This is my rolling blog post of all the talks and interesting bits I learned while attending GDC 2024. Consider this your free conference pass.

Impromptu User Study: My Uber Driver

In my 25-minute ride from SFO to my hotel I had a really nice driver who was a Steam gamer. Of course, this is a perfect opportunity to do some field research. Here is how he discovers new games and what he plays:

  • He learns about new games from Reddit. Primarily r/games, r/gaming, r/pcgaming. CZ notes: He did not mention r/indiegaming. But his preferences almost perfectly align with the most popular channels.
  • He also looks towards Steam to tell him about new games. He uses New & Trending. He does NOT do the discovery queue. CZ notes: My hunch is that overall DQ is a niche but potent tool. The most hard core of the hardcore buyers use the DQ but they are like influencers and mavens for the greater gaming community
  • He likes RTSs and thinks they aren’t as popular because DOTA and LoL consumed that audience.
  • He is playing Helldivers 2 because he loved the first one. He learned about the first one because his friend introduced it to him. CZ: This is very common behavior. I think MOST of all game discovery comes from friend recommendations. When your game is good and, interesting, it just magically gets wishlists despite you not doing anything. I think this is the invisible hand of word-of-mouth.
  • He said he doesn’t like Vampire-survivor-likes. He thinks they are too basic. He wants to be able to control the main character.
  • He prefers turn-based strategy because he likes the pace. He can stop and strategize. CZ: My driver is a very typical Steam player. Likes slow methodical games where he has complete control.

Conference Talks

Streamers Don’t Want To Play Your Game

Speaker: Jenny Windom  (Senior Influencer Manager, Kepler Interactive)

Link to talk description 

Summary

This was my favorite talk at GDC. It was so good. Very fact based. Very useful. There is so much to this talk that I can only capture snippets. 

The basics of this talk are that Streamers don’t care about your game, they are just using your game to boost their own channel and brand. That sounds bad but it isn’t. In response to that you need to figure out ways to work together where you use your game to support them and then you both benefit. 

Jenny’s Tips for doing this:

Understand that streamers consider the following before covering any game:

  • They follow trends
  • They have a niche
  • They look at their own analytics to see what games performed well for them and that influences future choices.
  • Streamers don’t experiment, they stick with certain games. 

Here is a quote from the Streamer @StumptGames “Due to ‘the algorithm’ we tend to chose things that will resonate with our audience and matches the content we do already. We know what content does well, and what typically doesn’t and we tend to choose games that we feel will get more views, likes, and subs.”

Here is where curators are finding games

  • Showcases (online ones like Wholesome Direct)
  • Game platforms / databases – They look for trending games on steamdb!
  • Peers – if they see someone is playing they play 
  • Community recs – in their discord people recommend games to them all the time. 

Platform advice:

  • YouTube is good for evergreen content
  • Twitch – not evergreen, but great for real time feedback
  • TikTok – trailers are better here. 

Tools Jenny uses to find streamers

  • Sullygnome – Twitch focused and look up streamer stats
  • VidIQ – Youtube focused tool for tracking video view traction and channel growth
  • Platform-specific Search – Use the Twitch and youtube tags and search boxes to find the games you are looking for
  • LevelUp – Licensed tool used internally to track creator and press coverage
  • Typeform – Tool to create surveys and forms for creators.

Advice for reaching out to streamers
Quote “I need your email to be easy to parse, to the point, and clear. Tell me what you need from me. I go through so many emails every day, I don’t want to – or have time to – read an essay.” – Mary Kish @fireescapepod. 

  • wanderbots blog post cheat guide on reaching streamers Great articles on how to reach out to streamers
  • If no response, confirm 7 days after first email
  • Only follow up 2-times. 
  • Physical influencer kits – are they necessary? No! Jenny does this for social media of those streamers sharing their game and their “kit” online. For Pacific Drive they focused on making about 100 – 150 of them.

Here is a really hard to read screenshot of an example email. I am attaching the full text of the email below.

Ready to survive the road trip of a lifetime? I’m reaching out about our upcoming game, Pacific Drive! You may have seen our release date announcement trailer, and Pacific Drive was even celebrated as one of the most anticipated titles of 2024 in the PC Gaming Show. <link>

Pacific Drive launches on Feb 22nd, and I’d love to send you a key to play the game at launch!

Please feel free to send any questions my way, and if you’re interested in participating, please email me back to confirm.

Thanks and hope to hear back soon,

Jenny

PACIFIC DRIVE:

About Pacific Drive

Face the supernatural dangers of the Olympic Exclusion Zone with a car as your only lifeline in this driving survival adventure from Ironwood Studios! Scavenge resources, load up your trusty station wagon, and drive like hell to make it through alive. (Releases on PlayStation & PC on Feb 22nd, 2024).

  • Navigate a surreal reimaging of the Pacific Northwest, and face supernatural dangers.
  • Uperade and repair your car – your only companion – using an abandoned garage as your home base.
  • Survive the unpredictable, hostile environment as you father precious resources and investigate the long-forgotten mystery of the Zone.

Release Date Trailer: <Link>

Website: httpp://www.pacificdrivegame.com/

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/epp/1453140/Pocific Drive/

Publio Press Kit: htps://www.pacificdrivegame.com/press-kit

The Marketing Money Talk: How to Budget Your Indie Game’s Promotion Campaign

Speaker: Thomas Reisenegger  (Co-Founder and CEO, Future Friends Games)

Link to talk Description

Summary

This super practical talk tries to answer the question “How much should I budget for my indie game marketing” 

His advice started by throwing out some common recommendations:

  • Don’t say 20% of your production because that is too general for indie developers.
  • Don’t plan your budget and feel like you MUST stick to it. This is bad because you shift where you find something worked. Don’t keep doubling down on stuff that isn’t working just because it is in the plan.
  • With enough marketing every game can be successful. This is wrong because a good game is the most important thing. Marketing is a multiplier.

Thomas then went to list the best value for money and where you should spend it.

  1. First party support. Paying agents who can get you access to exclusive deals with Playstation and XBox. Publishers can get you access to exclusive Steam deals like Publisher sales. 
  2. Making your Steam Store Page look good! costs are:
    1. Capsule – $500 – $5000
    2. Trailer  $500 – $10,000. Simple trailer 2k-5k, fancy 10k – 50k. Usually have 1-3 trailers
    3. Expert steam page review $250-$2,500
    4. Localize store page stuff – (8-10 languages )
  3. Marketing planning support ($200 – $2000 consulting fee) ongoing monthly retainers ($2000-$10000)
  4. Online events Free-$500 (for small events) up to $50K (for big big festivals like game awards)
  5. Social media management ($20-$100 / hour)
  6. Organic Influencer outreach ($2000-$5000 per outreach period)
  7. Organic Press outreach ($1000-$5000)
  8. Attending events ($10K+)
  9. Paid influencers – 2 hour stream from an influencer ($600-6000 under 1M subscribers)
  10. Paid social media ads (cost per wishlist = $1-$2)

The Flash Games Postmortem, Vol 2

Speaker: John Cooney 

Link to talk description 

Summary

This talk is a sequel to John Cooney (of Wonderful Elephant) really great talk about the history of flash games.  Part of the reason I liked the original talk is it really covers what I think indie games is missing today: the middle game. A high quality but simple game made in just a couple months that makes about $10K-$20K in total revenue. I wrote about this in my The Missing Middle in Game Development blog post.  If you are only familiar with AAA games, you should watch this talk and play some of those flash games so you can understand better what is possible for small teams. 

The original talk ended on this down note about Flash support in browsers ending. 

The 2024 version of the talk was a follow on about how the community has come back together to preserve the hundreds of thousands of flash apps. 

There really wasn’t anything applicable to Steam marketing but I thought this was an interesting chart showing how the Flash game eco system decays. This is what the end of a platform looks like:

Preservation – The good news from the talk was that although Flash is natively dead in browsers, the community came together and mostly preserved it through the following tools:

  • Ruffle – it works on the server side to emulate the flash without requiring an additional browser plugin.
  • The Newgrounds flash player
  • The Flashbpoint archive – archives of 150k Flash games. 
  • archive.org – online library of flash games 
  • Porting to steam – remastered versions of popular flash games often pop up on Steam by the original creators.

Steam Developers who hit it big and were once Flash creators. AKA They followed the “Missing Middle” Approach to learning game development and that leveled up their skills so they could make their “Dream Game”

‘Saturnalia’ Postmortem

Speaker: Pietro Righi Riva  (Studio Director, Santa Ragione)

Link to talk description 

Summary

This is one of those hard to watch post mortems about a game that didn’t meet expectations. The speaker was very brave and forthcoming behind what they did and what the outcome was. I have complete respect for this developer and his team. 

Saturnalia is a horror game set in 1980s Italy. Players wander, from a 3rd person viewpoint, around a spooky small Italian village while a masked creature chases them. 

Saturnalia was in development for 7 years and went through several iterations of being a first person game, to a 3rd person adventure. The Saturnalia released first as an Epic Games, Switch, and consoles in 2022. Then in November 2023, the game launched on Steam with 13,000 wishlists, and sold “about 2,000 units in the first few months.” This was not a successful game according to the developer.

Chris Zukowski Editorial

Again, I really respect the developer for being so candid about their game dev journey. I just want to be clear that I am critiquing their project but greatly respect the artistry they have brought. However, the story of Saturnalia is nearly a perfect example of not observing the careful “Anchors” of a genre. The development team is very well versed in fine art, graphic design, Italian politics, film history, and philosophy. However, I find that sometimes developers can over-rely on those and ignore the core aspect of what makes a game a game. Sometimes they get the attitude of “lets show gamers what a truly beautiful game is, those games they play now are crappy looking and trite.”

For instance, throughout development one of the key pillars of the design team was they wanted to toss out the traditional tropes of horror games. They wanted to try a radical art style that didn’t look like what the developer said was “a simple my first horror Unity project.” Instead the developers based their design on the graphic design styling of obscure Italian pulp novels named “Giallo” after their bright yellow covers. Here is one:

My favorite part of the whole lecture was listening to Pietro explain the cultural heritage of Giallo thriller novels and how they influenced Italian horror films. He has lectured at Politecnico di Milano, California College of Arts, Shanghai Theater Academy, Tsinghua University, NABA, and IULM among others. It shows! He is a great lecturer and I loved learning from him. However, these deep references and history do not make a good game. 

I wrote about Game Anchors in this blog post, and this other one. Basically Anchors are what make your game familiar to players. I know they are cliché, and trite, but players want the tropes. They don’t want too much new. Saturnalia’s players are not accustomed to its radical art style, the obscure graphic design, the setting that most people have not gone to, and the distant time period (1980s! I am old). This un-familiarity means that it is not going to scare them, it is going to make them confused. My gut instinct tells me that horror games MUST be set in the present day, must have fairly representational graphics, and must be set in a familiar place. The horror that players feel comes from the player interacting with and escaping from their own experiences and fears. If a player doesn’t recognize a horror-games setting, they won’t be inserting their personal fears into it. 

Good video games must be made by people with enormous artistic ability and a deep knowledge about art. However, this knowledge can also be dangerous. Sometimes artists are too smart for their own good and inject their works with extremely obscure references that alienate the audience instead of introducing them to something new. When you know this much about art it is almost like you are driving a Ferrari Testarossa and you must gingerly touch the accelerator to stay below the speed limit and on the road otherwise you will go careening off the road and crash into a tree.

I think artists over-estimate how much novelty players want to see in a game. As artists we want everything to be new, throw out the old guard, start a revolution, show them something weird. But players mostly want what they like but retold in a SLIGHTLY different way. This is the hard part about making games. It must be unique, but not too much.

Other tips from the developer

  • Limit novelty to graphics, settings, or gameplay (they were working with talented people who had artistic freedom)
  • Worry about missing clear communicable hooks – they didn’t have 1 new things that had a cool mechanic that you could tell people. There was no 1 clear unique hook. 
  • Retain genre-specific traits for recognizability. They kept saying “this is too stereotypical for a horror game and throw that out” – that backfired
  • Budget for experimentation – Subversive design costs grow exponentially. Fallback solutions should not compromise the concept – if one experiment failed is it so important that it brings the whole game down with it.
  • Extending development time risks irrelevance.  – if you were excited about something 6 years ago it gets old in a while. The developer thinks that the cool graphics of Saturnalia were scooped and less interesting after Sable released.

Other cool notes

  • The team got funding from the Italian government which meant they could reach out to each region’s film commission and request a location scout to drive them around and show them cool places to include them in their game. This sounds like a fantastic way to fund a game, and get a vacation. Consider doing that if you have funding from your government.  
  • Be cautious about taking investment money from friends. The speaker said if he was using his own money he would have quit working on Saturnalia a long time ago. But because it was his friend’s money he was afraid to let him down and abandon the project.
  • The team couldn’t get publisher funding but then they launched their trailer and all of a sudden the publishers started calling. Many people are afraid to announce their game because they think that a publisher likes to do that. But I think most games must get external validation before a publisher is willing to sign them.
  • Blood and Black Lace is considered the first true Italian Giallo film and it looks hip as FUCK (But I still wouldn’t want to make a game based on it)