Indie games: Still Too Cheap. Getting Cheaper.
jeff-vogel.blogspot.com
jeff-vogel.blogspot.com
All portals, including BigFish and the Apple AppStore, want to own the relationship with the customer. You, the developer, are an interchangable cog in that plan -- you can always be replaced. The customer comes to their storefront, their name shows up on the bill, the customer thinks they are doing business with them.
This is about as conducive to building your own brand loyalty as it would be if I grew up listening to Californication by Best Buy. Want to develop a mailing list, a following, upsell users into other products of yours that they'll find interesting? Well, that is going to be a little hard because the portal wants to do all these things and they'll actively prevent you from doing them.
To add insult to injury, you have to pay the portal 60% of your sale price. (The portal will phrase this, of course, as "We're generously going to allow you 40% of our sale price." Always remember, it is THEIR customer.)
Now, why would anybody put up with this? Well, to be blunt, most programmers suck at marketing and think they can't do it themselves. The portals do not suck at marketing and have distribution nailed. Thus developers get in bed with the portals and, well, its all over but for the crying.
You are much, much better off if you sell software on your own website, assuming you can get people to actually visit it. This is another reason why I warn people off of games: the ways I know which are really viable for small software publishers (SEO and CPC advertising) really really suck for games. People don't search for software, they search for problems and solutions to problems, and nobody has a hole in their life that they know only a dragon-themed match-three game can fill.
Oh, the natural dynamics of games (constantly increasing asset quality expectations) plus the incentive of portals to drive volume by maximizing selection through stomach-turning churn rates means that the sales vs. time curve for them looks like walking off a freaking cliff. This is unfortunate, because you can't do the "fire, adjust aim, fire again" learning process that categorizes most successful small software development. And, since you're not building a brand or a list, you aren't really developing any assets which can be used to make the next product more successful or less of a crapshoot.
On pricing: far too many people who play games have expectations for truly staggering development budgets to justify minor expenditures, and that is ignoring the large contingent who will steal the software given half the chance. Getting $2.50 on a product which took $100k of implied labor (a man-year for a single senior developer, not really that hard to imagine for a game) is just painful to think about.
Back in the real world, because you're addressing problem-sized holes in people's lives, you can charge more. A LOT more. I think at least a thousand people have bought Bingo Card Creator for $30. I get to keep about $28.85 of that, less expenses. The math gets more attractive than $2.50 a unit in a hurry. (Not to mention that $30 is, ahem, fairly cheap. You should see developer tools or B2B.)
Meanwhile, I get to keep a bit of a springboard towards future products and, of course, improvements.
I am much more likely to play another game if it comes up as a recommendation on HN or maybe Twitter or something.
There are also different kinds of games. Maybe the average crappy flash game is a hard sell (and I went to the PopCap site which was mentioned as the star of flash gaming in the article, and I still don't think those games are very good - though maybe calling them PopCrap would be a bit too harsh). But some multiplayer browser games might be in a completely different category, people might join because their friends join and so on.
Game can fulfill a need, too - which is also why many people get into games development, because none of the existing games satiate their needs. It is just that the need for yet another desktop tower defense or tetris clone might be on a sharp decline.
In aggregate, yes. The major casual gaming portals can sell millions of units of the games they feature most aggressively. If you're familiar with Mystery Case Files at BigFish, that series has sold 2.5 million units last time I checked.
However, it is a zipf distribution. (Popularly known as the "long tail" these days, and you really don't want to be paying 60% to be the tail.)
Like being an actor or a musician or an artist is the fantasy of coffee shop employees the world over, making games is the job a lot of nerds want to be doing. In fact, so many people want to be doing it so badly that they'll do it even if they don't get paid (much) for doing it. Thus, you don't find a lot of people getting rich doing community theater or playing in a garage band, but you do find thousands of people doing it, anyway. Fun jobs only pay the bills for a small number of the most successful practitioners of the craft...and often they are so successful by virtue of skills other than the craft itself.
On the other hand, building your bingo card software would not be a "fun job" for the majority of software developers. Building enterprise software is not a "fun job" for most software developers. Building systems management software is not a "fun job". At least, not for enough people that there are thousands of new products entering the market every month competing for the attention of the available buyers.
Add this to all the other issues you've mentioned, and it adds up to games being a lot like hopping on the bus for Hollywood. You're probably not going to be a star, and the industry will still have a hundred more just like you to chew up tomorrow. Of course, most of us aren't exactly destitute. If any of the folks here make a game and it fails (I've started building a brain games company in my spare time, so I've voluntarily entered this market, knowing enough to know that the odds of it being profitable are astronomically against; so I'm one of those folks), we'll still be working on other stuff and making a good living doing jobs that are not "fun", by most folks definition. I only spend a couple hours a week on my games-related stuff, and 10-12 hours per day on my real company.
I totally agree with you, but as a musician, i would go even further and say, when you're a succesfull musician or actor, you can make big bucks pretty easily. AFAIK, this is just not true about game developpers, who even if they are successfull, will probably earn just as much or a bit more than a regular programmer.
We talk a lot with my friends here about artist's condition, and how it's hard for a musician to make a living. However, the situation has greatly evolved, and being an indie game developper today is more like being a musician in the fifties, where musicians were really truly exploited by record companies and where releasing a hit album could be paid almost nothing.
I really hope the situation evolves, tho. The emergence of more conscient game portals would be a first step IMHO
The average record deal pays the artist about 12%.
The "ridiculous" rates being paid by the games distributors that have been mentioned in this thread are 45%.
Going it alone in music and games is harder, but in both cases it pays much higher percentages on sales. I suspect it is easier to go it alone, or use a hybrid model, in game development, but I'm not sure about that.
I think you have a sugar-coated view of the music business if you think it treats people better than the games industry. As someone that started out working in the music industry in the early 90's and moved into technology, I'm absolutely certain that it doesn't. Software developers have it easy compared to musicians, and even the game industry treats developers dramatically better, on average, than the music industry treats musicians. You should realize that the average full-time musicians salary is about $21,000/year (or was when I worked in the industry; I'm sure it's gone up a few grand due to inflation). The average full-time software developer is making something like $80,000 (much higher in expensive markets like Silicon Valley).
All the same evolutionary pressures that are making the music industry more tolerable are also occurring in the games industry. Indie developers can get their games in front of players via all sorts of paths, including mobile app stores, aggregation sites like Kongregate and Heyzap!, the various console stores, as well as traditional shareware models and channels. These are pretty much the same things that are happening in music (and a lot of the same players, Apple in particular, are involved in building them).
And this is the reason why doing games development on your own is not game development. If you want successfully market your games (and make a living fromit) your end up doing a whole lot of tasks totally unrelated to game coding. It's almost like having that day job again. It is really a "band" job: you need more than one payer. If you start up with a team and you are the coder, than you have chance.
The act of advertising the game is mainly a matter of getting it posted and reviewed online in places where your audience is most likely to look: If you're doing a niche, indie type of game, that doesn't mean catch-all portal sites. It means enthusiast communities. Most of the time it's just a matter of emailing whoever is in charge and having a few materials ready(screenshots, video). If the game is good it'll get a link. Multiply those links against every little blog you can find and you can gradually garner some support, even if the game is ultra-niche.
Pricing of the game-as-product is also an overly constrained way to consider monetization. It's hard to sell games because games generally don't sell themselves until you've spent hours playing them. So your two main options are to quickly grab the cash of the unsuspecting, or to build the rabid support of a few and give them ample opportunity to further buy in to your vision. And both of those two strategies can be taken far beyond just selling the game itself.
The real problem is making the game. It's easy to get lost in the multitude of challenges game development presents. If your motivations are poor, then there is absolutely no hope for the end result being any good. Jeff Vogel complains that it's hard enough for him as it is. But if you look at the games he makes, they're workmanlike and nearly interchangeable at first glance. They've definitely become more sophisticated over time, but not in ways that would help to grow his fanbase, build a brand name, or attract renewed attention.
You're wrong when you say "you're not building a brand." You most certainly are - you can build a brand around the type of games you make, the IPs within the game, the style of development you practice. Successful indies have a lot of style, even when they lack for production values. Nintendo is the king of game branding simply because they were the first - and one of a very few - to realize the importance of making their entire product line work as an "ecosystem" of high-quality brands and genres.
You're also wrong on there being no ability to iterate in making games. That is in fact the biggest advantage of indie/online development vs. retail: you can make dramatic changes and improvements via updates, add-ons and sequels, without spending a lot of money to push out a new SKU. Updates with "pre-registration" discounts are how the development of Mount & Blade was funded, for example. And the top retail developers have funds to effectively build the game two or three times in "reboot" iterations before releasing anything.
Essentially, what it comes down to is: looking at games as a product business will make the financials look bad. Looking at them as an attention+branding business, with a subsidiary monetization process, makes them look a lot better.
Even within the mainstream industry, a huge number of companies don't understand this, and coast project-to-project, with very little focus on tech reuse, design iteration, or brand development, and ultimately see nothing for their efforts. As well, most developers that do understand this are too undercapitalized to ever get a foothold. Game developers need a lot of runway - not to get great production values, but to have the time to iterate and build up their brand.
This type of distinction is made all the time in different areas of life. Gourmet food targets a different market segment than take away food, they do not compete directly against each other and as such they are priced independently.
If indie developers make a game that is trying to take a new direction and has some depth then they should be bold and market/price the game accordingly. What is great about our current environment is that the barriers for developers releasing and marketing their own games are much lower. There seems to be a real shortage of original games and thus good independent games tend to stand out. Braid is of course the pinnacle example of this but there have been others recently.
As with all kinds of development you really need to find and target the right market. If you do that then you don't have to compete on price with the 'casual' games where it is very hit and miss. If your game is a delicacy, a fine wine, then I think you should not hesitate to price it as such. Of course the upper limit to pricing is the price of AAA titles.
Jeff has really succeeded in finding the right under-serviced niche and focusing his efforts on it. I really enjoy his blog posts and he has actually been part of the motivation behind my decision to quit my job and start an independent game development studio instead (I do have games industry experience before you think that I am completely crazy!).
I really hope that the indie scenes continues to grow, strengthen and keeps taking those risks that the big guys are too scared of taking, especially in the current economic climate. In order for this to happen though, they really have to make sure that they don't price themselves out of existence.