IGC'04 Impressions, Big Business, Big Money

[Dan MacDonald]

IGC got me all fired up and I got motivated to to write. There were some sobering things at this years IGC, I think a lot of people will be afraid to say it because it's against the people who apparently have the money and power. Luckily I have very low overhead and am not dependent on them to survive so I can say whatever I want ;)

I also included a session summary of Jeff Tunnells Keynote on the Game Design process.

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=6557

www.planetthinktanks.com/dan/jefftunnell/ (game design summary)

[Bluecat]

Thanks for that write up Dan.

It's looking a little scary at the moment for indie developers, but I think you are correct. These new 'big' players are going to make the same mistakes as the big publishers. They'll end up risk shy and not want to fund games that haven't got a ready audience. At the same time, I think, they will grow to the point where a) they will start playing in the big publishers playground, and then b) will become targets for acquisition and be bought up by the likes of EA and VUG.

The great thing about the internet as compared to the retail industry is that these guys do not hold all the cards. Publishers got away with shutting the indie out of retail by buying up all the shelf space. It's a little harder to buy up all the 'internet shelf space.' There's plenty of room at the bottom... and it's a real big bottom. :)

[tolik]

I really agree with you, Dan (concerning major content holders). I've met with some of the guys and totally understand their positions. Their position are stable, they have stable markets and stable interests in stable world. Why expand into further unexplored areas if everything is stable and rock solid? Why take another niche if it's already satisfactory? Here comes a new publishing studio which takes another niche, has all the respect from the very beginning, but starts to take a significant share to become arrogant and unresponsive for the masses - "we've made our plan for this year on the content side, let's just sit and wait seeing how the money flow".

There should be a distinction from indies and commercial indies. Or something like that - when you cross the line, you are out of it. This scene has several goals in my opinion: create Games, create Fun games and create games Yourself. When you are creating a casual game which doesn't have all these three factors (let's call them GFY) and it does reach the masses, you become a money hunter without an attitude. You don't show up on forums ;) and don't talk to other people? "What for? To share my moneymaking ideas?"

Ahh, I don't know what I want to tell, but being a scener myself in the heart (yeah, DEMO SCENE, that's europe!), I really distinguish "Games" and "games", as well as I have an attitude to an every single thing on earth.

Whatever, sorry for my midnight mumbling.

[lowemark]

Very interesting reading. Thank you.

[Dan MacDonald]

It's true there is money to be made in this business, but what I value most is the lone indie who comes home from his dayjob heads out to his garage or office and starts making games because he loves to do it, because he's compelled to do it. He has fans of his game out there and to him their appreciation of his game is worth more then the actual money he receives from it. I really don't want to see that die, sure we are just a bunch of indies and in the end we really don't have that much leverage against people with millions of dollars, but I'd hate to see us consumed by it.

So ya, I'm a little bit of an idealist, I'll admit it, after that one session at IGC I was seriously worried that this business was just going to become a money chasing commercial cutthroat business. I don't want their vision of the world to be the one that new indies adopt when they think "how can I be successful selling games online", I want those people to value their customers and value the games they create, not just try and make something that sells to 100's of thousands of people. Let's not reduce it to that. I honestly believe that if we do the games that excite us and that we are passionate about we can still be quite financially successful even if those games aren't targeted at the majority segment of the mass market.

[Hamumu]

I spoke about this very phenomenon in my amazingly astute prescient fashion in an interview on the very site that this site used to be! I think that's where I did it. It was a year or two ago, anyway. I talked about how the bigger indies of today would grow up to be just like what the retail is today, and then there'd be a new set of indies under that. It's what happens. Indies will never go away/be consolidated. The CURRENT ones will, but the indier ones will out-indie them from underneath. I think it's inevitable that the ones that do huge business become these big risk-averse corporate entities, and that system froths up into being, but there's always someone smaller underneath filling the gaps. Who then grows up big and risk-averse, and so on. It's a cycle. I intend to stay on the little side of it for good (not that I have much choice, but if I did, I'd choose to).

[Chris Evans]

Great article Dan.


I honestly believe that if we do the games that excite us and that we are passionate about we can still be quite financially successful even if those games aren't targeted at the majority segment of the mass market.

Well that pretty much sums up a huge reply I was getting ready to write. But I'll say this.

I don't have a problem with selling games through portals (I plan to sell my game on a few myself). But as Indies, I hope we continue to create games we want to make. As Dan put it, create games that excite us and that we're passionate about. I don't want us to get to a point where we THINK we have to make a 3 color match game (or any other game the portals dictate) to be successful.

I've already seen it the past couple of years. Many Indie developers pushed aside the real game they wanted to make in order to make a quick buck creating casual games. The problem is the developers had little interest in the actual game itself. The purpose was to make money pure and simple. So when portals started dropping royalty rates, many devs accepted the deals anyway because they didn't really respect or value their own product.

Call me idealistic or sappy, but I really think a game should have a soul. For me, a game has a soul when the creators are really passionate and believe in the game. They either enjoy the genre or they're intrigued by it. Don't get me wrong I'm not one of those who think only Indie games have a soul. There's quite a few retail games too, such as Halo, Fable, and pretty much any Blizzard game. But I think we can all agree, it's much harder in retail due to the cutthroat nature. Just to get a game on a store shelf, a lot of compromises have to be met to get through all the hoops and middlemen.

The advantage of being an Indie, there isn't a huge gatekeeper between you and the player. You can make a game you're passionate about that you think people will enjoy and no one can deny you shelf space. The Internet is huge and getting bigger everyday.

But many of these casual games on the portals simply have no soul. It just solidifies my viewpoint when I go to the developer's website and there's barely any mention of the game. If you're lucky there might be a half-hearted placed Buy Now button.

Sure, a hit on a portal can mean lots and lots of money. But I'm sure many of us didn't become Indies simply for the money. I'm willing to bet a great majority of us could be making more money at a "regular" day job. Yet, we became an indie or desire to be an Indie because of the FREEDOM. Freedom in all respects. For example, I want to have the freedom to look my customer in the virtual eye and ask him if he liked my game or not. If he/she has a good suggestion, I want to be able to implement it and hopefully continue to have a long relationship with that customer.

So I just hope people don't get confused thinking that portals are the gatekeepers to the downloadable market. As Dan mentioned in his article, they want you to believe this. However, they are simply gatekeepers to their audience. They have a very big audience, but there's nothing saying you have to go through their audience or only cater to that type of audience. You are free to cater to other audiences that are niches or simply haven't been discovered yet.

This is why I think developing marketing skills are so important for Indies. I know many people just want to create games, but by developing proficient marketing skills it gives you the ability to find and cater to your own target audience, thus giving you true freedom to create the games you want. Exposure is the biggest problem for Indies, but we don't need to shove our games in front of millions of eyeballs to be successful. Several thousand that are well targeted well do just as well.

That's why I personally don't feel threatened by portals. Especially, since it seems many of them are getting more "casual" not less. They've found a fairly large market segment of 40 year-old women who play games. That's great, but obviously 40 year-old women aren't the only ones who play games. As the portals start pushing the upper extremes of the casual market and retail games get more hardcore, I think there's an unknown middle ground that's getting bigger. We just have to find it. :)

EDIT: I guess it still ended up being a long reply. :p

[Anthony Flack]

Good read, everyone. I'm glad this has come up.

It hasn't been the "evil" portals that have concerned me so much. They are doing a lot to help people get used to the idea of buying downloadable games, and that's great. I don't like the way that downloadable games are becoming defined as the most casual of casual games; that's a bit of a worry, and a shame. But you can't blame the portals for that - the real issue is that developers are focusing too much on casual games.

I've certainly noticed it on these boards... as people get serious and professional-minded, they start to make games based on a simple cost-benefit analysis, rather than making games because the game grabbed them by the shoulders and demanded to be brought into the world. I would say that probably 9 out of 10 games I see here are simply products designed to make money. You make casual games because the market has been established and it's low risk.

But anyway, the internet knows no bounds. Even if the "indie" market becomes the ultra-casual market, at least people are starting to come around to online sales and distribution. Other markets will spring up wherever there is a demand to be met. Anyone that is making games that people like and can't get elsewhere, surely has a future.

[svero]

I dont think of the portals in terms of whether they have good or bad intentions etc... They're businesses pure and simple.

That being said the market HAS changed and as far as the smaller developer is considered it has changed for the worse. Basically we have no more free places to promote our games and reach a reasonable audience. So we either give up a large part of what our games make (if we're lucky enough to get distribution!) or we spend our own money. Most of us don't have the cash flow to advertise heavily enough to succeed and we don't have the cash clout to get fair deals advertising. When real etc.. buy ads they buy ads across 20 sites for a year at a time and negotiate a deal to advertise a site that sells many games. When we look at advertising we look to advertise a single game for 1 month and hope to pull a profit. Near impossible.

For my part im now working on some clones. Seems to be all that I can do. Hopefully they will generate some cash flow and let me go back to doing what I want to do. If not I'll be taking a serious look at the app market which may or may not be better.

[Dan MacDonald]

I don't think of the portals in terms of whether they have good or bad intentions etc... They're businesses pure and simple.


I agree that the big distributors and the new publishers in the downloadable games space are not inherently evil. The exist because there is a business case for them to exist. It's like the formalization of any new market, once it reaches a certain size and has certain economics that can be presented to Venture capitol, the big players are going to be jumping in the pool. Guys like popcap and gamehouse will leverage these new players and generate great profits.



That being said the market HAS changed and as far as the smaller developer is considered it has changed for the worse. Basically we have no more free places to promote our games and reach a reasonable audience. So we either give up a large part of what our games make (if we're lucky enough to get distribution!) or we spend our own money.

I personally don't buy this for a second. It's true if you are going after the same exact market the distribution channels are going after. From what I've seen they are increasingly becoming less and less creative and becoming more and more intensely casual, mindless games of luck involving colors and matching etc...

I don't believe for a second that the the 250million people who buy games online are all grandchildren and women over 35. Sure that might be the majority, and in the past that was the bread and butter of the indie. But times have changed, small guys need to shift their focus and more then anything make game they care about. If you have 100k like popcap to spend developing a game, you can develop a game that you don't really care about and polish the heck out of it. It's hard enough to finish a game as a lone wolf developer or indie in the closet, it's 10x harder if the project your working on doesn't really excite you. Think pyrogon, and the infamous
Pyrogon Postmortem (http://www.bookofhook.com/Article/GameDevelopment/APyrogonPostmortem.html). This is what happens to you when you make games to make money instead of making games you care about. Thomas Warfield does so well with goodsol in large part because he actually loves playing solitaire, and it shows in his product.

I was talking to Mike Welch at IGC, the creator of DX Ball and Pocket Tanks, two very successful indie titles. A huge portion of his customers are women and kids, but neither of his games are particularly casual in nature. He does little to no promotion and still he sells enough to rent a small office, pay his mortgage and support his wife and kids. I don't believe he is an aberration, a fluke, I think he is the recipe for success, a model to be emulated.

It comes down to what Jeff Tunnell said in his keynote address on game design.


“Make your game sooo good and sooo fun that it doesn’t matter who you are (they will be able to enjoy it) . You will have an audience for that game, you are going to be impervious to the press or whoever and no one can take that from you. You will be approached and people will want to sell it.”

The point is, love your games, and make fun games. No matter who is in power or who has the money, you will be able to sell it. So don't try to make fun games for an audience you don't understand in a game type you don't enjoy. Make a game that excites you and YOU know is fun, as opposed to guessing what other people think of it.

[svero]

I personally don't buy this for a second. It's true if you are going after the same exact market the distribution channels are going after. From what I've seen they are increasingly becoming less and less creative and becoming more and more intensely casual, mindless games of luck involving colors and matching etc...

Bigger companies have made a conscious decision to take over the distribution in the market. They don't care what people will buy whether its casual or something else. The point is control of how games distributed. That's how they make their money.

So the real scenario is this...

- The download sites no longer serve the gamer - they dropped the ball and sold their distribution to bigger companies - gamers of all kinds have learned this. They simply don't have the traffic anymore.
- Gamers have learned not to go to download sites to look for stuff. The hard core audience reads bluesnews, gametab, avault etc... and the casual players and downloaders now go directly to the portals.
- Download sites therefor no longer provide a valid base for marketing. You only need to submit to know that's true. Anyone who's been in this for a while like I have has seen the difference between now and just a couple of years ago. if you submit a new program to sites there is NO sales spike whatsoever. Genre is not a consideration. Doesnt matter if it's simulation or casual.
- Press releases to game sites DO provide sales for the first month a game is released. Space Taxi 2 saw quite a few sales the first month from mentions in places like bluesnews, avault etc.. but to keep that going I now need to spend my own money on those sites. Not cheap.

So anyway..in a nutshell I don't agree with your assesment. I don't think it's possible to make a living off games unless you make something that is good for the portal audience or you have the money to promote it yourself. There will be odd exceptions. Maybe some game will be so amazing that it defies the rules and catches on by word of mouth. But for most of us that's the business reality. It basically comes down to this. You *can not* sell a game that nobody sees. That's pretty simple. If nobody sees it they can't buy it. How are you going to get the eyeballs? Download sites? Can't. Advertising? You probably can't afford it. Just pray for word of mouth? That's not a business plan.

[James Gwertzman]

Reading Dan's writeup and these responses I feel compelled to write. I disagree with a lot of what I'm reading here. I feel like people are turning this whole thing into a black vs. white issue whereas in fact there are lots of shades of grey.

In the book "Built to Last" (great book, btw, for anyone trying to build a company that will stand the test of time) there's a great chapter called the "tyranny of the or". The basic idea is that when forced to make a tough decision, many great companies find a way to somehow do both.

On this thread, the general synopsis seems to be "make money but be miserable OR make innovative games and have fun but barely make a living".

I completely reject that premise. Here at Sprout Games we've completely embraced the portals (we don't even try to sell games ourselves), we own 100% of our own IP, we're doing well financially, we make games that we think will be fun and that will entertain as wide an audience as possible, and we're having a blast doing it. You CAN run a successful business without letting a focus on the bottom line destroy your fun & creativity.

I'm extremely proud of our best-selling game, Feeding Frenzy. I think it's innovative (it's based on the same core mechanic as the original Intellivision game Shark Shark, but we've gone way beyond that original concept), a lot of fun for gamers of all stripes, beautiful, and well-crafted.

Furthermore we've sold nearly 100,000 copies at this point (and still going strong), and I know that we would never have sold that many if we hadn't been working with all the major portals and had a close relationship with RealArcade who is essentially acting as our publisher.

So what if we're making less money per copy than we could if we sold it via our own website? A small percentage of a huge number is still a very big number. Also, I know that our core competency is making great games. It's what we live & breathe. It's what we love doing and it's what we want to focus 100% on doing. Why shouldn't we focus on doing what we do well, and let someone else (like Shockwave, or Oberon, or Trymedia, or Real, or any of the other portal/distributor/publishers) do what they do well?

I learned a long time ago that you'll never be as good at something you don't enjoy as someone else who truly loves it. I know that this is the "business" board, but I suspect most people on here like writing code more than they like dealing with marketing & PR. Why not outsource that stuff to someone else who's probably better at it than you are? Then you can truly focus 100% of your energy at making the absolute best games possible.

[Dan MacDonald]

Make sure you read the comments I made on my .plan post as I think they help clarify my motives and the intent of the origional post somewhat.

James I certainly respect you as a person and your perspective but I also respectfully disagree. Have you ever thought how much you could have made if you cut out your middle men? Everything I've learned from indies who self publish is that their software (with steady updates) continues to sell, more and more each year. Take www.goodsol.com for example, I don't know exactly how long he's been selling his game pretty good solitaire but I know it's in excess of 7 years and it has sold more each year, and in some cases exponentially more.

I also herd that he sells on average, in excess of 60 copies a day from his own website. No middlemen. I wonder how long the shelf life for feeding frenzy is before it falls off the sites? A year? two? You become dependent on having a few hit's each year to keep your revenue up, and what if the next two games turn out to be only moderate successes like word harmony? Will you be able to sustain yourself if that happens? And what about your most valuable resource, the customers who play your games? Wouldn't it be nice if they were YOUR customers and you could market feeding frenzy 2 directly to them without middlemen? As it stands you really don't know that much about your customers.

You should be proud of feeding frenzy, it proves that the mass market doesn't just want to eat up abstract bubble poppers or connect 3 games. I also think feeding frenzy is a game you were genuinely passionate about during it's creation and it shows. (As opposed to pyrogon who was creating them purely for the money) However I think that while your present may be secure, your future is less secure because of your dependence on the portals. I think the bottom line is, if you want to build a business that lasts you build a business who's customers are the people buying the product, not a long value chain of middlemen.

[lakibuk]

Why not outsource that stuff to someone else who's probably better at it than you are? Then you can truly focus 100% of your energy at making the absolute best games possible.
Ok,but what when the portals don't want your game (like mine)? You can't spend months or years for developing a game hoping a portal will publish it.

[Greg Squire]

There's seems to be a certain amount of arrogance entering into some of the portals, almost as if they think the own the customer, just like retail publishers own the shelf space. Maybe not intentional, but a by product of the way they're running business; more customers = bigger ego (unless you keep it in check). The problem with this mindset is that there's no way to "lock up" the shelf space (or the customer) on the internet. If they loose site of where they're money comes from they're going to dry up, as the customer and the developer are certainly free to go elsewhere. I not saying that portals are evil; it's certainly not that black and white. But they need to realize this direction of giving less and less to the developer is not the right one. They are in a "symbiotic relationship" with them. It's either going to be a win-win or a lose-lose situation for them (not a win-lose like some tend to think).

I believe the big reason that people go to the portals, is because they've learned that they can find a lot of games there easily. They could find the other games not on portals (indie or not) if they tried, but most feel they don't have the time for that. The only "value add" these online publishers (portals) have is in connecting customers to product, and we all know there are other ways around this (maybe not as lucrative but possible). So, on the customer's end it all comes down to search ("How can I find a game I want quickly?"). On the indie's end it's all about exposure ("How can I get my game in front of enough eyeballs to be profitable?"). I think there are ways in which the industry could still shift. Who says there isn't room for another portal (more indie friendly) out there? I think sites like grab.com are a step in that direction. It is helpful from a customer's perspective, to have a handful of clearing house sites, instead of looking on every singe indie developer's site. That's why they gravitate to the portals. Perhaps if an alternate portal (a more indie friendly portal) existed, then they may eventually gravitate there.

Let’s go “Kick the Bear”! Or at least the bear cubs (Those of you who went to IGC will know what I’m referring to here.)

[tolik]

@James Gwertzman:
You are one of those people, who can preserve fun gameplay, great graphics and atmosphere and still think as of Indie.

Your game looks so professional, that it wouldn't be classified as Indie by a lot of Indies, I guess, but as a game similar to PopCap's one.
Your Game is Fun, I can't disagree. I was able to complete it from the first try in time before it expires the day it came out. I love it, it's great!

I (Dan, correct me if I'm wrong) guess we are referring to those individuals, who are making another useless clone of a True Game, but now it's 100% casual. The game doesn't have anything in heart - it has ugly graphics, simple gameplay and stupid levels but still is #1 on every channel. A wide marketing & sociological research was done to significantly improve usability, accessibility, as well as stupidity to reach the proper top-niche of the market. Then, publishers put it as a #1, try to preserve it, and by making exclusive agreements force developers to create second game out of the dullest heartless idea on earth (proved). The genre is killed, no more games in this genre can really interest a publisher since he has an essence of the success and doesn't care much about any other games similar to this. And it already sold 7 times more than your game, James.

The same game could be done in a manner, that everybody, EVERYBODY, not just pure poor casuals which don't suspect anything fishy with this "oh man fun game" would love. Add cute graphics, check, add cute replayability value, check, add cute sounds, check, add zillions of levels for every type of gamer to bring pleasure, add everything else and become a Fun Indie Game, check!
I don't want to take it personal but the game without all of this became a hit this/last year and closed the road to other games on casual channels and proved the correct direction for publishers + blasted the trend Dan has discussed.

The publishers will continue to look for quintessence of the most casual thing on earth and deny existance of truly Indie games. You will need to be either a professional with real mind online (having game design, programming and other skills with years of experience) to create the games which would satisfy both big publishers and still qualify as Indie (your case, James), or work on their ideas to implement the most casual ideas denied by most of the truly indies.

In order to become professionals, you'll need to work for years as a "Refugee from the Mainstream Games Industry" (quote from the forum's thread title).

These are my thoughts...

[Andy]

Why not outsource that stuff to someone else who's probably better at it than you are? Then you can truly focus 100% of your energy at making the absolute best games possible.

Real (for example) doesn't like to take even our best games - writes some misty explanations in change. That's why really... :)

But I'm 100%-agree with your opinion in common James.

And your Feeding Frenzy - "isn't bad" game btw. :D
Actually congrats with your success and good job guys!

[Chris Evans]

@James Gwertzman

I never meant to imply the issue was black or white. However, the portals have been kind to you because you specialize in the games that cater to their audience. I'm glad to hear you really enjoy making the games you guys develop at Sprout Games, I'm sure that greatly attributes to your success. Though you have to understand, not everybody wants to create casual games. The portals are extremely selective of the non-casual games they distribute if at all. Doesn't matter how good your game is, if your game appears to be a little too complex or a bit offbeat, they won't distribute it.

So I'm not really sure how relevant your post is for developers who don't make casual games. Developers who make niche or semi-hardcore games, there's no huge "marketing/PR" force that you speak of. There's no big portal that specializes in those games (Garage Games is trying, but they're still growing). So the developers who make those games have to pretty much go at it alone.

I've been lucky with my game Pow Pow because it's kind of a "fringe" game. It's not too hardcore and it's very colorful, so many of the portals are intrigued by it. However, one of the portals in particular think the game might be too complex for their audience, so it's not something I can rely on completely (And I refuse to dumb down my game, I think it's pretty straight forward as it is.) Fortunately, the game has been getting a pretty good buzz, so I'm confident I'll be able to do at least okay self-publishing through my website. Ideally, I'd like to sell my game both on my site and on the portals. Physical copies on my site, electronic copies on the portals.

You mention you don't even sell games on your website, what happens when Real or the other major portals shift their focus? What if simulations become the new craze? Will you continue developing puzzle games or are you guys all of a sudden going to start developing sims even though you may have no interest in them? No one ever has complete control, even those who self-publish. But right now for you guys, the balance of power weighs heavily with Real and the other portals. Your business sinks or swims based on whether they decide to publish your game or not.

I'm really glad you guys are doing well (I mean it). But I can't but help thinking you're treading on similar waters of Pyrogon. Fortunately, it seems you guys actually enjoy making casual games (unlike Pyrogon), though it also seems you're overly reliant on portals just as they were. It kind of scares me that you're not even trying to sell games on your own site. If you're essentially a 2nd party developer of the portals, then I guess it doesn't really matter. But then again, how independent are you to make the games you want to make?

[Anthony Flack]

Your game looks so professional, that it wouldn't be classified as Indie by a lot of Indies, I guess


Yikes! I hope the definition of a "true indie" doesn't hinge on being unprofessional and rubbish!

Now, if I could sell 100,000 copies of a game, honestly I wouldn't worry too much about the future... I could probably just about retire and live quite comfortably off that.

[tolik]

Yikes! I hope the definition of a "true indie" doesn't hinge on being unprofessional and rubbish!

Now, if I could sell 100,000 copies of a game, honestly I wouldn't worry too much about the future... I could probably just about retire and live quite comfortably off that.

I guess here comes definitions and differentiations of projects like "absolutely polished vs polished to some extent", "casual vs casual to some extent", etc. I can't yet define the real difference between truly casual and truly indie (besides the money point). A lot of the indie games doesn't become casual because of the "more-than-casual" gameplay (e.g. innovative gameplay), "a-bit-unpolished" interface, "B"-level graphics, etc.

I would like to hear everybody's opinion on this theme - should there be a distinction between casual and indie?

[Chris Evans]

Yikes! I hope the definition of a "true indie" doesn't hinge on being unprofessional and rubbish!

Now, if I could sell 100,000 copies of a game, honestly I wouldn't worry too much about the future... I could probably just about retire and live quite comfortably off that.

You should...assuming you don't have to pay for a couple other full-time developers and a big office space with a giant clay statue of Cletus in the front. :)

[Dan MacDonald]

Now, if I could sell 100,000 copies of a game, honestly I wouldn't worry too much about the future... I could probably just about retire and live quite comfortably off that.

Just remember that the going rate is between 20-30% royalties from Real these days, not to mention the fact that sprout had a more "traditional" (retail like) publishing agreement with Real. Also a good number of sales on real come from gamepass which ends up being a 6$ sale (or something like that, 25% of 6$ isn't great money). In the end it probably ended up being more like 15-20,000 sales for sprout. Still very successful but I know a number of Indies who have sold these kinds of numbers from their own sites and haven't had to give up their customers or the longevity of their titles to do it.

I don't want to come across as an attack campaign on Sprout, though I'm probably failing miserably (sorry James). I just don't think that Sprout is a good model for new indies. Especially now that the casual space is moving to a more retail like model with actual publishers controlling access to the distribution channels like Real, Yahoo, MSN, etc. For budding indies it just isn't a viable option.

[Jack Norton]

I don't think it's possible to make a living off games unless you make something that is good for the portal audience or you have the money to promote it yourself.
Reading this from svero, one of the indie dev I respect mostly, scared me a bit but so far in my brief experience (8 months) in the shareware industry I can only confirm that.
When I hear people saying "1.5 sales day from your site is a pretty achievable rate" I start to laugh because they obviously don't know anything at all about shareware nowadays.
That's why also I dare to criticize a bit Dexterity book. I really don't know which magic formula could he write down to get sales from your own site nowadays.
Back in 1999, there weren't those big portals sites or they were just starting.
Nowadays, while is still possible to make decent income from very good games (Betty) or niche ones (my UBM, or cliffski Starship Tycoon), would be very hard to make a living on your own with a "standard casual game".

Even big developers like Popcap make lot of use of the portals like BFG,Real, etc... but here's the catch: if you make a "standard casual game", not particularly bad but not particularly good either, forget about making some money selling it from your own...(and even from portals in most of cases).

It's sad but it's the truth... :mad:

[Jack Norton]

Also, I know that our core competency is making great games. It's what we live & breathe. It's what we love doing and it's what we want to focus 100% on doing. Why shouldn't we focus on doing what we do well, and let someone else (like Shockwave, or Oberon, or Trymedia, or Real, or any of the other portal/distributor/publishers) do what they do well?
Well imagine for a moment that your next game, that costed 10 months of development, isn't accepted by all/some of those (of course is quite hard to happen if you continue to make such good games, but who knows?).
What you would do? sell it on your own? :)

I don't hate portals, neither I love them. As svero said, they're just more channels to sell. But please, don't make the same mistake of the retail market...don't let the big names get ALL the channels, so that we are FORCED to sell our games with them, or even worse, make only the games THEY want... :eek:

I love freedom.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Albert Camus

[Mark Fassett]

Well - publishers entering the downloadable games space was inevitable. The reason they enjoy more success than download sites is purely a search optimization by the people searching. It is easier to find a well made game there than it is on download.com, so people will migrate to real and yahoo and shockwave, etc... I think we're entering an era where you have to create really good games and be a bit lucky to survive until the portals turn into really big publishers that won't publish anything that doesn't have a million dollar budget. Or, if you feel inclined - join them in their quest for riches.

[Coyote]

It was inevitable.

But what's really changed in the last five years? Nothing but increased competition. AND increased visibility to an alternative to retail stores as a source of games. It's good and bad. The big portals are legitimizing purchased downloadable games as much as Doom did ten years ago.

I think there was a window for casual-game indie developers which has already closed. But that doesn't mean it can't be done - it just means things have gotten (and will continue to get) harder.

My big question is if there will be an opportunity for "non-casual" games the way there was one for casual games. I don't know. Right now it's very hard not to get lost in the noise. Completely original games are ignored. Completely unoriginal games pale beside their big-budget competitors. Games that add original twists to established genres get the worst of both worlds - they are simulatanously derided for their lack of originality, and ripped apart for breaking the tired conventions of the genre.

I don't know what the answer is, but I have a hunch that it involves a lot of hard work, perseverance, and money.

[Anthony Flack]

You should...assuming you don't have to pay for a couple other full-time developers and a big office space with a giant clay statue of Cletus in the front.

I don't have to pay for anything. Cletus has a budget of $0. And I've never been afraid of stronger competition, even with a million dollar budget. More high quality titles are just what we need to grow the market.

So, with any luck the solution is just hard work and perseverance. I certainly hope so - it's depressing to think I was already working on Cletus during this "golden age" you all speak of when everyone was making money hand over fist. Bastards! And during all that time, Platypus was just sitting with Idigicon doing nothing, too. And I'm still flat broke now. Bastards, bastards, bastards.

But I would be curious to hear what people think has actually changed. Download.com is no good any more (was Download.com propping everyone's marketing up?). And the ultra casual market has become saturated. Overall standards have risen. The market has grown.

Assume the portals don't exist and their customers aren't automatically available to you... what has changed to make things so difficult? Was it all just down to download.com? More likely, the word-of-mouth network just doesn't care about a boring, average game anymore.

[Hamumu]

I sort of look at my business as a mom & pop shop. I run my little video game stand here on the corner of hamumu and com, and sure, there's Wal-Mart/RealArcade across the street, and they rake in the big bucks selling thousands of games a day, but that doesn't mean I'm out of business. I still sell my knick-knacks, a few a day, it covers the rent, it keeps me fed, and I'm doing what I love and chatting with customers and all that.

And the analogy continues - yes, when Walmart moves into your town, lots of mom & pop shops do die (we lost a bookstore here recently due to Barnes & Noble), but you _can_ still survive. They've got you beat advertising, and just by sheer visibility, but you can still do local ads, and most importantly and applicably, trade on your existing customer base and rely on their word of mouth. The only analogy breakdown that goes against us is that there's no street that people drive down where they might see your store and come in - on the internet, you go right where you go (maybe Google is the street - with a huge flashing billboard for Walmart at the top).

So I think all the doom and gloom is warranted, it's a rough situation, but it's certainly survivable. The important thing is to leverage what you do have, and just play your game - those guys aren't in our league by any means. Yes, you compete with them, but if you picture it in mom&pop vs. Walmart terms, you're not competing to WIN, you're competing to get some amount of people to notice you. Just like the mom&pop vs. the Walmart, you've got virtually no overhead, so you can get by on small sales. Walmart needs the thousands a day to survive, with their huge rent, electricity, employees (okay, at Walmart, that's a small expense), and much more.

I'm actually considering trying it out in the literal way - local ads in papers and things. Just because anyone in the world CAN reach my site doesn't mean there aren't lots of people in my own city who want what I offer! Like my mom&pop example: people may visit it while on vacation from Norway, but that doesn't mean I should advertise in Norway - advertising locally makes more sense. I mean, imagine if you were an old lady who crocheted sweaters. You'd put out ads around town, and people would buy your sweaters. That's how people used to run home businesses. The internet has opened up a global community, but it hasn't closed down the local one!

I've also considered taking it the next step to an ACTUAL mom&pop shop (which would sell my games, and those of other indies), but that's a big scary step, and I have 3 cats who would get lonely while I was running it.

[James Gwertzman]

So why don't all you guys making non-casual "indie" games band together and create your own portal? It'll make a good story so you'll get lots of PR from all the gaming sites. Take all the profits from the first year and use it to buy advertising; build your own e-commerce backend so you're not paying ridiculous fees to RegNow or something similar to it, and put all of your efforts into promoting that rather than a bunch of tiny one-off websites. Compete with the big portals at their own game.

[GameStudioD]

Things are changing in general. There are more independent game developers, thus more games, than there was just a few years ago. Things in the computer world have changed. Games on download.com used to be 'add-ons' to the other software you would find there. Someone would look for a zip program, and maybe pick up some games while they are there too. This scenario doesnt happen anymore because DL.com doesnt have much freeware anymore, PCs & Windows are bundled with more software, and open source is filling the void of freeware (indie games just arent on OSS sites).

Now, indie developers must adjust to this change and work together. Review sites similar to gametunnel, diygames and blogs are going to be major marketting tools for indie developers. These sites will be similar to how EGM, GamePro are (were?) an important resource for console gamers.

Also, more gamers want to play games through their browser. The market, in that respect, is changing. A person can check out a game without downloading anything, this is huge for gamers hardcore & casual alike.

[Bluecat]

I think James has a great idea here. Reading Coyotes closing sentence:


I don't know what the answer is, but I have a hunch that it involves a lot of hard work, perseverance, and money.

Got me thinking that there was one missing. Cooperation. Ants are millions of times smaller than an elephant, but get enough ants together and they can eat it for breakfast!

[Sirrus]

Anatoly,

I'm a bit confused about your position on the subject...
You are indeed involved in helping represent Oberon (who is one of the prime companies cited in the write up), yet you take a different stance?

Would be interested in understand it more thoroughly...

[arcadetown]

First off really enjoyed the conference and meeting everyone. It would have been even better if a select few didn't act like self glorifying big shots who in fact were not so important (I was laughing hard inside). We always strive to keep a very professional and personable approach as everyone, both big and small, deserve that.

I understand sites looking to simplify as it's a lot of work to keep in touch with a large base of developers. What is not right is the outright bad deals that are being pitched these days and how certain folks we're trying to get developers on board with the idea.

It's really odd to see people here complain about bad deals and so forth when they never see the good ones right in front of them or don't bother knocking on doors to go find them. There's still lots of large and even huge sites that give a good fair shake, us being one of course.

We grew to our size and will continue to grow because we do the "impossible". While others see negatives and road blocks we see new opportunities. While others see competitors we see partners that can help each other out. James from Reflexive made a very good important revelation about how people he once saw as competitors were in fact odd partners. This is so true and has been our motto from day one! Trust me, Karma is extremely important on the web, what you give (both positive or negative) will come back many times over.

[tolik]

Anatoly,

I'm a bit confused about your position on the subject...
You are indeed involved in helping represent Oberon (who is one of the prime companies cited in the write up), yet you take a different stance?

Would be interested in understand it more thoroughly...

Ok, you should understand that every person has his own opinion. I'm a developer and game designer myself, I went through years of different projects with different scopes and different platforms. I have some analytical skills and I work as a development manager now, not a producer. Being a development manager, I can judge what will happen to the created product if it will be a real Indie game. I can see what will happen if I will want to create my own game. We don't have much choice, so between the different opportunities, I see some, that are good enough for the current situation.
I see that I can help some people to get noticed by the big guys and reach the market which they want to touch. And still, I understand that we can't do anything about the current situation...

If you would be involved in the cell phone game market, you would understand casual gaming market a bit more detailed.
The situation on our market repeats their situation with ~1-1.5 years of delay. Everyone can do J2ME/Brew/whatever, not everyone can sell it. And btw, there's no Indie market on cells, that's an interesting thought...

[goodsol]

That was an interesting article by Dan and this has been an interesting thread. I've put my reactions to it up on my blog at http://www.asharewarelife.com (permanent link at http://www.asharewarelife.com/2004/10/portal-bubble.html.

In short, if you sell mostly direct you don't have to worry about the portals at all.

[Andy]

In short, if you sell mostly direct you don't have to worry about the portals at all.

:confused:
In short. If big portal proposes their collaboration to you and you get a chance to grab small 2-3 thousands - you can spend them at least on promotion of your own site - you can spend them to take a break and get a good vacation with your family or close ones to have even more forces on your activity later - you can buy the bottle of the most expencive wine, drink it to have something you can remember later whole your life... - No?

[EpicBoy]

I think the point is that in the long run, taking those thousands will kill you because you don't know who your customers are. Customer lists are gold, and with portals you never see who they are.

[Jack Norton]

Yes indeed.
You also forgot about exclusivity. It rules. If your site has exclusive games, people will notice it, sooner or later.
But that's the theory. The hard part is to actually manage to sell directly :)
It is true however that lot of people simply can't wait 3-4 years before getting some money (all we know that you must wait some years before building a good direct-sale list...).

[Andy]

Who prevents you from getting money while you wait that 3-4 years?

With your point of view you propose to loose 200 customer who could try your game and discover your company and wait that one customer - your exclusive one... :confused:

[tolik]

Who prevents you from getting money while you wait that 3-4 years?

With your point of view you propose to loose 200 customer who could try your game and discover your company and wait that one customer - your exclusive one... :confused:

And again, it's the matter of the approach to the games. If it's business, then you care about money and make games to get profit. So you should try to make them as casual ones and forget such discussions. Then, it's not quite an indie way, is it? You depend onto the publisher and his distribution channels.
If you are trying to make a game which you love yourself and would love to share with a limited amount of people, that's a totally different approach. It's Your Game, you love it as your own child, it's Art, etc.
Andy, different people have different goals.

Jack has created goalkeeper because he loves simulation/management, right?

[EpicBoy]

who could try your game and discover your company
That's the thing. Every portal that has approached me wanted my logos off the game (and theirs on), and any links that lead directly to my site were off limits as well. They don't want their customer knowing who you are.

[Chris Evans]

I don't have to pay for anything. Cletus has a budget of $0. And I've never been afraid of stronger competition, even with a million dollar budget. More high quality titles are just what we need to grow the market.



I wasn't saying it would cost you several hundred thousand to make Cletus. I was joking and implying that usually when people start making a lot of money they don't save, they instead hire more employees, get an office space, and increase their expenses.

Anyway but I'm curious too, was Download.com the driving (and the only?) force behind everybody's marketing plan a few years ago? Maybe it's because I wasn't around during the "Golden Age", but I just don't buy this doom and gloom. Sure, it's probably tough if you specialize in casual games, but for non-casual and niche games there's a lot of potential out there.

Just look at Gish, it's getting reviewed in major publications such as New York Times and now just recently in Gamespot. If you make a really GOOD Indie game, you will get noticed.

Also, I've noticed many Indie devs just don't realize how many gaming news sites are out there. Often times, it's impossible for me to find a review of an Indie game. For example Svero, I recently typed "space taxi 2 review" in Google and not a single review came up. It just brought up a bunch of pseudo reviews from download sites. I couldn't find a single editorial review. Space Taxi 2 is a solid game with nice production values, there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to find at least a few reviews.

I agree with GameStudioD that gaming news sites and blogs are going to be major marketing tools for Indie devs. So even if IGN or Gamespot do not review your game, there are still literally thousands of other smaller gaming news site that do cover PC games. You get enough of the smaller gaming news sites to cover your game and it starts to add up. But your game has to be good or have something unique about it.

I'll be honest here, one of the main reasons why don't see a lot of Indie games on review sites is because the majority of Indie games as of late have been uninspired puzzle games or clones. If we break out of that box, we'll start seeing more coverage as a whole. But I think Anthony's right, not many people care about boring average games, especially from Indies. Standards have risen and I don't think that's a bad thing. On the contrary, I think it will help Indie games get noticed more and break the stereotype that all downloadable games are ultra-casual games.

But let's be realistic, the days of the puzzle game gold rush are over (if you self-publish). A 2-3 month puzzle game is good for a little bit of experience and setting up your shop. But it's definitely a no-risk venture - You have no risk of virtually making any money. If you want to make money as an Indie, you have to do something different and add some polish to it. You can't place all the blame on portals or deteriorating download sites.

[tolik]

That's the thing. Every portal that has approached me wanted my logos off the game (and theirs on), and any links that lead directly to my site were off limits as well. They don't want their customer knowing who you are.

My guess: Reflexive doesn't do that.

[EpicBoy]

http://reflexive.net/index.php?PAGE=game_detail&CID=0&AID=9&CAT=Action&CATNAME=Action&FLEXSTATE=Action

A real quick examination of "Crimsonland" shows a very small "By:" line on the product page (not a link to the developers page, just their name) and a graphical link on the left side of the official page they've set up for it (http://crimsonland.reflexive.com/crimsonland/).

Downloading the game and installing it I see:

- the developers name appearing in the software license agreement
- when the game starts up, there's a quick fade in/out of the developers logo

That's about it from what I can see. The rest has "Reflexive" plastered all over it.

All links and "web site" buttons that appear in the game lead to Reflexive.

So they haven't exactly removed "10 Tons" from the equation, but they've come damn close.

[Jack Norton]

With your point of view you propose to loose 200 customer who could try your game and discover your company and wait that one customer - your exclusive one...
Well, I must clarify: I was talking mostly about my kind of games, niche ones.
Infact I submitted my casual games (spin around and quizland) to various portals (only BFG published them actually).
And as other said, they won't really discover your company... they put logos and prevent direct links to my websites. So unless someone close the game, open google.com and search for "winter wolves game studio", will never find me :eek:


Jack has created goalkeeper because he loves simulation/management, right?
yes indeed. that was the main reason. It was really an experiment. One day I had the idea of making a goalkeeper simulation and I did it. So far has even done well on sales, but honestly I hadn't much hope on that because was really a particular game :)
I try to alternate, a casual game, a niche game (or a game I want to make)...


My guess: Reflexive doesn't do that.
Eheh no sorry :)
Every publisher will do that. No one will leave a link to the website where people can BUY the game there and they would get NO money... ;)

[tolik]

See, Andy :)
Don't forget a lot of people even do freeware!

@Jack:
We did a gambling game on Penalty theme. Quite boring, but nice to check.

[Andy]

Jack has created goalkeeper because he loves simulation/management, right?

Jack made his Goalkeeper to make a pain to me mostly. :D
No. Really correct - because he loves etc. But love he that type of game even more he'd probably focus on idea to share his love with another peoples around and find something casual in the genre.


If it's business...


Check the title of the forum above :)



It's Your Game, you love it as your own child, it's Art, etc.
Andy, different people have different goals.


Oh, OK. Free Art, etc... Yes, I got an idea and hate it.

Our main task is to bring a pleasure to people. To grab money through that - this is the second task. Happyness if both tasks are working together...
So, you really suppose that we hate all our games, don't suppose them by our children, and make them for money only? - :confused: - No.

[Dan MacDonald]

So they haven't exactly removed "10 Tons" from the equation, but they've come damn close.

Keep in mind that Reflexive worked extensively with 10 Tons to bring crimsonland to the state it is in today. It was closer to a partnership then a standard distribution agreement, so perhaps it isn't the best example. Crimsonland is also the only Reflexive title that reflexive promoted to Real, Shockwave etc. mostly because their own affiliate network / distribution mechagnism wasn't fully in place yet.

[tolik]

No Andy, I didn't want to say that. Every game should have fun, soul, be a state of art, should be accessible (a bit casual) and then everything will be in harmony ;)

[Andy]

Every portal that has approached me wanted my logos off the game (and theirs on)

Fishes don't require our logos off. But...
To hear this from EPIC boy!... Kidding me? Give a specific style to your games (visual design and gameplay) - to let people remember and recognize it in the future titles. Should I teach you to this?! :confused:

Guys you all are trying to kid me today or what? ;)
Are you submitting your games to another sites? - Careful! They also got their link in the address line of the explorer!

[BlueWaldo]

It sounds to me like everyone is upset because big name portals are the “only” way to sell a lot of games, and they only give around 20% to the developer. Maybe the answer is to open a portal that offer 60% or even 80% to the developer, in exchange for being the only online portal that can sell that game. If the site advertised enough to get a strong customer base it would soon be the only site with the best games on it, and developers would get more money.

Would this idea work?
Would developers accept such terms?

[Andy]

Every game should have fun, soul, be a state of art, should be accessible (a bit casual) and then everything will be in harmony ;)

Every creation should be devoted to audience around otherwise this is not a creation but onanism (correct me please if this is incorrect word for these forums).
The higher audience - the greater creation.

Suppose so,

[Dan MacDonald]

BlueWaldo, that's pretty much exactly the GargeGames publishing model (http://www.garagegames.com/pg/publishing.php)
The problem is, they have two rules. The game has to be fun and it has to be cross platform and they have run into problems trying to get games from the community that meet these criteria.

This thread is getting a little off topic guys, let's keep it focused on the topic at hand. The basic message that I want to champion is that portals ARE NOT necessary for success. You CAN make a great game and you CAN get customers on your own. It takes a little longer perhaps, but if you are in it for the long term you will be rewarded for it. Also, you don't have to make a casual game to be financially successful. I think we should make smaller games that are achievable with our resources, but they don't have to be casual. Make something that excites you and it will show in your product, people will appreciate it and they will buy it. It basically comes down to this, Make fun games that you are passionate about and people will play them and buy them.

[Andy]

The basic message that I want to champion is that portals ARE NOT necessary for success. You CAN make a great game and you CAN get customers on your own.

Dan, please... OK. You can. But what for? To stay independent as a rock? :)
I do realize that if you think about portals that pushes you into the casual direction - yes. But look how they rotate the idea - we don't want to be published on portals to get a success one handred years later - our games are from indie elite that's why nobody buys them... :confused:

OK. I'm silence. No more for today.
You all are great!

[Diragor]

I have not sold any of my own software yet so I have no personal experience from which to draw my own conclusions about how best to sell a game. But while reading everybody's opinions here I don't see why some people are completely missing the point of the "get and keep your own customers" side of the debate.

If you sell your game through a portal you make exactly one sale to that customer, collect your 20% or whatever, and that's the end of it. If you sell your own game directly to that same person you get a lot more money and, more importantly, you have a potentially loyal customer of your very own. They might opt-in to your newsletter so you can tell them about new products. They might come back to your site on their own if you update it with interesting content regularly, they might buy add-on packs for the game they bought, they might buy the sequel to that game or a completely different game of yours. The point is, repeat customers are an easier sell by all accounts I've read, so that customer retention is quite valuable.

I'm just getting started here but I can tell you right now, I'd rather spend 5 years steadily growing my own loyal customer base than be a flash in the pan at some portal, no matter how many one-off sales I could get there in a short period. Part of the appeal of the indie thing to me is that I'll have only myself to blame if I fail, and I'll keep all (or most) of the rewards if I succeed. That won't be the case if I give away my customers and most of my profits to somebody else.

[EpicBoy]

To hear this from EPIC boy!... Kidding me? Give a specific style to your games (visual design and gameplay) - to let people remember and recognize it in the future titles. Should I teach you to this?!
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying.

Give the game all the flair and style you want but if the customer doesn't know (or care) who made it, it's all for not.

[Mike Boeh]

My thinking is a bit more along the lines of Thomas... Portals can't stop you from attracting traffic and making your own sales. There is no walmart in the equation here.

For example, my audience is what I would call "crossover". Somewhere in between casual and hardcore. These games wouldn't convert at a great rate to a casual audience, but do well to my visitors. It took years to build that audience of course, but now I have an instant consumer base for each new game I create or publish.

Thomas has the same thing for solitaire games, except he sells a lot more than I do :)

[Greg Squire]

I noticed that a number of you have cross links to other indie sites. This marketing technique can "cross-pollenate" customers. It's sort of a "banding together" of sorts. Does anyone have any data on how this has helped sales? By standing together, the bigger portals would have less leverage, I think (maybe not but much, but it's an interesting thought).

I also agree that the community needs a better Indie portal (as has been mentioned). I could be nothing more than a glorified link site at first, after all, that's all the shareware sites are. As long as it got enough eyeballs it could work. I think Grab.com is a step in that direction.

I think "togetherness" is part of the key in the indie community. Our survival is, in a way, dependent on everyone else. Portals have been a way to do this "banding products together", but it seems they want way too much for their "value add" nowdays. (Also if you have read this Wired article about the Long Tail (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail_pr.html), do so; it's good reading.)

[BlueWaldo]

I don't think a list of links or cross linking between indie sites is enough to compete with the big portals. People go to these portals because they know about them, and they know they have good games (games they want to play). To launch a site that could compete with the portals would require a significant investment in advertising.

[Anthony Flack]

What if you simply put together a low-overhead site with the emphasis on good search and rating capabilities, and an eye to being comprehensive?

Just try to make it good, and don't make a big effort to advertise it. See how far word-of-mouth takes it. You know, I don't think I've ever seen an ad for any of the big portals, or download.com either for that matter. All of these things I know about because someone mentioned them at some point. Of course advertising probably played a big part in getting them to reach critical mass... but if everyone was behind it and gave it a mention here and there...?

Also - I don't really see much harm in using the portals if you can. I don't know if the people you reach through the portals are people you would ever reach on your own - if someone is having their needs met (or thinks they are) by Realarcade then they have no need to go trawling for shareware. So my hunch is that these are mostly seperate, additional people to your core audience.

And I can see why they wouldn't want you to put your web address on the games they publish. But the idea that you should take your logo off is something I find quite offensive. That's going too far.

[Tom Cain]

As a niche platform developer, I'd like to add that non-Windows developers don't really have to contend with the portal question at all. (In fact, retail is pretty much out of the equation, too.) So switching to platforms where the portals aren't is another potential way to overcome.

[Anthony Flack]

That's based on the assumption that the portals are taking everyone's customers off them. Are they, though?

[svero]

In short, if you sell mostly direct you don't have to worry about the portals at all.

Easy for you or me to say. We both built up our companies in an atmosphere where it was possible to get direct customers without spending a lot of money by promoting through community channels like download sites that people actually visited for games. We've seen the number of important sites dwindle and consolidate, we've seen their traffic whiddle away to nothing, we've seen the traffic moved over to sites that we can no longer use for exposure without giving away the majority of the sale. I wouldn't want to be coming into this today with no customers. There's zero doubt in my mind that it was easier to build a customer base without cash flow a few years back than it is today.

Selling direct is always the best thing if you can do it. You have the eternal optimists who will say that there are new opportunities that didn't exist and so on, but the fact of the matter is... the online game industry is becoming more like the record industry. Would any of those same optimists tell me that a garage band can make serious records sales outside the structure of a major record company label and without radio airplay?

The problem is primarily exposure and perhaps partly competition. But mostly it's exposure. A new developer entering the online games sales market today has less opportunity to promote their software to the kinds of numbers of people needed to make a living wage profit than they use to.

I'll say again that I have nothing against portals and I hope to continue to work with them. But in you article you say...

"Online portals, on the other hand, only control space on their own web sites. This space is not limited and it is not expensive to create your own web site and compete with them. "

I strongly disagree. Portals have made a *conscious* business decision to control the disitribution of online games on the Internet. Ie... they want to be the only place people buy games on the net. And they've largely succeeded. (Part of the blame lies with dl sites - Download.com dropped the ball and sold all their game traffic to real. It's as simple as that. Nobody goes there anymore for games. You'll notice they changed their site recently to try and correct that. All the same, from a browser/potential customers point of view dl.com provides terrible service.) ONLY through that control can portals force low royalty rates to developers. The only thing they offer us is distribution. They don't have anything else to offer. If they don't control the distribution they don't have any value. The business *is* control. The business is making certain that we don't have those direct routes open to us any more. Control the distribution of games online. Leave developers nowhere else to market and they must come to you and take what you offer. You can't force a royalty rate down if there are 30 other places to make a good living without them. Again it will sound like I'm demonizing them, but I'm not. That's just good business. It's the same thing record labels do to maintain their wealth. They control distribution of all music. That's why they're so threatened by file sharing. Its not because music piracy hurts sales. It's because a change in the way that music is distributed hurts their distribution system. Ie.. the only thing record labels have of any value.

[Reactor]

Interesting thread, but I personally couldn't care less about the issue. Dan MacDonald said it right- good games sell. Making better games should be the focus of a huge thread, not portals. Someone around here should make a really awesome game, and I guarantee there will be thousands of people hitting google like possessed people to find it, even if the web is filled with a million super-sized portals. But you know, I'm always amazed at how amazingly average most indie games are, and am not surprised they don't sell against the portals. The vision for the average indie game is so small... so limited, they offer nothing average Joe can't pick up from his local portal. There just isn't anything worth leaving the local corner store for.

You guys don't need to form a portal. You just need to offer something better for people to eat, so they'll actually consider leaving the local fast-food joint. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but... being a consumer myself, that's honestly what I think.

[Jim Buck]

I think the point being made, though, is *how* do these people know to look for you on Google like "possessed people"? How did they hear about you in the first place to *know* to look for you?

[Jack Norton]

To Retro64 and Goodsol:
I agree with svero... is easy for you to say that... ;) you have already a huge customer base and when you started, Realarcade didn't even exist (if I am correct).
I don't say that you were lucky at all, you were clever to start a business in the right moment. Now is 10x times more harder...


I think the point being made, though, is *how* do these people know to look for you on Google like "possessed people"? How did they hear about you in the first place to *know* to look for you?
Unless you're talking about a game of commercial quality (but then isn't anymore a shareware...?) I think that this isn't possible.
Take Zuma Deluxe for example... I don't like casual games but I must admit that this one is awesome. Did they sold it only from their website? No.
If I had a game that sell 100 month from my website I wouldn't really have the need to use big portals...!

So unless you make a game better than that (really hard I believe) don't think the google strategy will work :mad:

[Andy]

[B]Take Zuma Deluxe for example... Did they sold it only from their website?

That's really a good example for every starter complaining in this thread how good and wide would be their audience. Take Zuma onto your site as affiliate guys - and try to sell it from there. You will see what you get and share with us. It would be good training for you anyway...

[cliffski]

This is an interesting (albeit slightly depressing) read. I've seen at least 1 portal (real) change over the years from being really pro-developer to really being just like a retail store. I don't think I will ever pitch a game of mine to one of the portals again. To be honest, there are so many portals with the same 10-20 games, that its really refreshing when you find a game (like lux) that isn't on those portals.
I agree its better to sell direct, which is what I try to do (with limited success) but to be honest, the big problem is exposure, getting enough traffic to your site. I think the way to do this is (unfortunately) paid advertising, which gets a bad press, but I can't help thinking if it didn't work the big megacorps wouldnt use it. It works for me anyway.
The point about most indie games being rubbish is valid too. To be honest, the last shareware game I bought as I recall was Star Monkey, which was done by Fiendish Games. Most of them are overpriced. I have to admit that some of my earlier games (Rocky Racers,Space Battle 3001) are pretty lame in relation to the competition, and not suprisngly dont sell anything like as well as Starship Tycoon (that only sells maybe 20-30 a month).
So I guess what I'm saying is, if you want exposure, you gotta pay for it. If you've had 10 sales, take that $100 and spend all of it on ads. You gotta speculate to accumulate etc.

[Reactor]

Jim, a good game will be known without advertising... plain old word of mouth. It still works wonders. But, by saying that I'm also not saying it isn't worth taking cliffski's advice and putting some hard earned cash to announce that it's out there. The point I was making was- if the games were better, people would eventually follow the world of mouth trail right to your door, instead of accidentally downloading it from a portal. The impression I've gotten recently is that most indies would much rather do what they've been doing for years- making okay games and then hoping someone bumps into it in the dark. I'm saying, someone turn a darn light on, release a better than average game and show gamers everywhere that portals can buy quantity, but individuals can still produce quality.

Most people I know buy games like Quake 3 and Jedi Knight Academy in the bargain bin for as little as $6US. The days of flooding the market with $29.95 puzzle games, and expecting to do well is over. No one can blame the portals. Even without them the sales are going to dwindle.

[EpicBoy]

Jim, a good game will be known without advertising... plain old word of mouth. It still works wonders.
But it's not magic. They won't find you if you aren't advertising. Word of mouth is great, but in this day and age people don't need word of mouth to find games. They already know where the portals are and odds are they already know a handfull of web sites they can go to for games (PopCap, etc) so I think the process of asking your friends, "Anyone hear of any good games that came out lately?" is dying off slowly.

The mentality becoming, "If it was good, it would be on RealArcade".

Not that this is a 100% truth or anything - of course people still talk about games and word of mouth is important. But relying on it to lead people to your games is like dropping the rent money on a single roll on Vegas.

[tentons]

I don't believe for a second that the the 250million people who buy games online are all grandchildren and women over 35. Sure that might be the majority...

I'm not sure them being a majority is even the case. Maybe that type of game has sold a majority comparatively, but that ignores the fact that there just aren't many "hardcore" or "middlecore" games being released by indies that are sold online exclusively. Don't confuse historic sales with potential sales! I personally feel that middle/hardcore gamers are going to become the big buyers in the near future.

Apart from that, it's inevitable that big publishers will move in--for all categories of games. As the internet improves and grows, more and more people will shop online, and distribution will take place online. There's money, so it will attract big companies.

There is hope, though. The main reason big publishers can bend over a new developer (of any type) is that the new guy lacks leverage. Well, before you approach a publisher with a project, get some leverage first! Fight back. Release some games and build an audience, get some buzz to show that you make games that sell. Don't go in there hoping for a deal with no track record. (And damn sure don't base your business plan on the assumption that you'll live on funding from a publisher. I already tried that, back in the day.)

Lastly, if you have a great product and you can make noise about it, it will sell. People will notice, and you'll be successful. Publishers will come to you, and you'll have the leverage to get the 50% you deserve. There's no manufacturing overhead, no MDF (market development funds) for the publishers to claim, so online royalties should be higher than retail. If you can't get it, sell it yourself. You'll be better off in every way.

The key to buzz marketing (ie, low/no-budget) is sparkle. Make your game look stunning, and you'll get attention. It really is that simple. For success, though, you also have to have a great game to back up the hype. But if you can impress people with screenshots, you've got a lot of marketing power.

Business is war. Prepare for the attack, and preempt.

[Sirrus]

As a side note...

Zuma is actually a rip off of an older Japanese game - completely indentical, only difference is the graphic theme.
Just know that almost all of their games are actually clones of older, less known games.

"Most addictive game ever offered" is a tag from Zuma...

Everyone thinks PopCap are geniuses, but in reality, they are really just another Microsoft - knows how to find and re-market older property.

[EpicBoy]

And why is that a knock against them? If they're smart enough to do it, they deserve their success.

They also did a number of things properly that other people seem to miss ... they have great marketing, cross promotions, you can play their games right on their site and then download them if you want the "deluxe" version, all of their games have cute/fun themes that people can get into, etc.

Ever install a PopCap game? Their games are the best experiences possible for the casual gamer market. Easy installation, easy instructions, you're playing within 1 or 2 clicks, you can leave at any time and resume the game later, etc.

They do everything right that the majority of indies do wrong.

[tolik]

Also, if somebody does think about puzzle/magic/etc inlays, they are rip-off from Origano.

http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=797

The company, still does exist and does gaming-oriented stuff.

[tentons]

They do everything right that the majority of indies do wrong.

I think that's a very important point to be reminded of. Success is a multiplication of many factors, and that affects exposure. If people have trouble getting your demo, installing your demo, or are otherwise confused by it, then it won't matter if you're on a portal or not.

Ease of use dovetails with presentation, which initiates exposure. It's all connected.

[tolik]

I think that's a very important point to be reminded of. Success is a multiplication of many factors, and that affects exposure. If people have trouble getting your demo, installing your demo, or are otherwise confused by it, then it won't matter if you're on a portal or not.

Ease of use dovetails with presentation, which initiates exposure. It's all connected.

Accessibility, usability and ease of play is a must for success, this is correct.

[Reactor]

But it's not magic. They won't find you if you aren't advertising. Word of mouth is great, but in this day and age people don't need word of mouth to find games. They already know where the portals are and odds are they already know a handfull of web sites they can go to for games (PopCap, etc) so I think the process of asking your friends, "Anyone hear of any good games that came out lately?" is dying off slowly.

I disagree. I never hear the end of gamers on the 'net asking that very question, or telling me that they've just played a great new game. When they do, everyone who hears about it goes and has a look. You might think that gamers don't need word of mouth anymore, but there are thousands of guys out there looking for indie-like games who don't like what the portals are offering. Gamer to gamer advice means more to a lot of guys than reviews, or what rates five stars on a big portal site. Really casual gamers are different, that's for sure, but no one here is limiting themselves to ultra-casual, are they? Anyway, I did also mention that there needs to be advertising to back up basic word of mouth.

[EpicBoy]

I'm talking more about casual gamers. Hardcore guys on the messageboards and such talk, sure, but I don't know about puzzle gamers...

[Jim Buck]

I agree. I think the concern about all these big portals is that there will be so much noise on the internet, that people looking for these types of games will go to the portals where the "noise" is consolidated in an easy-to-find place. The "word of mouth" method will have a much harder time as a result.

Re: doing older concepts well:
I think the best way to have a game that catches on is to take an already-used concept and execute it exceptionally well.. or to come up with a completely new and off-the-wall idea (and, even then, you still have to execute pretty well).

[goodsol]

We've seen the number of important sites dwindle and consolidate, we've seen their traffic whiddle away to nothing, we've seen the traffic moved over to sites that we can no longer use for exposure without giving away the majority of the sale.

I haven't seen this at all. While a few important sites have disappeared or been swallowed up by others (I'm thinking mainly of Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, etc) that has been more than made up for by an increase in traffic from the remaining.

Looking back at where my traffic came from in 2000 and comparing it with today, the top 3 sources of traffic are the same now as they were then - Yahoo, MSN, and Google. Only the order has changed.

You can pay to get a sponsored listing now but the main listings are still free.


I strongly disagree. Portals have made a *conscious* business decision to control the disitribution of online games on the Internet. Ie... they want to be the only place people buy games on the net. And they've largely succeeded. (Part of the blame lies with dl sites - Download.com dropped the ball and sold all their game traffic to real. It's as simple as that. Nobody goes there anymore for games.

Download.com has never, ever been more than a token source of downloads for me, so what they did or didn't do has had zero effect on me.

What, exactly, do the portals control? I sure don't see it. They are just sites like any other, some of them have some good traffic, but they control absolutely nothing about the distribution of online games on the internet. When I go searching for games you can see some of the portals in sponsored listings, but I don't see much evidence of them in the regular listings so they sure don't have anything approaching a monopoly on traffic.

Sure, Yahoo has a prominant link to their game portal on their site and MSN has the same for their MSNGameZone, but those have been there for years and haven't seemed to stop anyone from going elsewhere.

These portal sites only have traffic as long as they have good product and customer service. The traffic will go elsewhere if they don't. Real only gets traffic because their RealPlayer is on a lot of machines - RealArcade doesn't seem to have much of a search engine presence. BigFishGames must get most of its traffic from its affiliate system and from pay per click. Neither of these constitutes any kind of control on the traffic.



The business is making certain that we don't have those direct routes open to us any more. Control the distribution of games online. Leave developers nowhere else to market and they must come to you and take what you offer.

But how in the world are they controlling anything? The direct route is as open as it ever was, they can't stop you from putting up a site and getting into the search engines yourself. Unless one of the search engines themselves makes some kind of exclusive deal where they will only show links to a portal, the control you talk about can never happen. And if a search engine did that, some other engine would grab at the opportunity to take over the searches for people who want to see all choices.


They control distribution of all music. That's why they're so threatened by file sharing. Its not because music piracy hurts sales. It's because a change in the way that music is distributed hurts their distribution system. Ie.. the only thing record labels have of any value.

The only reason the record labels control distribution of music is because most music is sold in stores and the primary way of learning about new music is over the radio, which is also controlled by only a few companies. That will change when the internet becomes the primary way of hearing new music. There are already lots of musicians who bypass the labels and distribute direct on the internet, and that trend will grow. The music companies will do all they can to stop it, of course, but they will fail.

[KNau]

I think part of the damage being done to the indie psychology can be traced back to the early days of Dexterity and the "Make $10,000 a Month" article. Steve has since tempered his statement with the note that it took him about 2 years to achieve a state of profitability but the idea of that kind of instant success had already been set loose. Many developers lately seem to be planning to become instantly successful and can't understand why it isn't happening. It becomes very easy to blame the market.

If you are just releasing games this year, chances are you won't become self-sufficient until sometime in 2006! Yes, there are cases like "Think Tanks" where the success seems massive and instantaneous but don't bank on it happening to you.

I'm currently writing a developer centric article that will hopefully be posted on Game Tunnel about making games that are true to your heart and the mistakes I made with my business launch. I don't want to give too much away but here are a couple points:

1) The casual market is over-represented? Well, good riddance! I made the mistake of chasing "the fastest growing market" rather than making interesting games. I got my 2% conversion rate but with no traffic and no customer loyalty. There's just too much competition for the same dollars. Some people can swallow their pride and make match 3 games to chase after a piece of that ever-diminishing pie but I just discovered that I can't.

2) The portals are making buttloads of money from the casual market because it was the most underrepresented market. It's not anymore and I predict that within the next 18 months all the portals who talked sh*t to developers will come crawling back looking for new content because no one is buying the same old same old that they're selling. Even soccer moms are astute enough to know when a gaming concept gets old and I've heard a dirty rumor that the new Puzzle Inlay / Match 3 clones aren't selling near what the originals did.

They will have to find a new market to oversaturate and that's when you will appear out of the woodwork with your collection of action/strategy (or whatever) games. You the developer will have all the bargaining power because by that time they will need you more than you will need them. Wouldn't you feel better having big name publishers chase you? I bet then your e-mails will get answered pretty damned quickly!

3) Step outside the "dl.com + press release + shareware sites" box because that method just doesn't work by itself anymore (if it ever did). Gamers come from all walks of life and they don't always visit gaming news sites. Actually, statistically very few of them do.

Gamers hang out in coffee shops, read comic books, play board games, go to the movies, read Fangoria, etc. There are a million sneaky ways to get your product in front of a potential customer's eyes because gamers are everywhere!

Internet advertising is largely a waste of money, especially when you are starting out and sales from your site are low or non-existent. Buy a copy of "Guerilla Marketing", start networking and get creative! Start locally!

[Andy]

...Step outside the "dl.com + press release + shareware sites" box because that method just doesn't work by itself anymore...
gamers are everywhere!

So... advertise everywhere?
BUT! Not at dl.com, not in press releases, not in download archives and not in the Web? :confused:

[KNau]

What I mean is that gamers are all around you. It's up to you to figure out what your particular niche is and how to target them but, yes, I think you would do just as well to forget about the old "dl.com, press-release, shareware sites" as paid promotions.

You should still submit to shareware sites, send press releases, etc. but don't pay for it and don't give it more than passing attention because they aren't very effective methods. It's just too hard to stand out when you're doing what everyone else is doing, even if your game is brilliant.

I found paying for those services useful to do once because then I was able to find out what sites deliver traffic and what ones are pointless. Not all shareware / news sites are created equally so in the future I won't even bother with the ones that didn't deliver bang for the buck. In total, I found 4 shareware sites and 6 news sites that deliver - the rest were pointless. That makes future press release and game submissions much easier having narrowed the list.

Alternative Marketing Example:Most movie theaters will let you buy full sceen advertising in their pre-movie slide shows for reasonable amounts. There is a captive audience that will read your ad fully, 3 to 4 times in the cycle before the movie starts. That's just an example of one of the zillions of possibilities out there. Will it work? You won't know until you try.

[Hamumu]

KNau, That's exactly what I was trying to say with my clumsy analogy. And especially, if you ARE targeting "casual gamers", well, they're casual, so odds are good that the majority of the time, they're not at their computer! So yeah, start dropping ads out there in the real world! Of course, as with any advertising, measure and test so you're not wasting money. But I think the potential is very good for success in that way.

[Greg Squire]

From my limited understanding of marketing, word of mouth can be a powerful thing. But the way I see it, you have to do two things to get it working. First create a good game that people will talk about (bad games don't get discussed), and then you have to "prime the pump" (word of mouth starts with your mouth). You've got to be creative at "Guerilla Marketing" to start the ball rolling. And then you have to do it often, to start more balls rolling. Some balls will run out of steam, but others (hopefully) will continue and maybe start other balls rolling as well.

[svero]

>I haven't seen this at all. While a few important sites have disappeared or
>been swallowed up by others (I'm thinking mainly of Altavista, Excite,
>Infoseek, etc) that has been more than made up for by an increase in
>traffic from the remaining.

I don't know what internet you're using but my traffic from all download sites is now basically equal to zero. I use to get a lot of hits from palces like altavista, infoseek, hotfiles etc... A game on download.com is lucky if it generates 1000 downloads in a month. Most will get something in the hundreds.

>Looking back at where my traffic came from in 2000 and comparing it with
>today, the top 3 sources of traffic are the same now as they were then -
>Yahoo, MSN, and Google. Only the order has changed.

Even when my listing was bouncing around between positions 2-4 on google I didn't get much traffic from search sites and the traffic wasn't that well targeted. They've never been a major source of income for me. I do get many sales each month from google, but the majority of my income use to come from download sites, which are now defunct. That may be due to a difference in the kinds of games we make.

>What, exactly, do the portals control? I sure don't see it. They are just
>sites like any other, some of them have some good traffic, but they control
>absolutely nothing about the distribution of online games on the internet.

Analogously you could say.. what do the record labels control? You can make a song and send it to the radio stations and stores and hope to get airplay and shelf space. But in reality it doesn't really work does it. Why not? Because there is an implicit control. A record label essentially pays the radio station to promote songs. If you're a new artist starting out you simply can't afford to compete. In the case of music its worse than online. There are still opportunities on the web today that a musician doesn't have in the regular cd sales biz, but the market IS trending towards full control. I'd argue that by sheer advertising power real controls a large large portion of game consumers on the internet. I'd argue that they set out to control that audience on purpose. The control comes from the fact that there's a finite number of customers looking to download and buy games, and they have a finite number of games they're willing or able to play each month. If there are 50 ads for realarcade and they already have the client on their machine and one of the 8 games released by real that month suits their needs then you, with your 1 ad that they may or may not have seen are far far less likely to make a sale. It is a competition. And when one player is much stronger financially than the other they can effectively control. I don't know how the market works for solitaire games. But if you were to set up your own web page and release a new little platform game on all the download sites that was a good quality game, comperable to what real is selling, and not advertise it in any way other than your sites and the free submissions you'd go bankrupt in today's market. You'd never sell enough copies to survive. Contrast that with 4 yrs ago. A game released to the major download sites could generate 10's of thousands of dollars in a few months. Those days are over.

>When I go searching for games you can see some of the portals in
>sponsored listings, but I don't see much evidence of them in the regular
>listings so they sure don't have anything approaching a monopoly on traffic.

There's not complete monopoly yet but it is trending that way.

>Sure, Yahoo has a prominant link to their game portal on their site and MSN >has the same for their MSNGameZone, but those have been there for years
>and haven't seemed to stop anyone from going elsewhere.

This simply isn't true. If it were then I'd be able to see the 10-12x increase in sales I use to see from a submission of a new version of a game to download sites. I don't. So the traffic has in fact moved. And people are.. one way or another "stopped".

>These portal sites only have traffic as long as they have good product and
>customer service. The traffic will go elsewhere if they don't.

This I agree with. But the portals generally do a competent job and they have other mechanisms to keep their traffic such as Real's membership scheme where you can get games a little cheaper.

>Real only gets traffic because their RealPlayer is on a lot of machines -
>RealArcade doesn't seem to have much of a search engine presence.

Nobody visits the website much. They access the games through the realarcade client. The client is used by huge numbers of people because real advertised it heavily. What's the one ad you see front and center on download.com games section and that has been there for the last 4 yrs or so? Realarcade client.

>BigFishGames must get most of its traffic from its affiliate system and from
>pay per click. Neither of these constitutes any kind of control on the traffic.

Well bigfish is smaller but when you add bigfish, real, yahoo, pogo, gamezone, shockwave etc.. together you have a nice set of sites with combined traffic and better service. That has drawn away most of the traffic from sites where developers can get free exposure.

>Unless one of the search engines themselves makes some kind of exclusive
>deal where they will only show links to a portal, the control you talk about
>can never happen.

You don't need exclusivity to control a market. There is not control in the sense that anyone can still submit a site. There is control in the sense that, if you don't use the portals and you dont already have your own traffic or advertising budget it will be near imposible to make a living wage.

>The only reason the record labels control distribution of music is because
>most music is sold in stores and the primary way of learning about new
>music is over the radio

It's completely analogous. The only way people learn about new games is by advertising on the net or through sites they already visit that they learned about through advertising. That's your radio. The portal sites essentially are retail stores on the web. I could turn your argument around and say.. how is the music industry controlled. A garage band can pay all the radio stations to play their new single just like the record labels do, and they can go to hmv or whomever and ask the stores to stock their games. There's nothing stopping them. But in reality they don't have the resources to do it.

- S

[Anthony Flack]

The only way people learn about new games is by advertising on the net or through sites they already visit that they learned about through advertising.


It might just be me, but I don't think I've ever discovered a game through advertising. It was always someone posting a mesaage saying "You have to try this!" etc...

And occasionally a review, when I'm in a review-reading mood.

[Reactor]

Very similar experiences here, Anthony. Greg Squire, you hit the nail on the head with your post, as far as I'm concerned.

[svero]

It might just be me, but I don't think I've ever discovered a game through advertising. It was always someone posting a mesaage saying "You have to try this!" etc...

And occasionally a review, when I'm in a review-reading mood.

How many copies did your own game, Platypus, sell online in the 2 years it was up at idigicon through word of mouth before mike introduced it to his and the audiences of affiliates and portals all over the web? Here's a perfect example of a great game, that many people like, that turned out to be a big hit, but sold next to nothing through word of mouth due to lack of exposure. (I admit, in part that has to do with the changes mike made to the game, but I think if mike had made those changes and put the game back up only on idigicon's website sales of platypus would have continued to stagnate)

[paulm]

KNau has it spot on with the marketing. Gamers are everywhere, and it's up to the indie to find them. While I haven't read "Guerilla Marketing", I've read "Unleashing the Ideavirus" by Seth Godin (which you can download from the website www.ideavirus.com) and that's a great read. I've also read "Built to Last", and I would suggest that every entrepreneurial indie reads it. However, experience is good as a guide, but don't judge things by experience alone; read around and listen to what other people have to say, as their experiences are different, and are of as much value to your plans as your own ideas.

I read Dan's .plan on GarageGames and it was a sobering read. While I have no experience with portals (that requires a game, for starters), I can understand his reaction to their arrogance, and agree with the statement that there indies should get informed about their choices. However, I disagree with another idea presented in this thread that states that using portals is against the indie way. That idea is as backward as the idea that an indie game needs to be a puzzle game.

The biggest weapon indies have in their arsenal is their grey matter. Use whatever choices you have at your disposal, and if they don't match up with your long-term goals, then create your own choices. You need to be prepared to take risks, and follow up as many avenues as humanly possible. Try lots of things and see what works, prune the things that don't work and branch out. Don't become dependent on one avenue like the portals have; that's simply bad business.

Nothing I'm saying here is new, but it's the reality of the situation. If you have the drive, you'll find a way to get your game out there, whether you bypass the portals or not. Found your own portal; up the quality of your games; inspire a new game concept; straddle the indie-commie divide if you really must (i.e., get experience at a commercial game developer). Just fire your neurons!

I've found this to be a most enlightening topic.

Cheers,
Paul.

[Anthony Flack]

Svero - I'm inclined to put that down partly to not "priming the pump"... almost nobody had played the game at all when it was handled through Idigicon. No effort was made to market or sell it online. So nobody was talking about it because the number of people who'd actually played it was probably only in the hundreds. Certainly you need to reach a decent number of people before you can achieve the mythical "critical mass". Which is another reason why I'm inclined not to worry about piracy!

And the other reason I think, is because I don't think Platypus is really good enough to set people talking. It totally failed to connect with the hardcore shooter fans. Overall I'd say it was an "above average" game, and that's probably just not good enough to blaze a trail with.

[oNyx]

>And the other reason I think, is because I don't think Platypus is really good
>enough to set people talking.

Naaaaah. That's just not true. Over at that Quake3 board I maintain (~21k registered users) it had at least one dedicated thread and got mentioned at least 2 times. That's really not bad (it's the same amount of WoM that Gish got). Oh and over at yakyak (http://www.yakyak.org) it got one dedicated thread and was mentioned at least 16 times. And someone even said it's the best shareware game he ever played :D

[svero]

And the other reason I think, is because I don't think Platypus is really good enough to set people talking. It totally failed to connect with the hardcore shooter fans. Overall I'd say it was an "above average" game, and that's probably just not good enough to blaze a trail with.

Ok. That may be, but then what people in this thread are saying is, Don't worry about the direction the market is taking, don't worry about big business moving in and controlling the distribution, it won't affect you because if your game is good enough you can sell direct and rely on word of mouth. That's just a naive polly-annish view. It's not realistic. Even a game that sold at hit levels like Platypus, didn't take off on it's own. I can think of other games that were not paying the bills but were, in my view really fantastic titles. I acknoledge that there were other factors in platypus's case, but lets face it, not everyone reading this thread is going to make the next Half Life.

It use to be that a "good" game could make good sales. I'd argue that a good game nowdays makes near zero sales because of the structure of online distrubution. I've already discussed that I don't think it's very easy to sell direct due to the fact that traffic has largely moved over to large corporate portal game sites. But even when you do get distributed on those sites, the very top games get promoted and those that don't happen to selling the best.. well they're just dropped. There's just not enough virtual shelf space for all of them and so only the best 10-20 games get a real push. If you have 100 games competing to sell on realarcade, and the average top 10 game makes 100k in sales a month, a game that makes a mere 60k in sales.. (should it be promoted) can sell only 1-2k worth because it's not positioned favorably relative to those games pulling in the extra 40k. If you have 10 slots to really push product and you want to make the most money possible, you'll take ten 100k games and push those and let the 60k game sit in the back where it gathers virtual dust and, unseen, it sells less than it's full potential and eventually dissapears. On it's own website and through demos and unadvertised it will sell, but not in the volume you need to pay the bills.

All I'm saying is that the market is trending to one where, in order to get the kind of traffic you need to live off your game sales, you are faced with a scenario where you essentially have to give up the bulk of your profit or have to invest considerable sums of your own money. Some people have disagreed and stated that the opportunity to get all the customers you need still exists without having to spend tons of money to promote your own site. Personally I don't see that and I'm willing to bet that most of the people who've released their first game in the last year know that what I'm saying is true. (Keep in mind none of this applies to an established business like goodsol, or dexterity etc.. An established customer base and established traffic are powerful sales tools.) If you just released a new game on the download sites chances are you're making less than 30 sales a month. Maybe as little as 1-2 sales a month. In effect it's a bit of a catch 22 because, if you do get distribution you're only making 10-20% of the sale and you have to sell A LOT of copies to make a living wage.

Some games will sell that many copies of course. (spout - feeding frenzy) But most wont. (sprout - color harmony) If sprout hits a few snags and makes a couple more that dont really catch on.. well... solong. They aren't selling direct so they have nothing to fall back on. A few misses and you're out of money. And even great games can miss! You can argue, but I think Wik and the Fable of souls is a great game. Is it in the top 10 sellers? Maybe maybe not. Lets say it doesn't happen to hit for whatever reason. The public is fickle. There you have a game with fantastic production values that just doesn't make enough money to pay the bills.

Couple that with the fact that in order to sell your game on a portal it basically *has* to be a top hit to make any money, and you're looking at a market where it's much tougher to make a buck than it use to be. Is it impossible to sell direct today and to market cleverly and still make money on your own? No not quite... I wouldnt go that far. I think it can still be done, but I think it's trending that way. Barring a major change in the direction things are going I'd say that 2-3yrs from now it will be impossible for most games.

[Diodor Bitan]

What about games that are in genres the portals don't target? Simulations, strategy, RPGs, that sort of thing.

[svero]

What about games that are in genres the portals don't target? Simulations, strategy, RPGs, that sort of thing.

I don't think those genres sell very well online these days. In part because game players don't frequent download sites to look for them. I haven't tried to sell an RPG online, but I suspect to make it work you'd want to hit a whole different class of sites and have to do some advertising on more mainstream retail style sites to get at the audience. RPG's and Strategy titles have a whole series of sites dedicated to just those styles of games. I'm not sure if it's enough or could be made to work. It's just something you have to try I guess.

I think there's definitely a place for a hit casual rpg along the lines of legend of zelda, that would sell well through today's channels though. Popcap in an interview with indiegamer a few years back mentioned they were working on a role playing game. I don't know if the product is still in production or was abandoned.

I also believe that there's an underserved game market which doesnt really have a site of it's own. Imagine a site that had crimsonland, gish, alien flux, space tripper and only games of that variety. I suspect with the right kind of advertising a site like that could find an audience and do well. In a way the portals have focused on certain styles of games. I realize it was motivated by what was selling, but I think it was also in part due to where they advertised and how they gained their audiences. In a way the new direct2drive site that ign set up is a little like Im describing, except that their titles are too large to be considered good online sales material. I have a dsl connection now, but I'm still not willing to download a gig. I'd like to see a direct2drive that has the same style of content but with games like the one's I mentioned.

[Rod Hyde]

Imagine a site that had crimsonland, gish, alien flux, space tripper and only games of that variety.
I wish! Lots of games that I like, all in one place.

--- Rod

[Sirrus]

It was called PopQuest - heard heard a word about that since...

As for your comment about the major portals targetting particular styles of gameplay - I think you are absolutely right.
There is *definately* room for new portals that target genres of games.

Bringing together Gish, Space Tripper, Alien Flux, etc. is, what I feel, actually going in the right direction. The Casual games market will grow, consumer tastes will grow...time to prepare now...
Who wants to go in on it? :D

[Diodor Bitan]

I don't think those genres sell very well online these days.

Yes, but those genres will continue to not sell just as not well as they are not selling today, slipping under the radar of the current Real Arcade offensive, right? Or am I doomed as well? *crosses fingers* :)


Original post by svero
I also believe that there's an underserved game market which doesnt really have a site of it's own. Imagine a site that had crimsonland, gish, alien flux, space tripper and only games of that variety. I suspect with the right kind of advertising a site like that could find an audience and do well. In a way the portals have focused on certain styles of games. I realize it was motivated by what was selling, but I think it was also in part due to where they advertised and how they gained their audiences. In a way the new direct2drive site that ign set up is a little like Im describing, except that their titles are too large to be considered good online sales material. I have a dsl connection now, but I'm still not willing to download a gig. I'd like to see a direct2drive that has the same style of content but with games like the one's I mentioned.

It is true it would be a good thing if a site would serve a certain niche very thoroughly. In fact, IMO, that's what affiliation is going to lead to. To generate profits out of the customers of a certain game, each developer should recommend similar titles, hoping for the affiliate bonus. This way the sites of Gish/Alien Flux/Space Tripper would each promote each other's game, creating a distributed version of your site idea.

I wish there was a site like amazon.com for games, that would be able to connect peculiar customers with the kind of peculiar games they like, allowing for games in different niches to live side by side. For instance, I wouldn't care a lot for the game you've mentioned, but I would be very happy if I could search for "easy to learn but hard to master small strategy games". Or a site that would start with "if you liked this game we recommend that game" and grow into "people who bought this game also bought that game" (though I'm not sure this is even possible).

Something like this would make browsing for a game easy enough to make the site a real value. And, more importantly, since the site would target _all_ non-mainstream customers, it could really benefit from mainstream-like marketing. "The best game you never heard of" adds that would pick all the strange fish in the same net.

[Anthony Flack]

As much as I'd like to see a site the brought together the afforementioned games and others like them, I would much rather see a whomping big database with some Amazon-style structure.

[Andy]

As much as I'd like to see a site the brought together the afforementioned games and others like them, I would much rather see a whomping big database with some Amazon-style structure.

Independent RealOne styled game panel?..

[Anthony Flack]

Hmm, most of the stuff on Yakyak about Platypus was people talking about how they didn't think it was very good! "It screams AMOS/STOS freeware".

[oNyx]

Hey, I just wanted to point out that people *are* talking about your game and it was only "venusian" who said that stuff. Matt is most likely your biggest fan. And there weren't any other negative comments. I mean... it's not like everyone will like your game.

---

Back on topic. I think an amazon-ish database thing would be nice. "Other people who liked this also liked this" etc. Over at the off topic board someone posted a link to a related (imo pretty interesting) article.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

[Jack Norton]

I don't think those genres sell very well online these days. In part because game players don't frequent download sites to look for them.
Hmm you need to define "a game that sell well". To me, average of 30 sales month at 24.95$ is good. Sure not exceptional, but from one game... :)


To generate profits out of the customers of a certain game, each developer should recommend similar titles, hoping for the affiliate bonus.
Yes that's what we should really do. I put for first time some affiliate games on my frontpage but they aren't really fit for my market. I recently did a links exchange with cliffsky and put his game on my site on secondary page (maybe I'll put it in frontpage!).
So if you want to start this thing, I'd be happy to :)

[svero]

Hmm you need to define "a game that sell well". To me, average of 30 sales month at 24.95$ is good. Sure not exceptional, but from one game... :)

For me good sales is 10-20 copies a day. 5-10 decent 3-5 acceptable. And less than that it's a flop.

[EpicBoy]

For me good sales is 10-20 copies a day. 5-10 decent 3-5 acceptable. And less than that it's a flop.
That seems vastly unrealistic for 99.99999% of indies.

[adhominem]

Hello all, I'm one of the founders and creative director of PopCap... a long-time lurker here but first-time poster.

In answer to the questions someone had about us doing an RPG called PopQuest... it's still under way. RPGs just take a loooong time, as anyone who's worked on one will likely tell you.

We are actually working on a couple other things that are a bit outside of our usual puzzle game genre, including a fairly violent side-scrolling shoot-em-up. How will these games do comparatively? No one can say for sure, but we have had success with some other unusual games outside of the match-3 puzzle genre... eg most recently Insaniquarium, which is a fairly weird and unique cross of genres.

That said, we're also finishing up Bejeweled 2, a pretty safe commercial bet.

I think there are a number of people doing pretty well with fairly hardcore niche games... Dominions 2, Combat Mission, X-Plane, Laser Squad Nemesis, Spidersoft RPGs, for instance. But the audience for something like Dominions 2 is obviously very different from the audience for Bejeweled 2... a much smaller crowd, certainly, but one that is probably more dedicated and willing to overlook issues with interfaces, graphics, or even cost.

The big portals like Real, Yahoo, MSN, etc, are by nature mass market, reaching a broad cross-section of people, and so naturally focus on mass market games. Real has little incentive to spend its bandwidth promoting a game like Dominions 2, because they know that only a tiny fraction of their audience will be interested in it. Shrapnel, on the other hand, has a much smaller audience than Real, but they're all definitely interested in hardcore wargames.

Mass market portals want mass market games, just as cineplex chains want Hollywood blockbusters that appeal to a large number of people. But that doesn't mean that arthouse theatres can't survive, or that independent films can't be made, or that there won't be occasional crossover hits of the Big Fat Greek Wedding sort... it just means that in the shareware /casual /downloadable game business, as in any other business, you have to know your market. If you're doing simple puzzle games in the bubble-popper genre, they had better not be 20 megabyte downloads with inpenetrable interfaces, dark, ugly graphics, and a $49.95 price tag, for instance.

That said... I know that I personally would love to see some kind of "hardcore casual" site dedicated to broad, comprehensive, independent and timely reviews of new casual and quasi-casual games. There are a few places out there that do reviews and the like sporadically, but none that really feel like a reliable standard, as of yet. Anyone got casualgamer.com?

[svero]

That seems vastly unrealistic for 99.99999% of indies.

Well say you work 1 yr on a game. And now you put it out for sale while you spend another year developing a 2nd game. How much do you need to live? If you're not making 3-5k a month at least how can your company survive? You've got to do it part time or look for another job. So I don't think it's totally unrealistic. I think it's probably a little more than fair and quite likely 3-5k is not enough to live off of after paying your company expenses and taxes. If you're a one man shop you might squeak by. How many copies is 3k? at least 200 copies or roughtly 6 copies a day.

[Diragor]

I don't think anyone's arguing with you about how much is necessary to make a comfortable living, svero, but that doesn't mean it's realistic to expect to make that much anytime soon as a new indie developer.

I'd also like to interject here about the analogies to the movie and music industries. Indie game developers (talking shareware on the 'net, not retail) have it WAY easier than indie movie and music makers. The big boys in those fields almost completely control the major distribution channels (movie theaters and record stores) and the primary advertising methods in those fields are either industry-controlled (radio) or prohibitively expensive (TV ads) so indies are shut out. There's a lot starting to happen on the internet in those fields so things are changing, but they're not quite there yet. On the other hand, the internet is the primary distribution point and advertising channel for indie games. Nobody controls it and it's not that expensive. An indie game developer generally doesn't need a crew or outrageously expensive equipment or a special location in which to work. You can finish and sell a product without going full time or investing major money. Even a trickle of game sales is at least some extra money, whereas for musicians and movie makers you generally start out far in the hole and just pray to make back a portion of the costs.

Make the leap to publishing a retail game and it's a different story, but indie shareware game (or other software) developers don't have it so bad. Keep the faith and look on the bright side. :D

[Anthony Flack]

Mm, yes, indie movie and music makers usually expect to operate at a net loss for many years, if not forever. Of course in such situations it's really necessary to be working on a project you truly believe in.

Nothing is more depressing than making a net loss when you're trying to sell out, eh?

[Jack Norton]

You've got to do it part time or look for another job. So I don't think it's totally unrealistic.
He was saying that for a new indie that figures are absolutely out of reach and I agree. They're out of reach even for lot of veterans I think.
No one will make a game that sell 20/day from his site alone (that's what we were talking, not using big portals)...
20 a day is 600 sales / month!!! :eek:
I know no game that sells so much from author's website (even considering affiliates)...!
at least, to my knowledge :)

[SunAndGames]

I know no game that sells so much from author's website (even considering affiliates)...!
at least, to my knowledge :)

How about Dweep, Pretty Good Solitare, Pocket Tanks, Snood . . . probably a bunch more

[Jack Norton]

I have doubts on some of them, but won't tell which ones ;)
Anyway you are right, there are some that could sell so much (of course only from established developers in the business from 4+ years), but what percentage of total indie games ? I bet is close to 0,01%... :(

[KNau]

What about games that are in genres the portals don't target? Simulations, strategy, RPGs, that sort of thing.




I don't think those genres sell very well online these days


That may be true. My thinking lately is, why focus so much on on-line sales at all? We are all still buying into the "Make $10,000 a month on shareware" hype that the internet is the be all and end all of shareware sales. It's not!

As the net becomes less and less relevant for shareware developers I think that alternative retail outlets may be the answer. Look at examples like Garage Developer International who publish indie games and compilation CDs from their storefront operation. It's not their primary business but it generates revenue.

Another example; I have been developing a "zombie shooter" game as my backburner project. Last week I was browsing my local comic book store looking for the latest issues of Remains and The Walking Dead (I'm a zombie freak) when I stumbled across a board game called "Zombies!!!" from Twilight Creations. I bought the game, curious to see how their design of a zombie survival game differed from mine. I was immediately hooked and went back a couple days later to buy all 4 expansion packs at $20 - $30 dollars each!

If guys like Twilight Creations and Cheapass Games can survive and make a living through distributing their board games to hobby shops and comic book stores, why can't a shareware developer with similarly themed products? They have to contract the printing of cards, boards, boxes and game pieces - all we have to do is dupe CDs.

My point is, why rely so heavily on an internet only business when it seems like only 1% of the people get 99% of the sales? There must be other ways to get our games out there.

P.S. If you like zombie movies go buy the Zombies!!! game now. And read the comic book Remains. The Walking Dead is good but Remains is better :) www.twilightcreationsinc.com

[Greg Squire]

Again I think a lot of it boils down to “Exposure” (and having a good game of course). I agree it’s harder for a new indie (like me) to get established nowadays. It may be that we have to do business with portals and/or publishers in order to get our name established. We may have to make a “throw-away” title (as it was often called in the retail space) in trade for some name recognition, to build our business. Further, I also think there are yet a lot of creative ways to get the “marketing ball rolling”, that most haven’t tried yet. Sometimes doing something “out-of-ordinary” is the best way to get noticed. Don’t do what the big boys and all the other “lemmings” are doing (no offense to anyone intended here). You have to stand out of the crowd sometimes; not easy to do, but often needed. (Of course it would have to be something that would get you noticed by lots of people.)

I hope that all of you aren’t falling into despair over the things that have been said. I tend to be a “realist” in my thinking, but I still think it’s possible to “make a go of it”. I think I better understand some of the hurdles to be overcome now. Hopefully I can now plan for that better. I don’t expect to get rich doing this; my highest hope is to make just enough to support my family (full-time) with this. I know that may take years to achieve. “Chin up boys!”

[svero]

20 a day is 600 sales / month!!! :eek:
I know no game that sells so much from author's website (even considering affiliates)...! at least, to my knowledge :)

There are games that do 10-20 a day on a regular basis from various people's non-portal websites. I know of many.

[Jack Norton]

Hmm ok, better stop writing and going back to improve my games... :D

[dfvdan]

My point is, why rely so heavily on an internet only business when it seems like only 1% of the people get 99% of the sales?

This is in no way directed towards anyone specific, no offense intended. However, my impression when looking at the current "indie" market is that many games doesn't impress me much (nothing new, not polished etc.), and I am probably a pretty normal gamer. As such I'd expect that the few who gets everything right gets the majority of the sales. :)

In the end, I think very few customers care whether a game is an "indie" game or an AAA title. People want bang for the buck in some way, and you have to make very sure you're delivering the biggest bang in your niche. :)

Again, I'm a long-time lurker and have yet to release my first game (soon done after 12 months). So take my view for what it's worth.

[svero]

It's true there's not a lot of grounbreaking stuff, but then the same could be said of movies, console game, etc... etc... etc... Few games are going to be really oustanding and special. There are plenty of games in the latter category that are making a lot of money. In fact sales these days seem to favor less orginal and less impressive games to some extent. A 1 month bejeweled clone can make you more money than a 1 yr piece of art.

[princec]

Don't I know it :mad: :mad: :mad:

Cas :)

[EpicBoy]

I found that as well. The first game I did, a cheapo bubblet clone, by FAR made the most money.

[dfvdan]

It's true there's not a lot of grounbreaking stuff, but then the same could be said of movies, console game, etc... etc... etc... Few games are going to be really oustanding and special. There are plenty of games in the latter category that are making a lot of money. In fact sales these days seem to favor less orginal and less impressive games to some extent. A 1 month bejeweled clone can make you more money than a 1 yr piece of art.

Totally agree. However, you still have to have something that's polished and able to capture interest - and more so than the rest. IMHO, that's just the way it works, some stuff get noticed for the above reasons and take off (word of mouth, reviews, etc.) and the rest doesn't.

I'd say that goes for console games and movies as well. Take ALL movies and games and I'll bet that most don't make much money.
You have to count all games (console or not) and movies (including low-budget indie efforts) as AAA console games and big budget movies are all part of regulated channels, which aren't really representative to this discussion.
Had this been a regulated channel, 99% of us wouldn't be allowed to create games in the first place. ;)

[Jack Norton]

I found that as well. The first game I did, a cheapo bubblet clone, by FAR made the most money.
My experience so far is the opposite.
UBM (very niche game) alone made 10x more than Spin Around & Quizland (both casual games)... :confused:

[Dan MacDonald]

This thread has gotten a lot more activity then I at first expected. It's been very interesting to read different peoples perspectives on what is currently one of the hot issues in indie game development (and in retrospect has been for some time). There are pluses and minuses to putting your opinions out in public the way I sometimes do. One negative, and this one has bit me in the behind before, is a year or two down the road you change your perspective, but the Internet never forgets. One of the positives is that you get to have a lot of fun chatting with people about their own views on the topic. In doing so I've drawn some conclusions that I hadn't made when I originally posted the .plan on GarageGames.

Yes it's true, the portals are coming and guys like Playfirst are here to gobble up IP and use it as leverage against the distribution channels much like retail. As in any situation there are positives and negatives, on the positive a new developer starting out may need some cash to launch their own indie business. A publisher like playfirst may offer them cash up front plus a few royalties to develop a title. Great, there's some startup cash for the developer. The flip side of course, if the game goes on to be a huge hit and makes way more then the initial cash payment well good luck, you wont be seeing any of it. If your lucky they might let you do the sequel. Some studios out there may try to make this a full time occupation like the retail studios do, I think that is still a recipe for frustration and failure.

There is still a window of opportunity where you can work with the distribution channels like Real, Yahoo, and MSN directly without going through a Playfirst or any of the other IP sucking publishers that are soon to pop up.
In these cases, if a new developer can leverage a distribution channel to get some extra exposure, even at the cost of some profits I'd say that there is still room to do this successfully without selling yourself up the river.

For example, BraveTree published ThinkTanks via GarageGames and it was pimped out to just about every major online distribution channel out there. They got good exposure and a rabid fan base. Members of the community set up a fan site at www.planethinktanks.com. It doesn't matter where people buy the game, they always end up at www.planetthinktanks.com. Now if BraveTree was to release an expansion or even a sequel, one post on PTT.com would bring all those raving players directly to their site to buy the new stuff.

The point here is, when you can create a recognizable brand for your software, that users recognize and you own that brand (or IP) then you really own the customer. BraveTree doesn't have to go to playfirst and pitch an expansion pack or a sequel, they can just sit down one day and decide to do it, because they own the IP. Also because of the player site they have access to all the rabid fans who bought the game through other channels. No w I realize not everyone can follow this recipe, but it proves the point that even if you give up a little profit for exposure, and brand building, you can still bring the customers back to you and sell to them directly.

So in an ideal world you would own your own IP and sell directly to your own customers, but in this rugged competitive world that we inhabit - it's not necessarily a death sentence to leverage the distribution channels. Just make sure you never give up your IP ;)

[svero]

My experience so far is the opposite.
UBM (very niche game) alone made 10x more than Spin Around & Quizland (both casual games)... :confused:

The one rule to remember is that there are no rules. UBM probably hit a niche that was underserved and struck a chord. Don't forget your other indie niche game USM didn't have the same luck.

[Gmicek]

The one rule to remember is that there are no rules. UBM probably hit a niche that was underserved and struck a chord. Don't forget your other indie niche game USM didn't have the same luck.

One of the main issues with USM was that it was trying to enter a market already well covered by the big boys.

[Jack Norton]

Yes indeed. USM wasn't particularly original and has strong competitors like Championship Manager series (very hard to beat...!).
The Goalkeeper,while doesn't sell as good as UBM, is already doing better than USM, because I made a game based on another original idea (never seen a game focused on Goalkeeper).
Is true also that with soccer game I cut out the whole USA market, that is more than 50% of UBM buyers... :eek:

But what I wanted to say it's that there's NO general rule. There are too many factors. I think market research and a original idea can make a hit no matter what kind of game it is.