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[Dan MacDonald]

Thats a lot of accumulated wisdom there Fost. All good stuff.  Contrary to the current trend of independent game development I actually think the old wisdom was the best. Back in the dexterity days everyone wanted to make money making games, "go fulltime" etc. Being a full time independent was more about starting your own business then anything else. That's still valid I guess, but the important part was how to go about this.

The prevailing wisdom was to target an audience that wasn't being served by the retail industry or other big players. Steve Pavlina was making himself a very nice living with logic and puzzle games intended for a more mainstream demographic. In those days Real Arcade was just a little site with a few crappy games on it.  That said there was still a lot of money to be made, the audience was huge and largely under served. Indie's piled on by the droves, with no established competition there was a lot of opportunity. People were busting out games and making money.

Somewhere along the line everyone was making games for a wide audience, more portals showed up, even publishers, venture capitol, and a lot of the same busted patterns that have run creativity in the retail business into the ground. Still more then ever independent developers were crawling out of the woodwork to get on the casual bandwagon.

Some quick bucks were made but ironically, and this brings me to my point, the only ones really to endure were the ones that set out to do something different. I'm talking about wild innovation either, I'm talking about something not casual.. anything really. Guys like positech, Winterwolves, Moonpod, Ninjabee, PocketWatch, LargeAnimal... even GarageGames (though their kind of a unique case). The odd thing is for all the quick money people were seeking in casual games it was really the ones who set out to do something different that really found the means to sustain themselves.

In the end the old advice is still the most practical. Don't go where everyone else is, don't do what everyone else is doing, your only going to make it more difficult for yourself. What the years have shown is that there is more success focusing on making good games as opposed to making a quick buck. Money leaves quickly, but the experience you gain trying to do something different and your own you will stay with you forever. (at the risk of sounding cheezy)

[lexaloffle]

I certainly agree that for indies wanting to maintain some kind of creative freedom and sustainability, creating a loyal customer base to serve as ongoing patrons of one's occupation is certainly the better approach.

It's worth emphasizing how incredibly long that road is, though, before it reaches any kind of indie promised land. There are two main problems with it:

1. Self-publishing indie games is a really stupid way to make money, in general. Therefore (as Fost described), you have to put a lot of effort into non game-development related work to get by.

2. It's much easier to leverage your existing games and third party games than to make new ones.

In each case, not much time is left for designing and making new games, which completely defeats the purpose of being independent. I sympathise with Dan's sentiments (posted elsewhere) that to be free to design games, you really just have to have some other separate form of income. I spend a lot of time selling, porting, and maintaining games for not that much money. It's not what I signed up for!

It's a trap. A lot of Pavalinian indies seem to fall into this state and never actually return, having reached some kind of local maxima. In fact, I kind of cringe to use the term 'Pavalinian', because (among other reasons) although Dexterity was successful and demonstrated a good model for other indies, it was far from an inspiring example of game designing paradise. For me, anyway.

So that's where I am now, actually - stuck in this sticky indie well. There's a whole bunch of us down here as far as I can tell. It's very dark and smells of forsaken Amigas.

There is a point beyond this though, the idea of which I hold on to dearly, where the customer base and catalogue of games is large enough that marketing efforts and peripheral work are no longer required in bulk, or can be paid for. Fost's point about multiple titles is important.. the relationship between titles and income is somewhere between factorial and exponential, assuming the catalogue of games is not completely all over the place.

[Bezzy]

That's something I never really considered, but when I think about what the likes of PomPom get up to, it really rings true.

What is the answer? How can we keep skipping off to new creative horizons, and not be tethered by our old IP?

Can you employ more people to take care of ports and biz while you act as a sort of fire team, breaking the new ground?

[Dan MacDonald]

I know where your coming from lex, there's a bunch of people there. Twilight Games, Blitwise (though he's taking some risks now an hiring some people), Phelios was there too  (before he started maximizeing addwords). The odd thing is, when you look at all the contributing factors that determine the success or failure of an independent developers site, the one that is more indicative of their success then any other is how long they've been around. It's not what type of games they sell, though that does factor in, it's not production values (look at spiderweb software) though that factors in too.  The biggest factor tends to be how many years they've been around, the more years the more traffic.

It's not an exact science or anything, but more often then not its true. If a developer has been steadily promoting their site and their games over a period of a few years they invariable do build nice traffic and a nice customer base. Different games have different sized target markets and as a result generate different amounts of revenue. However the lessons seems to be, if you have the guts to stick with it a few years, continually taking baby steps you will be able to build something sustainable.

So that's my plan, do enterprise software until I pay off my house (10-15 year plan) release a few games that I really want to make in that time (might not be more then 2 or 3 to be totally honest). But on tail end of that, I should have an audience of people who like the games I make, and a low enough monthly burn to make a go of it.  For bootstrapping yourself, I don't see many other options if you really want to enjoy the games your working on. If you don't have a wife and kids, parents are a nice option to help fund your development. But barring some serious outside support your going to have to have a real job.

[Icedemon]

wow... ahaha... that was QUITE good..  I just signed on here today, and recently just got a gaming studio off the ground... i think i'll stick around for a while, after reading that...  awesome advice!

[torncanvas]

So I'm gonna go out on a limb here and add my two cents.  People are giving some good advice here. I really like this formula:

Income = Quality * Exposure

I think quality should be weighted quite a bit more than exposure.  Quality can be created via a number of means, but IMO indies often do the worst job at art production quality.  Granted, it can be one of the most expensive parts of development, but content can play a huge role in bringing in the cash-moneys.  Because of that, I think indies can stand to gain a lot of benefit from it.  It's important that the content be tasteful to a large audience.  Taste is something that's pretty hard to nail down - volume of books have been written on the subject.  I feel like people often overlook that, though, or at least don't put enough time/money into it.  And yes, you will have to not doing something else in order to make more room for quality.

Those that say "the game can sell itself" obviously weight exposure very little.  But I'd rather take their side than a side that considers quality and exposure to be equal.  I'm not saying anyone here does, or that taking sides is necessary, but you get the point.

Here are my examples of indie games that have a heavy focus on (what I think a large group of people would consider) tasteful content and could sell themselves:
Cloud
fl0w
Rag Doll Kung Fu
Alien Hominid
(feel free to add more)

I also think that good talent can get you a looooong ways with quality.  I bet there are quite a few people around, including on this forum, that have quite a bit of experience and talent with the games industry (not me).  What's so wrong with teaming up with them on something?

Anyone agree with this?

[Fost]

Anyone agree with this?

To put it bluntly - no. I want to believe it, but the reality is, exposure is probably more important than quality when it comes down to sales.

It's too easy to fall into that trap - I'll make a great game, and stick it on the internet, and even though I can't afford the time or money to do any marketing, my hard work on the gameplay will pay off anyway. It's the way the world should be, but it's not the reality of how it is. I just don't want people to get crushed after making something good and give up is all. Getting an amazing review in several high profile gaming mags doesn't directly convert into sales like effort put into marketing does - I know, because I've been there.

[PoV]

Yeah, sadly Fost is right.

Cloud wouldn't have had the exposure without being free.  Same with fl0w, and while I can't vouch for the PS3 game, the complete lack of public success stories doesn't say anything positive.  Rag Doll Kung Fu had exposure, via Steam, so it did better than most.  Though it's my understanding Media Molecule's Big Little Planet is being partially funded by Sony (See Indie GDC and Media Molecule presentation).  And it's been said in a few interviews that the Alien Hominid guys still haven't broken even (I forget where this interview was).  And Gish, the other one people like to talk about, didn't do all that well (See Cronic Logic interview on Indie Podcast Show).

I hate to point out that we are still fighting the uphill battle, but we are.  Indie games are becoming more accepted, and will continue to for years to come.  Sadly, we're still establishing the ground rules, and the market.  A sad truth of things is the more business savvy are the only ones that can and are taking advantage of the situation right now.  On the one side, it's the consoles.  On the other, there's portals including Steam.  Retail is fair game too, but you're not targeting the same people as EA, the same way.  At least that's the case for those of us without a booming website or community.

[GetAGrip]

I just wanted to add that it is alot simpler to get exposure from a free game than it is for a commerical version.

The game I am working on Penumbra: Overture, was first released as a free version and now recently a commercial version as been released. I first thought that it would be easy to get plenty of the demo downloads for the commerical version since the free version was downloaded alot. The problem is that as it is now we have gotten around 10% of the downloads we got from the free version and I was hoping for at least 50%.

As for exposure, the main problems for indies is that you often need to buy add space to be able to get any larger coverage on major sites and magaiznes. And since adds cost a lot of cash, it is really hard to get into magazines unless you have very good contacts or have a very known game (that will attract viewers/buyers), but for that you will need some exposure

[Fost]

I wouldn't bother with mag ads - the maths doesn't stack up next to website ads, and readers can't click on them and download your game. We've been really lucky to have some incredible reviews for Mr. Robot and Starscape in high profile gaming mags, but we've never noticed any appreciable change in traffic or sales when they hit the stands.

[Paul Eres]

Okay, about advertising, you mention only CPC and CPM, but there are other types of advertising. There are paid placements on shareware sites like Tucows.com and its kind, which Cliffski (author of Democracy and Kudos, you probably know of him) said he's found the most benefit from. There are also simple "banner ad for a month for X$" type deals. And there are things like projectwonderful.com. So even though I agree that CPC and CPM advertising is probably almost useless to the independent developer, I think that those other forms of advertising can work.

I should mention that I haven't done them myself, as I haven't yet released a shareware game (only freeware games) but I've seen others use them who have said that they've worked. Besides, I think it's a good idea to be experimental. Don't waste thousands of dollars on this type of thing, but try something, track it, and if it works continue it.

[Fost]

there are other types of advertising.

I've actually used all of these and they perform in a similar manner to CPC/CPM sites -except download sites which woefully underperformed for us once they sterted changing the rules (that could just be us though and if it worked for Cliffski then I'd say it's worth trying). Project Wonderful is basically a CPC site although you are gambling on what CPC you will get - just divide the amount you are willing to spend by the predicted daily clicks. The major problem with PW though is that there's no decent sized sites on there yet so you can't get any kind of major traffic boost if you are willing to pay more. Of course that may change if PW grows a bit more.

Of course, you are totally right in that experimentation is the key. You need to be looking out for new things constantly.

[torncanvas]

I guess part of my point was that a lot of devs will focus on gameplay and rely on that to carry through.  But maybe they should focus more than they usually do on making the game pretty because it will result in exposure.  IMO a game like Rag Doll Kung Fu was able to get on Steam because of the quality, so quality resulted in exposure by its very nature.  These are good rebuttals though, I can dig it.  So exposure, wherever it comes from, is hella important.  What can indies do to get exposure?  Festivals are an obvious one.  Here's my list of festival options.

Festivals

• IGF
• Slamdance
• FuturePlay
• Eerie Horror Film Festival
• Indiecade
• Edinburgh Interactive Festival
• GameShadow Innovation in Games Festival
• SBGames Independent Game Festival
• Vancouver International Game Summit
• Northwest Games Festival
• ScreenBurn Festival
• GameCity
• The British Academy Video Games Awards

Maybe someone else can comprehensively list out ad options?

[GetAGrip]

I also agree that making a pretty looking game is pretty much essential if you want to get people's interest. For example first time I saw gish I thought it looked very boring and it was not until I saw a gameplay video that a decided to play the demo and later on buying it. Now Gish is not a bad looking game but it still has that amatuerish look on it and if it had looked better I might have decided to try the demo first time I saw it.

So, in my opion getting good looking screens for your game is essential to gain get interest which hopefully leads to more expsoure (since more sites / magazines will consider you newsworthy)

[torncanvas]

Yeah, that's exactly what I mean.  I actually felt the same way about Gish, too.  But I saw my friend playing it and seeing it action made it cooler.  If the screens would have been prettier though, I would have been more interested to begin with.

I think it has become obvious that everyone agrees that exposure is really important.  I guess the disagreement is in where to put the least time/money to get the most exposure.  Honestly, I'm still not sure.  I don't know if making something pretty gives you the most benefit for the least time/money, but I do think it should be more important than it seems to be right now.