What happens behind the scenes of articles like that? Just to be clear, I am very happy for this guy that he took the indie leap and is shipping, and I hope his game does great.
But why is there a 2 page article about it in a semi-high profile blog? Neither him nor his wife has previous fame from past projects; the game's twitter (@druidsduel) has less than 1k followers, they didn't do a Kickstarter or something crazy that would have brought the spotlight, etc. I follow a fair amount of indie game devs, and hadn't heard about this until today.
So again - congrats to him on shipping! All the best! But there are many indies following that route (saying the market is saturated would be an understatement), and they don't get 2 page articles. What's going on here?
The only thing I can think of is that he has a publisher, which is unusual for first time indie game devs, and that perhaps the publisher just knows the right people to make stuff like this happen.
Maybe he just pitched his article to a few places and venturebeat decided to run with it?
Sometimes, article like this are written by the author, and the blog takes the article, edit it a little and publish it. I'm not saying it's what happened but it's certainly a possibility
It is all about connections. A family member of mine used to work for a nationally published magazine. I was asked if I knew of any non-chain, non-franchise stores that carried products of type X. I did and recommended my local store that I had just been to. The next week, they got an email "out of the blue" from an editor at the magazine asking if they would like to review products of type X from several manufacturers. They would have liked to participate but it didn't work out (there is a process, they're not just asking one store - they're looking for the store the best fits their target reader demographics)
If you don't have connections, you'll have to pitch. Pitching is much easier if you have attempted to make a connection previously.
Jeremy Olson of Tapity talks about how one of the reasons he is a relatively successful app developer. Even as a teenager, he went to conferences and made friends with some of the people there. For instance, if he met one of the editors of a well-read publication and they got along, he would follow-up. And when the time came to 'pitch', he would send an email about 'This is my latest app. It does X. Would you please check it out?'. Sometimes, the pitch would be colder.
"When the app gets approved, I’ll send an email to all the people who have written reviews letting them know its publish time. I’ll also push the news to Tapity.com, Twitter, and the mailing list (right now 65 people have asked to be notified but I hope to grow that significantly before launch). The key is to get as much buzz as possible in a 1-4 day window—enough buzz to put you on the charts or get noticed by Apple, starting the snowball effect."
Although he did have a kickstarter for his game, April last year.[1] Pretty small project... and I'm not sure why that was never mentioned in the VB article.
I agree with some of the other sentiment.
It's probably due to connections with various people.
I personally don't approve of such underhanded tactics in the indie scene.
When I was part of the indie game scene in the beginning (New York scene), there was a lot of hope and I guess naivety ,that the best game would naturally float to the top in terms of news and such.
However it seems more like the people you were friends with mattered a lot more than the actual game, that was incredibly disheartening to me and I dropped that scene.
I would say the indie scene right now works exactly the same way as AAA scene, with all the underhanded dealings just in its own microcosm.
I wouldn't call something "underhanded" unless there was some malice or sabotage of other people's work.
I ran into this attitude a lot when I was a professional musician. We worked our asses off constantly and eventually had some national success. The local Chicago indie scene kinda snubbed us at that point. I would see the same guys we always saw around town and they just weren't putting any effort into promoting their bands. But they would be mad at us when we had never done a thing to keep them down. In fact we had even tried to help others with introductions, pushing the fact that we were from Chicago and trying to mention friends when we got press. But we were just sell-outs I guess.
From a gametheory perspective you guys are defectors. If connections didn't play a role then the media would be using a meritocratic method to find products or give equal time to different products for evaluation. I wonder if this is something that society can change or if this is a fundamental part of the way that humans work.
Yea it felt like that. We had zero media connections and in fact were largely ignored by the press until we got signed by a big label. Once that happened the press we got was usually all through them.
I'm not sure if I understand this correctly.
Are you saying connections should matter or a meritocratic method (no connections) is better ?
Should society bother to even try to change the way this works ?
No apology necessary! I do know what you mean when people who are connected to someone in the press get lots of attention while other, more talented people go unnoticed.
Hey everyone! This is Kris Szafranski (@druidsduel), the guy in the article.
I have often wondered the very same things, so hopefully I can remove the mystery here for others.
There is nothing particularly special about my story. It's something of a combo of what wallflower and GuiA wrote already: opportunity, making connections, and tons of hard work.
I have a publisher, Surprise Attack Games. They contacted me after seeing the game on IndieDB.com. This was after the Kickstarter, which was indeed very small. The KS was my experiment in self-marketing, something I have very little experience with and in the end it got funded, but it was a struggle and a dose of reality. I hired PR help during the KS as I knew very few people in the industry media directly and social media only gets you so far. I also started attending as many local meet-ups as I could, getting to know the game dev community around me. They had amazing advice and support.
Surprise Attack is an indie publisher and I am not a Big Client. I thought my odds were best with a publisher and the deal didn’t come with any advance or other investment. So aside from the KS, the game is self-funded. I only went with the Surprise Attack after we agreed that Steam would be included. Until then, it was more of a distribution deal, which they publically offer to indies on their website.
The publisher used a well-known gaming PR person to handle the release. We pitched the author of the article two ideas and she liked them, combining them in a general human-interest type thing. A similar story ran locally last year in Minneapolis where I am based. My former gig was at a popular local company and my work their gained me supporters. This past experience has helped me a ton at having the confidence in networking and talking about my game.
In the end it’s just one article and my game’s success or failure is still very much up in the air. I just followed others’ advice: talk about your game all the time, to everyone. Know your audience and make them something they want to play.
I'll happily answer any other questions you have have.
I am the PR guy that Kris mentioned that set up this interview and feature.
I understand that most people think that there's some kind of nepotism going on, and in fact sometimes this really is how an industry (any industry) works. Not in this case, but I understand why you'd jump to that conclusion.
So why this game? Why this guy? Well the answer is in part because it is important to run this kind of article now and then to remind everyone that it ISN'T always about the guy who has all the connections or about the company with the billions of dollars to spend.
Games, especially indie games, are about the PEOPLE behind them. You are all correct that basically this article could have been about practically ANY indie (I work hard for my clients in hopes of making them the target) - but the important thing is the article its self gets published to remind us that for at least one person a game is more than a game, it is a statement, it is a life change, it is a dream come true.
In short, I believe this article is to say that in our days of ever increasing hype and flash that there's a human behind the scenes making what he loves and that GamesBeat is strong enough to talk about it. Plus the game is pretty damn good :D
But why is there a 2 page article about it in a semi-high profile blog? Neither him nor his wife has previous fame from past projects; the game's twitter (@druidsduel) has less than 1k followers, they didn't do a Kickstarter or something crazy that would have brought the spotlight, etc. I follow a fair amount of indie game devs, and hadn't heard about this until today.
So again - congrats to him on shipping! All the best! But there are many indies following that route (saying the market is saturated would be an understatement), and they don't get 2 page articles. What's going on here?
The only thing I can think of is that he has a publisher, which is unusual for first time indie game devs, and that perhaps the publisher just knows the right people to make stuff like this happen.