General News - Stop Being an Indie Game Developer

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In an article on Gamasutra the author writes about the need for indie game developers to start running a business if they want to make any money of their game development effort.

Wake up! Releasing your game, the actual pressing the release-button? it's not going to make you any sales! Maybe, just maybe, 1 out of all the readers of this article will be creating a game that goes big.. but that would be asking for a lot.

I've seen developers pressing the Steam release button, some even make this a bit of a clumsy, live streaming event where they aren't really sure what the steps are to releasing the game on Steam, and that it then takes some time for the game to show up.

Pressing that button, is not magically gonna give you sales or even eyeballs on your game. It will be on the "new releases" list for MAYBE a few hours, if you're lucky, cause you'll be "promoted" to the second page in no time.

Same goes for releasing on iOS or Android. There is no big fanfare or huge event or cheerleaders clapping for you. The store entry for your game changes it's database field "released=no" to "released=yes" and that's it! There are no crowds lining up to buy the game that instant, nobody cares!

This is not a bitter representation of the process either, this is just really all it is. Funny thing is that I told a bunch of developers in the days/weeks leading up to their release: hey, the game won't sell much if you don't tell people about it (it might not even sell copies if you DO tell people about it). But most just ignored that, because "you never know".. .. nope, I do know.

So stop dreaming: releasing games isn't magical, and selling games isn't done by releasing it.​

 

Good games sell themselves, you just need to create some hype.

If you're releasing trash, then you need to learn some marketing skills.