These days the game Interstellar Marines is making news. It’s an FPS that rivals top titles like Halo but it started out as a four-man project in 2006 and is entirely funded by the community. The game is available for free as chunk-size bites called chapters that can be played for free. And it’s being developed with Unity, probably the leading game development framework for indie developers.
Interstellar Marines – unbelievable but crowdfunded!
Crowdfunding platforms
The successes seen by crowdfunded games have created a demand that several crowdfuning websites try to fill. The latest addition is GamesPlant, founded by game business experts where projects can be created in any currency and relies on the Paypal platform.
Other indie game crowdfunding platforms include 8-Bit Funding, the Indie Fund (only selected projects) and Playism (Japanese, english version in Q3 2011). Of course there are more general purpose platforms that have also worked for games, like Kickstarter (creative projects), RocketHub (creative projects), Pledgie (general purpose) and Indie GoGo (general purpose).
Should you aim for a crowdfund?
It depends.
One indie developer nails it down to driving traffic. Obviously, just putting your game up on a crowdfunding platform and hoping for the best isn’t going to work. Hope is not a strategy. I cringe when someone uses the “hope” word in a sentence about the future of anything. If you have to rely on hope, you could as well start playing the lottery.
Driving traffic is the core issue, and I believe many developers seem to forget that. You have to have a website dedicated to your project and depending on where you are in your development cycle, it should be a seperate website apart from your personal blog and past projects.
You can have lots of “fans” of your project in someone else’s forum or website. But ultimately you want that traffic to go to your website. And once you have that, you can start thinking about funding your project. If you have a tight-knit community, then donations or pre-orders might work great for you. Or any of the other funding options. Or you could try crowdfunding as your primary option and simply direct your fans and drive your traffic to the crowdfunding website. It’s rarely going to be the other way around.
In any case, you will have to drive the traffic to the desired destination. Traffic does not come by itself, and without traffic there is no funding and no revenue. And for crowdfunding specifically, the more you have to show from your game the more likely it is that you are going to see a return in investment. It’s a constant give and take. Don’t expect to take first, then give sometime later. It’s the other way around, and this may be the ultimate misunderstanding of crowdfunding.
You do have to make payments in advance yourself. Without investing anything you won’t be getting anything back in return. That initial investment doesn’t have to be money though, it’ll be time and dedication that you’ll have to invest at a minimum. And you’ll have to show that with convincing screenshots, trailers, podcasts or vodcasts, frequent blog posts and so on. Convincing in two ways: one, you’ll be able to pull this off and show enough dedication for the project. Two, the game should promise to be fun and exciting and offer something new or refreshing.
Those are the ingredients for starting a game that can’t be completed without external financial support.
Prerequisites To (Crowd) Funding
I believe investments are often misunderstood by those who have never received an investment. To receive investment of any form, you first have to invest yourself. Quite literally: invest your time into the project, and if you can, your money. The more you do the more you show dedication. That’s step 1.
If you can’t possibly finance the whole game and you have to have an investment of some kind, your focus immediately has to shift from programming and creating game content to marketing. Only program and create content that you can show the world in some form or another. Anything that creates interest or buzz. A randomly generated world. A fun-to-watch teaser trailer. Anything you can make a story off of.
You will have to market something that doesn’t exist yet, except in your dreams and in your mind. I think this is giving some developers a bad stomach feeling, after all you’re taking money from others just on a promise. If you have that feeling, please re-consider your dedication for the project. If you don’t know whether you’ll be able to keep your promises and deliver, you may not be as invested in the project and convinced of yourself as you need to be. That’s what I mean by investing yourself.
Of course there will always be phases of doubts, so don’t stop on the first sign of doubt but know when you have to stop. Your best cure will be to keep on working. If needed work on something else that you’re not currently stuck on. I always have something else to work on, and some other website to post on, in order to be able to shift focus and just keep on working on something I feel like working on at the moment.
Make progress as often as you can – contrary to common project management wisdom what you work on does not always have to be goal-oriented or even useful. After all, we’re in a creative business, and creativity can not be had if you strictly follow instructions – whether they’re your own or someone else’s (your boss, your investor, your community). Just don’t piss them off too much. Quick bit of wisdom: it is much easier to apologize afterwards with something to show for than it is to ask for permission with only a promise and potential risks.
Finally, show that progress. That’s step 2. Rinse and repeat step 2 for as long as it gives you enough satisfaction. Notice that I said satisfaction, not revenue – unless your investor(s) call(s) for that. In which case you’ll have to be 100% ok with revenue generation being your central goal from the get-go. Don’t expect to be able to mix pleasure and business – it can happen but you can hardly ever plan for that, and business has a tendency to take away pleasure and fun from a project in the long run.
Luckily, in that regard you’re mostly off the hook if you use crowdfunding. And I believe that’s where its power lies – it requires a good connection between customers and developers from the start.
What’s The Best Investment Option?
Plain and simple: invest in yourself. Everything else follows from that.
Disclaimer
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Take a time-out if needed to focus on other things. Don’t feel bad about that. Continuing to work for the wrong reasons and despite growing discomfort will result in the ultimate failure – be aware of the warning signs!
Burnout can happen everywhere, not just in big corporations!
If you’re reading this, I think it’s fair to assume you’re one of those developers who likes to read other developer’s blogs. If you’re anything like me, you’ve read a ton of different articles from various blogs, from very popular developers down to the “little man” just starting out with indie game development, or software development in general. A lot of these articles reveal good advice and tell a story about success, and sometimes failure. But with all these developer stories and the advice those developers give their readers, what should you make of it?
You’ll likely be asking yourself exactly this question while reading all those articles from Gamasutra all the way down to first-time-developer’s blogs.
What stops you? The back and forth!
The biggest problem with all this advice is that you may be tempted, and (as we all do) use it for rationalizing about certain decisions. If someone tells you you can’t make money on the App Store anymore, and there’s a lot of supportive evidence (eg dozens of iOS developers mentioning how little they make) – would that influence your decision not to publish a game on the App Store?
On the other side, have you been attracted to the App Store exactly because of the success stories in which iOS developers tell us how they were able to make a living off of it, and some even got rich (*) from the App Store? And then did you wonder how you could repeat that success? Later, did you think you were a fool to believe that this was even possible?
(*) rich as in: at least US $100,000 in less than a year.
So many questions, and what’s worse: to each question there are seemingly thousands of different answers. If you read a lot of developer blog posts, what you’ll learn eventually is that the best blog posts are from developers who took some advice, put it into action, tested and analyzed it and blogged about the results. This makes for very interesting posts and is advice supported by actual facts put into context. But more often than not you’ll come across another post by a different developer having taken the same advice but coming up with entirely different results. What should you make of that now?
Well, it turns out there’s only two things you can do:
Test it, or ignore it!
If you’re interested to find out if an advice works for you, you can only test it. Speculate and rationalize about it all you want, without applying the advice you’ll never know. And without some metrics it’ll be hard to figure out how much that particular advice helped your game to greater success. Particularly the metrics part was never something I was too keen on doing or monitoring. For my blogs I used the least possible amount of measure points, a bit of google analytics here and whatever stats I am provided with by my eCommerce vendor or iTunes Connect.
If you have the same disinterest about measuring the actual success of your website and product sales and marketing efforts, you can get away with the bare minimum too. As for making games, you should just make the game you love, for the platform you love developing for, and do everything the way you want to ignoring other developer’s advice entirely.
Some might say this may be dumb advice, but interestingly, if so much of a particular advice is subjective and works out differently for different developers, the best you can do for your game and with your time is to ignore that advice and find your own way. I suppose that most indie game developers’ biggest problem is actually finishing a game in the first place. Reading conflicting opinion pieces about game development and business can only lead to one thing:
Confusion with a chance of stagnation
Easy answers may or may not be not inexistent. But what’s for sure is that if you can’t make heads or tails out of a situation, your mind won’t stop thinking about this unresolved issue. It just keeps going at it. Should you better do A or rather go along with B? Both have their advantages and disadvantages. This is so difficult.
Did you ever catch yourself in this kind of thinking? Not knowing about something you are about to do or are in the middle of it, and not knowing the results and not even having any grounds to base your decisions on other than other people’s experiences, how could you possible decide which option is best for you?
The answer is: you don’t!
You just have to make a decision – any decision really – and the decisions you’ll feel most confident about come naturally. The stomach feeling. Your first reaction when confronted with a difficult choice. The first answer is the best when there’s no obvious choice. Always! Even the unreasonable choice. Why?
It’s the decision that’s right for you that’s right
That’s basically it. You just listen to your inner voice and it’ll guide you through the decisions that are too context-sensitive, so to speak. By that I mean if some piece of advice, the way to go, or any life decision for that matter – depends on a lot of variables of which most are outside your control and/or very specific to your life, your experience, your situation – then the best decision is the one that just feels right for you. And that’s almost always the gut-feeling reaction you have when confronted with a choice.
This has one big advantage: you’ll feel good about your decision, because you own it! And confidence in a decision is actually more important than which of the options you decided to do.
But alas, we humans are suckers for easy answers. We go through a lot to be able to get an easy answer, or even just to believe we found it. That’s why religion is so popular, it gives easy answers to complex and unsolvable questions. Conspiracy theories work in a similar fashion because they allow us to simply ignore the facts and allow us to accept the answers that we prefer to believe as true. Then we’ll find the evidence to support that believe. Simple and beautiful.
We want the feeling of confidence that a particular decision is the right one before acting on it. But unlike religion and thanks to the Internet we end up finding so many varying results and we lose the confidence to decide naturally what’s best for us. Too bad the bible doesn’t have the answer for us, nor does Roswell or the 9/11 inside job.
Against all odds
If 80% of the opinions and data on the Internet tell us to do one thing with our game to be able to make a living off of it, but that’s exactly something you have a bad feeling about – then you shouldn’t do it. Free yourself from thinking that that’s something you have to do (*) to be successful. That is never true.
(*) About the only things we really, really have to do are breathe, eat and drink. Everything else is entirely optional. Even fucking.
You can’t do something right if that’s not what you want to do, and you’ll feel much better about your game by not doing it, which in turn is likely going to make the game better. For example, many developers have a strong aversion against offering microtransactions in their games. If you’re one of them, ignore the advice to use microtransactions as the money-printing method and just don’t use them.
You can rest confident that if you added microtransactions without embracing them fully, you are likely not going to make much money off of it anyway. Because you think they suck the money right out of your gamers pockets – and then that’s what you’ll end up doing, and you’ll end up feeling terrible about doing it! You might even get rich financially against all odds but even then you’ll lose some of your spirit, something that makes you, well, you.
What is success, anyway?
While you’re at it, you might also want to reconsider your definition of success. What do you really want to achieve? Without a clear goal for life, everything you do is prone to fail anyway. Do you really want to get rich? Or would you rather redefine rich as in: earning enough money to support yourself and your family while working less than 40 hours per month? Richness in time vs. richness in money. You can achieve the latter and not have the former, and vice versa. Think about it.
Why is it so important to know your life’s goal? Because it puts everything in context and guides you through the difficult decisions that could go either way. If given the option to work on a dull, boring and time-consuming job for 6 months but with great pay – would you do it if your life’s goal is to spend as much time as possible with your family? Would you do it if your life’s goal is to be creative and define your own destiny? Even if your goal is to get rich quick – would this job be the right choice for you and get you closer to your goal? Think about that, too.
In essence
If you can’t decide, ask yourself how you would decide if you just did this for yourself. That’s going to be the right answer. After that you can google the web and read through the conflicting opinions if you want, but unless there’s a clear indication that what you’re going to do is going to spell doom and failure – like making a porn app for the App Store (*) – you should just do what you feel is right. And do it with confidence.
If you do love porn so much and making the perfect porn app is your calling, let me tell you that the problem isn’t the porn, it’s the App Store! Once you realize that there are always other options, you’ll find other ways to succeed.
Interestingly, I’ve seen the oddest things happening when following your gut instinct against all odds and reason. There is this former colleague of mine who wants to re-engineer mathematics (website in german). He wrote a series of articles about his new way of doing mathematics with lots of tables and new definitions for multiplication and division to get rid of, among other things, the “division by zero” conundrum. On first and second sight it is probably the dumbest thing to do, right after suicide. But somehow it was also fascinating, and spawned an ongoing discussion and actually had me think about how the basics of our mathematics work. At the very least I realized just how much we take for granted without actually knowing too much about it. On the other hand, if you don’t know much about something, you probably shouldn’t try to re-invent it either.
The point is: you don’t always get the results you want, but you’re certainly going to get something of note if you follow your gut instincts and remain confident in your decisions and be involved with what you do. This is how the most exciting things get made. And exciting tends to attract more attention from others. What you do with this attention is up to you. And I’m sure you can do better than reinventing the wheel. Or mathematics, for that matter.
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