Business Plans For Games
Who has ever tried selling their games? It's difficult right? For the past 6 months my colleges and I have been competing in competitions and making demos about how we are trying to get our product to the market. We are Multimedia students, we know how to code, but we don't know how to be entrepreneurs. Is there anybody who has experience in the business side for games.
I'm proud to say that we have had some success to some extent at least. We started out making a game for the University of Pretoria for a Multimedia project, then won various awards namely 2nd place in the Microsoft Imagine Cup (South Africa) and first place at the University. The university has finally agreed to give us the IP for the game as well as sponsoring us for the trademark of the game (which we wouldn't have been able to afford without them). We have also been accepted to be incubated by Seed Academy.
We are now busy making a company called What If STUDIOS and our first goal is to get our game, SAM, on Steam Greenlight. https://www.facebook.com/samgamebywhatif
http://whatifstudios.net
I'm proud to say that we have had some success to some extent at least. We started out making a game for the University of Pretoria for a Multimedia project, then won various awards namely 2nd place in the Microsoft Imagine Cup (South Africa) and first place at the University. The university has finally agreed to give us the IP for the game as well as sponsoring us for the trademark of the game (which we wouldn't have been able to afford without them). We have also been accepted to be incubated by Seed Academy.
We are now busy making a company called What If STUDIOS and our first goal is to get our game, SAM, on Steam Greenlight. https://www.facebook.com/samgamebywhatif
http://whatifstudios.net
Thanked by 1Boysano
Comments
This leads to a basic question: what's special about SAM? Imagine Cup SA, and winning something at UP aren't exactly big things, I doubt you're going up against really high quality stuff. You need to go on an international basis to see how you stack up and can do in the market.
Something your post indicates is a conflation between programming and game design. Being a good programmer in no way means that you are a good designer, and really it's design that people care about.
With regards to selling the game: getting on Steam isn't a plan, it's more a baseline expectation. You actually have to sell the game, get interest in it. Who are you expecting to buy it? How are you going to convince them to? How are you going to get more people to know about the game? How good is the name of your game? And then there is the toughest question: is it actually worth making this game?
I know that last question is rather hard, but when it comes to an actual business side of games it's one that is essential. We get attached to our games, they're our babies, but not all of them are going to be financially viable products. If you look at your game how does it stack up against other games on the market, and get other people to give you that feedback because you're not going to be objective about that.
University is a good place to learn about programming, but the kind of business skills and project management that you need to make a successful game aren't things that you pick up from studying multimedia at UP, and I can kinda say that from mostly first hand experience (I did CS). There is a large gap between what you do at uni and what you need to do to make a successful game.
You're asking a very important question, one that doesn't get asked the right way very often. How do you construct a sustainable business out of building your own games? There are multiple people who run their own companies here who can give you loads of insight and information into what they did to get stable/profitable. I hope they reply here to so that my voice isn't the only one you hear...
I'm probably going to say something you won't like now. I'm sorry about it, but I think it needs to be said early on: I'm not sure that SAM is a product that sells itself, or even something that you should try to sell. I think that the requirements and goals you had for the game initially are completely different to the sort of evaluation and planning you need to consider when building a game for sale. Let me try to explain that a little better:
You clearly built the game for a university course. I know the course, I used to be called in to judge it when I still lived in PTA, I'm a Tuks alumni myself ;) I also know the Imagine Cup (which I also used to be called in to judge when they had game entries) so I can say without a doubt that excelling in those two competitions is great and something that you should all be proud of, it indicates that you can work as a team to complete a project and that you've also got the fire to try and make a game (which is way harder) than some boring software project that bounces data around a bunch of php pages. That's awesome and more power to you for sticking with it!
But what neither of those competitions focus on is sellability, and even more importantly, neither of them focus on players. What they care about and what they're designed to highlight is talent of a very specific type, hireable talent. How many IC winners have gone on to form stable companies around the thing they entered into IC? How many MM projects have turned into sellable things after university? (And yes, I know all about the IP and ownership dance, I did it myself with the game engine I built for my final year project at Tuks - it's a smokescreen at best) But, how many IC winners get offered jobs as part of much larger companies? How many job offers have you gotten? (Probably less than the third place team, provided they didn't make a game, games are a space that people find hard to evaluate) I tried to start companies around 3 different things that I built while I was at university and it took me a long time before I understood what was wrong with that approach, I had to learn what I couldn't see.
So a course and the IC competition are all about proving that you can do the things you learned at university. They have no handle on the things that matter in a game you're going to sell: User enjoyment, polish, marketability, differentiation from competition, etc. (I'm sure that others will point out things I've missed in this list!) And I think that the lack of those things is obvious in SAM, this is borne out by the fact that you're not really sure what's missing yourselves because you've never had to look for it, right?
With SAM, you were pretty much making a game that you felt you could make reliably - I'm sure that you felt that it wasn't too complex in the start and that it bit you in the arse more than a few times when it proved to be way trickier, hence things like the floating platforms in black space, or the third person controls, or the focus on jumping puzzles.
With SAM, you were also making a game for yourselves - how many people besides you played the game and, when they did, how many expressed confusion about the controls or the level design or where they should go next? Did that make you want to show the game to more people or want to show it to people less?
With SAM, you don't seem to have engaged in any kind of competitor analysis or see what's going on with the kind of game you were making globally. Third person 3D jumping puzzles games are difficult to pull off at best, and damningly annoying at worst. For every Tomb Raider or Jak and Daxter, there are literally hundreds of failed attempts at doing the same thing and that's just on retail shelves... Your competition these days in that sort of gameplay space are juggernauts like Yooka Laylee, Ratchet and Clank, etc. What are you doing, design wise in the first 3 minutes of the game, to make SAM stand out and yell how awesome it is? Difficult genres to get right are an indie opportunity, but you have to have something unique to give up front.
SAM, because of the way it was built and what it was built for, has been protected from other games, from players and from a lot of useful criticism that would have helped you make it better. I'd gladly be wrong, but I've watched a lot of your gameplay trailers in order to write this. Do you have the latest playable version anywhere?
So. If you're still reading, great! You've shown that you've got another skill that you really, really need to have as a game entrepreneur in SA - handling criticism. I'm not going to make suggestions of what you should do next (mostly because I suspect you won't like them, heh) but I am wondering what you're invested in the most: The idea of running a game company and selling your own stuff, or the idea of selling SAM. I think the difference is if you think you're close to the end, or close to the beginning.
P.S. I have a game that you should take a look at, it was given to me years ago by a very hopeful young company - it's actually a rather similar game. I keep the DVD box they produced as a reminder of so many things I've learned since. See if you can find "Free the Floopians" anywhere online nowadays.
I founded a company called Free Lives, and we've been selling a game for a while now (and turning a profit). Presumably if business skills are what sells games then I'm good at business.
But in fact I don't think we've done anything particularly clever in terms of business. I don't think we're business idiots either, but I think most of the sales we've received have come from the quality of game.
We have spent a lot of man-hours on the business side of things, but much of that has had to do with hiring new talent, and overcoming the pains of growing a company, and creating opportunities for ourselves that improve our lives and our motivation. I think we could have stayed small and done very little to promote the game and still have been profitable, but that wasn't what I wanted to do.
I guess this would be the entirety of the business skills I think a company has to have:
Make a good game -> Find a way to make some good marketing materials (like a good trailer, importantly some way to communicate to others that this game exists) -> The rest becomes easy if you can do those two well enough.
Though having good business skills can allow you to sell more than you would have otherwise. But business skills are only as effective as the game they're working with. All your energy can go into the business side of games and it can make very little difference, it's only worth investing in a game that was already going to experience some success.
I think 90% of being an entrepreneur in video games is about choosing the right project to invest in (which is a surprisingly hard thing to actually do, given that the worth of video games is so difficult to evaluate).
After rAge, continuous feedback. We took a step back and critically analyzed our situation as objectively as possible. The basic conclusion was that we were way too excited to get "going" with the game developement business with little, almost no idea what we were doing. It was our first shot at everything, design, game programming, business etc. We didn't feel like the game was strong enough to swim in the mobile ocean of games. Shit, I even went back to school to learn game design.
I'm not telling you to go back to school, or stop pursuing your business goals. I'd just like you to sit back with already all the feedback you've gotten here, critically look at your product, assess the risks and don't feel scared of making tough decisions.
We started out great. Spent a few weeks prototyping, looked at what we made and chose one we felt fit our criteria (small scope, large application space, kind of fun, etc.) and ran with it. Three months later Monsters and Medicine was done (kinda) and we let it loose on the world. We got onto the humble store (front page feature launch day), we got onto an Indie Royale bundle, steam greenlight was going well, all that jazz. Not magnificent, but by all means everything a small indie game could hope for (disregarding your prototype winning an IGF award...).
Here's the thing though, the game was not making anything even near our lowest estimates, not even close. Orders of magnitude less than what we had hoped. We saw the first inkling of this early on and throughout as we continued the development. We decided to continue pushing the game because we were close to done and we could use it as a learning tool for stuff like mailing press, doing shows, interacting with store fronts, and that's been really helpful, but it's not been keeping us fed. And hey, if a few people enjoyed playing it, that’s always good.
I'm on a bit of a story telling bender, and I can share the rest of our experiences if you want but what I really would like to get across is what we've learned in this last year and a bit.
1) Make sure you can survive without making any income from games. Whether from savings, a steady job, or investment from someone else, you need to be able to plan a realistic income. If you're living in your parents basement off of noodles that's fine, work out what that will cost you and how long you are happy with that lifestyle and stick with it. But be sure to constantly give yourself a reality check and adjust when you hit your own deadlines.
2) Virality is key. If you can grab even one in every one hundred players with a super niche game, but that player goes and enthusiastically shares it with 3 other people that might be sustainable. But if nobody's playing your game and asking for more then you probably do not want to pursue it. Note that niche games can definitely work. The trick here is identifying a dud from a diamond. I don't think anyone here has a sure fire way of doing said identification 100%, but I can promise you that showing your game to as many people as possible, listening to their feedback and trying to get to the core of said feedback, will definitely help you down the right path.
2.5) Focus on making something you and other people will enjoy. Enjoyment, fun and engagement are probably the most important things you want in a game. Your own feelings on this are majorly important, but not singular. You need buy-in from other people.
3) Disingenuous positive feedback is the last thing you ever want. You want people to be as critical about your product as possible. Working on something that’s bad, because no one has had the heart to tell you what they really think of it is a waste of time. Invite super critical feedback, even if it hurts; it will serve you in the long run if you strive to understand the underlying problem in your designs.
That's the end of my spiel. I kind of rambled a lot of that out, but I've been meaning to write up a synopsis of our experience over the last year for a while. Please note that not all of this is aimed directly at your specific situation @Eduard Still, I hope people find something helpful here.
@Eduard: if you're still reading these comments, maybe let us know? I hope you haven't been scared away by the wall of text :)