Money Talks

When thinking about quitting my job to work on the football game, one of my concerns was money. I've got a mortage and bills to pay, and I need to buy food. So, where is the money going to come from?

To begin with it was going to come from savings. I worked out that I had enough to keep me going for at least a year. But after that, then what?

Kickstarter has been a huge success for a lot of games. Developers set a target for people to fund, and then it either gets funded or it doesn't. If it isn't funded then it's time to find another source of income, and if it does meet the target then the developers now have a budget to work with.

But choosing Kickstarter brings some problems to the table - the first being designing the campaign to get people to want to invest. Stretch goals are probably the easiest part to come up with - if the funding goes past the original target and hits the amount on one of the stretch goals, then what additional features will make it into the game? This can be achieved by breaking down the design of the game into its most basic form and offering that as the base target, and then having extra mechanics or modes being added for each stretch goal.

For a solo developer though, those stretch goals will mean the deadline will have to get pushed further out in order to meet them. Kind of like how Scam Star Citizen has got away with taking money for nearly 10 years and still hasn't delivered on most of what they said they were going to do. Even for a team, it is still likely to push the dates back.

Then there's reward tiers. If someone gives £10, what else do they get that someone who paid £5 does not? If it's some kind of merch, then there's now the additional work of designing it, then finding someone to create and distribute it. And if it's not merch, then what is it?

I couldn't really answer the questions that doing a Kickstarter raised for the football game, and it's even more challenging for Halloween Game. Football game had different game modes, but Halloween Game doesn't. Additional levels maybe, but that's extra work.

So what alternatives are there that don't mean extra work?

In addition to asking to "like, comment and subscribe", YouTubers these days that don't mention a skill they want to share will tell you about their Patreon. Rather than a one-off investment like Kickstarter, Patreon allows people to give a monthly donation.

Like stretch goals, there are usually additional perks to giving money for donations - exclusive videos or subscriber-only communities to chat in. How does that work for a game developer?

Having a community means having to moderate that community. The chances that someone who is willing to part with their money to be part of a small community is going to say something offensive is less likely than someone spewing out toxic garbage in a public comments section, but it doesn't mean it's going to happen, and ensuring those comments are swiftly removed detracts from making the game.

Exclusive videos or articles is cool if your job is to make videos or articles, but doing them as a game dev is time spent away from the whole making a game thing. And if these are just bonus bits, then where is the main content that people are donating for?

Do the donators get the game once it is released? It doesn't seem fair that someone subscribing for just one month gets the same as someone as someone who subscribed for half a year, so then there has to be a way to keep track of who gets what, which is a bunch of unneccessary admin.

And with the donations being monthly, there is no guarantee of consistency. With a large enough audience, one month might rake in just enough to pay the bills, but that number might drop off completely without warning. Although for that to happen, the audience has to be built up anyway so it's likely going to take a long time before the audience reaches the size needed for it to be sustainable.

I've already committed to writing one post a week, but doing another one that is behind a paywall goes against the whole reason I decided to do these posts in the first place - for transparency - and it also dries up the well of things to write about much quicker.

It doesn't really seem fair that people can make a living by writing or making videos about video games by using Patreon, but it isn't viable for the people who make those games. Both groups of people are content creators, but because making a game typically takes much longer than it does to produce a video or write an article, the donators are starved for content.

Then again, the people using Patreon are usually giving out most of their content for free anyway. They might get a few pennies thrown their way by ads, and will sometimes do sponsored videos, but most games tend not to release for free unless there is some way for players to spend money buying content.

Halloween Game does have a feature that would lend itself to microtransactions, but the entire package is going to be a one time purchase. And since there's a deadline of getting it done by October, I'd rather put effort into making it and then try and get an audience instead of getting an audience and then making it, because when it's finished the audience will probably have lost interest anyway.

So what other options are there?

Before approaching investors or traditional publishers, and giving away a cut of the revenue and potentially losing creative control, there is one more option for game developers - Early Access.

With Early Access, an in-development version of the game can be launched, typically at a price below what the game is intended to be sold at when it is finished, and the players can give feedback. These games are usually missing some mechanics, but are usually in a playable state.

Early Access is what I had planned for the football game since, similarly to splitting things up for a Kickstarter, game modes could be released one at a time, and they had a lot of replayability to tide people over until the next update. But it doesn't really work for something like Halloween Game.

There are different areas in Halloween Game that could be released one at a time, but splitting them up would break the experience, which means that Halloween Game's only form of revenue is going to come after it is finished. Instead of a steady stream, it's likely to come in bursts - a spike at release before tailing off, and then spikes when a couple of free updates planned for Christmas and Easter can give it a bit of a boost in the store. Bursts would also happen when launching on other platforms.

So that's most of the year with no income, and no guaranteed income at the end of it. There's also some additional costs that I'm going to have to bite the bullet on (I'll talk about one of those in a couple of weeks).

To recover the costs, and keep me going for another 8 months, Halloween Game needs to sell about 3,000 copies. Given that there's 20 million daily logged in users on Steam, 0.00015% would have to buy the game, which seems quite low but the question is how many of those users check the store? I'm one of those 20 million and I'll maybe check the store once a week, if I remember, and it's only to see what is part of the weekend sale. And according to this article, 3,000 copies is above the average, so making sure I sell as many copies as possible is key.

That means putting effort into marketing, and I've no idea how I'm going to do that. And I also have to get the price right. I have one in mind, but it's hard to just if that is right when the game is just a bunch of mostly empty levels right now.

From a design perspective, I'm conscious of the 2 hour refund policy on Steam. I want to have enough content that most players will go over this 2 hour mark so they can't refund it, which sounds scummy but it's less of a dick move than completing a game in less than 2 hours and then getting a full refund on it. Halloween Game is replayable to a certain extent, and the planned free updates will add more content, but making enough content is hard.

And if Halloween Game doesn't do well, then the amount of time I can spend making 3D Game drops. I'm trying to think of what a minium viable product would be so that it can be released in Early Access as soon as possible, but it's difficult to find the balance between not enough content that players aren't engaged and too much content that players won't come back when the game releases properly.

The only control I have over this right now is to stop writing and get back to making the game to make sure it's worth paying for, until next week where I'll share a super magical line of code.