that it can all it can all go tits up if you don't have health care so suddenly you need to worry about that you need to worry about the corporation tax rate and stuff like that this is a slide kind of from a talk I did a long time ago that the dislike breaks down the numbers of how much money you need in terms of game sales to actually have enough money to live on and so I kind of

like looked up in the UK what they sort of average average income is and if you like scale it up and take away all this other stuff and you're making one game a year and it always does well it makes money and you you're never L and you never have to take time off or whatever then yeah you definitely need to to grow so at least a hundred thousand dollars a year and I know people talk about making huge amounts of money but actually selling hundred thousand dollars worth of games is actually really hard I also like publish indie game so I get I get pitches and most of them absolutely hilariously bad most of the game ideas are good the games look good you know the programmers are talented the people have talent but then when they get to like the business slide if there is one it's it's often just just like funny if you've been in the industry a long time the marketing budget is always zero because they're Indies and they're like gorillas and a bit rude and like they don't need to do any advertising or anything like that and they stupidly

think that a team of people who can make a really good successful piece of software are all going to like work in coffee shops and like sleep on the floor and eat noodles and stuff like that and that's really romantic for the first week but like after a year now everyone will quit everyone will go and work for you know some bank so you have to budget for that you really do yeah and also if you're going to go to TDC it's hellishly expensive if your plans are I don't need a marketing budget I'm just going to go to GDC and network well you know you've got flights and hotels and and if you live in Europe you know that's gonna cost you a small fortune and one way of thinking about this is if you are an electrician you have for example and you are kind of like an elk fishing you are a small business and they have all these costs that it just goes without saying that they're gonna have to spend this stuff and game developers seem to think that they won't need they won't need any tools they won't need an accountant they won't need all this boring stuff but you

do okay this is I keep pimping this book and keep pimping it so much that I really should have chosen something but it's a really good book and that book is it's kind of just there for people that think advertising doesn't work it does it's one of those things where it just does if you disagree I'm afraid you are just wrong and you need to read that book if you know it works or you will accept that it works but you're not really sure how there's another book called seducing the subconscious because adverts don't work the way you think they do and it does work for indie game developers people think that it doesn't but it does but it's quite technical you have to know about what you're doing advertising used to be like Mad Men maybe it's not anymore and it's incredibly technical and you will just burn your money if you don't really look into how to do it a few other bits this is why I do strategy games at $20 or more because I can advertise them and it

makes sense if you're making like a $5 game don't advertise I don't know how you're gonna sell that I just have no idea maybe you'll get lucky I don't know but you won't do it with this model you cannot track advertising you can track it a bit and there is loads of companies here and I'm sure there are loads of talks about analytics and that's great and go to those talks and learn all about it but you cannot track it a hundred percent and that puts people off that puts geeks off they hate it they say I've spent this amount and I can't track it was worth it and but there at GDC and when you say to them white why you at GDC are you sure you've got value from that they're like you probably must have done and they would they would do that but they won't take that same risk on spending money on advertising it's the same kind of thing it's an investment in you know PR marketing your game this is me just like pimping advertising again really so it's quite easy to look up how

much you've spent on Google AdWords which is why that's on there but I don't think it's even the majority of the the money that I've spent on advertising these are just stats that nobody nobody tells anyone so when you look at your stats if you do some advertising and you sort of think um is this I have no idea you can google it no nobody like Cher's stats like this so it's quite important just to kind of like know what at least one other person stats were one of the things that I really like about advertising is it's guaranteed coverage and it's the only guaranteed coverage you can ever get if you want to be on the front page of Rock Paper Shotgun next week it's easy if you've got the money and obviously that's a real pain and it's a real nightmare but you can guarantee it and you cannot with anything else you have to you have to have charisma and know people and like you now have an amazing game and all this other stuff and still you have to hope for the best but the reason that a lot of people advertise is if you if you

pay someone to have a banner ad or whatever for your game then it will definitely be there and that's kind of quite reassuring you know your game won't be ignored obviously the downside is you have to find the money for it so yeah it's quite scary if you kind of like look at some of these sums about how much money I'm suggesting people spend to promote their game and I'm only saying it because you know it works okay running at time and that's it thank you very much [Applause] Am boards and start with a little bit about myself back in 2001 I went in D before it was like actually that's what it was called and there were four of us and we were trying to build a demo pitch it to publishers building our own engine always sort of folly and we eventually ran out of money and I went to work for

radical and then Sony Online and EA and eventually left EA as it was kind of like in the middle of canceling projects in like 2009 and started working on skulls of the Shogun in collaboration with 17-bit and so with skulls we eventually signed a deal with Microsoft to publish on Xbox 360 Windows 8 Windows Phone and then we self-published on all the other platforms and we're coming out on ps4 in a few months so I'm here to talk about publishers and give you my wisdom over that whole timeframe all the meetings I've had with them and the relationships I've had with them how to deal with them it's I mean it's not just the basic like okay they'll take a cut of your profits that hinders your ability to sustain your business it's also the fact that you think that they will bring like their business and you know marketing skills to the table but the reality is you will need to learn to do those things anyway so you really have to look hard at what they're saving you and what they're bringing to the

relationship so there's two main kinds right now anyway in terms of publishers platform owners the Microsoft's the Sony's of the world and you think of these okay they have a solid user base they have channels to promote to their users that kind of thing but in reality it's more like this there's so many platforms they're all overcrowded the value of getting a feature on any one of them has just gone down from day one on all of them pretty much and so you think okay there's promotional only publishers and they have you know the PR skills the business skills that you might lack and you feel like you know you have the game making skills and bring those together they'll be great but in reality 90% of them are more just like they're just sort of leech value and not really adding value right now in the industry and so I'll talk more about that in a second the third is sort of the more elusive like development funding publisher and there's not a lot of them and I would have had a picture of the unicorn but like cliff said he actually does a little bit of that so it's not entirely true but it's pretty rare and some of the logic and the rules and advice I'll

give kind of apply to those two from each category so obviously with a platform owning publisher you get some funding get on their platform and they usually want exclusivity or like highlighting their features with skulls of the Shogun Microsoft like that we could play asynchronously across the PC and the console and the tablet and the phone all these things and that was what they wanted and so you know in terms of you know you think of exclusivity and it's like oh no you don't want to give that away but in reality there's a certain amount of time it will take for you to port your game of the next platform and giving away EXO civet II under that time is basically free to you and they will give you money for that which is great so on the flip side if they want more exclusivity you can tie that to you know higher sales amounts so if you sell really well in a platform enough to sustain their business they get more exclusivity so it turns out to be a more fair arrangement and one more thing to think about Linda big companies are making new platforms there's always a business opportunity there and sometimes a

creative opportunity but the reality is it's a big company like trying to do something innovative and so there's even more sort of gear grinding and bureaucracy you might have to deal with and that's definitely time beyond just like the tech development of working with beta software in the kind of thing now with promotional only publishers I've seen a bunch of contracts that they'll hand you just to start and it's like let's I'll take you know it'll take a certain percentage of your royalties for no guaranteed marketing like no marketing budget no specified amounts like well how about we just leave an unspecified amount of royalties in that contract so the real question to you is like you know what what can they commit to and writing because you might think they are essentially being rewarded if the game does well if they promote it you know the more they promote it the more it sells more money to make but in reality they're actually rewarded for signing like 10 Indies they don't have to do much work one of them hits and they make money from that so the system isn't really set

up right now in the current stated industry for them that's a sort of foster so yeah you have to look at what can they commit to and writing and you might think well what you know these things are sort of amorphous but no like going to a show like pax has specific travel costs buying online advertising has specific cost so if they can't build a marketing budget and show it to you then they probably don't know how to market your game and so really be extremely skeptical of any sort of you know claims of their promotion ability something else you also want to consider is like actual spending caps and you might think well I'll let them spend all they want but the reality is if they're spending money in effectively then that's coming out of your bottom line and you need to be like you need to have some kind of input in that process and just towards the overall negotiation process you know it's an old adage but being able to walk away and you might go into it you might think you've got to get this money it's only we gonna make your game but if you can't talk yourself out of that you will just put yourself in a position where you accept a deal that will really impact your life you

know negatively and stressful you will not be worth it I guarantee it and so you want to find what they want what's your leverage what's it unique about you that you can then use to kind of be creative and figure out their needs and come to a creative solution in terms of things so stuff like excellent sliding exclusivity scales and I've done this before myself I've seen many friends do it never chase money like whenever a publisher asks you to change something in a pitch or a demo and doing it for free without a contract in your hand just don't do it like that's the big big red flag I've seen people like just keep doing that keep chasing keep making tweaks for a particular you know partner and it just never a sort of appears visual you know comes together anyway so definitely you know keep that as a sign of a red flag and lastly just understand that you're going to be dealing with two or three busy people they're gonna hand that off to a their legal team which is potentially tens if not hundreds of

lawyers and they're going to give you back a boilerplate contract which will not include anything that you talked about and you have to go back to them and be like we talked about X and Z and then they'll put it in the contract don't be offended then we pissed off it's just a sort of a side effect of the organizational structure so in the future we'll definitely see more promotional only publishers you know we'll see youtubers are effectively becoming publishers the successful ones will kind of build a name for themselves and what they promote folks like devolver digital do a great job you can see them like the games they promote you can see where they promote them and how they promote them and now it lets players are basically taking royalties of games for like set numbers of videos and that's a great sort of equation in the sense that you know how many subscribers they have you know you know what percentage they're gonna take how many videos they're gonna make and you can estimate how much your games gonna make and decide if that number of impressions is worth it to you for that cost and lastly just some parting advice so you know like I said all those sort

of scales selling your own game business development you're gonna have to learn those on your own regardless and so what the publisher really brings to the table you know and you really have to kind of look at what demonstrable value they can bring and so you know if you really absolutely do need external money to fund the game like really question yourself and like how can you scope it down how can you make it without that money is there any sort of you know game in that range that is feasible and you got like I said you're gonna have to sell your own game anyway and do your own business of development so yeah what did they bring to the table [Applause] all right now time for the last session uh and that's me oh I'm sorry time for the last session then that's me and multi-platform PC and mobile

development so what I want to talk about in this session is basically the question of what do we do about mobile if you're starting a new project or you're thinking of starting and your project coming from triple-a oh we're kind of familiar with either PC or console development we're familiar with the market were probably gamers we kind of know how you know press works and so on but what about mobile right I mean it's a huge market we all know the stats about how many millions of devices are out there we've all heard about supercell or king-making unknown millions of dollars a day probably do we try to do this so the background is that I come from you know EA three-ring Zynga sort of large mid-sized companies mostly PC development web and console a little bit then decided to go indie we released a game called 1849 which was a simulation strategy game on PC and tablet last year this time and that was actually really

interesting it was a premium title so you know pay ones play as much as you want another free-to-play game and so I'm gonna be sharing some of the lessons from that and just to start with conclusions and we'll sort of unpack them a little bit I think at this point I wouldn't do a mobile only indie title I mean honestly I think that ship has sailed if you do a premium game that's mobile only it's too risky because your sales are completely dependent on getting featured or getting a good word of mouth both of which are very difficult and without them you're dead in the water but free-to-play is too expensive for an indie developer I mean buying ads is how you get players and ads are expensive but I think there is hope and cross-platform development so if you start with PC or maybe console but I'll talk about PC mainly that is something that you know that we know how to do we know how to build up that audience and we can use that to then improve our

chances on mobile and to make the game sort of larger and available to more players and yeah you will have to adapt again redo the UI that kind of stuff but I think it's worth it because who doesn't want a larger audience right go mobile plus PC means more players means more discussion which means more word-of-mouth buzz it also means diversifying your revenue sources so you're not depending solely on your steam sales or your iOS sales or whatever and that's always good here's our stats for 2014 for the game that I mentioned before 41% of that sold on Steam forty percent so the mobile iOS and Android combined that's a huge chunk of the sales right it would be a shame not to not to do that but as I mentioned it has to work with the design right it has to work not just with the UI not just making the you know swipe feel correctly or whatever but also with how

you approach the players and how we approach what they expect because your mobile players are going to be different from your PC players mobile players you know I'm going to stereotype this right now but there's more casual they're more occasional they're going to be maybe getting game recommendations from their family or friends but they typically are not going to be seeking out your title as much as PC games PC gamers are enthusiasts they're into their hobby there they are opinionated and they know what they like also some of them will react poorly to what they think are mobile mobile ports so that's something to keep in mind because these are different audiences and they value different things you not only have to change your UI in UX to meet their expectations but you also have to change your communication style which is something we actually fail to do with our game and now we've learned and we're going to do it for our next game which is you need different products stories because your mobile audience is going to value accessibility and short gray sessions and your PC audience is going to be a little bit more hardcore they're

going to evaluate different things so different store descriptions different YouTube videos different artwork different screenshots your entire story needs to be tailored to the audience so if you do go with PC and Mobile what kind of a revenue model do you do I would say premium is easy because it matches the sales on Steam or one of those stores so it's easy right just pay for the game once and you're done one thing to keep in mind though is that it's hard to scale the revenues up in the premium model as you grow your studio because you are going to be capped at some level we've all heard about Monument Valley for example beautiful game super popular and justifiably so I think they were recently reported as making some number of millions of dollars in lifetime revenue no that's lifetim right and they all the stars align for them they got Game of the Year awards they got multiple featuring by Apple I mean it

was perfect by definition there's only gonna be one of them of the year per year right most of us are not going to be that lucky even if we make good games so we have to keep in mind that without all of that stuff coming together we're probably looking at maybe hundreds of thousands if we are lucky tens of thousands of dollars in lifetime revenues on on premium on mobile so that's that's not a you know the not to scare anybody about it it's kind of a realistic thing which is again going back to well if we combine that with PC that's a different story free-to-play I don't think it's a feasible thing for Indies because you're going to be going up against big players for spend a lot of money to acquire users and we don't have that kind of money I mean unless if you're running a startup that's already venture funded then you can ignore the rest of the style you're in a completely different league and if you're looking at ads as a revenue source there are some recent there are some recent good examples of

that but historically there have not been worth it too much you have to have a huge viral hit for that to work and those are very rare if you do go with premium freaking picking a price point is going to be difficult and there's no good solution to this bit basically because you're anchoring on PC is high and unfortunately on mobile it is not right a mobile $5 game is expensive people not like to pay that if your minecraft or if your final fantasy you can charge $8 right and like that that's not you know compared to the cost of developing it that that's a kind of a different story so you're typically people go with the steered approach where they do one price on PC and another price on mobile and yes there will be a fraction of your PC players who are going to be upset by this because they will see this as you making a $5 game and then charging them 15 they're not thinking of it as it's a $15 game that has to be discounted on mobiles so just keep this in mind maybe

maybe one solution to this is to make something different about the PC game that justifies a higher price point getting the word out is also interesting in the mobile world on PC and console we kind of know how that works right we know how to talk to the price we know how what press is interested in we know that gamers read and interact with gaming media YouTube of that stuff in mobile is different from my experience and from reading player surveys the two biggest drivers for purchase of a premium game on mobile are store featuring and word of mouth and store featuring is a complete crapshoot because you will not know what you're going to get featured until you've already made the game and then word of mouth is just difficult to get because it depends on people knowing each other and talking about your game ads I don't think work very well for premium people have been habituated to when they click on an ad for a game there's going to be a free game and they're going to bounce when they discover you're asking them to pay and review sites are not as

influential as on the PC side again because mobile gamers are not hobbyists in the same way that PC gamers are so they will you know they will read less maybe review sites and yeah they're just a different audience so once again if you do a PC version first then you can build up your PC fanbase based on the ways you know about getting people excited and then use that to promote your mobile team and then one one last word is about getting featured because it is a crucial thing and getting your game out they basically it's not black magic right platforms look for games that will showcase the quality of their platform so of course you have to have a quality game right patting myself on the back because we got featured by both Apple and Google but you don't wait to be discovered platformers do have business people who are looking actively for

games to feature find your own business people who will represent you there are contractors who do business development who just like book authors agents in the way that authors agents represent authors to publishers same way people will represent you to Apple and Google find them hire them and don't wait to be discovered seek it out yourself so that's the end of my slides thank you very much and that's that's our talk and now let's do some Q&A if you'd like to come up to the mics in the middle if you have questions for a particular person please ask them by name otherwise you can just ask at all of us again hello thank you for the talk that was awesome I find that for me personally one of my biggest struggles is still working in the triple-a and just trying to kind of trying to work on my own projects because professionally I'm an engineer but I'm trying to work on my design skills through my side projects

there's this constant tension of trying to work on my project outside of work and burning out very quickly because you know I'm working triple a football full-time all day and so it's it's hard to find the time and energy to work on the side projects and yet needing those side projects to partly to prepare myself to to do design work on my own stuff and also to have projects ready to work on as soon as I take the plunge so I was I was wondering if you guys had any thoughts on just kind of dealing with that inherent tension I'd say I mean I had to actively I think I we were maybe in crunch when I did the coal game Jim and I said I'm not coming in this weekend and I did the global game jam I mean I'd say like Colin SiC on Friday have the global game jam and just hang out all weekend and make a game personally like I think so I was very lucky in that the my last company I worked out for two years while I'm a Thomas was alone were aware of Thomas was alone it had kind of gotten a name

for itself at that point but still I was going home and working every night the all I can although compliance was I found I found that what worked for me was doing something that was so different so vastly separated from what I was doing a work actually made it a hobby so Thomas was alone was you know specifically a game that had nothing to do with I was making social games by day at that point I was working on you remember Facebook games they were awesome ah remember GDC like three years ago funny times um so I was doing that stuff by day so for me like going home and making a platform was just like it was a hobby was different enough that it was felt interesting the other thing I would suggest as well as you specifically describe your skills play to your skills especially with a project now because you haven't got time it's all you we should always push ourselves but push yourselves within criteria you know if you're not like for me I was I knew I was a graphic designer who was a decent level designer and could write for a bit and therefore designed a game that was entirely about those skill set so that I didn't hit those walls cause the walls or what kills it the Wolves when you hit that

wall and it's like I'm I need to go and learn how to do something that's the point where suddenly watching Breaking Bad box sets just seems like a better play you know thank you I just that to that I think just just go home on time you know do even if you're in the the like triple-a industry and everyone's like oh you have to work with Lee like everyone works late and I've been there when I've walked out and everyone is still in the room coding and I just think well I don't care but be prepared because I've been in that position be prepared for everyone to hate you like I did you know I know I have this Cavalier way genuinely like be prepared to be the in the office he doesn't stay because I had to make that choice and it you know burn some bridges some people didn't like me because you know what Mike's gone it's five o'clock Mike's gone that was that was a choice I had to make it's a hard choice especially like if things had gone the other way and the game hadn't worked ahead hi my name is Stephanie question for you going from familiar to indeed team sizes

change right so what are you like takeaways on is there any role that you know going from those big teams a small team you felt oh my god those were irrelevant when we had them on Victor belief titles what I'm looking for is any strategies to like reduce teams one of the the other way around is we have you have some Triple E team sort of looking at the indie guys like wow you did dysentery like three guys you know and we have 15 guys and we can't even reach that so any like now did you've seen both sides like swim with skulls of the Shogun the three of us that started wearing on the game we were all multidisciplinary like two like programmers designers and one like artist designer so we could wear all those hats and we were also you know advanced and self-motivated so we didn't really need a producer for a long time because we're all on top of tracking that ourselves and we'd also like you know think aliy we'd also worked remotely before so we knew how to kind of like stay in touch and like keep on it without having to be

like super regimented which saved us a lot of time the other thing and I think this is sneaking up and I think everyone needs to take advantage of this because those of us who are making games big games a small budget to doing this and no one's talking about it don't it doesn't have to be one job one company one team one person ever there is amazing support industry starting to grow which is people who do creative jobs that take roughly a 10% of development or making 10 games a year people like my sound engineer is working on about 8 games coming out next year my composers working on a couple because that's a bigger job you can work out ways to structure this the biggest problem big or medium-size two big companies have is the dude sat at the desk who's not got anything to do that we need to not repeat that mistake because we haven't got room to do that treat it in a fair way pay people well if they're part-time because they may be out of work you know and it's and you've got to make sure everyone's safe and comfortable and happy and you're not screwing anyone over but work with those people I have an animator who's working

on three games he is making much much more money from working three three Lance gigs that are the same ours is his old job working full-time he's happy I'm happy because I'm not paying him for you know to keep him at his desk and and everyone's winning he gets to please and it's great for him as well because we've owned if even if one of those three games he's working on is a hit he gets to walk around GDC is the guy who animated that game you've heard of and you'll just like not mention the other two so it's great for everyone and everyone's doing it but we're not talking about because we're pretending we have these massive offices because we think we have to because we think that's the way to get respect from the bigger companies you know nest it work out a way to do to be either film industry basically bringing people you needed I'm sorry I'm going way thought all right so we are running out of time but please come over to the podium or we will go to the spolano room and we're done thank you very much you