![]() One strategy that's worked well for Crows has been a newsletter-marketing technique built on the back of Dr. While he spent much of the conference hammering at marketing techniques indies can use effectively he says the purpose of all his toolbox, beyond the thrills of profit, is to enable the Crows team to keep doing what they do best.įor Crows Crows Crows, Cox described a data-driven process built on the back of his work helping Kickstarters connect with audiences before launching. For instance, Mike Cox, marketing director of Crows Crows Crows, explained that part of his job description was to make the young company "sustainable." Cox described the rise of Crows as a response to the changing game market that Tornquist previously described. ![]() While Tornquist and Red Thread Games have been fighting the good fight for years now, many newer studios have been trying to find their own niches in the interim. "The way we're thinking, is we're looking at all these opportunities, and we're trying to hit as many of them as possible while doing what is our core competence, which is making story-driven games we can publish ourselves." Drinking your own Kool-Aid "If you spend three to six months making a demo for a specific service, and that service doesn't want the game, then you're going to have to turn that around and find somebody else to do it," he explained. Having survived one major transition, Tornquist explained that Red Thread Games is aiming to keep its doors open by shifting its model toward the newer subscription services that are emerging-services like Apple Arcade and Xbox GamePass, which have begun to pay developers for exclusive titles.īut Tornquist says it's unwise for the company to just hang its hat on any one prospective client. Having that openness in your company is important." "If people are informed, and they feel their job is predictable-not safe, because I think being an indie developer, safety is often hard to come by, but, that's important. "'It's good that you guys understand that, trust me I'm going to take care of that, I'm going to work on a daily basis to address this, and in a couple of months that equation's going to look different.'" "We have meetings where we look at this and say 'look guys, everything is fine for the next six months, in seven months there's going to be a struggle,'" he said as one example. Tornquist frequently referred back to a spreadsheet that helps him chart out Red Thread's viability, and he works to communicate it to the team as best he can. ![]() With the industry changing around Red Thread, Tornquist admitted that the studio had to lay off a number of employees in advance of Draugen's launch to ensure it could keep its doors open. "You need to be profiled, you need front-page treatment, you need a huge marketing budget, you need to have some meme-able thing in the game, you need to be an unnamed Goose, you need to have something that jumps out and captures people's imaginations, and it's hard to plan for that." "There needs to be so much more around it," said Tornquist. And in his words, it's not enough to "make a good game" anymore. Steam has become a more crowded marketplace. ![]() Kickstarter has grown to be a more viable platform for tabletop than digital games. ![]() The primary reason Tornquist has become concerned with studio survival is that the conditions Red Thread was founded under have drastically changed. One developer who's keenly aware of what it's taken to keep different kinds of companies afloat is Ragnar Tornquist, CEO and lead designer at Red Thread Games, a studio that saw great success with the Kickstarter for Dreamfall Chapters, but has worked hard to keep its doors open to make more narrative games like Draugen. We took time at Sweden Games Conference this year to ask a handful of developers how they're thinking about making companies sustainable, and ensuring they can survive shipping their passion projects. But before any studio in the world can think about bringing home blockbuster bank and buying everyone Teslas, it needs to solve that survival equation. What works for one studio, in one region, will never work for another. It's a question without a fundamental universal answer. This is a major question that many developers have talked to Gamasutra about over the years. ![]()
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