Post

Also, the power of social media - if you have 100k followers, it will certainly help you boost wishlists and get colloborations with journalists/influencers. 💪

Great insights, Tom! I have had a several friends who have made it big with small (2-4) or even solo teams - a key learning from all of them is getting a passive income train rolling first so you can focus on developing your game without worrying about money (ie keeping your overheads low)

Solid gold here, thanks Tom

Cheers Tom great stuff. More testing ahoy!

Very solid advice. We kinda share the same approach and priorities.

Superb article, and I'm so glad to see someone talking about keeping headcount down. So many people and studios treat extra bodies like a sign of success regardless of whether more headcount is actually useful. Low headcount means you have to have good communication and good processes.

If you were to write a book called "How to run an indie game studio", there is SO MUCH DEMAND right now that you would have trouble with your bank manager trying to get you to invest in conflict diamonds.

truth

Great read. But I always thought your games were in the Defenestration genre.

Thanks for sharing

I've been listening to old PC Gamer Podcast episodes in the car the past couple of weeks so I read this in the Master of Stealth's voice (more so than usual). Good god you're a clear and direct writer about this stuff.

"It might be a great idea, but investing years of your life and all of your money into a game with no external evidence that anyone will like it is like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the gun." Well said. Also, a lot of AAA worked this way for a long time.

It should definitely be edited in the blog post that "selling games" versus "selling copies of games" is a bit of a semantics thing so it could just say either. That's worth editing in the blog post.

this is cool - the part about "churn work" I think holds for any type of product development - you seldom get the joy of just grinding stuff out, its always confusing testing work.

I think similar to Supergiant, he takes big swings and it mostly pays off.

Tom did the rare thing of not screwing up after the 1st game (sounds like a joke but i mean it seriously)! kept making good games without blowing up the budget (as he wrote in the article).

This is excellent insight. Thanks.

Great read, very accessible and usable. Curious how you found your testers and marketing seems absent in your advise, why is that. That could hold advice nr 5 :)?

This was great thank you for sharing your wisdom Tom!

Note how 'testing' covers 50% of this list. Testing, and asking the right questions. And taking the answers seriously.

Thank you so much for this. ❤️

Super insightful blog post! Its honestly refreshing to just see someone who cares about sustainability discussing how its worked for their studio and wanting to share that with others.

Absolutely solid advice, thank you for sharing dude

Not that you need to hear it but I really enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards. So much fun. Up to the point that the puzzles became too hard for me, but that's 100% a me thing.

That was a great read Tom. Thanks for that.

Legend! 🫡

This was a great blog post, dare I say "whole ass article." Lots of fantastic advice. Thank you.

Really appreciated your perspective on pricing—so often it feels like studios aren't pricing aggressively as they could and this felt like the first time I'd heard a material explanation.

Thanks Tom, great read! Straightforward and easy go parse. I love the drop downs!

sometimes the like button needs to apply more than one like

Where we're going we don't need roads, we just need runway

One could say you gave a nibble of advice ^_^

I've beta tested a LOT of games and TBW had the best feedback collection by far. Devs should really learn from the example, putting in game forms to get feedback on the fly is so much better than just a discord thread labeled bug reporting.

what you say about the fact that we sell *copies* of games and how that relates to price is a breath of fresh air to read, considering what other people try to say on that matter

Really well layed out Tom. Thanks! I think I mentioned it before, but it was your intro to GameMaker series on youtube back in 2015 that helped me make the leap into gamedev.

This is really interesting! Thanks for sharing Tom!

I've only ever heard it to describe staff turnover (in a negative, burnout- or layoff-adjacent sense). I'm also partial to "thrash" as a term for effort that ends up thrown out or redone because objectives were unclear/unstable. As for 👇... I think most studios just call that "full production". 😁

double head count?

So much good info, appreciate it!

I feel like the first point of staying small isn't said enough. It's shocking how fast the math no longer works when hiring more people.

Great read! So many pearls of wisdom.

Dude, played Gunpoint so many years ago and didn't even realize it was from the same people as Tactical Breach Wizards. Loved both games! Cool of you to hand down your experience to others, keep up the great work!

The one differential with pricing that I'd bring up is that higher prices can eventually (theoretically) capture players who won't pay a premium via discounts. Much harder to do the opposite and get more money from folks who would have been willling to pay more!

That graph is excellent.