Categories
Games

Nintendo Reveals Details, Pictures, and Official Name of NX

Nintendo hasn’t given away too many details about their upcoming console known as NX. Rumors abound, with speculation based on patent filings, and recently a few leaks about the NX controller turned out to be hoaxes.

Many expected Nintendo to make a formal announcement at E3 this June, but the company surprised fans with not only the announcement but the release of their new console through the What’s New section of Nintendo.com:

It is with great excitement that we introduce to you the NintendOne4, our most advanced home entertainment console yet!

In the past our systems have been designed around the kinds of games our designers would like to create, and we usually kept those systems a secret until we felt we accomplished what we wanted it to do. Sometimes, however, what we create isn’t always well received by our customers.

They were clearly referring to the disappointing reception of the Wii U, of which they recently denied rumors that they had stopped production on it. Many of their target customers were never clear on what the Wii U was and why they should have bought one.

The NintendOne4 surprised many analysts who expected yet another console that was more unique than what competitors were offering.

Instead, Nintendo has opted to put out a system that seems more inline with what a follow-up to an Xbox One or PS4 would look like.

We’ve designed this new system based on the enthusiastic feedback of our most passionate fans, and we think you’ll love the gaming experiences this new system allows for.

NintendoOne4

Nintendo of America’s Reggie Fils-Aimé was quoted as saying, “We’ve always been interested in what the fans want”, and that the company was moving in a completely different direction due to the needs and wants of a devoted following.

“We knew we had passionate fans, but there was this very small, core group of people we discovered who were super passionate about gaming. They’re kind of the gatekeepers of games in terms of their influence, and in fact, once we started hearing what they had to say, we realized that NX had to be completely different from what we were originally trying to do.”

When pressed about this group of fans and their influence, Fils-Aimé referred vaguely to a very small group involved in social media who coalesce around “some hashtag or another.” They’re Nintendo’s essentially free focus group, and they have been instrumental in the company making the strategic moves they did.

“We think it’s amazing that there is this tiny community of very vocal fans who can tell you exactly what they’re thinking and feeling at the drop of a hat. And we want them to know that Nintendo is listening to every word they say and taking it very seriously.”

He quickly changed the subject to speak excitedly about the NintendOne4’s launch titles.

“There are an unprecedented number of innovative and enjoyable games people can play right now, which is unheard of for a new console launch.”

Almost 300 games are available, and some surprising items in the list include Halo 5: Guardians, which was originally a Microsoft-exclusive title.

“Yes, we have some very interesting partnerships,” said Fils-Aimé, while gesturing with wagging fingers in the air.

Categories
Marketing/Business

My Blog Post on Running an Indie Business en Espanol

Javier Fernández recently reached out to me about translating my post Indie Developers Have Always Needed to Treat Their Businesses Like Businesses into Spanish.

And so now over at Zehn Games you can read Los indies siempre han tenido que tratar su negocio como lo que es: un negocio, and it’s available to a wider audience.

I don’t speak Spanish, but I liked that he even translated the whiteboard image. B-)

I’m going to go drink my jugo de naranja now.

Categories
Marketing/Business

We Should Pay Attention to Indie Game Development Failures

GDC 2016 is over, and it featured talks by successful game developers sharing what they know.

It’s always tempting to find out what successful people do. The hope is that we can glean some insight into what WE specifically can do to be successful as well.

But what if we’re wrong? What if what they think they did to be successful and what we think they did to be successful is exactly what everyone else who failed did as well?

How would you know?

Most failures aren’t around anymore to share their story.

And so we risk having survivorship bias. We ignore the information we can’t see in favor of the information we can see, and then we make conclusions based on that part of the puzzle.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell all dropped out of college and built huge, world-impacting businesses. So does that mean you should drop out of college and start a business?

Before you make that decision, you should probably ask all the college dropouts who didn’t create huge businesses despite trying. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find them, and you’re unlikely to see read a book or even a blog post about their experiences.

Or if you talk to a financial guru who says, “Look at these stock picks I have! If you look at them, they’ve beaten the market by 12% for the last five years!” What this guru isn’t saying is, “And during those five years, I’ve been removing the poorly-performing picks I’ve also made, which would skew the results negatively if you saw them.”

Or when people talk about music today being terrible compared to music of the past. If you turn on the Oldies station, you’ll hear great music from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and now the 80s and 90s (oh, geez, I’m old), but you won’t hear all of the terrible stuff that was put out during that same period of time.

Why? Because it was terrible, so only the best music survives for the future to love.

The book Good to Great by Jim Collins aimed to find out what were the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to become consistently successful over a 15 year period.

Since the book was published in 2001, many of the companies highlighted got into trouble. Maybe they were great once, but clearly the “universal distinguishing characteristics” weren’t so universal.

So what happened here?

Statistics, basically.

I Need Coins

I’m currently watching some videos on Machine Learning offered by Cal Tech professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa, and in one of the early lectures he mentions something fascinating.

Let’s say you flip a coin 10 times in a row. What are the odds you’ll get heads each time?

That’s easy math to calculate: 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/1024

So, somewhat unlikely. Roughly 0.1% of the time, you’ll get all heads.

But if you flipped 1,000 coins 10 times each, what are the odds that at least one of the coins will produce heads for all 10 flips?

The answer: roughly 62% of the time.

Wow, those are actually pretty decent odds!

But it doesn’t say much about that one coin, does it? There are no insights into the coin’s design you can make. There is nothing about the way it was minted that is unique. All of the coins had a chance of flipping all heads, and this one just happened to be the one to do it.

And yet a lot of business success books are written this way. They look at successful businesses in hindsight, and then the authors try to identify the qualities of those lucky coins that resulted in them being so great, and they often ignore the rest which might be built and run similarly.

That isn’t to say that I think business success is a 50/50 flip of a coin. And to be clear, I think it does help to identify strong successes and see what we can learn from them.

But if we ignore the failures, then we don’t know if what we see successful companies doing is really so different and insightful.

From You Are Not So Smart:

Also, keep in mind that those who fail rarely get paid for advice on how not to fail, which is too bad because despite how it may seem, success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.

I gave a talk at Startup City Des Moines in 2014 about lessons learned having failed with running my own indie game development business full-time. I was surprised when one of my friends who worked there kept thanking me. She said that it’s very rare for anyone who has failed to share their experience, which is too bad because it would be so helpful if more did.

So if you failed, don’t shy away or be embarrassed about it. Let us know about it. Tell us what you learned.

Provide more data so that survivorship bias isn’t as easy for us to succumb to.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business

Should You Work with a Publisher or Self-Publish? #NotGDC

Adam Saltsman is the creator of Canabalt and founder of Finji, which is behind the Overland screenshots you may have seen him post on Twitter.

He’ll be giving a talk today at GDC called “Deciding What to Make: A Greenlight Process for Commercial Indies”.

People who attend will learn how to improve their ability to decide what game to make.

If you think success in indie game development is purely random, that game development is like throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks, it sounds like this talk will share some ideas to be more deliberate about it.

For those of us at #NotGDC and unable to attend, we’ll have to wait until his talk is in the GDC Vault and/or for him to upload the slides somewhere later.

But for now, you can read his blog post Publishers and You, a stream-of-conscious indie game development business lesson you can get without shelling out the money for a plane ticket or hotel room or conference pass.

Saltsman’s article gave some good advice about generally working with others, publisher or not:

So: what are your needs, and how can you address them? What parts do you want to work on? What parts DON’T you want to work on? If you can figure this stuff out, you will be in much, much better shape when you start talking to anyone anywhere about helping you ship.

If you don’t want to “do marketing”, that’s fine, but someone better do it because it’s key. And if you follow Seth Godin, you know that your game IS part of the marketing, so whoever does the marketing better be working with you from the start.

I want to focus on the part where he talks about the importance of marketing for self-publishing indies:

I’ve seen other devs call this the “non-game-dev” part of a project, and that’s sort of true but sort of misleading too, and on commercial projects i think it’s counter-productive. If you’re making a commercial game, helping the game find its audience is a part of making it. Sorry.

I’ve written before that indie developers have always needed to treat their businesses like businesses, partly in response to how many people think that running a game development business is just making games and hoping people buy what you made after the fact.

If that’s your business strategy, then yeah, your success in the industry is effectively random, and your goal is to put out as many games as possible before you run out of money.

It’s kind of like a less deliberate version of what Dan Cook wrote about in his article Minimum Sustainable Success.

When Cook wrote about a basic budget an indie might create, he said:

These numbers should look scary. They suggest that the vast majority of indie developers are ripe for financial ruin and are operating primarily on hope instead of any rational financial strategy. I think that’s accurate.

Oof.

But he also concludes “The big lesson is that your exposure to luck is something you can manage.” I would highly recommend reading his article for more details, but one thing he mentions is reducing the risk of any on game release with relatively cheap prototypes to nail the game design down before spending a lot of money on development.

Some people specialize in helping you identify what the market wants. You could become one of those people, or you could pay someone to do it for you, and it’s up to you as a developer to determine which is appropriate for your business. Saltsman argues that to make that determination, look at the needs of your project and not to blanket best practices or a vague sense that you need marketing.

Categories
Marketing/Business

A Press Release Template for Indie Game Developers #NotGDC

Since so many of us are instead attending the cheaper and easier to get to #NotGDC, I thought we should make a point of sharing our own advice with each other.

Write a blog post or create a video to share a quick tip. Tell us about a cool resource you found. Whatever you do, share it by using the #NotGDC hashtag.

While many indies know that marketing is important, they may feel uncomfortable with it, don’t understand how to go about doing it, or feel that with their small budgets that marketing isn’t an option. So, what can they do?

Emmy Jonassen, the Indie Game Girl, created her site as a resource to help indie game developers “find the adoring fanbases your winning game deserves.”

She provides budget-friendly tips and tricks for indies using over a decade of experience in marketing, and recently tweeted about her press release template for indies:

If you’ve never written a press release before, finding a press release template is a great place to start. Just like schematics instruct engineers, a good press release template will instruct you to execute a solid press release.

It lists 8 major elements, including the headline, game description, and contact info.

She provides a number of other resources, such as the perfect landing page for the indie developer and her presentation at Konsoll 2013 on Marketing Indie Games on a $0 Budget.

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Building an Enduring Game Development Business #NotGDC

Since so many of us are instead attending the cheaper and easier to get to #NotGDC, I thought we should make a point of sharing our own advice with each other.

Write a blog post or create a video to share a quick tip. Tell us about a cool resource you found. Whatever you do, share it by using the #NotGDC hashtag.

Ernest Adams, author and game design consultant, recently shared an answer he gave to the question “What does it take to build an attractive business in the video gaming space that endures for many years?” on Quora.

Vision, flexibility, and ruthlessness.

Go read his full answer at the link above, in which he talks about what he saw happening at EA before it became the 800-pound gorilla of the game industry.

He contrasts EA with Zynga. When I attended GDC in 2011, I remember noticing all of the billboards advertising games, which isn’t something I was used to seeing in the Midwest. I remember seeing ads for Zynga and its games, and I imagined the amount of money it would take to do so. Zynga had an IPO that summer, and it was huge.

Soon, however, it fell hard. Zynga’s been cutting its workforce and lowering expectations, and last month it announced it was selling its very expensive headquarters in San Francisco.

Adams argues that Zynga was unable or unwilling to adapt to the market.

There is quite a bit written about what Zynga did wrong, but it didn’t really have much to fall back on when people started using Facebook on their phones more than their desktop environments.

Which is interesting because one of Zynga’s supposed reasons for success was that it applied “ghetto testing” to get market data that informed decisions about everything from what game mechanics to add to what virtual items to sell.

It rode one huge wave to success, and now it’s floundering.

EA, on the other hand, has many failures, but only because it sees many potential waves and tries to make sure it is in a position to ride them. If one wave crashes, it abandons it, and it can afford to because of all of the other waves it is successfully riding.

That adaptability is amazing when you think about how fast the industry changes and how many years it takes EA to publish a single game.

Now, as an indie game developer, EA might seem to be the exact opposite of what you want to model, but you don’t have to follow its business strategy. You might, however, learn a thing or two about making your indie game development business sustainable by learning from one of the largest successes in the industry.

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Are You Also at #NotGDC? Let’s Share Some Advice!

I knew this week was going to be both fun and frustrating because so many people on Twitter will be posting about the 30th annual Game Developers Conference, but I didn’t realize how many people would be posting about it the weekend prior.

Kyle Pulver wins with the best tweet so far:

GDC is exciting, but for many, it’s also pretty expensive to attend regularly if at all. I attended once in 2011 and since then haven’t made my way back yet.

But since so many of us are instead attending the cheaper and easier to get to #NotGDC, I thought we should make a point of sharing our own advice with each other.

Let’s talk game development. What would you tell your younger self about the realities of indie games if you could? How do you create that special effect you showed off recently? Where do you find your motivation? Where do you stand on the subject of curly braces in your code or screen shake in your visuals?

Go ahead and write a blog post, create a video, or host a podcast. It doesn’t have to be long, or perfect, or anything other than you sharing the nuggets of wisdom you’ve earned the hard way. Alternatively, if you found a cool link to someone else sharing the behind-the-scenes of their efforts, feel free to tell us about it, too.

Whatever you decide to do, share it by using the #NotGDC hashtag.

I’m looking forward to seeing you at our not-a-conference.

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical Linux Game Development

A Better Way to Write Platform-specific C++ Code

Gaming on Linux reported that Linux porter Ethan Lee’s SteamOS & Linux talk at MAGFest has slides and audio available.

Ethan Lee has ported a number of games to GNU/Linux, and his talk gives some insight into what people can do to make the porting process easier.

Some of it is obvious, such as not accidentally introducing proprietary dependencies. Just because you like using Visual Studio, it doesn’t mean you need to force anyone who wants to build your project to need Visual Studio to do so.

He dug into coding patterns that make it easier or harder for someone to port, and while the slides are annotated, having the audio makes it easier to understand the context.

What I found funny was that the day before I saw these slides, I wrote code that looks almost exactly like what he had on slide 20 under “Bad Idea”.

I was basing my code off of Aquaria‘s, which has a long function filled with #ifdef #else #endif lines to get the path to the user’s save directory, providing a different path depending on if you are using Windows, Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux. While I wrote my version a bit more simplistically, it seemed like a decent approach.

Here’s what my code looked like:

std::string Persistence::getUserDataDirectory()
{
    #if defined (__WIN32__)
    const char *environment = std::getenv("APPDATA");
    std::string homeDirectory = (environment ? environment : ".");

    #elif defined (GB_ANDROID_BUILD)

    std::string homeDirectory = RealInstanceDelegator().SDL_AndroidGetInternalStoragePath();

    #else
    // IF ON LINUX

    std::string homeDirectory(".");
    // See https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
    const char *environment = std::getenv("XDG_DATA_HOME");
    if (NULL == environment || std::strcmp(environment, ""))
    {
        const char *home = std::getenv("HOME");
        homeDirectory = (home ? home + std::string("/.local/share") : ".");
    }
    else
    {
        homeDirectory = environment;
    }
    #endif

    return homeDirectory + "/" + Version::PROJECT_NAME + Version::DEMO_STATUS;
}

Ick. I would have to have to dive back into it and debug it if there is a problem later. Hopefully I got it right the first time.

But Lee’s presentation made me wonder how the “Good Idea” slide works and what was so different about it.

Here’s the code example in his slide:

char path[PLATFORM_MAX_PATH];
const char* GetSavePath()
{
   PLATFORM_GetSaveDir(path, "save.sav");
   return path;
}

It definitely looks cleaner without the preprocessing code, but even with the audio of the talk I didn’t understand what he was actually doing here. To me, it looked like his GetSavePath() was just delegating to a platform-specific version of the call, but how does this code know which one to use?

So I emailed him and asked.

His response:

The idea is that the way you write portable code separates the different paths from each other in a clear way while also being able to debug each path in a way where reading the path is trivial to do. The big problem with defs is that they often make things _crazy_ hard to read and are just error-prone in general, so I try to separate them in a different way.

Basically PLATFORM_* is just a blanket C namespace I make for separating everything; you just have a platform.h that all of the otherwise #ifdefy stuff will go to, then you write different platform.c files. In the case of the slide example I would write a platform_win32.c and a platform_linux.c, and of course you can mix and match if you really need to (linux.c and osx.c might both share a unix.c), and that’s a lot easier to reason about and is easier to share in places where platform code might be the same in certain places. It’s also a lot easier to know what you need to implement later when the linker points to exactly what PLATFORM_* calls it couldn’t resolve for a new port.

Ohhhhhh.

Ok, I get it.

So basically in, say, your CMakeLists.txt, you know which platform you care about, so you’ll build the project with the platform-specific .c file and ignore the rest, and when you read through the code, you don’t have the #if define #elif #endif mess to read through because they’re separated into different files that never collide with each other in the same build.

Nice! Oh, and also nice is that each of these implementations can easily be unit tested because you can create a separate test for each implementation.

So I got to work. I create one header file called Persistence.h and three different .cpp files: Persistence_ANDROID.cpp, Persistence_LINUX.cpp, and Persistence_WIN32.cpp. My project’s CMakeLists.txt would create a list of .cpp files to build. Now I make sure that list includes the platform-specific version of the .cpp file in the project’s sources. So if I am building an Android version of my game, it would build Persistence_ANDROID.cpp and ignore the Linux and Windows versions of the file. 

FILE (GLOB GBLIB_SOURCES *.cpp)
IF(GB_ANDROID_BUILD)
    FILE (GLOB PLATFORM_SOURCES PlatformSpecificImplementation/*_ANDROID.cpp)
ELSEIF(GB_LINUX_BUILD)
    FILE (GLOB PLATFORM_SOURCES PlatformSpecificImplementation/*_LINUX.cpp)
ELSEIF(GB_WINDOWS_BUILD)
    FILE (GLOB PLATFORM_SOURCES PlatformSpecificImplementation/*_WIN32.cpp)
ENDif(GB_ANDROID_BUILD)
ADD_LIBRARY (GB-lib ${GBLIB_SOURCES} ${PLATFORM_SOURCES})

And look at it!

std::string Persistence::getUserDataDirectory()
{
	std::string homeDirectory = RealInstanceDelegator().SDL_AndroidGetInternalStoragePath();

	std::string userDataDirectory = homeDirectory + "/" + Version::PROJECT_NAME + Version::DEMO_STATUS;

	return userDataDirectory;
}

It’s straightforward to read and tweak, especially compared to the ugly mix of code in the original version. New platforms would be easy to support by changing the build script and adding a source file.

Thanks for the pro tips, Ethan Lee!

Categories
Marketing/Business Personal Development

Rami Ismail: You Don’t Stand a Chance in Indie Game Development

If you’re a new indie game developer hoping to make a living in the current market, you’re doomed. Supposedly.

At Control Conference 2015, Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, creators of Super Crate Box and Nuclear Throne, spoke about how unlikely a new indie game studio will survive its first game’s release.

He compared the ease of indie game development to the ease of photography. At some point in its history, photography became available to the masses, and professional photographers had to compete with amateur photographers who could point and shoot with results that were often good enough. It shook up the market for photographers. I’m sure somewhere there is an archive of articles about the photopaclypse.

Some of his arguments sounded familiar, and it is because they are. He makes the same argument that Jeff Tunnell made 10 years ago in his blog post Five Foundational Steps to Surviving as an Indie Game Developer, the biggest one being “Don’t quit your day job.”

Ismail highlighted specific aspects of running an indie game development business that most new indies haven’t thought about or don’t know very well.

Whether it’s underestimating how much funding is needed, overestimating the number of people needed to work on a game, or not giving enough attention to your sales plan (or your personal health for that matter), you are ill prepared to do at all well in the market.

Quite frankly, the arguments he made, as insightful as they are, are depressing to hear.

But then he reminded you that this isn’t about making a living from your first game. It’s about surviving to make that next game. And the next.

It’s about building upon your successes and your failures. It’s about learning all of those things he said you don’t know so that you go from having no chance to having some chance.

A bit of insight into that kind of hard-earned learning comes early in another talk from Control Conference 2015. Vogelsap’s Jeroen Van Hasselt gave a presentation on why the highly-anticipated The Flock failed in the market:

You can catch something interesting at 1:34 seconds in.

During his introduction, we hear: “Vogelsap is a studio that specializes in making thrilling 3-D experiences that we present in an event and adventurous-like manner.”

Part of the presentation talks about how the student-run studio grew up, and I recognized that statement above as a mission statement.

Most new businesses don’t give enough attention to vision, mission, and purpose, and in fact Ismail says “vision” is just a word that doesn’t mean anything, but it’s clear that the people at Vogelsap at some point learned about them in the course of their own thrilling adventure while creating and releasing The Flock.

Worrying about vision, mission, and purpose isn’t bureaucratic corporate mumbo-jumbo. It’s not a pointless exercise to pretend you’re running a real grown-up business.

Vogelsap is not just making games. They have a focus, which most indies don’t have. When you hear about a new game with their name attached to it, you are going to have some idea of what to expect, and it won’t be a casual match-3.

What’s great is when indies share their learning and hard-earned lessons with the rest of us. Sometimes we pick up the lesson easily because it is intuitive. Other times, we might not grok them until we go through the experience for ourselves and come out the other side with a realization that this was exactly what they warned you about.

Your goal is to grow your indie game development knowledge, which is why it’s important to, as Ismail suggested, prepare for failure while aiming for success. Experience is infinitely more valuable as a teacher.

But keep your day job in the meantime.

Or don’t. I didn’t, ran out of money after a couple of years, and eventually got a day job again. I was stressed more than I have ever been stressed before, but I learned much more rapidly.

You’re an indie. You get to decide your path.

Categories
Marketing/Business

Indie Developers Have Always Needed to Treat Their Businesses Like Businesses

Dan Griliopoulos wrote Saddling Up The Horsemen: Is the market getting tougher for indie developers? at ShowMeTheGames.com, in which he argues once again that the so-called indiepocalypse isn’t new.

So is the market getting tougher? It’s easier than ever to get your games onto platforms; it’s easier than ever to make them; it’s probably easier than ever to finance them. But these all mean that the market is saturated, so it’s harder than ever to get anyone to pay attention to them – and there’s no simple, effective route to that.

He interviews a few people to get their perspective, but I have been hearing this story for many years.

Ever since I was part of the Dexterity forums, which are now the Indie Gamer forums, conversations have gone like this every few years:

“Man, things were so much easier in the past.”
“What are you talking about? Today’s indies have it so much better, what with all the tools and resources we never had back then.”
“Yeah, but it was easier to stand out and make money back then.”
“But there wasn’t that big of an audience then either.”

All last year, similar articles have come out basically saying there is a confluence of market conditions making the industry a more difficult place to succeed for most individuals, that it has always been this way, and we don’t even have enough data to talk about it very intelligently.

Bottom line: it’s easier than ever to make games, but obscurity has always been deadly to the indie game developer.

Some argue that getting attention and financial success as an indie game developer is primarily a matter of luck.

While I won’t discount luck being a factor, it’s not something you can plan for.

Since I can’t plan for it, what can I, as an indie game developer, do instead?

I can learn how to run my business like a business.

Because it is one.

I think the phenomenon of people worrying about how much easier it was to get attention in the past stems from the ability of so many to focus on just product development and having the marketing and sales taken care of for them.

Apple is producing a new type of platform that takes off, and it needs games? An indie game developer back then might think, “Wow, getting my game noticed is easy! My marketing plan can literally be a single line written on a napkin: ‘Release my game on iOS.’ There is nothing else I would have needed to do back then except focus on making a good game, which is what I really want to focus on anyway.”

In all of these indie game development platform waves, there was a rising demand in the market, and almost all you had to do was show up to take advantage of it. There were other parties such as Big Fish or Apple or Microsoft or Google who had a keen interest in seeing your success, so they did a lot of the leg work with promotions and awards. It’s like being the only water salesperson at a desert oasis. The money flows to the indies who exist in that space.

What happens when the market is saturated, and those parties don’t need to worry about promoting any one individual game so much? Suddenly, the lack of a marketing plan for an indie game developer is a huge gap in their business plan. Now you’re selling ice to Eskimos.

And many, many indie game developers aren’t aware of it. After all, they just want to make games. All of this business stuff? Ick.

This business anathema isn’t unique to game developers. Michael Gerber wrote The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do about It back in 1995, which was a follow-up to his 1986 book The E-Myth.

I got the audiobook in 2012, and I wish I had gotten it many years earlier. I didn’t because I thought the E stood for Electronic and was basically going to be about how Internet businesses are not any different from regular businesses.

Instead, the E stands for Entrepreneur, and the book is an eye-opener for anyone who is starting out.

Most small businesses are started not by business-savvy individuals but by technicians who think “I know how to make widgets. I’ll be my own boss!” These technicians work IN their own businesses, not realizing that what is needed is for someone to work ON the business itself, and for someone to manage the processes to get the results desired.

Indie Game Developer Business Plan

Running an indie game development business requires more than developing games. It’s a key part, sure, but a good business seeks out the opportunities that it can take advantage of. It finds ways to get attention, whether it was through ads, press contacts, YouTubers, or whatever the next thing is. It makes decisions about what game to make based on more than mere whim. It makes intelligent risks based on incomplete data, but it doesn’t ignore the data and guess. It defines success beyond vague statements like “making more money than I spent.”

So maybe it only looks like the successful indie game developers got their success through luck because so many of them don’t do have much more of a marketing plan beyond releasing on Steam or iOS. They don’t have much of a sales plan beyond, “I hope a lot of people buy my game. Like, a lot a lot.”

Again, luck can play a role for some. Flappy Bird was a game that happened to get picked up on network television one day long after it was released. Minecraft became a huge hit when Notch had a day job, and he never expected it to become the flagship title of an actual business.

But there’s a difference between hobbyists who have success find them and indie game developers running a business seeking success.

Maybe the problem isn’t that the market is crowded.

Maybe the problem is that many aspiring indies suddenly find that they have to do the hard work of running a business, work that looked like it took care of itself in the past.

NOTE: This article is also translated into Spanish by Javier Fernández Romero over at Zehn Games: Los indies siempre han tenido que tratar su negocio como lo que es: un negocio