I’ve already talked about market changes in the past, and how quick they are in the indie game developer’s world. In today’s blog I want to talk about what you can do when this happens.

First of all analyze

The first thing to do is to check your statistics and draw conclusions. This because it’s always better to verify yourself if what other people say it’s true. Or maybe, it could be for them, but somehow not for you.

I know what you’re thinking: yes there can be generalized effects, but sometimes a small group of developers can still find profitable what they’re doing. For example: let’s say that RPGs are no longer a popular genre on Steam (that’s false obviously but it’s just an example). A developer who has built a following over the years might find that it’s still better to keep doing RPGs, than trying to reinvent themselves doing a new genre.

Of course it’s not an exact science, and also depends how quickly you release games. Since I usually release at least 1 game a year, with an average of 2-3, I was able to see market changes much quicker than other indies releasing 1 game every 3 years!

I distinctly remember two episodes, in 2016 and 2018. I had just discovered that somehow the Steam algorithm changed, or perhaps was the market. Anyway, I suddenly had much lower revenues than in the past, and I told other indies, who though I was exaggerating or maybe was just my games. A few months later, those same people finally released new games and they all went to me scared screaming “WTF you’re right!” 😀

This not to say that I’m always right (you know I am! just kidding), but that obviously if you release a game every 2 years you can’t really know what/if things changed. If you release 2-3 a year instead…

Find a solution

After you’ve analyzed your data, and discovered exactly what happened, it’s time to find a solution. I did this already many times in the course of my indie career. First big change was back in 2008 when I stopped doing strategy/sim games and moved to visual novels/dating sims. The other big change was in 2011-2012 when I did my first RPGs. The last big change I did was last year when I started doing crowdfunding and changed the way I develop games internally to be able to release games at good pace.

Sometimes a solution can be simple or obvious, other times can be a guess and very risky. But as the saying goes, if you keep doing a thing, and that thing doesn’t work anymore, it’s stupid not to change.

Yes: trying something new can be scary, and it’s not guaranteed to work, but it’s better than just keep doing the same thing that is failing over and over, and end up bankrupt a few months/years later.

A practical example

Let’s see how I applied this system myself. As said back in 2018 there was a big change. That’s when I decided to do some yuri only games (never done before) and also include more adult content (more erotic than hardcore, but a further step from the kissing and partial nudity of past games). While I don’t have and never had issues with adult stuff myself, for someone coming from tame otome games was a big risk!

Anyways, how did it go? Below you see the revenues on Steam of a few games, 1st week, 1st month and 1st year.

Now you can see that PS2 is outselling everything else ,but as already said in the past, what matters is the ROI. I spent 1 full year on PS2. So even if it sold more, in the same amount of time I could have done 3-4 games like Hazel, for example (PS2 script is indeed about 4-5 times Hazel! and let’s not forget all the branching and RPG gameplay coding part lol).

What’s interesting is that even considering games released back in 2016 (when it was MUCH MUCH easier to make money on Steam!) like C14 Dating or Heirs & Graces, recent yuri games with adult stuff like Volleyball Heaven outsell them! So it seems it was the right move, and that’s why last year I made 3 more yuri only games with adult content, and all of them did well, much better than my other recent releases (yes, even including At Your Feet lol!).

Also those graphs are only about Steam’s revenues. I didn’t include the KS. Including Kickstarter money, Hazel would be in 2nd place after PS2. I didn’t include it since it wouldn’t be a fair comparison with older games but of course in the end still matters.

In summary: I took a risk, but it worked. Of course I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I still tried. This is how you stay in business. Try new things until you find what works, what the market really wants. What people pay for, and not what the vocal minority says.

Conclusions

I must say that I was unsure if to post this last part. It seems like that I have something against certain genres of games or content. No. It’s not about me or my personal preferences – indeed I just finished a game with all romance combos, and I’m working on the first Loren spin off that once again has all romance combos. So I repeat, it’s not about my personal tastes: those are hard numbers, statistics. Which could even be different for other devs, depending on platforms, following, art style, etc etc there are too many variables to consider. But for me, that’s what happened. After doing 3 more yuri games last year, now I clearly know it wasn’t random.

As I said in the past, if you’re a fan of a genre, you should support the authors, spread the word, and so on. Complaining or voicing your opinion won’t change things. If I was just doing games as hobby, then it wouldn’t matter. But I’ve been in this business since almost 20 years and I want to keep doing this until retirement age (hopefully!).

To make you understand better my position here’s a comparison: imagine at your job one day the boss tells you that you can choose between two tasks. Both are identical to you, you have no preferences. But one pays twice vs the other. What would you choose?

As you probably already know if you follow me on social media, my latest dating sim, The Curse Of Mantras, is out on itchio.

It’s out since about a week so it’s too early to draw conclusions even if early numbers are encouraging. To be honest, I’m already happy that I’ve managed to finish it!

If you backed it on Kickstarter, you should have got a private message with the itchio links. I’m also going to send you the Steam keys in the next days, since the release on Steam is coming soon too.

The Adult Content dilemma (again)

I hoped we would be done talking about this, but sadly, when I submitted the game to Steam, they put it in the “Adult Only” category: https://store.steampowered.com/app/618000/The_Curse_Of_Mantras/

Which is bad for two reasons: people browsing that category usually expect much more explicit stuff, while the game has nudity but in general very tasteful love scenes, and second because it prevents the game being viewed, or worse even purchased, in certain countries like Germany (this isn’t due to Steam but to some Germany laws I think).

The same thing already happened in the past for my games Volleyball Heaven and At Your Feet. But in this case it’s a pity, since it’s not just a plain visual novel focused only on romance/sex relationships: the game also has a very complex, detailed and fun card battling game, and I think it’s really bad if people can’t even try it because it’s labeled Adult Only.

Why this game was important to me

This is not a postmortem since as I said it’s too early and I can’t draw any conclusions about the game performance and so on. It did a successful Kickstarter, but that money was barely enough to cover its development costs (not even including my own time).

But this game was important for a lot of reasons: it was a game in development since around 2013-14. I had this idea of the afterlife/limbo, but at the time it was supposed to be a sort of Pokemon-style battle game. I hadn’t a clear idea how the game would be, but since I put out the first sketches/concept art, fans seemed enthusiast about the idea. I admit I was a fool to let myself carry by this enthusiasm too, because you can’t do that, it’s dangerous. And indeed, until 2018-19 I still had no idea which gameplay to use, until I finally made my mind and picked card battles.

The main issue was that in 2020 I released Planet Stronghold 2 which, despite being one of my biggest/better games, greatly underperformed compared to my expectations. So it was clear that the market had changed, and maybe such big games weren’t profitable anymore. But I had already started doing it, already invested time and money.

At the beginning of last year, I was still struggling with a bad burn-out, and even if I didn’t post about this in public at the time, I thought to cancel the game. Yes, even after I had already spent so much efforts, I briefly considered that.

Why? Because I couldn’t see a reason to finish it. It was a dying genre of games – big games with a lot of romances that had to be sold at a proper price, since it’s not one of those silly porn VN with 3 scenes and no plot, no character development, etc.

Also, because I was tired, burned out, and I feared of working months and months only to get the same results, if not worse, than making one of the games mentioned above – short, silly porn games that seems to sell well on Steam nowadays.

In the end, I thought this: this year (2021) I’ll make a few shorter games, to give myself some breath, both economically (those games are usually profitable) and also to relax, not having to code anything complex.

It worked: TFTU – Hazel, At Your Feet, Summer In Trigue and Love Notes were all fun, good games but not a huge, epic, 10 love interest game with ALSO a complex gameplay. So that was good, and by the end of the year I was ready to resume working and finishing The Curse Of Mantras.

This game will decide the kind of future games I’ll do?

Honestly? Probably. I mean, I’m definitely going to do the 4 Loren spin-off games in any case (indeed I’ve already started working on the first game in the series), but all those games have “only” 4 love interests each. I think, unless The Curse Of Mantras does extremely well, this will be my last “big game” I’ll ever make. For the reasons above. I love being indie and making my fans happy doing those big games, but I also need to keep an eye both on my health and finances.

Time for some news about this game! First of all, you might remember that I wanted to put this game on the next Steam Fest event.

In the end, I decided not to. But don’t worry, not because the game isn’t ready or not in a good state. Not at all! Indeed, I might start the full beta of the game towards the middle of this month!

The state of the game

As I already explained in the past, some devs use Kickstarter (or any other crowdfunding) as a way to recoup money spent, maybe to add more content, but when they do the campaign they might have already an alpha/beta of the game. In my case indeed, when I did the Kickstarter I had already done a lot of work on the game coding before. I had already started back in 2020, then paused it, and resume working on it.

Since the beginning of December to now, two months have passed, in which I’ve made very good progress, but I know that being a complex game the beta phase will take some time, so that’s why I put a longer deadline.

I wanted to participate on the Steam Fest, since with Summer In Trigue went well. The problem is, that with a visual novel is very simple to have a demo. You pick a point of the story, cut everything after it, and done.

With a complex game like this ? Not so simple. Also because how the framework was coded. So in summary, even doing a demo could lead to bugs present only because I had to cut content from the full game to the demo (cards, scenes, gameplay stuff, etc).

I started doing it. But after spending 2h on it, I quickly realized that it wasn’t a good idea, for three reasons:

1. I was effectively wasting my time to work on a demo that, once the Steam Fest ended, I’d have removed. So hours that I could have put to improve the full game instead
2. if by mistake I left some bugs, it could have even backfired: imagine, people playing the demo, finding crashes / bugs, and it could have made a negative impression on them
3. I said in the past that indie games aren’t directly competing with AAA titles. Sure, especially if are visual novels (and even better with adult content, which is not present in AAA titles for sure). But I also said that it might be different for more gameplay-oriented games like this one. I really think the next Steam Fest visibility will be much lower due to big AAA titles coming out around same time

And last but not least: since the game is such in an advanced state, in the end I’d have both a full beta out on my own site and a demo on Steam, which means I had to mantain two bulids and anyone who is developing games knows that this is a bad idea!

What’s Next?

I’m taking some time to polish stuff, and the editor is checking some last texts in the game. Then, sometimes around mid-February, I’ll start the beta as usual on my own site using itchio. Anyone who pre-orders it, or anyone who backed it on Kickstarter using the beta testing tier will have immediate access to it (with option to also have a Steam key later).

How long will take before the final game is out? I have no clue honestly, it all depends on how testing goes. For my previous card game I think the testing lasted 2-3 months but that was because the framework was still new, so I think this time should be a bit faster.

In any case, as always I’ll be sure to announce here once the game is officially out!

This is not how I imagined to start the new year… my cat Mirtillo wasn’t feeling good since a while, but being almost 16 we thought it was the usual age-related issues. Unfortunately about 15 days ago we discovered that he had cancer and it was already in advanced condition.

There was no possible treatment, so we decided to do nothing until he was still eating on his own. In the last 3 days, he always tries to hide, scratches his head continuously and is visibly in pain so we decided to put him to sleep.

He was almost 16 years old, and since he also was FIV positive, I can say that he lived a long life (I believe is rare for cats with FIV to reach such age). But of course, I’ll still miss him.

This is also the last male cat, we’re left now with “only” 4 cats, all females.

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone! Let’s see what I’ll try to do in 2022.

Of course, since I’m running a Kickstarter for The Curse Of Mantras, this is the game that will have my priority in the first months of the year. Like before, I’ve already done some work prior to the KS, and I’ve been working in the past weeks (slower since I sort of took some time off for the holidays). Gameplay-wise things are very good and even the writing/scripting of the story part is at good point so that (crossing fingers) I’ll likely deliver the game ahead of its deadline once again (still considering a longer testing time due to this game having a more complex gameplay than my recent releases).

This year will be 10 years since the first Loren release! It would be cool if the tenth anniversary saw the release of the first new adventure for Saren and Elenor, ToA: An Elven Marriage. And I’ll try my best to do it, though being a RPG, it won’t be easy. Also because, after finishing The Curse Of Mantras I won’t probably have the energy to do another complex game, so I might do a shorter/simpler one “as break”.

Indeed, I have plans for the next Tales Of The Under-Realm game. I won’t spoil too much but it will be set in the town of Lothark, and will see some cameos/references from my other games: Apolimesho, and Samael. Remember General Samael from Loren? He’ll be one of the main characters of the story, back when he was only the Captain of the guards.

It will be a dark fantasy murder mystery and you won’t be able to see everything / discover all that happened in a single playthrough. I have written a rough draft/idea and honestly I can’t wait to work on this, since I think the idea, mood, the character routes, the deaths (there’ll be many) are really interesting.

As said in previous post, being a smaller title will be yuri only, but even if you don’t care for the yuri part I think the story should be still worth playing, and if you like my fantasy world of Aravorn there’ll be many references, and many grey-characters. And also, many possible deaths, obviously!

Beside this, there are also a few other games that I’m working on during breaks, of some I’ve posted a few sketches/preview art on my Patreon but it’s still too early to talk about any of them, since now my policy is to talk publicly about something only when I’m 100% sure I’ll be able to release it.

Conclusions

So that’s the plan: Curse Of Mantras release, then crowdfunding for the next Tales From Under-Realm game, then ToA: An Elven Marriage and if there’s time, some other game. But I doubt it, since two of those three games are very big games with complex gameplay. You never know though, last year I never expected to be able to release 4 games!

Happy New Year!