We Failed at Publishing Competitive Games so You Don't Have to

[Music] all right we're GNA go ahead and get going here uh welcome everyone today we're going to talk about uh our company's failure at trying to get a competitive fighting game publishing label going um just from the premise there I'm sure you already know some answers yourself but let's get going uh if you're not familiar with myself for iron Galaxy uh I started iron Galaxy in 2008 um I was at Midway it was a studio Tech director uh before that um we ended up falling kind of backwards into doing a bunch of fighting games uh we started off doing a lot of like Tech Outsourcing that sort of stuff and then we kind of worked with Capcom on uh three really kind of well-received ports of Classics like Street Fighter 33d strike Street Fighter 3 third strike online edition dark stalker's Resurrection Marvel versus Capcom Origins uh and then kind of parlay that reputation from doing those kind of cool ports into years later taking over

Killer Instinct from double helix uh when uh Amazon bought them we did Killer Instinct seasons 2 and three and that's relevant for this talk because a lot of what we think about when when we're getting this like uh publishing label started is like who is our audience who knows us uh if you know Iron Galaxy it's probably from the fighting game stuff we've done uh they're probably fans of ours right um also hate Wind Jammers a ton thanks Pat uh another thing you might notice from is dive kick if you're not familiar with dive kick um it's the first thing we ever self-published and it's kind of the foundation for all the stuff we tried later um dive Kick's a really weird story the way it happened uh one of my designers Adam Hart was working on some of the Capcom stuff and he came to me and said hey I got a a little thing I'm working on on the side with some friends it's uh I want to run it by you though because it might be considered competing with the stuff we're working on here like okay let's hear what is it he's like well it's a game it's a two button

fighting game I'm like two buttons it's like yeah there's like literally not even like stick movement it's just two buttons one button jumps in the air the other button does a dive kick I'm like okay he's like there's two characters they're called Dive and kick I'm like okay he's like every character has a thousand Health every dive kick does a million damage like I'm like okay he's like and it's called Dive kick I'm like that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life go make it good luck godspeed and I laughed at him behind his back until I played it and then I played dive kick and I instantly fell in love with it like I kind of talked about like falling ass backwards and doing a bunch of fighting game stuff but I've always loved fighting games and fighting games are at their core they're about a couple things and the spacing right like knowing how far you are from your opponents getting yourself a good position where they're in more danger than you are they're about uh mind games and reading your opponents be able to predict what your opponent's going to do and punish them when you predict them correctly and dive kick has all that right and it also doesn't have like the

hey I got to make a z with the stick and hit three buttons exactly the same frame to do a shoken or whatever uh and it's like it takes all the complexity out of fighting games but it still keeps the essence of what's great about them it's always like a no-brainer we should do this at IG people know us from fighting game stuff so we bought it off of Adam and his team and brought it inhouse and uh we worked on it for about a year kind of taking it from that initial prototype to uh P to getting it out we put it out on PS3 vaita in Steam um we it yeah it was ended up being a pretty big game like one of the things I was really worried about with dive kick was the value proposition because like if you look at dive kick it looks mental right it's like there's nothing there and I it would be really hard to convince people uh how to play it and what it was about and all this so we want to make sure it was loaded up with stuff so we had 13 characters in there a bunch of backgrounds really robust online offerings and some single player stuff so this was the first thing we ever published uh we had do ourselves

you we we've worked on a bunch of games like Microsoft 2K WB whatever zenmax but this is the first thing sup nuts we were responsible for but I've been in a few meetings how hard could it be right so first thing you do obviously is identify your Market I read that somewhere um and we decideed to Target thank you we we decided to Target the fgc uh we knew that audience the best you know like I said before if you're in the fgc you've probably heard of iron Galaxy good bad or indifference um so we wanted to pick that is like okay that's our that's our core um one of the challenges of showing off dive kick is like I said it's really you look at it and someone explains it to you it sounds ridiculous the only way to get it people to like it and see what we saw in it was to take it like all to all these shows and we targeted a bunch of fgc shows we went to Southern California regionals Northern California regionals we went to CEO uh we went to ufgt which is now combo breaker in Chicago we went to Evo at Evo we ran a 350 person side tournament before the game ever launched which is insane we streamed the whole thing uh was really really cool and sure

enough when we took it places people loved it like it wasn't they liked it they loved it I remember the first time we showed it anywhere was PAX East in 2013 Adam showed it at his show uh but it was just a prototype this was the first time we showed the full game and we' never done a booth before we had to figure out how all this stuff works and we're spending all this money and doing all this stuff I was just afraid like tumble weeds would be blowing through the booth but by like halfway through the first day uh people were lined up 6 seven deep right and dive kick was the talk of PX East like it's not hyper like couldn't go anywhere without people like have You' seen this dive kick thing it was all like really really well and it was all really really easy and I'm becoming more more convinced this publishing stuff is super easy uh so then the game comes out it did about 200,000 units across all platforms uh we eventually also put it out on PS4 and Xbox One uh the game did awful on those platforms that's more an issue of timing it was way too late to put put a sequel out or sequel uh to put another Port of it out and I think people had enough dive kick in their lives at that point right um most of the

original launch end up coming from Steam which really surprised us cuz who we we're targeting the fgc we're targeting fighting game players and if you go to these tournaments we went to they're playing on PS3 they're playing on Xbox 360 they're not play like the weird M and bloody melty blood kids are playing on PC we're sorry Mel blood fans uh but no one's doing it no one's playing it right and so when people are buying steam we kind of realized we actually targeted the wrong audience we should have targeted the people that buy an indie game a month or they buy a coach Co-op game for their friend um so this was like the first like sign that like okay we kind of even though dive kick seem to do okay um it could have been a lot better and thinking about it more deeply uh I'm talking about dive kick a lot because it's the kind of the foundation for everything going forward we did and you can't understand why we failed with the next rev of games without understanding what dive KCK did um so people I think they'd be like hey

200,000 units that's amazing right uh well we actually lost a little bit of money with dive kick not a ton but some money um but we had great platform support Sony was an amazing partner for us uh they gave us some Pub funding from the pub fund thing so we could do the V version which is also the best version of dive kick if you're into that um they took us to E3 and they gave us an hour stream where they set up a press versus press tournament they had doc Dr schaw is one of the characters in the game they had cosplay they they paid someone to come in and do like Sony was an amazing partner for dive kick in a lot of ways like great reaction at Live Events like everywhere we brought it it killed it just destroyed right um good press and Enthusiast following like it was really weird like whenever we talked about dive kick people would write articles about it like if I wanted to tell this story of how Adam tricked me into buying dive kick like people would write about every time we put a trailer out they' post on their website it'd go on polygon it would go on Giant Bomb go on IGN and we didn't even have to email them they would see the trailer and put it up right again it's all super super

easy but how do we end up losing money given that clearly we ship too much of a game like I think uh I don't know how many of you are split like indev or like big studios like ours like we have 120 people at iron Galaxy right and one of the jokes I like to make is like you know someone can't like drop a pencil and pick it up without costing me $10,000 right just like nothing is cheap at iron Galaxy everything's expensive and it's a huge pain in my ass and uh when you work on a game like this for a year it adds up so it's pretty clearly one of the one of the core things I believe about dive kick we could have done a lot better even if we shipped ended up being the exact same game the exact same marketing plan if we would have launched with eight instead of 13 and then put five characters out over the next six months after launch we would have had a longer La sales window it would have been longer and better um we would have made a lot more money just from that one tweak Alone um and plus if the game didn't sell then we just could have stopped working on it and saved more money right uh we marketed the wrong group like if we took the money going to Northern California regionals Evo CEO and put it towards going to

stuff like you know ComiCon or an anime show or whatever uh we would have reached the audience that actually ended up buying the game and I'm sure we would have sold more units just doing that spending the exact same amount we did in a smarter way and then we squandered the good way with the Press like what I know now about publishing and like best practices and handling PR launches and marketing and all this stuff like the stuff we did right and a better job at with all these next round of titles uh if we would have done best practices with dive kick we would have sold a million units like I firmly believe that like the problem with dive kick is everything was too easy and we didn't have to work at it so we just thought everything would just kind of work out um that being said business is always full of failures and you're going to fail a lot when you're running a business it's about what did you take away from that uh experience and what can you package up going forward to reuse on an ongoing basis so we know have publishing experience we know what it's like to submit to the ESRB we know

what it's like to hire an external QA team to check for bugs for you we know what it's like to deal with Microsoft and Sony and all the weird quirks they have about publishing on their platforms right we know what it's like to deal with like the vacuum of information that can be steamed sometimes right um and that's super super valuable stuff we have a built-in audience now 200,000 people bought dive kick or got tricked into buying it whatever it is uh and they love it and they still like there's message boards that talk about dive kick the dive kick website all this stuff so they're iron Galaxy fans for life uh which is super awesome because it's something we never had before a lot of the work we did before is it's behind the scen stuff like we help a developer or a publisher ship their game on time we do a version of a version of a version of a game and it's not super glamorous it's behind the scenes but this is the first time it's like oh I love Iron Galaxy this is great so we had that better understanding of the market who we have to sell to talked about this a lot um the one thing I didn't talk about though is with the fgc stuff is like we really when I say we target the fgc it just wasn't by spending on events we really leaned into

like trying to get credibility with them in a way that was kind of dumb cuz it's like you know the fgc they got like a reputation like I love that community and it's filled like with loving like people that build things like build groups and friends but it's got a reputation for being like really rough around the edges and it's earned that reputation by and large fairly right and so our marketing was like that we talk about the game on streams we talked about it like that and I'm sure it was off-putting to people that weren't part of that Community right um we found voice right dive kick was the first thing we ever did we got to do the trailers like we wanted we did weird funny like in infomercial style trailers uh we got to do whatever we wanted and it was fun um yeah so we want to take those assets and flip it into a new publishing business right and the core premise for the business is okay what did we do wrong on dive kick above and beyond like everything else we probably just spent too much making dive kick so how do we get around that with other things we don't have anything internal we're working on right now that

kind of fits the bill so let's focus on like finding other people's games that are competitive right because like again if you think about who we are as a studio our fans play competitive games they play fighting games we know that let's not try to sell adventure games let's not try to sell firstperson Shooters because no one that knows us knows like anything about us in that context right um so let's focus on competitive games find ones that are near completion and in do micro Investments essentially in games that are near completion and be an amplification for whatever marketing or stuff they want to do um sorry just pointed at Tim Rogers Well Tim um and the execution on that we we had just a handset of core rules for games we were going to sign right again find things that you think you can recoup on on the first day right if you think about like okay games that's close to done with micro Investments say we make a $25,000 investment in a title right say we price it at $15

if we have to we have to sell 3,000 copies across three platforms on the first dat to recoup after dive kick I didn't think there was any way in the world we couldn't do that right dive kick taught me like no if we just do our things and and you know publish the games like we did dive kick there's no way we do that it's fall over easy it's like impossible to screw that up um we wanted to offer uh developers things other Publishers couldn't because we're a developer first and foremost who happens to publish right and we can help them like figure out how to get through QA he work on stuff like UI or whatever it is right um we so we also didn't want to do one title we wanted to build three and we always want to present them together the thinking being I think this is actually one thing we did that was pretty smart so uh you never show just one game in isolation right you show all three are together at all times so they're Associated together in people's minds like uh they don't see like the gunport trailer they see the video ball capsule force and gunport trailer so if they buy capsule force and they like it or they bought dive kick and they liked it they're aware of the other three

things they can do and it kind of just use them to amplify each other and then just do the same uh marketing and PR stuff we did for dive kick take it on the road a lot show it to people why it's great do streams do all this stuff and then obviously cash large checks um this is if you take away one thing from today's talk make it mefford's law first law of game development Nate mefford I started working with in 2005 he's a programmer he's without a doubt one of the smartest people I've ever met and mefford's first game development is the worst thing can happen to a young developer is to work on a successful game because you end up thinking you had something to do with it being successful I just soak it up and this was dive kick for us right like dive kick everything was easy whenever we wanted to talk about dive kick people would write about it people picked up the trailers people like they wanted to talk about dive kick there was an enthusiasm about dive kick and we thought it was us we didn't think it's not this game that's amazing right it's

us and this mechanism we're building around it that makes people so interested in it right um and once you lost focus on that it kind of re it makes you realize that every mistake you made was avoidable let's talk about those now so we've got this new um by the way I didn't realize mefford's first law of game development applied until I was writing this deck so I recent binding for your boy um I got to stop doing that uh we signed three games first one we signed was capsule Force it's kind of like got a nidhog screen push mechanic to it um it's got 80s Japanese anime kind of aesthetic to it it's really cool I love it uh gunport we signed uh that's the first one's by cloudit Eric and Cat uh second one was gunport it's necrosoft with Brandon Sheffield and his crew and I freaking love gunport right like it's basically volleyball with guns right and so instead of like bumping and setting like lamos you're shooting a ball across the net with a gun it's like totally cool video ball I fell in love with video ball is an electronic sport right um the

way to describe it to people if you've never seen it uh like the Shand that doesn't do it justice is it's like asteroids meet soccer right so um sign those all at once and then we launched the label try to get the volume here right so again we're going to talk about all these things at once and this trailer is kind of the first time we should have realized something we were doing was wrong because when we put out trailers for dive kick they like I said they'd get picked up they'd end up on every single website we wouldn't have to tell them they were out right um we put this trailer together Tim friend veto did this it's really good it's funny in the way we like to be funny uh it's kind of doesn't take itself too seriously in a way we we like to treat ourselves and it shows off all the games uh I think in a flattering way um and no one watched this trailer right like if you look at the US the views of it on YouTube it's super super low and we were used to getting like you know 50 to 100,000 views in a week on dive kick stuff right

um so this is video ball and I knew each game from a different way I I met uh capsule Force I got introduced to you from the devolver crew uh gunport I I think I Brandon I saw Brandon playing it somewhere no I heard I heard Chris charot talking about Gun Sport and I had to check it out and Tim when we were showing off uh dive kick Tim was showing off video ball with his publisher for the game at the time it was Midnight City and their Booth was always by our booth and so I got to know Tim and hang out with him and play a bunch of video ball I love video ball so to be clear I think all three of those games are super brilliant um in their own way and that's why we decided to publish them okay this makes a lot of sense but again like showing them all together like this um we did all this and no one no one bought the games right we went to shows we went to paxes We did an amazing booth at this last PAX East we had a billion people come through and play these games but they just sales weren't there what ended up happening capsu Force launched first on PS4 and steam um just never found an audience uh

we could never get excitement up for it we do a stream for capsule force and 44 people would watch it you know and we do streams for dive kick like this is this is like amazing we do like a character reveal stream for dive kick we'd have like 1500 to 4,000 people watching those streams that's like more than we get for Killer Instinct streams which is like a mindboggling um gunport and video ball both end up taking longer than we originally imagined and we had to make some tough choices uh like we don't have this infinite supply of money to keep dumping into this publishing venture it was like a fixed budget thing for us and so we just had to cut one of them so the other one could live so we end up cutting a gunport and I to be clear I can't wait to play that game when Brandon gets it done like I think gun Sport's brilliant uh and then we did video Ball video ball launched in uh this this last August I think on PS4 Xbox One and steam and it still hasn't recouped yet um so given all that like we're let's think about the faulty assumptions we made and why everything broke obviously there's mefford's first law of game development right but like

there's more kind of specific things about that um we kind of thought that like we had an audience of fans and it's core to who we are and they love Killer Instinct and they love dive kick and they're going to just because we say these games are good they're going to buy them right um it turns out and this is something I figured out way too late as well it's not that people like dive kick or Killer Instinct people like very specific things about the games they play right right like some people like the Sensei quotes from dive kick some people like that when Mr n runs backwards he squeals right and Killer Instincts some people like the shadow system or whatever it is right and if you're giving them an offering that doesn't have those very specific things in it they won't care they don't give a about it right so it's about really understanding the games you make and you pour your heart and soul into and you publish what what do people actually like about them you need to have those conversations with your consumers so if you're thinking about leveraging them later selling more things to them down the road you know exactly what you're

selling to them right um and you can't get like you cannot get too micro with that discussion like uh there's no level of detail that's insignificant when you're talking about that aspect of it so timelines and budgets the game would be small and predictable uh this is literally the dumbest thing I've ever done so uh and I've had some doozies I we're a game developer right and if you tell me hey here's an idea we're going to give you a short timeline and a little bit of money are do you expect a good result and my answer would be no way do I expect a good result like these things take time they take money they're done when they're done right like everyone knows that about games like they're done when they're done but yet somehow we wanted to find things that were like on a short timeline because we think they're near the end and make micro investments in them and expected a good result right um and that's just not how games get made it's not reflective of how games get made any business model you create for funding and Publishing games needs to take into account that you don't really

get to say when the game's done right you get to say when it comes out and it's either done or it's not right uh and that's like something that is very challenging about publishing and I don't really know short of like being absolutely Cutthroat about cutting Things Early uh I don't really know a good way to to fix that other than just have bigger budgets um and then lastly kind of talked about this one already if we just spent more time going to like you know Comicon spent more time going to like whatever all the other like uh kind of core shows we would have done a lot better uh not reaching out to the fgc directly that's more specifically for dive kick um so kind of wrapping up here uh there's two slides of learnings um kind of talked this first one already people like very specific things about the games they play uh it's interesting like what you think about it like this like what is on your game bookshelf that you play right and if you think about what you like

about all the games on your bookshelf you'll notice Trends you'll notice things like that and it's really easy to look at Steam and figure out what games people are playing and figure out should I even bother trying to Market it to this group or this group find people that like this game is that makes sense to try to Market to people that like uh uh Samurai gun or whatever it is right that's really easy to do with steam and steam spy um make an M minimum viable product um this really I mean you can only do this if the game allows it but like I said with dive kick if we would would have launched with eight characters and put the other five out over the following six months our sales curve would have been longer we would have made a lot more money we would add higher engagement and uh all those things are really good for like commercializing these things as products right have a plan to extend the game if it finds an audience this one is it's hard this is about finding a balance right because plans are cheap and Building Things are expensive right but if you don't have enough stuff people will never buy it cuz the value proposition is off and factor in the MVP discussion how do

you do it so like these two things are kind of like very coupled together in my mind you can only ship an MVP if you have plans you can easily execute on to make more stuff later right and follow up with it if it finds an audience right um and then finally hype just can't be created this is like you know again this is us thinking oh we made the hype for dive kick not dive kick made the hype for dive kick and it's an easy mistake to fall into uh with success to think like oh yeah this was good because of us and it's really no it's the game it's always the game um yeah so whatever your original business plan is like it would have been really easy to keep pouring money into gunport to keep pouring money into capsule Force to keep pouring money into video Ball but we wouldn't have I don't think we would have gotten a better result like video ball gunsport caps Force the market is so much more competitive now than what it was when we launched dive kick in 2013 right and I don't think you can do small

scale publishing on the budgets we were talking about in this day and age I just don't think it works right um and so pouring more money still would have been just a little bit of money in the grand scheme of things like we're you know these aren't like $2 million video games right so uh I think one of the things we did right from an iron Galaxy perspective it it it was very painful to have that conversation with Brandon and explain to him that we're uh we're walking away from gunport and he can have it back um but from Iron Galaxy's perspective it was absolutely the very right thing to do cuz it just it wasn't going to end well video ball Wouldn't Have Ended as well and you know we had to kind of pick our battles there um this is a good one I think this is if like if you're doing streams and getting 44 viewers if you're going to shows and not getting a buzz you know if you're doing trailers and they get 10 YouTube uh views on YouTube the first day you need to think about what the you're doing because you're doing something wrong right either something's wrong with the game something is wrong with your approach something's wrong with your Outreach you're doing something wrong and you

need to reevaluate even doing it at all right um good job that's me um don't artificially limit your potential audience this is a mistake we made on D kick I kind already talked about it we just leaned so hard into fgc stuff and had kind of a rough edge around everything we did with dive kick I'm sure it turned away potential consumers um in fact consumers that were the people that ended up buying the game uh finally if you're working working as a publisher you have external Dev teams probably don't assume anything about the external Dev teams like one of the bigger mistakes we made was okay we shipped I think iron Galaxy at this point has shipped like or helped shipped or helped shipped over a 100 products in eight and a half years like no one's done that right and you get really good by shipping things and these teams we work with are all very capable teams but they just don't have that much experience right and so we did not ask we we asked them questions we would ask ourselves we didn't ask them questions that you would have you should have been asking us eight and a half years ago

right and so I think we should have been more proactive about a lot of things I think we should have been more involved uh they all would have hated every second of it right but I'm sure we it would have been better if we were more involved in every like kind of uh even creative decisions and just talking stuff out so um remember mefford's first law of game development uh any questions oh sorry hey man uh good talk I was kind of hoping to hear more about your conference strategy is that was that purely for like player acquisition were you doing other stuff and when you talk about big shows like Comic-Con um being a smaller company do you ever fear about getting like drowned out next like The Avengers or something yeah so the question was he wants to know um what's our show strategy what do we what do we try to get out of showing it things like packs and our bigger shows worth it for a smaller team yeah it's strictly about acquisition and user engagement uh you can try to set press stuff up at shows

but they never come uh it's really challenging like the the other thing that's really great about shows is as a developer you build up a network of other developers that are your size and have your same problems and that's that's like it's a different it's like valuable on a different axis than getting fans of your company in your game getting drowned out at Comic-Con is absolutely a big thing but you need just don't spend a million dollars going to Comic-Con you know find a place where you can B sit at a corner of a table with somebody or whatever spend proportionately on what results you expect um yeah simply put so cool uh you were you were talking about how you had um 120 person Dev team yeah um so and you were talking about you're publishing these three other games uh what were you working on in between while you're publishing these games so the publishing team was very small it was me it was a guy Nam Eddie karez and Felix that was B essentially the publishing team and QA uh Chelsea who's my business partner runs all the other games we've done the big stuff we working on that time was Killer Instinct

that's like a 75 person team we did Elder Scrolls Online the console versions of that that's like a that was like a 35 Peak team uh just tons of stuff and they get the teams get smaller we have some projects that are like one or two people like oh well like we're doing the 4K upres for game I can't talk about unfortunately stuff like that so lots and lots of different kinds of projects um some creative some ports and some are just working behind the scenes to get stuff shipped and do you think um you know that publishing part that you said you know you end up being unsuccessful do you think it impacted like budget wise a lot of your other titles no so I I think I'm guessing I don't have to repeat these because he's on a microphone but just in case did uh this publishing failure cost us other opportunities and like this was money we set aside to set up a new business venture it was very budgeted it was very measured which is why we just couldn't keep dumping money into the games right um so no it didn't really have any impact it just meant like you know instead of starting our own indie game start setting the next dive kick we invested in these other external titles

right that's what it that's what it disallowed that's the opportunity it took away right thank you no problem think we got time for one more maybe we good all right thanks everybody [Applause]