5 years below minimum wage: the financial history of Ronimo

Starting your own game company is fun and exciting, but it’s also challenging. It takes courage and skill, but above all: patience and perseverance. Some become successful quickly, but in many cases it takes years to achieve financial success and actually make a decent living out of your own game company. It might take long to make your first product or get your first deal, and that first achievement might only be a stepping stone towards a next step that brings financial stability. Today I’d like to show an example of just how long that can take by sharing the financials of the first five years of Ronimo, the company I co-founded with 6 friends nearly 14 years ago.

TLDR: The very short summary is this: it took us 2 years to make any money from Ronimo at all, 4 years to earn (almost) our country’s official minimum wage and 6 years to receive a more decent monthly salary from our own company. During that period we were near bankruptcy twice. Why did it take so long? Read on and you shall know!

A note before I continue: this blogpost is partially about how long it took us to “make a decent living”, but the cost of living differs hugely per country. The Netherlands is a wealthy country so cost of living is relatively high. A quick internet search shows that cost of living is much higher in some countries and only half in others. Since most revenue is worldwide, the same sales might mean financial stability in one place, but not enough to pay the rent in another.

Also, for anyone used to reading US dollars instead of euros: if you just replace the € sign with a $ sign, you’re in the right ballpark (especially given that the exchange rates between dollars and euros have varied a lot over the years).

In our second year of studying at the Utrecht School of the Arts our classmate Fabian Akker brought up the idea of starting a company together, with a group. Around that time we had done a couple of school projects that had failed quite miserably, so my first thought was: “we suck, let’s not.” However, the third year was to bring the first major game project, so we figured that if we could make something awesome there, then maybe we could also start a company making our own games.

The resulting game was De Blob: a huge success! We put it online and got attention from gaming press and even had some publishers contacting us, wondering whether they could buy the rights to De Blob.

(Note that De Blob was not exactly made by Ronimo: of the 9 students who made De Blob, only 5 were part of the 7 founders of Ronimo.)

Convinced by De Blob’s success, we decided to really go through with starting our own company. However, each of us still had to do a 7 months graduation project. We combined them and made starting Ronimo our graduation project. Getting school to approve of that was a bit of a struggle, but once they did, we even got our own office inside school.

At the time, 'indie' as it's known today hardly existed and we had definitely never heard of it. We thought the only way was to make retail games and that required funding from a publisher. So we set out to make a pitchable prototype: Snowball Earth. This was intended to be a Nintendo Wii game and we hoped to find publisher funding once we had graduated. At this point Ronimo didn’t make any money at all, but that was okay since we were still students.

September 2007. We were so focussed on pitching to publishers that we did our graduation stuff on the side and crunched for what came a few weeks later: Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany! There we pitched to at least a dozen publishers. Some were interested and continued conversations with us afterwards. Hopeful, we continued work on the game, looking to improve it and increase our chances of signing a deal.

Our very first presentation was for a then pretty famous person from a big company. He was so excited that… he feel asleep during out presentation. Jet lag. Or disinterest. Or both. When we woke him up, he proceeded to try to sell us his own middleware and hardly looked at our game.

By this time we had graduated and had moved to our own office in Utrecht. A very small office for 7 people, but it was cosy and exciting. What we didn’t have, however, was money. We did some minor work-for-hire jobs, but since we weren’t fully committed to that, we hardly made any money there. Just enough to pay the rent of our office, but definitely not enough to provide ourselves with any income.

This is something I've seen quite a lot: studios who want to make their own games and finance that with work-for-hire rarely succeed at both. Either they hardly make any money from the work-for-hire, or they spend so much time on that that they can hardly focus on their own game. Often the result is that the game takes many years to build and turns out mediocre because of the lack of focus and time. The reason for this is simple: doing work-for-hire well and making it lucrative is hard and it's rare for that to work as an aside, especially for inexperienced recent graduates.

So, we didn’t make any money and we weren’t students anymore. How did we not starve? This varied amongst the founders. First of all, in September 2007 we managed to sell all the rights to De Blob to THQ, a then major publisher that’s now defunct. (Note that THQ Nordic is a different company that later bought the rights to the name and games of THQ, including De Blob.) For this we were each paid a nice amount (can’t disclose it due to NDA unfortunately), enough to pay the rent for quite a while. However, only 5 of the 7 Ronimo founders were part of the De Blob team, so 2 others didn’t have this.

Six of the founders had an additional source of income: the now defunct WWIK government subsidy. This paid recent art graduates around €600 per month. That’s less than half of the official minimum wage in the Netherlands at the time, but enough to not starve. To live cheaply, three of Ronimo’s founders rented an apartment together with one more person.

I personally didn’t get WWIK because I had some savings and thus didn’t qualify, so I went even cheaper: I kept living with my mum until I was 26 years old. I have a lovely mum though so I totally didn’t mind. Thanks, mum!

This is also a good moment to mention how privileged we are to be doing this in the Netherlands. In many places in the world all of this would have been much harder.

So, how did the pitching go? A few publishers were interested and one even flew over to do due diligence: judging whether we would really be able to make the full game. In the end none of them actually offered us a deal because Snowball Earth was too unique and we were too inexperienced to be trusted with that much money. We were asking for €1.5m development budget. Not much for the big game we envisioned, but definitely too much to give to a bunch of students who had so little clue about business and production processes.

Snowball Earth was too big a game to finish without funding, so we ended up cancelling it altogether. Years later we did release our prototypes, which you can still find here together with videos and screenshots.

What next, then? By this time indie was on the rise and we had managed to get Nintendo Wii devkits. We decided to make something small that we could finish and publish ourselves: Swords & Soldiers for WiiWare (the predecessor of the current Nintendo eShop).

We estimated we could make this game in 3 months. One year later, we finished and launched it. I’m still impressed that we managed to make something of that size and quality in just one year, and I’m even more impressed that we were stupid enough to think we could make something like that in just 3 months...

Throughout this year we still didn’t make any money, but we did hire interns. In the Netherlands internships are a standard part of many schools and are not paid like normal jobs. So for only €200 per month we could have a game student work for us full-time. Despite that low compensation, those interns were getting more money from Ronimo than we were! On average, we had 2 or 3 interns at a time helping with development.

In May 2009 Swords & Soldiers launched on Nintendo Wii. It got critical acclaim, reached the #1 selling spot on WiiWare in Europe and #3 in America. In total it sold 30k copies and made €146k during the first year (and very little on WiiWare afterwards). A big success for us at the time, but not that much money in retrospect.

In August 2009, after 2.5 years of working full-time with seven people, we were finally able to pay ourselves a monthly income. A whopping €600 per month! Oh wait, that’s super little… but it certainly felt like a big step forward!

Something we hadn’t realised yet at the time is the importance of porting our games to different platforms. That is, until Sony offered us money to make a PlayStation 3 port of Swords & Soldiers, including multiplayer.

To make this port and continue work on our next game OMG Space! (which would later be renamed to Awesomenauts) we needed more programmers. Up until this point I had been the only programmer at Ronimo (besides interns) and that wasn’t enough to make a port and a new game. We hired two programmers. Unlike us, those coders were paid real wages (though not very high ones). And so, while we the founders finally made more than our interns, we instead now had employees who made way more than us.

In September 2010 Swords & Soldiers released as a downloadable game on PlayStation 3. Unfortunately it didn’t make break even, so the only money we made from this was the initial porting budget we got from Sony.

Now that we realised that porting is a super important source of revenue, we also ported Swords & Soldiers to Steam and released that in December 2010. Making a port is only a fraction of the effort of making a full game, and every new platform is a new roll of the dice: a new chance at success. And indeed, while the PS3 version hardly sold, the Steam version would make us €120k in its first year and €35k in its second year.

Now that we had employees and paid ourselves a little bit, we had significant monthly costs. Too much to carry ourselves, so we were looking for a publisher for Awesomenauts. Near the end of 2010 this was becoming dire: we were only a few months away from being out of money altogether.

We were saved when we signed a publishing deal with DTP (yet another company that doesn’t exist anymore). The total development budget we got from them was €300k. Not much for a game of this size, but it was a lot for us! As is common, we received that money spread out over milestones and not all at once.

Awesomenauts was a very ambitious project, with complex multiplayer and simultaneously launching on two platforms that were new to us (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3). We needed more programmers to pull that off. Good thing the budget we got from the publisher allowed us to grow a bit more. In the first half of 2011 we hired two more programmers and a producer, bringing the team’s total size to 12 full time employees. On top of that we usually also had 3 or 4 interns working with us.

The funding also allowed us to finally pay ourselves almost minimum wage: €1400 per month. Still less than our employees got, but at least we felt like we were finally making real money.

In March 2012 we managed to secure some additional income: Swords & Soldiers was included in the Humble Android Bundle and this made us €37k. Towards the end of the year it got included as a bonus in another Humble Android Bundle, making us another €10k.

This money was needed desperately, since Awesomenauts had seen numerous delays at this point. I don’t remember the exact original planned release date, but I think in total the console release got delayed by around half a year. The publisher didn’t give us extra budget for that, so we had to make do with the money we had.

In May 2012 Awesomenauts finally launched on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But not before our publisher DTP went insolvent a mere week for launch. This made everything extremely complex and we didn’t know whether we would see any royalties at all. We got lucky: we had some unreleased DLC they wanted so we managed to strike a deal with the trustee for the insolvency so that the DLC would be released and we would still get royalties.

Nevertheless, Awesomenauts initially didn’t sell all that well on consoles and it took long before we got any royalties at all. We were nearly out of money but had one more card to play: a Steam port of Awesomenauts. Finances were so tight that we couldn’t pay ourselves anymore for a short period. We continued to pay our employees though, so only the founders were hit.

Then in August 2012 Awesomenauts launched on Steam and this version turned out to sell way better than the console versions. We were saved! And we had gotten lucky again with our publisher: since DTP was insolvent, they couldn’t pay for development of the Steam port of Awesomenauts, and thus we got the full rights to that version.

Awesomenauts kept doing very well so we supported it for 5 more years with tons of additional content. It also allowed us to finally switch what type of company we were: we switched from being a V.O.F. to a B.V. These are Dutch legal terms so let's not go into the details here. What it comes down to, is that a V.O.F. is strongly tied to the owners’ personal finances. If the company goes bankrupt, so does the owner personally. Being a B.V. is much safer, since now the company can go bankrupt without giving creditors the right to come after your personal belongings as well.

Being a B.V. does come with a requirement here in the Netherlands: unless you have good reason not to, the company needed to pay the active owners at least €2300 per month (after taxes). So in February 2013, six years after we started the company, we finally started to make a wage significantly higher than minimum wage. And even then it wasn’t that much: this excludes some insurances that are standard for employees but not for owners, and for me personally as a programmer: I’m pretty sure I could have made more had I worked elsewhere.

As far as I can tell, most game startups take several years to become financially successful. I think it might have taken us longer than most, but we made it at all and that’s already special. In fact, since the 'indiepocalypse' happened a few years ago most people who start a game company never manage to make a living at all (as I've previously said: the future of indie is amateur). With Ronimo we were lucky that we happened to start our company at a time when indie was hip and happening and it was relatively easy to reach players. Today, competition is much tougher than it was when we started, so chances of success are lower as well.

What’s the moral of this very long story? It’s simple: to start a game company, you don’t need just skill, vision and bravery, but also perseverance and a willingness to make little money for a long while.

The future of indie is amateur

The number of indie games being released on Steam and consoles has sky-rocketed this last year. At the same time, the amount of money being spent on indie games doesn't really seem to increase. In other words: the average indie game is making much less money! SteamSpy recently released some graphs that show that while total sales for all games together are pretty stable, median sales per game have dropped enormously. You only need to open Steam's list of new releases to see why: so many new games launching every day! Five years ago only a couple of games launched on Steam per week. Now there are dozens launching daily, and they're all competing for the same players. The average income of a new indie game has dropped so far that some even call this current trend the 'indiepocalypse'.



There are several reasons we're seeing this now. The most obvious reason is that marketplaces like Steam have made worldwide distribution easy. They have become more and more open to release games, and not just the cream of the crop. Five years ago, if a hobbyist made a game he put it on Newgrounds and didn't expect to make any money. In contrast, professionally made indie games released as paid products on other platforms and thus competed with hobby developers in a less direct manner, and often in different genres. Today many smaller games can also release on Steam. If Steam keeps going in its current direction, then soon everyone will release their games there. The same goes for other platforms: ID@Xbox isn't anywhere near the speed of Steam yet, but with 21 indie games released in August alone they too are stepping up the pace enormously.

Another important factor is that tools like Unity, GameMaker and Unreal make game development much easier and cheaper than it ever was. Previously many developers were confined to 2D browser games because 3D was technically too complex, as were mobile and console. Licensing a decent game engine that handled this was very expensive. Five years ago only teams with significant technical skill could make such games, yet now these engines don't require much more than the click of a button to reach most platforms.

The final drop is that game dev courses are abundant now. For example, here in the Netherlands we used to have only a few schools teaching game development. Today there are dozens. I'm seeing this same kind of educational expansion everywhere in Europe. More graduates means more people to make games and many of those are starting indie companies straight out of school.

Together these three factors have caused an enormous influx of people all trying to make a living making indie games. Their number is growing much faster than the market, so the average sales of indie games are dwindling. Many indie games that release today won't make much more than a few thousand dollars, far from enough to make a living as a full-time game developer.

What does this mean for indie studios? I recently met a young dev who had started a company with friends and spent a lot of time making their first game. When it launched it literally sold only a few hundred copies. His conclusion? He was going to look for a job and continue making his own indie games – in his spare time, as a hobby.

I think we are going to see this pattern for a lot of start-ups. There are so many games that only a few actually make a decent buck. The rest won't make enough money to sustain the company, causing those indies to bail out of trying to make a living as an indie developer. Many will become amateur indie developers instead.

I don't think this dire financial situation will stop people from making games. Development is just too much fun and that small chance at success just too awesome. What if your game becomes the next Braid or Minecraft? If you can't do it professionally, I'm sure many people will just build those games as a hobbyist instead.

Talented amateurs won't be able to make AAA games like the next Grand Theft Auto, but they will be able to make games similar to what indie teams of only a few people can make. A bunch of highly talented hobbyists working on a game in their spare time for a few years might be able to make the next Banished or Nuclear Throne. This is great of course, but they will be competing for the exact same audience as those trying to make a living as an indie.

Full-time indies competing directly with hobbyist developers will cause the chances of indie games being a financial success to plummet even further than they already have. As the chances decrease, it will become highly infeasible to start a company and 'go pro'. Heck, it probably already has! In the long term people will realise this beforehand and most won't even try to make a living making indie games anymore. I expect they'll just get a job somewhere (hopefully still as game devs!) and keep doing their own projects on the side.

Of course, some will become a hit and be able to make a living. Some others already have an audience and are really good at what they do, so those too will stick around. But in general, the vast majority of future smaller indie games will be amateur games.

Is this bad? No: 'amateur' and 'hobbyist' aren't negative words. They just indicate someone who does something without making money from it. This doesn't mean they can't be good at what they do: just like there are tons of hobby musicians who are actually amazingly good, we will be seeing more and more fantastic games by talented hobby game developers. As well as a lot of bad ones of course, which is fine as long as they too are having fun making games. I expect there will also be a lot of indie games from people who have a regular job as a game developer or freelancer and make their indie games as hobby projects on the side.

I've heard the current trend described as the 'indiepocalypse'. I don't think that word makes sense: this isn't an apocalypse as it isn't the end of indie. Instead it's a shift from professional indie to hobbyist indie. We'll keep seeing awesome indie games and some of those will break through to huge success.

There is a big downside though: this is very sad news for those who release their first game now. Many will have started their company when the indie scene was still small enough that all decent games sold at least okay, not just the amazing ones. Many will be disappointed when their game launches and doesn't reach an audience. I can only hope they'll realise how awesome it is to have made their own full game and feel proud of having released it. But it's a bittersweet second prize, when you dreamt of making a living as an indie dev.

What does this all mean for the bigger indie studios, the ones with more than ten people working on a single game? I don't know. They're capable of creating bigger, more polished productions than hobbyist developers, making those bigger games stand out from the crowd. Will this be enough for a good chance to earn back the much bigger investment? Time will tell. One thing I expect is that they will make more business deals with publishers, investors and other partners to decrease their risks and gather the required budgets. This will move those bigger indie studios further away from what is traditionally considered 'indie'.

If an indie studio is successful and grows its team, it is often not considered 'indie' any more. I regularly get the question whether our own studio Ronimo is still indie: “Aren't you too big for that now?” If that's true, then 'success' often means 'not indie anymore', as using that success to grow the studio apparently isn't indie. By that definition the only successful indies are those who not only have a hit but also stay small.

From a gamer's perspective I don't think any of this matters much. My favourite game this year so far is Ori And The Blind Forest. For me as a gamer it offers exactly what I look for in an indie game: it tackles a genre that AAA doesn't do (2D platformer), has a beautifully crafted atmosphere and brings a focussed experience that dares to take risks. Yet I haven't seen this game mentioned as being 'indie' at all. Apparently a type of game that I perceive as typically high-end indie isn't called 'indie' anyway.

An odd part in all of this is the new breed of 'indie publishers'. Now that the overflow of indie games has made reaching a bigger audience so difficult it makes sense to look for a partner to work with: a publisher that specialises in marketing indie games. However, I remember 'indie' was originally mostly defined as 'not working with a publisher or investor'. Doesn't that make the term 'indie publisher' a contradictio in terminis?

The result is that 'indie' is a word with very little meaning today. It's more marketing buzzword than anything real. Even the gigantic company EA has published games that they marketed as 'indie'.

Let's piece all of this together. What do we have? The vast majority of smaller indie games doesn't make money. Hobby devs can use cheap, high quality engines to make bigger games. They can release their games on more open platforms to reach more people. And finally, the bigger games often aren't called indie. Combining this can lead to only one conclusion: in a few years the word 'indie' will mostly be interpreted as 'probably made by hobby developers'. In other words: the future of indie is amateur!

Why indies should care less about financial independence

Many people in the games industry think the word "indie" stands for "financially independent", and indeed this is something that a lot of indie game developers care about a lot. Although it is an important topic, I think we should care about it less: being indie should be about creative independence, not about financial independence.

You might argue that one is impossible without the other: if someone is funding your game then of course that someone is also influencing your creative decisions. However, what a lot of people don't seem to realize is that no one funding your game is also a big influence on your creative freedom. You will need some way to get food and pay the rent if you want to spend a significant amount of time making your game the best you can.

Disclaimer: this post is only targeted at those who want to make a living making games. If you are making games as a hobby in your spare time, then please ignore this post and do whatever you want! ^_^

Without enough money to make a game you will often have to cut back on the quality and size of the game. You might even have to choose a different game concept altogether. In many cases this influence might be much bigger than that of a publisher or investor. Game development is always about compromises between time and budget on one side, and the quality of the game on the other side. Having an investor might open up a lot of creative options, even if the influence of the investor also closes some.

Of course you can work around all of this by just making really small games. Nothing wrong with that, but being constrained to making small games only is just as much a creative limitation as a pushy publisher would be.

The ultimate solution is to just have a hit. Then your next game will have a big budget and you will have complete financial independence. But few people have a hit and you cannot just force yourself into one. Until you have that hit, you will have to work with your real situation.

A common solution is to do work-for-hire half the time and spend the other half of the time on your own indie games. This can of course work, but it also means spending half as much time on your own game, or taking twice as long to build it. Often this simply results in spending most of your time on work-for-hire to make ends meet while making a mediocre game of your own on the side. Doing work-for-hire is often more limiting to development than any publisher would ever be.

Another reason it might sometimes be a good idea to let go of your financial independence is that you can focus more on your actual game. The business and marketing of releasing games takes a lot of time, so working with a financial partner who takes care of these things can free up valuable time to make your game better.

Note that actually getting financing from a publisher, investor, platform holder or other kind of partner is really difficult. In that sense it is not a simple choice of yes or no. What I am saying here is that indies should consider this option more often, not that it is an automatic win.

The solution that is all the rage right now is to avoid publishers and investors and go for crowdfunding instead. Crowdfunding is often praised as the ultimate freedom for an indie developer: if you successfully get funded you won't have a pushy publisher and you can make whatever you want with the help of the crowd. If only this were true...

In reality being crowdfunded is an incredibly limiting form of funding. You will have to make a lot of promises of how awesome the game will be to entice players to fund it, especially if you look for funding early in development. But what if during development some of those planned features turn out to not actually be fun? In practice there is a good chance that your backers turn out to be extremely exacting and will demand that you deliver exactly what you promised, even if you have already figured out that what you promised was just a really bad idea. Game development is inherently iterative, so you cannot know what features work until you've built and tried them.

It gets even worse if during development you get a better idea. For example, let's say that during the crowdfunding campaign you promised that the game would feature villages that grow as you progress through the game. What if during development you get some great new ideas for wildlife hunting mechanics that would be much better for the game than those villages. You cannot do everything and during normal development you would be able to just cancel the whole concept of the villages altogether and build the hunting instead. When being crowdfunded there is a good chance that doing such a thing would raise an angry mob. The so-called "financial independence" of crowdfunding might turn out to be very limiting to your creative independence!

A good example of this was recently seen in the rage over Godus. During their Kickstarter campaign they promised all kinds of things that turned out differently or not at all during development. Basically, the game just evolved as 22 Cans worked on it, and maybe it turned out to not be as much fun as was imagined at the beginning. The community reacted so aggressively that they even started threatening Peter Molyneux's family. I happen to also be a backer of Godus and all I ever expected from 22 Cans was to make the best game they could within the spirit of their Kickstarter. But this is not what the majority of the community expects. A specific feature set was promised and that feature set needs to be delivered or Peter Molyneux's family gets it. It is a sad example of the crowd stifling development, not supporting it.

My point here is not that crowdfunding is bad. The community funded the big Starstorm expansion for our game Awesomenauts on Kickstarter. This allowed us to grow the game way bigger and better than we otherwise could have. We are extremely thankful for that and really happy with how the collaboration with the community has been going so far. ^_^ I am just saying that the creative freedom that crowdfunding would give is extremely overrated and you should realise this before starting a crowdfunding campaign. Good communication and choosing the correct wording (like avoiding "promises") might also help a lot.

Of course my point in this post is not that every indie should start looking for a publisher or investor. There are a million ways to get your gig going. For example, I kept living with my mom during the first four years of Ronimo. This way hardly any budget was needed and we could spend as much time as needed to make the best games we could. There are many other ways to make things happen. Some concepts, like my crazy live-performance-art-game Cello Fortress, are just so impossible to make money with that no business would ever want to invest in it, so a different way of 'funding' is needed. My solution there was to just make the game in my spare time and not expect to make any money at all (note that I did get some funding for it from the Gamefonds government fund once I had a basic version running).

An obvious reaction to this post would be that I am "telling indies to be less indie". If your definition of "indie" is "financially independent" then yes, that is exactly what I am saying. And honestly, if that is your definition of indie, then I don't care about indie anyway. The only thing that really matters to me is the creative freedom to make the games I want to make, and that is what I consider "indie". I don't care what financial constructions are needed for that and I definitely don't care whether anyone else wants to call that "indie" or not. The only thing that really matters is to make awesome games.

What many indies are doing wrong

The indie explosion has finally happened. New indie companies and teams appear every day. At the same time a lot of pessimism has entered the scene: so few indies are actually making money! This is mostly because the market simply isn't big enough to support us all. But I believe another cause is that a lot of indies are all making the same mistakes. Here is what I think many indies are doing wrong.

Before I continue, a little disclaimer: this post is about what I think gives indies the best chance at making a reasonable income from their games. If you don't care about that and just want to have fun making games, then none of this applies.

Too small games

Every day dozens of indie games are released. During big game jams this can even be hundreds during a single weekend. To stand out from this crowd more indies should focus on making larger games. If you and your team spend dozens of man-months on a single game, then that game is much bigger than most competing games. This way you aren't being compared to a dozen games per day, but 'only' a few games per week.

Too many gimmick-games

Lots of indie games are based on a super unique idea that is fun... for exactly five minutes. There are tons of games that purely resolve around some weird gimmick. This trend is fuelled by game jams, since it is often impossible to make more than that in just 48 hours. Such gimmicks can be fun and exciting, and can sometimes grow into larger products like the excellent World Of Goo. But too often they don't grow beyond a simple gimmick.

The true skill of the game designer isn't in coming up with something original, but in turning that original idea into a substantial game that is enjoyable for hours. And no, adding a highscore list to your gimmick-game doesn't solve this: very few people will be triggered enough by that to play longer (even if it does work for a few people who might play your game for dozens of hours to get the best score).

Not enough polish, depth and quality

Very few indie games seem to execute on all fronts. Looking at trailers it is rare to see a game that has interesting, original gameplay and a cool visual style and good animation and good audio and etc. A game can't be excellent if not all aspects are at the very least acceptable. Especially animation seems to be something that few indies get right.


Too many bugs

Many indie games launch with a lot of bugs. Early Access seems to have triggered a trend where bug fixing and polish isn't valued as much any more. It seems like many developers think we only need more features and more content. You might want to reply that Minecraft and DayZ were huge successes despite being really buggy, but this isn't the norm and not an example that should be followed. In general, good games sell better than bad games. Don't make a bad game.

Too small teams

All of the points above have one thing in common: you need to spend more time on a game. This is easier said than done of course. What if a lot of indies joined forces and formed larger teams? Ten people all making a game on their own could combine into ten people making one big game together. Not only does this allow making bigger and better games, but it also fixes the problem that one person can't be good at everything. With a larger team it is possible to have specialists on board, instead of only generalists.

We made our first big release Swords & Soldiers 1 with a team of seven people and spent a whole year on it, full-time. Yes, we were lucky that we released that game in a time when there was hardly any indie competition, but that isn't the only factor. With around 100 man-months spent on it (including interns), Swords & Soldiers 1 was much bigger than most indie releases today. So even in today's crowded market it would stand out at least a little.

To avoid confusion: by "bigger teams" I don't mean 50 people. I mean 5 to 15 people who work on a game full-time for something like 1 to 3 years. That is big for an indie studio but still minuscule compared to triple-A.

Too many side-jobs

A lot of the indies I meet make money through work-for-hire and then spend the remaining time on their indie games. I understand the necessity of this of course, but often it doesn't work. If you work on your game part-time, how are you ever going to spend enough time to make a truly polished game? It is possible of course, but not focussing fully on your main game makes it really difficult.

How to fund development then? For me personally the funding was really simple: I kept living with my mom until Ronimo made enough money to live on. This took a whopping four years! I wasn't the only one living cheaply back then: three of the other founders of Ronimo rented a single apartment together. Had we sought a normal job, each of us would have made enough to get a decent apartment of his own right away. If you really really really want to make it as an indie, you have to be willing to make serious personal sacrifices. (Note that my mom is great, so not being able to move out until I was 26 wasn't that bad.)

Too little focus on the craft

Making games is hard. Programming complex systems is hard, drawing anatomy is hard, designing puzzles is hard. To make good games, you need to hone your craft. This seems obvious yet in the indie scene there is very little emphasis on hardcore creation skills. I saw this recently at the Screenshake indie festival in Belgium: hardly any of the talks were about actual development. Of course there should be room for a conference that focusses on other aspects of indie games, but I do think it exemplifies a trend that the only indie conference of Belgium ignores the craft of making games altogether.

Unity and GameMaker are a big part of this: they have made it possible to make games without serious technical skills. This is great but if you don't have those skills then it is also extremely limiting. Many indies wouldn't be able to make tech that isn't available as a standard Unity plug-in. This limits your possibilities and makes it more likely that you will make something similar to what others are making. Our own game Awesomenauts and my hobby project Cello Fortress wouldn't have been possible without serious tech knowledge of respectively multiplayer and sound programming. Having the skills to make whatever you want opens up enormous possibilities to stand out from all of those who are limited by the standard features of Unity and GameMaker.



No originality

This point pains me greatly. Five years ago being indie was all about being original, expanding what games can be and delivering unique experiences. Today so many people are making pixel-art rogue-likes, voxel sandbox games and platformers-with-a-twist that it seems like 90% of all indie games fall under one of these very specific categories. Not to mention zombies... I think it is super lame that 'indie' is now often the equivalent of unoriginal me-too games. This also means that you are competing with lots of very similar games, decreasing your chances of success greatly.

Of course not everyone is doing the same thing, but too many indies are. There are opportunities elsewhere. For example, Reus and Banished each brought a unique twist to the god-game/management genre, and both sold really well. For some reason hardly any other indies were doing this genre so Reus and Banished easily stood out.


Stand out from the crowd

Luck is always involved in success, but my impression is that if you want to stand a decent chance, you need to have at least one of these:

• A better game than the competition
• A game that does something truly new
• Appeal to an underserved niche audience
• More marketing budget than the rest (and being pro at using it effectively)

That last one only really applies to big companies with big budgets. I think a company like Supercell simply bought the success of Hay Day and Boom Beach through the massive marketing budget they earned with Clash Of Clans. For an indie, the other three are the reasonable alternatives.

A great example of this is Ori And The Blind Forest, currently a big hit on Steam. Not only is it incredibly polished and beautiful, and thus simply better than most other games, it also serves an underserved niche: big metroidvania 2D platformers are rare. Luck is always involved, but this game had really good chances at becoming the hit it is now.


Don't blindly follow my advice! Instead, figure out your own path and find an original way of doing things. There are a million ways to be an indie and many can work. But please stop all making the exact same games and mistakes, and consider what I have explained here. Some of these things are really difficult to achieve, for reasons of budget, skill or inspiration, but that shouldn't be an excuse to not strive for them!

Special thanks to Ronimo producer Robin Meijer for discussing these topics with me and coming up with most of that list at the end. This is the second part in a short series on the state of indie. The first part was about luck and in a few weeks I will write about why I think indies should care less about financial independence.

Luck and success in the indie business

Luck is an important part in the success or failure of any game studio. Why do some studios succeed while so many others never make a significant amount of money? Regardless of how good your theories are on what makes a successful business, you can never know for sure which games are going to be a hit. Games are entertainment and hit-driven and thus their success is inherently unpredictable. Luck cannot be controlled, but you can help it a bit by making the right choices. Looking at what many starting indies are doing right now, I think a lot of them don't think about luck enough. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter.

The success of a game is determined pretty much equally by three factors: the game, marketing and luck. Marketing and luck are just as important as the game you are making. If you do not market your game, then no one will know it and thus only a LOT of luck can make it a success. Similarly, if your game is not good enough, then it is also very unlikely to sell well.



While luck cannot be controlled, you can make such decisions that you need as little luck as possible. If you make an awesome game, do really good marketing and release it on the right platforms, then your chances are actually pretty good. But luck always remains a factor. Even the very best games can sometimes fail, and even the worst games sometimes become a hit. Anyone remember Psychonauts? It is considered a classic now, but sold hardly any copies at the time. On the other hand Flappy Bird was an enormous success, despite how crappy that game actually is.

When making your business decisions it is of course a good idea to look at what other companies are doing. What games sell, and why? However, it is a big mistake to attach too much importance to the outliers. Lots of people look at Minecraft and try to copy what it did, hoping to achieve similar success. But Minecraft is a one-in-a-million outlier. Of course Minecraft has some great mechanics, but it also required an enormous amount of luck to become that successful. The chances that you can achieve something even remotely similar are practically zero.

The same goes for Angry Birds and Candy Crush. It is not because of great talent that these games became such huge successes: they are well-made for sure, but there are tons of other games of similar type and quality that somehow did not become such hits. Before Angry Birds and Candy Crush became a success, there was no way anyone could have guessed that these would be the titles to become such big hits.



A strategy some studios use is to not make one big game, but instead make lots of small games and then hope one of those becomes as successful as Angry Birds. The reasoning behind this strategy seems to make sense: every game you release is a roll of the dice. Releasing more games gets you more rolls of the dice, increasing your chance at success.

I do not believe this really works. I think a single really good game has a much bigger chance at becoming a success than dozens of lesser games combined. Of course it is impossible to prove a theory like this, but I believe that a better game has an enormously larger chance of becoming a hit. If you can raise your game's quality from a 7 to an 8, or from an 8 to a 9, then you stand a much, much, much better chance. If you can somehow make a game that scores a 9.5 on Metacritic, then you can be almost certain it will sell like crazy. Even then you can never be sure though!

For this same reason I also do not believe in the 'fail early' strategy that some companies use, especially in combination with Early Access or free to play. The idea of 'fail early' is to release your game when it is only half of what it could be, and then see how well it does. If it does well, then you continue development and make it better. Otherwise you just drop the game and make something else. Like above, this allows a company to make more games and thus get more rolls of the dice. I do not believe that this works: the chance of the game becoming a success is infinitely better if the game itself is much better. That game that is dropped because the half-finished version did not sell well might have become a hit if it were actually developed into a good game, instead of a buggy or too small one.

(Note that I do think Early Access and soft launches can sometimes work, but for other reasons: they provide tons of testing and user feedback and it might also help fund the rest of development.)



'Chance' is also why big publishers can be relatively stable over time: they release a lot of big games, so the chance of them all failing is really small. This is the benefit of size, and it is a benefit that indie companies generally cannot have.

A good way to get more rolls of the dice is porting. If your game failed on one platform, it might still do really well on another, especially if that other platform has a different audience.

We have experienced this ourselves: Swords & Soldiers was a hit on WiiWare back in 2009. A year later we released an HD version of the game on Playstation 3, with added online multiplayer, but this sold very poorly. Then we released the game on Steam, and there it again sold really well. In hindsight one can come up with theories on why it failed on Playstation 3, but beforehand we had no idea. Every port is a new roll of the dice. Ports are much cheaper and faster to develop than completely new games, so porting is in general a good idea.



Luck cannot be controlled, but you can influence it. I would like to finish this blogpost with a great example of this: our own Awesomenauts. Awesomenauts is a big hit with around two million copies sold. Its success is partially due to its excellent release timing, which was pure luck.

Awesomenauts is a complex game to communicate. During the three years it took us to make the game, League of Legends appeared and became a gigantic hit. Suddenly our marketing became really simple: Awesomenauts is platforming League of Legends! This is a message everyone understood and that immediately had people intrigued with this interesting combination of elements. This helped our sales enormously.

There is no way we could have planned for this: the game took three years to develop so at the beginning we had no idea what would happen in the meanwhile. This might make one think that the success of Awesomenauts was all luck no skill, but this not the case at all. More like the opposite! Awesomenauts has a unique concept, is large for an indie game and is high quality. We spent a lot of time on marketing and have so far released the game on four different platforms, giving us four rolls of the dice. All of these combined mean that our chances were pretty good to begin with. Still the game could have failed, and luck was the final push that we needed.

There are two ways to improve your luck: get more rolls of the dice by having more releases, or improve the chance of each roll by having better releases. I personally think each release should be the best possible, by making a remarkable game with good marketing, a fitting payment model and on the right platforms. You can also handle luck by finding an investor who is willing to invest enough to make several games, so that you get more rolls of the dice. There are many possible approaches and it is important to think about luck and make sure your chances are as good as possible.

This is the first post in a short series on the state of the indie business. Part 2 is more controversial and will hopefully stir up some discussion, as it is about what I think many indies are doing wrong.

Proun cloning controversy: why indies should complain less about clones

My game Proun was recently 'cloned' by an iOS game called Unpossible. Unpossible isn't the first 'clone' of Proun: games like Synesthetic and Polyrider also copy the core gameplay and many obstacle shapes. Polyrider even goes so far as to copy-paste my main marketing text (DOH!). However, the timing of Unpossible is much more painful as Proun itself is also finally coming to iOS (and Android and 3DS): together with Engine Software I am working on a bigger and better Proun+. Proun+ coming to iOS means that it will be a direct competitor of its alleged clone Unpossible. I saw quite a bit of controversy online about whether Unpossible is a clone or not and whether that would be bad or not, so here is my own take on the matter.

I think most people are worrying way too much about most clones. The only clones that should be considered a big problem are direct rips that add nothing and are clearly only intended as a moneygrab. Most infamous clones are not of this type and indie developers should complain less and instead spend that time making more and better games.

One aspect that seems completely absent from how indie developers react to clones is pride. Usually your game will only be cloned if you make something very good and different from what already exists. Somehow most indies seem to only notice the negative and don't realise what a fantastic compliment being cloned really is. One of the things I am most proud of in my game development career so far is that Swords & Soldiers and Proun have both been 'cloned' many times and that De Blob has directly inspired other games. Indies should focus more on this positive side of cloning!



I think there are three types of clones:

-The "Asset Ripper" is the worst. These are clones that not just copy game mechanics, but even go so far as to rip assets directly from a game. Graphics, sounds, animations: they are just copied directly. We have actually encountered these ourselves once: a Swords & Soldiers clone had used some of our sound effects in their game. However, this was a small Flash game that was played by hardly anyone so we ignored it and didn't take any action. The "Asset Ripper" is the only type of clone that is definitely illegal, since it violates copyright laws.

-The "Art Replacer" is the next step: practically all game mechanics are copied directly and the only things that are changed are the visuals and audio. This is still clearly a clone, but we are already entering a grey area here. If the visuals are changed from a happy fairytale to gritty sci-fi, then the feel of the game itself also changes a lot. It is still lame to copy mechanics directly like that, but this isn't a complete clone anymore and might cater to a different audience. A famous example in this category is Yeti Town, which ripped Triple Town. They switched to a different setting, but the happy feel remained the same. Add that to a literal copying of every game mechanic and rule in Triple Town and it becomes extremely lame.

-Finally there's the "Mild Changer". This is the category Unpossible belongs to, as do famous 'clones' like Ninja Fishing. Mild Changers have a lot of similarities to another game, but add not just their own visuals: they also change the gameplay in some small ways. The core game keeps feeling the same, which is why people cry 'foul' so often for these kinds of games, but they do change things and thus create something new.

Unpossible is a clear example of this latter group. At first glance this game seems to play exactly like Proun, but it does change some things. The camera goes from third person to first person. This doesn't really make the game feel very different, but it is a real change nevertheless. The cable is thicker in Unpossible, so it is more difficult to see what is coming around bends and what is at the other side of the cable. And most importantly: in Unpossible the game immediately restarts when you hit something, while in Proun you can keep racing. This changes the game quite a bit.

I think developers should complain much less about such "Mild Changers". Genres evolve by copying from existing games and improving and adding to that. This is how we as an industry grow and discover new places. Truly new things are hardly ever made without grabbing lots of elements from existing things, in games as in most other subjects. Classic RTS Dune II lacked group control and regrowing fog of war. It is a good thing that other games 'cloned' Dune II and added these crucial elements, bringing the genre forward. A clone that is significantly better than the original is a great evolution and should not be frowned upon. (Not that I feel Unpossible is significantly better than Proun, but it still is an evolution.)

Strangely, if a game is part of a genre with lots of existing games, it is considered okay to only change some small things. But if a type of game has so few games that it can hardly be called a genre yet, then suddenly it is cloning and considered problematic. It seems like the general public thinks 'clones' are a problem if few games do it, but if lots of games all do it for years, then we call it a 'genre' and it is okay.

An interesting question in such cases is whether the developer of a clone knew the original at all. On the Touch Arcade forums Acceleroto claims to not have know Proun until Unpossible was already playable: "I didn't know about Proun until I shared an Unpossible build with some dev friends." My first inclination is to believe him: when I started working on Proun I also didn't know about F-Zero's Cylinder Wave track. (In case anyone is wondering about 2009's Boost 3D: Proun's first versions are way older than that, as can be seen in this forumpost from 2006.) Despite Acceleroto claiming to not have known Proun, when I actually played Unpossible I started to strongly doubt that. The similarities in types of obstacles and game feel are so incredibly strong that I really doubt whether Acceleroto really didn't play Proun until most of Unpossible was designed, especially considering how 'original' his other games are.

At Ronimo we are currently developing Swords & Soldiers II. Do I worry about the many similar games and even clones out there? No, I don't. We are trying to make Swords & Soldiers II better and more fun than the others. If we succeed at that, then the clones won't hurt us. If we don't succeed at that, then we should have made a better game and have only ourselves to blame. Ridiculous Fishing is a great example of this: Vlambeer made their sequel to Radical Fishing so incredibly good that it became a gigantic hit despite so-called 'clone' Ninja Fishing launching much earlier.



Another part of handling clones is that indies should simply make better business decisions. Unpossible will compete with Proun+ on iOS, but this is entirely my own fault: Proun has been out for three years now so I should have jumped on iOS ages ago. Had I done that, then Proun+ would have released well before Unpossible and the whole issue would not exist. This is a situation that often arises around clones: the original developer is very slow at bringing his game to other platforms and when he finally does, he complains that clones have sprouted in the meanwhile. This is especially important with games that are simple to build, like Proun. Ronimo's Awesomenauts and my own Cello Fortress are technically so complex that clones are much less likely to come quickly, if at all.

Before we learned of Unpossible we were already adding more variation and originality to Proun+ by introducing new game modes, more music and new visual styles. Seeing Unpossible can only strengthen our resolve to make the best game we can. If we fail at making a better game, then that is entirely our own fault. If we succeed, then I doubt the existence of so-called 'clones' will be all that relevant to sales of Proun+.

The indie marketing plan

Okay, maybe more like an indie marketing plan than the plan, since every game and every company comes with its own approach to marketing. Nevertheless, at Ronimo we have gathered a ton of experience with marketing through Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers, and I have also done quite a bit of marketing for my hobby project Proun. Today, I would like to share this knowledge in the form of a rather complete plan that other indies hopefully find useful to help guide their marketing.

Traditionally marketing is the field of the large companies and the large budgets, who buy advertisement space on television, magazines and websites. However, today a small indie studio with hardly any marketing budget can still get a lot of attention going. In fact, I think indie studios can potentially market downloadable games better than big companies! When we launched Swords & Soldiers, we were a pretty much unknown company with no marketing budget, and yet we managed to get enough attention going that when it launched, one review started with this sentence: "Has this much-hyped title been worth the wait?" I hope today's blogpost will help others hype their games as much, and more!

This is a very long blogpost, since there is a lot to it and I feel it is worthwhile to write something comprehensive. This means a big wall of text, so just this once I am going to start this post with a step-by-step summary. To compensate for today's wall of text, next week's blogpost will be almost exclusively images, giving fun examples of creative marketing things we have done.

• Marketing is one third of your chance at success
• Your biggest enemy is not being known
• Spend a lot of time on marketing
• Don't expect your publisher to do all the marketing
• Do not focus on buying advertisement space
• Send out press releases
• Find your own voice
• Create a press list
• Find big foreign sites
• Build a relation with game journalists
• Give exclusives to specific press
• Create news
• Create a marketing plan early on
• Use your indieness!
• Visit trade shows
• Start your marketing early
• Don't show crap
• Create trailers
• Send out review copies
• Send out preview copies
• Engage your community
• Social media are about replies
• Contact big Youtube channels
• Launch on additional platforms
• Keep adding features after launch
• Have a marketing concept for every patch
• Measure the success of your marketing by tracking metrics
• Be super enthusiastic about your game
• Be creative about your marketing
• Talk about your game, all the time
• Get Steam/PSN/XBLA/Apple/etc to feature you
• Get into bundles
• Do contests and give-aways with press
• MAKE A GAME THAT STANDS OUT

(I considered putting this image here, but it is really too lame...)

Marketing is one third of your chance at success
I think getting high sales is for only 33% determined by the game itself. The rest is one third marketing, and one third luck. Sometimes you make the best game in the world and it still doesn't sell. You cannot control luck, but you can definitely control your marketing. Lots of beginning developers seem to forget about that: they focus on making a great game, and don't do anything else.

Your biggest enemy is not being known
If you want your game to sell well, then making a good game is not enough. In the end, if no one knows about it, then no one is going to buy it, no matter how good it is. If your game happens to be the most incredible game ever, it might spread like wildfire (like Minecraft did), but any normal game will need a lot of marketing to reach an audience. Your problem is not that people might get the wrong opinion about your game. Your problem is that they have no opinion about it, because they don't know it!



Spend a lot of time on marketing
Doing marketing well takes a lot of time, as the number of items in this blogpost exemplifies. Spending this time is totally worth it and necessary. Take a couple of days to make a good trailer, then a couple of days more to contact press, then do some more. Marketing is often left out of the development planning, but if you are a small indie studio and need to do everything yourself, then you will need to schedule a lot of time for marketing to get the most out of it. Remember that you spend so much time making an awesome game, it would be a waste to not do the best you can to promote it!

Don't expect your publisher to do all the marketing
Some indies manage to get publishing deals, and they often expect that their publisher will do good marketing for them. However, it is wise not to count on anything, even if the publisher promises great marketing. Some publishers can indeed do great marketing, but I have heard enough stories from fellow indies in which the publisher did horrible marketing. There can be all kinds of reasons for this. For example, the bigger publishers might have signed a dozen games for release in that month and only focus their marketing effort on the ones that turned out best, totally ignoring the other games they signed. Some other publishers might just be specialised in something else and might have no idea how to market a downloadable game properly. In the end, publishers can do great marketing, but you should never count on it. Always plan a lot of your own time for marketing, and try to work together with the publisher to make the most out of it.

Do not focus on buying advertisement space
Buying banners on websites or pages in magazines is incredibly expensive. An indie game that sells 100,000 copies does quite well (big successes are of course way above that). At the same time, there are hundreds of millions of gamers. This makes getting to your niche target audience with advertisements incredibly difficult, and in practice the price of the advertisement rarely lives up to the amount of extra copies you might sell. Instead, there are tons of other ways to reach your audience. Ways that are often completely free and even more effective than advertisements.



Send out press releases
This is the most basic form of marketing. To get attention, you need press to write about your game. A press release is simply an email with some news about your game, usually including links to screenshots and maybe a trailer. If the news is interesting enough, press will write about it. You can send your press release to hundreds of gaming websites and magazines, and hopefully enough will pick up on it.

Find your own voice
If you have never written a press release before, you will probably look for some examples online, and are likely to see what kinds of texts most big companies send out. Don't copy their style: they suck. Big company press releases are often incredibly boring and contain a combination of marketing buzzwords and corporate language. There really is no need to do anything like that! When we saw an early press release about Super Meat Boy (might have been this one), we realised that you can do anything you want in a press release, and there is absolutely no requirement for boring stuff! Figure out what fits your studio and your game. And if you and your game are boring, then feel free to go for boring press releases after all... Find your own voice!

Create a press list
To send out press releases, you need to know who to send them to. So start collecting the email-addresses of as many websites and magazines that write about games as you can. Many websites show their email-address for news somewhere, or you might even be able to find the email-address of the journalist who writes about your type of game.

Find big foreign sites
Every game developer knows about big websites like IGN, Gamespot, Eurogamer, Kotaku, Joystiq and Destructoid. Finding such international websites is not very difficult, while it is easy to overlook local, non-English websites. Some of these are really big, though, and could get a lot of eyeballs on your game! One way to find such sites is to look which have a high Alexa rating. Alexa rates how many visitors a site gets, and although the precision of their estimates might be in dispute, Alexa is still a good way to get a quick overview of what gaming sites are big in, say, Italy.



Build a relation with game journalists
Game journalists are human beings (really!) and it is a good thing to treat them like that. They are more likely to write about your game if they know you and know what your game is about. If you met someone before, then it might be a good idea to mail them personally, instead of just adding them in your generic press release.

Give exclusives to specific press
Sometimes you need to bribe press into giving your game more attention. (Nothing wrong with a good bribe once in a while...) Websites and magazines like to beat the competition and be the first to bring the news. So offering an exclusive scoop makes it more likely that they put your game on their front page. Small exclusives can be specific screenshots you only give to one site, or you can offer some real news.

Create news
Some things are quite obviously news: the announcement of the game, the announcement of the release date, the actual release. Beyond that, it is all about creativity and what parts of your game are interesting. What you might not realise, is that you can create news yourself by being smart about it. The simplest way is to keep most details about your game secret and gradually release more info. Every bit you reveal can be a news item. This works best for titles to which everyone is looking forward, though: for Grand Theft Auto V, even the announcement of the date on which a new trailer would be released was news. For a small indie, it takes a bit more creativity and persistence to create news. How you formulate things is also important. With one wording something might be more newsworthy than with another, so you really need to think about this.

A great example is the reveal of the Chinese faction in Swords & Soldiers. In our first trailers, screenshots and press releases, we always showed two factions, plus a big question mark in the spot of the third faction. By continuously telling people that we were not telling them what the third faction was, we spiked their curiosity, making it a serious press moment when we finally revealed the Chinese. Had we shown the Chinese in the first trailer, this would not have been news!



Create a marketing plan early on
To create news and keep yourself from revealing everything at once, you need to plan your marketing ahead of time. Be creative, come up with a ton of ways to get press attention, and then put the whole into a planning. This also greatly helps to see what is needed for marketing. Making trailers costs time (our trailer magician Ralph often spends a couple of days on his best trailers), and to reveal something, it needs to be finished enough to show it in the first place. So make a big marketing plan with tons of moments to reach out to the world!

Use your indieness!
A good way to make press enthusiastic about your game, is to talk to them directly. Journalists often love talking to indies because they get to talk to the actual developers: real people instead of some random marketing puppet! Also, as an indie you are free to do as you please, giving you a lot of freedom in your marketing. You can make bold statements and even create a controversy, if you think that is going to help your marketing. I know one studio where the two members always pretend to be fighting in public, just to get more attention.

Visit trade shows
There are three ways to meet press: visit them, pay their ticket to let them visit you, or visit a trade show. All the big websites, tons of blogs and even hobby-journalists visit trade shows, and it is much cheaper to talk to a dozen of them a day at Gamescom, than to fly all over the world to visit each and every one of them. When doing this, it helps to make appointments ahead of time, since it might be difficult to find the right person in the crowd, and since some journalists cram their entire visit with meetings and don't have any time left in their agenda. If you happen to have some marketing budget, you can also rent a small booth to show off your game. This is a great way to reach the public and attract extra press. The amount of press coverage Awesomenauts got from our booths at Eurogamer and PAX East was definitely worth it!

Start your marketing early
This item is hotly debated, even internally at Ronimo. What is the ideal moment to start your marketing? Let me quote Spy Party developer Chris Hecker on this one: "Every AAA Indie Game has A Long-term Slow-burn Grass-roots Awareness-building Campaign" If you start early, people will see your game once in a while over a longer period of time, building a stronger sense of awareness that this might be something special.

I personally feel the ideal moment to start talking about an indie game of decent size is around 6-12 months before release, but big titles like Braid and Fez have shown that it can work great to start showing things years before release. The reason I prefer this timing is that the game is probably already looking good at that point, and that it avoids running out of news way before release.

Don't show crap
I think an important note to starting marketing early is never to release crap. Only show screenshots and trailers if they actually communicate the awesomeness of your game. Players and press are usually hardly able to fill in the gaps of an unfinished product, and are incredibly fast at drawing negative conclusions. This does not make it impossible to show things early one, though: often small pieces of the game are already looking good, while the whole still needs a lot of work.



Create trailers
This one is quite obvious, of course: trailers are the most flashy way to show your game in action to people who have not bought it yet, so be sure to make fantastic trailers! This is an art in itself, and if you have no idea how to do it, then check for example this presentation on making trailers. And please don't think one or two trailers is enough: the more the merrier, and I think a dozen or so is a good opportunity to get the press to show your game to their audience again and again and again!

Send out review copies
Unless you make the most anticipated game in human history, press are not going to buy your game themselves. You need to give them the game, preferably a bit before launch so that they can have the review ready on launch day. The press list mentioned earlier helps to find a ton of press to give the game to. And don't be shy about this: in case of doubt, just send a key. These gifted games are not going to hurt your sales, unless you expect to sell only a couple of hundred copies, which usually means you are doing it wrong in the first place.



Send out preview copies
Giving press early access to your game is an extra chance at media attention. So when you feel the game is good enough, send out preview copies. Make sure the preview still gives an enjoyable representation of the final game and watch out to not give away too much too early if you still need to keep some news for later!

Note that if you are making a console game, you will have to find out which press actually has a console testkit to run your preview on. The bigger websites and magazines own these, but most of the smaller ones do not.

Engage your community
So far most of this post has been about press, but press is not the only place to market your game! In fact, once the ball is rolling, there are other spots where marketing might be much more efficient. Facebook, Twitter, a blog, a forum, a blog (maybe even one as technical as the one you are reading now): all of these are possibilities to get into contact with your fans. For word of mouth to work, it really helps to have a fanatical core audience that talks about your game all day, and engaging them is a good way to keep them interested. Give them something to talk about!

Social media are about replies
On Facebook and Twitter, a reply is worth much more than someone simply seeing your post. If they reply to you, their friends might also see this, causing your post to reach a much larger audience than simply your own followers. Keep this in mind and try to post in such a way that it triggers reactions! Good examples of this are polls, and asking questions in which repliers can show how incredibly funny/creative they are. This is easier than it may sound and requires only a little bit of creativity. For example, one of our most successful Facebook posts was a poll that my colleague Olivier put online when the new Muppets movie launched: “Which Muppet would you want to see in Awesomenauts?” Of course we are not going to put the Muppets into Awesomenauts, but it is a fun question to think about and reply to, and tons of people did!



Contact big Youtube channels
On Steam we can see our sales statistics per hour, allowing us to track closely what works and what does not. The one thing that we have seen causing our biggest sales boosts, is big Youtube channels featuring our games. Contact channels like the Yogscast and the Cynical Brit and get them to feature your game. There are tons of Youtube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and a list of the 100 biggest ones concerning games can be found here.

Launch on additional platforms
This is not really a marketing concept by itself, but it does work great for marketing. We have seen with both Swords & Soldiers and Awesomenauts that each platform the game is released on, is a new roll of the dice. A new chance at getting a breakthrough and selling tons of copies. The first platform does not necessarily sell the most, and one platform selling horribly does not mean the game could not be a success on another. Somehow reaching your audience starts all over again when you launch on a new platform.

Keep adding features after launch
It is possible to get hype going after a game's release, but this is much more difficult then before, since the news, reviews and previews have already been spent. Creating patches that add new content is a great way to bring back attention to your game. We have been doing this a lot with Awesomenauts and every time we patch with something awesome, some press will write about, despite the game having been released months before.

Have a marketing concept for every patch
It greatly helps if you think about how new features added after launch might actually improve your sales. Try to come up with a marketing concept for each big patch. A great example of this from Awesomenauts is Skølldir The Terribly Overweight Space Viking. We asked Simon from The Yogscast to voice this new character for Awesomenauts, and he did a great job on the voice. Not only did our existing user base love that we added a new character, but it also gave the Yogscast a good excuse to talk about the game a lot, and many other Youtubers mentioned him because of Simon's voice acting. Just this one video got over 750,000 views on Youtube, and that wasn't even the only video they did that day! This is an excellent example of how, with the right marketing concept behind it, content you add in a patch can generate massive media coverage!



Measure the success of your marketing by tracking metrics
It is not always possible to directly see whether a specific marketing thing has a real effect, but in many cases, it is possible to measure response in some way. For example, maybe one press release is featured on all big websites, while another is not. And once the game is live you can probably see your sales per day, and thus see directly whether something had an effect. Be sure to learn from what works and what does not!

Be super enthusiastic about your game
Obviously. Radiate enthusiasm whenever you speak or write about your game!

Be creative about your marketing
This marketing blogpost may mention tons of things to do, but a lot of them require genuine creativity to really make them work. Coming up with things that could be news about your game requires thinking out of the box, so real brainstorming is in order here. Do not just apply your creativity to your game, but also to your marketing! In next week's blogpost, I will give a bunch of examples of creative marketing shenanigans we did to promote Swords & Soldiers, Awesomenauts and Proun.



Talk about your game, all the time
Chris Hecker excellently explained this one: "Most indies come up with tons of reasons not to talk about their game every day, and I include myself in this criticism (no one will care about this, it's not big enough news, I should save up for a big splash, I don't want to rock the boat with an existing or potential partner, it takes so much time to write a blot post, I want to wait until I've got this part totally figured out, this is too detailed and technical, etc). As far as I can tell, this is basically always a mistake, and erring on the side of talking about the game and updating fans is always worth it. There is so much to talk about in making a game that you can always avoid certain sensitive topics for a while if need be, and still keep up regular updates. And fans eat this stuff up, they love the tiniest details..."

Get Steam/PSN/XBLA/Apple/etc to feature you
This is the number one, this is the motherload. Nothing can push your sales as much as a feature by the platform holder. A front page banner on their store is the biggest push there is. This is very much up to their own decision, though, but you can help this by regularly telling them you want to join in big sales and keeping in contact. If you want to be featured well after launch, you often have to do a serious discount, and this is almost always worth it. To improve your chances you can even make banners on the right resolutions for their store and just send those over, to make it easier for them to feature your games.

Get into bundles
Like the platform holders above, this is not really a marketing topic by itself, but it is a great way to get tons of extra exposure. Especially the Humble Indie Bundle drives crazy amounts of eyeballs towards your game, if you can get your game into it.

Do contests and give-aways with press
If your game has been out for a while already, it might be difficult to get press to still talk about it. However, a lot of websites like to do contests where they give away cool merchandise and free copies of your game. Offering contest prizes to media is a nice way to get a little bit of extra press coverage, even long after release.

MAKE A GAME THAT STANDS OUT
This may be the last point in my long list, but it is nevertheless the most important one. If there is nothing special about your game, then getting any kind of attention to it is going to be a lot more difficult. You need at least one thing that really stands out, preferably more. This can be anything: your game can be really original, it can be better/prettier than the competition, it can have some unique angle, or it can go back to a genre that has been abandoned for ages. For Awesomenauts, we had several angles: the crazy eighties cartoon vibe (complete with a real eighties hair metal theme song!), how it innovates on the MOBA/DOTA genre by going platformer, the really detailed and lively graphics, and the completely crazy characters (including a Russian laser jetpack monkey and a pimp frog). Having all of these unique features makes marketing a lot easier. It all starts with a game that is worth noticing!



This brings me to the end of this blogpost. There are tons of other things one can think off (did I already mention targeting live game streamers, or traditional non-gaming press?), but I think the list above is quite complete as it is.

After this incredibly long wall of text, you might wonder: “Which item is most important, what should I focus on?” I honestly don't know, and I don't think this is a question you should even ask in the first place. Marketing determines your sales for a large part, so you should spend a lot of time on it and do it really well. Just imagine the pain if you have spent years on making a great game, and then no one notices it because you forgot about marketing... If you can, do all of these things! And then think up some more, and do those too! (And be sure to let me know if you come up with something good. We always want to learn more about marketing!)

Follow your heart, not your wallet!

Last November my game Proun won a Dutch Game Award for Best Original Game Design. When I received the award, I grabbed the microphone and did a short speech, which Control Magazine then asked me to write that into a column. Which I did! The Dutch version is currently on their website and in the magazine, and here is the English translation.

The Dutch games industry is doing really well. More developers than ever before! But still, if you look for truly special Dutch games, you will find painfully few. Testament to this is that at the last Dutch Game Awards, two student games and a hobby game were nominated for Best Original Game Design. Where are the companies? So many developers, so few people who create their own concepts. It's as if we have all become entrepeneurs, and left our passion and creativity at the door.

I think this is because many Dutch developers are afraid to follow their heart. With all these talented people, there must be so many good ideas floating around! Yet almost everyone is doing work for hire. Within budget, finished on time, a certain income. Hardly any creative freedom and everyone will have forgotten your game two months later.

Of course, there are exceptions. Just think about Ibb & Obb, Dinner Date, Super Crate Box, Killzone (yes, that one as well!), and of course our own Awesomenauts. And don't get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with doing work for hire. It is an important part of our industry and it is a good thing that we Dutch are as good at it as we are. But it has been taken a step too far: most developers seem to only care about a steady income.

And of course, building your own concepts also means more risk, and will fail once in a while. But I am certain that more truly special games would be born in the Netherlands, and more international success would follow!

Because truly great games are made from the heart, not from the wallet!