The Indie-O-Calypse with Jason Rohrer | Game Dev Unchained Episode 206

[Music] what's up everybody welcome to another episode of game dev unchain the number one podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof I am your host Brandon Pham and joining me this week a special guest Jason or are you doing Jason all right so I'm gonna pipe you in now we can finally hear you did thanks for joining us awesome so this is the part of the podcast where we let our guess introduce themselves to our listeners and viewers out there who you are where you've been what you up to yeah so I'm an independent game designer developer programmer one-person shop I've been making games for fifteen or sixteen

years now and during that time I've made 19 games so my most recent game is one hour one life which I've been working on for about four and a half years now and it's it's out and I'm still still putting out weekly updates for that but yeah that's my 19th game so I've been doing this a long time I've seen a lot of things come and go and I've seen the sort of I started my career right as the independent game development scene was kind of on the rise and have seen the glory days and the bust days and the in the apocalypse and seen seen through it all right so it's actually a very interesting topic then we're about to go and see so I I found you through multiple articles there's actually a few I would say Paul Revere's out there kind of talking about how the indie landscape has been changing and been changing for for better for worse but I guess in this instant can you kind of give us some kind of is

it a Binger bus right now where we are with the indie scene well I so I you know I gave a talk at GDC last year of sort of us I'm an India pocket has happened but the way people interpret it is that nobody's making money with independent video games anymore and simply false there's a lot of people making way more money with independent video games than they ever have made in the past now because the audience has gotten so much bigger so what happened though was that of course the marketplace got more crowded in a place like Steam which was the sort of gatekeeper historically friend of any video games back in the day I mean people who are putting games on Steam today probably don't know this or don't remember it but there was a time where you had to beg to get your game on Steam you have some kind of connection or you had to show your game to Steam there are vetting games they were just flat-out actually so for sleep is death which came out in 2010 I don't think I even

tried to put it on Steam but they eventually wrote to me and like oh sleep is death like school dude like let's put this on Steam and we kind of had a few e-mails back and forth and then they went radio silent for like months and then finally I kept emailing them and they never emailed back and then somebody else the person who I've been talking to it's team at left Steam and then somebody else got back to me and said no we changed her mind did that was never on Steam back in 2010 right and then for my next game of stereo star-filled sky I was like this is a much better fit for Steam like you know really should be on Steam it's sold well off I mean if sleep is death sold well on my own website as well but um you know I had to call you know basically email a friend who had games on Steam and said who's your connection at Steam and then I was emailing this person directly and they were hesitant and then for the castle doctor in the game after inside still for a star-filled sky they're also extremely hesitant they're like you just put this on greenlight I'm like this game has already made a bunch of money off steam it shouldn't go I mean like basically kind of y-you know

is the squeaky wheel and then they were finally like okay yeah it can go as Dee back then when inside starfox guy came out on Steam would've been like 2011 or 12 it was the only game that launched that day mm-hmm right and they did all this stuff with me where they know you can't come out on Monday because this one you know Triple A games coming out on Monday no Tuesday's already taken and Thursday you know so they they pushed me back a week and they skate you know it's very hands-on kind of thing I they even redesigned so I submitted a logo for inside a star-filled sky and I guess they didn't like it or thought it was too confusing so their art department inside valve redesigned my logo for me without it they didn't really ask me they were just like here's your logo wow man night and day because because right now it's all automated or it yeah it's a different time hey still a hand vet something some well yes so they still play the game make sure that it launches on some platforms obey and I simply I may look for anything that flagrantly violates the rules right so one hour in

life which is my most recent game I it launched off steam back in February 2018 didn't launch on Steam until November that year so I you know made a bunch of money off steam I was very successful off steam and I finally brought up steam and one of the things I did because I was trying to see if I could do it without ever going on Steam right it's like kind of can you build up a big successful independent hit off steam completely you know hey some people did it like minecraft did at minecraft nevermind on Steam right so I was like you know hoping hoping that it would get big enough that steam wouldn't I wouldn't need to put it on Steam but it didn't so I eventually put on a steam but I built this whole kind of infrastructure for you know tracking player stats tracking numbers of hours played tracking player reviews so off steam inside the game itself there was this thing where you could go and type a review and you know recommend or not recommend and it showed your number of hours played and that got posted on the home page for the game and that's still there if you go look at one hour and life homepage you'll see all these user reviews kind of looks like the steam review system right so I had that in place and it works inside the client you

don't have to go in like into some separate client to post your review it's right there right when you die you can hit post review run game and so it was working great but when I went to release the game on Steam they were like trying to solicit user reviews inside the game is against team's policy and I was not submitting I was not trying to solicit steam user reviews and whatever reviews people posted inside the game would still go on to my own website but yeah I had to turn that out for the steam version yeah so uh anyway so so that kind of stuff they still obviously they played the game they're not it's not completely automated right they let it and some some capacity and notice this one feature and said hey this rules right but they're definitely not they're not vetting games for quality or whether it's good enough for Steam anymore and now of course they don't know how greenlight it's now whatever and right now so that has changed a lot so there's a lot more games out there I think what happened essentially was that pretty bad games

back in town in if they got on steam and steam got behind them because they were innovative in some way but there wasn't really that big of an audience for them if they were had to buy with the market hmm would make a lot of money on Steam and so what's happening now is essentially games that aren't that great after all and if they're not you know those kinds of games are not making money anymore that's the in the apocalypse right like games that you play for an hour or two and kind of experience some kind of you know story inside or whatever players don't but really in a marketplace of games that are all vying for the attention players don't really value that in the way that they did a long time ago so a lot of those people who are trying to still use that same model of make like you know make this kind of somewhat innovative three our narrative kind of experimental narrative game those games are flopping hard right now because you don't like so the other thing is that you have like I don't know you've seen probably sales

curve sure games from back in the day it's like this big spike on launched hey with this long and kind of an especial decay tale and that doesn't that's not what the curves look like anymore there's no launch day is not your biggest day anymore it's like kind of but for me it was like five days after my launch on Steam that I had my biggest day well right so what's going on there it's like well there's no press right people don't read the press anymore all that sort of like press embargo and all that stuff that we used to do that doesn't matter like there are games that are flopping that get 50 articles written on launch day and they still flop right and my game had no articles written about on wash day and was a big success right so it's like mmm yes people don't read the press anymore it's a post gamergate world maybe I don't know exactly what is happening there but um you know you used to go on a place like rock paper shotgun or Kotaku yeah and see you know hundreds of comments now you go on rock paper shotgun and you'll see four comments right on an article right so the audience is not as

active there and so I think most people are finding out about games mostly through word of mouth and like YouTube is kind of like a word of mouth using word of mouth and twitch as well right and so in order for word of mouth to work your game has to be a game that you play for awhile right is if you only play it for an hour or two hours you might go and tell everybody about it the next day but you're not gonna tell everybody about the next week again right mmm and so the games that are successful are the games that kind of you play for I mean the average person who played one hour in life played it for can't memorize what this number is is something like four months or something like this Wow it's you know so it's from when I first started playing till one makes it finally quit right it's like so during those four months you're telling people about the game over and over again right and so that's what and you can make multiple youtube video if your youtuber you can make multiple youtube videos about if your stream or you can keep streaming it if it's a like like a little like three hour long kind of narrative type game what are you going to show on your

stream what are you gonna show on YouTube you know and you're not gonna be talking about it three months from now so I think in that way I think also just players tastes have changed and so on but the games that have fit into this mold of like you know some kind of replayable deep kind of infinite infinite unique situation generator kind of game those games have made so much more money than the old indie super hits that we talked about right we talked about like braid or Fez Meat Boy or something like that you know that's indie game the movie games it's like oh my gosh back in the day I was like you know 2007 it's like braids made 5 million dollars you know stardew valley is made like I would say probably 40 million dollars yeah it's just one guy you know rust rust rust is made you know 120 million dollars right yeah and you know so factorio again mutely 20 30 I mean this is your rough estimates right but mm-hmm

I mean five million dollars is is sort of an indie flop for you know I know so so it's like and and even like you know a game like the witness which is Jonathan Blow his next game doesn't really fit into this model very well it kind of defied all odds and became a pretty big independent hit just because he had you know he was such a well-known guy and the game is so amazing for what it is right yeah but there's not a lot of people still playing it you know there's a lot more people playing don't starve right now than playing witness and don't storm is like and here's yeah so yeah so I think that that so the witness and a few games have kind of defied the odds just because they were so amazing that you just couldn't not play them right and the witness is a big beefy for a content tech game it's like one of the biggest beefiest content it's insane it just keeps going and going and going and being more innovative and more like jaw-dropping and yes it's just like you

can you really sink yourself into it so I think in that way it does work as a sort of a word-of-mouth game because you know anybody who actually plays the witness for real it's gonna be playing it for a good month mm-hmm like yep still oh my god the witness is getting better and better and I was blowing my mind again you gonna keep talking about it right yeah yeah yeah but there have been people who have played one hour in life since launch right it's been out for 18 months and there have been people who have played almost every day for 18 months right so you know because it is this emergent kind of situation generator online you never every time you play it's totally different you know there's just a sort of infinite replayability so she I mean I'm not saying that's good or healthy definitely a game for 18 months but definitely one hour like it's capable of something like that and where where the witness isn't I mean you know most people would finish the witness before 18 months I open mm-hmm and you're having a lot of situational

things that you know I've been very curious about too and I want on flow of some of this first of all you were the before and after while steam greenlight and then now right where they're mostly not really vetting but just looking through and playing games to kind of make sure they're not in criminalizing their platform with like yeah bad bad tastes and gains or anything that might you know get them into trouble but anything illegal yeah anything illegal that's more their process now so like do you feel the I definitely empathize with what you're saying how now we have it seems chaotic but only because we have so many options right where before I guess in the extreme green that days we had someone kind of helping but it was more like that was the single source of if you're indie you have to put yourself in that platform and if you make it or not it can make or break your game kind of mentality do you feel that was a curated process versus now which one would be

which one feels better yes question because there's a lot of good games that didn't make it on Steam or wouldn't a lot weren't I'm not talking my green I'm talking my pre greenlight right yeah even before like days it was like does Steam think your game is good enough and it's not in a lot of cases I mean I don't know that one I don't know that sleep his death was good enough for steam maybe I mean it was pretty it was pretty hard to get into it was pretty hard to find people to play with didn't have any centralized servers kind of just said here type and I typed in your friend's IP address to connect it was a two-player game that had no matchmaking so probably you know they were probably right it probably wasn't that good of a fit for steam you know and and as an example I have thought about oh you know sleep his death could be released on Steam now right and in my were to do that I would take you know a month or two and add matchmaking right now a month or two and stand off the rough edges that in 2010 made steam say no they're probably right and so yeah so that's a that's a really

good question I don't know um you know does this curated the you know the curated platform you know favors certain people over others like people who have any kind of connection like I had a friend who had a game on Steam right so that gave me an email address to pester back for inside a star-filled sky for example um you know and so I had somebody to pester and that worked if I had didn't have anybody to pastor the game wouldn't cost right that doesn't seem that good on the other hand you know I guess games that kind of get vetted sort of and and and supported by steam don't aren't necessarily successful today you know I just use two case studies these are my friends games I mean I don't wanna I don't like I try to avoid calling out people right but you know I did give this indie apocalypse talk at GDC Lee and when I gave it I did call out four games and these are games that were announced at you know publicly announced

by the developers to have sort of failed or failed to meet their expectations right so you know game like where the water tastes like wine game like takoma game like introversion 's skin or Sombra and there was one more and I can't remember it right now but oh as Tezz so these were games that had these post mortem articles written by the devs or like oh my gosh we're never gonna pay back our investors in some cases it whatever works were screwed right so I didn't feel so bad about calling those guys out I wasn't calling them out I was just using them as examples but they ran examples of themselves and they're all I know I know all of them right so it's like it kind of feels weird talking about them on stage but it's important to actually talk about concrete examples right so this what at the example going to talk about now has not been called out yet I've just been watching these two games very closely because they're my friends games and I'm like curious about how they're gonna do and grace about how they fit into my understanding of this whole world the two games are overland and Noah Overland came out about a week ago and no wait it came out

two days ago three days ago um so Overland this by Adam Saltzman and just team it's almost he's the Canabalt guy and right he dear friend of the podcast yeah they've been on several times he's a great guy great guy and I've been watching that game for a year somebody's been working out for a long time and I played early versions of it and so on back in the day hold on a second nowhere is I actually have it's funny I have a this is a total tangent but it's a somewhat interesting topic is you just heard the beeping then go off so we had a really bad fire here in California a forest fire called the the camp fire I don't know it was a it was the one that burned down the town of Paradise it was gonna probably national no back last year and so we had all of our windows closed and we had to run a HEPA filter and stuff here in Davis because the smoke mean you literally couldn't see across the street so bad and so we got end up getting one of these like particle meters to just check our air quality inside of our house and

it was horrible inside of our house and that's why we got the HEPA filter but the other thing the particle meter does is track co2 and so it was going off just now because I have the windows closed because I'm recording this podcast and just me talking in this room killing yourself up is a co2 up above 1,000 parts per million where it's naturally outside it's 400 right alarm was going off a little groggy ragi I'm watching these two games i played i played noida at the IGF I mean I'm also friends with Petri who's the guy did cram physics back in the day really good friends with him and watch the kind of development of noise Jeff from the sidelines only played it once or twice before it came out late overlay him quite a bit before it came out and so Overland as far as I can tell just looking at the numbers looking at Steam charts which is where I go to look at how many people are actually playing a game yeah has not done well right it's gotten negative review scores on Steam first of all this is not them any reviews posted there's none many people

playing it's like you just kick him out it was like never really got much above 100 active players whereas noida on the other hand which just came out a couple days ago immediately shot up like 3,000 simultaneous players right 95 percent positive review score seen tons of reviews posted right and and just looking at those two games I mean they're both big they're both kind of examples of what I'm talking about some degree right these implement unique situation generators they're both extremely hard games where you can I mean if you really wanted to play Overland all the way through I'm sure it would take you a long time and every time you play it slightly different no wait also is a roguelike they're both kind of roguelikes in a way and annoy jay is this game with with wizard physics in a cave and every time he plays totally different than these crazy things happen but so they both kind of fit the model but why is one successful the other one isn't I think it just boils down to people it's just numb right it's like people

like Muay Thai better that's all there is to it I mean like you people play Overland and they get this kind of like Oh this kind of beats me down and it's not very pleasant to play and it's not that interesting and they play Noah and they're like oh my god and they're like this is amazing so at the end of the day it's still the same thing it always was right we could talk about types of games or markets or what's popular and what's not or what you know what players are willing to pay for and not but know still making a really great great great great game is still really hard but separate from that it was just it was brand-new never-before-seen game design in terms of like what players are actually doing in the game but it just wasn't that good and I you know I tried a bunch of different variations on it and never could find a version that was that interesting right so I sometimes get to a point as a designer where I'm just like I've explored this place as far as I can explore it I got to kind of pick the best version that I found and kind of throw my hands up in the air and just move on right my game Primrose on

the iPhone was also was a tile placement kind of puzzle game really inventive new mechanic in there about how tiles were cleared and how it worked and really cool in a lot of ways but just never I could never get the design to where I wanted to be in terms of how compelling and how interesting it was and I tried a bunch of different variations and a bunch of different finally get to this point where just like yeah I guess I got to leave this one behind I'm not gonna solve this problem right and therefore it's just not as good you know like if you compare it to drop 7 which is a similar game and a game that kind of inspired me in that space it's like oh I wanna make again like drop 7 but you know innovative in a different way drop 7 is way better than previous that's like way more people are playing drop 7 right now you know that's been like 10 years ten years later they're playing primeros right so you know there's not really a lot of people are looking for some kind of formula it's how things are sitting in a magic bullet or some kind of one weird trick and you know there really isn't one I mean sometimes you know just it's as simple as well you know people like this game more it's

more interesting to play right right I grew up in playing and I would like to make games that are single-player narrative and as we are discovering how viewership and streaming is becoming such a huge component to how people play games or buy games which is something that I think you're kind of vocalizing that we need to be more conscientious to kind of make this a part of the game design to make sure that there is an overlap with players who are initially excited about it and people who are slowly discovering it to kind of make make sense of the upswing later after launch right and so if the game isn't long enough and there's nothing to talk about and people are discovering it's slowly I feel if we're looking at that graph little gaps in between that slowly just dies out and not create in any interest so are you seeing that go ahead that spike that you get that spike that you

get at the beginning mm-hmm it's much smaller than it used to be right there were way more people who bought the castle doctrine on dating day one yeah then bought one hour and life on Steam council doctrine had all its ducks in a row and had this launch contest that everybody talking about every news outlet covered it no one covered one hour in life but even if they had there's two or three go I mean they're like two places to cover why are on lights launch right but even if they had they don't drive the traffic like they used to right so getting all your embargo ducks in a row to have like 50 this big PR blast on launch day doesn't really work in the way that it used to and so if you have a game so if you have a game that has that classic spike in longtail sales curve which is what a consumable short game is gonna have because people hear about it when they hear that read the initial article and then after that they stop hearing about it because no one's writing any more articles after that if you have that you depend on this giant spike and that giant spike for most people just isn't there anymore right so what you might like I sold more

games month to I think for one hour in life that I sold month one link something like that I mean definitely during month to mike-mike my sales slowly climb right from beginning a month to the end a month to my sales doubled right and so that is like oh people are playing this it's it's catching on right and so it's a different kind of game it's kind of game that can catch on and like you know 18 months later the game is still selling pretty well right and so like if if you're making these little narrative games you need to have this giant spike and I think the only way that you have a giant spike is if your game is just so jaw-droppingly good that people can't not play it right and I don't think we've seen too many examples of those I think we've seen you know some of these games I was like oh maybe five five years ago this would have been really good but my today's standards it's not that great and people are kind of shrugging about it right and that is not a good recipe for a big spike a

lunch day yeah I think this guy no man I is another example and it is an infinitely reliable game and so on but if a lot of people found that once they started infinitely replaying it it wasn't that great right there was a line that clash about but that game had a gigantic spike on launch day right and I think within the first week they sold seventy million dollars or something right yeah and that was because it was a game that so many people couldn't not play because there was this trailer and it inspired people and people's minds went crazy imagining what I was gonna be like and everybody just dog piled on the thing to buy it right and they've been a couple of other examples of this I mean like hyper light drifter you know something that has a really strong visual style or something where you just like oh my gosh like I want to annoy des probably something similar people watch trailers and little videos of what you can do inside Noah and they're just instantly transfixed like oh my gosh I've never seen a game like this poor it's so visually beautiful I want to be in there I got to play it now I can't wait and so the other example I would say it

hasn't come out yet but there's this game forthcoming game called I think it's called last night mm-hmm which is this pixel art kind of like out of this world or another world cyberpunk kind of futuristic game maybe scene I had an e3 trailer that kind of blew everyone away because it's kind of it's got a moving camera inside the 2d kind of pixel art mm-hmm it's like a cinematic pixel art game and I can imagine that game because people watch that trailer and their jaws are on the floor like when it comes out everyone's gonna jump on alright very very very well some of the examples the end apocalypse games just aren't they don't grab like there's something about the name there's something about the way it's presented there's something about the trailer where it just doesn't like grab you or it doesn't inspire you in the same way and if we even compare games like gone home and Tacoma for me personally it was like oh gone home sounds really interesting helmut just to me personally as a player never like never captured my imagination

that much and then there was also just like you know presentation voice acting that stuff is really hard and it's it's hard for triple-a people to get it right I mean go play what's the what's the game with the red haired woman who's in this world with all of a mex better like mechanical animals they're out the the Sony guerilla game won the Horus is Adan no horizon zero dawn giant studio giant budget super polished a lot of ways a game but there's so much wooden dialogue mm-hmm like I can't remember what her name is but yeah you come up to this guy again he's like oh I haven't seen you around here and then you come up to him again he's like oh I haven't seen you around here just like yeah yeah it's difficult yeah voice acting getting good voice actors paying for them paying good writers I mean all that stuff we've always scrimp on that stuff yeah and for an indie studio I think it's even harder

every once in a while there's lightning in a bottle I mean I think you know I think gone home was an example of lightning the bottle where you know everything kind of came together where the writing and the emotional tone and the voice acting and everything that came together in this way Stanley parable it's another example when they you just found this amazing narrator dude and he and Davies an amazing writer and and you know it just kind of comes together into this cohesive like holy crap this is the way it should be experienced but I think it's much easier to make something that just doesn't really come together especially if you're trying to do this narrative stuff right something that feels clunky something that's not believable character is something that you know has wooden looking mannequins that don't really animate right and their lifts don't sink right and there's I'm candy valley issues just like there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of really hard to solve problems and I mean even like for John blows game the witness I don't think that the voice recorders that are scattered all over the place I don't think they work that

well I think the voice actors aren't quite good enough a lot of them are reading in kind of a wooden way mm-hmm there's too many different voices I was like who are all these people and you know I don't know it just doesn't feel like it doesn't feel as well put together as the rest of the game um and so he and I know you know I'm talking to John like he really struggled with that part of the game like what is there a story in the witness mm-hmm is there any kind of like narrative elements is there any kind of thing any kind of words in the game and what are they and there was maybe gonna be a story in the witness but then he wasn't satisfied with it and he had different voice actors it was as satisfied with them and he tried himself as a voice actor he had professional writers helping him and he just kept going back to the drawing board on this element of the game so even if there might be that might be Jonathan Blow mm-hmm can that come up with something that's satisfying to him you know then you know it's it's it's hard right so I think that you know I think it's it's it's much more sort of dangerous waters right it's much easier to make something that you know you're so close to it you

can't really tell mm-hmm I've listened to this clip this voice actors clip so many times is it good or bad like I think trying to get some voice acting done for one hour and life trailer where I had this idea of oh there could be this trailer where there's this young girl talking about her life and how it started out and then a middle-aged woman a teenager and a middle-aged woman and like you hear the voice growing up right and eventually she's an old woman talking about the end of her life and this little like 1 minute long trailer and so I I pitched to I can't remember what's called voices calm or this is one two three voice actors and I got inundated with responses people giving me free examples of them reading my script right mm-hmm and I'd listened to a bunch of them and some of them are kind of amazing for what they were as I go you know if somebody just did this for free no to pitch to me you know but then as I listened to them on say oh this doesn't sound right I just can't like I'm not good enough as a director of actors pull this off and as I've listened to some of them over and over I'd be like well maybe this is good I've listened to it

too many times now I can't even tell ya yeah and so yeah I think that it's it's really like we were not those people mm-hmm well you come across a very uh we're not Pixar like Pixar yeah workshops the heck out of their stuff they take it back to the drawing board over and over they have this like weather that I can't remember the name of the story trust or the brain trust right and everybody who's working on a film inside Pixar has to bring it before the brain trust so they pick it apart all the whole narrative elements any part that feels a little slower it doesn't make sense or doesn't feel emotionally motivated or you know and and they go back to the drawing board sometimes with projects that they're years into right like the dinosaur like they just kept reworking that thing and it never really but they knew that wasn't quite right right yeah you worked it we worked we worked and they just couldn't get it right yeah but those are the best storytellers in the world and we don't have those people yeah industry they're working at Pixar then I don't we don't have access to that people are

directing the voice actors for a Pixar film um you know they got Holly Hunter who aren't good enough to be in movies or else new movies right yeah is better and yeah and so you know we're kind of we're on the bottom rung as far as the stuff goes we are not on the bottom rung as far as like amazing emergent systems go though we blow those movies out of the water in that department right so a game like Noah is firing on all cylinders there's nothing wrong there's nothing that makes you cringe a little bit or makes you feel like you know that's a little like I've been done better and like this is it like this is like a game edits like the it's the stuff it's though it's it's it's it's it's the way it should be right and so when we're trying to do that other stuff though very often we stumble into this territory where it's like you know yeah but like you're coming across a point

that I think a lot of artists or an indie developer simply ignore right we're making an entertainment product at the end of it and that needs to factor in as far as a game design because I think people have a natural inclination is like here's a fistful go make the game you've always wanted to make and we just go heads down and make that game but without really addressing the marketing changes and atmosphere of like realistically can it sustain itself as a product but also is it worth the damn that anybody else cares and that's where art kind of limits itself for the sake of art it's like no you're still making a thing that people want to buy so you got to factor that in as part of it I think that's that's really important I think people tend to discount that or they tend to say like oh I wish it wasn't this way why do we have to worry about what's gonna sell but I think for me as a creator someone

who's been trying to make you know aesthetically complex and artistically relevant supposedly artistically relevant work for my entire career I think that that kind of grounding is really important we're not just operating a bubble I'm not making gallery art you know for some curator or something that no one's gonna look at and no one cares about I'm like making my but because I'm making a commercial product like I have to it has to be good yeah I can't I can't fool myself into thinking that my bad stuff is good right and and go a whole career making stuff that India at the end of the day doesn't no one really likes and doesn't really you know it's like there's a certain like the rubber is hitting the road here because I'm supporting my family doing this and it also motivates me to keep going and also motivates me to keep making games motivates me to innovate it motivates me to innovate in ways that are actually interesting to people as supposed to innovating and this sort of vacuum or something right and so I know a lot of people who are supported by like professorships or who are supported

by you know they go out just see grants as because they're like working a sort of gallery artists or new media artists or something and some of them are making games that literally 30 or 40 people ever play and then they don't even exist like they're not online anywhere because they're a part of an installation or something it's like yeah it's like what I don't know I don't want I think I think you know making commercially viable art which is what you know independen rock bands and stuff are doing as well no it's what people were making movies and TV you're doing as well those things that I don't think that ends up being a barrier to making great work in fact I think it's probably where the greatest work is actually being done right mm-hmm you know I think that you know like Martin Scorsese in the 70s 80s 70s and 80s and 90s was making way greater works of moving images then I can't even name

some of these people but the like the the gallery installation video artists right right you know yeah they show like a video of some guy falling into a pool over and over or whatever right and you go and stand in front of it for like 30 seconds and you kind of get your fill of it and you can feel a little bored then you move on right it's like you know no one's gonna pay for that except for a collector and the collectors gonna pay enough for it that it doesn't matter that no one else will willing to pay for it no one would pay $5 for it if it was made in for bulk consumption all these people just had to go see I mean you were interested in film back in that era and I'm not even sure what year this came out but who had to go see Goodfellas and you had to go see casino right it's just like not if you're a film person that movie is those movies are incredibly relevant to you and they sold tickets right but they were really complex groundbreaking artistic achievements everything else right so it's like I think it's I think it's possible and

even important to be packing those things in and when the the you know if the audience is really not interested in the short narrative kind of thing or you make a short narrative thing and maybe they're interested in some but not others and then you know at the end really you have to acknowledge maybe the thing I made wasn't that good maybe that's the answer like that's always my first inclination I always try to avoid blaming other factors I mean wasn't right I didn't have the right pressed in like you know the president understand it blah blah it's like no what I made probably wasn't good that's probably the most obvious piece of evidence obvious Mazal thing right yeah so when you know first stepped out yourself I see so many people when something flops giving 101 reasons why flock prolly was it a great game that's probably it and so I've had things that didn't do as

well as I thought they would or whatever and it was always because they weren't good enough mm-hmm so I mean people have a way to find people even if you don't get press coverage and you've met people don't you know it was like if something's really really good it's hard to keep it a secret right the quality products all have long legs I mean it just shows over and again that at some point someone will discover the the the genius of it one will be wanting to tell someone and that's essentially what you were talking about the beginning of the episode you're just saying that you know word of mouth is still King and kind of harken back with all these avenues now for any developer is that we have so many choices now that we we kind of long for curation but not really those those days are again you're a gate keeper that decides whether or not certain games can make it which is not exactly the best democratic way of like the best product being out there in front of people but at least now we have

so few resources as indie developers that the individual oculus the way it affects us is mostly because we're more on our own than ever before but if you can survive this type of thing you can survive any change in the audience consumption right as long as you know the market yourself and make a quality product and be able to put it out in front of people that no matter where ever we start streaming games or whatever platform that changes it it shouldn't affect the success of your game you just have done it's also I think there's something interesting going on here where there's also this sort of pressure to innovate in a way right because animation helps you stand out and gives people something to talk about and so if your game doesn't really innovate that much then there's much less to talk about much less kind of buzz that can build up around much less forehead slap and when people

hear about your game and like or see it on YouTube or whatever and so I think that that is probably a positive thing right you know where if you make just another roguelike platformer people gonna make another roguelike platformer what are we gonna say about it right maybe it's even a really good one but it's not that doesn't do anything new where it's like if you make a roguelike platformer where every pixel is simulated a simulated material really interactive like what I've never seen a screen you know a gift that looks like that right whole levels on fire like what you know which is no idea right and so I think and you know for one hour in life you know all my games have been innovative in some way or another and oftentimes that has served me very well in terms of you know marketing or catching on with people right like mm-hmm the Castle Doctrine was a game where every player builds a security system and then you go out and try and break through the security systems with other players like that little elevator pitch is like what oh my gosh like everyone says instantly wow that's crazy that

sounds cool I mean and when I came up with the idea I frantically ran to Google to make sure there were no multiplayer burglary games and there was like wow I can't believe I'm the first one to thought of this this seems so like obvious and then you know after the castle action came out all these people came up to me other friends and game developers like I was working on exactly the same thing we never got to work though so we never released it me to it or whatever like it was just this idea that was just waiting to happen right mmm and when it when someone hears about it it seems so interesting and obvious you know like an obviously interesting thing to try playing that everyone is like who I want to try that right one hour in life as well it's like oh very simple a core idea multiplayer online survival game where when you join the game you're born as a helpless baby to another player who's chosen randomly as your mother mmm and you know instantly when people hear that even people who don't play games their gears start turning right that ha ha what that's gonna happen then what if she doesn't take care of you what does she mean to you what if she does this to you you know and like yeah that's what the game

is about exactly isn't that interesting and yeah so you know that kind of then if we compare that to you know to pick on over land again it's like Oberlin's a post-apocalyptic game in this beautiful little 2d diorama diorama scenes but it's kind of a turn-based strategy game where are you now the resources and control to decide your grant units are and decide when to spend resources and so on and it's procedurally generated and kind of roguelike and but you know there's not a there's not a conceptual hook right I just described it to you the best way that I can I can't really say anything else I can sum it up in some way that's like a lightning bolt in your mind but get your gears turning you like cotton I've kind of played games like that maybe I've never played one that looked as cool as this one looks and does look really amazing usually maybe I've never played one with dogs you know or you know there's a couple of little cool things about of it like there's dogs in it or this you know you

gotta you're gonna have to abandon some of your people and you can't keep everyone alive who that's kind of like Fire Emblem you know but there's nothing there's not a there's not a punch in the pot on the heart of the head right yeah and you know no man sky also exactly the same thing right mm-hmm you know this infinite simulated procedurally generated the universe where every planet is different and you can go wherever you want right that's my elevator pitch for the game and everyone's head just explodes when they hear that right yeah so I think that that in order to stand out among the 40 games that come out at Steam everyday Nordica people talk about your game in order to make your game worthy of making youtube videos about and all the other things like being that innovative is important and I think that's really healthy yeah that pushes us and challenges us they're not just status quo you know I think in another example is FTL versus into the breach which was the next game

into the breach was a big success kind of riding on the coattails of FTL but I think everyone I think even if you go now there's more people playing FTL than into the breach of this moment it was like 10 years old or something and the we talked to the guys at the company they're like yeah you know this game was really successful not as big as FTL but even that's as simple it's like you know into the breach is just not you know FTL is like like nothing else there never been anything quite like that before and it was really like oh wait there's this like crew and you're on a spaceship and you're running around from room to room in the spaceship and you know and deciding what to do and part of the spaceships on fire you know it's like something like so knew about it right and into the breach was just more like oh it's a turn-based kind of isometric strategy game so yeah I think that it just doesn't you know just doesn't capture it and like grab people in the same way right right and I figure you're actually uh maybe discovering the reason why a lot of these games don't work which is slow it always starts with the

elevator pitch and then like extrapolating that and making people wanting to know more and be curious about what you're gonna say next about the game so like getting them hooked initially is very important and getting them to ask questions and kind of shoot off ideas and get them excited is the the seed to making it buzz worthy and right as in any industry right we are this is where the old way is kind of would have helped or could be helping smaller developers is that the the the combination of the gatekeeper of getting financial people to put money behind your game is getting through that initial pitch making it sound like people who don't give a damn to finally give a damn there is something to that process that is largely missing because now that we have so much access to kind of have an idea for our game out there and self-published you know we're not

needing those gatekeepers there to kind of express ourselves freely but also we are missing that element of testing testing the idea against yeah I mean that's an excellent professionals so in the old days what would happen is you'd kind of make your game and then steam would shoot it down it wasn't good enough because it wasn't innovative enough because it wasn't interesting enough and you would just kind of go back with your tail between your legs and blame steam for a while your game didn't sell now you're like oh sure 100 bucks I'll put it on Steam hmm like it's like you know so and also if you needed to get a publisher behind you even earlier earlier days right no I mean there was there was an indie industry of box games mm-hmm I don't really know I mean people were buying like aquaria I think was being sold on the website on its own website and it wasn't on I think it was before steam existed but or like ish right I mean was

something that eventually made it into boxes on retail shelves somewhere so you know you have to you know get a company behind what you're doing with your money and so yet you are kind of being vetted there and now people are just you're right they're left to their own devices and then they're you know they're all expecting these amazing results from you know something that you know most people tell them this isn't this isn't that amazing yeah now our in terms of elevator pitches that's an interesting thing because it's like okay maybe some some games are amenable to that right like one hour or life you can sum it up in one sentence in a way because people interested Castle Doctrine as well Loida as well right but there's other games that are very good and maybe very innovative but innovative in a sort of a more diffuse way right and so then how do you pitch that right like how do you pitch what remains of Edith Finch this is really innovative but in this you can't really it's not innovative in a one-liner like you know yeah you know it's a

narrative game with all these different kind of completely different narrative gameplay things mechanics they're stitched together you know in a wacky house because and the other one is Stanley parable right it's like you know it kind of has to be experienced to really understand what's interesting about it and so that game is sort of unpickable in a way right you know but a game that games that are as good as those two games are sell themselves through word-of-mouth during the brief integral anyway right mm-hmm so you know I don't know have you ever see I'm assuming you played the Stanley parable right yeah yeah I played did you ever play the Stanley parable demo no most people haven't yeah it's really I highly recommend it it's free of course but when you go to plants okay what's the Stanley parable demo how do you make a demo for this game that it's so singular and just has to be experienced to even be understood at all right how do you pitch it to potential customers the Stanley parable demo is a

completely separate game that has nothing to do with the Stanley parable so it's the best game demo ever it's actually maybe if maybe it's better than the Stanley parable oh wow I highly recommend it that's alright anyway so that is like an example of like it's so singular that you can't even make a demo of it you can't really explain it to people even if you showed a trailer or shot you know it's like it just has to be experience right because it's it's it's about the gag right it's like the gag is what you're experiencing that's you know unmoor I know it's not really I don't want to simplify that way but you know the aesthetic space that it places you in is the whole point right yeah no well that would be the marketing pitched and it's like it's just something you gotta experience like yeah wouldn't talking about the game yeah it's like you got to do it everyone's talking about it yeah III like to would want to move the conversation you kind of touch this a bit how the the old ways

I do things kind of staying with that name where we relied so much on the press junket to kind of promote to have that day one sale to kind of determine the fate of our games right how bad is changing and I think I've read a an article about you kind of highlighting house streaming and and playing your game or other avenues for people to experience your game before purchasing is doing a lot better for people to actually decide on buying a game can you expand a bit a bit because I didn't realize it until I actually read through it and listening to you that yeah it's pretty much true I mean I read it just for the fun of it about like how this game is but it doesn't really entice me the like by now or even if the guy strongly recommends me the buyers like hey whatever it's not as strong as a recommendation as before and I guess where are they catering to

obviously their website is still an ecosystem for their readers where they stay within right it seems more like a Twitter thing people don't click on links or anything you're asking like who so if people who buy games don't read these articles which they obviously don't mm-hmm because the articles have no impact on sales it's serious mm-hmm I mean another quick example it's like and this is should be obvious to everybody but like I've had my games covered on National Public Radio three times now and including one hour one life right mm-hmm so on the day when it goes live nationally this was on the show wait wait I know a show to the best of our knowledge right so I'm on a ten minute segment where I'm being interviewed about my game which I think so I did it one about passage of course that wasn't even being sold I did another one about Cora minuet which was available for people to deposit money into at the time and I did another one about one our own life so when the day that goes live nationwide do not generally see even a

spike in web traffic mm-hmm on your games website right because people who listen to NPR obviously generally don't play video games or go out our websites to find out more about video games they're fascinated by the idea it was a story out it passed I buy the story of this developer and his interesting idea and whatever but they are not gonna go buy a game similarly I was in you know the in-flight magazine Hemisphere's I think it's called on United Airlines or I can't remember which airlines on for it you know you're in the in-flight magazine you're there in the seat back pocket knowing the whole month so it was this big you know profile about me and my family and about diamond trust in London and everything and I've had so many people come up to me within the next year or two saying I recognized you from somewhere when I meet them for the first time or something I saw you in some bang yeah then because pretty much everybody's board on the flight may already a magazine it's an awful magazine you know in terms

of like oh these articles are so short and they ask such dumb questions in the interviews and you know no but everybody who ever flew that month you know saw this thing and and and got taste and read my profile right now none of them play video games none of them went out and bought diamond trust of London or whatever was being talked about in the article but they all saw it absorbed it right and so I think that that's obvious right so then we get over to the gaming press which used to be the place that people went when they wanted to figure out what game to play they used to go and read these reviews they used to go and be you know watching rock paper shotgun or Kotaku or whatever to talk about what you know what interesting games are coming out I mean you know Kotaku covered one of my old indie games back in the day like gravitation or something mm-hmm it would just be this like deluge of traffic coming to try the game mm-hmm or when they covered some of my games that were for sale back in the day I would be this like deluge of people buying the game that day that's not the

case anymore so what's going on there I think that the reality is that the gaming press has actually been kind of gutted financially mmm that the audience is kind of dried up that they're kind of in a lot of them are operating skeleton crews you know people barely getting paid you you write to some guy who covers games and you're like you know you want to cover this and he's got to go beg for funding from somebody mmm Ino write it so you'd be able to write about it right and then he'll come back and say my editor doesn't have that and you know he's not willing to pay me to write about this right now because they just don't have like the advertising dollars aren't there like they used to be everything's kind of the whole landscape has changed it's still there I mean a lot of the websites are gone right mm-hmm what the wasn't there one called one up yeah yeah there's a couple there's a couple more like that that are completely gone and then a lot of the other ones are kind of run by like a fan community or like you know I don't know

it kind of feels like Destructoid a lot of those articles are written for free maybe yeah yeah yeah and so you know where these things used to be like these the hubs of the gaming world are hubs of game communities I think that there's sort of there's still the appearance of it operating the way it used to but I think the numbers are way way lower in terms of readership in terms of engagement and of what authors have been paid most of the the better writers and games have left game writing right I mean almost all the people I know who used to write about games and we're really good writers now do something else they're all you know doing PR consulting or working on game development themselves or whatever right so like what's left of these kind of people who are kind of enthusiasts and maybe they're barely scraping by I don't mean some some of them will tell me if I ask them personally oh yeah our website is still doing great really there's like two comments on every article like what yeah it's true it's true yeah I think that that's just yeah and and and I think and

nobody likes to talk about this but I I'm a can't be tarred and feathered for sayings but I think it has something to do with gamergate as well um I think that there was a kind of in in a lot of ways I think at least a good portion of the gaming populace felt like these websites kind of got caught with their pants down in terms of and this is 100 you know and I have experienced this myself right because they were covering things not because they were good but because they were friends with the people or they had a previous relationship with these people from previous games and they did that for me all the time right oh you you covered passage you covered gravitation well here's my new game and they'd instantly write back and instantly cover it right yeah um I mean it's like pre gamergate like I went to Kotaku just show cordial Inuit which is a pretty obscure idea right this like grid of numbers it looks kind like a bingo card where you're playing for real money against another person and out guessing them I went to

the New York City offices of Kotaku and showed Steven to tillow the game I showed it to him for like twenty thirty minutes right we played a couple games against each other um I don't even think it had finished artwork in it I think it was just a plain grid of numbers he wrote this like must have been like a twenty page I was like the longest movie who are close ever seen right scrolling and scrolling and scrolling all these screenshots all this discussion of the details of the strategy and everything right hmm like that kind of article won't be written today right gray and he did that in part because he had been following my career and he knew my stuff you know I was like no I had my foot in the door I could I could email him and go into the offices and show them this thing and and I think that people kind of got wise to that and realized that people were either people inside the game industry journalist journalist industry were either covering their friends games or games of people they were fans of right without merit right more they were covering games that had some kind of political agenda that they were on boring it and so I think that people

just kind of like yeah this is and I see it too also whenever my games recovered my games often have some kind of little edge to them or something and there'll always be a political comment in the coverage mmm right like the choice of not allowing men to have babies in this game is a controversial one it's science definitely gonna ruffle some feathers share or using more problematic to disguise so anyway I saw that happen a bunch of times where it was clear that the people covering the games had some kind of political agenda or were trying to paint me in some kind of make it a political light right mm-hmm and so that was all pre gamergate right so I kind of witnessed this firsthand and I was the beneficiary of it you know guilty as charged yes I used to email my friends and not friends I mean I didn't know them from outside of journalism but I've email people that had interviewed me and become friendly with me in coverage right right and so they don't

do that anymore by the way for the most part when I email them you go down there for years they don't even write back mm-hmm not allowed so you busy or they don't care about any games I mean a lot of them don't cover independent games anymore it's Ray they used to yeah I mean you know trying to get people to cover one hour in life which was this you know easily coverable game because it's so weird yeah to talk about what's ailing teeth I'd like to back to them over and over and over again and they'd finally come back and say no not at this time you know it's like okay this is definitely the most press worthy of interesting game I've ever worked on right mMmmm it's also my most successful by like you know factor for unusually right so like you know people are there's one guy who's made like three youtube videos a week for 18 months oh wow this whole Seattle is nothing but you know 3000 view you know or more every you know he has a pretty big audience and he pretty much covers nothing but one our own life you know so clearly

there's stuff to talk about there the stuff worthy of you know but like still like you know polygons has never covered it Kotaku has never covered it I think PC Gamer marginally covered in Rock Paper Shotgun covered it but it's like okay polygons not gonna cover one hour in life okay so it sounds to me man like the future is not exactly that it's a different type of coverage is evolving right now it's Lee we're used to be about press junkets of people writing articles and now we're aiming it more towards streamers and people and it's actually more research to be done towards people who are doing this and streaming your game to ask them like what exactly it are caught the type of content that you like to stream like what resonates with your audience and and thinking along those lines to make it more of a long tail for your game it seems it's just like the the ship is towards those people more than people

writing on anything to talk about there which is that I've seen giant streamers cover one hour in life right somebody email me on the weekend like dude lyrica streaming one hour in life at this moment holy crap and you go and look and you're like yeah there's 30,000 people yeah and there's in that case I remember specifically there was like no jumpin bearing no in spice yeah no spikes that day other people like when sees covered the game one time or just played it on a stream there was this pretty big spike that day and then he played it the next day and there wasn't the spike didn't continue right um like when Drake ass first covered the game on his YouTube channel there was a huge bump in sales as he continued to cover it you know that it didn't continue right so it's like there's there's this idea that first of all certain people buy games and certain other ones don't and people who tend to watch twitch streams for the most part I definitely was seeing way bigger spikes in the beginning when some

big youtuber would cover the game then when some big twitch streamer recovered because it's like people who are watching twitch are not there to figure out what game to buy there are just killing time killing time wanna hurt feelings yeah yeah they're there as a form of relaxation and entertainment and Rea also really want to be part of this little community right and this big community of people who are chatting on the sidebar and they want to get recognized by the celebrity that they become enamored with who a trans dreamer right yeah that's the product yeah it seems to shout out to them or whatever they want to hear lyrics funny jokes and whatever you say about you know vaginas or whatever in what our own light yeah yeah they want to be there for that and they're there because of the personality more than the game and they're not shopping and they're not like looking for but people who are in YouTube are more like hmm I'm trying to figure out what game to play let's watch a let's

play of it a little bit until you saturate each streamer or youtubers audience and you get all the people in that audience who are in the market for buying your game potentially and then it trails off right in terms of the impact of each new video right so it's like each of these youtubers has a different audience and the audiences don't necessarily overlap and in each audience there's some subset of people who are the types of people will actually buy your game and once if your game has been shown to those people it's kind of over all right you keep going back to the same streamer and be like hey you want to cover my game again and even if they do it doesn't really necessarily do anything right right so that's interesting the other interesting thing is kind of related to this is that despite all this crazy coverage that you get in all these different places where the yeah obviously hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of I think the top video for when our life has you know some some youtuber made has over a million views right so millions of people seen something about one our own

life when I was at Penny Arcade Expo having my booth this is just a couple of weeks ago mm-hm the vast majority people came to the booth had never even heard of the game right now which was weird right I'm at a game fan conference where Expo where everybody is like a die-hard game player he's walking around trying to play their favorite games and sends a lot of their time thinking about games and reading about games and watching streams about games and everything and despite all the coverage of mine our life has gotten you know way more kind of coverage and attention and you know day to day if I'm walking around and I talked to some kid who plays games I mentioned that I make games like in my neighborhood or something no big what game and I'll describe it like I saw that on YouTube mm-hmm so you know there is some you know penetration into these other kind of realms of existence item just my fans or something they probably don't own the game but all these people came up to the booth and they're I've never heard of this game mm-hmm explain it to me and I'll explain it to them you know

give them the elevator pitch about being born as helpless baby or whatever and um so you know Chris Hecker has this old adage that he always tells independent developers which is you know no one nobody knows about you gave whatever nobodies know nobody knows about your game right nobody's heard of it so always like know that there's just as however many people you think have heard about your game and been exposed to it there's this huge hundred times don't care they don't care not that they don't care they just haven't even had a chance to you yeah right right right and so that is true and so I think that with each of these new streamers and new youtubers and kind of there's a different segment of the audience that hasn't because people who watch sees or not they don't watch people watch these don't watch lyric and the people who watch lyric don't watch drag-ass and the people honey mess yeah PewDiePie is his own cadre of people and each of these people has like a following right um so yeah I don't know

I think that there's also yeah something be said there how much which people in those groups are actually in the market for buying games in which you're just sort of you're killing time or just entertainment missiles by watching games so what another another interesting thing is that it's in the middle of my second month I had this huge spike so I was going around going along like $2,000 a day or something second month right and then all of a sudden one day it was like $8,000 in one day and then went back to normal mm-hmm what is this look at the graphs I try to figure out how stover wait about that's Christmas Day that's the day when all these kids who have no credit cards yeah get their steam gift cards and their stockings right and they've been hearing for the past month because the game came out in November about this game and they've been waiting to buy it right and so you know it's weird you wouldn't think Christmas day is like a day when people buy stuff I'm being buying stuff at all right but if I know video case it makes sense that that's another thing to think

about right it's like men there is this as we get older we tend to forget this but you know people my age don't buy games anymore yeah so I'm not like I I'm not making I'm not really I mean yes I'm people my age you appreciate the game I'm making and kind of talk about and think about it but most of them even if they buy it because they want to support it or they just want to try it they play it for a couple of hours and Mike who I had my great experience of our own life thank you Jason and they're done yeah so you know the people who are really playing games are like my son a 16 year old son and people younger than him right and there's so many barriers in in their way in terms of actually getting a game right like to them you know these emails for people can't get the game working for one reason or another occasionally right mm-hmm and they're so heartbroken mm-hmm either from sometimes it's fun the person's mother I've been trying to get my son for the past hour at he's he's in tears you know how long he's so disappointed or you know I saved

up my Mike my birthday money for months and I find mm-hmm this is the one game I can afford to buy right so it's it's hard to kind of you have that perspective from our point of view as like for me is like an adult with like three kids and I'm a spouse and I'm supporting a family like I never really have to think twice if I want to buy a game right right I have the budget as part of my business expenses for research purposes and so on it's just like I don't buy that many games but I never like mmmm I can't afford that I gotta save up for it yeah so a lot of these people are looking for the biggest bang for their buck because they can only buy one game for the next several months mm-hmm right and so they're kicking the tires of every game they're watching all these YouTube videos trying to figure out which is gonna be the best investment because they're not just gonna go spend 20 bucks to try something they're basically spending 20 bucks to join a player community right and to become not somebody who has tried one hour in life but somebody who plays one hour in life

they're looking for the next discord to sink into and the next thing to be part of and then the next thing that's gonna kind of be their game for a while right like what are you currently playing it's kind of like asking somebody what you know what are you reading these days there's something that's like what are you what are you currently playing oh I've been playing some Nautica for and you talked to people yeah they've been playing subnautica you know for the past month that's their game currently right or they're currently into this game on our life or the currently playing factorio or they're currently you know sinking and annoyed to or whatever they're doing right and so that is kind of the way people are thinking about games now and this next generation we've forgotten what it's like I mean I remember saving my pennies I mean everything's totally different right so we can't compare but like you know when I knew Super Mario 3 was coming out and I had my gosh it must have been $50 saved up you know and I couldn't find a store that actually had in stock because it was selling out everywhere right and I was like calling Toys R Us every day to see if it came in yet and finally came in one day and my mom couldn't take me there that day even though I had the money you know it's

like I was calling my friends mom to see if she could take me to Toys R Us that day because they've got one copy of Super Mario 3 you know but but that would you know that was like something that was like an event right and so remembering putting ourselves back in that mindset of like the majority of our audience like a game purchase is this event right mm-hmm and so if you think about it that way then and I think maybe what had happened with you know the gone home successes and the narrative the short narrative game successes like five years ago was that there was still an audience of people who had disposable income and we're still playing games and I think like a lot of those people have gotten older and don't anymore and we have distractions now so okay I got real-life problems than to sit around play then we're left with the people who have always been playing games and those types of people are not at all interested in plunking down $50 on something to be over in two hours right mm-hmm well Jason we are at that one hour mark and do we need to definitely follow up

with a part two on this because this is a topic that is the the whole seed of this podcast is about it's just understanding the market and being able to go out there and promote great quality products and be successful at it and I want to thank you for your time in this part of the podcast where I hand the mic over to you to self-promote give attention to shout out to anybody out there and it is all yours so I'm gonna shut up now yeah so I you know I've got a lot of games on my website but the one I'm currently working on it's one hour in life and you can find that on Steam or on my own website you just do a search for one hour one life about right actually right after I get off the mic here I'm gonna go put out the update for the week I've been updating a weekly for the past 18 months so yeah you can get on board with the latest update and that's all I'm gonna pitch I guess that's that's kind of my life right now

that's awesome man thanks again Jason it was a pleasure talking to you and I'm serious I'm gonna follow up with you with other stuff it was truly enlightening I learned a lot and I want to thank you again the other thing I'll mention is there's the the the talk I gave at GDC which was back in March of 2019 it's called 2014 versus two thousand or two thousand something versus two thousand something before and after the indie apocalypse mm-hmm if you look up like Jason or at GDC talk on YouTube you can watch the whole thing there's all sorts of graphs and analysis and in-depth stuff so that that you know is kind of a an adjunct of our appendix to this talk over to this this podcast will definitely gonna link that into the video description as well as the audio podcast for people to find that talk that's how I found you and I found it very interesting as well and people really do need to dig into this and take control of their own success so thank

you again and that ends today's podcast thank you everybody all right thanks see you guys next week you [Music]