In this episode:

Jordan sits down with Jay Powell, the founder of The Powell Group, a video game consulting firm specializing in business development, publishing support, and licensing. Jay has over 20 years of experience in the games industry, working with companies like Other Ocean, Spill Games, and Deep Silver. He also leads the Indie Game Business Initiative, which produces a weekly podcast and virtual business conferences to help indie developers understand the business and marketing side of game development. 

Jay shares his insights on how indie developers can strategize their approach to publishers, avoid common business mistakes, and navigate the publishing landscape in a post-pandemic world.

Topics covered:

• How to strategize your approach to publishers as an indie developer
• Avoiding common business mistakes made by small studios
• Current opportunities in the game development market for indie devs
• The impact of the pandemic on publishing for indie and small teams
• The role of platforms like Microsoft Game Pass in today’s distribution landscape

For more game industry tips:

• Learn more about Jordan & Bright Black
• Listen on iTunes | Spotify (Support the show and leave a review)
• Visit www.playmakerspodcast.com for the full blog post and more!

Timestamps:

[03:28] Jay’s career journey and how he started The Powell Group

[06:15] The biggest mistakes indie developers make when approaching publishers

[10:48] Understanding the publishing landscape and your options

[14:00] How to prioritize your pitch to publishers

[18:10] The role of playable demos in pitching your game

[22:36] The impact of COVID-19 on indie game development and publishing

[27:50] Opportunities in the market for indie developers

[32:06] The role of platforms like Microsoft Game Pass in indie game distribution

[35:40] Jay’s advice for indie developers 

Resources & media mentioned in this episode:

Connect with Jay Powell:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Learn more about The Powell Group and Indie Games Business:

• The Powell Group 
• Check out The Indie Game Business Podcast
• Indie Game Business 
• Indie Game Business - Twitch
• Get your free list of over 600 game publishers! 

Games,platforms, & companies mentioned:

• Microsoft Game Pass
• Spill Games
• Deep Silver
• Other Ocean
• Steam
• Amazon Luna
• Google Stadia

Welcome to Playmakers, the game industry podcast. Whether you work at a studio, publisher, service provider, or startup, this is the podcast that will give you all the information and entertainment you need to succeed in the game industry. Who am I? Just your friendly neighborhood veteran designer and producer, Jordan Blackman. In each episode of Playmakers, I go deep to work, uncovering insights, tactics, and know-how from a wide range of game industry luminaries. My goal? To help you win the game of making games. Are you ready? Then let's begin.

Hey, what's up? Welcome back to Playmakers. It's been a minute. So what do I have in terms of updates? Things are good over here. Business is booming. Life is good. Been keeping busy, having a good time as much as possible. However, I did get coronavirus, and that was pretty intense. I was not one of these people who had to go to the hospital, not one of these people who was sick for a week and then immediately better. I was one of these kind of middle people, long haulers. I was sick for a couple of months.

And then after that, which was, in and of itself, just very intense to be sick for that long a time, I had what they call post-viral syndrome. I was basically unable to make it through a whole day without a nap for like two, three more months on top. So a lot of last year was different, different than the normal Jordan. But I'm excited to be well past all of that and back in action, and I hope you and your family are doing well. This has been such a challenging time for so many people.

And with that said, I want to get into our guest this week, Jay Powell. Jay is someone I've known for a real long time, about 10 years. He's been in the industry for, I think, 20 or more. And he's the host of his own podcast, Indie Game Business podcast. They have an active Twitch stream and a huge Discord server with hundreds of people active in there all the time. You'll find the links in the show notes. He helps indie studios succeed with the business side of the game industry. His clients include some bigger companies too, like Other Ocean, Spill Games, Deep Silver, and lots of small studios.

He's made products with companies like Amazon, National Geographic, Disney, Cartoon Network, MTV, Nickelodeon, Microsoft—you get the idea. His work has been published in Game Design Methods and Secrets of the Game Business, and Jay's one of the guys you will see on the speaking circuit in the industry at trade shows and events. Jay is a very experienced, knowledgeable gentleman, and we get into important topics for indie devs and small devs trying to get their foot in the door, especially with publishers.

We talk about things like how to strategize your approach to publishers as an indie developer, how to make that approach, what are some of the biggest mistakes small studios make when looking for these sorts of deals, when presenting their games, when making pitches—what are the big mistakes and how to avoid them. We talk about the hot areas right now of opportunity in the market for developers. We talk about how being on platforms like Microsoft Game Pass can affect sales on PC platforms like Steam—and it may not be the effect that you think it is. We also talk about how coronavirus has affected the publishing landscape for indies and small dev teams.

So if that sounds useful to you, then stick around. You're going to enjoy this interview with Jay Powell. Real quick, before we get into it, if you want to support Playmakers podcast and what we're doing here, I would really appreciate it if you would write us a review on iTunes or your platform of choice. And anything else you want to do, shoot me an email, send me a kind note, send me some cookies. Just kidding, not asking for cookies. But seriously, if you want to support the show, other than cookies, we definitely appreciate your review, your subscription to the show, and just being with us on the journey. So if you want to let me know what topics you'd like to see covered or what you think we should be doing as a show, you can send me an email at jordan@brightblack.co, and I'll hear you out. Okay, with that said, let's get into the interview with Jay right about now.

Hey, what's up, Jay? Welcome to Playmakers. Great to have you here.

Good to be here. I appreciate it. It's nice being on the other side of the interview table.

I know. I've been on your show before. It was super fun. And I know you've been doing it for a while now, which is impressive.

It was unintentional. It literally started as, "Hey, why don’t we do this?" And now it’s been two years. So the big running joke is I had a good friend of mine when we first started doing Indie Game Business, and he was like, "What if being a streamer and doing these podcasts is what you're actually going to be doing more?" And I was like, "What? Nobody, that’s not going to happen." And now obviously we still do the consulting work, but it's been, I think, over a hundred episodes. And it’s grown into a Discord and digital events.

Let's zoom out a little bit here. Tell us about you, your career, and how you got to be where you are now—doing the show, running the consulting that you're doing. Give us the bigger picture.

So I started in the industry back in the late nineties. I had an English literature degree coming out of university, which is literally just about as useful as a psych degree.

I have a philosophy degree. So I hear you.

Started an internship with an agency in the area. And so I basically needed beer money when I was in college. And I saw an ad, and it said, "Come in and play these games and give us feedback and tell us what you think." And I'm like, "I can do that. That's not a problem." And that's how it got started. And so it just so happened that the two guys that ran the agency, they came out of Duke University's Fuqua Business School, which is way above my pay grade. They knew business, but they weren't gamers, and I knew games. And then when I graduated, they offered me a job. Everyone I knew and my family was like, "Don't do this. Those two guys don't own anything, and it's horrible." But I wanted to.

I was there for 10 years. The last two or three years, we transitioned the company from being an agency into a casual game publisher. Over the first seven or eight years, I did some of the very first publishing and distribution deals for companies like Paradox. The first time Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, and Europa Universalis came to the U.S. was because of a deal I set up.

Paradox is still going pretty strong too.

Yeah, it's one of those things that, yes, you're not going to find all of this listed on MobyGames or anywhere else, but at least I know I was a little part of that.

So you got into this niche of doing the negotiation and the deal-making for these development teams?

Yeah, that's exactly it. At the time, we were actually doing country-by-country retail distribution deals. And the funny thing is, we're at a point in the industry where that's coming back around. A lot of the digital deals we do now aren't sectioned off by country but by language. We'll have a digital publisher in Southeast Asia, a different one in China, possibly another in Japan, and then one for North America and Western Europe, a different one for South America, and obviously, the MENA region gets another one. It's all coming back around.

Those deals aren't by country, they're by language. So you say, "Hey, if you can run ads profitably in this language anywhere, just go for it."

Yeah, we did that, and then we transitioned to a casual game publisher. At the time, I was literally doing four people's jobs. It was just too much. So eventually, one day I said, "You know what? I'm done. I'm out." I went into the game industry to start a company—my first startup—with two friends who had also worked with me at that company. It was a production studio, but at the time, there was no such thing as a production studio. Developers thought we were publishers, publishers thought we were developers—we weren't either. We were handling the design, business, and overseeing production.

Then we tried to make that jump from doing contract work to original IP, which is not easy. Even for someone who had been doing this for so long, it's not easy.

No.

The first game we did as original IP wasn't even really original IP—it was a licensed New York Times bestselling author—and that did really well. But the next two... didn't. And so, that was that. After that, a guy reached out to me—this is actually how I met you—Adrian Crook, who was running a game design consulting firm, and he said, "I need some help with biz dev."

He's been a guest. He's been on the show.

Yeah, so I was like, "Okay, I can do this." But then the more I started thinking about it, I realized, "Wait a minute, if there's a niche in the industry for a consulting firm that does nothing but free-to-play game design consulting, surely there's one for business consulting." And that's how The Powell Group came about—it's 10 years old now. That's what I've been doing on that side. We handle...

Does that mean I've known you for 10 years?

Apparently. Wow. You had hair.

I still have it now. It's just on my face.

That's all of us. That's the COVID laziness. Like, I'm not going to shave—I have no reason to shave. So fundamentally, with the consulting firm, we do biz dev, licensing, and marketing consulting for everyone—from indie devs to developers who've been around for two decades. We basically handle their business office, finding new contracts, publishers, and things like that.

But we also get brought in by publishers who need to find developers. We work with IPs, we work with a lot of tech companies. We track about 4,000 developers and another 750-plus publishers. We know what they want, what they're good at, what they're not good at, what they need—and companies who need access to that network and people behind it who have been doing this for two decades, that's who hires us. So, that's the long and short of The Powell Group.

And then we get into my hobby that has grown completely out of control with Indie Game Business, and that's basically our education initiative because there's nowhere to learn the business of games.

Totally.

We've got universities all over the place that are like, "Yeah, pay us 40 grand, and we'll give you a piece of paper that says you're a game designer." But they don't teach business, marketing, or anything like that. And that's the reason we started it, and it's been going for two years now.

That's awesome. And I want to support you in what you're doing because I think it's so important—helping creators, helping indies understand and succeed in the business side. You must have both if you want to do it sustainably. If you want to do a project for fun, that's great, but if you want to really make this your life and make products that people actually get to see and play...

Exactly, and that's what we tell people: If you want to be an artist and make a game, throw it up on itch.io or even Steam, and if it's something that you want to do as a hobby, you don't need us. But if you want to get past the part of your life where you're working a 40-hour-a-week job, then go home and work on your game at nights and on weekends—because that's what you're really passionate about—and you want to make that game as your job, you absolutely have to understand the business and marketing side of it.

So, let's say I'm an indie and I get that. I want to make it a job, I want to execute, but I'm just a beginner. What should I do next?

You need to understand how many options you have. And that's probably one of the biggest things I've seen in the last two or three years since we've been doing the show. We'll talk to a developer and ask, "Do you need help finding a publisher?" And they're like, "I don't know. We've already talked to everybody." Then I'll ask, "How many publishers have you pitched to?" They'll say 20 or 25, and I'm like, "Okay, you're only missing about 200 more." That's the reality, for better or worse, right now. Like I said, there are 750+ publishers out there. Are there 700 worth working with? Probably not. But you do have options, and everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, just like any other industry. Some publishers are better at doing pickup deals, and some are better if you need multi-million-dollar advances. The biggest thing is to understand how many options you actually have and then be able to properly execute—getting your game in front of them, showing them what they need to see, closing the deal, and signing a contract. But it all starts with understanding your options.

Do you have a way that you like to organize the approach to publishers? Like, for example, "Oh, we always want to start with the best publisher because that way we don’t make a deal with anyone less," or, "Oh, we want to start with not quite the best so we can test how people react and improve the pitch." How do you think about that?

Given that there are so many games out there—just last week, over 200 games launched on Steam—

Wow.

It’s ridiculous. If you try to pace it... So, what we do and what we teach developers to do is pare down that list of 750 publishers—which, by the way, you can download from our website. It's right there.

We’ll put the link in the show notes.

Yeah, knowing who the publishers are, create a target list. And then within that target list, yes, you can triage people, but you need to get it out in front of everyone as soon as it’s applicable to do so, which is basically as soon as you have a playable difference. The numbers game is a big factor.

What’s that?

Playing the numbers is a huge factor.

It is.

When you are fortunate enough to end up with multiple publishers who are interested, and you start talking numbers and contracts with them, that’s when you can start going, "Okay, here are my tier one options, here are my tier two options." But quite frankly, you don’t know if you’re going to get that. It’s not that often that happens.

Like a bidding war kind of situation.

You’ve got to get one person interested before you can get six or seven interested. So there are better publishers. There are ways that we go through and triage and rank things. We've got parameters on our side that we recommend. But at the end of the day, every game is different, every developer is different, and what they need is different. If you look at some publishers out there and judge their future performance based on their past experience, it’s just... a different producer on a game can have a heavy weight on how one game does from a publisher versus the next one.

Oh yeah. You mean at the publishing company?

Yeah.

Yeah, totally. Having been that producer, I get that because some of them are just going to go through the motions, and others are going to really get behind your project, see it as their project, and really lobby for it inside their company and outside their company to make it a success. And others are just in it to check off the boxes.

It's a lot of work, which, quite frankly, is the reason I've had a job for 20-plus years. You can’t just go out there and pitch your game to a bunch of publishers, and when somebody says, "Yeah, we're interested," you just up and sign a deal. You’ve got to do your research into what they've done in the past, down to, "Who are you going to put on my title? Who's my producer going to be? Who's my communication contact?"

There’s a lot of work that goes into this. I think a lot of developers don’t realize it because they don’t have to. Quite frankly, they don’t have to do it as often. I'm in a position where I’ve been pitching titles monthly for two decades, so I understand it. But if you’re coming in brand new and you’re like, "Oh, okay, this looks easy. I’ll just go to these events and pitch the game and talk to people." When they start getting into it, they’re like, "Oh my God, this is a lot of work." Yes, it’s a lot of work. That’s why I have a job—because we handle that.

And also, an indie dev on their own might not understand what actually is salient and significant to publishers when they're making a decision. What do they really care about? Which actually brings me to something I wanted to ask you: having done all these pitches, what are some of the big... because I have my own sort of list of like pitch no-nos that I've seen that really bug me, and I want people not to do. I'm curious, what are yours? What are the mistakes that you see people making?

You always have to have a demo today. You can't not have a demo. You can show a video, but you can't go in and just say, "Hey, here's this game on paper that we want to do, and this is what we're going to do." You've got to have something playable. First and foremost, you've got to have a video when you're going and doing stuff. And you've got 30 seconds. When someone starts watching one of these videos, your gameplay video—if you don’t hook them in that first 30 seconds, you’re not going to get them. They’re going to turn it off; they’re going to go away. Same with a slide deck. I had a developer send me a 27-page slide deck as a pitch deck for their game, and I was like, "You need to cut more than half of this out." You have 10 to 15 slides before you lose their interest.

I've heard that complaint. In fact, I just heard this a couple of weeks ago. A colleague got a pitch that was like an hour and a half. And at the end of it, he just... not only did he not want to do the project, he just never wanted to talk to those people ever again.

Yeah, and it happens. That is the reality of it. On one hand, it's about understanding and being able to boil down your game into its most basic elements. On the other hand, it's a matter of understanding that people have a time limit. They can’t sit there and listen to you for an hour and a half talk about the reason the elves and the dwarves have been fighting in your game lore for the last 300 years.

It's the same reason I tell people, "Hey, don't write a cover letter that's three pages, no matter how passionate it is." Because it's offensive to the other person's sense of their own time. You're showing that you don't care about them as an audience.

There's a whole art form around, "Okay, how do I get my pitch and my deck down into 10 or 15 slides? And how do I create a gameplay video that shows everything I want in 45 seconds?" Those are skills in and of themselves.

Yep. And you've got to also be able to demonstrate it, right? If I see a pitch that says, "We're going to have a great compelling story," I'm always thinking to myself, "Just tell me the story. Can you give me a one-sentence story that compels me? Because otherwise, why should I believe you?" Or, "We're going to have amazing graphics," but there's no picture.

My favorite was—this was 15 years ago—a developer, I was watching their gameplay video, and they go, "Okay, imagine the graphics 25 percent better." In what? And I don’t even know, are you talking about adding 25 percent more polys? Is it going to run? I don’t know what that means.

They’re going to actually put that phrase on the screen in the final product

Yes, exactly. It's very much still a "What have you done for me lately?" industry. What you did five years ago, while commendable, isn't necessarily applicable to what you're doing now.

So you're saying that's another thing—relying too much on your past successes and not showing in the product what you're going to do now that you’ve got it. You’ve got to show it now.

Exactly. You have to do both, but your track record alone—walking in the door with a game that’s not playable in any way, shape, or form—won’t get you a deal. You might say, you were the lead designer on Diablo III. That’s great, but that was a multi-hundred-person team, and now you’ve got eight people. So how does that really correlate to what you’re doing right

now?

Makes sense. Now I’m curious, given your experiences and the fact that you’re so in the mix, so familiar with what all these different publishers and developers are up to—what are some of the areas of opportunity that you see for devs right now? There was a time when Steam was a great opportunity. There was a time when Apple Arcade might’ve been a great opportunity. What do you see happening now and in the future?

Damn, Jordan, that's a good one. One is, for the right game, you can actually still go to retail. There are a couple of retail publishers that have popped up. If you had asked me five years ago, I’d have said there’s no way, but retail is somewhat viable at this point.

People are still buying games at Walmart.

Yeah, partly because it’s the only place some people can buy them. But it’s still very much a real thing. Everybody wants to talk about cloud gaming and the “Netflix of gaming,” and I just basically want to backhand somebody every time I hear that phrase because we’ve been talking about the Netflix of gaming for a decade. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The interesting thing in the last year is we’re seeing more platforms realize they have to have exclusive content, which sounds like basic ABC stuff. People don’t sign up for Netflix just to watch Friends. They do it to watch Stranger Things or Orange is the New Black or Marvel movies—or whatever exclusive they have right now.

Almost more like HBO than the original Netflix.

We've seen Apple Arcade pop up, and Apple’s obviously paying for development. Google Stadia is paying for development right now. Microsoft is paying for development on Game Pass. And I forget which developer it was, but in the last month, they said their game is still available at digital retail, but it’s also on Microsoft Game Pass, and their Steam sales have basically tripled. Because it’s on Game Pass, cloud gaming, and I bundle streaming, gaming, and subscription, all cloud-based gaming is here to stay.

There’s not going to be a one-shot solution. The big thing now is Amazon jumping in with Luna, and it’s like, "Newsflash, Amazon tried this 10 years ago, and they failed dramatically at it." You can’t just open the door and go, "Hey, we’re here," and expect there to be one solution.

Stadia is real. I mean, talk about a team that tried to make a big splash and is almost forgotten about at this point in the conversation.

If you’d asked me that two months ago, I’d have said, "Yeah, it’s a complete waste of time," and their launch was abysmal. Even when they came out at, was it GDC? Yeah, I watched that and thought, "Okay, you just used an hour of my time and told me nothing." I think they have the right idea, but you’re not going to get acceptance in the core gaming space when I have to go rebuy the game I already own just to play it on your hardware that you made me buy.

And like you said, there’s no exclusive content.

There wasn’t, but now there is.

Oh, what do they have now?

Some indies. They have some indie stuff going on. That's the lowest barrier for any of these publishers to get. Before you pull a Microsoft and start paying seven and a half billion dollars for Bethesda, the easiest and quickest content that you can get is indie games—and they're a little cheaper too.

I just wonder if that's going to do the trick for Google. My sense is it probably won't. I think it's great for the indies to get involved and get out there and good for them. But I wonder if that's really going to bring people to a platform.

I don't think so right now, but there's a lot of opportunity out there. And I think when the pandemic hit, there was some negative press along the lines of, "I, as an indie dev, can't go to PAX or I can't go to GDC, and so my sales are going to plummet." And that was not the case. It still is not the case. If anything, this pandemic has been a godsend to indie developers because it has forced the rest of the industry to look digitally in terms of acquisitions. And now you're able to very easily get your game in front of hundreds of publishers.

To some extent, it breaks down some of the barriers or distinctions between big players and small players, increases the appetite of the audience for content, and maybe decreases the speed at which the big players can release new content on their own. A lot of opportunities are showing up there.

So, the conversation we had this morning, and it was with Fernando Rizzo, he's the CEO over at Modern Wolf. The point that he brought up was, think about when you and I were releasing games 10 years ago. A launch campaign was like 18 months long. You announced the game, you went into development, you hyped the game for a year, and then you had this big launch.

Yeah, you dripped out screenshots, and you had the reporters come in for this little sliver of a preview, and then they came in for the bigger preview. And yeah.

Exactly. And now, more recently—and this is just in the last few months—you’re seeing these two-month and sometimes two-week campaigns. The example he brought up this morning was EA just released Squadrons. And in all fairness, that could easily be billed as a successor to the old X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter games, some of the biggest games of all time. They didn’t do an 18-month cycle. They did like a two-month or maybe three-month cycle. They announced it, and then they launched it. And that was it.

Well, you remember Apex Legends. I feel like Apex really showed that this was viable.

I’ll even go one earlier than Apex—Fallout Shelter from Bethesda. They announced that like at E3, and it launched that day.

But that was free to download, right? Oh wait, Apex was too. Yeah, but Squadrons isn’t. So, that’s an interesting progression. You go from like, free-to-download, sort of casual, to free-to-download AAA, to now paid AAA.

Because the point that he brought up, which is a good one, is if you look at the data on Steam wishlists, for example, older games in Steam wishlists don’t convert on nearly the scale that something newer does. And if you think about it—I never sat down and actually put that together—but even with my own gaming, I realized that I’ll get an email that says, “You have 14 games that are on sale,” and then I look at the email and I’m like, “I don’t even know what half of those are,” because I wishlisted them like a year ago or six months ago. I don’t even know why I wishlisted it anymore. Now, with so much content being out there, our ADD brains are even more ADD than normal.

I think a lot of players, they want to stream it on Twitch. They want to tweet about it. They want to be part of the conversation. They want to make YouTube videos. And that will also—the engagement there is always going to be higher on new content than if you're playing something from two years ago. So that just keeps the cycle going.

It puts pressure on publishers and developers to have a lineup of stuff that’s coming out. And the bad side of it is, we’re almost back to the old retail days of, if that game doesn’t perform in the first three or four weeks, then they’re going to kill it.

Yeah.

And I say that, and then I have things like—this podcast can’t see me—but my background right now is Among Us, a game that was floundering on Steam for two years, and then just absolutely exploded in the last, what, three weeks? It’s not like a lot of industries where you can go, “Okay, this is the optimal way to do everything.” There’s not an optimal way. It’s understanding the market, understanding the business, and being able to adapt to it on a whim. That’s the hard part.

Yeah. I see what you're saying about if something doesn't fly, they're going to oftentimes let it go quickly. But on the other hand, stories like Among Us and also Rocket League—Rocket League was apparently languishing for two years or something. Where they just, they continued to just support it, tweak it, look at the data. I learned that from, um, we had a guest on, Gordon Rowe, who told that story. So, and Among Us is another great example.

The only difference is Rocket League was a different game. That was—I forget what it was.

Right. That’s right.

The game before that. And then they basically just prettied it up, repackaged it, and boom, they launched it again and it was gone. Among Us is so odd because it literally wasn’t. I mean, as a matter of fact, like, they had already announced they were working on a sequel. Now they’ve announced that they’re not working on the sequel anymore. And it’s three people. When Fortnite took off, it’s like my entire LinkedIn feed was, “We’re hiring. It doesn’t even matter what we’re hiring for. We’re hiring for everything.” Because even a company the size of Epic, that handles not only original games but also the backend and the engine of hundreds, if not thousands of games, even they weren’t prepared for what happened when Fortnite just exploded.

The Fall Guys right now are also just like, “We just will hire. We just need people. I don't know what you're going to do.”

We need people with a pulse. And that's it. And so, it’s—you just, you have to be nimble. You can’t come into the industry and say, “Okay, here’s our two-year development pipeline, and this is all the features we’re going to have.” And it’s not that easy. Ten years ago, you were shooting at a moving target when you did that. Now the target is moving and disappearing and reappearing and warping. And you just have to be able to be nimble with it and be ready for whatever.

All those points you make, make me think, Hey, you know what? It's also about just getting products out and iterating. So even if your first or second or third product doesn't succeed, you're getting data, you're learning what people want, you're building those relationships, you're understanding how to make better games. Just having that one game that you have to get perfect can really hold you back, keep you from jumping in the pool, and ultimately having that success.

That is one of the biggest mistakes that we see new teams making. It's like, they, in their head, have their magnum opus that they wanna create. And you can't really do that. You've got to start smaller and get some base hits out there and understand, here are the basics and this is how you do it. Before you can develop a game with a two-year dev cycle, you need to do a game with a two-month dev cycle, and ship it. And see what happens after you ship it.

Yeah, you can't start with The Witcher 3.

Yeah, exactly. The developers and the studios who understand analytics—and I don't care how, we're not talking about pulling data and ad stuff out of people—but understanding even the analytics in your own game are the ones that are going to be successful. I started playing Fallout 76 when it first launched, and no, it wasn't the greatest thing ever, but this is a huge company that has been around for a very long time. They're looking at all of this data that nobody else is seeing, except for them. They know what's working and what isn't and whether or not they need to continue working on this.

And obviously, they were seeing enough that they were like, "Yeah, this is working." You can't always take the negativity from Twitter and Reddit and apply it as an actual reality because you don't know what's going on.

Totally. One thing I want to talk to you about is funding, like early-stage funding. So before people are coming to you to help them close publishing companies, but while they're working on the demo, what have you seen successful teams doing to get their projects up and going before they come to you?

Making sure you understand what it's going to take to get it out the door in the first place. And in a lot of cases, you have to have another job. How long does it take to find a publisher? On average, for the last—I will say for 21 to the last 23 years—it's three months. Now it takes longer just simply because of the sheer number of games that are coming across the desks, and publishers are frantically trying to get as many games out as possible right now because with the pandemic, there's a ton of money in the industry.

I don't think any of us know yet, but the feeling is when this pandemic is over, or if it continues to go on, all this money that has been chunked into the industry, just hand over fist for the last eight months, it's going to die. It's going to go away. There's two things that people buy when situations like this hit or recessions hit, and that's entertainment and alcohol. And eventually, you're not going to have enough spare money. Food and rent are going to be more important than games and beer, and that's going to go away. So right now, it's one of those—you got to make hay while the sun's shining. Publishers are trying to make as much hay as possible, but that creates its own bottlenecks. And it's one of those that you just really need to—you need to understand what it's going to take to get your game out there and be realistic about it. But that's the bottom line.

That's great advice. And Jay, it's been great having you on. I think we could do a whole nother show here just about the impact of COVID on the industry.

We can—I can—we can keep going for hours.

I certainly know you can, and I appreciate your time.

Let me give folks the quick rundown on IGB and why we do it and what we do. It's, I realized...

That's the Indie Games Business Initiative.

Indie Games Business. And if you Google Indie Game Business, chances are it'll come up, or you can just go to IndieGame.Business and all of this stuff is there. The whole reason we started it was because it was frustrating. The fact that to learn this stuff and to hear the lectures that happen at GDC and Gamescom and all of these conferences, you're spending five, 10,000 to get there, and not everybody can do that. And so I was like, why don't we just bring those sessions to Twitch? And so that's what we did to start with.

Cool.

And now that has grown, and there's a podcast, and that part has taken off. And so the next step was, if they can't go to a conference and learn the business side, then they can't go and meet publishers either. And so that's when, in early 2019, we started doing digital events. I spent all of last year jumping up and down telling people, "You've got to—digital events are the future. They're more accessible. They're cheaper. You get all of this." Nobody cared. And then February of this year hits, and it's, "We're all doing digital conferences." We literally—so our Q4, 2019 Indie Game Business event had about 150 attendees. The one that we did in March of 2020 had over a thousand.

Wow.

And so that's how quickly—but we do this to give developers a chance. We will teach you about the business of games through the podcast or through a webinar. And then the Discord—we're up to almost 2,000 industry professionals in that thing. And that's just another aspect of it. It's the part of my job that makes me smile the most. I love being able to do it.

I think what you're doing is really great and really helpful for a lot of developers, and ultimately that means more great games for people to play, including us. Yeah, I support it all the way. We'll get the links in the show notes, and it's great having you on, and I'd love to have you back sometime.

Yeah, anytime, Jordan, you know that.

Okay, that was the interview with Jay. I just rhymed, which is fantastic! If you can use this information to get some great games made, that makes me very happy. If you know someone who would benefit from the information in this interview, please share this with them so that they can succeed, and they can make better games or have their great games get published. And again, subscribe, write a review—that is how you support the show. And thanks, I'll see you on the next episode of Playmakers.

Okay, so you've made it to the latest secret meeting of our secret end-of-the-episode club. Congratulations. I am proud to be among... among... among us. I have "amongst us." I was just trying to work in Among Us somehow, and it didn’t work, but I am proud to be here with you right now in a secret club, sharing that brotherhood, that sisterhood. And here’s the thing—we’re going to have fewer meetings of the club in the near term. If you want to know if a meeting is coming up, you’re just going to have to make it to the end of that episode, but we will not be doing one in the next episode. And then after that, we’ll just, we’ll just have to wait and see because here’s the thing—if I do a secret meeting every single time, then everyone knows it’s coming, and it’s not that secret. But if it only happens sometimes, then it’s like this super special thing.

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