Infinitap Games

In this diary, I talk about the difficulties I've found running an indie studio from a financial perspective especially relating to taxes and business structure. I am not a lawyer nor an accountant, so take my advice worth a grain of salt.

I've always imagined that financing the creation of an Indie game would be interesting to plan out, although I can imagine that it's a hard task to undertake. Setting realistic budgets and contingency plans can be annoying and difficult to gauge (As I should know from some of the projects I've had to do in University! hahaha)

I'm curious actually Matt, how is Neverending Nightmares coming along financially anyway? Like have you met all of your budget limits or have you been forced to go over them in a few cases? I can understand if you don't want to answer seeing as it's a bit cheeky to ask about finances hahaa

I think it's a reasonable question. Even with the kickstarter and Free the Games Fund money, that wasn't going to cover the entire budget of the game. The plan was always to supplement the money we made there with consulting gigs. Fortunately, we've been able to get a few consulting gigs so far.

As far as budgeting goes, we are doing well - perhaps too well. I say "too well" because we haven't been able to get all the artist hours that we budgeted for. We are 220 artist hours short from where we are supposed to be right now, and it is making things a little tough. This build that we are going to get out in a week or so really should have been done close to a month ago... :-/

As to why we are short on the hours, we missed 100 hours vs. what is budgeted between Joe, Adam, and Chris last pay period, which really hurt. Joe and Adam had to do a lot of work for the Halloween convention, so they couldn't put the hours in we needed. The other 120 hours were for various personal issues and whatnot that just built up over time.

When I realized we had time deficit, I was kind of happy because I was thinking it gives us more breathing room. However, I really should have been proactive and tried to figure out how to make up the time.

However, we are definitely not where we should be, so now, we really have to make corrective measures. Unfortunately, the only solution I can think of is to ask Joe to work overtime, and fortunately he agreed. It took a little persuading, and I feel kind of guilty about it, but I think it will make a huge difference or the game.

I didn't realize it when I scheduled the game, but Joe is kind of a bottleneck. He does animation, builds out the levels in our internal tools, and helps me with the game design aspects of the levels by designing the maps and whatnot. In addition he is the lead artist and gives feedback on work that Adam and Chris do.

I think the main issue is that we have a lot of animation to do, and a lot more than I had planned. Someone actually volunteered to be an animation intern. I was very excited, but we use proprietary tools for our animations, which have a bit of a steep learning curve. Before our intern fully got the hang of things, she quit because she felt like she didn't have time.

So perhaps that is TMI, but that's where we stand on the budget! We are doing just fine financially for the time being, but we need to spend more to make up for the artist hours that we missed. Hopefully that answers your question!

Thanks for being so open, that's very interesting to hear. You don't hardly ever hear anything about that side of things from developers.

How does the consulting work, I know you probably can't give details, but is it mostly software companies and stuff buying programming hours from you or am I way off?

Thanks for being so open Matt and responding to my question

Glad to hear that you're doing well financially at the minute! Hopefully you don't have to spend too much to make up for the lost time, if need be mind you could always push back the release time a little. I mean I can't speak for everyone of course and you would miss that important Halloween release window but I'd rather you be OK financially than get the game on time. I can imagine that being financially strained would be very stressful so I personally wouldn't mind waiting as long as you're well-being is kept in order

But as I said I can't speak for the entire community or consumer base, just felt like adding my two cents hahaha

Matt,

I want to echo the others and say that's really cool that you're being that open about the finances of the game. It's really interesting to get to read about...since I've never seen the inside of how producing a video game works.

And I want to echo JPrice saying I agree that if you had to delay the game, it might not be awful, but from a purely marketing standpoint, everyone has a hard-on for horror in the Halloween season...so I can definitely see the incentive to release pre-Halloween.

One more question, you once mentioned that due to budgeting, you'd be shipping the physical rewards last. Is that still the battle plan? Not that I'm impatient or anything, I'm just curious.

Basically for consulting, I offer my programming services (or Dan's - the other programmer) to people for various things at a flat per hour fee. We do stuff with game audio, and I've done effects programming for an interesting installation based thing that millions of people will see (but I think it's NDA'ed, so I can't say what).

While personally, delaying the game would give us more breathing room, I think it would be a mistake from a business perspective. My top secret plan is to get the game out a month or so before halloween (end of September) and then hopefully get in a Steam promotional sale for Halloween. If we release too close to halloween, then people would feel burned by the promo sale (although people will feel burned anyway). However, it is very HARD to get in a Steam promotion, and I think our best shot is at halloween. Steam promotions can essentially double what you've made until that day, so they are KEY to having a financially successful game.

While all of this is speculation and who knows if we can actually get in a Steam promotion, they are so incredibly valuable that I want to make sure we maximize our chances.

Also, I promised my wife I'd ship on time for this game. hahaha So I am pretty much stuck releasing then. That being said, I still think we can put together the game I want to make at the quality I want to make it. It's just going to require a bit extra work.

Does that make sense?

With respect to the physical rewards, we are going to do those post ship. While the cost is one part of it, the main reason is really that we don't have time to do anything for them because we are so busy finishing the actual game.

Sounds great! Just from a consumer's perspective, Halloween sales on Steam are very attractive. It doesn't hurt that I love horror games.

What's the process of getting into a Steam promotion? Do they just take a certain number of games or something?

Also do you think people have become a little more burned out on Steam sales? I always think of this article, which is a few years old by now, so I don't know how well it still applies: http://www.thedrmnews.com/games/lower-p ... e-revenue/ Specificially Gamersgate in that article was talking about sales spikes of up to 5500%(!) because of discounts.

I know I had to cut back, because if I bought everything that was 50% off or more, I'd never play it all and I'd be broke

I don't know what it takes to be featured but at least for Retro/Grade, they told me that the sales were too low to be considered for any promotional opportunity.

This brings up an interesting issue because we've sold thousands of copies through kickstarter and continue to sell slacker backer packages through the humble widget. I'm trying to think about the best way to position the title, so we can get maximum impact of sales through the Steam website at launch. It's weird though because we sort of have a soft launch - the game is available now to alpha backers, and we'll open it up to beta backers at some point (I'm thinking June/July), and probably open the game to all backers when we are still testing before our actual release date.

At a certain point, I'll probably shut down slacker backer-ing just to drive more interest through Steam. I would like to replace it with presales through Steam or something, but I don't know if they usually do presales or whatever. It's complicated!

For the actual promotions, I suspect they invite games that they think they'd do well. Being a new release horror game with (hopefully) good reviews and good sales, I think we'd be an obvious choice for the halloween sale, but who knows.

While I suspect that there is plenty of steam sale burnout, Valve has grown the Steam audience to such a large number, I think the declining percentage of audience who buy games on a sale is more than made up by the giant increase in the audience.

Of course this is just speculation, but I think Steam sales are extremely important to making money as an indie dev. That being said, I think day 1 success is important for opening up sales opportunities as well as getting good placement in the rotating banner ads, which really helps with discoverability.

I think it would be so cool if we could really come together as a community to help promote the game. Maybe like we all do a Let's Play of the game before release and create some kind of cool mega-mix. I hope Matt wields the community like a light saber to vanquish the foe that is people not buying the game.

It's sort of silly, but I really want NN to do well, because I want to see Infinitap become a major thing that makes horror games. Yes, there's lots of horror games coming out from indie these days, but Infinitap is carrying the Silent Hill torch man.

On a related note, I hope that pewdie pie dude does another Let's Play once the game is out (or even before it's out...maybe he'll get a preview build if he backed???). Didn't his video of the demo seriously get like millions of views? Millions of views before you even added in any kind of conflict to the game!!

My Wife's pre-teen brother is obsessed with Pewdie Pie, and pewdie commands like an entire armada of viewers who love horror games.

Come to think of it, my wife's brother has no idea I backed this game. I hope Pewdie Pie does a let's play...convinces my wife's little brother to play the game...and he sees my name on a tombstone. An entirely elaborate gag's gears are set in motion. Nice.