Making the World Give a Damn About Your Game in 2018

[Music] hi everyone thank you so much for coming now I know it is late in the day the jetlag is hitting me so I'm gonna try to stay awake for the next hour but seriously thank you so much for coming at this time hour ago to talk five o'clock that's ridiculous so you're all amazing people so today's talk be I I did a talk yesterday I don't know how many of you were at that one but my talk yesterday I talked about how badly games are selling on Steam and it's it's it's obviously a problem it's been a problem for a long time but right now it's especially a problem and it's a problem that's many more people than ever before are trying to solve themselves one of the one of the numbers in my talk yesterday was that I worked out that roughly just less than 10% of people who were actually releasing games on Steam essentially are actually making enough money from even just the first month of sales to even continue comfortably on making games I mean obviously that doesn't count people who are just kind of doing it as a hobby aside a a full job etc but if we're talking about actually being in the business of making games the vast majority of people aren't able to sustain themselves but there are ways to get into that top seven a part of the talk I gave yesterday was me essentially saying that yeah games aren't selling so great on Steam but when people are doing the legwork and they're making a good game there are there's still plenty of people out there who are happy to buy games on Steam you just need to be putting the right things in place and I guess by being here at this talk you are probably one of those people who would like to be one of those top seven percent good for you so I'm Mike I have been working in video games for a long time I used to writes about video games I actually went to uni doing computer science to make video games and it turned out I was really really bad at it because I just found it boring so then I decided I'm just gonna be rate all the people who make them and became like a critic and as part of what I did when I was writing out games I did a lot I started writing for places like Gamasutra I started to do a lot of talking to developers working out why their games sold then I started to dig into numbers and I found all of this stuff fascinating some weird reason because I'm a lunatic and and then that sort of led me on to getting hired by the publisher tinybuild we did a bunch of stuff there and had some pretty decent success which kind of backed up my egotistical theories and then last year I thought I can do this myself Zizi decided to start my own publishing label no more robots and I've gone gray since then so it's it's it's been going it's been going ok as no more robots I've been using Matt's I guess you guys call it math to to work out how to make games sell and I released our first game last month called descenders downhill mountain biking game from the beautiful people rage squid dutch studio and and next week I'm announcing game number 2 which is causing me even more stress hooray so here's just some rough idea of why you should remotely care about any of the words I have to say this is so so descenders came out on February 9th and since then the the game has essentially made more money in its first month than rage squids previous game made in his lifetime we she's it's fantastic for me because I love the I love the people I work with I especially love ragequit and I wanted to secure their futures and just in the first month of the game we have definitely done that which is absolutely lovely and a lot of other people have been very interested in the game as well we've been working with Xbox some special behind-the-scenes things we've been talking to our killers about a VR version because everybody our version I don't think they realize how much they're going to throw up when they actually try to ride a bike in VR we've got this massive discord server around the game who are feverish about every single little thing we do Andy and it seems like we're gonna make some decent revenue by the end of the year for the game across those two platforms I mean the plan then is to bring it to ps4 and switch and all kinds of things so it's gonna write which is like a massive sigh of relief for me can you imagine if I just started my own publishing label and and bottled it on the first game that would have been really awkward so so when I was putting this talk together whenever I put talks together like this I always try to envision like things that you guys are going to want to know and I know that a lot of the time people want to know about the basics and I've done loads of talks about the basics you know things like like he's listed here just writing press releases how do I get youtubers to care about my game how do I get the press to cover it does press coverage do anything what can I do with my steam page I decided when putting this talk together that I'm not going to talk about those things because they've been done to death and again like I say by me if you just go on the GDC vault which you have access to with your badges and enter my name you'll see too many talks from me on these things so if you want to know about those things please it's a lot of that stuff is still super relevant you can go look that stuff up what I really decided I wanted to do was talk through when was setting up no more robots and when I was trying to decide how to make descender sell the things that were import that I think ended up being massively important to what I did whether I was purposefully doing them at the time or not because I think that everything I'm about to talk about is some of it will be some of it will end up being a little bit vague some of it will be you know sort of may or may not apply to you but I think a lot of it is just stuff that when we talk about marketing we don't really talk about a lot of these things so anyway the the main so the main six points I'm going to talk about the the one thing that the rides through all of these things is that I absolutely hate it when I see people saying that it's all about luck and I've seen people say we each need a bit of magic and all this kind of stuff I when I when we were when we were going to announce and release descenders I I knew it was gonna sell that might sound egotistical it might sound like I'm just like digging myself up but it's because we had done all the right things and we knew how to position it and we knew what to do with the marketing for the game that at least X number of people were going to buy it I mean eventually more people bought it then we had hoped for so that was that was nice and you could and of course I'm not going to say there's zero luck involved of course there's a sprinkle of look as well you know some games will absolutely explode while other similar games won't do there's always look at involved in everything but to say that it's all luck and to say oh you know some of these biggest games they just they got lucky in this game just was unfortunate I I don't believe in that at all and I I think that a lot of it is just negating the need for look really so yeah these six points say I'm literally just going to go through these things one by one and explain exactly what I mean by them and why I think they are super important especially now so number one working out what is exciting about your games so here's this you think that you know what is exciting about your game but you were wrong okay and that might sound flippant but I I i will honestly bet that at least three-quarters of the people in this room who think they know what is exciting about their game i'll wrong about what is exciting and if i talked about their game i'd say a thing and they'd say i hadn't really thought about that as being the exciting thing what a lot of people do and what i sometimes do as well and have to talk myself out of doing is you you decide on a thing that is exciting about your game write a feature maybe that's exciting about your game and it is okay fine it is an exciting thing about your game that you think but it's not forward facing exciting it's not like public exciting it's exciting maybe in a technical standpoint or it's exciting as a as an additional thing but what you actually need is you need the thing that's exciting and it makes people actually them want to give a crap about your game i always need to have stupid terms for everything so what i like to call this in my head is the the hook and the kick i the thing that you are thinking in your head is exciting about your game and maybe the way you've been selling it is probably the kicker the problem with the kicker is that no one will check that out unless you've hooked them first you need the the hook first to actually reel them in stupid metaphor and yeah to actually get them and then you hit them with the other thing that sort of seals the deal example with descenders when we were first talking about how to sell a game we were constantly talking about the procedural stuff in the game so so the whole point in the game is that every single level you ever play in descenders is procedurally generated from a from a string like a seed of numbers and this there's hundreds of millions of levels in this game right and the the technical stuff that has gone into making bat is honestly incredible and the guys of rage squid are just geniuses but but but here's the thing if i describe this to you don't think that on the spa I would hook you with that I think you'd be like oh that sounds that sounds pretty impressive that sounds kind of cool but from talking's and telling people about this it was obvious to me that it was cool but it wasn't actually making them remember the game or want to check more stuff out about the game it turned out that when I just straight-up told people it's a downhill mountain biking game as stupid as that sounds I'm literally just describing what the game is that I was actually way more interesting to people because they don't know other downhill mountain biking games there aren't any and then if I followed that up with oh hey it's got procedural generated worlds they they go how does that work how could a bike game have procedural worlds and then I'd have the conversation or then maybe they'd go and check out some more information without those two things together they complement each other right if I just told you it's a downhill mountain biking game you might be like oh cool if I just tell you see Girls Generation mm-hmm get lots the games are doing that the two things together work such that you actually come out of the conversation maybe wanting to see some more this is what you you need to be trying to find basically you need to bat that line you keep saying to everyone right that line that every single time someone asks you what are you making than what I go about think about that lying you say to people is he actually interesting like is it an actual interesting line where if someone said back to you in a bar tonight where you're a you're obviously gonna go and do that tonight when someone does that are they gonna go tell me I want a card and or are they gonna be like okay cool do you know if there's anywhere else that has a free bar so it this is this is honestly the thing this is and with every game I'm working with I'm tirelessly just trying to work out what is that exciting line that has these two elements in it where I go it's this cool thing and by the way it's this as well and make them want to read more it's it's just one of those things where it's I honestly feel like this is such a simple point and yet we just all still get it wrong right I still get it wrong even when I was first doing just send as I was getting this wrong it's so easy to to not get this line in place in the first place and you need this other thing the thing with this as well is that it can actually then end up just helping you through all of the decisions you make not just on the marketing side but on the design side as well right it can really help to kind of hone in on all right well what is the game it's this thing so these features are the most important thing that we need to be talking about so yeah have a real think about this so once you've got that let's say you're at the point where you really want to get people interested in your game the the main problem I think that a lot of people have at this point is they you'll put out a trailer or you put out a website or anything like that a press release and it might do amazingly I've seen people put out trailers that have got quarter of a million views absolutely fantastic the the problem a lot of the time is that then people this quarter of a million people watch the trailer and then they go it was pretty cool and then they just go somewhere else on the internet and your game is forgotten five minutes later and especially if you're announcing your game and you know six months later you're launching six months later they're not remembering your trailer they've seen a million other trailers on YouTube they've seen trailers as ads on YouTube that they're not going to remember your trailer from six months ago so what are you doing to make sure that when they watch that trailer they've actually then got somewhere to go and something you know that it's gonna be a small number of people right those core of a million people aren't gonna want to connect with your game but even if just 1% of those people want to connect with your game that's a massive number of people who if you could get them and contain them somewhere then that would be pretty nice the answer that I have found is as simple as this chord I started experimenting with discord two years ago I anybody who knows me knows that I always tried to stay on top of the things that I I think you're gonna kind of be the next big thing and discord at that point was already massive but it was massive mainly for players there was some developers on there but it was it was a great place for for I mean I mean it's just like IRC and not a crap it was not a trap Skype basically but um but the the thing with discord is that they have a lot of users don't know if you know this they've got like over a hundred million registered people on discord now and that is a lot of people and so I decided after I'd done a bit of experimenting I was trying to when at the company I was at before we were trying to sort of collect people together who were excited about our games into a into a discord and it was fine we got a few hundred people and it may be but the the problem I realized very quickly is that if you don't give people an incentive to join some kind of community like that then they don't and it's it's it's it's funny actually I feel like a lot of the time there's so many talks and panels and everything on how do you how do you look after a community how do you maintain a community now whenever that does a talk or a panel on how do you start a community how do I get the people in the first place and that is the big question and it turns out the answer is give them free stuff magic I know so so I decided I would try and do this I would try and give him a bunch of actual reasons to join a discord so when we announced descenders last year I said look if you want to be part of the closed beta for descenders you have to join the discord I had no idea at that point how I was actually going to get them in the beta I just wanted them in a discord so I did that what I also did was that I decided that wasn't enough and I needed to build some kind of so game I should say by the way I've just realized I keep talking about discord as if you all know what it is it just in case there's people in the room who aren't aware discord is essentially like another one of those chat programs right where people can join servers and they can make channels and they can do voice chat and they can do text chat it's not that discord did anything crazy different to all the others it's just that they did it in very clever ways and they've got a bit lucky as well and they've got lovely people working there as well which always helps so okay we're up to speed on what discord is now so what I decided to try and do was create a game in the descenders discord that people would then want to play before descenders came out so that's what I did I made it so that when someone joined the descenders discord they couldn't see any channels except this one channel called pick aside and in the game there's three teams and I made it so that before they could act act access anything in the discord they had to pick one of these three teams out of the game and it gave him all information about these three teams but it told them once you've done it you can't change again and they pick aside and then it would open up the rest of the discord and give them special channels as well and it would also change the color of their name for the color of that team in the game and put them in this like tribe mentality and then we started picking them off against each other each week doing community challenges who can do the best fan art who can come up with the best this the best that and this stuff made people stick around because they even though they had no idea how the game played yet and they would it for another six months they they desperately wanted to win every week and they wanted to we made it so that they'd get special emotes or emojis I don't know what you call you'd get special ones of those each week depending on which team won and all of this I mean it took some work I'll I'll admit it was a it was a lot of and I learned a lot about community management very quick Klee because about 5000 people ended up joining in a very short space of time but but here's the thing when we got to the launch of the game those were thousands of people who were super into not just the game but ORS as well because they had this direct line to us and they were at by this point there was all sorts of memes that they'd made around all the developers myself because they felt like they had this super close connection to us in fact when we launched the game we launched it 20 minutes early and only told the Dischord server and then I realized the launch discount haven't been applied it wasn't gonna be applied for another 20 minutes so I said in discord I'll just just wait 20 minutes the launch discount will happen and we sold like a thousand copies of the game just in the first 20 minutes because discord people were so adamant they needed the game right now that they didn't care about the 10% discount when you have a community base like that that is already prepped and ready when the game is going to come out that is a useful tool to have and the cool thing is as well they're still there now and they're causing the causing like the long tail of the game to go and even like I've launched many games that I've never seen you know normally it's like up here for the launch and them this game has has been like this it's it's continuing to sell because these people are bringing their friends in and it's it's honestly it's it's being one of the the craziest things I've out of everything I've kind of put together for making a game cell it's one of the things that has worked the the most well apart from like having great day long sales we've had a lot of situations as well which I hadn't sort of envisioned were going to occur so for example all these people just desperately want you to give us positive steam reviews immediately as well so within like a day we had like a we had like a 94% positive rating on steam because they'd all plowed it with positive steam reviews whenever someone would leave a negative steam review people from the community will comment on it trying to help them and then end up flipping negative steam reviews into positive one and I didn't have to do anything to make that happen these people just did it themselves and a lot of people if people had problems they had bug reports and all this and stuff they came in the discord we've got a channel called bug reporting they could go in there all the bug reports are right there they're not clogging up the steam forums where it just you know obviously normally steam forums just look like you know hell basically so it kind of helped clean up that place as well I'd go work for discord honestly I know it looks like I do I just I I honestly a it's honestly one of the the the most the most brilliant things that has happened for people selling games I think now that there is now this centralized place where you can collect people together but like I say you just got to make sure that you actually give him a reason to do that now what I want to talk about here it was was streaming so I've done many talks about streaming in the past and streaming is obviously still an important thing is more important than ever maybe so so here's the thing about streaming it used to be you know like a couple years ago a few years ago you try and get big streamers to play your game right and then someone big will play your game and you get a nice spike you tubers as well and talk about youtubers with this as well what you need to know now is that that doesn't happen anymore for descenders not even for last year it hasn't been happening and anybody who's launched a game in the last year and maybe has had a big youtuber or streamer will know that there's just no spike at all anymore you know we've we've had we've had pretty much every single massive streamer play descenders in the last month and we'll have it okay day that day you know it might be elevated slightly but there's no spikes at all people watch streamers and youtubers for the streamers and youtubers now they don't watch they don't they don't make purchasing decisions based off your media I mean it might be that they watch multiple youtubers or streamers see your game multiple times and then when it's on a 25% sale go I remember lyric playing that maybe now that that's possible but you don't get the immediate lyric is playing this game I need to own this game thing anymore that doesn't happen so if you are trying to base a marketing around that do not I wouldn't even I used to suggest that people do you know sort of do twitch integration and you know chat integration and special like twitch games and all that kind of stuff if you are going to do that stuff don't spend a long time on it I would honestly suggest because I don't think you're gonna see much in return do it as like a cool little side thing maybe but yeah I honestly don't think it's worth putting the effort anymore now the reason why I've listed mixer here and I'll explain what mixer is because I'm I'm discovering this week that not as many people have heard of mixer so mix it is is is an another streaming platform I think it used to be called beam and it's it's owned by Microsoft and mixer mix is definitely smaller than switch but mixer is interesting because it is essentially twitch three or four years ago it's kind of it's it's growing rapidly and it's having a lot of resources put into it and because of that it's very difficult to get any traction on twitch anymore because twitch is very folk dreamers right and now the front page is always these massive streamers and starting off as a new person it can be very difficult to get some traction on switch mixer it's a lot easier to do that now and it's especially a lot easier for developers because even though as far as I can tell Microsoft aren't screaming so much about this they on the mixer platform they're very much supporting developers a lot I I started talking to to the the team there and they said they had no idea they were doing this they said to me oh yeah we can give you a developer account on the mixer and I was like ok yeah sure you do that and I got a little verified take on there and then the next time I streamed I went from page on mixer and they just featured developer on on the front page of mixer just by you being a developer and you streaming on mixer because that to them is like you supporting their platform over the other bigger ones and I mean in the last I've been streaming descenders every single day for the last month and I've had like over 200 filed nearly quarter of a million people watched these streams which is bigger numbers than I was even getting on Twitch and any especially if you've got a game coming out on Xbox as well it's amazing because the the streams the front page streams appear on the Xbox dashboard as well so when I'm on a stream and I say hey is anyone from Xbox watching the chat goes crazy and we're we're aiming Zhai have to send us out in roughly about May so I this is this has been a massive thing for me I've got all of these eyeballs from from Xbox players where normally it can be quite difficult to specifically get people who play on xbox right you just hope they read some press or they look at forum now I have a direct line to people who are who are playing on xbox and they're watching my game on xbox and they're saying oh this seems really cool I'll buy it and I'm saying yeah please do so so if you're if you're releasing a game on xbox hundred percent get on this if you're not there's still I would still heavily suggest that you get in touch with Mick so they they they have been honestly nothing but but amazing really alright so this one this one I find massively important but I'm gonna have to explain it very well I think that the I think a good number of people don't do a very good job of the way that they actually give off a vibe about their game and what I mean about that is that the way that your game is shown in public in the way that people perceive it will eventually determine how much value they think I know they sound horrible I know it's the kind of word you don't hear right but you've got to think about these things is the way people perceive the actual value of the and when it launches whether they think am I gonna buy it in a sale I could I not be bothered because we hear this all the time right now that people don't buy games at launch they just wait for sales I think a lot of that has to do with this image you do for your game so for example and I'm going to show you this char now all right this chart here is a thing that is in my head that I'm gonna have to explain and I have I have had this in my head for like a year now and it might make no sense but it makes perfect sense in my brain so I'm gonna try to explain it to you I think that there are three different categories of the perception that people have of games in their head people when they look at games they immediately just from about a trailer they watch a trailer and they immediately in their head put it into one of these three things they either decide that's an indie game or they decide oh that's do I call it double-a but you know lots of people have it's the the mid tier essentially right and then they've got oh that's a triple-a game and the it's really I I think it's really important to know not just which one you fall into but then also to know what that means for your game I talked to a lot of developers who are either pricing their game wrong or they have what I believe is like a double-a game but they're treating it like it's an indie game when I when I was first talking to the ragequit guys about descenders like they were showing it to me and they were saying they were saying are we we think we can probably charge about $15 for it and we'll you know we'll try and get on some of the indie sites and all this kind of stuff and I thought they were mad because the thing that I was looking at I was looking at this and saying to them what are you talking about this is this is not a perceived indie game that you have here this is what people would perceive as a double-a game this is this is the kind of game where people would see a trailer for this and they would think oh I pay a bit of money for this and I remember when we launched the original trailer for the game there was YouTube comments saying I'd only pay $40 for this I think it's it's that kind of thing and and they could have believed it I mean eventually we've ended up charging $25 for it and we have had no quite like we've had barely any people saying this game is too expensive it's really important to know where you are on this if a lot of the time you'll just know right a lot of the time you know with your game whether it is going to be classed as indie in people's eyes that's absolutely fine that the next game I went out saying next week I believe is going to be perceived as indie but then it's it's when people are in between this indie and triple-a one they're at the top of the indie one and they could actually move on to the next one I have this whole new audience it's that where you really need to think where exactly you are on these because it can make a massive difference for you it can make an absolutely massive difference I think being perceived as as a double-a game has helped us in lots of ways with descenders and and it is directed the way that I sell the game I'm going the net the next game I'm announcing which is more of an indie title I'm definitely going to be selling it in very different ways the way I've been selling descenders because of this perception I think so yeah it might not seem that important to you but please have a think about where you fall on this so I said earlier that I do not like relying on look I think that anybody who tells you everything is look base is wrong and you need to put everything in place to make sure that when your game comes out you're not just sitting there and hoping and praying this is going to sell which i think is what the vast majority I'm sure there's plenty of people in this room who have released games on Steam and have sat on launch day and said like hope people think it's cool all its that it's the wrong thing to do you used to be able to get away with that you can't anymore you're absolutely can't anymore so the discord stuff I was talking about was a perfect example of making sure that you are reducing the risk you we knew when descenders launched we could see the numbers we could see how many people were active in our discord we could see we could see exactly well not exactly but roughly how many people were at least going to buy in week one things like steam wish lists it's it's kind of it's kind of common fact now that you normally in your first month sell your wish list kind of convert somewhere around between 7% and 12% somewhere around that so if you are building steam wish list and you get to 30,000 wish lists then you know that that in the first month you are most likely unless you're game for some reason doesn't match this model at all which you know I guess it can depend on it can depend on the quality of the game but you would hope to at least be converting those into about 3,000 people it's it's this kind of thing where it's it's horrible but it's all a numbers game if you have the numbers when the day of your launch day comes and you know that at least X and where these people are going to buy it you can then use that to flow in some more people if you're completely just relying on oh I hope people see the game on launch day that is it's really bad news the other thing you can do is try to get as many people involved who are influential and try to get them to put skin in the game what I mean by that is that you have to do that horrible thing that no one likes doing where you just start really doing all those horrible horrible cringy things I am pretty sure you know the kind of things that I'm talking about the things like for example just trying to talk to every single person possible and it's funny whenever I whenever I tell somebody for example that I have a TweetDeck setup that has multiple columns where I'm tracking just looking for the word descenders looking for the word rage squid walking for this looking for that and whenever someone tweets within like five minutes I'm tweeting back at them and DMing them I'm saying this I'm sending on that people some people react really badly to that and they say oh it's bit much that isn't it it's a bit weird that you're doing that it's like it's a bit creepy in a way that you're just sort of you kind of watching over anybody who ever mentions your game doing that sells games so you should do it even if it makes you feel all weird inside and horrible if someone that I cannot tell you the number of times I've seen someone tweet about the sender saying oh this seems pretty cool don't know if I'll pick it up though and I've tweeted back at them just saying something like oh thanks for saying that that was really nice it's cool that you considered it and then they've tweeted a screenshot back at me saying oh it's really cool you tweeted at me I bought it though not singular tweet just just made us another twenty five dollars and it it blows my mind how often that happens especially with like streamers I see a streamer saying yeah I've seen this to send us games room and I'll immediately just DM them a key I won't even ask I'll just get in their DMS and I will send them a steam key and then tweet at them saying yo you've got a steam key and you're your DMS now and they'll they're like they'll they'll all of a sudden in the next two minutes I'll see I can just imagine them at home just like being like wow just they just follow me and then they say oh my God thank you so much and that evening they're playing the game it's it's it wasn't that much effort for me to do that it helps that I enjoy doing that I must stress like I'm a weirdo and I enjoy doing all of this stuff I appreciate that we lots of people in this room who were just like I do not have time for that I'm so boring but doing these awful things I feel like there's a reason why we find them awful and sometimes you just got a great your teef another one just emailing people asking for stuff people hate doing that every single deal or anything I have put in place for descenders I emailed multiple people asking for stuff until they got back to me everything with xbox I email my email xbox over and over and over again sending them this send that's sending the builds of the game being like cool can I meet you can I and setting things up showing them face to face that I meant business with this thing and then every single time I see even a minor opportunity I'm jumping all over it and you know a year later now Xbox are like okay well it seems like maybe he's going to be able to make this sell on Xbox so maybe we should you know support him quite a while and this has happened multiple times we've we've done stuff with them video all the stuff we've been doing with discord obviously I've been then trying to after I've got into discord thoughts of those guys again we've mixer me just emailing them and saying like hey is the stuff I can do our mixer and then coming back and now just because I asked I'm getting hundreds of thousands of views on mixer and that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't just asked asking is hard I know I know it can feel really hard to just because a lot of the time it's like impostor syndrome right you you feel like they're not gonna care about my game I don't care about Who I am don't go into it thinking that because I think you're making is super important and if you if you truly feel like it's this massively important thing to you go and show other people it's important as well go and talk to everybody and ask for things the vast majority of the time when I just ask for free stuff people give me free stuff because I guess people find it hard to say no so really just just honestly do it you'll you'll you'll be surprised how far it can get you just emailing people and asking for stuff the final thing after all of this is to just be realistic so again these are numbers from my talk yesterday the average game on Steam is making about $30,000 in its first year now so what you need to be doing is you need to be imagining if my game makes thirty thousand dollars in the first year which is entirely plausible what am I going to do about it or what can I do right now to be able for this to be okay essentially so I mean there's it's it's a tricky one right there's no easy answer to this there's there's plenty of there's plenty of things you can you can consider you don't want to you know this there's certain things on this list that you don't just want to hobble into your game you don't just want to go well we probably run out of money here and if we're only going to make that much money let's just do early access early access obviously makes sense for certain types of games and not other ones multiple platforms is is a massive thing I keep telling people if like a lot of people just don't think that they're going to be able to get access to Xbox dev kits or they're not going to be able to find someone to help them port that kind of stuff Xbox give away free dev kits they literally will send you two free dev kits all you have to do is just sign up your game with them and they do that or release it to in Europe I'm saying I'm talking as if I know what happens in America but if you if you're in Europe that's what they do and there's there's plenty of people around as well who who are throwing funding into this there's there's loads of local things again I'm talking from UK perspective here unfortunately but as far as I understand this so over here as well all that said and done if if thirty thousand dollars in the first year isn't going to be enough for to support yourself or a team then you you absolutely should have that horrible conversation of is this sustainable for for us to be doing this full-time and and if it's not then what do I do essentially but it would be it's it's a it's just a very bad idea to not consider all this stuff I know it's grim and I know it's very like just a horrible way to kind of get to the end of this thing but you do need to think about this stuff otherwise you could just you can get caught out in in just horrible way I've seen too many developers put everything into or release and then it's maybe not gone as well as their hope in and then they've realized oh god I've got a plan and obviously you get massively depressed weather after a game launch whether it's done well or not so you don't particularly want a double whammy of badness right I'm I'm done I promise I know I've talked forever this is this is if you just want a to long didn't read or if you fell asleep a little bit and checked your phone a little bit drawing that I don't blame you here are the important points I mean the main ones the the main things I would honestly say that have worked amazingly for the descenders launched the disc god stuff I was talking about the the mix of stuff I was talking about getting all the deals in place with with Xbox even just just getting those guys to help us out has been amazing and then really just unfortunately just doing the legwork just gritting your teeth and really doing this stuff I appreciate that we lots of people in here as well who just don't have the time to do a lot of stuff or just don't want to because it's boring if you are one of those people that's fair enough I would suggest then you find someone to do it for you put it this way right if you work with a publisher or some allow that yeah they're going to take a cut of your game but what is worse right a hundred percent of a small number or seventy percent of a large number you you really need to weigh up whether or not you need someone involved in doing this stuff because it's so important and if you don't do it there is a high chance that unfortunately your game isn't going to to do as well as you would have hoped I feel like I've ended in a really down tone I should have I should have prepared a joke for this part but whatever that's all your game alright thank you uh God talk forever deny I think I have like four minutes left if anybody wants to ask a question there's microphones here and here I would love questions hello um so first of all thanks for the talk that was awesome and your previous one yesterday was also very informative I was wondering if so you talked about steam wish list as a way to use it as a KPI or a predictive measure so I was wondering if there's any other KPIs that you keep your eyes out for and any other ways of seeing basically measuring success or predicting a measure of success and whether you've with your with no more robots whether you've seen a scenario where you have those KPIs and a title that's just not meeting them and that you've had to can or change the strategy so I get I guess the obvious why I feel like I keep saying this over and over again but I feel like the like a big obvious one for us was the discord stuff we we could see exactly how many people were in the server how many people were active in the server and we could see as well just how many people were feverish in the server as well so we were pretty confident at the kinds of numbers that were going to convert from people who were in our discord to sales there and we kind of couple that with wishlist as well but I wish I had I wish I'd started to mix the stuff earlier as well to be honest I wish that I'd gotten on that because I feel like that would have given us a massive bump a lot of the stuff was just centralized around those places there's there's obviously there's plenty of other ones but these were the ones that I felt like I could really call focus on and that wouldn't just grind us into the ground I to clarify I love looking at numbers I love like working out all these things but I think you you just end up you just end up getting a little too into these kind of things though you knew you start to see numbers in your sleep a little bit if you if you start to worry too much about the stuff so and yeah that was enough for me really hello hey thanks again for the paradox very very rumbly I felt like it was quite rambling wasn't it was the braid a mojo Michael don't worry so I have a question about you kind of touched on giving off the right vibe when it came to your game and one of the main things that you focused on was a price point yeah what else goes into that so I I think the in general people price their games too low I've I've been seeing developers all day and pretty much every single developer I talked to today I've told them that their pricing you know like everybody puts in their little kind of debt dough and they're like we reckon at a launch price of $10 or $15 and pretty much every single person I'm selling today I've said you can charge more than that by the way you know like and a lot of it comes down to things like genre and descenders when we when we announced as Enders we were hoping that were given off the right vibe and when it turned out we were and we started to get comments like I wouldn't pay $40 for this yeah that was a pretty good set that gave us a good sense right of what kind of price we could charge i honestly looking back feel like we could have charged more than $25 frere this point and we we maybe could have pushed it to 30 but but I mean that's that's the best buy the buy but a lot of the time I would suggest to people when they're trying to decide on the price to to take what kind of game they've got look at all the other games that are coming out on Steam right now but specifically look at which ones are doing doing well with not like the massive ones you can even cut those ones out because they're all you know kind of miracle workers when you look at sort of the mid tier games which are doing pretty well I'm making you know sort of half a mil for themselves and month a lot of the time those games will be will surprise you they'll be priced a little bit higher than you think I saw a sort of strategy game today and the the the guys making that said they were thinking or they record they could get $15 for that I said to them you could get $25 for this strategy games on Steam right now sell well like a lot of the time strategy games because it's very niche it's very PC Gamer if you look at the price of those kind of games they they are priced higher because because people who play those kind of games don't mind paying a little bit more there they are like hardcore PC PC gamers so yeah it's it's it's honestly it's doing just a lot of research and really asking yourself can I can I ask for a bit more and remember as well the people who you've gathered around the game before the launch they'd honestly pay anything like and and that's that's not to say you know you should exploit them or anything like that but it's more like you dropping the price you going oh I'll drop the price by five dollars just in case they don't care absolutely don't care like I told you that all these people bought our game when it didn't even have the launch discount on it they just want to play it so so why discounted by that by if people weren't going to buy it at launch that extra five five dollars off is it really gonna pull them in and yet adding an extra $5 onto your price it sounds like a tiny amount but you sell an extra ten thousand copies of your game yeah like for a lot of people that's that could be like a whole extra year's worth of living so you know it's it seems like small numbers but I think it's honestly really really important to think hard about it okay thank you very much hi yes thanks for the talk in regards to developing a community pre-release do you have any like insight as to what's the best timeframe for that in terms of you know not doing it so early that you risk losing interest versus too late yeah no time too yeah I I think I think we announced descenders to early okay we we announced it in July last year and then it came out in february which is seven months why is that like certain months i I think that was too long it felt like it dragged a little bit and I wonder if we lost some people along the way because it felt like it was too long we split that time up a little bit with the community you know the weekly community stuff and with we ran a closed beta for the disc or people in October but but yeah I I would honestly say six months is the long issue I think that between announcement of a game and actually launching a game the sweet spot is somewhere between three and six months okay sometimes depending on what your game actually is I think that's enough it's a decent amount of time where you can build up a little community but you're always telling them it's coming very soon I promise it's coming very soon and not have them disappear too quickly okay all right thank you guys very helpful hey you thanks for the talk you touched on youtubers and twitch streamers don't really convert well to game sales they're mostly there for free entertainment what is your view on media outlets and previews and reviews do you see a bigger ticket from those kind of no no I not not for a long time to be honest I I was giving talks by this years ago I was saying that the press don't really do much for for us like just a clarify it's still well worth getting press to talk about your game and getting youtubers at the streamers everybody just because they don't do spikes doesn't mean they aren't causing I think that descenders is plateaued a nice number of sales per per day thanks to thanks to all the coverage because now when someone if someone sees it and they they search for the word descenders they see all these articles talking about it they see it on this website that website and I think that that helps to sell it so anybody who's coming along but no I I not four years to be honest have I seen any sort of spikes out of specific press I'm talking about my games yeah thanks an interesting thing actually is that is that when we announced to senders we we ended up getting about I think about 125,000 views on the trailer like in the first month about 40,000 of those came from from from games press and about 85,000 of those came from bike press and that was about two outlets mil for the bike press is what you're saying yes so just getting contact with the bike press confuse them out and I'll put a bike in your game work for us hi hey there so earlier in your tub well thank you for giving this talk by the way um let's see earlier in your talk you talked about like asking asking a lot for like partnerships and stuff like that it seems like you took a pretty fearless approach and coming from a north questioner the problem that I find in simply just asking for things is that there is a tone of perception around what the response might be so then my question to you is would you prefer just recklessly asking for things because you don't know what might happen or would you prefer a more temperate approach depending on the type of game that you have what's the worst thing that could happen if you ask them why you you if you if you ask someone if you go to someone and say okay I want this come can we work together on this thing the worst that's gonna happen is they're gonna ignore you you're never going to burn a bridge or anything by asking someone for help the the worst that's gonna happen is you'll feel a bit so someone didn't get back to you the best that's gonna happen is they're gonna say all right cool let's jump on a call and I'll sort you out and at that point you've you've got a window you're right I do I do I can be a bit reckless with all this kind of stuff but I think it works so be honest I think people actually appreciate a direct approach sometimes I I guess reckless was a little bit too too reckless yeah I would say more courageous I guess forward-thinking yes I'm struggling for words here no no it's like I was saying I I honestly I I think I think it's one of my personality Pro points I feel okay doing this all the stuff I was talking about you know doing the horrible like cringy stuff as well for some reason at some point in my life I decided I didn't care I appreciate that a lot of real human beings actual emotions find this stuff hard and find it hard to just ask just get over it just honestly just ask because like I say everything that happens you make happen no one has been coming to me get dry you know trying to just being like hey can we help you with the success of descenders I have asked and asked and asked and made every little thing happened by asking so just just just do it just try it just try it just grit your teeth and try it start asking for stuff if it doesn't work out for you ignore me and go back to now for a month just for a month straight what can happen a month just try asking for things see how it goes and if you hates it fine so maybe it'll change your life or feel like it's earning some kind of life seminar yeah to do this yeah that is what I would say all right cool do it I think I guess before I give the mic over to the next person you mentioned earlier about you know getting dev kits I was going to say can confirm because I had a pretty epic freakout when I like the game that I that I'm working on managed to somehow become a part of ID at Xbox and I had a pretty epic freakout when they showed up at my door because I thought we're gonna be loads people who who who don't ask that kind of stuff yeah I'm like and and how easy was it it was you was actually pretty easy yeah I mean you have to fill out up adorable forms right because we don't get anything like that without filling out a whole bunch of forms but you did the horrible form fairly now and then the thing turned up and then two giant wave boxes yeah yeah hello hey just echoing previous sentiments I was at the talk yesterday really enjoyed it wasn't planed to be back but here I am so thank you very much and so you mentioned all the benefits of a discord community it just sort of sold me on it but having not seen your previous talks I still feel sort of unclear on how you got that initial bunch of people to be there what are the steps involved in that and if it's your previous talks yeah maybe I didn't explain that well enough so so so what I was trying to say was that you you need to give people a reason to be joining the discord and the way you do that is that you tell them that to get this free stuff you're gonna give them they have to join the discord the free stuff for us was doing a closed beta through the discord so we from the moment we announced the game we've said we were going to do a close beat a very soon and we said that the way to do that was to sign up in the discord the the press reported on that and a lot of those people do I have to start one more question okay cool and a lot of those a lot of people then if they read the article on a press website and we're interested it they then click the links the disc or people fall away right because most people won't click the link the discord in the first place and then of those people most people don't have discord so you end up only getting a small funnel of people but even so a small funnel of people for us was thousands of people but you got the word out to traditional press outlets and things exactly yeah and then around about the time we were doing the clothes beater as well you know in the like couple of weeks we announced the date for the closed beta we got another surge of like a couple of extra thousand people back into the discord again because we said this thing's coming out for free in two weeks here's how you get it and another bunch of people came in so yeah it's surprisingly easy to get people to kind of want to be part of your community if you're throwing free stuff happens thank you very much who knew hi apparently we only have one more question so I'll try and make it a good one it better be great had it be great you mentioned finding a publisher or other partner to do the annoying and/or cringy work yeah do you know anyone who's interested in publishing games and if or more generally suggestions for finding and connecting with the source people yeah I mean when it comes to that kind of stuff everybody's looking for different things the the main thing that I'd say is if you if you're working with a publisher make sure that you're getting a good deal to be honest well one of the one of the main reasons why I did set up my own thing and in fact why it's called no more robots is because over and over and over again people were telling me when they work with you know indie publishers or whatever you want to call them they you know they sign off they'd maybe not sign a big sign a deal which was maybe not great and then they'd never talk to that person ever again who signed them because now they were passed along to another part of the company and and then there was like okay cool we'll hear from you in six months then when you've got the build ready and then we'll push it out and it's if you're going to work with a publisher do some heavy scope and of them basically talk to email every single death who has worked with them and say what's it like to work with this person because you don't want to it can be exciting right if someone's showing interest in your work and is saying hey let's work together we'll take this this revenue share and and then we'll put it and it might sound amazing but then when you sign with them you realize crap like they're not doing anything and they're the worst I hear that all the time and it can easily be remedied by just making sure that you email people who were published with them before and saying are they okay are they cool and if they say no then you don't because it's never worth selling your soul [Music] did I answer your question pretty much okay good right thank you very much everybody thank you

Channel: GDC

Views: 107,053

Rating: 4.9008155 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, producing, Mike rose, steam, selling games, selling indie games, indie games, no more robots

Id: IWRu3RRqQmY

Length: 63min 22sec (3802 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/themoregames]

Their description:

In this 2018 GDC talk, No More Robots' Mike Rose discusses what currently works (and what doesn't) when attempting to sell a game in 2018.

I am not Mike Rose and I am not affiliated in any way.