I hope one day to start a game company creating opensource games. I'm now leading a opensource project to create a game in pygame. Which is very good for my learning experience too

Great video! Super helpful for someone in my shoes.

I absolutely hope he's right about the algorithm being more important in the future. As a solo indie dev, coding, art, and music are far too time consuming for me to spend my time worrying about marketing and social media.

Never seen your channel or videos before. Not even your other channel that I just looked up. But whatever you did or the algorithm that pushed your channel to my suggestions did good/worked out.

Shut up, Flanders.

please change the money icon on the thumbnail to smth different, it rly wasn't clear at first sight that its a dollar.

This is awesome advice!

Great video! This raises some very important questions that I feel I should be answering.

Thank you soooooooo much, this is so useful!

I have no idea how a guy from the 70's know so much about indie gamedev of today. Excellent content, subbed!

I’ve replayed this several times while doing instacart. I want to make games but I’m trying to pay bills. The problem is the more I work the more I want to just create. I need to find a balance. I don’t think it’s wrong to want to be compensated for making a game but is it wrong to want to make a game for the money? The more i work the more frustrated I become knowing I’m not following my dreams but bills are bills. I’m worried that if i approach this as a business I’ll lose the passion for it. Idk maybe I’m losing it lol. Book marking this either way.

thanks man ,really helpful

Clicked on the video expecting advice on starting an Indie Game Studio like the title says, but this is just solo game dev advice.

Wow. What a great resource I just stumbled upon. Thank you so much for making this! Can’t believe you don’t have more subs. Will be sharing this around.

Heads up, the links in the PDF aren't clickable.

This video has to blow up, you made it so concise and realistic.

Impressive video, there’s a lot of insight here. I may have to watch this a few times. Such a little gem of a channel. Also, I’m glad you put up Shadows of Doubt, it’s by far the most immersive detective game I’ve played.

Loving the videos Cam keep am up

Great talk Cam :))

📂 Check out the free blueprint PDF goingindie.co/assets/Indie_Studio_Starter_Kit.pdf ⬆ The resources linked in this document are meant to help save you time, money, and headache on your indie development journey. Every resource may be purchased for less than the cost of a new AAA game.

That last nugget of knowledge was really useful for me🎉

6:00 I'm not sure what he is trying to really argue there. But having a good game that will be interesting to a (large enough) audience is _always_ the number one reason why a game could sell literally any copies. There is no 'do marketing in way A or B and get guaranteed sales' nonsense at play. Not ever. It's why the whole obsession over wishlist numbers or even review numbers is so stupid. Steam algorithms aside, most of which is literally completely hidden anyway, many successful games do not have tens of thousands of positive reviews or wishlist numbers, yet sold well regardless. It's because the game itself is good. 95% of traffic comes directly from Steam, because his KZbin channel is really aimed at developers, not gamers. Also keep in mind that the Steam algorithm will give _all_ games a fair chance of climbing within the algorithmic systems. It's how some of these 'made in 3 months, zero marketing done' type games can still blow up on Steam. It's direct prove of why wishlist numbers are a lot less relevant than they are made out to be. 8:00 That's really just 100% speculation from his side, with random numbers. There are no statistics to support such a claim at all. The actual game is 100000% more important. It's why even being on the frontpage for a bit doesn't guarantee you any sale spikes. There's no comparison to any external traffic being driven anywhere. Steam actually values things like people buying the game, playtime and in-game engagement way more than how people respond to say a random screenshot of your game or a developer announcement on a Steam game page. Consumers also really love a properly valued game at an interesting discount (not just at launch). Most indie devs really underestimate this fact too. 10:00 No, all those algorithmic rewards will always follow trends. There's absolutely no reason why Steam couldn't start to overvalue shorter games that are finished in under 10 hours, allowing people to move on to the next 10 hour game. We saw these types of changes in algorithms on KZbin dozens of times. From focusing on 10 minute videos to super long videos that kept the audience captivated, all the way to overpromoting KZbin shorts in almost a TikTok style. Unsurprisingly, some of this stuff changes just to see if it ends up more profitable to them. You can probably find some type of average playtime statistic underneath all of Steam's algorithms that is currently promoted more than say shorter or much longer game experiences. It's just how statistics and algorithms work by definition.

get rid of the music, it is distracting other than that nice interview :)

The problem is: you don't know if the game looks good and is fun BEFORE you launch a steam page. But to launch the steam page - you pretty much need 50% of the game completed already; have a nice graphics, trailer, screenshots, etc. I've been working for 3 months only on my trailer! And what do you do with a game that shows up not very good? Abandon the project entirely?.. And, well, all of this interview can be summed up to "make good games, don't make bad games, m'kay"... Which is not very helpful >.<'

The background music / ambience was a little bit too loud on this one but nice video nevertheless

I've often wondered why I don't see many indies doing something similar. I like the idea of having a few small games that basically are just used to "bootstrap" larger projects. But, I also see the flipside where you would 1st have to make these smaller titles (months-years) but you would then need to most likely support for awhile which might bleed into development time on larger projects.

You may have higher EV at other things, but there are very few things that have the potential to make as much money as a highly successful indie dev. Notch made $2B+ with Minecraft, ConcernedApe and Tynan Sylvester made $100M+ with Stardew Valley and Rim World respectively. Dozens of solo developers have made $10M+ and hundreds if not thousands have made $1M+. You still have to be in the top 1% of the profession, but there's very few professions that are guaranteed paths to millionairehood

🆒

cool

As a game developer who works 50+ hours a week in a full time job and has fitness hobbies and family, I have to agree that I am unhappy with the duration. I’m 4 years in and finally finishing up my game this month. I did everything. Programming. Assets. Voice Acting. Music. Handrawn cutsceene animations. Marketing. And now porting it to vr as well. No prior programming skills. You Can checkout my devlogs too. That’s another thing I did alone. Devlogs took up SO MUCH time as well. And now hurricane Milton took out my power for a bit and that slowed me down. I cannot wait to be a full time gamedev :) congrats!

Making games is a business. There are multiple ways to do it. I am for the small prototype idea. But it can be expounded farther. I help devs FINISH. I want to help 100% of devs finish 100% of their projects

why is youtube filled with people who dont sell games giving advice on how to sell games?

Thomas has been an great inspiration, nice crossover vid!

Great chat, got a lot from it, especially as an indie solo dev myself, in a similar situation.

There is so much freedom in making indie games

Good watch. Thanks for the great content so far!

Great story! I've been following Thomas for quite some time and was interested to hear this interview. Keep up the good work.

Thanks Cam! I always love getting to chat with you.

Hehe first here :)

Huge thanks to Thomas for sharing his job evaluation spreadsheet! Feel free to make a copy :) docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fiDlFCCnFKRkbVaSOt5LkizhFhTfIl5VgXc6t98yalg/edit?usp=sharing

Fuck wishlist , fuck steam !, fuck the internet !

9:25 I think the difference between the KZbin algorithm and the steam algorithm, is that while your channel did not have a lot of data points at the beginning of your channel, KZbin did and you posted content that plugged in nicely. So because other people produce content like yours, when you uploaded videos, KZbin looked at the subject matter and suggested it to me. Because I am contently watching game dev content. They are not going to show me make up tutorials, because I don't search for makeup or any related topics. But when you posted videos on a subject that I watch, KZbin put your videos in my feed hoping that I would click on it. Steam probably does this to some degree based on my library and what types of games I click on, but it is still can only promote ~500 games like Chris suggest.

The goat

That’s a refreshing perspective

I spent $1k promoting my mobile game on tiktok the video got about 135k views 5 downloads. $50 on google ads, 700 download.

Hey, my game appears at 9:54. Thank you so much, Cam Stoker! <3 By the way, a little update for you: We have 2.3k wishlists after the first trailer. Currently, I'm getting around 250 wishlists every day, and the number is still growing.

Great video! Really interesting to see from your perspective after making the 100 shorts.

Why did you fail? Because you're treating your audience more like wallets to milk rather than potential customers to be satisfied with a GOOD game! Do it crappy enough and people will feel disrespected.

Highly valid.

Conclusion: "Just start building and make crap happen" :D