If you’ve been paying much attention to the independent gaming scene, you’ll probably have heard of Dwarf Fortress, the absurdly deep fantasy world simulation by Bay 12 Games. Gameplay involves guiding and developing a group of dwarven settlers in a world that keeps track of everything from geological phenomena and climate to the individual dirtiness, injury, and mental state of each dwarf. Developed by a single programmer with writing from his brother, it’s been something of a cult hit, attracting a small but utterly rabid group of fans. You might also have heard of a game called Mount & Blade by Turkish developer TaleWorlds, an ambitious open world game set in a medieval society. It started as a garage project from a husband and wife team, and grew as time went on and funding became available.
Both of them have proven successful financially. A steady steam of user donations is the only stream of income for the creators of Dwarf Fortress, yet it grants them an impressive monthly tally, which they publish regularly on their forums. Mount & Blade instead opted for discounted pre-orders that gave access to beta builds, and this was enough to fund development until Paradox Interactive picked them up. Now their game is available at retail and recently went on an 85% sale on steam… a sale which was so popular that steam burned through all the serial numbers TaleWorlds had provided them and needed to procure more! These two companies are pursuing very different paths to financial success, but they’re both obviously doing well! How the heck are they pulling it off, and are there any common threads?
The most obvious similarity—and perhaps most impressive, given the scale of the games in question—is that the development teams have been quite small for both games. TaleWorlds started as a husband and wife team, and remain quite small even now that they have publisher support, while Dwarf Fortress has only ever had a single programmer and a writer… a fact which continues to make my head spin, given the infamous scope and depth of the game. I suspect that the small size of the teams involved have been helpful to their financial success. After all, labour is the greatest expense in game development, and with only one or two developers a small revenue stream can still be enough to pay them a decent wage. Of course, the less developers you have the longer it’ll take to create things, but if you work smart there are ways to strike a solid balance between profit generating product quality and the number of cooks in the kitchen.
There’s also something to be said about the kind of games these are. They’re both “open world” games in many respects, though their approach is very different. Dwarf Fortress is an all-encompassing simulation with a disturbing level of detail, and playing around in that sandbox and doing crazy stuff is the whole point. Mount and Blade’s open world aspects, by contrast, are mainly an excuse to set up a series of fights for your to hack and slash your way through. M&B’s focus has always been on a realistic representation of medieval combat, along with their extremely well done third/first person combat system. They both have areas where they’re very weak, as well. Dwarf Fortress is entirely ASCII art, Mount & Blade’s open-world aspects tend to be lifeless and pointless, and both games have learning curves that feel like running headlong into a brick wall. The appearance is that they have neglected secondary aspects to perfect their core features. What this tells me is that, at least for independent games, players are willing to forgive poor production values or neglected gameplay elements as long as the main hook of the game is implemented well. M&B’s titular mounted and melee combat is brilliantly done, and Dwarf Fortress managed to out-Will-Wright Will Wright… if that ain’t an accomplishment, I don’t know what would be.
So, lesson one: Focus on your strengths. If you do what makes you unique very well, you can get away with not doing quite as well on the rest.
The revenue models of these two companies seem very different on the surface. Bay 12 Games offer their products free of charge, and merely ask for donations. Essentially, their games are as cheap or expensive as you want or need them to be, and their funding is entirely dependent on the gratitude of their players. TaleWorlds, on the other hand, is closer to a traditional retail model with their use of pre-orders. So far as I can tell from reading interviews and digging around the net, the creators never thought they’d be able to make it to a finished product. Instead, they elected to offer a “pre-order” at a significant discount that guaranteed access to the beta builds, thinking that players who bought in wouldn’t get burned as hard if the final game never materialized. In other words, you pay for access to all current and future builds just like you would with a normal game, with the removal of the expectation that you will receive a finished product. Users are therefore paying for a PROMISE that a finished game will eventually appear, instead of the end product itself. Bay 12 is banking on their fan’s generosity and gratitude, while TaleWorlds is banking on their trust.
I’ve got to say I like both approaches. It provides precisely the right fiscal incentives to the developers, and even for people of enormous integrity it’s always better to have your economic model support your principles. Both models demand that not only that you deliver a fun experience, but you deliver updates in a timely manner and treat your fans well. If you break that trust, your revenue will disappear, but if you keep that promise you are duly rewarded.
That’s lesson two, then: Set up your incentives to support your principles. Perhaps not a necessity to success, and possibly even a barrier to making money, but I can’t imagine a better way to hate your job than to be forced to abandon your principles just to pay the bills. Not only that, but I think some credit has to be given to the fans as well. They recognize when a creator has their best interests at heart, and many of them are all too happy to reward that. When they can see that the developer has nothing to gain by jerking them around, it becomes that much easier to trust them.
Still, neither of them would have gotten off the ground without some form of marketing. If nobody knows about your product it doesn’t matter if it’s as fun as two barrels of monkeys; it just won’t sell, and you’ll have to live in a box. Since boxes are inconvenient places to develop games from, you’ll presumably want to get the word out somehow. Dwarf Fortress and Mount & Blade (at least in its early days) never had big, noticeable marketing campaigns. They were indie projects nestled deep into the dark and gloomy cracks and fissures of the internet, relying only on those who had crossed them and lived to tell the tale to spread their names. Or, to be less of a dramatic twit about it, they relied on word of mouth… the cheapest and probably most effective marketing technique there is. Eventually, they both gained a lot of recognition in the press, but I’m inclined to chalk this up to same community forces that got their names out in the first place.
Speaking of communities, the fans for the two games in question are pretty impressive! The Dwarf Fortress forums are filled with people exploring the game mechanics, telling stories, and otherwise being ridiculously hardcore about the game. Mount and Blade has a HUGE library of mods for a game as obscure as it is, indicating an impressive level of involvement on the part of the community members. In both cases the communities are thriving and active, with lots of dedication from participants. This seems to me like the thread which ties everything together. I believe that it’s this community aspect that allows them to get away with their unorthodox revenue models, and which allows the pervasive word of mouth advertising.
I’ve long believed that online communities are capable of achieving awe-inspiring feats. Wikipedia is a textbook example, as is social media like Facebook or MySpace. It’s amazing what you can get the intertubes to do for you if you point it in the right direction and tell it to sic’ ‘em. Collaboration is a powerful tool we neglect at our peril, as is the inherent social nature of the human animal. It seems obvious in retrospect that putting effort towards building a strong fan community would make alternative funding and advertising mechanisms much more feasible… for starters. If one were clever, they could do things like employ some kind of collaborative development scheme do help develop their game assets!
Take away number 3, then, is that a cohesive, involved community is a powerful tool. Taking the time and effort to build, develop, and maintain it will pay dividends in the long run. The details of implementation are another issue entirely, though. Perhaps in another blog post.
That’s all I could come up with. Anyone else have any insights on the success of these two games? Or perhaps another game that would make a good case study? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
