The indie developers viewpoint: how to succeed
At the GDC Europe conference in Cologne, the founders of the indie game studio Simogo shared their secret of success: you just have to do what you like and not listen to anyone. The position of indie developers (and the two founders at the same time are the only employees of the company), on the one hand, commands respect, and on the other - makes them doubt their words.
Direct text guys said that trying to make money on the game is bad, that cross-promotion is below their value, and instead of analyzing the metrics, it’s better to start creating a new product.
Simon Flesser and Magnus "Gordon" Gardeback (Magnus 'Gordon' Gardeback) are already known in the App Store thanks to two successful products Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit . By the way, the first game has 170 thousand purchases, the second - 80 thousand.
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Note that Beat Sneak Bandit is distributed at a price of $ 2.99, and moreover, Flesser believes that they are a bad bargain: the game turned out to be more “niche” than they expected, which means that the price tag could be wound up.
And the same Flesser declares that, nevertheless, the success of a product is not determined by the amount of money earned by it, but by the long life cycle. Those. in other words, the longer the players are pleased with your game, the cooler it is. Simogo basically does not release updates and does not make sequels: "We did not do Bumpy Road 2, although she probably would have easily earned a lot of money."
Indie developers prefer to spend their time on creating new projects, which they are sure should noticeably differ from the mainstream. And as an example, they give their first project Kosmo Spin , a typical kazualka, which was sold at a price of 99 cents, was regularly updated and did not stand out among the rest. According to Flesser, this game was “a fart in space”.
But Beat Sneak Bandit is a special game. At the heart of the gameplay is musicality, to play without sound is basically impossible. And, despite the fact that I had to dig deeper into the code, because Unity does not support the FMOD API, the result of Simogo was satisfied.
By the way, they release games only on iOS - porting to Android is also considered a waste of time.
Their main message is to do what you like and do not listen to what the others say. This advice is respectful, but it’s worth considering that it’s true that Simogo doesn’t use cross-promo, advertising or analytics and generally considers any sales planning disrespectful to its users. If money is not so important, then why not distribute your products for free at all? And how many indie developers can afford not to bathe about money?
Direct text guys said that trying to make money on the game is bad, that cross-promotion is below their value, and instead of analyzing the metrics, it’s better to start creating a new product.
Simon Flesser and Magnus "Gordon" Gardeback (Magnus 'Gordon' Gardeback) are already known in the App Store thanks to two successful products Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit . By the way, the first game has 170 thousand purchases, the second - 80 thousand.
')
Note that Beat Sneak Bandit is distributed at a price of $ 2.99, and moreover, Flesser believes that they are a bad bargain: the game turned out to be more “niche” than they expected, which means that the price tag could be wound up.
And the same Flesser declares that, nevertheless, the success of a product is not determined by the amount of money earned by it, but by the long life cycle. Those. in other words, the longer the players are pleased with your game, the cooler it is. Simogo basically does not release updates and does not make sequels: "We did not do Bumpy Road 2, although she probably would have easily earned a lot of money."
Indie developers prefer to spend their time on creating new projects, which they are sure should noticeably differ from the mainstream. And as an example, they give their first project Kosmo Spin , a typical kazualka, which was sold at a price of 99 cents, was regularly updated and did not stand out among the rest. According to Flesser, this game was “a fart in space”.
But Beat Sneak Bandit is a special game. At the heart of the gameplay is musicality, to play without sound is basically impossible. And, despite the fact that I had to dig deeper into the code, because Unity does not support the FMOD API, the result of Simogo was satisfied.
By the way, they release games only on iOS - porting to Android is also considered a waste of time.
Their main message is to do what you like and do not listen to what the others say. This advice is respectful, but it’s worth considering that it’s true that Simogo doesn’t use cross-promo, advertising or analytics and generally considers any sales planning disrespectful to its users. If money is not so important, then why not distribute your products for free at all? And how many indie developers can afford not to bathe about money?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/149572/
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