Notes on a series of 3 micro-talks
- How to get client work and balance it against your own IP development (Christopher Langmuir of Anemone Hug Interactive)
- Anemone Hug has had 4x revenue groth every year (since 2015)
- 50% of all hours company-wide on internal IP development
- Can’t hide from the business stuff
- You’re going to need that stuff in place when you ship a game
- Having client work allows you to hire people with real employment agreements
- Before you start your studio
- Have at least a year of runway (you’ll need it)
- Get credit now while you’re still employed (you’ll need it)
- Get a mentor (you’ll need advice tailored to your context from someone who’s gone through the growing pains you’ll go through)
- Getting client work
- There’s no magic directory that you can go to to find clients
- It’s hard to get and it’s ahrd to do it
- Always be networking (“go wide”)
- Grow your team—provide solutions, not labor (don’t do single-contributor contracts)
- Provide something like ports, or systems, etc.
- Climb the ladder (“go narrow”)—first get work from orgs that are a little bit bigger than you, not AAA studios
- Get games-adjacent and non-games clients
- Not an obvious substitute to in-house development
- Get attribution for your studio—start the negotiation with getting attribution on par with the company hiring you
- Deliver on time & on budget
- Balancing against internal IP development
- Be wary of business burning you out creatively
- Don’t assume 50% work means you’ll get it done in twice the time… it’s more like 3x or more
- See Gwen Frey’s “3 Steps for Founding a Successful Indie Studio”
- Find people that can wear multiple hats (need them for client work)
- Protect your team from sales thrash—don’t expose your team to contracts you’re trying to get
- Hardware & IP partnerships as keys to running a studio without a surprise hit (Theresa Duringer of Temple Gates)
- Most indie games aren’t household names
- If you have something in between a total hit and a total flop, what do you do?
- Cannon Brawl averaged paying back 2 people about $70k/year for time invested
- Where to go from here?
- Ask yourself: who has too much money and not enough video games?
- Not VCs!
- Speculative hardware seems like a good idea (VR now, previously PS Vita, etc.)
- Developing for a new medium means no users!
- Never, never!
- …except if there’s money!
- When there’s an arms race between platform owners, you can actually get grants from the platforms or VC funding to make their platform look good
- Other companies like airlines, TV shows that want to expand into the new platform
- If you’ve put in the time to learn this new platform, it puts you in the running for winning contracts
- Try to keep these “research” projects under 6 months
- …except if there’s IP
- Nobody wants to risk their evergreen IP on a new platform
- Use uncontested platforms to get good IP
- This is how Temple Gates got a bunch of board game IP; they then used that as a stepping stone to more board games
- Your superpower as an indie studio is that you’re a team that works well on small projects
- Once you’ve found a genre, stick to it
- Gets you a reputation
- Lets you reuse tools
- “Who has too much money and not enough video games”
- Their answer was board gamers
- Take advantage of being nimble through lots of small projects (small risks)
- A more traditional idea of what it means to be indie (Tanya X Short of Kitfox Games; @tanyaxshort)
- Craftsmanship, lifestyle, and sustainability as the studio’s goal
- How to make each game better than the last (both in terms of the game itself and how they “feel”)
- Kickstarter
- Can’t sustain a studio on it
- But it does fit the strategy of being opportunistic
- Diversification as risk management (“take more shots”)
- Start with a core, build outward from there
- All their games are systems-driven RPG
- Multiplier: central community hub to move people between games
- One shared social media, not one per game
- Lets people “bond” with “the brand,” but also with the individuals
- Multiplier: self-publishing: there’s one place to find all their games (no other games competing with them)
- No distractions
- Funnel to become a superfan:
- Like/follow
- Newsletter
- Purchase
- Fanart
- Cosplay
- Revenue sources
- Steam
- Other PC store sales
- Console games
- Merchandising
- Grants
- etc.
