Fuck that! Phil Fish, you fucking told them what you thought. You told them how you felt. You told them the actual score. What was actually going on. The internet however decided it didn’t want to hear it, because the internet is mob and the wisdom of crowds is inversely proportional to the square if its size. But deep down we all know, really, that Phil Fish was right. He said what we were all thinking. He said what we want to say. But you can’t do that. It’s taboo. It’s censored! Not allowed.
While definitely not something I agree with, and even for me there is too much cynicism in it it was an
interesting read
Comments
What a bizarre stance to take.
His argument hinges on the assumption that A ) the only value that customers have is the money they give you and B ) unhappy customers cannot communicate with each other, that one unhappy customer is worthless because he/she cannot discourage others from avoiding your game.
Or conversely that a happy customer cannot encourage others to purchase your game.
One customer in isolation who bought your game for $2 might not be worth much in terms of money (assuming money is everything), but its well documented that customers don't act in isolation.
Though Puppy Games have written other regressive, reductive rants. They're also against giving out free demos as I recall... something both Free Lives and QCF have been quite successful at. I don't think they're people anyone in the indie community should be listening to.
Though I do think that selling your game for $0.20 in a bundle can be a bad idea, especially if you're going to have to deal with support for those people. But I think that's the developer's fault for selling their game at an unsustainable price, not a reflection on the worth of customers.
On the one hand, if you sell at a lower price for the same amount of profit, you will have more customers for the same amount of profit, which means your ability to server them does go down. (I mean if you earned 1000$ with 10 customers vs. 1000$ with 1000, it seems impossible to give the same level of support). So if there is a trend for games (and other things - obviously my experience is more with tools) to sell for less, it's much harder to treat customers well. Of course, this is a crude oversimplification, I realize price is not a knob that you can turn to control the number of users while keeping profit constant, and that 1000 users can have much more impact on marketing than 10, etc. It does worry me though that things seem to become cheaper and cheaper (while production costs and support does not).
And another thing about sales: we got a bit of a shock with Unity's madness sale this month. We were not part of the sale, and while it was on, we virtually sold no copies of our software for Unity! For two weeks! (And that after months of steady growth). When the sale ended, we started to sell again at the rate we expect almost immediately.
Have others seen similar effects when sales are on that you are not in?
And what are your views on things such as regular sales, bundles, and how do you navigate the stormy waters of these things?
What sales? ;)
My sales numbers seem to be totally independent of any reality, i think they are actually randomly generated.
Remember that he's talking mostly about a customer's worth in terms of support and other "hidden" follow-on costs. So when you're charging a reasonable amount for a game (and remember, Broforce and DD are selling for close to what the old Puppygames stuff sold at) you can basically afford to support a customer because the hour or so that takes you has a chance of netting you another sale, or maybe preventing a problem that might happen to someone else as well (but then you're talking multiple hours because coding/testing/updating). When I'm working on a game, my time is worth more than $10 an hour... So handling support calls for too many people in that time is going to be a negative return for me as a dev, compared to a button that just straight-up refunds someone instantly.
Personally, I've felt pretty burned by releasing on Linux because of the sheer amount of support time it's generated... We get less support calls for other OSes that outnumber our Linux sales by huge multiples. AND supporting Linux isn't a simple matter, most issues are unique, so you don't get many problems that you can solve quickly... But yeah, bottom line: Supporting a release is much easier when a big corporation is helping you do that support - Unity handles a lot of our problems for us, if we'd written our own systems like Puppygames had to, we'd have a much larger "support cost".
Also, the no demos thing was a rationally tested thing for them - games that had demos sold worse than games that didn't have demos. They even tested the same games on different, isolated (and exclusive due to IP filtering) casual portals. I'm not sure how much has changed since that testing was done, and I know that the DD alpha was good for us, but I also know that if we'd charged $1 for the alpha and made 10% of our downloads we'd have made like 3x the cash from the DD full version so far ;)
Back then reputation wasn't really something a studio could hope to build up: Your games were marketed by portals and they didn't really want your logos and brands appearing in front of "their" users. Maverick devs sold things on their sites and built some reputation that way, Puppygames was one of them.
Reading the backlash to this article makes me feel really sorry for developers in general, because clearly there's a large proportion of gamers who are completely oblivious to the incredible hardship that currently exists in trying to make a high quality product & a living from doing it, and this whole situation actually makes me embarrassed to be a gamer.
Even worse are those know it all posters who say that all it takes is to make a game of quality and it will almost always sell. Yeah right, tell that to the hundreds of indie games on Steam,XBL and PSN that are all but lost in the dust of last gen and hardly got more than a mention in even the most niche gaming sites.
If something doesn't change I'm scared that gaming will be reduced to a kind of Youtube like advertising system, where a minority gets wealthy while almost everyone else just does their art in either a) a pathetic mimicry of what is popular in desperation to get to the top, b) a financially risky and genuine and creative desire to get to the top, or c) part time capacity with little expectations of earning a living or becoming popular.
F^ing sad situation if you ask me given the amazing potential of our digital age.
So you certainly know more than I do about Puppy Games. So all of my thinking might be faulty.
But it looks to me like Puppy Games are in gradual decline, and have been for a while. So when you say he's a seriously old indie, I'm not sure that them having been making games for a while is proof that he has wisdom. Rather it appears to me that his ideas which may have been sound 8 years ago are now outdated.
Unless I'm wrong about that? Puppy Games really does appear to me to be pursuing an strategy of diminishing returns.
To be fair. I do have issues with listening to elders, and I tend to reject people's credentials if their current efforts seem to contradict their past achievements.
Regarding demos. Cas's data obviously held true for his games. But there's research that shows that good games are boosted by good demos, and that average games are hurt by average demos.
So couldn't Cas's data regarding demos simply be that Puppy Games release average games and their average demos hurt their sales? (or good games with terrible demos). Wouldn't that be more true than assuming there's something wrong with demos? (Which was his conclusion as I recall)
Obviously a lot of AAA games aren't releasing demos these days for that very reason, except for the AAA games that players are going to fall in love with (in which case producing a demo is statistically a good idea).
Honestly I'm not sure how much the Broforce demos (and Expendabros) are going to benefit the sales of Broforce. I'm not sure they will at all. But we're competing for mind-share and advocates more than sales, and the demos certainly help there.
In conclusion: I'm saying that Cas's arguments sound to me like he's blaming blaming external factors for his problems when really his problems are internal. Like indies that complain that "Discoverability is a problem on Steam".
Having consumers that aren't worth your time really is because A ) Puppy Games are making games that sell proportionally few copies at full price so their average customer earns them little money or B ) their games don't 't sell in enough volume for them to afford, or they're otherwise unwilling to hire, staff to support their games or C ) Puppy Games are working with their own engine and this makes support costs crippling.
If any of that's true, then the solutions aren't easy. But surely it'd be better to recognize those as the problems and then focus on fixing those problems, rather than taking what seems to be a defeatist stance on the part of Cas?
Also. Yeah, Mac support has been a pain. I'm sincerely wondering about the wisdom of porting Broforce to Linux...
We might still port it to Linux, because I think we promised it (as I recall), though I'm not looking forward to it, but maybe we'll try outsource the support for the port or something.
But it was apparent that the people who bought the game on sale weren't as interested in the game as the people who bought the game for full price. They were much less forgiving of the rough edges in the game due to the game still being developed.
I think Vlambeer have it 100% right that they're not putting Nuclear Throne on sale until it's finished.
Personally I don't ever want Broforce on sale at a 50% or 75% . I don't want to sell to people who are that ambivalent to the game. Though I don't think leaving that much money on the table is wise, and Devolver who are our partners in this aren't going to see my point of view.
(Though to be fair, Devolver don't want a price cut of more than 33% at any point before launch, and Broforce probably wouldn't have gone for 33% if Steam hadn't pushed in that direction)
1) PuppyGames has run into financial difficulty recently and changed direction on their projects.
2) RockPaperShotgun picked up the story, sympathetically. But, as is standard for the internet, there were unsympathetic douchebags in the comments who shat all over the devs.
3) The dev waded into the comments to argue with the douches. Things got heated.
4) After working up a head of steam, dev takes to his blog to rant about how customers are worthless and how it doesn't matter if they threaten to take their business elsewhere. Bearing in mind that he'd just been having a fight with trolls that, basically, threw the fact that they were taking their business elsewhere elsewhere in his face.
5) End result, dude calls the people who support him worthless ants just to vent a little steam at the trolls. What's achieved? You've alienated your supporters, and trolls just get a kick out of getting to you.
Like I said, I empathize with the dude, the stress of trying to keep a business afloat is incredibly high and there are tons of douchebags out there who will pick at you till you snap.
But devs really need to step away from the blog when they're feeling pissed with the whole world. Write the rant, save it to drafts, leave it for a week. The alternative is shitting your pants in public.
As to what he actually says, nah man.
People still buy full price (in fact a couple of devs have reported that sales actually increased the number of people buying full price post sale, bizarrely), and you can't measure the value of an individual customer purely on dollar sale value. There's intangibles like word of mouth that have to be factored in, and Kickstarter demonstrates that fan goodwill can translate into significant dollar value, if that's all you're interested in measuring by. (Personally, I don't think you should be making games if that's the only metric you measure by, but whatever)
And you can't directly translate support to dollars per hour like that. A fix you make for one customer solves the problem for potentially many customers who might experience it in the future or are currently experiencing it, and failing to fix it may result in negative reviews or word of mouth that has a long-term negative effect on sales. If mac owners considering buying the game read a lot of reviews saying "buggy on mac", that may put them off buying entirely, etc. You can't simply boil it down to hours spent vs the amount of money you earned off the first client to report the issue, that's just silly.
When you know the full story, the picture becomes fairly clear. A dev got emotional and lashed out at ten thousand people to land a hit on one or two who aren't even going to feel it. Not the first time that's happened. I understand what drove him to it, but it's just unfortunate.
- Either way, consider that it'll likely only make up about 5% of your sales, which seems to be about average. Will this justify the porting costs?
- Day 1 support sells better, later ports not-so-much unless you are a big demand game.
- If you do outsource the port, make sure the porter helps you integrate whatever it is they did with your main source, instead of the port being separate fork.
EDIT: Also worth noting that it's a community that are a bit like dogs - they'll respond in a way that reflects the way they are treated and they can smell it. Example: after Aspyr released their Civ V port, they got such a flood of positive comments, they made a poster containing some of them and put it on their wall. This is it:
And still, I think the point he's making is incorrect. Cliffski priced Democracy 3 at $25 and it was his fastest selling game ever, and topped the steam strategy sales charts for like a week. At full price.
And he still sells plenty direct.
Prison architect? Sold tremendously well at $30 and up in early access, and is still selling well at $29.
So when Puppy says this :
"The upshot of it is, within 5 short years, the value of an independent game plummeted from about $20 to approximately $1, with very few exceptions."
Either there is some strange new magical special exceptional category of indie games that are immune to these platform shifts and the apparent consumer belief that indie games are only worth $1 OR he is wrong and he's missing some factor.
Now, I'm no expert. I admit that. I'm just guessing here. But myself, if I was looking for reasons why some games were struggling to sell at $30 and others did just fine, I'd go back to the basics. The economic basics. The first principle is that demand vs supply determines price.
Consider the respective games, consider the genres, consider the fierceness of the competition. Dem3 and PA are fairly unique strategy games. Puppy games makes retro-styled arcade action and tower defense games, yes?
How heavily saturated has the retro, arcade action and tower defense market spaces become, lately? How much more difficult is it to stand out and get attention from the press in that sea of competition, do you think?
Sure, you could blame the platform and the shifts in digital gaming for the pricing. But that's not where I'd lay the blame, myself. Chris Robertson made $200k selling a spaceship model for Star Citizen. People have money, they still buy shit.
But you have to offer them something exciting and/or different.
But yeah, like I said, that's just my opinion. I'm no expert, I've yet to sell a game. It just seems to me that if 2 different games have 2 different results on the same platform, the logical place to look for the cause wouldn't be the platform, it would be the games themselves.
And in regards to demos hurting his sales, that suggest to me that demos aren't succeeding in whetting the appetite of customers and persuading them to go buy, they're convincing customers that the game isn't very exciting, or the they've seen all they need to just by playing the demo. If your demo has a negative conversion rate, assuming you've built a competent demo, that suggests the game is the problem. Because your demo IS your game, attempting to sell itself.
Either that or it's related to some casual portal ad-revenue model issue, I dunno.
So, my own take on this stuff is mostly to go: "Yeah, support is expensive and annoying and not something I want to be doing." I know that, in order to sell games, I need to make those games visible and I can't rely on random discovery, that takes a ton of work (which is also expensive, time-wise). I'm seriously worried about perceived value of games to people buying them, I do feel like the race to the bottom is a thing that exists. I kinda hate the way people moan at me about DD being a whole $15 instead of, like, $3 and TBH, I kinda don't care about people who want to buy it at $3.
Saying that low-price customers are worthless is a good way to get game buyers to push back a little against the race to the bottom bullshit, if only just a little. I don't care if it chases people who were only going to moan at the price of my game away (yay less moaning!) but I do care if it makes someone who thought games were expensive before be okay with paying over $10 once in a while. Maybe it's a good emotional way to get a few people to think positively about game prices. If that's the outcome, then cool :)
As for Puppygames being in decline... I have no idea. Maybe? I know that the long tail certainly isn't what it used to be, digital game sales are starting to suffer from the same bargain bin aging problem that meant games don't earn shit at retail beyond their launch month. That's a scary thing to devs that have relied on long tail sales in the past, especially devs who don't want to do the constant bundle/steam sale/new prototype/early access hustle... I'd love to see comparative numbers on this.
The AAA market is saturated with new releases every month (over 50 at least). XBL and PSN have massive archives of exclusive games )probably going over 100 games which look super interesting just by their aesthetics). PC has its own digital marketplace via Steam & GOG which has easily over 100 good looking exclusives from 2008 onwards. The comes the ongoing back catalogue, which accumulates, not disappears. Maybe it would be a good idea if games actually evaporated (bio degradable), I'll be the first to say that hundreds of Mahjong games should be added to that pile a.s.a.p.
The point is, we're coming to ahead with regards to the amount of games being released, the price of games, and the amount of time a human being has just to play those games that look interesting. This is an accumulative trend, and only serves to heighten visibility problems. Even highly revered games in the past like Strider and Street Fighter II would struggle and get visibility in a modern day game marketplace unless there was some money hatting or social media trending going on. What do you think that is alluding to Gareth? That supply is far exceeding 'actual' demand, and whenever an actual genre is perceived to be in 'short supply', that its probably more a case of the players not wanting to play older games in the genre, players aligning with the developer based on nostalgia/common interests, or the freak of nature that is social media encouraging mutant trends like Angry Birds and F.Bird. Its not an actual supply problem. In fact, oversupply might be the biggest problem we're facing.
I've just said that I think oversupply (in certain genres) is the problem. Which makes it a supply problem, namely that the supply far outstrips the existing demand, which naturally drives prices down.
Anyway, even if one genre has a small supply at any given time, taking the other factors listed in my previous post into account leads to the situation that we have today, that there's not enough time to explore all the interesting looking games out there, even if they all cost $1 to experience.
Jesse Schell looked through the Xbox data (via EEDAR) and came to these conclusions (which I'm sure you've seen before... but it's a great talk so I'm posting it here anyway) :
The superstar-brand AAA games have long since mostly dropped demos, while smaller budget games, including indies and many of those that make barely a blip in the market, continue to release demos because it's a cheap form of PR.
So, yes, if you graph out all the games and group them into those categories, the top performers, sales-wise, will all inevitably be in the group without demos. Incredible! Conclusions!
He really should have compared those categories to marketing spend. I'm willing to bet the green line also strongly correlates to the games with the astronomical marketing budgets. But nah, man, it's demos that's the problem.
It's also incorrect to compare games with trailers vs games with demos and make a conclusion because you're not comparing two identical games that take the demo/not demo approach, you're comparing 2 different games. So more than one variable is changing per test.
If Tomb Raider has a demo and sells worse than COD without a demo, does that prove anything about demos? No, you have to keep the thing you're testing on constant while you vary the demo/not demo variable. Otherwise, it could just be that COD sells better than TR, regardless of demo.
You need to test TR with a demo vs TR without a demo (of course, you're still probably testing them in different markets and so some other variable could still be to blame. It's a difficult thing to test, like whether DRM actually achieves anything or not).
Comparing apples to oranges. But it's a nice enough talk, he weaves an entertaining narrative.