REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — It’s an amazing time to be a developer in the game industry. The distribution, public relations/marketing, and funding trifecta that kept the old guard of “big publishing” in power for so long is evolving. Now, everyone from the inexperienced dorm room developer to the veteran contract development house have a much better chance of seeing their dream projects become tangible products.
In turn, this era of accessibility has created some new challenges for content creators. The one pro of the old system was that, although big publishers had an incredibly lopsided leverage over developers, publishers handled getting the game exposure and maintaining the product’s life cycle for their developers. When the high barriers of entry of the old system began to crumble, anyone and everyone could flood the market with their ideas. This crowded and constantly evolving environment can make handling the issues of a product’s exposure and life cycle exponentially harder for anyone, let alone developers who traditionally were not expected to handle these issues on their own. It doesn’t help that the line between the independent and commercial markets are beginning to blur; where it may soon not be a question of who is the biggest fish in two separate lakes, but perhaps that there are too many fish vying for limited consumer attention in one large market.
During the “Rise of the Big Indie Studios” panel at GamesBeat 2013, the discussion leaned toward how independent studios are successfully tackling the challenges of this new era of self-publishing. Steve Allison of TellTale Games, Jeff Graham of Wolfire Games/Humble Bundle, Craig Allen of Spark Unlimited, and Mathew Hannus of Sleepy Giant contributed to the talk, with three overriding philosophies dominating the discussion:
Develop a solid relationship with your audience — and pay attention
We’re not just talking about when your game is close to, to coin a retail product term, “going gold,” either. Developers can easily start building a relationship with people who show interest in their game even during the very early days of development. As Graham explains, “We were very open to experimenting with ways to just connect with the world in general. Back in the day, I would man a livechat widget on our website every waking hour; we were working 17 hour days. Anybody who happened by our website could ask me questions about our game developer process and what we were doing. What we gravitated on was this idea of open development … that we might be able to turn the development process itself into our PR and discoverability strategy.”
This early connection with the audience can also help you identify what sort of audience you are really attracting and how you may want to mold your project to fit that demographics’ demands. Allen adds, “I think if you look at this movement from, kind of representative business that’s creative to creators and their audience. You’ll find your own level. Maybe your audience is really big because you have mass market appeal. Maybe your audience is really niche. But you’ll be able to run your business according to the size of the audience that is interested in it. It will favor people that are life style oriented to their community.”
Making your creative talent forward-facing throughout all phases of the project’s life cycle may still seem like it is out of the game industry’s comfort zone, but as Allen points out, many other pop media industries have been making it a major part of their marketing for decades. “So, you know, in music, you look at Lady Gaga, she doesn’t just do an album go away and come back in two years with a new set of songs,” he said. “She is out promoting, doing concerts, doing appearances, doing fan reach out, she has her fan community, and she is engaged in a very transparent and unified way. You’ve got to eat what you make. It’s not this thing that we hired a bunch of people and we’ll just put a brand on a shelf and people will buy it because we told them to. The audience will support what they care about.”
This audience engagement during independent development can also fill in another void that traditional big publishers use to provide: a gauge for when a project is not working both creatively and commercially. No one wants to argue with a room full of creative people about who knows best about content (outside of other creative people and critics), but even the best artists require someone detached from the process to give heart breaking critical input. Without a publisher standing over the development team, acting as that heartbreaker that is not invested in the creative process, there can be a lack of honest constructive criticism both in content and direction of the product. As Allison explains, this is a pay-off independent developers must address, “With the access to distribution in your lap, it comes with a lot of responsibility to spend your money and time wisely, because now instead of a publisher telling you that it doesn’t work, you’ve got to be able to tell yourself … and that’s really difficult when you’re also passionate about what you’re making. That’s a radical shift in thinking because good content rules the day, so you got to make sure you’re making content people care about.”
Depending on the type of creative people involved on the team, this concept may also require a very difficult shift in gears. Craig Allen adds, “I remember we [Allen and Allison] were talking a couple years ago about that shift from product centric development where you, kind of like a novelist right? You go down, into the hole, you write your book. You get every chapter right. [You get] the expression of everything you want [created] and then you throw it over the wall and people buy it or they don’t. I know you guys [TellTale Games] had to struggle with just a whole different rhythm of production because now you’re on this treadmill. It’s market daily newspaper: You’re showing up, you’re writing the news article, you’re re-writing it the next day, you have new information, the audience gives you opinions, ‘Oh, I got to pull that in! The big story I thought was going to be a big story: nobody cares. I don’t know why they don’t want to know how Obamacare cost so much money for the website. We’ll drop that story line; we’ll pick up another one.’… But you’re shifting with the audience. That…from the talent perspective … I mean, we’ve seen that that’s a very different mix of talent. There are people who are just not comfortable releasing unfinished work.”
While the criticism element may be painful, audience engagement ultimately offers developers something that the big publisher middle men could not: clarity on what your player base enjoys. Craig Allen explains, “What I think is really exciting is this conversion [from the old system to the modern one] where the audience is really in control. Kickstarter is just the start of, I think, what I feel will be more and more real data driving the creation of products, services, games…in a way that creates a whole new structure. So whether it is talking to the audience, working with the community, figuring out who you’re talking to…you got to be a lot more targeted and a lot more responsive than this other system where you can kind of abstract things. [For example] ‘Nielson ratings says that this show is being watched’ … ‘I don’t watch it, and I don’t know anyone that watches it. Really?!?!’ … Oh, yeah, yeah!’”
So really nailing who your audience is and intimately engaging them can be an invaluable resource. It can provide you with information about your audience in general, what elements they value in you as a developer and provide a blunt analysis of if they like your product’s direction. It’s pure data from the tap that traditional big publishers use to spend considerable resources mining for, in order to provide their developers direction when shaping their projects.
Don’t be stubborn: Try news methods of promotion
Above: YouTube is just one of several highly effective and cheap marketing tools.
As explained in the last section, having a good rapport with your audience by being forward facing throughout a project’s life cycle can give you an invaluable amount of information on what your fan base wants. A loyal audience can also help spread the word, even over the smallest of updates, as Graham discovered, “We basically time-lapsed our game and every major feature update we’d have; we’d make a video about it and put it up on YouTube to see what would happen. Not every update was an amazing news story for the world, but, sometimes Reddit would really like the blood effects when, you know, guts were splattering on the side of a wall with realistic physics and dripping down or whatever … and Reddit would go crazy. All of a sudden we’d have an inflow of customers we never had before. It’s like, well, what can we do next?!?”
Even if you have broad PR and marketing budget that affords creating buzz through traditional channels, such as a major television or web banner ad campaign, you have some very obvious and very cheap modern alternatives available to you. Allison reveals just how much potential these avenues have. “We have the ability to talk to people through, you know, having YouTube and Reddit. [These things are] so powerful, these things were not around four years ago,” he said. “So learning how to martial them to your benefit is where success is made, because with really good PR based on having a really good product idea and really good execution – you can move people. You can get millions of dollars’ worth of media exposure just by pushing people to things on the Internet. Every YouTube video is a content marketing experience and can get somebody engaged more than a TV spot. If you can get 10 million video views on YouTube, that’s the same as spending $5 million bucks on TV. That’s all new.”
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to try something completely crazy and disruptive, either. Humble Bundle, for example, is a special sales event co-created by Graham, where developers offer their games to be added into a special multi-game pack. For a limited time this pack is sold to customers for whatever price they decide. If a customer buying the bundle wants to pay $50, $25, $1 — they can. It is definitely an idea that would send a traditional publishing executive harrumphing you out of the building, but in practice Humble Bundle was incredibly successful — not only drawing in significant sales, but creating a very positive buzz for everyone involved.
“Now the problem, the main one, is discoverability. Now that everybody can have a try at making an awesome game, how do you get the people looking at your project excited? At Wolfire Games we started in August 2008 and weren’t exactly sure how to make that work…but we kept trying different experiments and Humble Bundle is something we stumbled into as an experiment that started working,” Graham said.
Take advantage of the digital product’s new organic life cycle
Above: The digital product’s life cycle is more like an active heart beat with spikes and dips — not so much like the high dive plane crash of traditional retail life cycles.
We’re no longer in the “one and done” age of the traditional retail product, where a game’s sales life cycle is a linear decline toward the bottom. In the digital arena, successful products always have a chance of pulling out of a dead period with a spike in sales, provided a good promotional game plan is put into place. Allen explains the old retail philosophy: “For a big organization that has a [traditional] slate and a portfolio based approach to business – it’s a fire and forget kind of mentality at retail. Right? ‘I launched the product, I get my money, and six weeks later I’m maybe doing some … you know … retail markdown, some inventory clearance. I’m trying to clear the channel and get ready for the next set. I’m moving on and moving on and moving on. …”
Allison also remembers how things were in the old retail system, “At retail you can change the price, and it can take five to six weeks to change the sticker, complacency, you have no idea if they actually changed all of them. All of that stuff is a big problem.”
And how things have improved, “With digital, like I want to run a sale … or Steam is having a Halloween sale. They want 66 percent off for four days. You say, ‘OK.” At 10 o’clock in the morning it happens. Four days later it goes back. You have such granularity in all the changes you can make today it’s amazing. You can stoke and extend the life of your product,” Allison said. “The retail curve looks like this [hand high in the air] for five weeks and then it just flat lines [brings arm down]. [Your product] maybe has a price jump where there is a little blip, but in general in digital it really looks more like a heartbeat. So, you know, as you move through the life cycle you’re going to have to take bigger and bigger chunks out, but you can still have a million dollar week when you’re 19 months old.”
Just like creating buzz during development, marketing and launch phases — it pays to recognize when doing something unorthodox may help pop audience interest in your titles postlaunch. “As the content creator, content owner, game developer, you always want to give people a reason to discover you and it is kind of in your best interest to do wild and crazy things from time to time,” Graham said. “That heartbeat is usually caused by [something] like, you know, Steam approaches you, you probably want to say ‘yes’ to whatever sales they are going to do. We’d like to think Humble Bundle, and we have some data that supports this, but Humble Bundle is very useful in the bag of tricks for developers as a way to gain a lot of attention and driving nice chunks of revenue when it is the right phase for them and their development cycle.”
These promotions and strategies don’t just have to affect one product in your line up. Again, smart planning and execution of a promotion dealing with one product can help revive and spike the sales of other similar products you provide. Allison shares an example of this working firsthand. “So, we launch the series, we go through the five episodes and we have people passionate about it for the first six months, and then we get to the finale. Then we, at some point, [about] two-three months after that finale, we would make the first episode free.
“After we made the first episode free on The Walking Dead, we had a revenue jump of about 400 percent, and it leveled off at about … and maintained a cliff of about 150 percent more than where we were headed. It kind of leveled off after the finale ended in about three months. So for us it is life cycle management. We are probably always going to move to a free episode 1 and then what we have in the app store is that episode 1 is a part of a shell, with four other episodes that you can buy within it. It works. We’ve had since the episode one [of The Walking Dead] went free; we’ve had like 18 million downloads of that episode. So it worked, for us.”