They Paid Us To Upgrade Our Indie Game

We sold the IP for our indie game Islanders and they actually made a sequel. Whenever I tell the story, other developers are quite intrigued. So, I thought I'd just make a quick video about it. This is the original Islanders. We made this on a team of three at Game School. It's a minimalist city builder where every building gives points depending on surrounding structures. We made the game in 3 to 9 months depending on how you count. The three months were at university. That's where most of the game was finished. And then we put in a bit more time before and after release to polish everything up. The game was very successful for our standards. I don't remember exactly how many copies we sold, but it was hundreds of thousands. We decided to port the game to consoles or have the game ported to consoles because the way you do that nowadays is often times by just getting a console publisher or a porting studio. And usually the way it works is they just make the console port. They do everything like from porting to marketing, etc., etc., and they just get a revenue share. So, you don't pay anything upfront. they just make the game for consoles and you split the revenue from it. That's what we did and we found a porting studio called

Codesync. They did a good job. They were always quite professional and we liked working with them. So when one day they approached us and asked can we license to make a VR version or maybe a mobile version? We were like you you want to do something with our IP? Like honestly we're a bit like we're fresh out of university and all of a sudden somebody wants to do something with our IP. So, we thought for a bit and we decided to take a bit of a long shot and instead of licensing, instead of providing them a license, we asked if they just straight up want to buy the IP instead. The reason this made sense for us was because we were done with it. Like, we did not want to work on the game anymore. And here was somebody who did. They wanted to make new stuff for Islanders. So, the most obvious thing seemed to just hand it over. We jumped on a call with them and said, "We thought about your proposal. Do you want to instead of licensing islanders maybe buy it for, you know, a lot? We were expecting for them to laugh at

us or something like we had no idea what to expect, but they were just like, "H, yeah, actually that that sounds reasonable. We'll get back to you." And they did get back to us and they agreed. I'm probably not allowed to share the exact number, but let's just say it was about 1 to 2x of what the game had made so far. And that was about a year after release, if I remember correctly. In case you don't know, this games on Steam make most of their revenue when they first come out. So, in our opinion, this was quite a fair deal for both sides. After selling the IP, we didn't hear back from them too too much about New Islanders projects, but that was exactly what we wanted. We didn't want to have to worry about it. The first thing Codesync decided to do with the IP is make a VR version. That is interesting. Not exactly where I would have decided to go, but still very cool that this exists now and we didn't have to lift a finger for it. After that, it went very silent for years, and we almost didn't expect anything to come at this point. But one day, they just sent us an email. Hey, hey, the

sequel is about to come out. Turns out they hired another game studio called The Station to make the sequel, and it looks good. There's a YouTube video on their YouTube channel called We Made the Sequel Islanders New Shores, and it's honestly the most adorable thing I've ever seen. Hi, we are the station and together with coatsync we have developed a new game for you. Islanders new shores. So these are people I've never seen before and they probably had to open up our crappy student spaghetti code unity project. I don't know why it cracks me the hell up. To add some more depth to the game play, we have introduced new buildings and new ways for the player to earn score. In the first game, all buildings scored by checking for other buildings inside a sphere. In Islander's New Shores, we have buildings that check if they're blocked from view, distance, and line of sight, new scoring shapes, a building

that grows stronger the longer you play, and more. This is very funny because we had very similar ideas when making the original islanders, and I think I was the one who originally pushed back against those a little bit and was like, "Hey, let's explore what we can do with the simpler system first." And it turned out that this simpler system was actually enough to make for a lot of interesting gameplay. So now it's like double as interesting to see all of those ideas in the game. I'm very curious to try it out, which we will do in a second. The art in the first game looks deceivingly simple. But the longer you play, you realize how complex the color palettes are and the work that went into it. We wanted to bring that same feeling to the sequel while pushing the visuals further, or rather as far as performance allowed us to. Our friend Freedomman made most of the art for Islanders back then. Unfortunately, he left our company and went on to make some games solo, which he's also very successful with. For example, he made a game called Summerhouse. They're right like Islanders had very complex color schemes. There was like a very complicated color scheme generator and it could generate lots and lots of

different color schemes as well. And also, I find it funny how they analyze our game like the original head D. It's like it's hard to describe. It's like somebody's writing an essay about you. We've made a total overhaul of the art with the intention to add more depth, richness, and life without compromising gameplay. It was important to us that the Tetris-l like gameplay was as good in the sequel as it was in the first game. One thing that's very safe to say is that they've been very respectful with the source material. Like they could have made a crappy mobile game with gems and loading bars where you have to wait for two days for your uh castle center to upgrade or whatever, but they actually just made a sequel. There's no battle pass. It's just an indie game sequel. And this is also one of the points where I'm like, I don't know if every time you sell an IP, you're going to have this exact outcome. Press X to doubt. There are probably some questions you have as a developer after a story like this, like should you sell your IP if you want to? How can you

try? What's the best way to do it? And should this be a more common thing in general? Should more studios sell their IP? Should more studios buy IPs? I have some thoughts on all of these. Let's talk about it while I try out the game. Islanders new shores is coming out on 10th of July, so might already be out by the time you see this. I got early access. I have an early key to this. I don't think this has been done on YouTube before. developer reacts to sequel. There's a first. Okay. So far so similar. This looks much better than the game we made. Like in terms of visuals, it's just straight up an upgrade. So I think the mansions get more points from being close to the city center. Yes, they do. And then we'll separate the houses a little bit. Oh, I think that's a new house shape. You unlocked a new island to explore. Ooh, island counter. Score counter. Oh, bonus points. Bonus points. Oh, I get to pick an island type cliff house pack. Houses can be built on any cliff side. So, here

I get to choose permanent upgrades that I think I get to keep for the rest of the run. I'm already starting with some cliffhouses. [Music] That's really adorable. First question, should you sell the IP of your game? I think you should only do it if three conditions are met. Firstly, you don't want to work on the IP anymore. Secondly, somebody else wants to work on the IP. And thirdly, you trust that someone. Long-term support and maintenance for indie games can be surprisingly stressful. You'd think that maybe once the games on Steam, you don't really have to touch it anymore. And for some games, that's how it works. But for others, it's unfortunately not. For example, my last indie game, Will You Snail, has an extremely exhausting tail cuz I decided to make a level editor. And I also was a lot less lucky with the porting studio. They eventually broke their contract and stopped paying me, which caused a lot of trouble and a lot of stress and is also why the game's no longer available on the Switch, by the way. I'm sorry for that. So, if there's a way to not have to ever worry about any of that for your game at all, ever again, that's honestly very, very freeing. You just give it away and

you're like, I'm completely free of this. I never ever have to touch this again. And this is a surprisingly big relief. Another thing to consider is that if you have a good IP and all you do with it is have it sit there and do nothing with it. That's like leaving money on the table. Essentially, if you sell your IP, you get to capitalize on that a little bit because you're not just selling what's there now. You're also selling the potential of what could be there. Oh, you get a I get a boon. Oh, I can switch between buildings and boons. Wall platform or blossom. Select an area to make all trees blossom for plus two points each. Ah. Ah, that's so pretty and so satisfying. Oh, the mills are different now. More cliffhouses. More cliffhouses. Wait, another boon again. You get get boons quite quickly. Multiplies the score of the next building you place by 60%. At first, I thought it was like um a little bit too

similar to the original, but I I can see I can see what you did there, Shaman. Ah, I love the new look. That's quite a lot of points. So, let's try activating the boon. [Music] And now we get This is yet another boon where you get to place some new trees on the island. On sand, I get fewer trees, but blossoming trees. Interesting, interesting, interesting. So once you decided that you might want to sell your IP, what should you do next? Uh, obviously just ask. The difficult thing is finding a partner that you trust and that is worthy of your IP. But the next requirement is arguably even more difficult. You need someone who also wants your IP. How the hell do you do that? The temple was already a building in the original islanders. Like one of the points that could give you the most points here, it seems to be in a behind the upgrade. So, obviously, I'm going to go with the one I don't know yet. Let's grow our pigeon network.

You're probably going to punch me for the answer again. People get upset when I when I give this answer. I think the first thing you need to do is just make a good game. Like, if if it's not a good game, if it's not a valuable IP, then nobody's probably going to want to have it. But then, at the same time, you do get away with a lot more than you think you do. So, even if you think it's not going to work, just shoot your shot. And when you do, do it confidently. It's usually a good idea to set an anchor for the price before the other party does. So I would recommend you should be the first one to name a price point. It should be a fair price, but it should also be a confident one. So don't underpric it. Also explain why you want to sell the IP so it doesn't come off as there's something wrong with it. We want to get rid of it. What you want to communicate should be more like there's a lot of potential slumbering in this IP and you can unlock it while we go ahead and work on new games or something like that. Oh my god. Steal some seaweed points. Get a boon. Level up grants points to

unlock the next building pack. So, I should use it when I need a lot of points to level up. Cliff houses could be kind of cool here cuz I can place them here in range of everything. Aviary is much more difficult to place than I thought. It wants houses but no castle and no city center. How am I going to do that? Also hates farms. It just hates farms. Oh, they also don't give any points. They only want mansions. Oh, they want they want mansions. Sauna can only be placed along the coast, providing outdoor comfort to your islanders. Mountain shrine. Place it high up to best utilize its large score area. Should it be more common that indie game developers sell their IP, that there are other studios that buy IP? I think just straight up, yes. Yes, I think this

should be a lot more common, especially in the indie games market, right? Not a lot of indie game developers think about this. There are not a lot of studios that specialize in buying IP, if any. Like, like I don't know a single one. Honestly, indie game developers are very good at innovating and coming up with valuable new ideas, but we're not very good at capitalizing on them. And honestly, most of us also don't really enjoy that part of game development all that much. So I wonder why are there not more studios that try to buy these IPs and try to do very good life cycle management, do updates for the games, and so on and so forth. I bet a lot of indie developers would really enjoy that service. And I also bet that if done well, this could be very very profitable for both sides. To be honest, I bet there are a lot of challenges that come with that. Like for example, making sure that what you the updates you add to the game are actually things the community wants and so on. But it's not like this is impossible to figure out, right? You can ask the community, you can do surveys, you can ask the original developer what they think. And most of the time, bigger studios don't want to take any risks anyway. So why not take

something that has already been proven to work and scale it up? One problem with this is that the games market changes very quickly. So what worked 5 years ago might not work anymore. Like for example, there are a lot more hyper casual citybuilders now than there were 5 years ago. But I still think that if you specialize in life cycle management and do basically nothing else but update games, you could build a very, very successful studio around that. And I really hope you get to see more studios like that in the future. Until then, I'm afraid, yes, it's going to be quite difficult to find someone who wants to buy your IP, but if you want to try it, then you should still try it. Solo applause to The Station and Codesync for the amazing job they did with this title. I hope that you are willing to support projects like this. There's a link in the description. If you found the game interesting, give it a go. Uh, and other than that, I just hope you found the video interesting. Thank you for your time. We hope you enjoy Islanders New Shores as much as we do.