How To Make Indie Games In 2025 w/ Jonathan Blow — Full Time Game Dev Podcast Ep. 024

Mr Jonathan Blow dude I've been trying to get you on the podcast I think I've been trying for two years I mean we can look in your it's been a little while you know it hasn't uh my schedule has not been that predictable so I apologize for making it more difficult than it needed to be oh no no worries man I well I appreciate you just taking the time because I I think this podcast might be something like a therapy session because I was laying awake last night and we'll introduce you in a sec but

I just want to let you know that last night I was laying awake at like 3:00 a.m. and I was I had this thought of the amount of games coming into the pipeline is not going to slow down it's just going to be more and more and more games and it seems like there's less and less money especially from like investors it doesn't look good like the game industry just doesn't look good it and I I'm sitting here going how do we how do we how do we fix this what do we need to do

as indie game developers to get ahead of this and so I'm glad to talk to you because and this is your introduction because you were there at the very beginning of like the you you were the impetus or at least you were seemingly the impetus of the the the indie game boom right with the indie game documentary 2008 2009 it was like the Glory Days and now you're I'm talking to you at a point where the game industry in my opinion is at at like its weakest in like 20 years is is that correct maybe

longer than that yeah um you know i' I've was talking to some other developers who I mean I I hadn't exactly thought too hard about how bad is the current crash right um but you know I've heard people Express that it's the worst state that games has been in and here I'm speaking of the whole industry like IND plus triaa and all that it's the worst place it's been in since um like the Atari video game Crash of the 1980s if you even know what that is I don't I don't so when I was a

little kid um I was like uh no probably seven years old or eight years old and my parents got a home game console back when there were not very many things that could be described that way and it was the the Atari 2600 game console although the one we got was like an off-brand one sold by Sears or whatever but you know kind of like an old Nintendo or whatever you'd put a cartridge in and the game would boot up instantly unlike many games today and uh you know these cartridges were like you know $20

in in 1980s money or whatever which is you can at home whip up your own inflation calculator to figure out what that is today but you know they weren't they weren't totally cheap yeah and and so you know games went into this boom because this Home console Market was a like a a new thing that blew up and and the games weren't that hard to make because the graphics were so terrible you know like that's where most of the effort in a modern game goes is like into Graphics yeah um and so you just kind

of had to program something that would plausibly be a game and you could sell it at the store and all all these people would buy it and so over you know I don't know how long it it took um there's this guy digital ant Aquarian who makes really good um you know he does really good writeups about various periods in video game history and various games and stuff and I'm pretty sure he did one about this time but over a course of a few years it went from totally New Market to very successful um everybody

loves the games everybody's and then tons and tons more people are making the games right and then of course the games became so low quality and simultaneously while that's happening while the quality of games is dropping like the novelty wears off right so the market sort of shrinks from everyone who wanted like a short-term cool new thing which is maybe a large percentage of the population down to like people who are serious Gamers you know in the 1980s and that's a big cut in the audience and so very quickly over the course of like a

year it went from booming industry to like a horrible horrible horrible bust so I just remember as a kid I would go to like whatever the the store was you know on on the next block over is just like a you know sold General kinds of stuff but they sold video games there because that's what happened and there was they had like a a giant barrel of Game cartridges for 25 cents each and they were just like please please please buy some of these and get them out of our so this was at the tail

end of the uh the bust yeah yeah and I just I was hyped as a kid that I could get all these games for 25 cents but it was not good for the industry right um and so right now is probably something like that you know you hear about all these games there have been very high-profile games that come out and like literally nobody buys them right yeah um but for every one of those there's all sorts of to get back to Indies for a second there's all sorts of Indies who worked for years on

something and then you know they release it and 10 people play it and that's it you know yep and uh so it is it is a very hard time uh it is it is the hardest time that I have ever been a professional in the games industry That's crazy dude because you you were you were in tripa in the early 2000s right I yeah and and before that I was even Indie I was Indie in like 1996 it just wasn't a good time crap it was the worst possible time to be Indie yeah um cuz

that's when it started to get really hard to make games so I'm trying to learn to make them at the same time that's when they went 3D but there wasn't 3D Hardware yet right yeah so you had to draw all the pixels on the screen and make them be 3D some how right and and do it fast um and then after that you know I did I did some Contracting for some more AAA companies and and games and stuff and then I went Indie again um around 2004 or something like that right and you made

braid worked on that for a while then you made witness which was a huge project because you long story short you built both engines for both games right complete separate engines for both games well there the engines are connected you know but it's essentially a new engine yeah it's just you don't have to delete all your source code and start over you can take what you have and build on it and that's been a very useful a useful thing that I've done through my life okay so I want to get into the story of all

of that but really quick I wanted to ask you okay so yay the industry is awful yeah what like what is what do we do like what what's the do you have a 2025 game plan my game plan is very focused on finishing and releasing the game that I've been working on um yeah which is actually a bigger project than the witness was unfortunately so it's just hard yeah you know there's just a big challenge getting it finished and then of course like I just said it's very uncertain to release a game now you know

we release the anniversary edition of bra earlier this year and I was like oh this will do fine right it shouldn't you know you don't expect a a remaster or re-release to hit with the energy of a new game that everybody's excited about but you expect it to at least be reasonable and it was like nah you know Market's quite poor now actually and so we're going into next year looking at that and saying like well what um what do we do about that and I have a very specific plan that I can't actually disclose

uh for this one game right but that's the way that I'm thinking is very situational very specific about what I need to do in terms of general advice about the industry as a whole I don't know cuz like what I think in AAA there's actually a way that it might get solved um because you know there's all these companies putting up all these big Investments and most of them aren't panning out and so those players leave they go look for a different industry somewhere to invest in which on the one hand is not really good

right you think of hey your industry is thriving if there's energy and money going into it right but on the other hand then one of the people left in AAA if they make a game um they might might actually survive right and not get competed to death and so so then maybe they can make a better game and put more money and time and energy into that but for Indies that Dynamic is very different right because who's in Indie it's like anyone who can download unity and open Unity test scene do whatever and make some

stuff and then push the ship on Steam button right and so that's never going to go down right like that's supply of things is never going to decrease yeah and so on the one hand so here's the thing on the one hand that's good for gamers right because hey you have more Choice than ever before right if people weren't making something that you wanted to play now maybe they will because there's more people making stuff um but again on the other hand it's it's also not good because if most developers can't really survive then the

person who's going to make a high quality version of the thing you want to play may never get to the point where they could do that right so we may just end up in this churn of just really low quality stuff all the time which then of course can lead people to stopping buying games or looking in that place for games right so like I have an iPhone um I tried I tried using a Samsung phone for a while and the UI was too terrible uh but you know so I have this iPhone and if

you go back to like 2009 or 2010 you would have thought that this would be like a an awesome future vibrant gaming platform or whatever and I guess by numbers it is right like there's games on there that make a ton of money um but like I don't I don't I literally do not ever look on my phone for a game to play like the last time I did that was probably more than five years ago exactly me neither and and the thing is is that going to happen on PC it might right or or

maybe you know it might turn into a thing where you just don't ever go look at any of the storefronts because it's all junk but um you know maybe you're in some Niche Community somewhere on the internet and somebody tells you about a thing that's cool right but I don't know it's just it's very hard because you know if developers can't survive they can't make the good version of the thing because games are are hard and I don't I don't see how that changes I mean and and of course anytime we talk about this um

it's easy for someone who just plays games to go look and see the successes at any given time like there's always games that have done very well often on really low budgets so like the one that's coming to mind right now is batro which came out I I don't remember exactly when like a year ago or a little bit less um not a high budget game at all and was tremendously successful in terms of the number of people who played it right um but again for every one of those there's like hundreds of developers who

didn't have that much success and you might say well maybe their game just wasn't good but a lot of them are are pretty good games you know and it's just when things are too crowded it's just hard to survive and I don't see I don't see how to solve that problem for the system as a whole because the cost of Entry is so low the only way to solve the problem is like you if you're a developer have to go in and win right in this very like red ocean you know middle of the Gladiator

Gladiator Arena kind of a situation and that's that's not great either I mean on the one hand it's like it's great if somebody succeeds that way but it's not great because like if you want to play the best game right you want to play the game from the people who are the best at designing or programming or drawing art or whatever um you don't necessarily want to play the game from the people who are the best at like marketing or you know uh picking a genre that is um you know palatable to the largest demographic

or whatever those are very non- Indie Concepts at least going way back to the days you were talking about like the 2008 kind of days yeah but now it's like well maybe that's the cost of Entry now is you have to do that I mean I'm I'm not doing that um I will just continue to operate at whatever budget level is available like the nice thing so I design and program so I could theoretically just make a game myself right in fact I braid was the majority that um right you know there were definitely other

major contributors to that game but it started as just me making it by myself and okay you know I could have made it by myself I just wouldn't have looked nearly as good and all that stuff right right um and so I have that option uh unless unless it gets so bad that one person cannot even make a living anymore um but hopefully it doesn't get quite that bad so we're not there yet right we're not there yet but like it's been getting worse every year so this year is really really bad right like it's

been I mean anyone who isn't aware of how bad it's been you can just go look at how many game studios have done layoffs or just gone out of business right in the past year and it started I think around last November like a year ago right and there was a big heavy series of like layoffs and all this stuff up through April May and then we got a little bit of a break where it softened for a little bit and then now it's starting again um because all these things are just not working out

you know and yeah so it's very hard and is it is it uh Jonathan do you think it's related to AI at all I don't currently like if you're making a game so there there's always you know like there was some game a week or two ago the stupid Minecraft thing that somebody put up where they're like oh it's Minecraft but it's AI generated right jez that's sort of the leading Ed of the AI hype cycle and anyone who actually plays games looks at that for 5 seconds and is like look this is not actually

a game and it's not actually playable as a game um now the place where of course AI can come into it more is is this controversial territory of you know generating art assets and stuff right so like I said art is the most uh labor intensive part of a game it's the most expensive part of the game takes the most time um the thing is it is not yet clear how that actually works in practice if you're trying to make something good right I mean these technologies will always improve but even just talking about static

2D images last time I went on Mid journey and like tried it to actually get it to generate what I wanted you know I had to try for like an hour and eventually give up and just sort of accept the closest thing that it gave me or whatever right and so that's very far from Prime Time and the problem is all these people who make these AI generation tools right now don't really have games as their use case anyway so these things don't fit very well right yeah so I couldn't if I wanted to use

AI in a game to generate art and stuff which I don't really write now because like I said we're almost done with the next game so it's like like what that is is pretty much set yeah um but imagining that I wanted to go do a game that had AI generating assets like that like I just don't know how to make it not be crappy compared to what what you would hand make now that said like I said maybe maybe budgets spiraling downward means that that's the only option right that could happen but I think

what's maybe more likely so you know you have these engines um maybe un is hanging in there but of course unreal is is seen as the higher quality one yep and they're sort of becoming these totally closed ecosystems where you go into them and you don't you don't ever need to go outside them right and so yep like unreal has this whole metahuman system for Designing characters where you you normally would have done that in like Maya or some character design tool right um so you could imagine like the way that AI generation might become

useful is if it gets built into one of these engine I mean you know of course you can already go and like download plugins for them and stuff but they're not like designed for specific uses they're not run through these use cases of like real things that real developers actually need to do and so if you had that in there if you had like in the Unreal Engine like look this thing just generates Gears of War levels or whatever um you would you would start seeing it used more in games but you know right now

if you say AI in games I just sort of think asset flip games or what yeah well the reason I ask is because I heard you in a podcast I think it was eight months ago I can't remember who you were with um but you said that it it's so hard to make games now and I feel like it's easier to make games now I feel like that and so I'm not arguing with you I want to try and get pick your brain on why you feel that way because no these both both statements are

true okay let's go um it is much easier than ever before to get the minimum cost of Entry like which like what what is what can you call the minimum thing that's a game right like well it's something that runs on some kind of computer system and puts some stuff on the screen probably and reads input and lets you do some things and maybe there's a goal or whatever um so like I said you could just download Unity now and you could have that by the end of the day you know it wouldn't be a

very good game right right but it would be uh a game right and so when I say making games is hard though what I mean is um if you're actually trying to make something really good I see um then the the problem is even um you know using something like Unity or unreal actually gets in your way in the back end right in the front end it's great because it gets you started faster I see and it lets you rapidly iterate without investing a long time in like just getting stuff on the screen or whatever

right but on the other side of it you know a part part of wanting to make something really good is like adjusting it to be just like how you want it to be because you think that'll be the thing with Maximum Impact H or whatever impact is a very vague vague word um and the thing is you know there are certain things that are easy to adjust in you know in an engine like unreal or something like okay if I want to change a texture and or the way it looks you know that's like very

easy um if I want to change the way light reflects off the water that's pretty hard yep right because you you sort of at least have to know how to write shaders and then it's complicated because you have to work with the engine Shader system instead of a simpler one that would be like if you just had your own game right so some things are easier some things are are harder actually um but but really the thing that makes games hard is games are really complicated now um just designs are complicated you know like if

you're going to make a game that's um you know a multiplayer shooter right way back when I started that was just like put some dudes in a level and have an internet connection and they run around and do the thing excuse me I'm coughing a bunch no you're right I was sick like a week ago and I thought I was better and then it came back I don't know that's all right man me too but you know now like if you look at like you know Apex Legends or something which is now kind of an

old game but um I haven't even bothered to look at like OverWatch 2 or something but um me neither you know they all have all these tons of systems about and and you know a lot of them are like cynical how do you make money things like the you know loot boxes and whatever and but all these progression systems that unlock all these things and like you you couldn't just release a multiplayer shooter probably right without all that stuff because everyone would be like where's all the stuff yep um and then if you write down

the development schedule of like how you know how how much time does it take to do what to make this game the actual core multiplayer shooter part would be like a little part and then all the other stuff would be pretty big actually because you know for every hat that you want people to be able to unlock or whatever someone has to model and texture that and that's a lot of work you know whereas going back to Apex Legends again you know if you just if somebody models and textures a building on a map right

like that takes work but then that building is just there right and it gets used like for every play session forever right whereas if you make a hat it gets used by a percentage of characters sometimes and then it's old and people are not interested in it anymore knowes yeah so it's just a fundamentally different kind of a thing so in a way what you're saying is it's easier to technically make a game it's harder to stand out and have an edge well it's harder to technically make a game too is the other thing though

um again it's it's easier to get started making a game right but again if you're trying to make a high quality game yeah you have maybe a lot of uh you know things you want to make sure are correct like I want my frame rate to be smooth right yeah I want audio to play with low latency and I want to be able to play a lot of sound effects and stuff and some of that is actually getting harder because code the code that programmers have to work with yeah is bigger and bigger piles right

the operating systems are less reliable and more complicated to interface with and and so on and and things that um that people think are features or or that are featur legitimate features make game development harder and these things just keep stacking up so here's here's one that'll blow everybody's mind hopefully um right now in the video game industry it is an unsolved problem let's just let's take a subset like the PC because when you talk about consoles with specific Hardware it's different but on the PC there is no right answer to how do you make

a game Run with a smooth frame rate like that's just like an unsolvable problem and it gets more unsolvable all the time um people who are interested um there's a guy named Allan lats who's from Croatia uh he used to be at Crow team working on you know Serious Sam kind of stuff if you know those games um I don't know what he's doing now but he wrote he wrote this uh essay about how hard it is just to try to render at a smooth frame rate if you're really trying to do it and like

it's near nearly impossible for a lot of reasons right so back in the day when you just had your Atari video game console or whatever you knew that the TV was running at 60 HZ if you were in America or 50 htz if you're in Europe right um now what refresh rate is your monitor going to have I don't know right um maybe it's got a fixed refresh rate maybe you have vsync turned off in the game in which case we have to like manually wait around for some amount of time and then flip the

thing whereas if if you have vsync turned on what that means is we actually like uh I don't know how to like we sort of lean on the Monitor and wait wait for it to tell us to go again yeah um and that's that's a reliable way to get a smooth frame rate except people can turn that off in the driver or like an Nvidia control panel right and then your game has to cope with that or then now there's you know gsync and uh a MD's version of that whatever that is and like those

you have to have a totally different way of like you have to decide what frame rate you might probably be able to smoothly run at and then run the timing yourself yeah um and and so right there for one game I've just said like five different strategies we had to do all this on great anniversary right um which is why it's fresh in my mind and that's just hard it's way harder just to draw frames like it doesn't even matter what's in the frame just to draw frames smoothly is way harder and then of course

you know because this scene is so full of graphical assets that the GPU might have a more highly varying amount of time trying to deal with than it did in the past right yeah um that's harder uh but um and then the the thing that people don't realize is you also can't like if I need to have these five different strategies for trying to have a smooth frame rate that's not an isolatable problem it's not like I just write that code and it just lives uh somewhere and then it's done because it affects everything in

my game right so the the other problem that people don't realize is it is kind of generally an unsolved problem to have a game where the physics does not depend on the frame rate right so like correct making the experience the same for somebody who's on a 60 HZ monitor and somebody who's on a 240 HZ monitor is actually really hard if you really care and you're trying to do it right like there are mathematical constructs that could help you right there's like various numerical integration techniques and stuff but that's actually in some cases very

hard to employ and it also ignores that like the basic structure of a game is you have like if statements in the middle of the frame that make stuff happen and then you know if you want if you want those to happen exactly the same same like just regular gameplay code to happen exactly the same for a 60 HZ player as a 240 HZ player you kind of have to [ __ ] the 240 HZ players experience which isn't a good way to do it because the reason why you bought a better monitor is you

want a better game experience so all this stuff is I could dude I could go on for days about this this is just two examples of how it is very hard now to make a a high quality game but there are like a hundred examples well do you're like the you're the opposite of me because I I can't write my own language I know you're writing your own language right what's it called yeah it doesn't have an official name okay um so don't worry about it it's just it's not publicly available okay I wasn't sure

if you had it like open source or something but any some point we will but it's not yet so you're you're like the opposite of me and you you know you might be the opposite of most the people listening right now because in my head I'm like okay if if all these problems exist I'm just going to let Unity handle it you know I'm going to let unreal handle it yeah and my question to you is isn't that the case though like isn't isn't isn't Unity going to do its best to keep the frame rate

stable and we can just rely on Unity right so it makes it easier for game development in theory that's true and that would be an advantage of using those engines but in practice like dude I can't even get two-thirds of these games to go full screen correctly you know and like why not like if you use the engine and it solves the problems for you why do I have all these problems we like oh wait I went full oh it's in a window on my second monitor let me try to move it back oh yeah

it's like it's like not even cropped correctly on the screen now oh my input is somehow like a third of the screen off like I have these problems all the time um and then you know frame rate is a subtler problem though so to get to that specifically yeah um these engines definitely do have like code to try to do all this stuff that I just said but they're not magic so they don't know exactly what your game wants to employ and when in terms of these strategies and then even if you just let the

engine do one that problem that I mentioned about gameplay code being inherently um frame rate uh dependent is still there like yeah you you know maybe maybe if you're spawning some particles or particles are actually the easiest thing to make frame rate independent but we'll use that as an example so the engine could do a really good job making the particle systems behave exactly the same at varying frame rates right but then you know something else like uh you know I'm let's say I've got a Sci-Fi driving game I don't know why this is the

image that came to hit my mind but I've got a Sci-Fi driving game and I've got like a magnet and I'm pulling on something that's following my car or something like if I wrote the code to do that um it's probably frame rate dependent unless I was very very careful right and so then then you have to lean on the engine for everything and the the problem is there's always just some point where they didn't do what you need and you need to do some stuff you know is this something that bothers you on a

core sort of principled level or is it truly a problem with development um you know what bothers me the most is that nobody seems to care about any of this stuff like de development is getting harder and harder yeah not even just in games just like in software broadly speaking like the pile of software that exists is getting crazier and crazier you know the the operating systems that we all run on are getting crazier and crazier and it just it's so much harder to make a program that works correctly than it was like 20 years

ago and people seem very unconcerned about this and it just makes me sad like as somebody who likes good craftsmanship it just makes me sad because it just means every program is going to be a thing where it's like does this really work I don't I don't know but I've tried to talk to people about this I've even given little speeches about this and you know usually my speeches go very well but this is one where I've just I've given it twice and it hasn't gone well either time because people have a hard time believing

that software is in a declining State when they can see cool new toys all the time right like oh dude go go check out these images that mid Journey could generate now that's obviously advancement and it is it is advancement but things are so multidimens dimensional that you can advance in some directions while declining in other directions right so it's becoming more and more like jumbled and chaotic naturally it's almost like what's that law where everything becomes more and more chaotic and is it entropy or something like that entropy yeah yeah so it's like is

that what you're saying is like software is just it naturally has devolved and become more and more complic sofware Engineers when you go learn software engineering in school one of the things that you're supposed to be learning and that they do teach in theory is like you know staving off entropy in that way right it's like this is why we structure our code and try to write things in a clean way and refactor them when they get messy and stuff but somehow just as as a discipline of software Engineers globally we just always take that

in the wrong direction and make bigger messes so you can be thinking in fact this probably characterizes like most code by people who thinking they are writing clean code like you can be thinking that you're factoring something very nicely and all the concerns are separated and whatever and then but you end up writing 10 times as much code as you should have had to solve the problem and so the pile is 10 times as big yes and then it's like what and then everybody has to deal with that after that right right yeah so does

does open source solve the problem so okay have you first question is have you touched Unity or unreal I helped somebody with a unity game in 2012 so it was quite a long time ago with a much earlier version of the engine what I worked on an Unreal Engine game for like a year uh in the year 2002 so this was a much earlier yeah much earlier version of the Unreal Engine uh so the answer is yes I've worked with both but not not in anything resembling the configuration you would get if you download okay

have you touched Visual Studio oh yeah all the time okay so that's probably a better example um everyone listening right now is probably either unreal Unity or gdau I I won't speak for gdau but unreal and unity and visual studio are like heavy like when you it takes like five 10 minutes to open it up visual studio if I want to edit something the compile time when it goes back into Unity is like maybe 15 seconds which is unbelievable every time you're trying to make a change so my question to you is is is that

kind of what you're talking about there's just a a mess of bloat underneath the surface and like you I've got people in my audience who always say you know Unity sucks or unreal sucks it could be that they don't know why they're saying that that they think it's features but really in reality it's just terrible software is do you think that's the case so there's a number of things that get worse as the amount of software increases right so one is everything takes longer like you're saying right um Things become less reliable so one fun

thing that happens to me in Visual Studio sometimes this gets caught on this has been caught on video it's in a YouTube clip somewhere but like you right click on some you go to the properties page because you want to like change something and you right click on it and you type in the new like launch options or whatever that you want to use I don't know and then once in a while if you like close that window with like just the wrong timing it says like error unable to Marshall change property change status or

something right like I don't even know what the error message is but it's like I just tried to change a property in the property page and it failed right so that kind of stuff starts happening more and more um but then also in terms of trying to work with the code like maybe trying to modify some code or maybe you're not even trying to modify it you're just trying to understand it so that you know how to call the the functions or something um that just becomes more and more difficult as there's more of it

obvious viously right and then um you know building code uh one of the things that I focus on in my programming language is making sure that it compiles very quickly so our whole game compiles in two seconds right now um from scratch that's a clean is your game like a complicated like 3D game or is it a simple yeah I mean it's talking about braid or no no no this is the new game that's not released yet um yeah it's uh you know it's it's much more uh complicated than the witness let's say that wow

um so and the reason for that is I think it's actually very important for productivity because if you you know you have some idea of how you want to change some code you make the change you hit the button how long is it before you can see the effects of that change that matters really a lot I think in terms of um how how effective you can be as a programmer because it's like how fast can your mind go yeah depends on how fast this cycle goes so back in this 2002 Unreal Engine game I

was working on um the minimum amount of time that it took to try out a change I mean you could make some very trivial changes if you avoided touching um so back then there was like unreal script right and uh the the problem is if a lot of your games code was in unreal script and you wanted to change something like add a variable to some data structure somewhere that would invoke a full recompile of the entire engine because the unreal script had to interact interoperate with C++ so it would generate headers that were included

and so if you really changed anything um it was like a 35 minute recompile process and then oh jeez 10 to 15 minutes to start the game and load into the level because the that's just what it was so yeah it was it was the least productive I've ever been in my life because it took 45 minutes to really try something and you can try to adapt in that situation you're like well I'll try to make more changes um and see them all at once or whatever right but it there's there's downsides to that as

well so yeah I think it's something like status quo you know when I I was listening to your podcast earlier today to prepare for this podcast and you were saying that the witness you could you could like boot up and like a couple seconds is that what you said or um it was it was about seven seconds when we released it on Steam you know it's like with I I have grown accustomed to Unity just being bloated like when I click the play button here's what I do when I when I click the play button

I immediately pull out social media and scroll Instagram for like yeah 20 seconds or when I make a change to my code I'll just okay I guess I'll scroll on Instagram for just a little bit and in my head I it's just the norm you're just acco it's like you get accustomed to like the US government having bloat it's like well this is just the way it is yeah I mean that's just yeah and so my question to you is is is is it you you you've Express frustration on many podcasts about you're frustrated that

people don't seem to care and I think they don't care because they don't they don't know the alternative they have no idea that it's possible to have software that isn't bloated you know um do you think that do you think that something like gdau or open source is the solution well it it hasn't been yet so the question is uh you know what what changes there I mean so so in open source generally um my observation is just that a lot of these programs are just super buggy I mean obviously there's a few that are

like Main Stays yeah that are that are well relatively well uh engineered and maintained but really if you pick a random open source program it's not that good and so you have to ask what what was the problem so the open source thesis was right you have all these eyes on the code from around the world and all these people who can make changes and and so that should be really good for quality and speed and all these things but it doesn't seem to be mhm um so so that's a question now in terms of

gdau specifically um I have never used it so I can't I can't say anything about that um yeah especially not its trajectory over time yeah um because uh you know you have to have experience using something for a while but I will say so there's an open- Source compiler engine that almost everybody in the world uses now called llvm right and for the programming language I'm working on we use it uh we don't have to use it but we use it uh you know if you want to generate code that does optimization um we use

their Optimizer um and so it's a very useful component um they update it pretty often right yeah and approximately every time we up because we try to skip a couple versions and do you know whatever um it usually gets between 15 and 40% slower every time we move to a new version you know for exactly the same workload because we're like compiling the same thing and we know what it is and and so just like so any anytime you have a percentage change like that that's iterated over time like let's say something gets 10% slower

every year right that's actually that's an exponential right that's 10% interest and people have heard all about how interest rates make these big parabas right yeah um that's what it so so one of the sicknesses in the software industry is that people will say like oh I added some features and it's only 8% slower that's that's obviously worth it and it's like no because that's an iterated process that a lot of developers are doing and so you're you're like paying 8% interest on speed every year or it's it's more like gaining interest but as if

money was a very bad thing to have right and so just nobody takes this seriously I don't know do you think that um do you think that the hardware manufacturers want the software to be bad there certainly uh is in the past that was a clear incentive I think yeah but nowadays at least for CPUs like CPUs don't get that much faster you know for for Intel CPUs they're definitely not getting much faster anymore AMD was doing some cool multi-core stuff but single core is not necessarily getting faster you know Apple had had some pretty

big jumps for a bit and now they're kind of leveling out right um Qualcomm same thing so like unless we invent a radically new CPU technology um I don't know if that dynamic's in play anymore so just to give people I mean this is this is going pretty far back in history but when I started my first game company in the 90s right computers were getting so fast like regular desktop computers like you would have today with like a a 486 CPU in them um they were getting faster at such a speed that we would

tend to buy two computers a year because you could just get you could get a computer that would make your development 30% faster in six months right and like that's just not how it is like I actually just swapped out the computer that I have at home but the the desktop that I program on and game on and all this stuff um I had since 2019 and I swapped out the GPU right at some point but that was it and it was fine it was plenty fast and so um for that reason I don't think

they're incentivized by software getting slower anymore um I do think it's more a cultural failing on the part of software Engineers like so you know the modern thing that's still getting faster is you know gpus slash a accelerator kind of things and they don't they they're now selling on um increased capability right as opposed to old things being slower so you need a faster a faster thing so interesting but I do think that that wasn't in like if you go back to go back 15 years or something I think Intel definitely wanted software to keep

getting slower and then they would you know they would offer features that only run on our CPUs that you can use to make things faster yeah do you think that uh that game developers have a any any is there any benefit for game developers to do what you did which is write your own engine should they it's It's A Hard Road to travel because it is a lot of work right um so now fortunately I think once we have an engine now engines have kind of stabilized enough that I don't think we would need to

radically rewrite it again so that cost like if you were to make an engine of your own now you at least get to have it for multiple projects now oras in the past that wasn't even true because you know if you work on a game for a few years then the right thing to do because gpus had changed so much and CPU speeds had changed the right thing to do was just like different algorithms than you had started with and you had to rewrite the whole thing and now that's not necessary but it is a

lot of work like not going to lie um it's it's uh you shouldn't do it if you're not interested in it right is that why you did it just mainly because you're interested in it youself I mean I like it well historically if you go even so going back even to the witness because these games take so long right the witness started in um 2009 actually I started prototyping it in 2008 but like I started hiring team for it in in 2009 and back then if you looked at what was available in terms of like

game engines that you could license none of them really could do what we wanted to do so we did sure uh pre-baked Global illumination and very far view distance right um with with an LOD system to kind of you know do our best to to make things not look too bad as they get further away and those are things that you would get probably stock in Unreal Engine now right but back then you couldn't get them and so you kind of had to build it if you wanted it um and you know for for the

new engine it's like well I'm making this new programming language and so I want to validate that the programming language is good for games and I want to see how the language helps us make the engine better right and so um that was sort of a motivation to do that but I've just never I've never been a person who would be happy like all the things that are a bummer about off-the-shelf engines um it's just my personality that those things are more negative for me than they are for a lot of other people sure yeah

so it's some is it is it some some deep sort of perfectionist about you or is it practically necessary for you to perfectionist is the wrong word cuz you you cannot survive as a perfectionist in the game industry it's just too hard like I probably did have perfectionists personality traits when I was a little kid before I had ever done anything real right but once you start trying to do things that are real you get perfectionism beaten out of you really fast but but maybe it just sort of sublimates into something more sophisticated which is

just um a tactical I'm going to do the the best best that I can I'm going to try very hard to do the best that I can within my current circumstances right does that bug your does that bug your team sorry to interrupt you but does that does that bother people who you work with like team members that you want to do everything from scratch and you want to start from the ground up and you even want to write your own language does that bother people like the artist for example because he might have to

work in those confines sometimes um especially toward the beginning like you're building stuff up and it's not very good yet then it's like well you know arst have to deal with yeah um so I I think I think for people who are not on the technical side it's harder to see the appeal of that yeah for sure sure um but even for people who are programmers like some some people just don't want to replace the foundations of anything right like some people just want to write some code to put some stuff on the screen man

man right and and so those people can't really see the appeal either um so you know you just you got to work with people who um who are compatible with the approach that you choose right y well that brings me to a question I wrote down this morning which is do you still are you still working with a the team you're working with earlier this year or did you have to scale down um we scaled down a it um and now I'm going through so it's complicated because what um what the answer is um the

majority of the people uh who we were working with let's say a year ago at this time um we still are except not exactly because um you know anytime you're shipping a game so we were shipping braid anniversary on like nine platforms and so you got a port to a lot of consoles and stuff and so we were working with um contractors and stuff like that where um it was just known that that was a temporary Arrangement and so obviously those uh those people are off working on contracts for other games hopefully um but in

terms of full-time people you know we had a couple people um who just moved on naturally because you know the end of a project is a good timing for that whenever people wanted just go do life stuff or whatever um we did have a layoff though um we are fortunate enough that we're still here um unlike many game developers this year who no longer exist we still exist and we're still making this game um and we're not you know we're not totally out of the woods like the money situation is still is still hard um

but you know where're uh we're doing our best I don't know I don't know if you saw any of the screenshots uh that I posted from the game but they're they're looking no I I didn't I didn't well I didn't know if you could tell me what the game's called or anything because I haven't seen it I can't tell you what it's called because I don't know what it's called did you post it on did you post it on Twitter yeah yeah if you scroll back a little bit you'll find it let me see here

so how big is the te how big is the team right now um like nine people I think got it got it um with with uh so there are still also some external contractors that we work with um who are uh you know like like Sound and Music people for example are external to the company and are sort of working in a in a partial manner because we don't honestly have enough work for them to do full-time on it right now sure sure and we also you know when you're a small developer you kind of

can't build out like we it would be very foolish for us to like build out an audio department right yep um because we're just too small for that y so we work with external people for that okay so and by the way I'm looking at the screenshots here on Twitter it looks amazing looks so cool um oh I love it man cool so this is you plan on this coming out next year whatever I mean I don't I don't have an exact road map um it might be a little bit more than that uh but

in my brain there's about one year of development Left Right does this stress you out like does does does doing the indie game thing stress you out I know that's a bit of a deviation all the time dude like I okay so are you an anxious person because you seem like you're just like shoot from the hip who cares let's have fun I don't care if I burn a pile of cash as long as I get to do what I love I have certainly burned a pile of cash let me tell you that um I

don't know it's very frustrating I actually don't like running a company um at all I don't either I mean I I had five people earlier this year in q1 and Q2 yeah and we're not that way anymore um because our project is wrapping up as well and uh my my body hurt dude like my it was specifically my belly like my my tummy was always upset and I was I always felt sick and I couldn't figure out what it was yeah I don't know how it was for you but I I definitely at some points

so while trying to do the witness for example um at some point like if you count all the contractors who were working and stuff like the peak team size for the witness was 22 people y um which included like more people than there should have been and like we were working with some external Architects to design the the buildings uh in the game which are very realistic and at some point they had like five people on it because they put Junior people part-time and whatever and it's but I still have to deal with all these

people right uhhuh uhhuh um and it was very like I had this feeling it's like look trying to make a game it's like you're trying to control your body to do something right um like let's just say I want to do something simple like I want to go in the other room open the refrigerator get a bottle out open it and take a drink right and that's shipping the game and in principle those moves are not very sophisticated but imagine you're trying to do them and like communication between your nerves doesn't work very well and

you're drunk and like you're barely able to stand and you kind of can't see and whatever yeah and that's what I it felt like I like I had this this Sensation that like it's it's like trying to steer your body when when you have all sorts of physical problems and your body won't do y what you're trying to get it to do yeah it's very unpleasant um I don't like it it's very rewarding sometimes so you know those screenshots that I posted I posted because I was just happy with how good they look you know

and those were things that came up you know we have an art meeting once in a while where we just review stuff and make small course Corrections um to whatever is is being worked on yep and those came up in that meeting and they all look great like the you know the work that's being done on the game now is is really great and I'm I'm glad for that but oh man there were so many painful times yeah to get here uh and it might all fall apart tomorrow before we ship like that's just how

all this is so are you gon to approach the launch of this differently than um braid anniversary edition uh yeah it's going to be super different um I do not so the launch plan and Excuse Me Maybe we about that no that's that's fine no no worries you did mention you you might not want to talk about this you don't have to answer I'm just curious if there's a marketing strategy that you yeah we do we do have a marketing strategy for it it is very specific to this game though so again it it doesn't

generalize I don't think okay and um I'm not sure how well it's going to work because it's it's going to be a pretty different tactic yeah uh so who knows right but you know for for the bra anniversary we were doing um just a variant of of what we had done before where you know we had a PR Company who we worked with before to like talk to the Press about the game and all these things and you know that sort of thing doesn't seem to work very well in the current environment yeah for all

the reasons that we discussed I think and other ones too is there are are wish lists a good metric anymore you know I don't know I've been very cynical about wish lists the whole time so even going back years ago before things got really hard Indies would be all very excited about wish lists right but I would say like a wish list is someone who decided not to buy your game right so I mean obviously if you're before release it's sort of a bookmark or whatever but um I just don't find I don't find that

I don't know I don't take them that seriously even for a game like the witness it's been out a really long time right um there's some large number of wish lists for the game right and those are just people that never bought it and those probably do convert to sales at like some really low rate but like I just eh you know I think I think the way in which wish lists are good is just maybe the steam algorithm uses those to help gauge interest in the game sure and determine you know placement or something

um but then again I used to think steam uh was totally algorithmic but then I've been seeing stuff on the homepage that's like obviously paid placement so it's like oh maybe that's how you know the the kind of scheme we have to compete in now like if I had known that maybe I would have not paid for PR for great anniversary and bought some paid placement instead I don't know well you know it it it it feels like there's it feels like there's it feels like the ground is moving beneath our feet as game developers

and what worked 10 years ago or 5 years ago is slowly and subtly changing yeah and true to to sort of wrap this conversation up I wonder if we can try and end on a positive note because and I I want I I I so here's here's my strategy for 2025 and let me just tell you what I'm going to do um and get your thoughts on it because I I might tell my audience and the people who follow me that this might be a smart move um so once we wrap up Twisted Tower which

is our first person shooter once we're done with that it's a heavy heavy project probably spent more money than we should have it was 2 and a half years of work and hopefully it makes us some money um I'll cross my fingers but once that's done I'm going to go solo and I'm going to go super tight and small and my plan is to there's two things I want to try the first thing I want to try and I want to get your thoughts on this the first thing I want to try is um build

something that I can get paid to make while I make it and I you know you I don't know how you fund things and I know you want to work with you maybe you want to work with a team but for like people who are listening they're like solo developers you know they're they they they they're not even paying themselves a salary right and so my theory is why not make a game that can be paid for while you make it not with Publishers or a fund but specifically with something like Early Access or patreon

or something like that yeah now for me it's easy to say and you as well you have a pretty good following on YouTube so I can go into my YouTube audience and I can activate them and they will support me as I make a game like if I wanted to I could activate them with a patreon membership and get funded you know and my salary would be paid for while I make a game my question to you is is does that seem like a a smart decision to try and essentially build an audience that becomes

your lever because there's there's a a lot of different levers you can pull when it comes to game development and to actually uh you know ensure you're funded does does audience ownership and utilizing a small tie audience and sort of living in that bubble as you make a game do you think that's a smart strategy as opposed to relying on the steam algorithm or hoping that your game makes money when you launch it on a storefront instead activate an audience while you make the game I think it's a good idea like any approach stepping back

more generally any approach that gives you more agency is better as long as you know how to use that agency to improve your situation right so like just putting a game on Steam and going like hey I hope people buy it right is in some sense you're just letting fate decide yeah what will happen right whereas you know if you do a situation like you just described where you probably start with a very minimal game and get some people interested and you're evolving it over time um you like at every step of that way you

can core suggest right you can change decisions that you had thought were the right decisions before or whatever you have all this time during which to observe and adjust and I think that's probably good now the trick is though that works for certain kinds of games Y and not other games right so like if I'm making a puzzle game that has like Puzzles with specific Solutions sure it doesn't work that well in that kind of a scheme because like once somebody played the puzzle and they know the answer there just isn't that same kind of

replay value that a small community could have but with a game where you could have like people playing it continuously I don't know if it's a first-person shooter or like a tactics game or like any of these kind of things that you would play repeatedly um or you know s Factory or whatever right like they just did this very long extended beta um that lasted years like I think I think that could be a good development plan what I will say you know I dude I spent so much money on this game and engine and

programming language and part of the reason it was so expensive so you know it took a long time right projects take time um and then just if you're running this model where you have a team the whole time then you're just automatically paying for however many years of development there are times the number of people right and that gets expensive like really fast um especially if the number of years starts getting large um and the thing is it's not necessarily very efficient because especially in the beginning if you're doing something interesting maybe you don't know

exactly what the game is and you know maybe you think so for example you know for the first several years of this game we had an art team doing art on on what we had and you know I had this idea that the game would be done a lot sooner than it actually has right but that's a very common thing to Happ right that's like 100% of game projects um and so but in retrospect if we just didn't have an art team for the first three years we would have saved um a couple million dollars

at at least probably more than that well did you scrap all that art um not not yet a significant amount of it has been SC some of it is like so none of it I would say is at the Quality level of those screenshots that you saw right and so then you have this thing where you come to the end of development you're like okay well now now that we know this is how the game looks let's go redo some of this stuff from the beginning and I think that's you know that's less uh expensive

than doing it from scratch but like it's it's more work and so there's a bunch of things like that like there's I can you know Hinds side is 2020 but there's a bunch of positions that I had in the team that I just wouldn't have if I were to do it over again and it would have cost less and we might have even gotten done faster because you know organizing people to do stuff is difficult and takes time and energy away from other things and then you know I I was not because I'm trying to

program and design all the time right I was not being like full-time CEO with my finger in every pie and like looking over everybody's shoulder sure and because of that there were times when like things would sort of start going in the wrong direction for a few months before I would notice before I would really look at like the code or the art or whatever and say like what's going on here and just that's all wasted time you know Y and uh but at the same time you know I didn't run the development the other

way but but the the reason the way that I'm relating this to what you're saying is um I think so for my next game um I even even if this current game becomes successful and we make a bunch of money I don't think I would use that money to staff up right yep and then even if as naturally happens sometimes you know people will move on to another Pro so after the witness for example um we had one of the dudes on our art we had a very small art team it was two employees in

one contractor um by the time the game shipped and then one of those employees uh went off to do his own indie game which ended up uh being successful cool um so you know that's great when that happens um but you know like I I feel like figuring out the game is very important and that can be done with a more minimal staff so you might have something and people have been saying this for years but we just never do it in the games industry very much you would end up with something more like a

a Hollywood style model where you're developing the film with like a minimal number of people or maybe just you like under the situations you described sure and then maybe toward the end once you've got a good game you're like okay we're just going to do a crash course in making it look better or whatever right and I I think think that's the most efficient way to spend the money probably um that's brilliant you know like so essentially what you're saying is the way that you've been making games is is an incorrect or not incorrect but

it's a high-risk sort of shoot from the hip model or framework it would work better in different contexts that I'm not in so for example you know if you made a game or or your competitor makes a game or something and you're like I want to clone that game and you're looking at it and you know exactly what the game is then it's it's kind of easy for the team to be efficient at that but like when you don't exactly know what the game is and there's all these questions and stuff it's just becomes inefficient

in all directions now the other problem that we had about efficiency so this Project's been going for so long um it's been going since before covid right and we used to run an office in San Francisco where we had some people who were remote but most people were there in the office from day today and like stuff just worked better you know um people were more productive they were happier um they uh they understood their co-workers better there were fewer arguments and all these things um and now we're completely remote uh for many reasons uh

Co being one of them and just it's very hard to to make things run efficiently uh when when you're fully remote you know we compensate for it to some degree I think but I think we just took an efficiency hit which translates into making things more expensive and so that's also maybe so if the options are you know run a you either to be efficient you either have to run a team in an office in a physical location somewhere in the world where you can get skilled people to be there you know in 2025 that

sounds difficult and expensive to me and something that maybe most viewers don't have as an option right yeah and so then yeah something more like what you were saying I think is um is a more sensible option like if you if you can do it right I mean the thing is again if you can design and program that's great because you can just be the backbone of the game and just do it and make it work or you know sometimes back in the early days of Indie fund um you know we funded a game called

Cube QBE which was pretty successful MH and they didn't have a real programmer on that team at all right wow and that was sort of the earlier days of when you could do that um but I think you could still do that right if you just like use blueprints or something sure sure kind of just keep dragging the lines around till something good happens you know um so yeah I mean there's okay so let's get back to to the point um I I do think you're right that especially if you're unknown and don't have a

track record um going directly to people and making a relationship with them um is uh it's going to be the the the best way to get an audience right as opposed to throwing a game on Steam and having nobody buy it yeah um but also it can just help you make better decisions and I I would fully support that also it can keep you motivated right I mean different people have different personalities but um a lot of what used to happen I don't know if this still is what happens but it was so back in

the days when it was very hard to even get a game on screen um people would just quit because it was too hard like they were a year into the project or six months and they were just depressed because they had all these Amazing Ideas and like they just have a piece of poop on the screen and they're just like this is terrible yeah and um you know if if you have people playing your thing and appreciating it um that can provide that kind of motivation sure uh that said like I said it only works

for certain kind of games probably and that my my theory is because the game industry is looking Bleak and I don't think it's going to be Bleak forever but because it's looking Bleak my opinion is just for me personally I'm just like I'm just gonna I'm going to make the game that has those attributes for essentially Early Access or Community built game I'm just going to choose that genre for 2025 and 2026 just to just so I'm not spinning the chamber you know yeah um and additionally those kind of games are so you know it's

not a profound idea because I think a lot of even like AA they're doing this they're building community-driven games because they can prove each layer of development before they even do it you know so you can you can pretty much know that if I invest the next six months in this concept it's going to be worth it because people liked what they had to begin with right so everything's Proto I don't know if this is a word but prototypical right every single now there's a downside to that as well right um so the kind of

development that I always did was you know I'm the highly opinionated art dude off in the corner who's like people don't understand why this thing I'm going to do is going to be cool but they will when it's done right Y and in that kind of situation um you may not uh you you may be steered away from that kind of design right by your audience yeah and is that good is that bad I don't know on net because the bad part is of course maybe there is this cool thing you could have made that

you won't make because everyone's telling you nah don't make that right on the other hand um you know if if you couldn't survive anyway then you weren't going to make the thing and so if interacting more with the audience helps you survive and get an audience then that's just the way things are going to go like that's the evolution of the system over time is that the things that can survive Will Survive and the things that can't survive won't survive yeah I think a good example of what you just said is witness is the witness

is cell shaded right not exactly but it's got It's got it it's not photorealistic right I can imagine a audience if they followed alongside you and held your hand while you you guys made that game they might say where's the specular you know where's the normal map there's the roughness why why doesn't it look more realistic and you might feel the temptation to do that I I have I've had my my Twitter audience tell me consistently over and over we like it when you make more realistic stuff but what's so funny is the analytics of

a tweet prove the opposite the community says one thing but then my tweet does better when it's cell-shaded or when it's straight from the heart as opposed to straight from sort of a a democratic vote on what it should be like cuz I'll live stream and they'll tell me what to do and I'll create it and it's just not as powerful as if I was a Hermit making it completely alone so you're right and I I'm I'm trying to figure out the balance here because I don't ever I personally don't ever want to make a

game again that's a gamble or at least that's as big of a gamble as what's what we're used to I'm I'm trying to figure out a way it'll help me sleep at night where I'm like how can I make a game I know I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure that it's going to make a good amount of money and I can make that money quarterly every time like or like monthly while I'm making it and I'm not sure if that exists but I just I crave it right now you know I mean certainly some version

of that exists many versions of that exist right it's just finding finding the one that clicks for you that you can do yeah is a you know obviously it's difficult um you know the history of the games industry though is you have all these long long long lived franchises where somebody found something that worked and then they were like oh this is what people want and then they just made dude I don't even know how many Call of Duty games there are but there's a lot of them and there's a reason there's a lot of

them because that's what was successful right yeah and so that exists obviously as an indie you don't need to sell Call of Duty number of units right um and so in that respect the problem's easier to find something that works for a bunch of people sure um but it also could be hard so you know um I don't want to I don't want to Dish about another developer this nothing that I'm about to say is meant to be negative in any way these developers are friends of mine right but so you know the game subnautica

was very very big very successful sure sure um it was huge um that developers uh previous games um were like kind of okay successful but not really enough to run the studio long term right um and then subnotica you know I actually don't know if they if they knew before they released it that it was going to be much bigger or not I haven't talked to them about that but obviously it was it it blew up huge and everybody loved it and all this um and then they made another game after that that was just

a totally different idea you know and it it was very hard to get attention for it really um this was like over the past couple years maybe it came out two years ago or something so the market was already hard but but not as hard as it is today um but just like imagine you have a game like subnotica and there's all these people who want they're interested they want to know what your next thing is they're they care about you and they're interested and then you release something and it's like crickets right y um

you know that that's happened to multiple very successful developers right so super giant games another developer who are friends of mine vague vaguely friends I talk to them every few years um So currently you know Hades 2 is out um it's very successful Hades 1 was very successful like like very meaning you know very very very top of the curve yep of what anyone could ever expect right tremendously successful games um they started out making games that were very successful for Indies right so their first game was a game called Bastion that won a bunch

of awards and like people were into it and it didn't sell Hades kind of numbers but it was a successful game right um and they did they did one or two other games I don't know and then they did this game called py which was a um you know sort of like a a fantasy um like fantasy in the sense of like dwarves and elves or whatever not not like fantasy football but like fantasy Soccer kind of game or something I won't try to describe it you can look it up or whatever and the game

just freaking bombed like they spent all this time making it and then um and then it just uh it just went literally nowhere right and you might despondent at that and just be like oh my God what are we going to do as a developer like is is the market becoming unbearably difficult do we have a future as a developer I'm sure they probably had those kind of thoughts and then their next game was Hades right and it just blew up completely and so um I don't know what lesson to take from that maybe you

should have them on and uh and they could tell you yeah um but uh you know the way I think about it is just I'm not in control of what people ending up end up wanting to buy or tell their friends about or anything um so I mean on the one hand you want to make money because that's how that's how you can make more games that's how you can you know pay people to help you make games and all that yeah um on the other hand you're just not in control of that ultimately you

can make decisions that try to try to maximize that but you're not totally in control so the way that I think about it is just whenever I start a new project I just ask myself is this something that I respect like do I respect this project enough that after it's done even if like hardly anybody bought it I will feel uh that I put a good thing into to the world and that um I made a good use of my time not necessarily in the monetary sense yeah but in like developing as a game designer

and becoming a a better designer and progressing the thought of you know what is the state of the industry in terms of thinking about game design or whatever like you can pick your own criteria of what those are but that's a thing that you are in control of right um do I feel really good about this thing that I'm working on or am I doing it just to make money ideally you do both at the same time yeah you make something that you feel really good about and you also expect that people will enjoy it

and buy it but if you end up in that category of like oh I just I don't really care about this thing I'm not that interested in it but I'm doing it because it's a hot for some reason still like for five years going there's been so many Indie Gam games that are like deck building but where you do something weird with the deck right and like batro was that right so that's an example of a tremendously successful game but you could end up making something like that because it's like well people are buying these

deck builders I don't really like it and I don't I'm not that motivated but I'm trying to make money and the thing is that's bad in multiple ways one because if you didn't end up making money then you kind of wasted your time the whole time right as opposed to to like doing something that you respect and feel good about but then also if you don't love it at some level you're not going to make the good version of it yeah right and then you're just much less likely to succeed also so I certainly have

uh no problem with making money I need to make a lot more myself these days but um just because it's been so long since we I mean we released great anniversary but you know like I said that yeah was not a big hit um but I think what we did with all the commentary and the new levels in there is like super interesting and I'm glad that we spent the time to do that so so that's that's a good you know that's a that's a good outcome if you can't control the Money Lover yeah I

mean did you ever were you ever tempted to just capitalize on braid um like makeing sequels and stuff yeah like cuz we were we were talking about about subnotica how they just decided no I'm we're going to go in a different direction and it's like I I feel like you kind of did that right it's like I just want to I just want to do what I want to do and so you made witness and now you're making this you know um that's why that's why I I I I view you as a purist or

a perfectionist which is like it seems like Jonathan doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do right that's pretty much true pretty much true but there are consequences to right so like I mean I made plenty of money off braid and the witness and all that like those games were very successful but if you're trying to maximize how much you made braid 2 and witness 2 could have made a lot of money correct you know and I just didn't do them so well I like that approach you know to wrap up here I think that

we started this conversation with me saying how to tell me what to do for 2025 and I I don't think we got a firm answer and I honestly I have not gotten a firm answer from any sort of Industry veterans anyone who tells you they know is is deluding themselves or lying to you because as I think you said like things have just changed they're new and so nobody's learned it yet mhm right y I mean that's that's why I think everybody's got to sort of just try out their own little path path I'm going

to try out is I mean it's for everyone listening I I I feel like what I'm about to say isn't Incorrect and correct me if I'm wrong I don't don't think it's hard for small Indies to keep doing their thing like to to to to get 100k from Kickstarter or a publisher or something and make your game a tiny little game Solo or with a tiny team I don't feel like it's that much different right well Kickstarter seems hard because because people fall into this trap of promising all sorts of stuff correct that they have

to do and then and then they spend all the money doing the kickstarter rewards yes but yeah I mean you know there's this essay that's pretty old at this point it's like from the dawn of the internet um you might even remember it but um I forget what it was called but I think it was called uh like 10,000 true fans or something or 1,000 I think I think it was 1,000 true fans right correct and the the idea back then was just like look if you make something creative maybe it's not that popular and

you don't have a mass audience but if there's even like a thousand people who are really interested in the specific thing you do and you could get them to pay a $100 a year because they're that interested yeah then like you can live off that right quite quite well back then $100,000 was more money than it is now right so maybe maybe you need to adjust the numbers but but that point being like you know that that actually maybe isn't that hard it's like it's definitely achievable and you see people doing it on the internet

in various categories all the time cor right like you see I mean even on YouTube where like people get paid dirt right per per view it's very low Revenue but people are able to be successful um there so well it's because they they have like for me I have products I offer like yeah you know teaching and courses and stuff and and games like it I I just feel like I feel like the the solution to 2025 is either reputation which you have and that helps you sell games maybe I'm wrong or audience and building

an audience like we're in we're in an era of of everyone's competing for attention with the storefronts and I'm sitting here going I don't want to play that game I do not want to play that game I'll try but in the meantime I'm going to build my own audience and my own little island and in terms of building up audience too that gives you advantages that people might not think about so so for example let's say You release a game on Steam let's say your plan was to release games on Steam and they just get

more and more popular and that's how you build an audience right yeah sure the problem is um for privacy reasons and because also because valve knows what's valuable yes you have no real way to contact your audience on stee AKA do not own that contact yeah um whereas if you do something like a a you know a patreon situation or whatever and and you also like you know most of these systems like have some kind of a barrier between you and the people but you can give them ways to give you their information right in

an opt-in way and then when you release a new game you can just tell those people directly right and probably you know I mean emails don't have great conversion but it's bigger than zero which is what you'll get off steam right so do you really think it's zero um it's not zero but like just that fact that you can't contact I see all these people who loved your game at all I mean you can post on the news feed for the game but you're also like you're not allowed to post arbitrary things on there so

one of the rules is you can't advertise another game in the news feed for your game I think I think uh a really cool system for steam would be if they I could imagine this would go really wrong and really bad but if they did it right if they had some kind of social media Vibe on Steam where you could like build a brand and you could build either either a personal brand or a corporate brand that would be so great that would be so great where you could actually build that audience and reach out

to them and communicate to them in an effective way because right now for me I have to use platforms like kajabi kajabi is is a way to build your own sort of list of people that you that you're in full communicate you have full communication with and full control with that to me I think that would be great I mean even small steps so one of the most ironic things so back when we launched the witness um we had all these crashes happening it turned out there were graphics driver crashes right so they weren't they

weren't actually crashes in the game um most players were fine but people who had specific graphics cards had problems right and how how do we communicate with them to try to fix this problem in an expedient manner yeah well people would just post on the steam Forum I have a problem and then we reply what what computer do you have what Graphics Hardware do you have and all that but guess what like 99% of these people participated in the steam Hardware survey right like you could yeah like they upload the data of their whole system

like we could we could respond if we could just see that data we could have fixed this problem so much faster and without bothering people but it just wasn't available right not even as an opt-in for the user right not like if you post on the support Forum it would be great if you could just say click a check box that says show my Hardware stats yeah like and and they just don't do that stuff I don't know I mean that's obviously uh very very small step in a social network Direction compared to what you're

talking about but I think that you know if I was wanting to grow the steam store and make it more relevant I would be thinking what what do other stores not do that we could do and it would be that kind of thing I mean maybe just because they're the top store on PC they don't feel the need to fix what's not broken I don't know I I I think you're right you know I think you're right but that that would be a really cool solution in the age of Tik Tok which I can't stand

Tik Tok and I don't I don't love it uh but we're in that era I'm sitting here going how can steam capitalize on on uh community community engagement and and building a an ecosystem around each game and that ecosystem supports that game and it's good for valve because they'll make money right so there's something in me that's like and I guess it's just because I've seen the value of social media like this is this is like my whole career now like it's I started in games and I was making money full-time from games and then

all of a sudden just YouTube happened naturally and it's like holy crap like this is this is way bigger than I thought it would be um and I don't even get that many views um and I'm just realizing there is so much value in audience ownership and everyone everyone and you're doing this I think everyone is building Their audience or everyone should build their audience it's like this insurance policy um for the creative um at least I found that to be true but yeah I mean I think that's like just people who like your stuff

want you to tell them about new stuff exactly like that's just how it's been and the fact that it's so hard you know so I have a fair chunk of Twitter followers and I always felt like um that hey that's a good platform for people who are interested but just Twitter is so like noisy and ephemeral that you know I made I did some experiments a couple times of just like tweeting several times about another Indie developer game so for example there were some Games inspired by the witness right and it's like oh hey if

you if you like the W if you're following me on Twitter because you like the witness check out this other game sure um and like could I have any effect on those games success at all and the answer was no no maybe it's a little bit different recommending something else but like yeah it's like I don't know Twitter a lot of the way these platforms work is they just stand between you and the people who want to know the things and then they act as a traffic cop and somehow the traffic cop never never does

the thing that you want I don't know but if you just email people that's great email and we'll end with that um because I need to pee but email okay great email is the is the Lynch pin of all social media networks email is like the foundation and it's the best I mean if I if I had to pick one thing to keep my my whole online presence afloat it would be just an email list yeah um so so I believe that my cave out there would be that we've never tried this seriously like we

did at one point put a little email sign up on it's like at the bottom of our web page that nobody goes to or whatever and we got like 30 signups or something yeah um but if if we were to try to pursue that strategy seriously uh which we may do um yeah I mean it's again it gives you agency and it's better than just having no control yeah dude Jonathan I would love to do this again I learned so much from you man I appreciate it so much right on man thanks for talking a

good rest of your day you too dude do you do you want any links in the description anything at all um how about if you uh you can't put images in YouTube descriptions you cannot you cannot yeah but we maybe you could like link the tweets to the screenshots sure we were talking about so people could have a visual I wish I wish you had a name for that game so I could put it in the and like a a steam page I I wish I knew what it was called too it's just um I've

been working too hard on other stuff I have some candidate names finally but I don't thanks to chat GPT no I tried that and it just didn't work that well no um it's always very generic