Industry Professional turns indie - seeks advice
by Jay Barnson · in General Discussion · 09/26/2003 (11:42 am) · 22 replies
After six years programming videogames for a living, I gave it up for a slightly higher-paying, theoretically more stable and less stressful (HAH!) programming position outside of gaming. Three years and three companies later, I've been chatting with friends who are still in the games industry, who help remind me about all the things I used to hate about the games industry, but all the things I used to love about writing games. It's fun again. So finally I decide to give it a go, complete a fairly easy project with a 3D engine I've been puttering around with for the last 2 years, and find out about this emerging indie movement and get involved.
I feel like a newbie all over again. I figure the best way to get over that is to plunge in and get all my mistakes made early. But I'd still like to hear advice and suggestions from those who have been down this road before me. I also had some questions that I haven't seen answered here or on other indie game development forums:
#1 - GG specific: Assuming one already has a game engine, a website to call home, and a business license... what advantage does publishing through Garage Games offer that another shareware hosting service (which takes a smaller percentage) does not?
#2 - It seems that the indie game "companies" mirror Hollywood in a pretty disturbing way - companies seem to form for the purpose of producing a single title. When the title is completed (or, more often, dropped), the company often dissolves. Is this typical, or just my perception? Or is it mainly the unsuccessful ones which do this?
#3 - It seems that 99% of the indie game projects out there get to a particular stage and then dissapear. The old 80/20 rule... "20% of the job takes 80% of the effort" may be at work here. But I was wondering if there really is such a high rate of failure in indie game development projects, and what people thought the leading causes of failure were.
#4 - Like everyone else, I'm curious about numbers of units sold. It sounds like most indie game titles are lucky to sell double digit numbers. Now I know there are a few break-away hits that buck the odds ("Bejeweled" comes to mind), but that's not what I'm interested in. The big boys play the hit game, and it's a dangerous gamble to pin a business on (even a part-time side-business). I'm more interested in the "working-class" indie games: The solid, well-done titles like the top contenders in the IGF, or titles like Marble Madness & Orbz.
#5 - What sort of target hardware are best to shoot for? While an indie doesn't have the budget to compete in a battle of looks & flash against the major publishers of the world, does making a game that can run on a 300 mhz celeron with a TNT-2 actually hurt potential sales because it is dismissed by gamers as not being "worthy?"
#6 - The folks who have successfully published titles through independent channels - are your games pretty much part-time ventures, or do you work on it full-time and do contract / part-time work to support your game development gig (or are you so successful you make a decent living doing indie games alone)?
#7 - For those seasoned vets of indie game development: Were there any blunders you made with the release of your first indie title(s) that you wish someone had warned you about? I'd love to hear any sort of cautionary war-stories.
#8 - Besides the GG crew, who else has made the move from professional, non-indie game development to the indie scene? What are your thoughts about the transition? Any rude awakenings?
#9 - I noticed that many of Garage Games' titles have online, multiplayer play on what looks like a common server. Is this a single server, or a matchmaking server of some kind? If so, does GG maintain this, or is this done by the individual studios?
#10 - There is no 10. Yet.
Well, that's a TON of questions. I look forward to hearing back on any of these, or any other bits of advice.
I feel like a newbie all over again. I figure the best way to get over that is to plunge in and get all my mistakes made early. But I'd still like to hear advice and suggestions from those who have been down this road before me. I also had some questions that I haven't seen answered here or on other indie game development forums:
#1 - GG specific: Assuming one already has a game engine, a website to call home, and a business license... what advantage does publishing through Garage Games offer that another shareware hosting service (which takes a smaller percentage) does not?
#2 - It seems that the indie game "companies" mirror Hollywood in a pretty disturbing way - companies seem to form for the purpose of producing a single title. When the title is completed (or, more often, dropped), the company often dissolves. Is this typical, or just my perception? Or is it mainly the unsuccessful ones which do this?
#3 - It seems that 99% of the indie game projects out there get to a particular stage and then dissapear. The old 80/20 rule... "20% of the job takes 80% of the effort" may be at work here. But I was wondering if there really is such a high rate of failure in indie game development projects, and what people thought the leading causes of failure were.
#4 - Like everyone else, I'm curious about numbers of units sold. It sounds like most indie game titles are lucky to sell double digit numbers. Now I know there are a few break-away hits that buck the odds ("Bejeweled" comes to mind), but that's not what I'm interested in. The big boys play the hit game, and it's a dangerous gamble to pin a business on (even a part-time side-business). I'm more interested in the "working-class" indie games: The solid, well-done titles like the top contenders in the IGF, or titles like Marble Madness & Orbz.
#5 - What sort of target hardware are best to shoot for? While an indie doesn't have the budget to compete in a battle of looks & flash against the major publishers of the world, does making a game that can run on a 300 mhz celeron with a TNT-2 actually hurt potential sales because it is dismissed by gamers as not being "worthy?"
#6 - The folks who have successfully published titles through independent channels - are your games pretty much part-time ventures, or do you work on it full-time and do contract / part-time work to support your game development gig (or are you so successful you make a decent living doing indie games alone)?
#7 - For those seasoned vets of indie game development: Were there any blunders you made with the release of your first indie title(s) that you wish someone had warned you about? I'd love to hear any sort of cautionary war-stories.
#8 - Besides the GG crew, who else has made the move from professional, non-indie game development to the indie scene? What are your thoughts about the transition? Any rude awakenings?
#9 - I noticed that many of Garage Games' titles have online, multiplayer play on what looks like a common server. Is this a single server, or a matchmaking server of some kind? If so, does GG maintain this, or is this done by the individual studios?
#10 - There is no 10. Yet.
Well, that's a TON of questions. I look forward to hearing back on any of these, or any other bits of advice.
About the author
Jay has been a mainstream and indie game developer for a... uh, long time. His professional start came in 1994 developing titles for the then-unknown and upcoming Sony Playstation. He runs Rampant Games and blogs at Tales of the Rampant Coyote.
#22
#1 - "Build it and they well come" only applies to fantasy movies about baseball. Generating traffic for a site and getting people to KNOW about your game is about as hard as making the game itself. Marketing is another huge task. I had NO IDEA.
So there's a lot of advantages to getting your game on a larger portal. The greater number of sales can well be worth the lower revenues per sale. GG has really excellent royalties for a portal of this size, AND are developer-centric (a lot of the biggest portals require you to scrub away any links / references to your company). And as with most portals, you can always go the non-exclusive route, which means you can use other sites (like your own) to reach your customers.
#2 & #3 - I see this a lot. And the answer is the same. It takes more than a cool idea or two to design a game. It takes more than a desire to be in charge to manage a team. It takes more than a cool engine and some neat tools to produce a commercial-quality game. Everybody (even us old hands) underestimates the amount of effort it takes to complete a game, but those with no experience tend to VASTLY underestimate it. By orders of magnitude.
I think with #2, some of it has to do with the fact that indie games are a hard, hard way to make money.
#4 - The average indie game sells somewhere between diddley and squat. Don't be average. Just like the mainstream game industry, there's a HUGE difference between the top 5% and everybody else.
#5 - Still don't know
#6 - Most successful games seem to be getting released by full-time teams. I hope we can buck the trend.
Maybe after I've had experience actually SELLING a game I'll have a more complete write-up of lessons learned, and answer the missing #10: What should a veteran of the AAA game industry know before embarking in the wild world of indie game development?
And #11 - I'd still like to know the answer to this: Will I finally be able to get some sleep after I release?
09/02/2004 (2:20 pm)
I've got a few answers, though most of 'em are exactly what I was told a year ago. This was a very helpful thread. I'm still not released, though, so I may still be making horrendous blunders every step of the way. But here's a little bit I learned:#1 - "Build it and they well come" only applies to fantasy movies about baseball. Generating traffic for a site and getting people to KNOW about your game is about as hard as making the game itself. Marketing is another huge task. I had NO IDEA.
So there's a lot of advantages to getting your game on a larger portal. The greater number of sales can well be worth the lower revenues per sale. GG has really excellent royalties for a portal of this size, AND are developer-centric (a lot of the biggest portals require you to scrub away any links / references to your company). And as with most portals, you can always go the non-exclusive route, which means you can use other sites (like your own) to reach your customers.
#2 & #3 - I see this a lot. And the answer is the same. It takes more than a cool idea or two to design a game. It takes more than a desire to be in charge to manage a team. It takes more than a cool engine and some neat tools to produce a commercial-quality game. Everybody (even us old hands) underestimates the amount of effort it takes to complete a game, but those with no experience tend to VASTLY underestimate it. By orders of magnitude.
I think with #2, some of it has to do with the fact that indie games are a hard, hard way to make money.
#4 - The average indie game sells somewhere between diddley and squat. Don't be average. Just like the mainstream game industry, there's a HUGE difference between the top 5% and everybody else.
#5 - Still don't know
#6 - Most successful games seem to be getting released by full-time teams. I hope we can buck the trend.
Maybe after I've had experience actually SELLING a game I'll have a more complete write-up of lessons learned, and answer the missing #10: What should a veteran of the AAA game industry know before embarking in the wild world of indie game development?
And #11 - I'd still like to know the answer to this: Will I finally be able to get some sleep after I release?
Torque 3D Owner Danner Jones
You have a lot of great questions, many of which I would guess you now have answers to yourself. I, for one, would be interested in hearing your personal comments on some of them. I don't think you're alone in that you had a "good, respectable" job that you gave up to go indie. Many of us would love to know how you're faring a year later.
-ner