I had the honor of getting interviewed by the legend Keven Kelley for his Cool Tools Youtube show and podcast. In my interview I talk a little bit about games marketing at the end, but it is mostly about my love of optimizing my trip through an airport. 

If the name Kevin Kelly sounds familiar, he is the guy who wrote the famous blog post 1000 true fans. 

A lot of people (including Mr. Kelley) ask me if the 1000 true fans thing works for video games. Sadly, I don’t think it does. 

The peculiarities of the marketplace, the consumers, and the product, make it nearly impossible for small scale production to work.

What is the 1000 true fans theory?

Here is the thesis of the article: “To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.”

Here is the key equation of the article:

  • A true fan is a person who will buy anything and everything you put out
  • Put out $100 worth of products each year
  • Sell direct so there is no profit sharing (e.g. middleman like Steam taking 30%) 
  • 1000 people x $100 = $100,000 revenue per year

You might be thinking “That sounds so nice, so simple.1000! I can gather up 1000! I have 500 twitter followers, that is almost there!” 

And many people think if they find 1000 true fans they don’t have to do the stuff that I always talk about like finding what genres people like, following trends, marketing. It sounds so nice.

But it is very very hard with video games and the 1000 true fans thing doesn’t work for us. Here are a bunch of reasons why the 1000 true fans thing doesn’t work indie game development

Games are cheap to sell, expensive to make, and take a long time to develop

I wrote this post about the average indie game price. The average price is $8.70. If I look at the top top Indie games, they typically charge $15.50. So for ease of math, say, the average indie game costs $10.

Also, most indies take 1 to 2 years to finish their game. 

So if you take 1 year to make a game and sell it for $10, you can’t get by with 1000 true fans. You would need 10x as many. You would need 10,000 true fans.

If you take 2 years to make your game, you need 20,000 true fans.

And even then, that only works if you are a solo developer. If you are a coder and your teammate is an artist, you need to split it. Even if you hire out for short contracts like musicians and artists, that takes a chunk of your gross revenue.

There is one way to increase the price of your game and that is to sell a buttload of DLC and in-game purchases. F2P games have superfans but they call them “Whales.” F2P games are designed to allow those superfans to spend thousands of dollars on in-game purchases. That is an option but just about every indie considers F2P games are the worst thing in the world and the whole reason they want to have 1000 true fans is so they don’t have to resort to “cash grab” tactics. 

So is there a way to get to $100 worth of stuff to sell / year?

Let’s consider a hypothetical:

  • Direct Release 1 game @ $10
  • Direct Release 1 DLC / year @ $5
  • Direct Release 1 Bonus Christmas Levels / year @ $5
  • Run a patreon $39 (see below for how I got this number)
  • Sell a plushie of your character @ $6 ($29 cost but production costs = $6 net) 
  • Sell the physical version of your game for consoles @ $6 ($39 – production costs $)
  • Sell a digital hint book of your game @ $10 ($39 – production costs $)

Total merchandise: $81

Side note merch is kind of a nightmare, read this great blog post by Grace Bruxner, creator of Frog Detective

We shift genre too much

There is this weird thing about indie game devs where most of them are allergic to sticking to a genre. After a big launch, they quickly pivot to something new saying they “lost motivation” or “got tired” of their last game’s genre. I often see devs hopping between FPS, roguelikes, puzzle games, and platformers. 

Imagine if Nirvana’s second album was rap, and their third was country music. That would be ridiculous. 

Why is genre shifiting so common for indie game devs when artists and musicians don’t? I don’t know, but the restlessness of indie game developers means it is less likely for fans to follow them between all their dalliances with other genres. Dedicated gamers usually stick to one or two genres. 

Fans don’t fall in love with us

I know we as indies think our secret power is that we are cool, personable, opinionated, and, you know, like, keeping it real, man, instead of a corporate shill, man, but despite all that, people don’t fall in love with developers, they fall in love with game characters, and genres. 

I think it has to do with the fact that you never see us. We are not visible during the consumption of the art. A musician is up there on center stage singing with the spotlight on them, a comedian has their face in front of a camera talking right to the viewer. Most indie devs don’t even show their face on social media. The number of indie twitter and discord profile pictures that are either a company logo, an abstracted illustration of their face, a design, or heaven forbid an anime character, isn’t helping fans relate to them. 

There aren’t that many game creators that are household names. Even Shigeru Miyamoto, the most famous and successful game developer of all time, sits in the back corner while an actor takes the spotlight:

Gamers fall in love with the game, not the person.

It takes a long long time to get 1000 true fans

Part of the allure of the 1000 true fans is how approachable “1000” sounds. But it is easy to get a following on social media, it is very very hard to get them to spend money. Remember, a true fan has to spend $100 on you per year. 

Personally, as a Steam marketing blogger who sells stuff directly, I have gone through the receipts and calculated that I have 460 true fans who actually do buy $100 worth of stuff every year. It took me years to get to that number and I have done GDC talks, appeared on famous youtuber shows, posted a weekly blog, and written endless twitter threads. 

Note I have 8000+ twitter followers, just about as many discord and email subscribers. So the vast vast majority of your followers are not superfans. They just are followers. 

I sell helpful business information to companies. This is much different than Indie developers who sell toys to people who complain a lot that “there isn’t enough content” or that “they nerfed the rocket launcher.” Nobody, really, needs another game. That is why it is so hard to get true fans.

Seriously it is really hard to get super fans

For instance, look at sokpop! They put themselves forward, they look adorable, and they release A LOT of games and they have been doing it for years!

But even then, we can see from their patreon, that they have 2422 “true” fans. But remember that there are 4 people in Sokpop and the average donation per person per year is $38.64. If we divvy that up per member of sokpop, each one of them only has 600 “true” fans. And those aren’t even true fans because they don’t spend the required $100 per year.

Summary

So I am sorry to be a buzz kill here, but I don’t think the dream of saying f-you to the man, quitting your job, and making whatever passion project you want with the hopes that you can pull together 1000 “true fans.”

I don’t like to leave on such a bummer saying “no you can’t have fun!” here is your best bet going forward

  1. You are going to have to sell through Steam: I am sorry, they are just too big and they are so good at selling games. They have millions of people who trust them to deliver games. Even Epic couldn’t beat them and they have all the Fortnite money in the world. And I know I say you shouldn’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms but you have to make some sacrifices. Read my next point about how to insure against this.
  2. Build up an following: You should build up a mailing list (yes it still works). Discords help but remember, you don’t own that following. If they sell out to Microsoft or change their monetization structure in the future, you could lose access to everyone in your discord. A following allows you to slightly influence the algorithms like getting 10 reviews nice and fast, getting people to buy your game on day 1 so you move over to “new and trending” and boosting your social media posts. Following make everything else easier.
  3. Make games in genres that people are excited about: I know I know you hate when I say that. But it is so much fun making and marketing a game that people desire. I know you might not 100% love the genres that are selling well on Steam but it 1,000,000% better than the alternative of finding a real job and making boring database software for some boring enterprise software corporation. Here is a link to what genres are selling well on Steam. Here is another blog I wrote about genre.
  4. Sometimes make one for you: They call it one for me one for them. Once you have a backlog of games that are sustainably earning you money, you can take slight detours to make a game that you truly like that you know doesn’t sell well.
  5. Keep projects and dev times small: Remember that math I posted above? If you make a game every year and sell it for $10 you need 10,000 true fans. If you make a game every TWO years you need 20,000 true fans. It is very very hard to sell more copies, but it is much easier to cut scope. Make smaller games more frequently. I get a cold nervous sweat whenever a first-time-developer says they expect to release their game in 2 or 3 years.
  6. Partner with businesses and governments: Be on the look out for licensing deals. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix are willing to pay you to make games for them. Side note: they typically only give money for games that are in the hot genres so see point #3 above. Also, depending on where you live, there are governments that are for some reason willing to give tax dollars to people who make games. Jump on that.
  7. Sell some other products: Sell your own courses on how to do whatever you are good at. Consult for other studios. Sell plushies (even though they don’t sell very well). Sell hint books. Sell deluxe versions of your games.

This is the best path forward to having a more sustainable, long lasting indie career where you can mostly do what you love. For the most part, it isn’t going to be one hit game that lets you realize your life long dream of being a wandering Flâneur. Unfortunately you need a lot of irons in the fire, a lot small streams of income from several sources to make this work.