The Financial Future of Game Developers
raphkoster.com
raphkoster.com
This image from the article is so true it actually hurts. The number of times our company has had a conversation like this would boggle the mind. We are not even a mobile game. We are a free to play PC title and we still get this garbage.
It's interesting that publishers for Asia don't have this mindset. They are willing to actually put money up front, something that no non-asian publisher has ever offered us.
The day to day business stuff is handled by our Managing Director (listed as Lead Designer on that page).
If you release your game yourself to a limited market, prove it has good revenue & retention stats, then shop around for a publisher, you get much better terms.
The (non-asian) publishers still come out of the woodwork to offer you these kinds of garbage deals. We just don't take them. The fact that we were already successful is why these leeches turn up in the first place.
These "publishers" are essentially glorified and very expensive user referral programs.
Why would you sign a publishing deal if you know that your game has awesome retention and big revenues?
The idea is to share the risk.
(on top of that, it's a damn solid game too.)
It's hard to sell to marketing though, apparently.
You wanna make games? No one's stopping you from creating the most whackier experimental game this world has ever seen.
You wanna make money off that? You gotta wade through all kinds of shit, as is usual in most businesses. And before someone mentions Minecraft - it is such an outlier that it's not usable as argument in any discussion.
I don't subscribe to the self-entitled tone of the article that making games in itself is something virtuous and should be basically subsidized. I love Koster though, Theory of Fun for Game Design is what made me really interested in game development.
>You wanna make games? No one's stopping you from creating the most whackier experimental game this world has ever seen.
Creators still have to pay rent, buy food, and pay other bills. So unless you're privileged enough to be able to pay your bills without making any money, then yeah you do need money to make games.
Money is just a thing we use to get other people who don't like us enough to work for us for free to do things for us. There are ways to get resources to make development possible beyond saving up a ton of cash (which carries a lot of risk in and of itself).
The main reason I ended up in boring IT world instead of gaming, even though I do know a few people in the industry, is a consequence how the whole industry works.
More so in Europe where not so many games make a hit. For each Crysis and Killzone there are lots of 1 game closed studios.
It's absolutely true you can do it for the love of it. Not questioning that. But the above is a recipe for a crash.
Do one for the money, the second for the show, third to get ready, and then make proper games. That's exactly what I'm doing now. Quite literally.
I can't wait to start doing games I'd like to play! Just few more months.
Side note: I also read A Theory of Fun almost a decade ago and it is still one of the better books I have read on the subject.
The real question is do you want fame and industry class "success" (ie, your game sells millions) or do you want to be creative. Terrible example, yada yada, but Minecraft is still being sold from the Mojang site where the company (and originally Notch) gets 100% of proceeds.
If you want to see millions of people play your games, with millions of copies sold, with front page storefront ads, then yeah, you sell your soul to the entrenched interests. But you don't have to play their game - you just need:
1. An Audience who likes your content. 2. A way to eat as a result of that content.
Really, the obvious answer is the audience plays patron as the article denoted funder. That, in the long term, is the macroscopic way this is all trending anyway.
And I'm not talking kickstarter style get-a-bunch-of-money-at-once-and-blow-it-all. I mean you have an (open) product, put it out there, advertise it however you want (personally or outsourced) and hope that those that experience it think its worth continued funding.
Also, metaconsoles is kind of a misnomer - you have a platform spectrum, from open accessible platforms to walled gardens with padlocks. On one side, you have the wild west of self-hosted downloads for free platforms like Android (without the play store, think fdroid) or desktop Linux, and you progress from there through Windows, the Play Store, OSX, and finally the iOS / old console locked down ecosystem where you need a developers license, development tools from the source, etc.
Yeah, Steam is barely better than a console - they act as gatekeeper and takes a huge cut - but on the platforms Steam supports, you at least have the option to use other platforms as well, like gog, the humble store, desura, or self hosting. When there is whole stack lock down like on the traditional consoles and iOS, you are literally praying at the alter of the corporate owner that they give you a blessing.
As far as the loyal audience, yes, I agree with you on that, even mentioned it in the article. But that's not a living wage for most, and the latest research says that sort of environment is more susceptible to a hit-driven winner-takes-all market. That leads to an ugly place as regards the income levels for the typical dev.
On some level, its a question of how you both eat the cookie and have it, right? What independent game developers want is some guarantee of a base income, but also with the option to cash in big if they do make it big.
Maybe there is an opportunity there - I'm not sure if a credits organisation is what you're looking for. But maybe something like a self-organised fund that will buy stakes in individual projects, where the stakes are paid out more in a salary style?
Semi-organised group of indie-game developers that guarantee a (lowish) living income to all in the group in exchange for a relatively large chunk of any large windfalls to support the future. If games are actually sustainable then something like that feels like it could stand a reasonable chance, right? Assuming you get past a critical size and have some name recognition. Could also move into the same benefit areas that unions do.
Essentially something like your own very light-weight union/co-op.
Alright, I have a mobile game company, currently very unprofitable.
Also we have our stuff on iTunes, because that is the only way we know to distribute on iPhone and iPad.
Tell me sir, a way to distribute to our end users easily, and I will PROMPTLY figure how to do it.
(by the way, we are already on Google Play too, and almost any random android store you can think, even ones that net us 1 download per month, even carrier stores at the other side of the planet too).
Not soul-sucking. There are other things to complain about Valve, but 30% for their services is not one of them.
Steam has provided a tremendously better experience in all aspects to the old methods of selling and maintaining games.
Hell, I shipped a fucking game on Steam and I don't know what the % we gave them was (though I could probably figure it out by doing enough math on the sales numbers...)
One thing I do know (second-hand information, but from an expert) is that they even demand a huge cut from F2P games, despite the fact that F2P games have their own download, patching and payment infrastructure. They literally charge as much as they can possibly get away with, even when they offer near-zero service.
The quality of the services Valve offers for your money is also fairly low. The Steam API breaks constantly (usually because they are haphazard about changes and have near-zero automated or manual testing), is poorly documented, and is infrequently maintained. Valve can and will ship a Steamworks update that breaks a core part of your game, and leave it broken for weeks no matter how often you complain - unless you happen to have the phone number of someone at the company, or send them numerous emails. The APIs that do work are slow and limited. It's better than nothing, certainly, but not so magnificent that it's worth 30%, especially if you compare it with something like GAE or EC2.
Discovery on Steam is a bit better than on mobile stores, I give them that.
I held greenlighting thing in high regard, but these days a lot of crap gets greenlighted so, meh.
Compared to the traditional brick & mortar channels which came before it? Yes, it sure was!
If someone actually wants to go out and pick up a box, they're not going to do that on Steam.
It's true that digital distribution in general offers lower costs than brick & mortar, but that's not specific to Valve. At most they were leading the charge on digital distribution with Steam, but even when they did that they were still selling copies at retail.
As with most types of entrepreneurship, the answer is to look for niches rather than chasing massive pop culture success.
It sounds so easy in theory, doesn't it?
Getting a game in front of people who enjoy it enough to give you money is hard. Very hard. Raph's ideas from 2006 around direct relationships and celebrity are still very much on target today -- that's how most successful creators seem to manage it, beyond the randomness of viral outbreaks. (I count entering/winning the IGF as a form of celebrity.)
Beyond that, advertising it is a spray-and-pray that will likely suck up more of your money than you'll ever make, and net you a bunch of high-churn players who don't give a toss about what you've created. Not every game has an obvious niche audience to go after, not every creator welcomes or invites celebrity, and sometimes the weirdest, most un-game-like things hit a nerve nobody was expecting.
My mind keeps circling back to the 'people who bought x also liked..' problem, as mentioned by Greg Costikyan [1]. Discovery is broken, and so on, but it's not discovery - as in players actively seeking out games - I open any store on any platform and I'm inundated with choices. It's being discovered that's broken, being discovered by an audience who will truly appreciate what you've created.
The hard part is slicing the gaming landscape, and individuals' different experiences of the same game, to such depth that a Pandora-like algorithm could work effectively -- or relying on independent curation and journalism to step in and highlight the gems among a sea of overwhelming noise.
(If anyone wants to hack on the recommendations side of things, let me know!)
[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GregCostikyan/20140324/213784...
I'm a little skeptical of that rant you linked. Anyone blaming the audience's "lack of taste" is going to have a hard time of it, in games or music or books or movies or whatever. You just don't get to do that. You have to make things that satisfy you and the audience both. If you don't, that's your failure, not anyone else's.
If the only games you've ever played are shitty clones at the top of the free list on iOS, how would you possibly know enough to spot a high quality game at a glance? It's not a failing of the players, it's a failing of the industry.
Companies operating storefronts have a responsibility to do better, by offering more useful data that's less vulnerable to these issues. For example, instead of basing recommendations on the masses, prioritize recommendations from what your friends play, so that people can benefit from each others' experiences with the few less-popular games they play. Prioritize games with overall low sales that have high average ratings, are played by a large number of your friends, or are in the same genre as many of the games you play. Randomly show them games that don't match in any sense (or only match in one or two categories), and gather that data to identify 'hidden gems' that you can push up the rankings.
These are all random ideas that might help bring low-ranking games up towards the top, increasing variety in the top lists and increasing engagement (not to mention revenue). It's embarassing that all 3 major store operators (Apple, Google, and Valve) have an utterly lazy approach to discovery, where they literally just do a sort based on one or two values and dump a list onto your screen.
In say music you can go into say the metal genre and find all kinds of super specific niches like death metal, viking metal, black metal etc each with their own hardcore fan bases who you can appeal to and target on sites specific to them.
Gaming doesn't have the same niching and with the explosion of indie and mobile games it really needs it. I for example love multiplayer sim games (anno series) and multiplayer tower defense games (tower wars, sol survivor) and instantly buy any games in these genres that I hear of (I bought a 4 back of sol survivor and 3 pack of tower wars as soon as I heard of them).
Now that I'm developing my own multiplayer tower defense game (http://www.towerstorm.com) I'd like to reach others like me who enjoy this genre but am finding it very hard to do so. I either have to market it to the masses or reach out to specific people via social media.
You get hosting for both your page and downloads, update mechanism, statistics, a DRM that users don't hate, payment mechanism that users trust and already have their credit card registered...
All that costs money if you want to do it own your own, and you also get some exposure.
I like this game, and I equally like the way they got traction. They released a restricted version on The Pirate Bay, although the description of the torrent was as if it was a full game. Not very usual, but nothing new either. But a well written blog post about it (http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...) got them homepage of HN and loads of other press coverage, which helped to take off.
Well done.
it looks like they fill all of the same roles as Apple. I feel like this might not be the right way to divide the industry.
They also mostly only publish things that are already hits, so in a lot of ways they are a re-user outlet.
I hope one day that most games are illegal, just like the drugs.
If you have kids, you know what I mean.
Computer gaming is a hugely important industry, and the reason that we even have powerful computers and graphics cards today.
You need to defend your opinion a bit more if you want it treated as anything other than that, an opinion.
one reason there are less boys in college than girls, guess what, games. I actually read this somewhere.
My piano teacher, whose two kids are still at home playing games, at their 20s.
You don't just blame drug abusers, you do also blame the drug dealers. In _most_ cases, game designers are doing the same thing as a drug dealer who sells the drug, wearing an IT hat. Parenting can not do this alone when gaming is now becoming a culture/fashion/addictive, due to our genius developers.
Games are a part of culture, just like music is. Music serves no intrinsic utilitarian purpose. You wouldn't want to cut a person of culture any less you would want a person to never listen to music.
Of course, anything in excess tends to be bad. And some games are engineered in diabolical ways and only live to make money. But games in an of itself are a natural and important part of a normal human beings life. And in this generation, computer games are.
As parents we're doing our best, I'm just saying gaming is in the most part, a bad thing, I'm not saying every game is bad, as some drugs are useful for medical reasons too.
it's a shame to compare most games to music and painting, that does not make the game industry looks artistic in any way. it's more in the ballpark of alcohol, cigars and drugs, yes they're all popular, same as games, but they do not get the positive images in the society, games should be treated the same. Games do not deserve anything more positive than drugs, again, for the most part in general.
I am fine to be down voted to zero, though I hope some of you game developers know that, there are other ways to make a living than being a game developer.
I'm interested in knowing, in general, how games help kids, teenagers, even adults to be a better person to the society, by reading more, working harder, be less voilent, and staying touch with the real world? There are indeed some good games, again for the most part, they're the opposite.
I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly, but this seems like a strange false dilemma. Kids shouldn't only play games, but there's nothing wrong with letting your kids play them in moderation. It certainly doesn't make you a bad parent, quite the opposite. Many games can improve critical thinking ability. I discovered programming as a kid out a desire to make games. If I hadn't been allowed to play them, I wouldn't be where I am today. Good parents should let their kids play games.
The conversation is more complicated than you realize.
At level 1, there exist many parents who, for whatever reason, purchase gadgets for their kids as a means of distraction. Video games, cell phones, etc. This is generally a result of poor decision-making and life circumstance. (Mother died and dad is trying to pick up the slack; hospital bills crippled their finances and they're exhausted after coming home from their third job; work is more important, they weren't really interested in having kids anyways; etc.) Really, this should be level 0, but the exact reason isn't relevant.
At level 2 is people like ausjke, who look at this and see a lot of kids who are utterly absorbed and addicted. They respond to this by swinging the pendulum as far as possible to the other side. Don't be like those kids; they make their parents look bad. To an extent, they have a point: LED screens are very captivating, no matter what's playing on them. But at the end of the day, it's an overreaction.
At level 3, you have angersock, who can see as far down as level 1 and blames the parents. They're not wrong, per se, because the issue at hand is at level 2. If parents paid more attention, then the kids would play in moderation rather than excessively. It tends to be unheard because people at level 2, like ausjke, are pretty self-righteous about how they themselves have parented or were parented.
But as ausjke says, there is a surprisingly good analogy here in drugs. That is, the problem with drugs has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with societal demonization, power struggles between classes, poor legislation, and economic consequences. He says we ought to blame the drug dealers, but he never asks where they get the drugs and more importantly why they bother at all.
It's a conversation that's been tread over and over and over again. It's not a false dilemma; it's a call-and-response routine.
All that said, there is simply too much complexity wrapped up in the "Games are evil!" sentiment to really do much than call back with the rote "But but but the parental responsibility!".
Why are kids not playing outside--is it because of cookie-cutter suburbs and helicopter parents and the terrorists and kidnappers? Why don't parents have enough time to spend on their kids--is it the long hours at work to support a consumerist and debt-ridden lifestyle? Why is it even important for kids to have access to phones or video games?
These are all interesting questions somewhat fundamental to the issue, and unfortunately they'll never be answered to anyone's satisfaction.
You can have interesting conversations about this stuff; you just can't have it with people who aren't ready to move past the routine.