Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way

[Music] hello welcome to failing to fail the spider web software way I would like to thank you sincerely for taking a chance on this talk being as most of you have no idea who I am and I'm keeping you from your day drinking my name is Jeff ogle and I run a company called spiderweb software which I started in 1994 we're uh we're a little company uh two full time employees now it used to be three most people have never ever heard of us but we've been around for a very long time based indie fantasy role-playing games very low-budget very retro a lot of words a lot of dialogue very story heavy intricate settings we do them for Windows Mac iPad Linux and Android when we can get someone to do the port for us these are some of the series's that I have worked on over the past they are not household names this is a full list of the full length games that we have released for money the games in italics are full remasters we don't we don't half-ass our remaster when we remaster we redo everything the other games are completely all new full-length titles and we write pretty big games God knows you don't want to count all that but it's over the time we've been in business we've released 16 full length all new games and the seven remote sorry eight remasters what do we do well this is our very first game exile escape from the pit which we released in January of 1995 and just to be clear even by the standards of the time this was a pretty darn cheap looking game it's adorable it's functional it's a clearly recognizable Ultima knockoff but you know it's it's it's cheap and scruffy in comparison about a month and a half ago we released a Vernon 3 ruined world which is a remaster of Wernham 3 which is itself a remaster of exile 3 ruined world so we've been around long enough that we are doing remasters of remasters and now if you look at this I mean graphically production values it's fine you know we're not crapping ourselves up there it's reasonable no one's gonna no one's gonna mistake it for a triple-a title or something but it's basically functional we don't write hits now don't get me wrong I have nothing against hits I would love to have a hit I think it's a great thing to shoot for it's just not what we do we try to service a respectable niche with competent games in order to sustain a pleasant sustainable middle-class income so why am i up here any developers love and should love post-mortems they love the stories of creating a thing because you can sort of pick through it magpie like and look for elements of the story that you can use to help yourself well this was a post-mortem too except it's not a post-mortem of a game but of a career because I am older than the stones and the dirt I have been writing indie games continuously for a living longer then I'm not going to say everyone but the list of people who have been doing it longer is not long and it's by a matter of months indie games as a big thing are new they're really new that we only became a full big hundred million dollar a year industry in like the last five or six years so the idea of how to do a full career a 20 30 40 year career in this industry is very much an open question so it's not talked about much forty years my god there isn't going to be a planet left then so that's why that's the purpose of this talk to start approaching this question how do you how do you keep the ball rollin and so I'm gonna tell you as a story about the last 25 years a couple blame funny anecdotes and a couple things that I observed about the nature of our industry I'm not going to have any answers for anybody because you're all your all your own artists but perhaps some things I say might help you to ask a better quality of question so this is the old person part of the talk and I've observed that there is nothing that young people hate more than old people talking about what things were like when the world was young who punch cards my first computer was a cinder block with a keyboard duct tape to it yeah there's gonna be there's gonna be a tiny bit of that but I promise to try to round it around to some bring it around to something that might be valuable to you so how did I get started I was a really really weird kid when I was five I spent all of my time in my bedroom with a pencil and paper drawing increasingly elaborate mazes because they fascinated me I was lucky enough to have worried but basically supportive parents 1975 or so my dad went to a bar with friends and he came home and said Jeff I saw this weird thing I'd never seen before that you'd find it interesting and he described to me a thing called pong and he was right it did sound awful interesting but I couldn't try it because even in 1975 five-year-olds hanging out in bars was not going to fly but one year later on a Washington state ferry I found this big old wooden box you where you could put a quarter in the front and you could fire rectangular torpedoes at these two dimensional boats for 70 seconds and if you did it really well you could do it for twenty more seconds and even then my tiny little barely alive pea brain knew that this was my thing this was my bag writing video games for a living was an idea that compelled me all through my childhood all through I read everything I could about video games about programming I played them whenever I got the chance when I was 10 I walked into my fourth-grade classroom and there were people with this weird-looking blue book and some funny shaped dice and once again I didn't look at it for like two or three seconds before it had colonized my brain and that night I was bugging my parents please oh my god taken to the mall so I can buy this and I that was how I got started with Dungeons and Dragons my school library had a program where kids could write books oh you could put him in the school library and then other kids could check them out and so I immediately had to like learn to type hunt-and-peck style and I wrote my fur the undie module put it on the library now at the the news media at the time even the most prestigious outlets were starting to run stories about the evil of gamers about how our there are these treacherous evil corrupt insidious creatures who must be feared a proud media tradition that continues to this day and as a result a concerned parent called the school library and as a result of that I'm the only person I know personally who has had a book banned from a school librarian this is the module that I wrote art also by me the tunnels of grok and you will note in the title that I spelled the tunnels with these somewhat less common le spelling well as the point of all that I have been gifted with a gift that is almost unprecedented in the whole of human experience I am older than the art form in which I work now this is one of my all-time favorite quotes by William Goldman a writer and screenwriter best known for making the Princess Bride nobody knows anything and he was saying this about the film industry which is a far better understood industry than ours video games are young nobody knows anything we're still scrambling to figure out how do we design these things how do we create these things how do we test these things how do we sell these things how do we market these things how do we have loot boxes to 100 million dollar project without causing to blow up on the launch pad nobody knows anything and if you think you know a rule one of you out there your fortune and your fame might be figuring out the way to break that rule and you know in two days grownup GBC is going to start real GBC is gonna start and these holes are gonna be filled with Microsoft people Electronic Arts people in Activision people walking down the hall like they're too cool for school and looking at me like there's something they just scraped off their shoe and there's gonna be high-powered consultants here whose job is to charge a fortune to stand on the corner of the room and pretend they're the person who knows something don't be fooled nobody knows anything and this is your art form just as much as there's still don't patronize me okay my first game was a thing called shareware which was a marketing technique what was shareware well in 1994 most software was sold in boxes on store shelves and shares based on the bananas radical idea wait a second what we're gonna do is we're gonna write demos of our names small portions and people are free to spread their demos to everyone that they knew they can put them up on BBS's they can put them on American online they could give copies of the demos to their friends in the on the off chance they had any and if you liked the demo then you okay you pirate it at 90% of the time but sometimes you got the full version by sending me money now how did you these demos get around and how did the money come back because bear in mind at this time there wasn't really an internet this is we're back to 1994 there was no real web browser there was no real web most people this is my first 14 4k modem which was capable of downloading my 1.2 megabytes first game demo in in a blazing 90 minutes you used these how was your game distributed well you could put your demo on AOL CompuServe prodigy these were services that cost $3 an hour to be on that's how much the internet cost in 1994 three dollars an hour you could get demos by buying magazines which had shareware on discs in the front you go to your local office max or compusa and spend it ten bucks for a disc with 30 to 200 shareware games shareware demos to try out to me you want a discoverability problem this is a discoverability problem and finally my favorite you could go to the mall and you could go to kiosks and you could go to shops and then there were walls covered with discs with shared demos on them so you would go and you would pay up to ten dollars for a shareware demo you would take it home you put in a computer and if you liked it you would call me on the phone and say hey your demo I want the full game I'd say hey the full game is $25 and then you would say you you freaking con artist I paid $10 for this disc and then proceeded to yell at me for upwards of five hours so as you like the game you wanted to send money back you mailed me a check using a stamp you would get a postal money order from the post office you would mail me cash one Viking and mailed me $25 in change the envelope went like this chee-chee-chee and finally if you could get a credit card a bank to trust you you're a small business we gain the ability to accept credit cards which almost never happened put a pin in that I'll get back to that later so it's 1994 I'm in grad school and I hate it my wife at the time has already quit grad school and gotten a real job and we decide to live the dream and actually own a computer I will as an aside at this point I have been very lucky in my life in the opportunities I've been given and the background that I have that just enabled me to learn to program when I was a child I want to make it very clear that that fact has not escaped me now here's your standard old person statistics for our first computer which cost about 3,700 adult dollars of today dollars adjusted for inflation it came with 8 megabytes of RAM which could be upgraded to a lofty and princely 16 megabytes for only 680 of today dollars I bought code warrior to write computers programs because I liked doing that and if you wanted to learn to program at the time there was no internet so there were no discussion groups she just went to the local bookstore you bought books and you stared at them until little pinpricks of blood started appearing on your forehead got a computer I want to play a roleplay game because that's totally my bag but I couldn't find any so I figure what the hell there's no role-playing games I might as well write one and if there had been good role-playing at the time I probably never would have written one but I just happened to get another lucky break you're gonna see this chart again I got into a trough in the business cycle what this chart says is that industries have a tendency to go through boom times and the bust times it is a very important concept to understand I'll get back to it when I talk about today I grad school I can live my lifelong dream I'm gonna sit down and I'm going to write a full-length fantasy role-playing game and they'll release it to try to get some pizza money so now I got to sit in a room and stare at the wall what the heck am I gonna do I'm gonna live my dream but what am I gonna write how am I gonna write it so it doesn't take me long I come up with the idea I love these games as a kid so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to every single game I liked as a kid and steal the single best idea from everyone and I'm going to get my craftsman way amalgamate them into what I hope is a cohesive and satisfying whole indie games are great for innovation I love innovation but innovation is not the only path you must remember that every single one of us stands on the shoulders of giants I looked at what I liked to play and then I copied it that is my creative process and my second lesson is this is all going to be about finding my creative process my way of doing business and the importance of defending it and this is gonna sound like sort of artsy fartsy ooh follow your blues man the advice no it's not it's a very hard-nosed practical advice and I'll tell you what most of the people you're gonna run in this thing run into in this thing are looking at their career over a timeframe of one years two years five years which is reasonable especially if you're trying to get started but that's not the timeframe I thinking I'm thinking about in 20 years in 10 years in 40 years I want to know what your career writing shareware games is gonna be like in 40 years and that's a long time if you're gonna work in that length of time and you're gonna be operating at a very peak level of efficiency because you need to in this business you need to create a life you need to create a mindset you need to create a process that is not going to rubber you because if you if there's something that's rubbing at you if there's something that's putting you off your feed over the next 40 years it is going to rub you down to a nub so I'm writing a game I do my grad school stuff during the day and I worked on the game at night fortunate I was in my 20s so I had infinite energy I spent four months hacking out something like an engine my wife at the time was enormous ly supportive she drew these adorable little cartoon grafite graphic icons for me like art that I still get emails requesting to this day I spend about five minutes making the world placing the walls placing the swords giving the orcs dialog another month testing it and then it was done I had a complete functional massively massively flawed whole but I had something I could handle people and say this see this this is a game it was massively flawed it was embarrassed me deeply but then again every product I ever write embarrasses me deeply but this is one of my guiding phrases when one work in this business in the end you know it's you struggle you struggle to ship the game but at some point you got to push the button some point you got to kick the thing out of out the door if I double the amount of time working on a game seeking perfection I need to double the amount of sales that I get from that game to justify doubling your sales is hard time is valuable I am always striving to be the only thing better than good which is good enough I get another lucky break I'm on Usenet which is the only discussion forum on the Internet at this time the internet was small enough that only one insane and ARCIC discussion board covers the whole thing the fan of softs had a hit game called realms they wanted to get in publishing so they offered me a really good deal in order to take my orders for me and give me sort of a basis of a couple thousand people to tell about my game they were enormous ly helpful to me I probably would not have a business if it wasn't for their help a third lesson I strongly recommend whenever possible that you'd be lucky I I tend to get a lot of trouble when I say this there is there are a lot of people who just to get through the day they really need to believe that they live in a deterministic world that contains some measure of justice but that is not the case especially when you're trying to live in art you eventually are in need a lucky break eventually you're gonna need someone to vouch for you and all you can do until that time is work your butt off so that when your lucky break comes you are fully ready to jump on it and take advantage of it so I'm starting games I have to do all the tedious legal business stuff I have to research what it takes to get a business like and then do that pick a business name all of that stuff so my next bit of advice have a quality accountant and I know you're thinking this is a professional conference why are you telling me this tedious 101 level stuff because I have lost count of the times what I've talking to it talked twice seasoned the independent professional who should know better and they're asking me eight questions and I like dude you need an accountant not me because once you get in the point where you need to pay taxes where you need to do payroll the mistakes are many and they are high-impact if you screw up your payroll withholding all that is going to earn you is a tiny little sympathetic shake of the head from your auditor before he destroys you selling a game so I need to pick a price which is as difficult back then as it is now fortunately at the time all successful shareware games were $25 so i sticked that that is in today dollars $41 now imagine that imagine actually being able to look people straight in the eyes in charge and forty one dollars for a game but the tragic truth of this that we are making a bespoke artisanal product for a niche market and we should be able to charge this it is only the overcrowding that keeps us from able to charge what we're worth but that's the tragedy of the business let's share so I have to make a make a demo and another tragedy of my business is that I was making my demos too big 10 hours 20 hours I give released Hakeem it's like a 30 hour demo I shudder to think of the amount of money that that insanity cost me over the years but I was been weirdly weirdly proud of it too one thing that helped me sleep at night is that pretty much everyone who got my game one tried it and found it worked on their computer to plated enough to know they'd enjoy it and since we're in the developers and we like to act like we have subscribed to a higher ethical standard my one of my mottos has always been look if you don't like my game I don't want your money I'm gonna be the only person you're gonna run into him this thing who think the main problem with the steams refund policies is that they're not generous enough I've had a one-year no questions asked a refund policy forever and I've never had problems with it because by and large the people who play money for games pay money for games are pretty honest it's done and I'm out of excuses it's time for me to press the button to upload the demo to America online and changed my life forever and I'm terrified I'm completely terrified and I'm only able to do it by making what I call a progressive screwdriver and here is here's how you make that a screwdriver is an alcoholic beverage it is orange juice with vodka added nobody doesn't made a screwdriver drink it down and then just added more vodka when I press the upload for my first game I was wasted and god help me it's old we got a like a little Corps of people buying the game because of our publisher we because of that attention we got probably the one of the single biggest stroke of luck a copy of mac world put us on their shareware CD which was a normally successful and because our game just it was there weren't many role-playing games and ours was competent we got a lot of word-of-mouth and a lot of people say don't count on word of mouth don't count on word of rough word of mouth isn't gonna get you through and I'm like I've always been reading it like good lord what else do I have my games are slow pace they're not good for YouTube and twitch streaming they're cheap they're not good for getting press we're never going to get a proper publishing deal we can't afford to advertising and even if we could advertising almost never worse word of mouth is all we ever got and to be perfectly honest you need to write a game that's good enough that someone's gonna be passion enough about it to bug their friends and talk about on the forums about it if if you don't have that then you may have a problem so anyway this is what a game selling looked like in 2017 thanks to luck and thanks to Fanta sauce kind help we made fifty three thousand dollars in today dollars in our first year and that's that's solid money that's a middle-class income for a grad student that's amazing and so I'm like okay this is this is for real and the the best thing about I think one of the great miracles of being an indie creator in any field is that I owned my work when you make a video game you've made a miracle you've made a machine that prints money normally when you're making machine that prints money it's a felony and they send you jail but here you they they let you get away with it and even if that machine isn't making money right now you wait five years you're a master it might start put some more ink in it it might start kicking out money then there is not hardly been a day gone by since I released exile that I have not made money off of it and owning your work is one of the greatest things in the world and even back then I knew if I want to try to make a go of it my whole story was gonna be about two things making a back catalogue and getting myself some fans so at this point my grad school performance is pretty much non-existent so I take a masters I get the heck out I pour exiled to Windows writing games on Windows 3.1 the less said about to that the better it took me three days to draw one hurt one 256-color icon onto a screen I put that demo on America Online that sells to great so now I need to write another game what am I going to do well it's the commuter game industry I take the name on previous game and I put a put a two after it about this time now everyone in this business is familiar with the phenomenon where your game sells great and then the sales suddenly dropped by 90% these days in this enlightened accelerated time that usually takes about three days back then it took me a few months but not long after I decided to go full time my sales just immediately fall into the toilet and I felt like I was going to die I took that limitless terror and funnel that energy into working on to exile to harder now at this point now that making a new game all of a sudden the pattern for how I like to do things starts to be clear I I tend to I like a small company I like to work alone I keep I keep doing that most of my colleages functional so I keep using it I reuse most of my assets assets most of my graphics most of my sounds I am merciless about reusing assets I have used the same wolf icon in like 15 different games if it's a decent icon it looks like a wolf the next same it's still gonna look like a wolf people make fun of me for it all the time but I am also still in in business whenever I release a new game I look for the 25% of it that's the worst and I redo that I am the leanest and the meanest of developers and again this is all part of finding my creative process people make fun of me for it all the time but it's still it's it's just the way I work and if you're not like that if you are if you need bespoke art and if you need custom music if that's your process then then go with it you know you have to earn more sales to make up for but if that's what you need to do to feel happy with your with your life in this business that's what you got to do but if you feel find a thing where you feel that it's okay to be cheap do not let anyone shame you out of being cheap Finnish exile - it takes a little over a year it's like exile but a time to look tiny bit better so it's still selling I have to write a new game well my last game had a - after the name so I decided beating it's the video game industry I changed the tutu III now by this time I have pretty much entirely stripped mind my childhood of good ideas so I evolve my design process instead of stealing ideas from the games from when I was young I look at the games they came out in the previous three years and I still the best single idea from every one of those again innovation is great and is one of the greatest strengths of being an indie but another of the greatest strengths of being in India is that we have the ability to pick up the genres that are too small for Triple A people to take advantage of puzzle games roguelikes adventure games and exploit those and because there's so many games there aren't that many underutilized genres but a new genre becomes underutilized every year it's 1997 the web exists so I code this utterly utterly gorgeous website it's on spider web software calm still it's not on spider web calm because someone has been squatting on that URL for the last 25 continuous years we decide to go independent we break from fantasy often we start doing everything ourselves to do this convincingly I have to gain the ability to take credit cards now at this time no bank will trust me because nobody seriously believes it is possible to make a living make money on the internet they think I'm going to collect a bunch of credit cards and then fly off to Honduras or whatever so I beg bang after bank after bank look I'm a real business I'm making real money I need to be able to take credit cards and finally one bank to prove that I'm not a con artist they asked me for a printout of my website so I print out my website I hand it to them they look at me like I'm a wizard and then they sent me a credit card swiping machine to go in my apartment so to order people call me on the phone and I typed the number and with my finger we program our own online store we host our own demos we handle our own file file handling we do all our own security we do all of the own horrible stuff that services like iTunes and steam make make frictionless and you know I just have to say sometimes take a moment to appreciate how how amazing everything is like I hear Indies complain all the time about the cut that Apple and steam take but all of the stuff that steam does for you and makes easy I've had to do myself support myself all apart I've hired full-time employees to do the stuff that seemed us I know how much it costs and more importantly they do too so if you want to be mad at steam fine but bear in mind that that percentage is not going to shift we finish exile 3 it's big it actually contains some innovation in addition to the theft there's still not a lot of role-playing games out it's exactly the right game at the right time and it's a big hit now I say that I had a shareware hit now these days when you have a hit that means that you get to build a mansion out of yachts in 1997 having a hit was something less different my first year sales from exile 3 was in today dollars $330,000 and that's don't get me wrong that's serious money that's life-changing money that's you so you have again that sells like that you're gonna be eating out on that game for the rest of your life that says I'm gonna be in this business for a long time money but it's not it's still I have to work for a living money and by the way before I am before I leave this this slide I want to III beg you please please support big cat Bart calm and end of the bid work they do my radiant wife Marianne who's the wind beneath my wings has a job that she hates so she quits her job and comes on board with me and since then we've been writing spiro software together she is my business manager and keeps every single thing running at this point we're doing all our own everything ourselves we are most of our orders come in over the phone and we talked to humans people people talk a lot about how on the internet the anonymity makes it easier for people to be to be mean to each other but but anyone who has done phone customer service I assure you people have no problem being utterly inhuman to you when they're talking to you like a person this is a key lesson for anyone who runs a small business or deals in a in a creative way it is a human constant that a certain number of people let's say 10% no matter what what the the demographic you're talking about people are left handed people with red hair people who are gamers people who are mismatched socks a certain percentage of those people are always going to be mean a certain percentage of those people are always going to be cranks and there's nothing you can do about it and you when you're building your business world and your your mind environment you have to take that into account and if you remember that often the people who are angriest at you are not going to be completely anonymous they're gonna be the people who five years ago where your most devout fans and then you changed a thing and it was their favorite thing and they don't like you anymore just remember there is always a very thin line between love and hate and so if you're gonna if you're gonna make it for your 40 years shelter your brain if there is a sort of input that puts me off my feet and slows down my work I have to be working at top efficiency to keep this ball rolling if something is keeping me from working I cut it out mercilessly I have no idea what my steam reviews are none I never go on my forums unless I absolutely have to if a new game is out I have to look on it see if there's any bugs I look at my forums but otherwise I never look at forums I'm on Twitter but if people start being mean to me on Twitter I quit and I go on go back on when the coast is clear and let me let me be clear you no I you know I'm I'm a white guy so I get less abuse I'll be straightforward about that bear in mind I still get abuse I have gotten some input from out in the wild that has utterly and legitimately terrified me but other people will get more abuse than I am because of who they are it is not fair it is one of many unfair things that you are going to run into in this business but no matter what happens once again there's gonna be cranks and you can't do anything so you have to shelter your brain because in the end the first order of business is your work and producing it and one more side note don't be afraid to fire a customer they say that the customer is always right that's not true customers are wrong all the time but the truth is nobody ever won an argument with a customer there there are times when you're gonna have to say to someone look my thing isn't for you I can't add that feature I can't write that expansion I just I just can't do the thing you want offer them a refund and send them on their way if someone is on the forums and you can see that they're just there to cause trouble ban them if people are making a noise that person who is screwing up your business you shouldn't have banned them ban them to the beatings will continue until morale improves daddy is home if you're on the floor if you're on your forums and someone is just there to make trouble you can tell and some of them are good about they'll just push right up the line and push back push right up in the line and put push back people who are nice and who support you will understand about this time I also start you know trying to help others share where people do what I do I create this website which is still up is hilariously out of it it's like 20 years old but I've always written talks written written given talks given written articles done everything I could to help shareware developers because I believe in it I really do so in a very short period of time we go from not believing it is possible to make money on their net to believing it you can only make money on the internet and he you know even at the time people it was fully obvious that that this was ridiculous basically people would just like make tech companies they tried to grow really really fast even though the company was obviously doomed they try to get enough interest in it to get in a whole bunch of IPO and investor money cash out move to a different continent then the whole thing exploded which of course it did as it had to fortunately we live in a much more enlightened time now and we can be assured that that will never happen again the the bubble was a big help for us everyone their cousin was making I'm making a video game website because they thought there was money in that and we had a lot of free free PR from it they sent out shareware CDs we got it we own a lot of them between having a successful game and sort of splash onto us from the internet boom we had to ask ourselves now what what what's our business gonna do what's gonna be like these we could get investors we could build a real business I could make a games that my parents aren't ashamed of what am I gonna do we could build something really big we thought about it we had some conversations and we basically did nothing we are one full-time employee to do for us all the stuff that steam does first now so we could go to Disney World sometimes that's pretty much what we changed and just to be clear we have we have no regrets and if you want to build a big real company Mike if you want to be a Viking my god go for it you have nothing but my admiration if that's the way you need to be to live in this business do that but me I'm a I'm a humble toymaker I sit in my garage and I make a little toys for all the happy boys and girls that's my life that is what I do that is what I'm that is what I'm always going to do live or die that's my that's my bag and just one work one more fun aside during there are so many magazine games magazines that for a shorter time it was very very good money to write about video games I had days where was like oh god I want to work on this game but I have to write game criticism because it makes so much money oh it feels good to laugh of course that ended and yet someday someday it may return when enough people go out of enough people in field go out of business and the demand for some reason increases you get a growth period in the business cycle you just have to be lucky enough and ready enough to catch it when it comes so over the next four years we write more games we write blades of Exile which is exile but with this really dumb obvious scenario creation system that's simple enough that anybody can use it and we get piles and piles of scenarios for it it's still it's still popular it's we open the source debt I decided to write a new IP I'm writing in called navigate which is something almost like innovation its historical role playing game with celts versus romans in ancient Britain with I've read actual books and so this is what it looks like and usually I switched my graphics around I'm trying to get a little bit more like productive values it had a really innovative story structure where it's one story but you can play two different sides and see it from both sides it kind of seemed like an educational game which is death but it's still its old ok and I was getting really sick of this point of everyone telling me your graphics suck your graphics suck your graphics so I spend some actual money I hire actual artists and get graphics that are somewhere in the same continent as the standard for graphics at the time the result of course was that every day people told me your graphics suck your graphics suck your graphics I that was the last time I ever made the mistake of making an effort it's really important to note in indie games that pretty much every game is going to be someone's favorite game your goal is to make a game that is enough people's favorite game to keep you keep you in food and shelter and this is why you should always be very scared of someone asking for more curation on a platform because one person or one panel of people can never ever predict in the end what the market is going to like the only thing that can decide what the market will like is the market we've been in this for a few years our games were selling consistently we had a real fan base we had a role-playing games or an evergreen niche and we served it well everything seemed to be just cruising along fine so that's that's when we almost went out of business suspense our next series was the gene for cherries which I'm enormous ly proud of and is next in line for a really nice remastering it's an actually gene for chicanes were actually innovative is a sci-fi fantasy hybrid there's no bad guys Indian Forge there's just factions that you choose between the gameplay is very open-ended you can play an entirely pacifist character get there the whole thing with trickery and never never do a fight at this point the Exile games are embarrassingly old so we start remastering them as a Vernon games and once again those sell those celebrate we hum along for another another six years we do to June fortunes we to to remasters we have fans every year in November we do a sale 10% off can you imagine that always does really well around this time we're making in the 200 thousands a year for three full-time employees and that's most of the time that's around what we make and and that was pre that was pretty solid so 2007 we've been doing this for about 13 years I remaster blades of eggs all those blades with Vern Amit has a really powerful scripting engine people can use to make scenarios it takes forever to write it and it was just too complicated people weren't really as into making making adventures with it I write dream Forge 3 and quite frankly I was lazy I was been a long time as complacent I slacked off and I made a game that was just too similar to the true previous games they just didn't do that well they went down a bunch and let me I'll just show you numbers to show web for us almost going out of business means two thousand three we make almost three hundred thousand dollars in today dollars the next year we it's down by over a quarter and again three full-time employees we have a ton of expect unev expenses doing the things that steam does for us and on top of that we got we got two kids and you know you know they don't how much money does it take to raise kids all of it so this seems like a pretty healthy number but this means we're bouncing checks yeah at this point were we're kind of running scared and so at this point I wise up and try to get over get over my complacency I start redoing debris double my energy and start redoing everything I can and once again here's some advice that seems like sort of artsy oh yeah you always have to keep growing as a human man have you have you ever looked at your hands no you have to keep growing it as an artist and this is hard-nosed practical advice because remember for the most part we're toy makers we sell amusements we sell things that people tickles people's brains we sell surprised and complacency and predictability and repetition are the death of that if you want to write a sequel great sequels are awesome but your sequel better introduce something new and it better introduce that new thing early because if people pick up you're going to go yeah I've done all this and I don't need to do more of this then you're gonna start bouncing checks we extend the Exile series into burnham 4 5 & 6 with a completely revamped engine that does really well we redo a lot of stuff about how we do Jean Ford for I expand the scripting engine and create really complicated multistage events and introduce them as soon as the game starts the next two gene for James sell really well and then the most surprising thing I could have a mat possibly imagined happened indie games games became big indie bubble is not really the correct term it was not really a true speculative bubble over I should call it the indie glut but I'm not going to go much into the factors that caused it's been much discussed I will only add one factor about why James got big that I don't think gets enough attention indie games are successful because people like us we're the little guy we're the scrappy tinker's in our garages fighting against the big monolithic corporations there is a this is an enormous leap our philandkatrina these are made about this and it is important to remember that we are likeable and is important to concentrate on staying likeable because that likability is one of our greatest assets if you're likeable that is what people will make people stand stick with you through rough times and that's what people will go to York make people go to your Kickstarter and spend a thousand dollars for a $15.00 game steams big indie games are big I write a whole new game engine and a whole new game which looks a little bit prettier called Avedon and between having a nice-looking new game and back Hadlock were able to make a lot of money and I have to return again to the idea of luck now at this point I've been making indie games for four decades and I was sort of humming along but all of a sudden indie games became big when I wasn't nobody was expecting and there was a huge demand of for product and hey I was sitting on years and years of years of back catalogue and as a result of that I was able to get more deals and make more money than I in any remote way deserved we got on all the fashionable online stores we luck into a meeting with steam and I'm sure a lot of people ask Jeff Ogilvy get detailed why is he in that place well one of the things is I always tried to I was trying to be the most frictionless person to work with I only go she ate about contracts but not very much I'm not a hard-ass I answer emails right away I pay contractors right away someone asks for assets they have them in their hands by the end of the day if you're as frictionless as possible to work with you will be amazed at what opportunities it opens for you we lower our games to $10 because Steam tells us that's what we have to do to be on Steam we do so when God knows we made it up in volume and at the beginning of the ending lot this is how much money we made it is again this is life-changing money it's just the culmination of a very lucky break followed by a lot of work a lot of work and it's more than we deserve the indeed galette can starts to rise people see that indie games are big and they start writing them we do our standard thing we write two more new games we write two more remasters we make them as good as we could we sell a ton and then as more indie games flow and we sell a lot less massive competition means we can't make up and volume anymore we raise our prices to $20 which is where we are now indie development enters the recession period of its business cycle a recession period I suspect will probably last for a very long time because it's tough to make a living as an artist other people are writing indie games now it's a hot thing it even gets to be in rooms you all appear and I quietly get old nobody I don't think anybody could have possibly imagined how big the video games were are going to get it's over a hundred billion dollars a year which is pretty pretty big and it's this is a vicious industry this is a nasty competitive blood sport industry and as much as we hate to think about it we are to some extent in this room all in competition with each other there is only a finite number of humble slots there is only in slots there is only a finite number of steam steam frontpage slots and it's a zero-sum game if I get an opportunity someone else doesn't but it is fantastic perhaps necessary that still sometimes we can come here as a summit to general genuinely try to help each other because we're artists and God knows nobody else cares about us it's it's one of the few things that makes life doing this tolerable month in Africa we came out with another remaster Birnam three ruined world and it's doing quite well it's not setting the world on fire but we're going to be able to keep writing games for a couple more years and I'm going to alternate between new games and remasters as long as I can long as I can handle it and when I write a game I'm making an whole new game right now and a whole new IP and whenever I have a question I follow the same Northstar that I always have my process is I figure out what I want to play and then make that and if my tastes ever get so bad that I fall out of out of line with the market then I will receive my just punishment and then I'll go right banking software or sell shoes it helps that over the year we have a fan we have a big fan base people drift out from being our fans for a decade and then float back we have a long bat catalog which we mercilessly exploit whenever we can and one of the great things that never be ashamed of an old game for games fun ten years later it's still gonna be fun never never go to sleep on your old products if you believed in it once can your ten years later keep believing in it but this is kind of the real question I've told you I told you a story about how I managed to live a life they dreamed of as a child and let a lot of people envy can you do it too and that's the big question and honestly I have to believe that it is possible if you write quality games consistently if you're tenacious if people like your games if you build up a fanbase if you have the tenacity of the cockroach then you will eventually make it maybe making a living as an artist is hard it's always been hard as always will be hard and I want to say reassuring things but I'm too fundamentally honest to not I I have to tell the truth it's possible but it's rough and people ask all the time do you think do you think I have what it takes to make it what do I what I need to do to make it and my favorite quote about this comes from noted stand-up comedian and banjo enthusiast Steve Martin you should always try to write games that pass the pee test you want to write a game that's so compelling that people forget to pay if you let people test your game you tell me I can't play it anymore you should always be shooting there should always be one person out of your testers one weirdo who's grabbing you by the lapels and going I got to keep playing this game that is that is the goal and it's hard my god I know it's hard and that's why you can't you can't put your day job you have to until you have some confidence until you're sure and again this is a process thing some people will prove me wrong but I really believe unless you're absolutely sure don't quit your day job until you've got the game that you're going this is it this game is addictive I will bet my life on it because you kind of are so I just want to end with a couple inspirational words just because I am fundamentally cheery in all of the havoc and all of the terror please occasionally take a moment to be proud people who do what we do people who are artists and musicians and whatnot are carrying on a tradition that is as old as humanity the the compulsion when you see a blank canvas a compulsion to fill that canvas with something to take all of the weird stuff in your brain and go blue and hope that it lands on someone and makes their life better what we do is a noble thing and I ask you it's a rough road ahead but I ask you to not forget it and to be proud I will be taking questions for a short time if you've got it if you've got a question for Jeff please come and line up at the mic while people are coming up I will say if you follow my Twitter you've already seen this I was looking at my desk drawer I found it this is a three and a half inch floppy disk on it that says in case of emergency I found it in my drawer where has been sitting for about 15 years and at some point about 15 years ago I remember making this disk I remember thinking this thing if I'm ever in trouble I have to have this or everything's gonna explode and I copied something on a disk and put it in a drawer I have no idea what's on here all I know is I can never get rid of this I can never ever get rid of this thing I'm gonna I'm gonna be buried with this this is in my coffin on my head's gonna be on it like a pillow I'm not someone on Twitter decision you know it's it might be a Linux reboot disk oh yeah like I'm gonna take extra effort to keep running Linux okay they're there they're here there's your hot take oh sure so what was the degree you were working on what was the Jeff that we missed out on because he decided to make games oh I was at Rutgers University in beautiful central New Jersey working on a PhD and applied to mathematics because the world needs much more of that and yeah I just I just couldn't stand it the whole point of grad school is to make your life so miserable that it forces you to decide to do something proper [Music] theoretically it's possible oh sure I have not put my day job yet so I got that going for me yeah we're gonna game late at night that's the that is the that is the artists tradition so my question is is that I maybe this is too personal for you to answer but you know I'm a one-man shop right now okay you know I have lots of programming and design experience the art is where I'm like kind of struggling and so I'm at the point where I'm actually is trying to ask the question is like how do I move forward with that do I go with a very like cheap indie look like some of you know your early games or do I like you know start investing and people to like start making art for me and it's like more professional level I guess I was wondering you're inside of like window when to advance that so I'm trying to bring up this slide because this is the ah okay well it's kind of visible it's so there's tons of free resources online I'm my mind is just shattered by the depth and the quality of resources you can license online for free or very reasonably priced so be merciless you know real artists ship find what it takes to get your thing off the launch pad and download that and of course it's gonna come up to your creative creativity and a skill as a craftsman you're gonna have to you know you gon open game art com you're gonna see 500 million icons you have to pick out the ones that work together in a cohesive whole cohesive whole your probably get to the point where that gets you 90% of the way there and there's some things that you can only properly do with bespoke art and when that happens then you got to find a real artist you got it but you got to pay out some money and that's that's still my process when I'm designing game I look at all of my resources my like my own back catalog of art I look at the art that's free online that is of quality and I say okay what can I make for cheap but what do I gotta pay a person for so my advice make cruddy program or download stuff from sites make cruddy programmer art for the rest make a game make it functional and then and then you know show it to people in play man s would ask yourself do I got a live one here and if you do then then you know it's time to deal with the whole other topic slash universe of pain that is finding and dealing with freelancers but that yeah that's the best advice I can give I guess just a real quick follow-up like if it's not all about money when do you know like when it's time to like maybe like advance your own skills and like work on your art skills to be like full-featured as opposed to it depends on who you are I'm bad at art so I don't do it but there are some people who are pretty good at art and it's in the you know make an icon see how it looks see how long it takes if your taste is good enough you'll be able to tell if it's a good icon or not if you're and how long it takes figure out figure out how much money it would cost to have a freelancer do it see how much money you got on hand and then and then make the call it's just the sort of business skills that you're gonna have to develop yourself thank you you're welcome hi good talk thank you two quick questions you had mentioned how fans could kind of turn from love to hate pretty quickly is it possible to go the other way around oh sure life is long you know over over a course of 25 30 50 years you know it's like a fan of like me and then they'll hate me and then they'll go for live their life for ten years and forget I exist and rediscover me again and go yeah you know and is it worth kind of like pursuing that particular moment to try to convert them back or you just kind of like break it there I oh I'm trying to convert my my fans my old fans back all the time through a process that I call releasing a game you know I write the I write the best thing that I can and and and put out there I'm certainly not focusing on in on individuals and part of it when I write so many games I don't expect anyone to play all of my games because look at all this crap Jesus Christ I write work on two different series at the same time that are very different I have fans people were fans of one series and hate the other series and and the vice versa oh god I had a really good point with that no I guess I didn't know I I just you know I just make the things and I when I make a decision I just asked what what really works for this and people are notoriously changed verse and risk-averse if you change something you're always going to lose people but you've got to change things you're gonna go crazy so that's the game you always got to make sure that when you change and you do a new thing that thing you add is gonna bring in fans to replace the ones you lost or hopefully increase the number do you feel like you're the majority of your fan base existed before like the steam and indie bubble oh yeah well remember I was doing this for a living I start doing it for a living in 1995 and Steam only became a thing that Indians were crazy about 16 years later so I've been building fans forever I made my mailing list if you can't make your own mailing list my god that's a good mailing list it's just a big red button to that you hit it in a thousand dollars flies out make a fanbase cultivate your fan base if at all possible communicate with your fan base I mainly do it by email but always answer an email if someone cares about me that much all it's on their email back cool thank you you're welcome oh hi you mentioned about peaks and valleys throughout your career sure when it's a valley how do you keep the sort of emotional fortitude to keep going forward how so the question is you know when its value when things are going hard how do you how do you how do you keep your emotions on an even keel and what I tend to use is methamphetamine which is oh I'm in for it okay again this is a very individual very human very person-to-person case when I get terrified I work harder but I also I make sure to take time off you you you know you're gonna have hard times you're gonna have times when you're sad you're going to times when you're scared you're gonna have times when you're angry you still need to eat you know just sleep and you still need to maintain your relationships and you just got to find find your way to manage that like like I said I don't look at my forms only that Mike employees are forbidden to tell me how much money they're making we're making I never look at my sales when I balance the checkbook every three months then I know how much money we're making otherwise they don't know because if I find out just gonna stress me out you figure out you you know your own brain and I don't figure out the thing in your brain that enables you to deal with the terror cuz you will always have some of the terror thank you very much you're welcome maybe I'll suggest no no it no half measures man I'm going out on top yes thanks for the talk I was wondering if you were starting out today would you use a your own engine again or would you choose some of the existing engines I'd probably make my my own engine because I'm a total code I enjoy programming enough and tech stuff enough and this is this is an area that people argue about a lot but I feel very passionately about if at all possible own the source code for your stuff it is it has saved our butts so many time and some people are thinking right now I'm not a tech person I'm a creator I use an i use an engine so I don't have to learn how to code so my source code wouldn't do me any good to which I respond the way you may have overlooked is that you don't need to know how to program if you have the source code you'll find some hungry get out of college you hand them a basket of our earth dollars and you say here's my mess make it work and then they disappear and they come back and your engine works they have money and something to put on a resume you have a working a machine that spits out dollars and you both get on with your lives but you can only do it if you have the source code so that that is much more than you ask but it's definitely yeah yeah because I think it's fun my engines suck but I like writing them I get I'm sick of everything in my job so I if there's something I like doing I grab on to it with both hands awesome thank you thank you so you mentioned that you release the game about one yook one game a year yeah one on one one they have here's a little bit about the decision like is that a really deliberate choice to do one a year or and how much of the personal deadline it works for me it's why I find that if I've been working on one game for about a year and a half I either need to ship it or do a Hemingway I just can't I can't stand I can't stand looking anymore so I get it year and a half it's a full game it's basically functional I've made it 25% better fixed made 25% of what was bad in the last one better I kick it out and go on on to the next thing I like having a lot of different games and I think it's fun as we only have a few seconds left two final pieces of advice don't be proud of not getting enough sleep you need to sleep too and to get a chair that's good for your back because when you're becos my god you're gonna miss it thank you very much

Channel: GDC

Views: 336,676

Rating: 4.9364491 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: stxVBJem3Rs

Length: 59min 46sec (3586 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/FrootLoop23]

Why are people still fighting over percentages?

Games are going exclusively to Epic because they're stuffing millions of dollars into the pockets of publishers. That miniscule percentage difference means nothing, when those same developers are accepting it on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, and everywhere else.

[u/Delachruz]

This whole thing is just getting tiresome at this point. As a consumer, my first concern as a consumer is myself, as egoistical as that sounds. Even on a baseline, if I have choice A and B, A being better for the creator, and B being better for me, I will lean towards B in most circumstances. There have to be reasons beyond some executive, publisher or even Indie Dev to get more money for me to consider moving.

At the same time, whether the detractors like it or not, Steam does do a metric f*kload of things that EGS currently does not. And until that changes, the will keep having to lifeline their shitty storefront with exclusives which will cost them millions of Moolahs. This seriously can't be profitable for EPIC at the moment, even if it is for Developers. I'm especially skeptical since you can't find any decent numbers about sales figures and such, beyond that stupid "Metro sold 2.5x more copies hurr durr" as if that means anything.

[u/TheGhostAssassin]

Love it.

[u/Sentient_Buttplug]

30% isn't that big of a deal if you take into account that your title can and most likely will reach 10x the sales figures of any other platform, or all other platforms combined in some cases.

[u/Patrick_McGroin]

I think I'll replay Exile 3 again.

[u/Berserker66666]

Like everyone else has said (And we all knew it anyways), those third party exclusives on Epic store is all about the money Epic pays those greedy publishers. That's all there is to it.

[u/ziplock9000]

I seen this before, it's one (if not THE) best GDC video ever made. Some really useful information in it.

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