This content provides crucial advice for indie game developers on how to navigate the process of signing with a publisher, emphasizing the importance of due diligence, realistic expectations, and understanding the value a publisher should provide beyond the basics.
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I get people coming to me all the time pitching their next game and when I say
to them, why aren't you just working with that label again, they say "because they
did nothing." Are you looking for an indie game publisher? Have you been approached
by an indie game publisher, marketing company, or agency? Before you move
forward with anything, please watch this video! We had the pleasure of speaking
with one of the brightest minds in indie game publishing marketing at this year's
PAX West. Mike Rose's game dev journey started when he was a writer for game
sites like Gamasutra, Pocket Gamer and Kotaku. After a decade of being a
journalist he joined the indie game publisher TinyBuild where he launched
titles like Party Hard and Punch Club. Today
he's the director of the publishing label No More Robots.
Mike's also an accomplished speaker having done multiple GDC talks focused
on indie game marketing and the indie game industry. In this video we talked to
Mike about how he started his publishing label No More Robots, what he looks for
when choosing to publish a game, and what devs should watch out for when signing
with the publisher. We are Ask Gamedev and this is how to spot a bad indie game
publisher (and more advice from Mike Rose). Welcome back! We make videos on
how to elevate your game development and inspire others. If after watching this
video you want to continue the game dev conversation check out the video
description for a link to our Discord server. My name is Mike Rose. I am the
director our publishing label No More Robots and we publish games like
Descender, Not Tonight, Hypnospace outlaw, Family Man,
Nowhere Profit, whole bunch of games. I joined TinyBuild at the end of 2014. I'd originally been a game
journalist before then. I had been at GamaSutra and Kotaku and while I was
there I was just really interested in how games sold and the reasons why game
sold. I think that's part the reason why TinyBuild picked me up. And so while I
was at TinyBuild I very quickly learned what works and what doesn't to make games
sell. And so yeah then from there I sort of
went off in my own direction and that is what No More Robots is. No More Robots - the
name came from me talking to a lot of developers about their... their working
with indie publishers. There are a lot of indie publishers. And when I say to them
why aren't you just working with that label again they say "because they did
nothing." Like they they did the bare minimum, and then they like took 30%
off us. Oh my god we've got a publisher! We're gonna sell loads now! And then
publisher... the reality of it, is the publisher doesn't do much, and then they
don't make much money, and then they have to give part of that not much money to the
publisher. A lot of developers will just say like they didn't feel like it was
very personal at all. They felt like they were just added to the list of games this
publisher was putting out. It's horrible. There's plenty I could name who are
still doing amazing work you know people like Finji back there. And Devolver
and... and Team17 and Raw Fury. There's some great ones. The whole point of the
name No More Robots is to show that when people are working with us, they're
working with us. Like it's very personal. If anything, I get too much in their
space, and I'm sort of helping out with design stuff and I'm helping with
community building... and we do a lot. I think a big thing for me that has really
helped in selling game is having games that are doing something different.
People like different and weird. People like funny as well.
So you'll see in a lot of games we do at No More Robots now... they're all... they're
all very easy to describe because they're just different from everything
else. You know we've got like Hypnospace Outlaw - this 90's internet
simulator. You say "nineties internet simulator" a lot of people now know which
game they're talking about. We've got this Downhill mountain biking game which
isn't weird but it's different. There are no other downhill mountain biking games
right now. We've got an anti-brexit simulator, which you know like... again... like
what other game is there? And it's weird and it's funny... and that's pretty much
like the basis of my whole publishing label. It's all the games we bring on are
just weird in some way and make people kind of take note of them. Just trying to
let go and share, you know, sort of share the workload. Of all the people I'm
terrible for that. I am... I'm a control freak you know. I need to just like have
everything close to my chest. I need to be doing everything. The first year of
No More Robots it was me. It was just one person doing everything. And after about
a year I finally like gave up and admitted that maybe I needed some help
with this stuff. How are you... how are you trying to handle all the social media,
and the community building while also making your game it can be? Very
difficult to sort of let go of that. And I've worked with a couple of devs, you
know, who you can tell that they're very they're not sure about working with
someone else because it's it's their baby. You know this is their game and
they want to control everything and they kind of hate the idea of giving a little
piece of it someone else to help. As long as you can find the right partner for it,
it's definitely a thing worth considering. I've seen... I've seen people
looking for publishers and then in the end going "I can't do it. I can't do it.
I've got a I got to do this myself because I'm too much of a control freak."
and then their games come out, and it's suffered because they didn't have the
expertise to be selling it, or they just didn't have the time to be selling it.
You just need to be able to admit to yourself like... I'm already handling the
game, it's too much for me to handle, and, and kind of hand the reins over in
selling the game a little bit. You getting 70% of a large number... it's
better than you getting a hundred percent of a very small number you know.
So you need to be able to admit to yourself... do I need help with this? Any
developer working with a publisher should have extremely high expectations
because you're literally giving them probably a decent chunk, you know, of your
revenue. Sometimes I see developers saying like "oh well I hope that they'll
handle like social media, and some community building. I hope they'll put
out some press releases and some trailer stuff. That's the least they should
be doing! That like... that... that's.... that's the baseline! Like if a publisher is
saying like "oh you know we'll... we'll handle this and this." That seems a bit
weird to me. They should be explaining the things they're going to be doing on
top of that. We do a ton of stuff with Discord, running the public betas through
Discord, kind of pulling in Steam wishlists and stuff like that. We do a lot of
stuff working directly with the platforms, you know, kind of going to
Xbox and Playstation, Nintendo, and Steam - taking the games directly to those people
and building the relationships, making sure that when a developer's game comes
out, the day it comes out, those platforms care. That's really important because
then they're just more inclined to shout about it and to spread the word which is
obviously going to lead to more sales. I think a big thing when a developer is
talking to a publisher, is that they should be asking, when the... when the
publisher says "yeah we'll put out the press release", the developers should be
following up with "okay but what else are you going to do?", because every other
publisher is going to be doing that as well. So yeah, I feel like maybe a lot
more developers need to understand: don't just sign with a publisher because they
say "yes, we'll take you." Again, a big thing that a lot of developers don't do is
they don't go and talk to the developers who have already worked with that
publisher. I'm happy to give out the email addresses of all of the devs we've
worked with because I know I know they are gonna sing my praises, you know, because I...
because of the way I work with them. But it's when... it's when a publisher doesn't
want to do that, and they don't want to give out the developers email addresses...
that's when alarm bells start ringing. You want to find the skeletons really, you
know, before you sign that contract. Because once you sign, you
yeah... you've got a problem at that point. So yeah that's the main thing the
developers should be doing when they are talking to a publisher, basically, I think
the big thing is knowing when is the right time to start talking to a
publisher. And it's tricky because it completely depends. I've seen games where
people have made a game over a weekend and then they've signed with a publisher,
because you can already see what the game is. You can already see it's fun.
Nowhere Profit - that guy Martin, he's been making the game for four years when
he... when he came to talk to me. Whereas you know, like with the Descenders devs,
they'd been making it for about six months. I think it's hard to quantify but
it's about, just knowing like you... you want to be able to maybe just try and
show it to some friends, and it not feel like weird and awkward (like you're
having to over explain the game and stuff like that). It should be that when
you are showing it to someone, you can just like show them a video you know, and they
just go "I get it. I understand what this is." You know with every game I've got,
like with... with Not Tonight you know our anti-brexit game... I was at a show,
the guy came up to me and just had a laptop said "can I show you something?" He
popped it down next to me - in about five minutes into it I'd already decided.
I'd already decided it. Like I'm having... this is mine now. It should be obvious
when you're at the point when you're ready to show really. You should feel
confident. That's one thing: if you... if you don't feel 100% confident,
why don't you? What is it about it? Is it that there's some weird... like you know
you're not happy with the art? You're not happy with this or that?
From early on into making your game, think about localization. If you localize
your game properly, and you have it kind of translated in simplified Chinese and
maybe French and maybe German you can end up with like say you know... like
another third of sales, you know - on top of what you would get if you didn't
localize your game. A big problem I see is the developers wait until about three
months from launch, and then think "oh man I need to translate
my game" and then they just can't. They've not set their game up in a good way. All
the text is like baked into the game, or it can't be pulled out properly. So from
the early on into your game, especially if you have a lot of words in your game,
think about "how am I going to translate this? Am I going to make it so that it's
all... it can be exported into a Google sheet, so I can just give this Google
sheet to translators, who can just fill out the Chinese translation and I
can import it straight back in?" And it's not even just the translation as well.
Sometimes there's really obvious things in... in certain games where you get to what
,you know, you get to try and translate it, and you're like "how on Earth is this
gonna work Chinese?" You know like, it's just stuff like that. It's a really.. so it's a
really really boring answer but it's genuinely like one of the biggest things
that can... can lead to really increase sales when your games comes out. Hmmm let me
think. I guess, a big thing right now, that is on my mind a lot, is that it's getting
harder and harder to sell video games. I did an analysis a
year and a half ago for GDC, where I like worked out that the average dev releasing
a game on Steam is probably making about $40k in the first year. I have been
looking at numbers again recently and it's probably half that now. Which you
know, if you imagine, even for one person you know, in the first year $20k wouldn't be
much. If you've got a dev team of three people, it's unsustainable. I don't really
know like to say "so you should be doing this to solve this" - it's... it's... it's a bit
trickier than that. If you're thinking like "oh I'm gonna spend a quarter of a
million dollars making my first game", you probably shouldn't do that, because
you're probably gonna make about a tenth of that back. If new devs are coming in, they
should be probably thinking about smaller projects just to get in first, you know.
Sort of a six-month long project with a small team. Make the smaller games, get
them up on Steam, learn how everything works, then once you've actually got that
knowledge, you can go make the big one. And hopefully you'd make more money
there, because you've already learned all the things not to do. But if you... if you
put everything into your first game, spend all of your savings... re-mortgage
your house... all that... all the crazy things that developers do, and then you end up
making like about a tenth of your money back... that's bad news. Yeah, so that's probably
the main thing that I tell a lot of people now. Really, really think! Because I
hate to tell you... I hate to tell any new dev... but you... you're probably not gonna
become a millionaire. So.... you really need to be thinking about this stuff really.
Thanks again to Mike and No More Robots! You can follow Mike at @RaveofRavendale
on Twitter, and learn more about Descenders, Not Tonight, Knowwhere
Prophet, Hypnospace Outlaw, and more at nomorerobots.io. For more Ask Gamedev
check out this list of seven common marketing mistakes that indie devs make,
or this playlist of our game development interviews!
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