Indie Game Development and How to Fund Your Game
This article is intended as a guide of sorts for the independent game developer who has worked on a small game for a couple of months, but feels at a standstill of how to ramp up production and marketing for it. In this guide, I will cover the current challenges that game developers face today, and what possible solutions there are, including angel investors, incubator programs, publishers, and crowdfunding.
90% of entrepreneurs fail.
Us game developers are entrepreneurs. Yet unlike many of the “tech entrepreneurs” we hear about often in media, our goal is to share our own artistic or creative vision with the world for the sake of entertainment. It is important to realize the high probability of failure before moving forward.
When it comes to game development today, often students and professionals alike feel at a loss. The two main options that loom before us are: 1) Work a steady, 40hr/week job, and develop your game after-hours or on weekends, or 2) don’t work a job, invest all of your time and savings into the game in the hopes that one of your many applications to a publisher will lead to financial investment.
The former, unsurprisingly, will often lead to burnout. The latter is a financial risk. As a senior in college, I’m in the former group and will very soon transition to the latter.
Game development is inherently a tricky medium that, as I cover in my book, How Games Get Made, is unstable and yet requires an incredible amount of collaboration of people and tools. Unlike traditional art, games are not something that you can create in a day or a week — truly sellable projects often require months of original creative production, on top of several months dedicated to quality assurance to make it professional grade. And there is no guarantee that we will “succeed”: or, as some of us like to call it, “make money”. We can invest a year of our lives into a project without any financial gain.
What I write in this article will be the product of research that I was required to conduct for my own sake. I am currently very concerned over the state of my game project that I am working on, and have worked with my team to ensure that our game balances salability with creative expression. Yet, knowing that I am soon heading into the second category, I have busied myself with extensive research into finding future options for our game.
I hope that this article will provide you with some starting points on how to continue to work on your game.
1. Angel Investors like Indie Fund
Indie Fund is a mixture of sorts between a publisher, an angel investor, and a loan fund. It is an independent group of previously successful indie developers who would like to contribute to the success of tomorrow’s game developers. They provide somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000 in funding on average, they do not own your IP, and they do not provide any marketing support.
Their process acts as a loan fund because if you do make over the amount loaned to you, you are required to pay it back on top of a 25% revenue share until you double the initial investment or until 2 years after the initial investment date, whichever comes first. However, if you fail to generate enough revenue to repay the investment within 2 years of release, you no longer owe Indie Fund anything.
They have an application listed on their site, but beware that it is most likely by rare chance that you will be selected. They have only sponsored an average of 5 games a year since its inception in 2010.
Here is a great list from Michelle Chen on Gamasutra regarding funding opportunities like Indie Fund.
Games funded by Indie Fund include Monaco, Hollow Knight, Q.U.B.E., Framed, and Hyper Light Drifter.
2. Game Incubator Programs
Game Incubators are what they sound like — they provide space and time for you to develop your game. While other ‘Incubators’ exist (see: Incubate USC), I will be taking a look at NYU’s Game Center Incubator specifically because of my experience studying it.
They provide financial assistance ($8,000 per person for 4 months) as well as mentoring, networking opportunities with publishers, and business development for your game.
The goal of the Incubator is to provide three paths of success: 1) self-publish your game, 2) crowdfund your game, or 3) pitch your game to a publisher. You are free to choose which option is most feasible or appropriate for your project.
If you make under $10,000 in the first year, you keep all of it. If you make over that, however, they will receive a 10% cut of it.
Games that have been supported by NYU Game Center Incubator include Circa Infinity, Ape Out and Gemini.
3. Publishers
While AAA publishers have come under a critical eye in recent years, “independent” game publishers have often been well known to maintain a good relationship with their developers (re: giving creative control to the developer, more lenient with timelines than AAA publishers).
Publishers usually offer significant marketing, development, or development support.
Generally, it works out to be that the more they initially invest in you, the more revenue as a percentage will be taken post-publication. This percentage often ranges from 10 to 30 percent.
This goes without saying, but the larger the publisher (re: Chucklefish, Team17, Devolver Digital) the more marketing support, the more existing fanbase, hence more sales. Yet the larger the publisher, the larger their volume of applications, hence the less likelihood that you will be noticed.
When considering publishers, make sure to check out what games they have actually published on top of what services they offer. If they specialize in 3-D games, they most likely won’t take your pitch for a 2-D Metroidvania. However, some publishers will specify that they are interested in expanding the types of games they make from just 3-D to 2-D. Make sure to read their “About” page.
When contacting a publisher, the process follows a somewhat standard procedure.
- Write a to-the-point email which includes the title, genre, elevator pitch (“Outlast but a 2-D dating sim”), game mechanics, team member info, and what you want from the publisher (money? marketing support?). It should be short (some would recommend a bullet point list). It should also include a gif of your coolest feature from the game within the email (<5Mb), a link to a YouTube video reel, as well as a playable game demo.
- Write an in-depth “Pitch Document” — a 10–20 page document and/or slideshow which goes into detail regarding the mechanics of your game, your most important features and innovations, your visual style, a team member showcase (to prove that you are capable to creating this game), a “current state” analysis (where are you at now?) and budget expectations, ideas for marketing your game as well as target audience, and risk assessment (are you potentially unreliable fresh college graduates, or are you a busy parent of two kids?). Finally, you are expected to detail exactly what you need from the publisher in terms of marketing support or financial investment. Attach this to the email, or if you are not allowed to include attachments, send this to the publisher when you receive a response with interest in your game.
Here are some examples of “real” Pitch Decks, for reference.
Here is a list of great independent publishers to get started.
- Humble Games, Publisher of Forager and A Hat in Time
- Serenity Forge Games, Publisher of Cyanide and Happiness: Freakpocalypse and Alto
- Devolver Digital, Publisher of Gris, Katana ZERO, Hotline Miami
- Tiny Build, Publisher of Hello Neighbor series and The Final Station
- Square Enix Collective, Publisher of Forgotten Anne and The Turing Test
Here are some great guides from other sources:
- Game Funding Tips: How to Impress a Game Investor by Ninichi
- How to Pitch Your Game to a Publisher or Anyone by Tiny Build
- Pitching Your Game to a Publisher — Tips and Advice by Stas Ignatov for Gamasutra
4. Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding completely hinges on early interest in your game. You will not receive magical interest in your crowdfunding campaign if you haven’t told anybody about your game. Crowdfunding is something that is only possible if you have built up a significant following on a social media platform like Twitter of dedicated fans who have expressed interest in supporting your game.
Crowdfunding also equates to a loss in revenue post-publication, because developers that crowdfund often do so with the condition that supporters will receive a free copy of their game once it comes out. While this is important to keep in mind, I see crowdfunding as a net positive simply because of the social media interest-storm it often generates and the peer-to-peer spread of interest in your game.
Crowdfunding is also dangerous because it is basically a community loan for your game idea. It is up to you to fulfill your promises on time. As Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games, who has designed successful tabletop games including ones backed by Kickstarters, put it, “I think there’s a lot of risk if a company is relying too much on any one platform or audience… if I relied on a single distributor to sell our games to retailers, if that distributor went bankrupt, I’d be in big trouble. Same goes if I stopped selling directly to consumers and only relied on distributors and retailers. Similarly, I don’t see how it would benefit a company to lean too heavily on Kickstarter — in fact; there are companies that are in the process of failing because of their reliance on Kickstarter.” (source)
Games that have successfully crowdfunded include Hollow Knight, Faster Than Light, Undertale, and Shovel Knight. Remember, however, that 90% of entrepreneurship fail; if you look up “games” on Kickstarter, you will find that most Kickstarter projects are severely underfunded.
In Conclusion
I hope that this information was helpful and informative in your search for where to go next. Yes, it’s a confusing and stressful journey, and there is no guarantee of success. The knowledge that my idea may fail is daunting — and it’s statistically improbably to think that I will belong to that top 10% of entrepreneurs that will succeed. Yet, game development is a pursuit of passion. I do this because I love doing it.
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Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts from my book, How Games Get Made: The Stories of the People Who Make and Play the Games We Love, as well as thought pieces and deep dives in the format of an article series. How Games Get Made launches on December 7, 2020 on Amazon (link coming soon)! If you want to connect, you can reach me via Twitter: @emschaale!
