Mode 7's Paul Taylor

We did something a little bit unusual - we released [Mode 7’s first game] Determinance in about 2007, and that was a commercial failure in terms of direct sales, but what it led to was quite a lot of contract work. We did some work for a company called Novint, who made a 3D joystick thing called The Falcon. It’s this fantastic controller that never really got the recognition it deserved, but it was pretty unusual. So we did some work for them, and that led to some other things, so we realised that we’d made a game that had some good qualities but was fairly divisive - either people really like it because it’s unique or they hate it because it’s weird. So what they want to do now is make a game that is good, that gets good review scores, that we’re happy with, that lets us do something we want to do. And it doesn’t matter how long it takes: we won’t pay ourselves anything, just enough to live on, we’ll keep working at it. And that’s not really an approach that most people take, but we were pretty young at that stage so we were able to do it.

I think a lot of indies now are finding what they think is a market opportunity and they’re cherry-picking. They’re sort of doing enough work to make a game. And that’s okay - that can work as business model, and it’s probably more sensible than what we did, because it’s quite risky to go ‘oh, we’ll just throw everything at it.’ But when you can do that cheaply, it just enables you to really transition. This game has been a huge change for us - we didn’t know if we could make a good game, and proving that to yourself is really important. So we decided to do that based on contract work initially, and then we put the beta on sale and it started to sell at a level where we could keep doing this and spend as long in beta as we wanted. So we spent a year on beta, mostly to get the singleplayer done.

I don't like the idea of being in an industry where I have to endlessly badmouth my competition. I find the big publisher smack talk really hilarious

In terms of other things about the payment model, I think the free key for a friend thing is really great and everyone should do it. We spent a long time thinking about whether we should do that, and I just realised that about 90 per cent of indie games don’t hit all of their possible audience because the problem is reach. Bigger companies are able to spend massive amounts and you’re just never going to be able to compete. But I think if you can sell 100,000 units you can definitely sell 200,000 units. So I was never concerned about cannibalising the possible userbase, I just thought it was a great way of spreading the game. It’s kind of our concession to free-to-play - I think anything you can do to boost awareness and boost community is a positive thing.

Yeah, but I asked myself was that fear rational or not. I really don’t think it is. The fact that indie games can go on selling and selling and selling at a low-level for years after their release just proves that again it’s all about awareness really, keeping people talking about the game, showing it to other people. And what better way of having the game spread than someone getting it unexpectedly? When you look at the tweets, and there’s people saying ‘oh I just got given a copy of this, you should check it out’ - that’s why we’re doing it.

Yeah, we’re very keen on not dumping things. One thing that we said is that we’ll always keep servers running, as long as we’re in business, and if we go out of business we’ll open-source the server so someone else can run it. We’re doing this because we want to make games, not because we want to make piles and piles of money - although we do want to be commercially successful. There’s definitely a tension between those two things in the indie games scene in general, but it’s so important for us that our games persist, and we’ll take any steps we can to make sure that happens.

We talked about all kinds of business models, like can we do it as a free game but… well, I’ve been vocally anti-free-to-play at times, and that probably misrepresents me slightly. I was probably just being angry about free-to-play at those times! But free just isn’t right for the game - you should pick a business model that suits the game primarily, and don’t try to shoehorn things into the trendy business model at the time. So no, I don’t think I’d do anything differently… We also got some funding support from an organisation called ScreenWM, who were doing some games funding at the time, but that was just a really small amount to work on some of the art stuff and also some advertising stuff. So I think it’s good for indies to look around - less so now, unfortunately, because there have been lots of art funding cuts and things - but there are things out there that you can do. Just being plugged into local things… BusinessLink, actually, were really good for us - talking to people like that, even if you think business things aren’t relevant to you because you’re just in your bedroom making indie games, is worth doing.

If anything, maybe looking into more sources of funding like that is something we could have done, but I think we learned a lot doing the contract work that we did, but it’s also good to have other ways to make money, because games are so fickle and changeable, you never know what’s going to happen.

We were a bit slow on that one. It’s something we’re actually looking into right now, because there’s some stuff you can do retroactively which some people don’t realise - so yeah, talk to your account about R&D tax credits. It’s a bit complicated, but finding a good accountant, something you can communicate with on stuff like that, is really vital. Especially as indie games companies aren’t going to have high-power CFOs, and you’re lucky if you even known people in that world, so it’s about trying to get advice that makes sense. Good people should be able to help you - some accountants can tend to obfuscate stuff for their own nefarious ends, so try and avoid that…

Yeah, the indie networking scene is huge and it’s massively supportive actually, because everyone understands the idea of mutual benefit. A lot of indies talk to each other and compare notes on everything from business to tax stuff to development. I think a lot of people don’t realise that actually - we get asked a lot whether we have a rival with x company or x game. Fray has been the most recent one, where people have gone ‘ooh, they’re making a game that’s a bit like your game, you must hate them…’ and that’s just ridiculous. Everyone talks to each other. I really like meeting other indies, especially other indies with whom we’re supposed to have massive beef, because that’s just a good situation to have a laugh with someone. Really I don’t think competition is a real problem, unless you’re making a massively derivative game - certainly with us and Fray they’re two very different approaches to a similar idea, and that’s just really healthy because they can look at our game and say ‘that worked or that really didn’t work’, and we can do that with their game when it comes out. And also I’m mentioning them in an interview, they’ll mention us in an interview - there’s a lot of mutual benefit to be had. I don’t like the idea of being in an industry where I have to endlessly badmouth my competition. I find the big publisher smack talk really hilarious - you can see the interview question coming in, and then the spokesman revving up the insult machine, like ‘what can I say about their controller that makes them seem bad?’ We don’t have to do that, so that’s really liberating. I can just say nice things.