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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 ...

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...

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 controll...