Introducing the Best of British Summer Sports Jam!

This week at Develop Conference a team of indie mobile developers took to the floor to announce the Best of British initiative. Best of British is a collective of mobile developers - including Spilt Milk Studios (Hard Lines), Big Pixel (Off the Leash), Mobile Pie (My Star), Future Games of London (Hungry Shark), and myself - who teamed up earlier this year to pool our efforts and share our skills, audiences and connections in order to make a splash in the mobile market.


This weekend we will be developing our first collective game, Best of British Summer Sports, as a 48 hour jam. Mind Candy (Moshi Monsters) have been kind enough to lend us their offices for the event, while Unity are kindly providing sponsorship, and will be on hand to offer technical support.

Best of British Summer Sports will be a collection of rapid-fire minigames, played against the clock. Each member studio will produce a selection of their own micro-challenges, which will be compiled together for continuous play. So you'll be able to sample all the development skills our rag-tag team of misfits has to offer!

We would all like to thank Unity and Mind Candy for helping to make this happen, and also to Osborne Clarke, who have been incredibly supportive throughout the Best of British initiative!

Follow the Best of British team on Facebook

Adventures at Develop Brighton!

I'm back this week from an incredible time at Develop Conference 2012 in Brighton, where I was speaking last Thursday. While the weather didn't exactly hold up there was plenty of warmth from the games industry community and I made a lot of new friends from all sides of the industry.

Particular stand-out talks included Brian Baglow's closing talk from the Indie Marketing Day, highlighting what indie developers should be doing to promote their games but aren't. This earlier talk from him, along similar lines, is a must watch if you weren't there! I was also thoroughly impressed by Fat Pebble's unique plasticene design shown in their talk about their upcoming game Clay Jam, and the creativity and ambition shown by FuturLab in their press and media operations.

Marketing and PR was a key issue on the Indie track this year, and with good reason. It's the hardest part of an indie's operations, in my opinion, and certainly something I've put a lot of time and effort into. So to see such inspiring and thought-provoking discussion was extremely valuable. Other highlights included Benni Hill's talk about running White Paper Games, and Rob Davis (Playniac)'s talk on how they followed up the launch of International Racing Squirrels for Channel 4 - all very insighful.

My own talk went down very well indeed. Several delegates commented that they found it inspiring and useful - something that I am, to be perfectly honest, chuffed to bits about! I plan to produce a video based on my talk on Indie Exposure, but do take a look at my blog series if it's a subject you would like to know more about.

Finally, I made some fantastic new connections and was glad to meet up with games journalists, other indie studios, and many more fascinating faces from the industry. I'd definitely recommend going to the next one, event for the networking alone. Develop Liverpool will be in November this year, and the conference will return to Brighton next summer. I hope to see you there!

The slides from my talk can be downloaded from here

Indie Exposure: A Rundown

With my Develop Conference talk coming very soon (Thursday 12th July everyone!), what better time to put up a summary of my Indie Exposure series of articles? The articles have been kindly reposted on GamesBrief, an in-depth resource for games business articles that you should definitely take a look at.

Part 1: Why is Exposure So Difficult?

The biggest obstacle to success as an indie, in my view, has been exposure of my game to its audience. How do I get people to know about my game? This article looks at where these challenges come from, especially in open marketplaces such as the iOS App Store.

Part 2: Making the Most of your USP

Part and parcel of your game's marketablity is its unique selling point. Being able to explain why your product is awesome in one sentence or image is incredibly powerful. Emphasising what makes your product remarkable, rather than its general quality or polish, is what gets people talking. But you need to find a marketplace that is looking for something to talk about.

Part 2b: Virality

A response to Kevin Allocca's informative TED talk about viral videos. The video explains the mechanics which determine what content goes viral and the importance of tastemakers - all of which is equally applicable to making a marketable game!

Part 3: The Personal Touch

As an indie developer you're able to operate on a personal level in a way that larger studios cannot. Use this to leverage your audience and the press by offering them memorable experiences and a genuine connection to the creator. Your personal efforts are hugely effective in gaining the interests of tastemakers.

Part 4: The Free and the Exposed

There is perfectly logical reasoning why putting your game out for free can engage more users and make viral propogation of your game more likely. However, it is by now means a magic bullet. This article reflects on my own experience with Greedy Bankers: Bailout! and asks why a free price band may not necessarily help your game spread.

Indie Exposure: The Realities of Free

It's been a while since the last Indie Exposure post, hasn't it? When I was planning to post this instalment, I was preparing Greedy Bankers: Bailout! for launch - that is, the free version of the game with expanded game modes for in-app purchases. I fully expected this to make a massive difference to the game's fortunes - specifically, enabling much better exposure.

Of course, as with the best laid plans, this strategy didn't go the way I expected. While I am receiving consistently higher downloads of the free version as I had been getting on the paid version, I was expecting the userbase to grow by significantly more than it actually did. I needed to do some thinking before I could wax lyrical about the exposure opportunities for free games. 

I'll begin with my starting logic: offering your game for free should make it more open to recommendation, and hence benefit your exposure. Let's think about why.

The Logic

Put yourself in your customers' shoes, or look at your own purchasing decisions. I presume I am not an atypical iOS user, and from my own experience even paying 69p for an app requires a big decision. After all, how many times do I want to spend 69p before I find something that I really enjoy? Unless I am cautious about my spending those 69p's could really add up!

When I buy a cup of coffee, I know exactly what I'm going to get and have a fairly accurate estimate of how much I'll enjoy it. So paying £1.80 for my medium Americano is not a big decision. With a game I have only the vaguest idea how much I'll enjoy it, even if I take time to read all the copy, see the reviews and look at the screenshots. In short, I'll be taking a risk. 

Speaking at Develop Brighton, 12 July 2012

Hi everyone! Just to let you know I'll be speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton this July. I'll be giving a talk titled Indie Exposure: Tackling the Challenges, based on my recent blog series.

Breaking into the market as an indie developer takes more than just a great game, with publicity and exposure being major barriers to success. Drawing lessons from his Greedy Bankers series on iOS, one-man studio Alistair Aitcheson examines why visibility remains such a challenge, and explores ways to achieve it.

He’ll explore how freely-accessible marketplaces like the App Store are approached by consumers, the importance of a bold and remarkable USP, and how pricing and platform affect your ability to draw attention. He also examines the opportunities unique to indie developers, to take memorable design risks and to become identifiable personalities.

I'll be speaking as part of the Indie Dev Day on 12th July. Early bird tickets for the day are £75 before 13 July. I went to this day last year and found it both insightful and useful, and an affordable alternative to the full conference for smaller studios, so it's highly recommended! I'll be in Brighton for all three days of the conference this year, so if anyone else is going it'll be great to see you there.

The feedback I got from my Develop Liverpool talk was so encouraging, and thoroughly enjoyed giving my presentation. So I'm excited to be able to speak at the main event in Brighton this year!

The conference is also running an Indie Marketing Day on 11th of July, which has a very exciting lineup of talks, and is definitely work taking a look at.

Greedy Bankers: Bailout! Launches

The free-to-play edition of Greedy Bankers, titled Greedy Bankers: Bailout! is now available in the App Store.

Please do tell your friends, and pass on the link - the more players the merrier!

http://itun.es/iP66K7

The new version is FREE, and introduces two new game modes - Mystery and Bailout - alongside brand new music and sound design from musician Tom Parfitt.

Greedy Bankers: Bailout! is free to play, with additional game modes priced at $0.99/£0.69/€0.79 each.

Thanks very much, and happy banking to all!

Indie Exposure: This Time it's Personal

So we've had a look at where the challenges of indie exposure lie, and the power of the USP in your promotion, and how to make the most of it. It seems natural to follow on with a discussion of one particular USP available to all of us indie developers. It's something few AAA studios have quite the same access to...

It is ourselves.

Our ability as indie developers to be individuals, with distinctive personalities and motivations is incredibly valuable. Here's why:

Your Marketing Story

Your marketing story is one of the most important promotional tools at your disposal. Tadhg Kelly wrote a smart article on what makes for a good marketing story, which is a must-read.

Stories are emotive. Stories are memorable. Stories have a human face. We as indies have unique and fascinating stories to tell. Because of our scale, we can be individual personalities, and readers of our stories can put themselves in our shoes. You may not think you have an interesting story, but you do. Micro studios taking on entire game projects must inevitably take a unique and usual path to get there. The tale of an indie who struggled to get break through but persisted through thick and thin is inspiring.

Indie Exposure Addendum: Virality

Thanks to game developer Bateleur (FastRam Design) for recommending this video - it's well worth a watch. The video is a talk about how viral videos get popular, and I think there's strong parallels with the indie and iPhone games markets.



When I posted links to these articles on the TIGSource forums, a few points were raised. I'd casually mentioned a "mass gatekeeper" created by the consumer audience in my first article. This is to reference the point that the consumer network has replaced the gatekeeper that used to be publishers and platform holders. Developer Paul Eres suggested that the mass gatekeeper was less potent than the tastemakers: games press and gaming voices that inform large swathes of followers.

I think that both of these are true. Fortunately, I think that both of these gatekeepers are very similar to what they see as remarkable.

Preparing to Launch... Greedy Bankers: Bailout!

The previously announced Greedy Bankers:Bailout! has just gone out for its final round of testing! Should the beta tests prove successful, I'll probably launch the game towards the end of the week. Greedy Bankers: Bailout! adds in two brand new game modes, Bailout and Mystery, and offers the Arcade mode from the original Greedy Bankers entirely free of charge. The extra game modes will be unlockable by in-app purchase.



The new version also includes a brand new soundtrack and sound design by musician Tom Parfitt, making it considerably brighter and buzzier than its predecessor. The music's been stuck in my head for weeks, which is always a good sign!

I'll be sure to keep you posted as and when Greedy Bankers: Bailout! is submitted... watch this space!

Indie Exposure: Making the most of your USP

The articles in this series are featured as guest posts on GamesBrief: The Business of Games

In my previous article I discussed how and why exposure is the major issue facing independent developers. In the next few articles I want to talk about some of the key ways I feel this can be overcome, drawing on my own experience with the Greedy Bankers games on iPhone and iPad.

It can be very easy to see marketing and game development as separate disciplines - that creating an awesome game and drawing in new players are separate tasks requiring separate sets of skills. The reality is that designing your game to be marketable is a key part of development. It's up to you as a designer to identify, develop and promote your unique selling point.