LOGIN 2010 – Indie Obstacles Panel

What follows is the notes I took on Corvus Elrod’s panel discussion on indie obstacles at LOGIN 2010. Any mistakes are my own!

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Corvus Elrod, moderator: We have four panelists who are extraordinary in their own right. Andrew Stern of Stumptown Game Machine, released Touch Pets Dogs and also worked on Facade. Charles Berube has released an extraordinary number of quality Flash games, storytelling games, shmups, sidescrollers. Dylan Fitterer produced Audiosurf, available on Steam and on the Zune. Brian Green kept Meridian 59 alive for 9 years, bought the rights to an MMO that was being shut down and kept it alive for almost a decade.

CE: Andrew, what are some obstacles you’ve faced?

AS: one obstacle is the idea of staying indie in the first place. Actually my studio is in the process of being acquired so that’s an obstacle I’ve failed to overcome. There’s a whole host of challenges trying to make indie games. I began in the industry at PF Magic working on Dogz, Catz, in the 1990s. I learned how to develop games in a small startup kind of environment, and in 2000 I quit and went indie, self-funded, it was an ecstatic experience. Developing indie games and watching your bank account drift downward is an emotional roller coaster. One big obstacle for me was how to be able to fit indie dev into your life. I did a blend of consulting work as well as my own indie work. How you pay the rent is important.

CE: How does being acquired present challenges?

AS: One of the reasons we went along with the idea of being acquired was that it would give more resources to the group to build more stuff. Now the group is going to have to grow. I’m a designer/programmer DIY person. The idea of managing a team and being more hands-off is going to be a big adjustment for me. It remains to be seen how much freedom I’ll have although you definitely lose freedom once you start taking funding. It comes down to the relationship you have with the people who are funding you. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to keep going in that indie mode.

CE: Brian, you’ve done development under non-indie positions at 3DO.

BG: It was different from being indie, although when I was at 3DO I was on a small team of one or two people. Since we were such a small team we were kind of ignored, but there’s still the hierarchy and the bosses and being given resources. It was a learning experience working for a publisher. When I went on my own I didn’t have a safety net. I know how things are supposed to work but there are lots of business details that I have to know about: taxes, payroll, etc.

DF: I had an acquisition offer before Audiosurf was released, and it was a good offer, but I didn’t take it. I didn’t want to be a manager and I needed to see the project through.

Audience question: So the acquisition offer was more than you expected to make on the game and you turned it down?

DF: Yes, but I knew that there was the possibility that I could have made more money.

Audience: Did you get advice from a lawyer on the music IP issues around Audiosurf?

DF: Yes, I did.

BG: Not that I encourage anyone to break the law, but a lot of times people get paralyzed by legalities. On some level you need to barrel forward and hope for the best. You run some risk but risk is part of running a business.

CE: Charles has done a lot of Flash games and has tried to turn that into a living.

CB: The whole thing is one long terrible obstacle. I want to focus on the terrifying pressure that’s happening in iPhone, indie, etc. There’s a pressure to not cost any more than $0.99 or be free, and to be the best game out there, and to provide new content every week, and customer support, all financed by NOTHING. I’m concerned from a point of view where I’m trying to make a living, but also from a philosophical point. It troubles me that games are considered less valuable than a cup of coffee. I don’t know yet how to overcome that. I think microtransactions are an option.

Audience (Kim Pallister): What pressure? If you’re indie you set your own price.

CB: It would be nice to believe that you can set your own price but to compete in the app store you need to sift through an enormous number of cheap apps.

Audience/KP: Differentiation is hard, but a majority of the top grossing iPhone games don’t sell for $0.99 so it seems like the price drop is a last ditch tactic.

BG: Well the race to the bottom is about getting more sales to get on the top selling list. M59 was one of the first monthly subscription fee MMOs. The going price for a lot of games was $12-13/month. We went for $10.95/mo and we had continuous feedback from players that it was too much. I think there is that pressure that if you’re making a game that isn’t AAA you should charge less and somehow magically make money.

Audience/KP: I get the pressure to make that top 10 and not be below the fold. But all the guys dropping to $0.99 aren’t magically appearing on the top 10 list either.

CB: I agree with that, some of this pressure is perceived and may not be real on final analysis. But it’s a difficult thing to overcome when your bank account is hang gliding towards 0 and you see a community discussion that nobody is going to get something for free. And that I’m deleting an app without a weekly update.

Audience/KP: The latter part of your argument sounds like an issue people haven’t been talking about enough, that you’re selling once and acquiring a relationship that you need to turn into a business model.

Audience: Hi, I’m an independent developer, me and my boyfriend are the two people in the company. We released our first app and it was successful but it’s on Facebook and customer support alone is a full time job. Has anyone found a solution for this?

BG: Yeah, that’s a big obstacle for indies is turning something into a real business. We hired a co-founder’s brother to work for cheap on customer service. You have to find people who will work for you. Find interested game developers at your local IGDA meeting who want to get into games or are tired of the corporate life.

CE: This is an uneven playing field. We have individual developers who see the potential to make quality apps on iPhone or portals, who are competing with companies that have venture capital and full staffs. They’re putting 10 $0.99 apps out there and supporting the ones that do well. It’s both remarkable and terrifying that a two-person team can compete with Zynga. I know an iPhone developer who’s developed a great puzzle game and can’t even get people to review it. It’s tough to get over that barrier of perception.

AS: Even though the iPhone app store lets you self-publish, these perception problems are still there. Innovation plus promotion are what you need to do to get noticed.

BG: Or just dumb luck. A friend of mine sent an email to Rock Paper Shotgun and the person who read that email happened to like it and get front page featured. For indies sometimes you can get in on the ground floor of a new platform and find success. Timing is really important, sometimes good or bad things happen to you that you have no control over.

AS: My motto is I’ll try and make stuff, work part time as needed to fund it, can’t worry too much about whether the game will make any money.

CE: Touch Pets Dogs was one of the biggest budget iPhone games. It was featured in the OS 4.0 announcement.

AS: Our marketing was handled by ngmoco, so we had a big venture funded company trying to capitalize on the same marketplace indies are trying to compete with.

CE: In the day when games were all PC-based there was a variance in price. With consoles there are only a few tiers. Is there some psychology where people on iPhone will want to see a flat tier?

CB: You have set values you can choose for most distribution channels, not the same flexibilty where you can charge $17.98 or whatever. You have to pick a price point which defines everything you’re going to compete with.

BG: There’s a whole field of pricing psychology. One example from M59 was we came out with a daily/monthly/weekly subscription thing and little CDs that you put next to the checkout at game stores. When the CDs were free nobody touched them. When we started to charge for them people actually decided to pick up the CDs.

CE: You were one of the earlier indie games on Steam. Now there are tons of indie titles there. What light can you shed on your price point decision?

DF: They advised me to sell for $10 when I wanted to do $20, and convinced me on that price point.

Audience/KP: It’s interesting that you say they’re probably right, because you might have been an experiment to see how you would have worked at $10.

DF: I think everything with Valve is an experiment!

Audience: Our game was free and we made tons of money. We gained a loyal community of people we know on a first name basis who like to throw in $5 or $10.

CE: You leveraged the culture of being indies to play on that ethos.

Audience: We are very active on our discussion forums, it’s worked really well with the personal relationship aspect.

Kim Pallister: There’s a book called This Band Could Be Your Life, about how SoCal punk bands created their own distribution channels. All the zines and so on were fans they enlisted to market their games.

Audience: I’m curious as someone who’s a complete newbie here. What do the panelists think is the importance of festivals? Any tips or war stories around this?

AS: Festivals are a great place to meet other indie developers and potentially get your game noticed.

Audience: Have you been to PAX? The Behemoth sells so much merchandise directly to fans.

BG: One problem I’ve found on the indie side of things is that it feels more lonely. There’s no office for you to hang out in. The more opportunities you get to talk to other indie people, the better. I have a blog that I keep at psychochild.org that’s a great opportunity to talk with people.

CE: I know several people who have been IGF winners. It’s more than just submitting your game to a festival. There’s a culture around people who submit to IGF and you have to be a part of that culture. You need to not just design a game, but also talk about your philosophy of design, etc, so that when your game gets to IGF people know the developer and what you stand for. You’re building outreach to an audience beyond the game itself. The indie games that go on to win IGF are invariably people the community already know about who have an awesome game.

Audience: How do you incentivize people who are working with you?

CB: You offer them giant boxes of endless ramen noodles.

BG: I had a terrible time with that. I had M59 and wanted to work on my own projects for a while. I tried to incentivize people to work on my stuff. You find people, everything looks great, they’re part time, you ask them to not drop off the face of the earth. Two weeks later you just don’t hear from them ever again.

CE: I know some small studios who use internships and work with local schools. But you want to find someone who will seriously benefit from being in your creative culture, so you need to enrich volunteers or interns.

BG: You need to be careful about volunteers, you can be sued for minimum wage pay if the work is intrinsic to the company.