( ~ this is a talk turned blog post ~ )
In game industry social media, or in bigger conferences like GDC, you will have a lot of talks about how to make a successful game.
Success is a very subjective term. It’s defined by many things. In cases of video games, it’s less defined by cultural or social impact, and more by the money that a game made.
That’s important to acknowledge because everyone’s definition of success is going to be different, especially if you set out to pursue this as your own “art”. Art’s definition of success is more related to social impact rather than money.
Online discussions about how to find success as an indie developer are so common that advice starts to conflict.
I think it’s all an interesting observation to make, because you’ll have so much information that it becomes hard to parse what is or isn’t a good game, and what is or isn’t a good success.
Even gamers have their own opinions of success, that are wildly different from developer opinions of success, which are often different from publishers or bigger spaces.
Success is really something you define on your own terms, and pursue on your own terms.
It’s not news that the game industry has undergone tumultuous times. Layoffs are very common, even for games that are a success.
We need to challenge these notions of success, especially if games are to survive as an artform.
It’s not possible anymore to promise anyone a safe career in the game industry, if they just work hard enough, have enough of a portfolio, or pursue the right education.
It is however possible to promise that anyone can be in the game space as artists, exploring what the craft means to them. Over time, you can exist here sustainably. As a solodev, this is my background.
Earlier on in my time in games, when I decided to pursue this as a solodev that is not working for a studio, but entirely as my own art… I eventually received accolades, as a result of not giving up.
One of my works, Tetrageddon, was nominated and won at IGF. Before it got into IGF, I had been submitting it to the festival for three years in a row.
Plenty of my other work became popular, especially in the festival circuit.
This eventually led to one of mine being in the permanent collection at MoMA.
I say all this because through-ought this journey I also received plenty of criticism for not being “successful”, since the definition of success was about monetary feedback rather than cultural relevance.
It was hard to showcase at more mainstream places like E3 and have to explain to people “why this is here” (a common question at that time). I had to break down that this is art, rather than entertainment made to sell.
Even with my work being in MoMA, that still hovers when I go to more mainstream industry events.
As an artist, by my own standards, I am a “success” because it is big to have my work in a museum, and to have a meaningful impact on people’s lives through my art.
From an industry standpoint I am a failure because I don’t make enough money.
The game industry has always been under that cloud of “entertainment made to sell”. That being the primary goal of making a game.
This is not a criticism of the fact that it’s an industry, but more of a criticism of how hard it is for art to find an equally respected place here.
Nevertheless, as the industry changes, alternatives continue to thrive.
– Links featured above
* https://findnicegames.com/
* https://www.freegameplanet.com/
* https://www.alphabetagamer.com/
* https://warpdoor.com/
* https://itch.io/c/7037/the-good-stuff
After the last few tumultuous years that the game industry has undergone… seeing mass layoffs, job insecurity, it becoming harder for indies to sell their games even if the game is by all standards “good”, and also seeing that AAA games undergo mass layoffs, even if a game is a success… Note on the other end of that spectrum, despite the game industry increasingly making record breaking profits, little if any of this actually goes to developers… It’s clear that people that make games are not benefitting from that success. As such, the present model is unsustainable.
Alternatives are vital now.
I think, at this point, it is more important than ever to examine this as an artform for individual artists and explore our own definitions of success. The current mainstream model no longer works. It is too broken to be sustainable.
Individual artistry, individual creation, and pursuing this as a personal artform is (to me) the best most sustainable mode of existing here.
I think most of this, importantly, needs to start with destigmatizing failure.
Failure is our greatest asset.
We need failure in games, and especially as artists. It is the best tool for good game design, and at this point, we need space to embrace it without stigma.
It’s important to recognize good failure because the best games out there are ones that failed often, failed loudly, and failed gracefully.
Devs that managed to stay in the game industry are good at failure.
Game design itself is about iteratively evolving your ideas and constantly managing failure in a constructive way.
Sustainably existing in games is to understand failure, in all manners of being or creating here, and understand how to navigate that constructively.
We no longer have a type of industry where we can chase promised financial success on the road to “making it”.
We can only sustainably fail.
I’ll offer some examples from my own work…
Tetrageddon Games took years to create. All throughout that creative process I was told I am wasting my time.
I picked it up again after a very difficult stint working with two game companies. I absolutely failed at my dream, but I didn’t give up. I wanted to do this for myself.
I stubbornly submitted it to IGF for three years in a row before it was nominated. I got used to rejection letters from festivals, until it got accepted into what I viewed as “the big one”. Only after that did it start being accepted as a success (from the perspective of an award winning indie game).
Before IGF, Tetrageddon had been rejected from Steam. At that time Steam manually reviewed games for the platform. I tried submitting to them a few times and always was rejected.
After IGF, despite these obvious rejections that seemed to indicate the game would not get on Steam, Steam gave it a slot. No questions asked.
Either way, I ultimately decided to not put it on Steam to try going the alternative storefront route for my work.
Everything is going to be OK, received a lot of friction while I was making it. Enough that it was viewed as a failure for a good long while. It broke through and won a number of awards, but wasn’t a big financial success. It made it into the MoMA and is recognized as an important video game now.
Work that is different often receives plenty of friction before finally finding its place. I view this friction as a sign that I’m following the right path to doing something worthwhile.
The journey is not always easy, the end result is worth it, at least to me. I see so many people saying that my art changed their lives. I don’t think I can use money to quantify how much of an impact it has had on people.
My latest release is a good example too…
One of my most recent releases is a playable essay about technocapitalism and the role individual creators have under techfeudalism. The whole title is: “individualism in the dead internet age, an anti big-tech assetflip shovelware manifesto”
It’s very much set up to fail. It was intentionally designed to have everything going against it. I very much wanted to vent by failing from the outset.
Assetflips and shovelware are incredibly unpopular among gamers, and both of these terms are levied as insults against games they don’t like. This game features both of these things.
It’s way too “politics in video games” discussing the issues of tech culture. Much of what it criticizes is established in the game industry.
It’s a walking sim, and that’s not exactly popular either.
It almost reads as trolling because of how it’s built to embrace these controversial topics, even going so far as to criticize capitalism.
The above video is a full playthrough of it.
Things that I think are compelling about it is how it’s a eulogy, museum, and archival work all at the same time. Hyperlinks are strewn about the spaces, to illustrate the current talking point.
The spaces serve to illustrate the essay by hiding screenshots everywhere… in either the monitors, or behind glass like it’s part of a museum exhibit. It draws inspiration from “museum tours”, where you get to hear a tour guide talk over an audio device, as you wander about a space. This is similar, but in a fantastic sense.
The links are rabbit holes into the real world where you can learn more about the history that is being discussed.
The software of mine that I highlight is so bizarre, weird, unusual… that it feels almost like the entire thing is fiction. The alternative history, entirely different mindset to software that is being discussed here, is such a contrast to what we have today that it almost feels like its a fiction or ARG rooted in an alternative reality.
It drives across the point that things could have been different, and still could be different.
If you are interested, I say more about the project in this GameDeveloper interview.
I made “individualism in the dead internet age” for an event that wanted something edgier, artistic, and different. It was meant to be a talk that I give via preforming playing this game. Like the game is the talk.
When I showed the demo, it was too “negative” for the event. I didn’t have the energy to change it all, since this entire structure is a lot of work. So it never showed for what it was built for.
Essentially it failed from the get go.
I tried to submit it for a live performance at other events. One event said they would take it, but forgot. It didn’t get into any of them. It was bumpy at first. I didn’t think it was interesting or anyone “got” it.
I wanted to get it onto Steam, but Steam rejected it. Steam said that the way it linked out to things on itch.io was against its policy. The links in this game are really important to it, so I couldn’t change that without fundamentally changing the game.
Steam also didn’t like that it has screenshots of Tweets or Discord conversations. For the sake of the essay, these are also important because the screenshots illustrate what is being discussed, as well as linking out to the content.
Steam also didn’t like that there was Donkey Kong, Mario, and Pikachu in the game, vaguely displayed on some of the monitors. It took me a while to figure out what they meant because the game does not use these in any obvious way.
I eventually found that these are displayed as a screenshot of a screenshot of another game that’s partly cut off on one of the monitors… I’m not sure how much of that does count as valid criticism of the project since this isn’t a Nintendo fan game that’s ripping Nintendo assets. Pikachu is not in the game at all, but that was still mentioned as reason for rejection. They also mentioned that the Portal logo was in it, but I couldn’t find that either (unless they meant the exit signs, which are a universal icon and not Portal logo)…
I was told by a few people that it’s something that absolutely goes against the grain of Steam, so they wouldn’t allow it or even welcome it because of what this “playable essay” represents. Not all games are welcome on Steam.
This is certainly one of them that, by principle of what it is, cannot be allowed on Steam.
Not being able to have your game on Steam is generally considered a bad thing, but it’s worth noting that I only recently started putting my stuff on Steam. I got this far without being on the platform. It’s never been a huge loss for me.
Either way, this was another failure.
Eventually, after it being rejected everywhere, I published this “playable essay” on itch.io. I just wanted SOMEBODY to see it, even if they might hate it. So much work went into it, it would have been a shame just to let it disappear on my harddrive.
Itch.io featured it right away. It was received very well. This was a victory because it got a lot of downloads.
After that, it was nominated in IGF for the Nuovo award, which is a big accomplishment for any game.
I kind of suspected that IGF liked it because so many judges mentioned it during the judging process. It was obvious that it was finding its audience finally, despite being set up to fail.
In the end, everything about this, everything considered unpopular and a big fail, is what worked for it.
It wouldn’t have made it into IGF if it wasn’t viewed as a critical piece of media. The fact that it’s controversial is what ended up making it meaningful to people.
On itch.io its reception was that of an important game because the message is critical in this day and age.
It found it’s place, and it’s now viewed as an important work!
Overall, this story is very much in line with my entire artistic career. Everything I’ve created up to now has been viewed as “too different”, too loud, too weird, too unmarketable, too artsy, too much of something… Yet, I got this far.
Even moving back to Slovenia, when trying to start a game event, I’m told the space has a hard time figuring out how to place me because it’s hard to define my work so they don’t know what to do with me. I’m used to that and enjoy it now.
I exist in an industry that told me I would fail the entire time that I’ve been here. Still, my work found its place.
To navigate this, I understood what was working against me, and turned that around. I would incorporate that into my work, advocate for myself, or just keep at it.
Despite what is a setup for failure, it has been deeply meaningful to me. I don’t think I would make the type of work that I love making if it wasn’t for learning how to accept all this.
I’ve come to view friction as a sign that I’m doing something meaningful.
At this point the rest of the industry is failing, so I feel like I’ve won in some manner of speaking.
I’m still here when a lot of the people that told me that I would fail no longer are.
In any event, I believe that failure ends up working for you if you don’t give up. That’s important in games because they are so fundamentally built to manage failure… For players, the way you design them is a lot of trial and error… Once you have something good then it’s in the way you need to work to see them successful.
Failure is a better teacher than success. Sometimes it leads to something better than success.
The Electric Zine Maker is one of my best selling games on itch.io. It’s almost overwhelming how it regularly seems to get people paying for it.
It took forever for it to get to this point.
Even that has a lot going against it.
The Electric Zine Maker is a printshop and art tool that makes creating zines easy by making the template process easy. You select panels, draw in them, and the entire thing is ready for printing. No messing with complicated templates that you have to learn.
Once you print it, each template has a set of folding instructions and videos.
It removes the level of entry for making zines.
The Electric Zine Maker is fundamentally meant to be bright and chaotic. It is built to fill a very small, very specific niche, which (if you are aiming to make something a success) is setting yourself up for failure.
Even though this is the selling point of the software, a lot of people complain about its colorful chaotic interface.
It’s not exactly fitting into the standards of good software design. It even goes so far as to reject all these standards.
Like all my work, the Electric Zine Maker exists very much on its own terms.
All that said, I would argue that if I made something more mainstream, something that had less colors and playfulness, it would not be this popular. Think something like photoshop, where all the tools make sense, the UI makes sense… I know it would disappear into the sea of art software that’s already out there.
I can confidently say that because I’ve worked on mainstream things before, that follow all the rules, and it’s great, but it’s so easy for that to disappear. From my experience, following all the rules and going down the well traveled path, is a lot of work too.
It’s a bit of a ruse to tell people that if one does everything right, fits in, follows all the advice, that it’s going to be a carefree success.
The fact that the Electric Zine Maker is so wildly different is what makes it interesting to people and helps it stand out.
For example, when I showcase this at events, it’s so fascinating to see it pull people in. The bright colors tend to be magnetic. People can’t help themselves but be curious. This helps in a digital context too, when people browse games from a list. They will be curious about things that look different.
Through ought the years of working on the Electric Zine Maker, fighting for it, and trying to get people to understand its value, along with the praise for it, I was often told that it’s just “too different” and wouldn’t really work.
It’s a very love it or hate it project.
Still, it’s one of my most popular things on itch. People talk about it now like it’s a vital piece of their creative lives. The way it’s so unique is what people desire about it.
Failing to fit into standards is a good thing. Understanding what you are making, what might go against it, what friction you may receive, and then navigating that is what’s important. If you set out to do something, it helps to understand what it’s place will be in context of the greater digital landscape and sea of games that’s out there.
I couldn’t have gotten this far by being “normal” and making work that fits in.
As it is, with the state of games, the issues of financial sustainability, discovery, when you hear how even “good games” just don’t make it… Games that are unique, and offer something new to players, are ones that tend to last.
I feel the same if you pursue this as an artist. I think the days of a game industry with a safety net, where you have certain successes assured you, are over and it’s an opportunity to re-examine our place here critically.
Following these established paths to “success” just isn’t working. It was never inclusive to everyone to begin with. It was not to me so that gave me a different perspective on how to be here.
Understanding why this is failing is how we can navigate it, even build a better future for ourselves and others.
Games evolve out of failure. They are a weird iterative cross between software and other artforms.
I can’t stress enough how much this is about learning as you go, recognizing what fails, changing that, and building in new directions.
A classic example is how Valve’s Left 4 Dead was born from a killed project about flying fairies. It’s hard to find anything about this online, but it’s a pointed example of how you let things change to find where they fit.
Celest was first a Pico-8 game, then the concept was iterated into something bigger.
Smaller tools like Pico-8, GBStudio, and Bitsy are wonderful prototyping points where you can iterate into something bigger once you understand the structure of what you want.
I also find it helpful to test run ideas in these smaller tools because you can release those smaller projects and see how people respond to the story or structure of something that could potentially grow into a larger project.
One of my latest releases is a short interactive poem called “A Butterfly“. It’s a large abandoned world that you explore to, as the game prompts you, learn how to fly. You do that by learning about the journey.
You look through ruins of a lighthouse and the petrified remains of titans that are reaching for the sky. You learn that this is a graveyard for them and you pretty much came here for the same reason that they ended up here. Nobody can leave once they are here.
The game is divided between a story and poem. These two different narratives happen simultaneously, and it delivers these two very different ways.
You find the poem by collecting giant ghost butterflies.
The actual story, of being trapped here and slowly losing yourself to this space, is delivered through pieces of a Bitsy game that you collect.
The poem and short story meet at the end by acknowledging that you now learned to fly. In case of the poem, it is finishing the metamorphosis of becoming a butterfly. In case of the short horror story, it is letting go of your previous form.
The game lets you fly away. Upon closing, it prompts you to save a text file. If you look at the text file that’s on your drive, you find a final poem. This is a small gift for playing it.
You can see that tools don’t matter as much as finding a compelling structure for your ideas. The thing made in smaller tools evolved to becoming a larger open world. Since exploration was so crucial to this game, the spaces where fleshed out in tools that supported narrative and exploration.
Bitsy does that very well.
– Links featured above…
* https://www.thebasemesh.com/
* https://blendermarket.com/
* https://www.fab.com/
* https://www.models-resource.com/
In “A Butterfly” I made all assets, textures, generative sound system, everything… On my own.
In “Individualism in the dead internet age” I used assets from Fab (formerly the Epic Store).
“Individualism in the dead internet age” was made in less than a month. A Butterfly took almost a year. The first was more popular than the seconds so I don’t think time spent on things like assets, engine, aesthetic, polish, how much of all that you stubbornly do on your own, matter as much in the grand scheme of things.
Success is erratic.
It’s about the actual heart of your project and what you are trying to accomplish with it.
“Individualism in the dead internet age” uses assets to illustrate what is said, and that’s used to structure the journey. “A Butterfly” uses surrealist metaphor.
Using assets made by others VS making your own, is maybe controversial, but it’s very common, and nobody notices unless the game is considered “bad”.
Either approaches have their own blessings and pitfalls. Ultimately I don’t think it matters as much as making something you’re proud of.
Both of these are built around story.
They are environments that break up storytelling through a space, and moving through that space is how you have that delivered to you. It’s an arena for curiosity, mystery, that finds cohesion through a message.
Nothing about our digital worlds, from desktops, to software, to websites, is without story or context. Even games that had very little graphical fidelity (like early text adventures) relied heavily on words to make the journey through their space compelling.
I find that beautiful because it shows that you don’t need anything fancy, expensive, or to be part of a large team to make something meaningful. You just need to have the courage to do it yourself. Failure is an important part of that process.
Since games are at the point that they are right now, I think being a solodev, or working with a team of friends, will become much more of an established mode of being here.
Success cannot be guaranteed. The liberating thing about that is that you can really claim your own space here, on your terms. You define being in the game industry for yourself.
I think we are at an important impasse right now as artists and creators not just in the game industry, but in the grander scheme of tech culture.
With the rise of fascism, and the way that is so closely linked to tech… it is important to point out that fascism has appropriated tech as its own, when tech very much does not belong to fascists nor is it a result to them.
Tech was taken from the original idealists who believed things like the internet belonged to everyone.
Game development belongs to everyone.
Creating on computers, as coming from the personalized computing boom way back, is something democratic that belongs to all of us.
Tech is communal. It is democratic in nature. As all innovation should be.
As it stands with the current state of the game industry and tech culture, we need to stop thinking about profit, and profit above all else, and think about tech centered in common good again.
The inevitable result of technocapitalism is fascism. The only way to fight that is to create better futures outside of that idealistic structure.
Games are part of that too. Games are where we can make a difference to imagine better futures.
It is our responsibility to participate here, to take up space here, and find new ways to thrive, outside of the abuse that seems to be eating everything.
We create our own future.
So, that said…
Forge your own path.
Failure is good. It is more sustainable than success.
NATHALIE!!! I’m deeply affected by what you wrote here, and want to respond and let you know how glad I am that you spoke up and shared your perspective. It’s such a scary, uncertain world, isn’t it? VCs pulling funding, studios claiming they turned a big profit then cutting most of the staff anyway… even the venerable who’ve been relatively stable are having a tough time, like what I read about Cyan Worlds.
I’m keeping what you said in mind, and applying it to what I do with music. I’m reminded of something parallel that Louis Cole said, which I reckon you’d appreciate:
> “If people actually followed [their tastes more], music would be a lot better than it is,” Cole says. “It’s purely what I’m excited about and what I’m excited to hear. That’s the main motivation behind it all. On top of that. It’s fun to have different sounds and different things to try. I would love to try this thing that maybe doesn’t exist.”
Have you read Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff? Living a non-linear life of curiosity. I’m in the midst of it now, and one of the key points she brings up (and has a tidy way of wording) is to prioritize OUTPUT (what you can do) > OUTCOME (you don’t have control). And the whole learning from failure stuff, but she has a beautiful way of wording it.
These things need constant, daily reminders to be brought to fruition, time and time again. It’s terrifying not getting feedback and wondering if you’re doing things “right”.
I admire you for sharing what YOU DO THAT NO ONE ELSE DOES!!! And I hope reading this has emboldened others to fail iteratively, fail deliciously. It’s tough when resources are dwindling and you wonder what the next day is gonna bring… but all things considered in an atrocious system that doesn’t give a damn unless you care about yourself, there’s no other way to live. Today’s failure is tomorrow’s success.
P.S. I showed this to my wife, she also thinks the flames on the lower-right corner of your blog and the skeleton hand cursor are awesome. ??