What Do We Mean When We Say Indiepocalypse?

Thanks for uh being awake at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, everybody. Um don't forget to turn off your cell phones, fill out the questionnaire at the end, all that good stuff. Uh and also, we're hoping to have enough time for a little bit of Q&A at the end, but rather than use the microphones, we are going to ask you if uh to tweet questions to Stevewink as you go along. Um so, you know, keep those questions in mind. And also, we'll go to the wrap-up room after this. By the way, panelists, we're going to go to the wrap-up room after this. Okay. Um so right this panel uh features five panelists all of whom have released games into the marketplace and those games feature a range of success to not so success uh embodies different platforms different approaches to the market different backgrounds in indie games and as Steve mentioned our goal is to elevate this discussion with hard data both from our own businesses researched uh from the internet and other places and also some you know speculation and subjective ideas as well. One thing that we all agree on is that this word is super crappy. It's very button pushing and reductionist. It implies things that no one here believes in. Uh so we think of this as like a market phenomenon, maybe a slump or a

downturn. And we're hoping to address all of these types of topics. First panelist is Jeff Vogel. He is the president of Spiderweb Software. They've been making indie games for 20 years. And because of the consistency in these games, Jeff has been in a great position to notice market trends, and this has made him a high-profile indie apocalypse blogger in the past few years. Um we have Rebecca Saltzman, CEO of Fini. This is a small publisher and developer of recognized indie games whose stretches all the way back to Cannibol, but uh they recently released Panoramical and Feist, and they have upcoming releases Overland and Night in the Woods. We have Iman Iberic, who is a game designer and PR manager of Coffee Stain Studios, uh best known for the wildly successful Goat Simulator, but he's also going to be talking about the Sanctum series of games. This is Jordan uh Thomas, the co-owner of Question, who recently released Magic Circle. He's a recent addition into uh from the mainstream industry where he worked on the Bioshock series among other things. And myself, I'm uh Randy Smith, co-owner of Tiger Style. We're best known for iOS releases. There's two spider games in Waking Mars. And we have a little bit of a foothold in the Steam market as well.

So, is the Indie Apocalypse even a real thing? We've all read those blog posts about indies not making as much money these days. Sometimes lots lots less money. And we've heard scary stories about games that should have been successful but weren't. I've unfortunately heard a couple uh since I've arrived at GDC this year. And this is usually contextualized as a relationship of supply versus demand. Supply is going up, demand isn't keeping pace. So, one of our biggest marketplaces obviously is Steam. And the data we're looking at here and all of our Steam data is credited to Sergy Galvankan, the Steam Spy Guy, who generously provided this stuff. And what we're looking at is how many games were released each year into Steam. And um you see obviously it curves up. Uh the green light is considered, you know, one of the horsemen of the indie apocalypse. This is where it was launched in August of 2012. about a year later is the first time the hundred a batch of 100 games was green lit at once and by the end of 2014 we have um many hundreds of games being green lit in just a few days. So no big surprise here you open the floodgates there's more supply in the market. Uh so looking at demand we can

take a look at owners. So what this is is the total number of owners for all those games released in that year. So for all 86 games released in 2010 if you add up all their owners it's something like $17.1 million. Now, there's an obvious upward trend here, and uh the reason it goes down in 2015 is cuz those games came out more recently, therefore, they've had less time to acrue owners, right? So, it's hard to know exactly where this should be. Um, but probably we can assume it's at least as big as 2014. Now, there's a really important disclaimer here that because of the way the Steam Spy algorithms work, if a game occurs less than a thousand new owners per month, the margin of error for that data is like enormous. So, there's a lot of noise in this data. I included the high margin of error uh noise data. So, we can put both of those sets of data on the same graph. And we can even divide total owners by total games. And so, the peak here is in 2011 with just shy of like half a million owners per game. But importantly, that's just really crude math. There's no mythical average game. Um, but what we do see is this general downward

trend. Um, the reason we use owners as a metric is because Valve doesn't make public Steam's total sales numbers each year. But uh Steam Spy was recently able to estimate the size of the market and hot off the presses here for the very first time ever. Thanks to Sergy again, the Steam Spy guy. We have some numbers which estimate the size of indie games market in particular. So um uh there's some important disclaimers I mentioned below. Most importantly because uh Sergy is a lot more rigorous about data than I am. He would he refused to include any games that acrew less than 1,000 owners per month. Um but and that includes a lot of indie games, right? But basically what we can see here is that Valve processes significantly more than $1 billion of indie game sales every year and it's right around onethird of their overall games market. So that's pretty cool stuff. Uh turning our attention to the mobile market. This is data published by Statista. Uh some important disclaimers. This is just Apple the app store. Um and it's not indie games, it's all games. And moreover, only the dark blue part of this bar is games. The the rest of it's like all apps. And so what we're looking at is between July 2008

and July 2015. This is the number of apps in the app store total in the thousands. So we're approaching two million apps by the middle of 2015. And then demand, this is sort of covering um the same time frame. And what we're looking at is the number of downloads in the billions. Um and so we're approaching 100 billion downloads by 2015. So you can really crudely superimpose these two graphs in Photoshop and see if there's anything worth noting. It kind of looks like in around 2011 and 2012, supply is growing faster than demand. catches back up by about 2014. But there's this really important disclaimer here, of course, which is that um is that free to play, right? So free to the premium apps are only about 11% of the apps on the app store, but they uh acquire 92% of the revenue. This is the beginning of 2015. So free to play is another one of the uh horsemen of the indie apocalypse. It was introduced uh in the middle of 2009 and uh March 2011 is the first time premium revenue overtook premium revenue and it never went back. So, uh, I just want to be really clear like it's very

easy to be misleading with data even if you're not intending to be. So, as a primary example, those prior slides don't prove that it's harder to succeed today than it was in like 2012, for example. Uh, I've heard a theory that like a lot of the newcomers to the market are really hobbyists and they're not, you know, adding they're not taking out more demand than they're putting in. Um, that's a possibility. So, we did our best this, you know, to do this 100% properly is a monthslong research project for each of us. That's not what we did. But we are going to try to present you with some good information anyway. So here we go. Without further ado, let's bring up Jeff Vogel. That was terrifying. I'm going to go back to my hotel room and cry. Hi, I'm Jeff. Check. Check. Uh, okay. Who am I? Why am I standing here? I run a little mom and pop shop called Spiderweb Software. We're based in Seattle. We've are older than the stones in the dirt. Uh there's my URL, Twitter, and a blog upon which I've written a

fair amount on this topic, which is why I'm standing here. And uh what do we do? We write fantasy role playing games. Really old school, cheap, retro, Mac, Windows, iPad, Linux, and Android. I can get someone to do the port for me. Very textheavy, very storyheavy. Most importantly, all of our games, while not identical, are very similar. That'll become relevant when comparing sales later on. Here's a list of our games. Don't be ashamed if you haven't heard any of of any of them. I don't write hits. Don't get me wrong. I love hits. I'd love to have one, but I'm more I'm in the business of writing respectable niche titles in order to make a respectable middle class income. Here is a picture of my latest game for the iPad. You can see that, you know, it's fine. It's basic. It's simple. It's functional. I mean, it's not going to set the world on fire, but I'm also not publicly soiling myself either. So, I want to talk about the indie glut, the indie boom and bust, or

as it is commonly known, an economic phenomenon, I believe, called the business cycle, which is much discussed and I will get back to in more detail in just a minute. When I wrote about this, I used the term the indie bubble, which is a really nice clickbay title. It got me a lot of attention. It is not technically true. Uh it is not a classic speculative bubble in any way. I also will not be using the word indep because the word is silly, childish, and reductive. I like things that are silly, childish, and reductive. I'm just not really going to use the word because it's basically inaccurate. There is no apocalypse. Indie games aren't going to go away because we're awesome and people love what they do we do. But business circumstances change and we need to pay attention. So I'm going to tell you a little very brief story about what I think happened that will require proof and I'm going to be chipping in some of my sales sales figures just to point in the direction of what might be going on. This is just going to be a few points of data. It's not going to prove anything but it is a start towards accumulating data and

telling stories. So what's the story? Around 2008 there was a confluence of three big events. First of all, AAA development could arguably be called very stagnant with not a lot of innovation. A lot of people were getting kind of tired of what they were doing. At the same time, a bunch of indie developers showed that they could really bring it could really bring really compelling, awesome, highquality products to market while at the same time indie friendly stores like Xbox Live, like iTunes, like Steam became available. And as someone who scrambled for individual share sales on CompuServe in the 1990s can tell you, Steam is an infinite bag of miracles. Indie games became really hot all of a sudden. There was a big demand for them. People like me who had a had a back catalog that went on for days were able to make far more money than we deserved. Demand became really high. Oh my god, indie games are cool. A lot of people flooded into the market. A lot of indie games started being written

because people want to follow their dreams. Demand's really high. Supply goes up to meet demand. So what happened was first there and this happens all the time in all sorts of businesses. There's a growth period, a new market with a lot of demand appears. People see that there's money to be made. They flood in. Supply goes up to meet demand. But the supply keeps coming in. That's when you pass the peak and you enter what I believe we have been in for a while now, which is the recession period, where which is the long, gruesome, agonizing, bloody process where the supply, also known as human beings following their dreams, goes down until it meets demand. And there are some hard realities. Human beings only own finite money. There's only a finite number of gaming websites. They only have a finite number of space to put new articles if titles keep flooding in. is just not not enough. And that's what leads to the painful recession process that I believe is happening. But there is no apocalypse.

Indie games aren't going anywhere. We're a thing. I mean, we're a billion dollar a year business. That's amazing. There's just going to be the occasional adjustment and the occasional necessary shrinkage. Was anything I just said true? Really, I'm going to tell you sales from my last four games, and you can see my story and make your judgments from there. I'm going to be talking about my last four retro role playing games. There's Avdon and Avidon 2 which are new IP and A Vernum and a Vernum 2 which are remasters of older games. For comparing, it's better to compare games from like serieses. You can see the years they came out. Earlier was very much in when indie games were go-go hoay and the last one came out last year when maybe not so much. Uh I to raise the price for the fourth game because I you know had to to so my business wouldn't explode. It's it's hard to do research on this topic because it's hard to compare two games because comparing sales of two games is really apples and oranges, which is why I think I can be useful because my games are really similar.

They all have the same style. They are all the same sort of game. They're all for the same platform. They all get most of their sales from the same place. They all do their PR in the usual word of mouth bargain basement kind of way. There's just a couple differences I'll point out for the sake of intellectual rigor. the earlier games got a lot more press and a lot more bundle coverage although I think that's more of a factor of it being early in the indie indie boom before the glut happened and also obviously the earlier games have been out longer so they had more time to get sales but all of these games are well past their initial sales surge all of these games are in longtail territory I'm going to tell you two things I'm going to tell you the number of copies sold on steam and the number of earn amount of earnings on steam the key difference here is that number of sales on steam will include humb Humble Bundle and other bundles, but it will not include the money from Humble Humble Bundle. Uh, so the sales numbers are going to be really high, but a lot of those sales were for a dime each cuz, you know, yay, yay, 2015. Uh, there is a

lot of in inexactness. It's hard to do economics research sometime. So, I'm going to need to ask for a certain amount of forgiveness. So, here are the actual numbers. I'm going to draw your attention to Avdon and Avdon 2 first. So you can see that in between 2010 and 2013 there was a fair amount of drop in numbers of sales uh because there was less interest uh there was still some still getting bundle but interest in Avon 2 which is why the number is fairly high but you can see that the actual amount of cash made was a lot lower because everyone was waiting at that point everyone had learned just wait for the bundle a Vernum and Vernum 2 very much the same thing a Vernum got a fair amount bundle interest. A Vernum 2 has gotten basically no bundle interest, but you know, maybe I'll offer one of the humble bundle guys a car or something. Uh the number of sales therefore went way down. And of course, the earnings went went down quite a lot as well. I'm going to have to ask you to take my word for it that the quality of

these games is roughly similar. The user reception among the people who actually bought it was roughly similar. You can verify that somewhat by looking at Steam reviews if you want. uh all of my other games on other platforms have um followed the same pattern. I don't really have time to go into that and I also a lot of those figures I just don't have access to it anymore. So this is again another take my word for it and maybe sometime I'll do a longer talk. The big story, the big lesson from this this story is that the game business is hard and it's a tough competitive miserable blood sport kind of business. And there was a time when a lot of people were making a lot of money and it became possible to forget that. But now people have to remember in the games business success should always surprise you. Failure should never surprise you. That's the cost you pay for living your dreams. That's my story. Uh unfortunately there are a certain number of people going out of business and that will continue until life becomes tolerable for those few who

survive. Have a have a have a great day kids. [Music] That was awesome. Thank you Jeff. Um, so please welcome to the podium Rebecca Saltzman, CEO and co-founder of Fini. Let's do this. I have to push a start button for you. I'm looking at a spinning pin wheel. Okay, cool. Oh, we can do this. We got it because I Okay, you're on. Hey, my name is uh Becca Saltzman. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Fini. Um, I run the studio in Austin, Texas with Adam uh Atomic Saltzman. Um, we've been doing this uh since like 2006. The that's about how long the studio's been around under various names. Um, I handle the

business, legal, financial aspects of the entire studio. I also basically take care of our publishing branch. Um, I also do writing and design on our games, which people don't know. Um, so yeah, I do a lot of things. I'm also a mom of two kids and uh they're crazy. So that's me, that's my youngest, and that's where you can find me. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about first year revenue for our games. And these are like actual legit numbers. Um, and you're looking I'm thinking, "Holy crap, that's really high." Um, but it's not. Most people think Cannibal made us like millions of dollars. And like that is legit not the case. Um, right now that number you're looking at is 715,000. That's like our lifetime revenue on Cannibal, which came out like what, 6 years ago. The first year, that 273, that's what we made in the first year. These are some of our other titles that we've had. Uh, Gravity Hook, uh, first year 46,000, lifetime 54, hundreds, 437 in the first year. It seemed really awesome. Look at our lifetime. Um, likewise, Capsule about

six grand so far in the or 14 grand total. Um, and then our two most recent titles that were released last year, um, both of which are IGF nominated games, Feist, uh, is currently at about 105. Uh, Panoramical is at 33. All of these numbers are pre-platform holder cuts. Um, so yeah, this next one's kind of interesting because you're like, that's a lot of money. Nice job. How do we actually work in this industry? We're all on Revshare. This says how many Revshare owners are on each of these projects and about the average or the yearly average. But you have to understand most of our income has been made in the first year. I want to point out specifically hundreds which looks like it's done great but it made all of its money in the in in the first year. Um it didn't actually pay itself back. Um so yeah, our highest revenue shareholder would have averaged like 44,000 a year on Cannibal. Um we've had three Rev shareholders. Panoramical has nine. Um and that's that's how it works.

It doesn't actually come out to be much money when you start like cutting everything away. So just for numbers sake or whatever this is where the majority of our income actually comes from. Obviously u for fist and panoramical the majority is from steam. Um we have an other category which would be um weird uh deals that we've made with various companies. Um GG.io. So that's like our most recent PC release money. And then our mobile games. We've always done premium uh games on uh iOS. We sell mostly on iOS. That's where we've been. We've had had a really great partner with iOS. Um but yeah, we've always done premium games. We've never done premium. So, our Android market is very little. Okay. Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about what our expectations were before we released a lot of our games. Cannibal. We didn't have any. No

expectations. Cannibal went viral as a non-monetized flash game. We didn't even have an ad on that. Hit like, you know, 10 million people in the first month. We didn't even put an ad on it. Um, we ported the game to iOS in under 3 weeks. Um, what did it have though? It was it was novelty. It was the first. It was an autorunner. It's like a whole genre now. Adam's Wikipedia page is hilarious. Um, we had uh this weird media integration on Twitter. Twitter was sort of a new thing at that point. Um, we also used the hardware properly. In 2009, people were still sticking like virtual D-pads. Just kills me that that was like a thing. Um, our next game, Gravity Hook, like, why were the expectations were so bad? Like, we we've only made like 55,000 on this particular game. And it took six months too long. And we totally had a clone. We were beat to market. Um, and we were late to market. And the game was actually broken. We didn't figure that out for a year. There weren't enough things to grapple. So, good job us. Hundreds. Uh, took 18 months. It was 12 months late. Uh, we thought it was going to take six. It took 18. Um, we expected because we were grown-ups at

this point, 300,000 in the first year, which we totally hit with Apple backing. Um, but that was our worst case number. Uh, this paid back development for four people. So, it did not pay for our next project at all. Um, we only had about a 100,000 maybe to go forward to space out over four people. We expected a long tail after a high launch and it dropped off significantly after the first 14 months. Um, and at the Apple store like the store started to change. There's a race to the bottom. people didn't want to pay that much for a premium game. Um, and they didn't want to pay money at all on games. Uh, Capsule, the game is about a fix aix a fixiation for heaven's sakes. Like it's slightly niche. Like like if you don't get PTSD from playing this game, like I don't know who you are. Like are you a human? Are you a robot? Uh, we had no expectations for this. Like it was a passion project. Adam like sort of dives in on these things. He's like, I got to do this fee. We just missed the effing boat

entirely. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about this, but our worst case, like mine and Adam's absolute worst case number on Feist was 100,000. And we hit that. Like, so people are like only 100,000 on Feist. I'm like, dude, like we hit our worst case number. Like it's not a we it's not a failure when you hit the number you expect. And we hit that in 4 months. uh panoramical like what the f like how do you market a numovo game? Um worst case in revenue was 20,000 on that and we hit that in about 4 months. So why like why why did our why did we not make our Scrooge McDuck money? Um what went wrong? We have had cloning problems. Like that's a legit thing. Uh we made a game about asphyxiation. Not exactly like high popular title. uh remember Limbo like that awesome beautiful game that like was in development at the same time as Feice? Vice just took seven years too late and we underestimated the uh impact that that would have on the market. Uh we don't watch streamers. We're like old

people. Uh we didn't realize that that was like a legit thing and we undervalued that and uh we don't have we didn't have the vocabulary really to explain what panoramical was. How do you talk to people about this? Um, we also like have perceived like clone ripoff problems with Feist. Um, short awareness buildup. It was priced too high at $15. I mean, there's things that we just missed that we could have uh changed if we had had a little bit more foresight, which now we have. Um, because we're doing two new things. We have Overland and Night in the Woods coming out this this year, and they're like really really awesome things. So, what are we doing now? Um, we are streamer friendly. like it's been from the ground up on Overland. Like this is a game for streamers. Um we're building in features that are for streamers specifically. We're talking to streamers and asking what they want. Um we have replay value. Um Feist is an incredibly beautiful experience, but it's like a 2 to three hour experience. And how much replay value is actually there? Cuz we didn't even put in speedruns. Like that

wasn't even a thing. We didn't have like an achievement for that or anything. Like you played Feist and you're like that was nice, but Why why would I ever play it again? Like it's so ludicrously stupid looking back at it like that. We miss that. Um so replay value it's procedurally generated with Overland. Um it's basically infinite. Uh art tokenism is just like people always say Fini your games are so beautiful and it's we look for things and design for iconic. We don't want someone to go like uh oh your game looks like X Y and Z. So, we give a lot of um like free uh leeway for our art designers to like do it, man. Like, own it. It's yours. Um we have multiple releases scheduled, as many press bumps as possible. Um we're providing the words for players to describe. We really hone down on exactly how we want people to talk about our game. We have a 100% team online presence and we push people. uh our art designer for Overland has like, you know, a 100 thousand plus Tumblr

followers and we sometimes end up on the front page of Tumblr. And that's not because of us. It's because Heather's awesome and like we're utilizing Heather to push the game forward. Like we're not shy about that. Um we think Project Vulnerability is an asset. We talk about our funding problems. We talk about our crazy kids and our insane schedule and how we budget and like we're real people with real problems and we're in this industry so we're humans and like that's a legit thing. We want to be that. Um so people can talk about us in a lot of different ways. Um we also have cross media appeal. Um and we have mailing lists. We talk to people outside of the traditional gaming press like board game press especially for Overland kind of big deal. There's a lot of like crosspollination there. I can't believe I just used that word. I'm sorry. with Night in the Woods. What are we doing for this? It's super styled driven. Nothing looks like Night in the Woods. This is Scott Benson. This is what he looks like. Um Kickstarter, the supplemental free stories, direct email marketing. I mean, I could go on forever. Creative marketing, the game size and team story. Like, these are

things that are directly correlated with this particular game when we talk about this. And conventions. Be not here. Be at a convention. It shows really, really well. So, the pool's getting really, really crowded. This isn't an apocalypse. It's an overcrowded market. I told you I got kids and dogs. Uh because the barrier to entry has been democratized. This is basic economics. You have to step up your game. So don't go swimming without your flotation device. Hedge your bets and hedge those bets and hedge those bets because that's what we're doing and we have to um have a backup way to make money. You have to eat. Thanks. That's my thing. I'm going to be in the wrap-up room afterwards. Thank you, Rebecca. Okay. And please welcome to the stage Armen, whose last name I'll allow him to pronounce. Thanks. Hi everyone. I'm Armen Imbraich. Uh I work as a game designer and PR manager at Coffee Stain

Studios. Uh and I'm going to talk a bit about our um our experience with the so-called Indie Apocalypse. Uh we've released um actually not only Ghost Simulator, we released a couple of other games on Steam as well. Uh I'm going to talk about Ghost Simulator, but I'm also going to talk a lot about uh Sanctum Sanctum 1 and Sanctum 2. Uh cuz Sanctum 1 came out, you know, in the golden days of indies. Uh Sanctum 2 came out a little bit after that and 6 months after Sanctum 2 came out, people started whispering in the Apocalypse. Uh so I think they're really interesting um games to look at. Um when we released Sanctum 2, uh I noticed that uh it was a little bit different than when we we released Sanctum 1. Uh we there was some loss in discoverability. Uh my gut feeling was that people were a little bit more reserved uh in 2013. Uh and of course uh Greenlight hit Steam sometime after Sanctum 2 came out. Uh and that

was quite a big deal. Um we've all been to Steam Spy. Um, we've all looked at the numbers. Uh, but what what I think is really interesting is I did a quick um search at uh the words um steam steam sale, steam holiday sale, and as you can see um it's not very big in 2011, but sometime around 2012 2013, uh it just goes crazy. Uh, and we've, if you've seen that meme with Gabin with the crown and freaking dollar signs behind him, it has like couple million views on YouTube now. Um, you know, that's when people started, uh, talking a lot about the Steam sales. Uh, and so when we released Sanctum 2, uh, those early award-winning games like, you know, Braid, Limbo, Fez, um, if you've seen Indie Game, the movie, all those games from that movie, uh, started going on 75% off. So, what we

noticed was that we're not just competing with the games that are releasing right now. We're competing with the games that had like 95 in Metacritic score uh, and their own 75% off. Uh there was a quote uh that a player said. He was like, "Oh, I was such a huge fan of Sanctum 1. Can't wait till Sanctum 2 is on 75% off." And as a developer, you know, you get pissed off. You're like, "What is there a competition that I know about that's all about giving as little money as possible to the developers that make games that you love?" But of course, I mean, that's how consumers work. That's how I work. I'm not going to go and buy a shirt that's really expensive just because I want to give as much money as possible to the guys that made the shirt. Um, so that's something that we need to get used uh used to. Uh, when we made Sanctum 2, it had so much more content than Sanctum 1. Uh, Sanctum 1 released with like three levels. Sanctum 2 came out with like 16 levels. We had so many more enemies, uh, more weapon variation. It was just like bigger and better in every single way. Uh but it still sold

roughly as well as Sanctum 2. Uh which kind of it messed us up. Uh because you realize that, you know, just because you make twice as much content, that doesn't mean that you're going to get twice as many sales. Uh and you know, maybe you don't think that's a big deal, but when making twice as much content, it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars, then that's uh you know, it's quite a big deal to think about. Um, and oh, 40% of the players never finished the first level in Sanctum 2. We had an achievement when you finished the first level. Um, and mo a lot of our players didn't even have that. Uh, probably because a lot of people bought our game on a sale, never installed it. A lot of people bought our game, started it, and they were like, "Ah, I'm going to make some food instead. Do something else. Can't be bothered." You know, it was just $2.74 either way. Um, so that kind of o opened up my eyes for that. Um, when we

made Sanctum 2, the purpose was that, you know, we're gonna make the coolest, we're like 20 employees at Coffee Stain. So, we were like, we want to make the coolest indie game that you can make. We want to set the bar for indie games. Uh, we joked around that we were like small AAA, uh, lowercase AAA. Um, and the purpose of Goat Simulator was just just to make the craziest thing we could possibly conceive. And of course, Goat Simulator was widely more successful than Sega 2. Um, this is the revenue uh on Steam for us uh our games. Uh, as you can see, Goat Simulator has one/ird of Ghost Simulator has more than all our other games combined. Um, and as you can see, uh, Sanctum Sanctum 2 is sold a little bit better than Sanctum 1, but I think that's mainly because we discounted Sanctum 2 harder than we did with Sanctum 1. Um, why is the market like this? I think it's because money isn't the bottleneck for consumers anymore. It's time. Especially with um Humble Bundles. You

know, you pay $1, you get like five award-winning indie games and one AAA game. Um, so it's not like you don't I don't have the I don't have the $14 to buy this game. It's more like I have a backlog of 100 games that I haven't played yet, so I don't want to buy any more games till I finish those. Uh Steam doesn't have physical shelves. It's not like when you're at GameStop, you have um you know like 50 games on shelves and they have them for 6 months and then they remove them and replace them with new ones. They have all the games that ever released on Steam. Uh so you're not competing with other people on your shelf. You're competing with every single game that's ever released on Steam. Uh and they're also on 75%. Uh so I'm going to get I've been I've been very negative. I'm going to get to my more positive slide. How do you release a game in today's market? I think um making a radically different game just gives you a better chance of success because it bypasses a lot of the barriers that are on Steam right now

such as people's huge backlogs. Uh why buy something that's similar? Like if you're going to make you love Braid and you're going to make something similar to Braid, why would people buy that when they maybe maybe they already own Braid and haven't played it? Maybe braid is going to go on a sale soon anyway. Um, so I I I think basically uh what what it comes down to is that we're just going to get more variation on Steam. People are just going to try and, you know, make even more different things uh than they did previously. Uh it helps with discovery. There's a game called Cluster Truck made by genius Swedish people. Um uh it's about [ __ ] trucks. Uh, and uh, you know, a game like that is when you see cluster truck, you just got to click on it. And I hope go home and look up cluster truck. You're going to remember the name anyway, right? Um, and sharability. I think games that are fundamentally different from what you've

you've played so far are better water cooler conversation. Uh, it's more interesting to talk about that insane game that you played um yesterday than uh, oh, I played this uh, very well balanced game with good content and it had a good variation in enemies and there were a lot of different weapons. It's just more fun to talk about something that's totally crazy. You did it. I did it. [Music] Did you want presenter tools or not? Uh yeah, I forgot. Thank you so much, Armen. And please welcome to the stage Jordan Thomas of [Applause] Question. Thanks, Randy. Uh yeah, so hey, I'm Jordan. You're looking at a picture of The Magic Circle. It's the indie game we released in July of 2015. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how it did on Steam. uh because as

you pointed out it's all of it on Steam Spy anyway so why not share? But to do that uh I kind of need to find a metaphor that makes this a little bit more fun because Randy we only have the one game and uh this is all still pretty raw. So in that spirit I'm going to go with enhance enhance enhance a six-minute murder mystery. Uh the indie apocalypse if it exists is such a widespread phenomenon or cycle that I can't wrap my head around it without sort of zooming in personalizing it. thinking of it as a maybe a predator that has it out for games like ours. So before I can do that though, I need to talk about the game from an objective point of view and then we'll get into the subjective fun stuff that might have doomed us. So the Magic Circle is the story of a legendarily unfinished game. You play the hero of that world and you're sick of waiting for your story to start. So you steal the tools of game design and sort of fix the game from the inside. Retailed at 20 bucks. Uh our team comes from the Bioshock series, Dishonored and so forth. In theory, we know how to close from many years in AAA shipping lots of titles. We spent roughly 100k of real money, not counting crucially two years of opportunity cost.

But that did lead to some strong mainstream media coverage for our game. We had a lot of positive attention leading up and a reasonable social reach uh when our trailer came out. So we sort of leveled off at about 80% on Metacritic, 90% uh on user review scores, and we were recently nominated by the IGF for excellence in narrative. Thank you, by the way, if you're in here. Um, but the upshot is that we sold about 16 and a half thousand copies and we're on 44,000 wish lists. So, this is not sustainable for us to go on making games like The Magic Circle. We need to move on and fast. So, this chalk outline kind of represents how The Magic Circle did on Steam now that you know. Um, we are a little bit like a teddy bear who wandered in the woods in search of gold and got promptly sh. Uh, so the question is though, did we shiver ourselves? Right? Uh, did some of the some of the decisions we make come more more subject and more internal or are they things that might affect games like yours? Well, let's start with the external stuff, the stuff that at the very least

there are many parallels for in other short narrative games. So, first, that's our big thing. 3 to 6 hours give or take. And Steam players responded with violent negativity to that. They of of our negative reviews, over 50% mentioned length as the dealbreaker. Even reviews that otherwise read like ads for us. that surprised us. Um, but it dovetales in a pretty ugly way with the culture of sales on Steam. As some of my colleagues have pointed out, uh, Steam players know that on a long enough timeline, they can have your game for next to nothing. And so, it's not about whether they can afford you. It's about whether they it is love at first sight, whether there's a reason to buy your game right now, because otherwise they put you on a wish list and promptly forget you. And then finally, Steam is very much like the App Store, as my friends have mentioned here. Uh the the truth is that a short narrative game that does not update as often is less commonly on the front page of Steam. So keep that in mind. Now, what about the more flattering stuff that suggests that we screwed ourselves and we can do better in the future? Well, uh first we had no marketing budget. Uh we kind of um ignored the

potential for marketing through Kickstarter because we felt it was at odds with the tone of the game. Uh we focused at first on making a great game and hope the rest would sort of self-align. That was the wisdom of 2013 when we started the thing. But the big one was that our game is pretty polarizing. Um, it has a very stark art style which people tend to love or hate. Uh, it was buil as a comedy, but it has some very serious parts. It sort of focuses on how games and game developers can go wrong. And I remember the IGN review is just like this game is angry. And that kind of stuff uh leads to to fairly polarized opinions in the user base as well. So, but we had compromised for so long that we really needed to make something that was radically unlike everything we had done before. And we're still quite proud of that, but it has had some cost. And we on that note could have focused on something that had a more clear genre for our debut title, which a lot of developers have done. Uh Steam players really do respond well to your game being like anything some some kind of touchstone. Uh so, you know, what does that where does that really leave us? Uh question uh and and you

guys if you are thinking of making something like this. Well, first I would say that if you are considering a short narrative game, maybe don't rely on Steam to make you piles and piles of gold and fund the next projects exclusively. And if you do, certainly consider uh some expansion plan so that it isn't just a fire and forget project. There is a happy ending here though, which is that teddy bear chuck out line was pregnant and the paramedics made it to her baby. We we we were here. I may talk to you, but just look at him. He's kind of mean and he might turn out to be some sort of vengeance-driven vigilante. Uh the the time that that we have spent on the magic circle has sort of claimed our innocence. We are we are not the same as we were when we started out and that might be healthy, but it still feels like a little bit of a loss right now. Um but um curation is your friend. Uh curated bundles coupled with consoles which are harder to get onto have a very strong possibility of bringing your game to a somewhat sustainable overall loop. relying on Steam solely was was sort of

our mistake. Uh Mike Rose's talk, which you can find at that link or just in the GDC vault under Mike Rose, uh talks about how if you have reasonable support from the platform holder and uh decent scores, you can see up to 30,000 sales on the PS4, 20,000 on the Xbox One. That even somewhere in between would put us in a position where we might recoup some of that opportunity cost I mentioned earlier. Our next project is much safer. Uh it is multiplayer focused. uh has a very long tail and does actually have a a solution in place as a primary design goal to help players understand why they would want it now. But I can't go deep on that. However, if you survive through AAA, especially PC AAA, this might be something a little bit familiar to you. The the flight from PCs to consoles, the focus on multiplayer and the receptivity to publishers, all of which uh we kind of went through this once already. I'm just hoping that if we go through another one of these boom buff cycles, we can pick a better name than Indie Apocalypse. [Applause]

Thanks. Thank you, Jordan. All right. Super cool animation. Okay. Uh again, I'm Randy Smith of Tigerstyle and um Tiger Style's first indication that there might be such a thing as an indie apocalypse was when we released a game in 2015 and it was doing much less business than games we released uh previously in 2009 and 2012. So what we're looking at here is our first 6 months of revenue for a flat comparison. Uh but it gets a lot worse if you add in lifetime revenue and development time. So Spider 2, our most recent game, took us nine person years of effort, but it made significantly less money. So if you look at that in terms of ROI, specifically net revenue per person year, um in 2009, uh Spider 1 was making us close to half a million dollars, um per person year, but uh Spider 2 is making us 13,000. So this is a very not sustainable, um indication. So we

actually had every reason to believe that Spider 2 was going to be a better commercial product than Spider 1. I mean, it's on more platforms. Um, there's this hilarious story about how we to promote Spider 1, we just released it into the app store one day with absolutely no messaging or promotion whatsoever. Um, compared to Spider 2 where we did like, you know, a bunch of the things indies do when they're promoting a game. We had the social media stuff and a website and a trailer and we went to expose and all that kind of stuff. Um, they're both both games were covered pretty well by the mobile press, but Spider 1 was absolutely ignored by the core gamer press whereas Spider 2 was picked up very favorably by like, you know, a good smattering of the who's who of the core gamer press. um they're reviewed about the same way. They're both good games um by most metrics, if not all metrics. Um Spider 1 is this very minimal game. It's extremely focused around this one core high concept. Um and Spider 2, you know, you better believe we spent those nine years like adding stuff. There's tons more content. It features lots of polish, depth, replayability. Uh we kept the previous high concept and we expanded it with some things including this feature where it knows where you are in the real world and then it matches the time of day and weather in

the game with the what where it is at your location. Um, so all kinds of things for the press to talk about, right? Um, but despite that, like Spider 2 did all the work. Spider 1 got all the the glory. It was the one that got editor's choice from Apple. Um, Spider 2 got a less important banner from Apple. Uh, no coverage from Steam whatsoever. Um, Spider 1 was game of the year on a bunch of different websites and IGF and some other stuff. And Spider 2 is, you know, on on the year end of year list for quite a few mobile websites, which is very pleasant. So, obviously Spyder 2 is a better product, right? But is it three and a half times better if we look at the first 6 months of revenue? Or if you want to go ROI, is it a 40 times better product? Cuz if it's not, then maybe the market's to blame, right? So, do we blame the Indie Apocalypse? Well, the week we came out, you could buy Batman Arkham City Game of the Year Edition with all downloadable content for less than $5 on Steam. And of course, Clash of Clans was still pulling in $1.5 million every single day. And we cannot compete with these games, obviously. But, you know, at the same time, there was a game with absolutely no graphics about programming in assembly language that was kicking our ass and making the kind of money that we

were used to making. And there was a chooser an adventure game that was told with push notifications that was raking in lots more than that. And this kind of illustrates a big games versus small games concept that I'm going to come back to later. So, was there something wrong with Spider 2? Was that the problem? Well, it was a multiplatform game and that among other things probably meant that's why we got less support from Apple. Uh, it's not a great match for Steam. like it was really hard for us to shake our mobile legacy despite working on that an awful lot. Um, and you know, we didn't really play the Steam PR game very well. Um, is it because it's a sequel? Um, I think it might be. Um, we felt like this was a good decision because it was less risky. We had a fan base that was clamoring for us to produce a sequel. We knew that we hadn't reached our full audience and so we could expand into them. Um, and we did we did our jobs correctly for sequels. Like all of the press quotes are like this is exactly how you're supposed to do sequels. you know, we retained everything that was good about the old and then we made a bunch of new stuff, too. And but, you know, Armen and and Jordan have already alluded to this, like this is an audience that's interested in cool new things. And so, like, even if your design and art and

everything about your game is like all but objectively better than the prior game, which they gave a game of the year award to, like the, you know, those that type of attention is going to fresh new concepts in this market. The indie market likes high concept stuff. And so, ironically, by adding lots more stuff, we were sort of diluting our high concept. like the audience had to spend more effort to get to the part that was cool and unique and fresh about the game this time around. We might have been better off just focusing on one thing. Like this is just the game about our cool mystery concepts or this is just a game that focuses on that real world location time and weather type stuff. Maybe a different way to think about it is to think about what Spider 1 did correctly or benefited from why it was successful. And so, you know, uh it was released at the dawn of the app store. It was a much less crowded market. Free to play didn't exist yet. The market was growing very rapidly. And um you know our intention was to stand out by making a very solid heartfelt game on a platform where that wasn't the standard at the time. So among other things it made Apple's hardware look good and they really you know supported and featured us a lot. So coming back to this chart another way to consider this comparison is like you know Spider 2 uh hit a

market upswing and it hit the right notes to ride that upswing versus Spider 2 which was released into a parallel marketplace and it was not Indie Apocalypse retardant. So what do I mean uh by an indie apocalypse retardant game? Um, well, here's my thoughts on how to approach this. Uh, I like to think about games that are big, medium, and small, and where big and small are good and medium is a bad idea, uh, financially speaking. And this is kind of mostly in terms of production effort. Like, you can see the big games are kind of like the triple A games, if not AAA. Um, and the problem is that medium games can't compete in the arms race against those big games, which are so expansive and they have all this depth and spectacle and gloriously long play times. And compared to small games, medium games are like really expensive and they're also diluted. you know, those small games get right to the crucial high concept more immediately. They're more self-evident. Um, you know, but that said, there's a bunch of other medium-sized games I could list here. You know, potent potentially you could qualify them that way. And they've done very well. So, you can think about, hey, why did these games succeed whereas Spider 2 did not. I think it's super important to target your platform, you

know. So, um, if you're targeting the App Store, it's a really good idea to be Apple exclusive and to show off their hardware features. um that audience really likes games that are very immediate, very beautiful, and your goal is to get some featuring from Apple because if you don't, you can, you know, just throw your game out the window. Um and you know on Steam there's a bunch of design qualities that the Steam audience seems to like. They are looking for deeper, more beefier, more involved games. They think like things like systemic gameplay, replay, multiplayer, and so forth. You should uh I see games successful when they like have this very long PR campaign with multiple stages to build a big audience and awareness before the game comes out. And the goal is to launch strong and have those Steam metrics put you on the front page with featuring. And of course, there's consoles as as Jordan mentioned last year, Mike Rose spoke at the IGS about the console market in particular. It's still curated, so it does limit supply. And uh you know, we're we're porting Spyder um to the PS4 and VA. So, we're hoping that will work out for us. Um I actually don't think it's a wonderfully great idea to go multiplatform on launch day. Um especially if you're a smaller

game on that side of the spectrum. You know, I know there's this lever in Unity or whatever, and you can just pull it, and it pops out all these versions, and it's so free or whatever. Um, but actually, these things are a big distraction. They take a lot of time and attention. You really should be tailoring your PR campaigns and your game design around them. So, my approach would be like, don't do it simultaneously. If a game is taking off and is successful, think about where to port it. And if you're going to port between App Store and Steam, definitely start on Steam, not the other way around. I think indie teams of the future are probably going to need dedicated PR people and dedicated business people, which is a little sad because if you're like me, you sort of got into indies to get away from this kind of stuff, but there's a lot of really important work here and you have to treat your business like a business and have people who are helping out with these important things. Um, and I think it's, you know, we might need to reconsider publishers because they provide all of those things that I just mentioned and they also really help with discoverability. They can provide you with funding. Um, when I think about the future of indie games, I wonder a little bit. Uh, you know, I like to compare to like indie music or indie film. Uh, indie music is just an enormously like ridiculously crowded space. And

basically, everyone's a hobbyist who doesn't ever think they're ever going to make any money no matter how great, you know, their their album is or whatever. Uh, indie film's not that far apart. The barrier to entry is a little higher, but it's still risky. Um, and I wonder a little bit about are we going to come up with better discoverability tools? Like indie music's got a really strong emphasis on blogs and labels and so forth. Um, and just to end on a high note, I just want to point out like I'm old enough to remember what it was like to make games in the 90s and it was [ __ ] awful. Like the publishers had a strangle hold on creativity. Like unless you were making a game where it was like your Edward's pistols hands killing [ __ ] like it wasn't going to get published. And so you had to kind of like try to squeeze in your expression and art on the side of that. And it was pretty awful. Um, and you know, I think indies proved like we got everything we wanted. We have like this list of stuff that we're like we talked about in the '90s like this is what it's going to take to bring games out of this ghetto. Um, and we got what we wanted and now we just have a much bigger marketplace full of more creative people and I think that's a really good thing. I'm like happy to have them here. So that is it for our [Applause]

[Music] presentations. Okay. This is depressing. Do I do I have a business? Did I just go home and check my bank statement? Um, let me let me start with one, then we'll review this together. Um, so Armen and Jordan, I'm going to give you the hard question that Jordan asked to dodge. So, do your best, Jordan. But you guys both mentioned this idea of games um that need to be bought now and you and as a customer, you can't just wait for the sale. So, can you give us a little bit more thoughts about what that means and what to look at? And I'll let Armen go first so Jordan can dodge better. Yeah, definitely. Uh, I think it's um I think it's really important to make something that you know you you can wishlist things on Steam and then you get an email when the game is on sale. How fun how fun isn't that for like if you're Valve that's a lot of fun. Uh I absolutely I think it's absolutely correct cuz uh we all have our Steam backlogs and I think making something that people got to play right now.

You're like you just got to click it, you got to buy it. Uh it it makes life so much easier. Um, yeah. Uh, I guess I would add to that that in addition to the sort of like that's a toy. It's not like any of my other toys and I must touch it because there's not going to be another goat that I can sort of molest and ragdoll. Um, I I think that there's also some value in the idea of a communitydriven game. Uh, that there is a wave that streamers and other folks wish to ride. In other words, something about your game uh where there is some benefit to mining out the unknown for kind of collective games culture around your title. Um there there's horror games are very good at this where there's a lot of new scares and eventually they do kind of get used up by the sheer aggregate of streamers, but early on they kind of want to be there before anybody else can. So their reactions are novel. So the people who can who come to their stream to watch your game exclusively um get something that uh everybody else hasn't already kind of mined out. I just want to add one final thing. It doesn't just have to

be Farm Animal Simulators. Uh what what Jeff does is basically uh I think when your when your fans see your games, they're like, "Holy [ __ ] there's a new Avernum out. I got to buy it right now." Nothing beats having a fan base. Yeah, exactly. So, I think it it it can be doing something totally crazy, but it can be having a niche and providing something that no one other provides. Cool. Um, we're getting a lot of questions on the tweets, uh, to the tone of like, why do we think supply is going to go back down? If, you know, the the tools to build games are so accessible and so easy, doesn't that just suggest more people are going to come in here and want to build games? Again, kind of to my indie music point, whether or not they're intending to ever make money. Um, do either of you two want to answer that, have thoughts? Go ahead. Well, the beatings will continue until morale improves. Um, of course people are going to keep writing games. People are going to keep writing games like crazy. But if people want to keep writing games to make

money, there is only the the the money pool is still finite. And by the what I'm saying might not be true. I hope it's not true. But I I believe that, you know, if people while people are going to keep writing games, if people keep writing lots and lots and lots of really big budget, really intense games, they're going to they're they're they may run into to problems. Yeah. Just to add on that, this is actually something um Randy talked a little bit about, but the market's not going to get less crowded. Like that's just not going to happen. People are going to become hobbyists. They're going to get like real jobs. They're going to, you know, hedge their bets like a thousand times. But what's going to happen is people who work for dis like do discoverability like you know they'll start uh cross-pollinating their own audiences. It's something like that that it's half the reason why we entered the publishing market is like how can we grow a bigger audience and it's we get a whole bunch of games under one umbrella and then we have access to a whole bunch of other people. Um, I think that's where it's going to go is like it's going to constrict down and then you're going to

um like PR is just sorry, sorry Indies, we've been talking about this for years, but PR is just going to be a [ __ ] thing you have to do. And like it sucks. Like you have to find somebody that's like good at it and can like talk to people and like get the message out, but like our audience is like a fraction of a fraction. like that's who plays indie games and like you gota you got to hold on to your customers and like get the message out. Cool. I mean this one this next question kind of dubtales with that which is like well what what are your thoughts on if you've done everything right in terms of like your marketability your game you have like it's good to stream you have good talking points a distinct art style and it's not catching on. Is there anything you can do to sort of salvage your marketing campaign? What what are your thoughts on that? Well I can actually pop in cuz like we're doing this right now. Uh we like we talk about this a lot. We take like legit contracts. Like we when we release a game, we know exactly how much like our like this is how much we spent and this is how much we need to make back. And if

it doesn't make that back in sales, we have 300 other backup plans in place. Like uh and like that's that's just what we do. Like uh we have a family, we have a house, we have like a life. And like I can't destroy that because I work in a volatile market. So that's that's just the reality of like being a grown-up. Like it kind of sucks. But like we have backup plans on backup plans on backup plans and like I could talk about that all day. And uh I I would I would add to that. Um, sorry, just that uh the curation thing is also potentially your friend like I I mentioned during the talk that that there are bundles out there which can sort of buy your game in lumpsum and create word of mouth that would otherwise not have existed at the moment of launch. Uh that stuff has at least created a nice little blip in the curve uh of sales friends that I I know who have released games and then been approached a while after release.

So, one of the most amazing advantages of being an indie that people discuss not often enough is that you get to own your work. And that's incredible cuz if you release it and it kind of flops, you still own it. You can release it for new platforms. You can wait 3 years for a better market and remaster it. You can wait 10 years and remaster it and re-release it. You You don't just have the cash. You have a thing that can be generated for you to generate more cash later on. It's true. We have cannibal. Like maybe someday we'll do something with that. Like it's there. It's just sitting there waiting to be mined someday. Exploited. Exploit that [ __ ] We're also getting questions about sales and like this the sale the prominence of sales and how they drive um you know the customer's behavior like is there any thoughts anyone has about like promising never to put your game on sale for the six first six months or anything like that? Dude, don't make that public. No, don't do that. Don't don't think why not. Why isn't a good marketing strategy? No. What are you going to do? Are you going to write it on Facebook like or like

send your press release? People aren't like everyone doesn't know everything instantly about your dialogue window at the beginning of your game. No, but why not do that? No, try it. Yeah, I don't know. Try it. Like the forums, like you're putting these games out on places where like the forums are like cesspools of horror. Like they're looking for any reason to destroy you and they don't care if you've made something amazing. Like why give them you may internally say I'm never putting this game on sale. That's fine. You don't got to tell anybody that. Like and you may launch this game and be like dude this was bad but I made this public statement and now now there's another thing be like yeah if you like now you put it on sale two weeks like there's some stuff where it's like you don't need to talk about this stuff publicly like tell your fan base like gaming like there the forums are cesspools you guys. Like don't give them ammo to be mean. Like make your games and like be a business person on the outside of that.

Yeah. If if you're going to do it, get security cameras cuz someone's going to pipe bomb your house. Don't let your mom read the forums. Okay, last question. Are we all screwed by VR? Do we all need to Do we all need to get VR jobs? I already have one. bedroom. My answer is no. I hope every single one of you moves to VR cuz then more candy for you. All right. Thank you very much everybody for coming. Uh we're all going to move to the wrap-up room. Yep. I'll be taking on all comers until free lunch is available. All right. Thank you.