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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...

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! ^_^...

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 fro...

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...

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 ...

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 typ...

Designing a free to play game with microtransactions is a huge challenge. It is incredibly difficult to find the perfect balance between giving players a strong incentive to pay something while still making the free experience good enough that they keep playing. This challenge is crippling to the game itself. It is impossible to make a game as fun as it could be for both paying and non-paying players. At least one of those groups gets a game that is less fun. Game design is all about making a certain concept as much fun as possible. By tweaking things like difficulty, flow, reward systems, variation and complexity the game designer tries to create the best experience possible. This "best experience" is an invisible target: you can never know whether you have reached it, or whether tweaking some things would make the game slightly better. It is also something that differs depending on the target audience. Some players like a challenge, others like a more relaxed experience. So...

I have previously discussed pitching your games to publishers , but that was from a very specific perspective: if you already have plans for a game and are trying to make a publisher interested in that. Once a studio has gained some credibility the opposite can also happen: sometimes a publisher is looking for a developer for a game they want made, and they ask a bunch of game studios to pitch for that project. Around four years ago (early in development of Awesomenauts ) this happened to us twice, in both cases with well-known publishers looking for a fresh and different take on a famous franchise they owned. Today I would like to show the concept art our artists made for one of those, and explain how these kinds of pitches work. Note that things like this are almost always under NDA, so I cannot mention the name of the publisher or the franchise involved. An NDA ("Non-Disclosure Agreement") is a common type of contract used in the games industry in which two parties agree t...

Scrum is one of the most used project management methodologies in the games industry. I know many companies that use it, including we ourselves at Ronimo . Most companies don't use pure Scrum: they change parts to fit their needs. This is so common that there is even an official name for it: ScrumBut (as in: "We use Scrum, but ..."). Any Scrum purists I have met are strongly opposed to ScrumBut, but when talking to them I learned that their views are so rigid and stubborn that they don't understand that one of the core concepts of Scrum is fundamentally broken when used for game development. The purists I met simply deny the problem and come up with fancy crap like this: "ScrumButs are reasons why teams can�t take full advantage of Scrum to solve their problems and realize the full benefits of product development using Scrum. ... A ScrumBut retains the problem while modifying Scrum to make it invisible so that the dysfunction is no longer a thorn in the side of ...

I have been making schedules and work estimates at Ronimo for years now and although I won't claim that they are always correct, I have definitely learned a lot so far. One of the most important things I learned is what I like to refer to as The Maarten Principle , which I would like to discuss today. The Maarten Principle is named after Ronimo programmer Maarten who first coined this concept. An important part of planning is trying to figure out how long it is going to take to build something. Scrum extremists might have you believe that you don't need to do this since your game is always finished and just getting better over time, but in practice there are a lot of things that you just have to do to make the game releasable. Implementing console certification requirements is a good example of a task that cannot be skipped, but usually there is also a vision for the game that just requires a certain amount of features and assets to make it a good game. To have any idea how m...

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 Fran...

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...