Comment by randfish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randfish | Hacker News Reader

Incredible work, Brian! I'm in awe of what you've done in such a short amount of time. I started an indie game company (still working on our first title) and had a few related questions if that's OK?

1) If you didn't need a salary or marketing help, would you still have signed a publishing deal? My sense is most of the publisher value lies in getting paid before the game launches, and with marketing around launch, but curious if those are wrong assumptions?

2) Early Access vs. Straight Launch - any insights about why you chose to do a full launch vs. an early access beforehand? Was it something you and the publisher discussed in detail?

3) Outside of Steam's ecosystem, how much marketing, promotion, social media, YouTube, Discord, etc. stuff did you (or the publisher) do? Do you think that pre-launch work had a sizable impact on the launch and post-launch success? Or would you say it's mostly the Steam algo making the game more visible to the right buyers as the positive reviews rolled in?

Truly kind of you to share so openly here. Already sent some of your other replies to our game team

Thanks Rand!

1) It obviously varies w/ each dev's situation, but I think your sense of the value prop is a fair default one w/o context. In my case, there were four reasons: 1) having a partner to help with (to me) "the unknown unknowns" (i'm only a dev and a novice designer, literally anything else would be my first time doing it, so i figured having an experienced partner there would be wise) 2) the advance was nice just from a "bird in the hand" mindset 3) they helped me connect with a really good artist (critical to the project's success imho) 4) having a big name behind you can't hurt, and bigger publishers do have more relationships with the ecosystem (streamers, platforms, etc) to help your game succeed.

2) EA is appropriate for certain kinds of games. But I knew exactly what Ballionaire was going to be, and felt it could be achieved in a year. I knew that this mechanical space was going to be rapidly saturated, once all the games inspired by LBAL (including Balatro!) started appearing. So I was determined to get the game out before that happened, which set a certain scope and pace, obviating EA.

3) The trailers were a really good promotional tool, very effective. But most of the paid promotion was sponsored streams, not traditional "marketing" (ads). I think the game has a natural tendency for organic spread, due to its fun/simple premise, watchability/streamability, low price point, and so on. It's just an easy game to see, and say "ooh, I wanna try!" because it's instantly understood how to play, and IMHO is very inviting aesthetically.

My takeaway: Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out. (Of course this only works for a certain kind of game!)

How far were you into building the game before you began to approach publishers? YC speaks frequently about investing in the founders, and not the idea---but then dives right into well you need to have revenue and/or users and it's a bit of a double-standard---so I'm curious what stage you were at when you started talking to publishers and what state your product was in when you finally signed a deal.

I'm curious about this as well so I took a look at the publisher's site and found some info: https://rawfury.com/talk/ under "Game Pitches". Would still like to hear from OP on any specifics though.

"Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out."

Sounds like outstanding advice. I hope we can follow in your footsteps! (and thanks for the kind and comprehensive answer)

Honestly sounds like good advice for almost anything new/creative :)

RE: "Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out."

For games with a limited run time is it possible to balance this against Steam's 2 hour return policy? Feel like we're now trapped in a position where you can make short little proof of concepts on itch but when it comes to trying to make something professional you have to bloat it in a way to minimise people abusing that.

This is very much personal opinion but if you can blast through all of a games content within 2 hours of purchase it wasn't finished / big enough to justify a financial transaction in the first place.

Two hours is about movie or novella worth of content. Both are priced at about the same rate. Not all games have to have 10s or 100s of hours of content. Today, I expect a big(ger) part of gamers are like me: older people who like games, but can only game a few hours a week. Last non-4X game I fully played was CoD2. That was 2005.

Honestly, that could go both ways. Like I'll happily pay cost-of-small-game to watch a movie that will be over in two hours, and there's a whole category now of single-sitting games like Journey, Minit, A Short Hike, etc, that are easily able to be completed in that timeframe but are obviously worth their modest purchase price.

To some of us adult gamers with actual lives and commitments, having something that can be completed in 1-4 sittings is a huge boon, like okay this is a thing I can do without abandoning my family for the next two weeks.

I literally started a company on that thesis. It failed, but I still believe in that mission.

Were you trying to make short games or offer some kind of abridging service?

Because I've wondered about that too. Like, right now there's a pretty big dichotomy between "purchase and play a game myself" and "watch someone else play it on youtube/twitch". But it would be interesting if there was a market for a kind of interactive guided tour, like for $10 let me play the best 4-6 hours of AC:Odyssey, and that's delivered as a mod that just trims all the fat, levels me up quickly enough to hustle through the main story beats and see the good boss encounters and action set pieces.

(Ubisoft themselves sort of do this with their paid XP boosters, but that doesn't actually cut content, it just lets you skip a few hours of grinding over what is otherwise still a 40hr+ experience for most people)

I love this idea; I can no longer justify 40-100 hour playthroughs. Lots of people rave about Elden Ring but the time investment is just really offputting. I'd buy a version of it at half the price and one quarter of the playtime.

That said, I'd imagine a fair chunk of the impact of major set pieces and end bosses is that you've spent many hours to get to that point. An abridged version would have to leave bough in to allow emotional investment in the story. This is still possible.

Gamers Digest? (For those of you who remember Reader's Digest).

Perhaps I'm an outlier. I expect to pay for my personal gaming experience. But if there's some necessary part of gameplay I don't like, that's negative experience that makes the game worse for me, reducing the value of the game to me. To skip that gameplay seems like something that shouldn't cost me anything, or even get me a discount because I'm not getting some of the experience I paid for. Like say if a side dish is so bad I send it back at a restaurant. I neither expect to pay for that nor a premium for someone else to eat it for me!

So I'm not willing to pay a premium for such a thing. I don't see why the game with the bad part missing should be worth more than with the bad part present. Rather, the inverse! I'll more likely skip the game entirely and find a different one that doesn't have such mandatory grinding.

As I say maybe that's an outlying opinion since making money from this kind of thing apparently works. It it helps, I'm in the adult with family demographic and my time (rather than game purchase levels of money) is what is at a premium.

I've never bought an XP booster myself, and I feel some of the same conflict. Although I can obviously afford it, I don't think I could stomach doing this for new releases. So at most it would be something where I'd be interested after 2-3 years when all the patches are in, bugs are fixed, and review consensus has settled.

So rather than pay US$70 today for a buggy, grindy new release experience, I pay $20 in two years for the base game + $10 for the "player's digest" mod.

I expect even then it would be a tough sell, particularly having to be on PC— a lot of the market for this kind of thing would more casual console/mobile/streaming players.

I was making short games. Specifically I was trying to make games that packed the same density of concentrated entertainment as other media.

The abridgement thing sounds like a smart approach, but ultimately I've gotten more enjoyment from shorter games that don't pack the fat in to begin with.

I'll happily spend $5 on a 2 hour game. That's a better return than a movie theater ticket.

My PM perspective on this is that games are dominating the media market primarily because they are a good value proposition in our tightening economy. I think a good thing to shoot for is around 2 hours of game play per dollar spent, e.g. make it so that it's an absolute no-brainer for a customer to buy your game vs going to a movie. Replayability is a major aspect of this, look at how many hours people spent on LBAL and Vampire Survivors despite both having relatively simple mechanics.

How many people really would abuse the return policy like that? I can't imagine it's that many.

I can't find the source now but I recall reading about some game that was heavily impacted by it. I don't think it was this one but here's an example I found just now https://kotaku.com/steams-two-hour-refund-policy-forces-horr...

A big part of the issue is that a lot of people do not consider it abuse. The value of games is so heavily burned into a lot of people's minds as being a dollars to hours ratio and Steam having this blanket policy could be perceived to be endorsing that perspective.

In your case, what do you think your glowing hook was?

"Don't overbalance" is an invitation for Spiffing Brit to play yet another perfectly balanced game :-)

Funny that, of all the questions to ask, you of all people ask marketing questions, Rand :)

> My sense is most of the publisher value lies in getting paid before the game launches, and with marketing around launch, but curious if those are wrong assumptions?

Don't publishers pay you a cut AFTER sales start coming in?

Yes and some provide funding during development which they recoup later. Every deal is different. Raw Fury provides funding in advance for some.

> most of the publisher value lies in getting paid before the game launches, and with marketing around launch

Reading this, I'm wondering if there is something like a publisher for other types of Software than games? Looks a decent deal. No?

Isn't that exactly what vcs do?

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