If you were laid off from your AAA job, are thinking of starting an indie studio, and are struggling to decide what type of game to make, I wrote today’s blog post just for you. In last week’s blog I explained how different the indie game space is from the AAA space. Specifically, I hope you picked up how important the right type of game is to find success as an indie game developer. It is critical to understand that there are genres that just don’t sell on Steam.  In the previous post I explained that AAA dark-ride “going around” games are very very hard to sell at indie scale because th ..read more

8 Quick Tips That Could Save Your Studio’s Life It is so sad to see all the AAA layoffs. I am so sorry if you were affected.  If you need a slight bit of consolation, there was some research that the folks at Freakanomics did where they studied people who were thinking of quitting. The people who took the plunge and actually quit were much happier than the people who decided it was safer to just stick with the job they didn’t fully love.  The Upside of Quitting I know this probably isn’t your exact situation because you did not willingly leave, but you probably at some time sa ..read more

Starfield Launched on September 6th, 2023. It will arguably be one of the biggest launches this year. I have written about how I think Indies over-emphasize their release date and are overly cautious when it comes to launching along side a AAA release. In today’s blog I want to look at Chillquarium a game that did well despite launching on the SAME DAY as Starfield. I want to show you that it is not a fool’s errand to launch during a big release The tiny Chillquarium Release date: September 6, 2023 (DAY OF Starfield) Chillquarium is an adorably cute pixelart incremental game where you manage a ..read more

Intro In a previous blog post, I introduced you to the Discovery Queue (DQ). DQ is a very important widget which is how top tier games get lots of traffic (Read that post here.) What is the Discovery Queue? In short, if you drive a TON of traffic from outside of Steam (like youtube, twitter, tiktok, reddit), the algorithm takes notice, and says  “Whoa this kind of traffic correlates with games that sell a lot, so we should start treating this game as one that has potential.”  The Steam Algorithm if it were a human being Steam tells you why every game ends up in the DQ  right ..read more

Look, indie game development is hard. Really, really hard. We get 0 visibility and they are very hard to make. So I am making a plea to all indie game developers who want to do this full time, please please please make at least 1 horror game.  I know! I know! I have heard the excuses: “I don’t like horror movies, I don’t like horror games.” “I am an artist using my medium of games to unmask the inequities of the world. Horror is beneath me” “I am squeamish”  So why do I keep begging developers to make a horror game? Here are my reasons. #1 Steam players LOVE horror games In 2022 I ..read more

What is the Missing Middle? Other than he is my total hero, and he was born and he was raised in my hometown, I wanted to interview John Romero to try and solve the modern indie game development paradox.  The paradox goes like this… When John Romero was making games In the 1990s there was no digital distribution so you had to get a company like Softdisk to publish you and physically manufacture and distribute your games by mail! There was no Unity, Gamemaker, Godot, or Unreal so if you wanted to make a game you had to have a full-time person (in their case John Carmack) crafting your game ..read more

I think the biggest reason so many indie games “fail” is that teams enter into making huge, overly ambitious projects that take years to release before they are ready. Indie teams do not spend enough time making smaller (and less profitable) games first before transitioning to multi-year projects.  I know it seems like the modern games-industry ecosystem is unique and there is no one who can understand our plight, but indie game studios have faced similar problems for decades and they have been able to ship creative, profitable games under those conditions. It’s critical that we learn the ..read more

Indie game development is hard and at times it seems like nothing works or everything that used to work no longer does any more.  In today’s post I wanted to show off 3 games and 3 marketing campaigns that achieved huge successes in terms of wishlists or sales. Best of all, these are all games from small teams with modest track records.  I know, I know “survivorship bias.” But sometimes you just need to feel good about something working and someone who is doing well. Give yourself a treat and soak in the good news. Also, I just want to show these as examples of how developers are doi ..read more

Steam has been rolling out a new presentation trying to dispel some more myths that people keep spouting about visibility, wishlists, sales, and “the algorithm.” They actually posted the new presentation slides here which you can read and download here.  I heard the presentation and I wanted to provide some additional context (and my own editorial) to what they are posting. My editorializing and “reading between the lines” will be marked with (CZ NOTE) Read my other blog post about Valve’s Steam Next Fest Q&A where they also dispelled a bunch of other algorithm myths. Big shoutout to ..read more

IMPORTANT: In this post I talk about the mysteries of the Discovery Queue but I am trying to de-mystifying it. If you have a game that has been boosted by the Discovery Queue, I am interested in your story; Please complete a survey with the following button: Please complete this Discovery Queue survey How games get real visibility One of the negative side effects about my writing about amazing success is that developers who are just starting out can see games getting 100s of wishlists a day (that is not hyperbole) while they are stuck getting 1-3 per day. To a new developer working as hard as ..read more