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.

Other developers on the ideal patching frequency

Last week I wrote a blogpost about how we think it is better to have a bigger patch once every one or two months than to have really small weekly patches. I was curious what other developers' experiences with this are, so I asked around for more opinions on this. Since patching on console and mobile is so different I looked for developers who have a game on Steam, which is the platform that enables regular patching best.

Someone also pointed me to the Valve talk where they explained the importance of communication around patches and how this helped them grow Team Fortress 2. This is an incredibly interesting talk, so be sure to check it out:



Here are the replies I got from fellow developers:

Jamie Cheng from Klei
developer of Don't Starve

"While I have lots of opinions, I think it comes down to "it depends". Personally I think many devs try to do it the Valve Way only to find they don't really, truly understand why it works for Valve."

Mark Morris from Introversion
developer of Prison Architect (currently in Early Access)

"I guess the update frequency is linked quite closely to the style of development. For us, we wanted to produce quite meaty chunks (the hope being that we would get press coverage for individual updates). A month gave us enough time to develop decent additions, but was at a frequency that would still be engaging for the players. I could see weekly working, but I think that each update would be a lot less polished and would have a much more iterative development feel about it."

Kimiko from Berserk Games
developer of Tabletop Simulator (currently in Early Access)

"I think it would also depend on the game. For us in Early Access, we are one of those who patch every week or 2 weeks. Our game is a different spectrum compared to ones with stories, weapons, & what not. So patching each week works well for us. We're only doing this for Early Access though or for "bigger" updates, we'll spread it out a bit, like when we add in Oculus Rift or some of our other bigger stretch goals. Once we are out of Early Access, then we'll spread our updates out every month or so."

"There's only two of us and we work well putting out our patches each week, because it's usually about tweaking things, fixing bugs and implementing a feature. TTS is more for people to create their own games, so for us, it's better to get things out to help our users out more. Once we feel TTS is at the point where the community has the tools they need to create their own games to their fullest abilities, then we'd go out of Early Access and we wouldn't need to update every week anymore. But my point is, is that we'll still update after Early Access, but we won't have that greater need to do it each week like we do now, because it's at that "completed" stage and we'd focus on the bigger picture of adding in the bigger things from our Kickstarter stretch goals, and find ways to improve it in general."

"I think we probably spoiled our community because of our weekly updates and who knows what the uproar will be if we switch to monthly, but it's probably something we'd do gradually and we'd let our community know since we're pretty transparent. [...] As long as we keep our community in the loop, that's most important."

Pete Angstadt from Turtle Sandbox
developer of Cannon Brawl (recently released out of Early Access)

"I think the regularity of update scheduling, whether it's a week or a month is probably the most important part. That and communicating the schedule to your audience. [...] Vlambeer has a weekly schedule which they communicate to players with their livestream. Other games I think have done 'in-game' countdown timers to the next patch, or at least had the latest patch notes visible in game. If we had to do it over again, I would have gone with a very regular monthly patching schedule and included patch notes in game."

Roel Ezendam from Ragesquid
developer of Action Henk (currently in Early Access)

"We recently switched from bi-weekly to monthly updates for our Early Access game Action Henk. The biggest improvement that we have noticed is that we have far less overhead that's being spent on finishing and releasing the update. With a short update cycle the game constantly needs to be in a stable state, which makes it harder to work on larger features or a big overhaul. It also just takes time to publish the update and check if everything is working properly. These bi-weekly updates basically put us in a constant state of crunch, whereas the monthly updates give us a bit more breathing room."

Erik Johnson from Arcen Games
developer of AI War: Fleet Command and The Last Federation

"We've found that patching often isn't a bad thing if supporting your core community members (in effort to expand your core community) is your aim. [...] Anyway, I agree that this isn't a solid way to market the game in the main, but that's where our larger, more content-focused updates and DLC releases come in. I've found you can't tap the well too many times no matter how you slice it (unless you're in that fortunate position to have a sizable audience just begging for more) as far as reaching out to new players -- but a consistent stream of smaller updates keeps the community you already have established active and growing. That said, we do find that even our most popular games occasionally hit periods of patch ennui for both our community and our development team. :)"

Josef Vorbeck from Chasing Carrots
developer of Cosmonautica (currently in Early Access)

"We update Cosmonautica in 2 week cycles. We even did this before Early Access, because it's our standard rhythm with two week sprints. And we think, that we can deliver enough in two weeks to make these updates meaningful. Also we think that it's crucial for an Early Access title, that the players see constant progress during the development. These days Early Access has a mediocre reputation, because some devs are leaving their games or decide their games are finished, even though more features were planned. With our update cycles and constant communication we're trying to earn the trust of the players. It just works for us, the response so far is really great. And of course it's important for us to get the valuable feedback from our players on a regular basis. But after our final release we might switch our update rhythm to aim for larger content updates which deliver their own story, as Joost stated."

While digging for opinions I also got a replay on Gamedev.net from a user named Orymus3 who wrote a really interesting remark on the term "patch" itself:

"I would avoid using the term 'patch'. To most people this suggests you are fixing bugs, which also infers you develop bugs. What you really want to put forward is the fact you're actively working in the game, and are releasing new content. 'Content Push', 'Release', etc. are all better terms to refer to what you're doing. This may not appear like much, but imagine that a player comes across a post about your game (it's the only thing he's ever seen) and he sees 'Patch'. He's likely to think: here's another incomplete Beta filled with bugs, I'll give this a pass."

Why patching too often is a bad idea / The magic of the Vault

Recently I have seen quite a few games that launched with the plan to patch really often, especially Early Access games. Most of those games patch once a week or once every two weeks. This may seem like a good idea: iterate quickly and show clearly to the user that you really do the best you can to make good on the promise of improving the game. For a time with Awesomenauts we also tried to patch as often as possible, but by now we think that is actually a bad idea.

The main reason for this is that the more often you patch, the smaller the patches are. Lots of small patches means lots of hardly noticeable changes to the game. Why would a user come back to your game because of 5 balance tweaks, 3 bug fixes and improved graphics for 2 weapons? Why would a regular player be exited about this? The changes done in weekly patches are just too small to make an impact.

Combining a bunch of those smaller patches together creates something much more noteworthy. In a bigger patch once every one or two months you could overhaul the graphics of all the weapons instead of just two, do dozens of balance tweaks and fix a ton of bugs. Simply combining all the changes from a bunch of micro-patches into one bigger patch turns it from a bunch of uninteresting patches to one exciting patch that really improves the game significantly.

An important note here is that I am NOT suggesting that development should be slowed down. On the contrary: keep improving and extending that game as much as you can, just like we try to do with Awesomenauts! I am only suggesting to group the changes and release them together.



The goal of doing a games-as-a-service model where you are constantly improving the game is not only to improve the game, but also to excite the players. Keep them playing longer, bring back players who stopped playing and get new players. To excite players you need stories. Not literal stories, but things that players can discuss with their friends. Bigger patches are much more interesting to talk about.

Having bigger patches also allows you to create new 'stories' without additional development. You can give a patch a name and a theme simply by looking at the changes and finding some similarities. This way you can create a new story for the patch itself and make it feel like a big event.

Since December we have been doing active marketing for each Awesomenauts patch. We announce a patch beforehand and slowly reveal information about it. We have made a special website for this: Voltar's Vault.



A couple of weeks before a patch comes we open the Vault. At that moment it contains only locks. Then in the weeks up to the patch we gradually release more info on what is going to be in it. Usually we first give a vague hint, then a couple of days later we announce what it really is. This pushes anticipation for our patches enormously. Our community creates a Vault topic on our forum for every patch and posts hundreds of pages of discussion there, as you can see in this topic for patch 2.7. The more interesting the features are and the more suggestive (but cryptic!) the hints are, the crazier it gets.



The result is that we can create crazy hype for every patch and get big peaks in our playerbase whenever we release a patch. The day a patch launches we have twice as many players as on a normal day. Sometimes we can even create significant sales bumps ourselves. Those are small compared to the bump of a Steam sale, but Steam sales require getting lucky with Valve to get a slot. We can create sales peaks through hyped patches ourselves.

By increasing the size of the patch and adding a name, theme, Vault website and hints we can create real stories, worthy of discussing with your friends. In some cases even worthy to be picked up by press: a couple of big news websites (including Destructoid) often write about our patches. This only works because there is enough time in between patches to actually hype them, and because patches are big enough to make this worthwhile.

Note that if you look at our patch notes you might get a different impression. We do many more patches than I describe here. The reason for this is that we distinguish between major patches and hotfixes. A hotfix is a small patch that only fixes some immediate issues. Obvious bugs or even crashes should not be left in the game for a month, so we don't bunch up fixes for game breaking issues. Hotfixes generally don't add anything new: they just fix a broken game experience.

We started bunching features into bigger patches after we heard about how Valve went the same road with Team Fortress 2. Apparently they did weekly patches for quite a while, sometimes doing even two patches a week. They claim to have much more success with the patches since they bunch them up and give them a name and a theme. I tried finding the article where I read this but couldn't find it. Regardless, have a look at Team Fortress 2's patching history and you will see that Valve creates big patches with some time between (plus apparently a lot of small tweaking patches).



So far this post has mostly been about marketing. There is of course also a practical side to patching and continuous development. When we want to do big changes or add complex new features to Awesomenauts we need time to balance and tweak those. A big portion of that is done through semi-public betas on Steam. When we add a new character we need several weeks of beta to get his balance right for launch. This workflow is not very compatible with weekly patches.

Also, focussing on having something new ready every week probably requires incredibly short and focussed development cycles. This might sound good but I doubt production can be this focussed permanently for a year or more without burning developers out. Doing weekly patches requires really good management to keep it going and likely adds constant pressure on the dev team.

In the end patches are also a form of marketing: they need to create stories. Not literal stories, but things that are worthwhile to talk about. Things that press can pick up on, things that players can discuss.

PS: here's the follow-up blogpost to this one: Other developers on the ideal patching frequency

Tips and tricks for a successful convention booth

Last week we were at Gamescom, showing Swords & Soldiers II and Awesomenauts to the public. Gamescom is the biggest game convention in the world, drawing in a whopping 400,000 people. We have had booths at several conventions in the past years so I figured it might be interesting to share some tips and tricks based on our experiences.

Our booth at Gamescom was part of the Indie Megabooth. The Indie Megabooth is an awesome initiative where a lot of indies hire a big area together and fill it with their games. Since the Indie Megabooth has been so successful in recent years it is now a real organisation with dedicated people to manage it all.

There are several advantages to being part of the Indie Megabooth. For starters it is quite affordable and they take care of a lot of the organisational complexities. More importantly it gives gamers who like indie games a clear spot to go to, hopefully making indie thrive more on a big convention where most booths are gigantonormous monsters from the big publishers. Another good reason to join the Indie Megabooth is that it is great to meet other indies and hang out with them. For example, we were next to Capybara Games, creators of Below, Super Time Force and Sword & Sworcery. Since I really look up to them it was inspirational for me to meet them and discuss game development.

As with all good things there are also some downsides to the Indie Megabooth, in this case mostly because it is so good. The Indie Megabooth is very popular among developers so they get way more requests for booth spots than they can handle. The result is that not everyone can get a booth. It also makes them not very flexible if you want a bigger booth.



To decorate our booth we used big cloth banners. This works really well: they weigh little and unlike posters they hardly tear or damage. You can just roll them up and bring them along. Banners are also a really cheap solution: the type we use costs only around €20 per banner (we got them at Drukwerkdeal.nl). The only downside to the banners we use is that they are slightly transparent, so if the surface behind the banner is coloured or uneven then you might see this through the banners.



The most important thing to us is that as many people as possible get to actually play our games. For this reason we put four screens in our booth: two for Swords & Soldiers 2 and two for Awesomenauts. Since both games support local multiplayer we could have up to ten people playing in our booth. This is quite a lot more than any of the other indie booths, where some could have only one player at a time since they brought just one computer for a single player game. Since players could also play single player on our screens we had between four and ten players at any given time. We rarely had unused computers for longer than a couple of minutes.



While we tried to cramp as many players as possible into our small booth, our friends at Two Tribes had a different approach that I also really liked. They had only two screens for their new game Rive but had a slick design for the booth. They put in nice chairs and beanbags, giving players a very relaxed playing experience. They clearly focussed more on giving each player the best possible experience than on reaching as many players as possible. (Rive is also a great game, by the way, playing incredibly smoothly.)



If audio is important to your game then be sure to bring along some big headphones. There is a lot of noise on game conventions, especially from big booths. We were near an AMD stage where people received free stuff if the crowd shouted "AMD" loudly. At other moments they just played really loud dance music. The Indie Megabooth crew even gave all the indie exhibitors earplugs because of this. One of the other exhibitors had even brought along a microphone to talk to his players without having to shout. When I talked to him it felt quite awkward that he answered me through a microphone while I was right in front of him so I wouldn't personally use this method. Still, I totally understand why he solved the sore-throat-from-talking-loudly-all-day problem this way.



The goal of going to a convention is of course marketing and business. We had a lot of good business meetings and we had many players at our booth, but unfortunately we didn't reach as much press this time as we had hoped. We asked around and most indie devs said the same thing: it was difficult to get a ton of meetings with press going this year. This might be because Gamescom doesn't show as much new stuff as E3, so it is a bit less interesting to the press.

A couple of developers did have a lot of press meetings. One had hired a PR agency to set up the press meetings. While our experiences with PR agencies have so far been very bad, this one had apparently done really well and set up a lot of interviews for them. Another dev said they had started to contact press four weeks in advance. We only started contacting press two weeks before the convention, so we might have also been too late for maximum reach. In general though most devs said they didn't meet as much press as they had hoped, so it seems like Gamescom might also just not be the best spot for this. Of all the conventions we have visited so far we had the most success at Eurogamer Expo a couple of years ago. I have no idea whether that was accidental or whether Eurogamer is actually better for reaching out to press.

From press we go to another exciting topic... utensils! It is a really good idea to bring along a bag of random utensils. My colleague Robin had brought along things like scissors, pins, several types of tape, screwdrivers and pens. Several of our neighbours borrowed them during the convention, so apparently not everyone brings such things along. You never know what might be wrong with your booth so it is good to pack these even if you don't expect to actually need them.



Convention visitors love button badges. They often stick them to their bag right away, hopefully triggering a tiny bit of extra word of mouth and definitely making sure the player remembers the game when he gets home. Buttons are really cheap to order in large batches so we just doled them out freely.



To my surprise our flyers were quite popular. I even saw quite a lot of visitors grab a flyer without playing the actual game.



If you are making a console game then be sure to ask the platform holder for permission to bring along testkits, or borrow special exhibition kits from them for your booth. Travelling with devkits is generally not allowed and you definitely don't want the risk of having to explain to Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony that a devkit was stolen from your luggage... We even got lucky and received two of these awesome exhibition stands from Nintendo. They look really professional and take up less space than a table with a television, so this was really cool.



Really important when exhibiting at a big convention is to never let your booth remain unattended. Always have someone there to look after your stuff. Theft happens a lot at these conventions. The worst time for this is during the night. We knew this beforehand so we brought small computers and carried them to the hotel every evening to be sure they were never left unattended at the booth. Several other indie devs apparently were not aware of this, resulting in two console testkits being stolen from the booths during the night. Never leave stealable stuff at your booth when you are not there, and don't trust convention security to keep your booth safe.

Another tip is to bring a couple of extra people and not have everyone at the booth all the time. Standing at the booth for five days is incredibly exhausting, especially with days like Gamescom's Saturday that last from 9:00 to 20:00. We were with three Ronimo devs and didn't realise until the last day that we could have let one person sleep late every day. This would have helped a lot since getting up at seven every morning and working such longs days is simply too tiresome. Maarten and Robin even had blisters on their feet after a couple of days...

The absolute highlight of being at Gamescom for me were the fans visiting our booth. We met one player who had played Awesomenauts for 2000 hours. Realising that we have made a game that quite a lot of players love so much is incredibly cool! Another player, r0estir0bbe, even brought us a bag of Swiss candy as a gift for the team. Thanks r0estir0bbe! ^_^

Wacky marketing thingies

In last week's blog post, I mentioned several times that doing marketing as an indie requires creativity. It is easy to buy advertisement space, but it is a lot more challenging to come up with things that are so interesting that press will write about them for free.

At Ronimo we greatly enjoy coming up with such weird marketing stuff, so here are some of the most fun/creative/weird things we have done so far, and also some that I did myself for Proun. Some only cost us time to do them, while others did require small amounts of money to produce. Note that not all of these actually worked as well as we hoped, but they are hopefully still fun to see! ^_^



Swords & Soldiers hot sauce! The game's story is all about barbeque sauce, so giving press special branded hot sauce seemed fitting. Of course having these made would be very expensive, so we simply bought standard hot sauce, removed the labels, and put our own stickers on them. All of this was done in a hotel in San Francisco, since importing large amounts of food is probably not allowed. I suppose the hotel still remembers Ronimo fondly for clogging the bathtub drain with soaked labels...



For Awesomenauts we had a little bit more budget for marketing, so we had these special bags of Awesomenuts made to hand out at Gamescom 2011. The naming pun is so good it was just impossible not to!



I still consider this one of our best marketing tricks. For players who got all the achievements in the WiiWare version of Swords & Soldiers, a special code was generated that they could e-mail to us. We promised the first people to do so a bag of Swords & Soldiers swag, which amongst other things included the special poster above (autographs of the entire team are on the back). We announced this before the game launched, and we actually saw quite a few people online discuss how fanatically they were going to play on launch day to win one of the prizes. The buzz was nice, and as a bonus it turned out that one of the winners was a game journalist, who posted the contents of what he won as a news article on a big WiiWare site.



A friendly marketeer was nice enough to help us with some press releases, and he came up with the term "Morefun (tm)", which is something we had apparently come up with in our game laboratory. It made no sense at all, but it was funny and quite a few websites picked up on it. This is a nice example of how something as small as the way you word a press release can already have an impact on how well your game is covered!



For Awesomenauts we had an intro made with a real theme song, for which this great singer was hired. The song turned out to be a great central piece for our marketing efforts. All our trailers end spectacularly on a high note by Jeffrey, and the cheesiness of it all got a lot of buzz going when we first announced Awesomenauts!



Since Sonic Picnic made such a remarkable soundtrack, we figured it would be a good idea to have it printed on vinyl as a gift for press and friends, and as a reward for competitions and such. Having a real vinyl copy of your soundtrack is indeed amazing, and everyone who receives it, seems to love it. Even those who don't even have a record player...



When we learned it was possible to order special shoes themed to your own game, we just couldn't not order them for Awesomenauts. These shoes were recently given away as the main prize in a competition that some website ran.



A lot cheaper to do were these custom Swords & Soldiers Move controllers, since we customised them ourselves. These were given away at a contest on IGN. We had hoped to reach front page with this, but in the end IGN didn't post it that big, so the actual reach of this was limited. Still, fun swag to make!



This is an example from a totally different category. Making more than one or two trailers require that you look at your game creatively. You need to think about how it can be something new and interesting in every video. For Proun I made a video in extreme slow-motion, which differs greatly from the speed of the real game, but is pretty mesmerizing to watch.



I did not choose Pay What You Want for Proun as a marketing gimmick, but it turned out to be a great trick for that indeed! As far as I know, Proun was at that point the biggest game to ever be Pay What You Want right from launch day. The Pay What You Want model was also still quite new to games at the time, so press picked up on this massively and it drove tons of extra attention and sympathy to the game.



Another example of something that was not intended as marketing, but turned out to be great for it: a couple of months after Proun's launch, I released the complete sales data for Proun, plus an analysis of what I thought it all meant. Revealing sales data like this is extremely rare in the games industry and was thus picked up as news by lots of sites. The result was a lot of extra sales, and I think in the end around 10% of the total sales of Proun happened because of that one blogpost.



The main reason De Blob managed to take off and get enough interest that THQ decided to buy the rights and make two console reimaginings, is that we put out entire version of the game online for free. Looking back, our version of De Blob can be considered to have been a prototype for the final version, which we released online as a marketing trick to increase interest in the game, and to see whether the concepts were good enough for a bigger game. Apparently sometimes just throwing your early stuff on forums can be a great marketing trick!


Most of these marketing ideas generated a decent amount of buzz for our games, but of course not all of them turned out successful. However, at the very least we ourselves greatly enjoyed each and every one of them! ^_^

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!)

The Epic Shoes Of Awesome Winning

I often talk to people about that good indie marketing requires doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get press to talk about your games. The good thing is that such "crazy stuff" usually is the same as just "awesome stuff". So even if a 'stunt' would fail and isn't written about that much, we still end up with awesome swag. I intend to some day write a couple of blogposts about marketing, but in the meanwhile I just can't wait to show the awesomeness I have for you today. I would like to present: The Shoes.

Yes, we have Awesomenauts shoes. Only one pair, but they are just insanely awesome, and custom-made by Kyozokicks. And here's the best part: we are giving them away to someone who likes Awesomenauts on Facebook or who follows RonimoGames on Twitter. So if you are not doing one of these things yet, then please do so now and get a chance at winning The Shoes Of Cool!

These shoes are even cooler than the custom Swords & Soldiers Move controllers we made two years ago. I realize I am saying a lot of "cool" and "awesome" and such here, but I just really love this kind of marketing! ^_^









Yellow shoelaces! YELLOW SHOELACES!