Five Years of Being a Full-Time Indie Game Developer

Can a great game fail? I guess I'm finding out right now. It's early, it's currently scary, and it could still go either way. Pure drama! Our game was released 2 days ago (Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon - ShroudedMoon.com). It's metacritic'ing at 94, which is stellar. It's got almost exclusively very very positive reviews on Steam and the App Store. It's the sequel to the Game of the Year in 2009, per TouchArcade, the Indie Games Festival, and Apple themselves. Sounds like a guaranteed hit, right? So far it's doing 1/3 the business of any of our prior games, despite an App Store banner (not as good as ones we've had in the past but still - we're super spoiled, very few companies get one). This is definitely our best game, we truly poured our hearts and souls into it, we are a highly respected company (called Tiger Style), and players are responding super well to it.

So what's different? Well most notably, there are probably 20-30x more indie development studios in the market than there were when we started in 2008. I've heard hundreds of games come out on the App Store EVERY DAY. Angry Birds 2, one of the biggest properties ever, is free and it came out last week. This feels like a quiet time on Steam, but so far we have little traction there, and you need to demonstrate sales before Steam gives you main carousel promotion. Gaming press is overwhelmed with things to write about, so although they've been interested, we don't have many reviews from them yet. We've got lots of Lets Play and YouTubers, but how many sales does 500 views convert into?

Honestly, in the past we've been like "It's fine. We make great games that people love. We'll just release it, and the audience will find it." That was true in 2009 when we released Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor with literally no promotion whatsoever. It was less true in 2012 when we released Waking Mars (alongside Outwitters, if you're out there Alex!), but still the App Store sustained us and the Steam market eventually found and loved us and gave us a few dollars. But the worry is that in 2015, no matter how good your game is, the audience has way way way way too many amazing games to choose between.

We're currently far behind, as just one example, a game about programming in Assembly language. It's probably amazing, I can't wait to try it. And that's the problem. So many things to play, competing for your attention.

SO! What does the dramatic near future look like for us? Well, I think we have major piles of new press reviews coming in on Monday and Tuesday. That will definitely help with awareness. And we're pushing on some of our more unique features in hopes of being recognized as newsworthy (eg - it uses your local real world time and weather and mirrors them in the game, it's based on a real historical secret society that you have to research in real life to learn the deepest secrets, many many layers of mystery and gameplay). We're asking our tastemaker and other well respected developer friends to help spread the word. I believe with enough awareness we're back in business - it's happened for us before. But if that doesn't pay off by the end of the week, very few people will write about us after that. So our hope at that point would be to be a "long tail game" that wins awards and winds up on "best games you didn't play last year" lists. It might pay the bills, or not, and it certainly isn't what we hoped for.

Alex - if you're out there - I've been in indie 7 years, before the indie revolution really started. I was in mainstream for 11 years before that. It's been crazy watching the market as we worked on this game. It's hard to target a market this volatile when the game you make takes 2+ years to make. By the time you're done, everything is different. So, yeah, I relate to a lot of what you wrote, and thanks for sharing! -Randy

Oh, of course there are some areas. I also can name the one or other. But when you want max-out your chances, to get hired and are not a star-programmer in such an area, you will possibly find yourself in some dull and boring area, how I found myself one day (I must admit, that I had total different expectations about the job, but that is a long story by itself ...).

Agreed. This point comes up frequently, and nobody's able to point to more than the tiniest handful of genuinely great games that have failed commercially. I think we can at least say that 99.9% of failed games are not very good.

Regardless, if you're making something special, you're in a much better position to be able to promote it. In business terms, go for the niche that's not currently being served, and execute well.

Do that, and the marketing is easy. Games journalists want to know about unique games that they'll love. They definitely don't want to cover the ten thousandth mediocre clone of whatever's popular at the moment.

Ico failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ico

> I found a few startups who are either using games to fund and solve real user needs or using Unity to create educational/informative visualizations for museums and businesses. This led me to change my mind and return to creating games and hopefully start working with one of these startups

That sounds amazing, I think there is a lot of opportunity in repurposing Game UI for non-game environments. A lot of gameplay UI is optimized for common actions & being intuitive to use