Designing the business for your game

What the talk is about

Wojciech Pazdur explains how to design the business around a game, drawing on the experience of Farm 51 since 2005. First, plan from resources: the office, the team, and money for software, engines and outsourcing; even "three friends just coding" consume resources. Second, plans will inevitably break, so budgets and timelines need a buffer; he assumes the initial budget will double. Third, work-for-hire helps stabilize cash flow, and relationships with the team, publishers and players must be built from the start. Using the studio's own projects, he shows dependence on a publisher, a failed attempt to build a shooter on humor, weak publisher marketing, and the self-published World War 3, which became the studio's biggest success. In Q&A he covers Steam statistics, console review scores and keeping the marketing team small. Useful for indie teams and producers.