From Free-to-Play to Indie
GDC · GDC, Independent Games Summit · 2016 · 38 min
Which billion-download habits help an indie game, and which ones quietly kill it. Lessons from producing The Consuming Shadow.
A talk about what carries over from free-to-play to indie, and what does not.
In a short sabbatical between Halfbrick and Storm8, I produced The Consuming Shadow, a Lovecraftian procedural-horror game by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation. Coming from Rovio and Halfbrick, I expected the free-to-play instincts to transfer cleanly. Some did. Many did not.
The talk covers the differences in the marketplace, Steam Greenlight and discoverability, and the realities of building a community around a smaller game. It went on to a Very Positive player rating on Steam.