Read on Twitter
Got on Twitter to talk about the business of indie games and the world is exploding but IM STILL GONNA TALK ABOUT IT because I recently gave a bunch of advice to someone and you all should hear it. THREAD: How to reduce your risk while developing an indie game.
At a basic level, your risk in the probability P that you& #39;re going to make X dollars if you spend Y dollars. If P == 1 and Y < X and you have no better options, then you should immediately spend the Y dollars. The problem is figuring out P X and Y.
You& #39;re probably not sure at all whether you& #39;ll make money, in other word your P is unknown and low. So you have to discover P and raise it. If you discover P is low and can& #39;t be raised, you should cut your losses and find a different game to work on.
You can discover P and raise it. Exactly how you do that depends on what you& #39;re working on. But it& #39;ll probably look something like building a prototype or vertical slice and putting it in front of players who have previously purchased similar games to collect their feedback.
Each element of this could be a whole book, but this is Twitter so you& #39;re getting the Cliff& #39;s Notes.
How do you know when to responsibly quit your job or invest your savings into your indie game? The answer is when P becomes known and goes up. Use the stair-stepping method: When P goes up a bit, your time/money investment goes up a bit. When P is highest, you go all in.
Spend small investments of time/money to discover/verify P, which unlocks larger investments, the goal of which is to discover/verify higher values of P, and so on.
When you start out, risk is high because you have no data. Invest a small amount in decreasing risk, eg collecting customer opinion data on similar games. When your risk is lower, invest a modest amount in building a prototype, and collect further data based on it.
Use it to attract a Twitter following, or to sell preorders, or to sign up a mailing list or find a minimum DAU. Something concrete that can unlock the next higher investment. *Do not* proceed to the next step without *plausible and concrete* proof that the game will sell.
You: "The more I spend on the game, the more it will sell." This is false when used as a general rule. Features matter, but the marketing work is a larger factor. You should be adding features only because it increases P, eg players indicated they quit the game for lack of it.
You& #39;ll be surprised how many features you don& #39;t have to build if you take this attitude, and the fewer features you have to build without decreasing the customer& #39;s perception of quality, the faster you can release (ie the less it& #39;ll cost you out of pocket.)
If you& #39;re thinking, "The game needs XYZ features" but you haven& #39;t talked to your players about it, then you don& #39;t actually know. You& #39;re guessing and you& #39;ve maybe guessed wrong and created yourself unnecessary work. You should validate the assumption against your player base.
"OK I will go gather data on whether the game is fun." No, that& #39;s not what you& #39;re after. You& #39;re a game designer, it& #39;s your job to identify fun and you don& #39;t need players to tell you.
Watching over-the-shoulder playtests is excellent for improving the first-time user experience, but they won& #39;t raise P.
"OK I& #39;ll start doing this when I start marketing." If you find yourself saying this, you& #39;re probably confusing marketing and advertising. Marketing isn& #39;t selling your game, it& #39;s earning the trust of an audience. Save the selling for the days before launch, start marketing now.
Marketing and finding/raising P are in fact almost the same activity. If you find yourself with a big Twitter following, name recognition, and Twitch streamers banging your door down, then you& #39;ve accomplished marketing and raised P real high.
If you wait for launch to reach out to media then it& #39;ll be too late. You need to gain their trust first - ie their confidence that if they stream/report on your game then people will read/watch, because you& #39;ve already shown your game has an audience.
Media aren& #39;t audience attractors for game developers. Media deal largely with games that are already popular. Sometimes a popular streamer will play your game, but this is lightning in a bottle and isn& #39;t reliable. You probably shouldn& #39;t make it your plan.
OK enough beating around the bush. HOW DO YOU RAISE P? Read on for answers.
You& #39;re a scientist. You create a theory. This theory has structure that you can break down into small pieces. You test each piece. When your tests are successful, P has increased.
The person I recently advised came up with this wonderful model:
1. People need to know about the game. That means word of mouth/Twitter/articles/streams/etc.
1. People need to know about the game. That means word of mouth/Twitter/articles/streams/etc.
2. People need to want the game. That means art and features.
3. People need to be able to buy the game. That means a storefront and distribution system.
Your job as a games businessman is to come up with the model and figure out how to break it into smaller testable pieces. It might be incomplete or incorrect, or difficult to test. This is the main reason why business is hard. It& #39;s your job to figure this out.
Break each of these down into something more concrete. Get as specific as possible. It helps me to write a document as if I& #39;m pitching to an investor or boss. Who will you be selling to? How will people know about it? How will you get Twitter followers?
If someone starts streaming it, what streamer will have done that? Why did they do that? How did they hear about it? Work backwards from what you want to happen and figure out what you need to do to get there.
What art style will resonate with your audience? What do similar games use? How can you test it? Can you build a cheap and short pitch video that shows a few different art styles and show a few random players of similar games?
The distribution and store model is largely solved for games, but you have a lot of options. The early access decision, for example, is affected by how people interact with your game and. You choose to do EA because you think it will help you along your path to your goal.
If you don& #39;t have an existing audience then this is an uphill battle. It& #39;s difficult and time consuming and you have to do it in addition to making the game. (Another reason why you should have as few features as possible!)
If you& #39;re a game developer who possibly worked for a AAA company or as a programmer for Google or something then you are good at managing development risk. You know how long it will take you to build your game. What you don& #39;t know is whether people will buy it.
So you need to spend most of your time where your risks are - creating and testing the model of how you go from 0 players to whatever number you need to be sustainable. Put the editor down and open a spreadsheet.
End of thread :)
