Luke Schneider, of Radiangames fame, gave an insightful speech at GDC on Tuesday as a part of the panel entitled The Next Steps of Indie: Four Perspectives. He is known for his successful string of seven games in eleven months, including Fluid, Fireball, and Ballistic. During the twelve-minute speech to a crowd of over 400 guests including other developers and members of the press, Schneider shed insight into his development process, sales numbers, strategies, and future plans.
Of his seven Xbox Live Indie Games, Fireball suffered from the poorest sales, which he believes was caused by the poor art design of the title’s cover art. The studio’s games have had 135,000 trials, and 41,000 sales, which equates to a 36% conversion rate, of which he makes 68 cents for every dollar (that’s almost $28,000 revenue).
Schneider attributed a number of factors to the success of his studio. Most importantly, he credited scope control, and simplicity as key components. For example, all of his titles run at a resolution of 1280 x 720, are 2D and lack online multiplayer. By avoiding items that are difficult, and focusing on his strengths, he found he could produce quality titles in a limited amount of time. Furthermore, when developing titles, he found that restrictions he placed on his art allowed him to use it across multiple projects, which is responsible for why so many of his titles share aesthetic qualities.
Eliminating outside distractions proved beneficial as well. This included browsing the Internet for information, dealing with publishers, and worrying about what the competition was doing at the moment. He stressed that despite what most people may think, working as an independent developer is still a job, which meant he had to keep the same work schedule that he previously had while working for a large development studio.
Being a completely independent studio meant that Schneider had to fulfill every role of the developer and publisher, but he found that “as long as I’m doing something, the game is going to get done.” As Schneider grew weary of the development process, he’d work on music composition. During a two-week period between titles, he finished the music for Crossfire 2 before the game even began development.
Upon completing his games, Schneider found that the number of blog visits to his site had no correlation to the number of downloads or sales. So, he learned that it was best to focus on building awareness around the product launch, as opposed to sacrificing precious development time for promotion during the development process.
He concluded by noting that as his success goes, it is important to keep it all relative. Your numbers may not be outstanding when compared to those of others, but as long as you are making an effort to improve on your last product, then it is a success. ”There’s something to be said about finishing that many games by yourself and having thousands of people enjoy them,” he said.
Schneider concluded by revealing a recent rejection letter from Steam declaring that one of his games wasn’t a good fit for the service. “So for all the speakers who keep mentioning how wonderful Steam is, please stop kicking me in the face.” Still, he plans for bigger titles, slightly longer development cycles, and expansion into other platforms in the future.
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