

Why Indie Games are Getting Pushed Out and How to Stay Alive - darrelsumi
http://blog.soragora.com/post/34200604874/why-indies-are-getting-pushed-out-and-how-to-stay-alive

======
TillE
App store discovery is definitely one of the biggest problems. Especially
Android, which persists in using a limited set of bizarre subcategories for
games.

Both Apple and Google have humans maintaining their storefronts to some
extent, but what they offer is incredibly limited. They're not a fraction as
good as Steam for finding new things you might like.

And for the last point about tracking metrics, here's a great blog post on the
subject by a then-Google developer:

[http://replicaisland.blogspot.com/2010/01/tuning-with-
metric...](http://replicaisland.blogspot.com/2010/01/tuning-with-metrics-
redux.html)

~~~
xiaoma
I don't have any problem at all discovering good apps on the App Store. For
the most part, the stuff on the top of the store is great, and when I want
something a bit quirkier (i.e. a Hokkien-teaching app) I search for it. What
kinds of apps do you feel are difficult to discover?

------
michaelpinto
I recently went to an conference and found out that typical user acquisition
costs ranged from $60k to $120k in order to get a top 25 title into the app
store. Added to this was the fact that you pretty much had to give away the
game for for free, and then hope to sell things in the game to the 2% of folks
who would buy. So what this really means is that the launch of the game is
really the start of an ongoing project to refresh the same title to keep user
interest. These are quite daunting tasks to an indie developer who might be
able to throw $20k at a project.

The best advice that I came across was to make it a point to avoid doing what
ever everyone else was doing. So go after a niche gaming audience and maybe
even think of another platform where the well funded publishers aren't
playing.

~~~
jonnathanson
To me, the implication here is that you can no longer bank everything on one
title. Your first title may need to be a loss leader for a second and third
title, to follow shortly thereafter. Hopefully you build a fanbase with the
first title, and you try to convert those fans to the subsequent games. This
is not cheap, by any means, and for true garage-style indies, it will mean
either raising some capital, partnering with others who have it, or being
incredibly savvy with PR and guerrilla marketing. Or it may mean a really
long, slow strategy, building up a loyal following over the course of a few
years. (That's the way a lot of fledgling studios had to do it in the early
console days, and it may be similar in the future.)

The niche strategy is the other option. I've seen certain niches that have
really loyal, under-served fanbases with deep pockets and a high willingness
to pay for quality. Take the RPG segment, for instance. Square-Enix (an 800lb
gorilla, sure, but still) recently released an RPG for a whopping _$30_ on the
iOS App Store, and by all accounts, it seems to be very successful. I'm sure
you can measure the number of people who paid for it in the hundreds of
thousands, and probably not the millions, but still, that's a successful
launch. A small, hyper-loyal niche without much price sensitivity can be the
basis of a very lucrative strategy.

~~~
jblow
Loss-leading is for losers. I mean, it works if you are a large entity with
super-deep pockets and a long horizon before you need to make your money back.
For small developers it is death.

The first dot-com bubble was all about user-acquisition and loss-leading. Look
where that ended up.

~~~
jonnathanson
Perhaps "loss leading" was the wrong term on my part. A more accurate
description for what I was trying to get at would be expecting to break even
or turn a small profit on the first game, then converting that game's base to
a higher-margin second game.

That being said, I don't think loss leading, in and of itself, is out of the
question for a small developer. There are periods of time during which
dropping your price to free can drive a significant boost in trial. This is a
valid promotional strategy, assuming it's used sparingly and strategically
enough that it doesn't piss off the userbase who paid for the game.

------
hdivider
This discussion seems to focus on the mostly-saturated iOS App Store, which is
fair enough, given the money being thrown around there, but I wouldn't write
the Windows Store off just yet.

We've got just over 800 indie games in the Windows Store right now, and many
of those are (quite frankly) basically crap. To me, this looks like a
tremendous opportunity for indie game devs. It's still a gamble, but that kind
of comes with the job.

"Although 2D and casual games are still dominant, a growing fraction of mobile
gamers are looking for console or PC level quality."

Gameplay/concept/'atmosphere' comes before graphics, surely. Sometimes even
the big players get this (eg: WoW, especially near its launch).

~~~
drawkbox
Windows Store for Windows Phone 7 was largely a flop since it was impossible
to do native code with it (games had to be in C# with XNA, or in other words a
new title entirely and harder to port).

Android grew faster in games with 2.3 introduced the best NDK support (C/C++
rather than Java) (NDK initially was limited in 2.2).

Windows Phone 8 allows native support, this will be a land rush soon if there
are decent phone sales. The only pain point of going to Windows then will be
the DirectX portion compared to OpenGL (they really should have gone OpenGL ES
on mobile for port reasons, it won on embedded already).

Platforms like Unity and others will be setup for it so it opens it up for
many more devs = more games.

~~~
pjmlp
There are many AAA studios already making use of C#.

A big issue was surely the tiny market size Windows Phone has.

~~~
jblow
AAA studios may use C# for tools, but exactly zero of them use C# for their
actual game engine.

~~~
pjmlp
Are you sure?

I know a few cases in German studios.

~~~
jblow
Like what? AAA has a definition involving budget, it doesn't just mean "not
indie". I am not aware of anyone operating at that budget level and using C#.

~~~
pjmlp
ExDream, <http://exdream.com/Games/>

The first company in the world releasing a .NET commercial game back in 2002.

Bitcomposer, <http://bitcomposer.com>

EA Phenomic, <http://www.phenomic.de/>

------
jblow
I don't have much patience for articles like this.

Look, if you can't get someone to open your app more than 3 times, maybe it's
because you are not making interesting things.

If you build something that is high-quality and that makes a difference in
peoples' lives, they will flock to you, because there is so little of that. On
the other hand, there is an overabundance of 99-cent and free-to-play software
that has no real reason to exist other than to try and make the developers
money. But this is the mindset that this article comes from (evidence: the
author's first three pieces of advice are "cross-promote", "market well", and
"internationalize", things that have nothing whatsoever to do with what is
being made or how good it is.

These are not useful tactics, at least not in isolation, because they don't
address the core problem: that a developer in this situation is a dime-a-
dozen. The solution is to stop being a dime-a-dozen.

You don't need to differentiate your particular piece of software so much;
work on differentiating yourself as a developer, in terms of the quality and
interestingness of what you produce; be a thought-leader rather than a
follower who mainly thinks about cross-promoting; and once you manage these
things, you will automatically be doing okay. (And you are much more likely to
be satisfied with your life, which is quite a nice side-benefit).

Of course, most people will not follow this advice, because it requires
effort, introspection, course-changing, all that stuff. Most iOS developers
will continue going as they are and continue suffering the consequences. Not
pretty but that is just how it is!

~~~
5hoom
Very well said.

Articles like this reduce games to some grey, by the numbers marketing
exercise. The reason so many games on the app store sink like a rock is
because they just plain aren't enjoyable experiences and treat their players
very cynically. It's totally disappointing that micro transactions, sneaky
psychological tricks and nagging the player at every stage is so actively
encouraged in the mobile space.

Gameplay and designing experiences for the player is seen as some sort of
afterthought.

Games can be such a wonderful immersive medium, but it's hard to get lost in
another world while there's a bright bouncing icon asking for your credit card
or facebook details every three seconds. Mobile games really could be so much
better than this.

I for one would love to see more focus on building great things and less on
monetization. Long live the indies and hats off to people like yourself who
are out there pushing things forward.

~~~
rrradical
I spent two years building an iOS game without any special psychological or
monetization tricks. My goal was simply to make an interesting and engaging
game, and charge people a few bucks up front to play it. But making a living
doing this is not as simple as it seems.

My game (<http://buttonbrigade.com>) is completely unique and those that play
it love it, but so far the market has shown very little interest, even for the
free version. From this side of the fence, it seems much easier to market and
make money off of a clone of an existing game.

I wish it were simply a matter of making a great game and enjoying success,
but if I want to keep doing this for a living, it seems I need to put much
more effort into marketing than actually making great games.

------
wonjun
We were motivated by this problem, so we've been working on a site that can
help you guys pump hype into your indie games, [http://www.hypejar.com/most-
hyped/video-games/indie-kickstar...](http://www.hypejar.com/most-hyped/video-
games/indie-kickstarter)

------
uvTwitch
One thing I've learned from doing small game dev: We are responsible for our
own marketing. I think it is healthy to expect and plan for app stores to give
us exactly zero exposure; it leaves much less to chance.

