201–210 of 379 posts
Use every sale period available to you and not as weekly sales. Make custom 14 day sales. Add steam cards to the game asap. You should start doing this right after reading this comment really. Also you should lobby steam for a daily deal sometime next month. If they say yes you should set that daily deal for the day the summer sale ends if you can. Also you should push raw fury to do a publisher sale, those can reall…
Just kidding, or maybe not.
How much is left after steam takes their cut, taxes, etc? Heard it's about 30-40% which is really demoralizing
Do you think "diamond in the rough" games exist? Some claim that there are games that are hidden gems that haven't received the recognition they deserve. Other claim they have never seen a generally good game that didn't have generally good success. What is your view? I think some games are good within their niche, but their niche sucks. Something like a hardcore roguelike with ASCII graphics. Within the hardcore rog…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose that when your previous employer has over 3B users (FB alone, not even counting IG and WA and whatever else they have going on), 200k might seem like a small number of people :P But I agree. OP, 200k is a hugely respectable number for a game or any piece of software for that matter. I’d be happy if 200 people used any of mine, never mind the k :p Congrats! :)
even with a publisher, 200k copies at launch for a very small indie team is easily on pace for the 1%. https://intoindiegames.com/features/how-much-money-do-steam-... TBH I forgot the 1% was so high, even for an indie. But network effects are crazy, so getting to 700k will eventually be a thing.
Next that 7M number is for self-published games. Aka, games where the dev is listed as the publisher. OP has Raw Fury as his publisher. Next Raw Fury posted their contract publically a while ago: it is a pretty harsh contract. 50/50 split, but there is a profit ratio baked into the recoup which is super odd. If OP had held off, did his own marketing for a bit, then negotiated with publishers once he had traction, he might have gotten a better deal.
The challenge for Indie devs with publishers is how the good publishers ask a pretty high take. Meanwhile the good deals come from new publishers with poor or no track record. Personally we signed with Hooded Horse which publically offers better deals and is highly effective. The trade off being Hooded Horse is famously quite selective.
Thus honestly: self publishing is the default-best choice. We did that for our last game and effectively replaced a publisher by just spending a bunch on marketing.
I realise you can make games in any language/engine. But could you explain the language/system/engine you used? How did you go about validating the game is fun? Did you end up having an intuitive sense for it, or did you need external feedback to refine the mechanics? My steam deck might as well be a billionaire/balatro machine.
Godot 4.2 / C#. Godot is an amazing engine and I highly recommend it for indie devs. The iteration cycle is a few seconds. IMHO, using Unity will absolutely slow you down, as a designer/programmer. I can't comment on the reality of a 3d game with a complicated art pipeline, however. But for a game like Ballionaire, Unity or Unreal would have been a mistake. Ballionaire was fun by day 3, the first time a ball dropped…
Never having been in the video game industry, nor knowing anyone that has, I've never really understood what the role of a publisher is now that games are distributed digitally.
What were the benefits for you of having a publisher, could you have gone without one and maybe finally how does one go about finding a publisher?