

From exec to indie: One family’s wild ride ends today with debut of dream game - Gbits
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/from-executive-to-indie-developer-one-familys-wild-ride-ends-today/

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GuiA
What happens behind the scenes of articles like that? Just to be clear, I am
very happy for this guy that he took the indie leap and is shipping, and I
hope his game does great.

But why is there a 2 page article about it in a semi-high profile blog?
Neither him nor his wife has previous fame from past projects; the game's
twitter (@druidsduel) has less than 1k followers, they didn't do a Kickstarter
or something crazy that would have brought the spotlight, etc. I follow a fair
amount of indie game devs, and hadn't heard about this until today.

So again - congrats to him on shipping! All the best! But there are many
indies following that route (saying the market is saturated would be an
understatement), and they don't get 2 page articles. What's going on here?

The only thing I can think of is that he has a publisher, which is unusual for
first time indie game devs, and that perhaps the publisher just knows the
right people to make stuff like this happen.

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davedx
Slow news day... human interest.

(Yeah, I'm jealous, trying to hustle my game's launch with dozens of indie
blogs got me almost nowhere...)

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covercash
I skimmed your HN comments and personal site but didn't find any mention of a
game. Are you hiding details somewhere I'm not looking?

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kdszafranski
Hey everyone! This is Kris Szafranski (@druidsduel), the guy in the article.

I have often wondered the very same things, so hopefully I can remove the
mystery here for others.

There is nothing particularly special about my story. It's something of a
combo of what wallflower and GuiA wrote already: opportunity, making
connections, and tons of hard work.

I have a publisher, Surprise Attack Games. They contacted me after seeing the
game on IndieDB.com. This was after the Kickstarter, which was indeed very
small. The KS was my experiment in self-marketing, something I have very
little experience with and in the end it got funded, but it was a struggle and
a dose of reality. I hired PR help during the KS as I knew very few people in
the industry media directly and social media only gets you so far. I also
started attending as many local meet-ups as I could, getting to know the game
dev community around me. They had amazing advice and support.

Surprise Attack is an indie publisher and I am not a Big Client. I thought my
odds were best with a publisher and the deal didn’t come with any advance or
other investment. So aside from the KS, the game is self-funded. I only went
with the Surprise Attack after we agreed that Steam would be included. Until
then, it was more of a distribution deal, which they publically offer to
indies on their website.

The publisher used a well-known gaming PR person to handle the release. We
pitched the author of the article two ideas and she liked them, combining them
in a general human-interest type thing. A similar story ran locally last year
in Minneapolis where I am based. My former gig was at a popular local company
and my work their gained me supporters. This past experience has helped me a
ton at having the confidence in networking and talking about my game.

In the end it’s just one article and my game’s success or failure is still
very much up in the air. I just followed others’ advice: talk about your game
all the time, to everyone. Know your audience and make them something they
want to play.

I'll happily answer any other questions you have have.

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vgsmart
Howdy folks!

I am the PR guy that Kris mentioned that set up this interview and feature.

I understand that most people think that there's some kind of nepotism going
on, and in fact sometimes this really is how an industry (any industry) works.
Not in this case, but I understand why you'd jump to that conclusion.

So why this game? Why this guy? Well the answer is in part because it is
important to run this kind of article now and then to remind everyone that it
ISN'T always about the guy who has all the connections or about the company
with the billions of dollars to spend.

Games, especially indie games, are about the PEOPLE behind them. You are all
correct that basically this article could have been about practically ANY
indie (I work hard for my clients in hopes of making them the target) - but
the important thing is the article its self gets published to remind us that
for at least one person a game is more than a game, it is a statement, it is a
life change, it is a dream come true.

In short, I believe this article is to say that in our days of ever increasing
hype and flash that there's a human behind the scenes making what he loves and
that GamesBeat is strong enough to talk about it. Plus the game is pretty damn
good :D

-Joe Lieberman Indie Game PR Guy

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empressplay
Cool, looks like a re-imagining of Archon...

