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This is the fourth post in our multi-part adventure blog. We made "Nameless: the Hackers RPG", a one-handed, touchscreen, no virtual-pad, turn-based, non-fantasy, 12+ hour JRPG, built for mobile bite-sized gameplay on iOS. *phew!*
Check out our previous posts on Gamasutra Blog:
The core of BoxCat is composed of Steve and myself, James. We're not trained as Game Developers and have only recently dropped everything to follow our dreams.
We are coming in with prior business experience from other industries, so the most we can do is cross-reference similarities of how B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) interact during a show. We recognize that attending a single game industry convention won't give us a gambit of knowledge. We're simply hoping to share what we've observed.
Nameless: the Hackers RPG for iOS Kiosk at GDC
iTunes Link: http://nth.box.cat
Free Lite Version: http://nthl.box.cat
Reviews & Mentions: http://box-cat.com/
Exhibiting at conventions may not be for everyone. It's very expensive and requires a lot of preparation.
Deciding to go to GDC 2013 was a difficult decision, especially when mobile profits are blade thin. It’s not our place to say if it’s a definite do-or-don’t for anyone else, we’ll leave it to each team to decide for themselves. We can only talk about why we decided to go as BoxCat for our first game, Nameless.
About the Nameless Project
We're a small working team of 2.6 full-time people over nine months. We actually have a team of four: two full-time, one part-time, and a friend that helped out for a few weeks.
James Liu (@JamesBoxCat)
Project Coordinator, Game Design/Developer, Coffee Addict
Stephen Ip (@Poor_Musician)
Music Coordinator, Game Design/Scripter, Homeless Guy
Yuichi Haga
Art Coordinator, Game Design/Scripter, Family Man
Tony Chang
Game Developer, Ninja
Here are our project expenses for Nameless the Hackers RPG:
We are not including the cost of food, shelter, and lifestyle. Living costs will vary from place-to-place. We consider this "Sweat-Equity" within our team; it's separate from expenses. You can estimate our costs by calculating 2.6 people times 9 months times the cost of living. We live in Los Angeles, California, USA.
We'll go into detail about how we managed our budget and how we ran the project in a future post. There are no absolute correct way to run a project, everything has pros and cons.
For now, it's only important to highlight the cost of attending GDC verses the rest of the budget.
Our Considerations
It was December 2012 when we made the decision. We knew that exhibiting at a conference would be very expensive, possibly $5000-6000+ USD.
The base cost of the Kiosk was $3250 with no WIFI access. We knew there would be additional costs for hotel, printing, giveaways, business cards, TO-site travel, and ON-site travel.
In December, we also knew we would be selling Nameless in March on promotion for $1.99. After Apple's cut of $0.59 we would be left with profits of $1.40 per copy. We figured we would have to sell 4000-5000 copies of our game in-order to make back GDC costs.
We did our homework before hand, we knew this was risky for a mobile game. Ultimately we made the decision for a couple of reasons:
- Our game was a premium game, so we thought traditional marketing might work.
- We are completely unknown in the industry. This would be a way to meet Journalists.
- GDC is an industry (B2B) conference, which meant we could meet other developers.
- We plan to make 2-3 more games. This was not an all-or-nothing gamble.
- We need to better understand the “pulse” of the game industry.
- The education was something we could take with us into the next project.
Our GDC Adventure
GDC gave us a better understanding for the industry. We were able to meet many talented developers, publishers, students, speakers, media, advertising companies, development companies, art, music, and the list goes on! Our sales? Not so much.
We'll try to break down our experience as much as possible. We also feel that we know why our sales didn't reach it's full potiential.
GDC Effects on Our Sales
We should emphasize that the commercial impact of GDC on Nameless was small because we did not take full advantage of pre-attendance.
Here’s our download graph with GDC week highlighted:
There was definitely an indirect effect on our sales for being at GDC, we do agree it's a bit hard to tell from the graph alone. We were able to connect with various Journalists and each "bump" on the graph can be linked to a post about Nameless.
You can see our collected posts here: http://box-cat.com/
It's important to mention that the indirect effect was not simply because we were exhibiting. There were many factors involved which required us to engage socially.
Launch Timing
In our other post, we mentioned that we didn't do much in-terms of marketing and only did what we could as a bootstrapped dev group. Most of our efforts were giveaways which reached out to consumers. GDC is an industry (B2B) conference, so our efforts didn't do much to reach industry Journalists.
Before GDC and before launch, we felt that Journalists may have a high chance of overlooking us. In our minds, this is especially true because we had never published a game before, no one knows who we are, and the iOS AppStore is significantly flooded.
We had two ways of thinking about this:
- "We have a published game! We're definitely here to stay!"
- "You've never heard of us! Please check out our demo!"
What we couldn't do was figure out a way to say:
3. "We have a limited following! Please check out our demo!"
For better or worse, we decided to launch our game a week before GDC. If we had a previous game, we probably would have gone with option #3. Regardless, we're pretty satisfied with our decision.
Pocket Gamer Party
This was an intense mobile gaming meet-up that happened during GDC. We got wind of this while following 148Apps:
http://www.148apps.com/news/gdc-2013-month-meet/
The moment we saw this we added ourselves to the Eventbrite page. Here’s a quick list of the type of people we met here:
- Publishers already in the mobile market
- Major console publishers looking to get into the mobile market
- Major online gaming publishers looking to get into the mobile market
- Translation services
- Audio services
- Art services
- Established development studios
- Marketing advertizing businesses
- Journalists
- Indie Developers, Artists, Muscians
- Students
- SDK companies
We met a ton of people, made many new friends. This was important to us because we could talk to them and ask them about their view of the industry. Many people were willing to tell us about their experiences and what made them jump in.
Meeting the people that have been there and done it before, is easily the biggest justification for us to attend GDC. It's important to note that exhibiting made no impact on our ability to attend. It was open to everyone.
Indie Mobile Speed Pitch
We also attended the Indie Mobile Speed Pitch, it’s kind of like Speed dating but you pitch your apps to media Journalists. www.148apps.com were the ones to set it up. Each group had to get a limited ticket from EventBrite. When the event started each group had 5 minutes to present themselves to the Journalists before leaving for the next table.
http://www.148apps.com/news/gdc-2013-month-meet/
These media journalists were in attendance:
This led to much needed awareness for Nameless:
Press Lists from GDC
As an exhibiting member of GDC, you not only get the kiosk, but you also get a press list for all press that have registered themselves for GDC and opted in to be contacted. We were emailed by GDC early March and we immediately started milling out emails.
Again though, this may have been too late to have a strong impact on pre-awareness. All of these emails were effectively “cold-emails” during a time when everyone else was probably already bombarding them.
Many of them were not focused on mobile or were not Apple iOS related. Even so, a good number of them emailed back. We attribute our cold-email response rate to a video we found by Ben Kuchera from Nov 2011 on RunJumpDev:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiqyFfsSUDA
We followed this advice while aggregating other things we learned online.
This led to more visibility for Nameless before and during GDC:
The press list also led to an interview with “Action” (that’s his name) from IndieGamePod. His site is titled “Experimental Game Dev Podcast Show”. Here's our interview with Action:
http://www.indiegamepod.com/?p=3071
Effects on Sales: That's it? Lessons Learned
It's important to note that Nameless is a paid premium game in a niche JRPG segment that isn't highly sought after on the iOS store. We feel that if we had a freemium game, each of these media posts would have resulted in many more downloads.
Also, if we had the ability to do so, it would have been better to hold our game while giving exclusives to Journalists for one big push. We found out later these are called "Media holds". We didn't ask for this because we had already launched our game.
We imagine, if we better understood the Journalism landscape we could have given them a slow drip that may have built up a fan/hype base. If we could have compounded our original downloads from our silent launch with the power of multiple media sites on the same day, we would have been in a better position.
At our highest rank under All Games, we reached 120th. We wonder if we had better coordinated and planned our launch if we may have broken the 100th rank barrier.
Events and Networking
Similar to other industries, we recognized that simply exhibiting will not work. You must attend all the other events. You need to schedule meetings. This takes time and planning. Here's an additional list of everything we did as well:
Our Thoughts on GDC
- We accomplished most of our original goals:
- We're unknown, meet Journalists. Check.
- Meet other developers. Check.
- Be able to build 2-3 games with confidence. Check.
- Better understand industy. Check
- Build knowledge for our next game. Check
- Could have planned our launch different. Next Game.
- Worth the cost of exhibiting? For us, yes. We now have a pretty strong understanding of what we should try next. It's not guarenteed to work, but it's much more informed.
- Everyone that walked to our Kiosk talked to us about the awesome talks happening upstairs. Part of us wish we weren't boothing and were in full attendance instead.
- Next time, hope we don't need to count our expenses in # of apps we need to sell.
Next Upcoming Topics
We have the following topics we'll be also touching on in a few days. It takes a while to make these, we'll be posting until we're done. We're adding a few more to the list since everyone seems to be enjoying this.
Stay tuned! Follow us:
@BoxCatLLC
Facebook PageFeel free to ask us anything in the comments. =)
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I generally don't promote iOS titles, simply because there aren't that many in my genre, and I can't make money on them from affiliate sales, but I did retweet the youtube video (@redpandagames).
My only criticism about the game is that the characters don't look like hackers. I know people are going to get mad at me for saying that, but the black is super buff, and no hacker would spend that much time at the gym. They would be too busy doing computer stuff! The lady with the purple hair looks more like a scientist, and the blond guy looks more like a jock. However, a hacker really could look like anything, but those people look more like models or something. Never would have guessed they were hackers or computer people.
I really like the way that the game Infinite Gameworks (http://visualnovelgames.com/VN-Infinite-Gameworks.html) portrayed their game dev characters doing different jobs like audio, etc.
Anyway, I wish you the best of luck. If you can manage a port to Windows without too much trouble or extra work, I would highly suggest it.
You're right on the characters, many others also felt this way.
For the characters, we tired our best to define them by personality and also give them some emotional growth milestones within the story. We're big fans of the Tales Series and old school Final Fantasy. Their character windows actually animate and hop-around during the cutscenes similar to Tales.
Here's a quick intro:
Jayden (the blonde female) - She used to be a script-kiddy and ended up getting hired by a well-intentioned secret organization. She now takes on blackhat (off the record) missions. She's a strong minded and confident female. She calls people on their "BS" and takes a leadership role in the team.
Cody (the blonde guy) - Used to be a whitehat (ethical hacker) which decided to take on blackhat missions and was hired by the same secret organization. He's new to the team and gives a sense of innocence, but he's quite handy to have around.
Tiny (the bald guy) - Is a digital forensics expert that works for a police station. He's formally trained in network security and digital evidence recovery. Spends a lot of time with other police officers.
Hannah (the purple hair female) - She's also a strong minded and intelligent female. She loves cryptography and is studying to finish her thesis. In a way, she is definitely a scientist. She geeks out on data.
We tried our best to weave real hacking terminology and real hacking situations into the storyline. There's a lot about social engineering topics. We did our best to keep it entertaining while also introducing the player to a technical storyline.
Many thanks! We'll have to check out Infinite Gameworks. Looks awesome. It's good to hear that visual novels are picking up. =)
I didn't realize that your game was sort of a visual novel, so I'll mention it in my end of month newsletter. A lot of my users read the newsletter through iPhone, so it may help.
Also, I forgot to mention - thanks for the detailed information on GDC. It's priceless.
I want to translate into Japanese this article at my blog.
Would you give approval translation permit to me?
Please give us a link to the translated article. We'll share it on our channels as well.
I posted translation article, below.
http://nanmo.hateblo.jp/entry/2013/05/25/220850