Newbies Exhibiting at GDC Play! Our Costs and Lessons.

This is the fourth post in our multi-part adventure blog. We made "Nameless: the Hackers RPG", a one-handed, touchscreen, no virtual-pad, turn-based, non-fantasy, 12+ hour JRPG, built for mobile bite-sized gameplay on iOS. *phew!*

Check out our previous posts on Gamasutra Blog:

The core of BoxCat is composed of Steve and myself, James. We're not trained as Game Developers and have only recently dropped everything to follow our dreams.

We are coming in with prior business experience from other industries, so the most we can do is cross-reference similarities of how B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) interact during a show. We recognize that attending a single game industry convention won't give us a gambit of knowledge. We're simply hoping to share what we've observed.


Nameless: the Hackers RPG for iOS Kiosk at GDC

Nameless GDC Play Kiosk San Francisco

About the Nameless Project 
We're a small working team of 2.6 full-time people over nine months. We actually have a team of four: two full-time, one part-time, and a friend that helped out for a few weeks.

James Liu (@JamesBoxCat)
Project Coordinator, Game Design/Developer, Coffee Addict

Stephen Ip (@Poor_Musician)
Music Coordinator, Game Design/Scripter, Homeless Guy

Yuichi Haga
Art Coordinator, Game Design/Scripter, Family Man

Tony Chang
Game Developer, Ninja

Here are our project expenses for Nameless the Hackers RPG:

iOS Mobile App Game Project Cost

Nameless Project Cost iOS App

In December, we also knew we would be selling Nameless in March on promotion for $1.99. After Apple's cut of $0.59 we would be left with profits of $1.40 per copy. We figured we would have to sell 4000-5000 copies of our game in-order to make back GDC costs. 

We did our homework before hand, we knew this was risky for a mobile game. Ultimately we made the decision for a couple of reasons:

Our GDC Adventure
GDC gave us a better understanding for the industry. We were able to meet many talented developers, publishers, students, speakers, media, advertising companies, development companies, art, music, and the list goes on! Our sales? Not so much.

We'll try to break down our experience as much as possible. We also feel that we know why our sales didn't reach it's full potiential.

GDC Effects on Our Sales
We should emphasize that the commercial impact of GDC on Nameless was small because we did not take full advantage of pre-attendance.

Here’s our download graph with GDC week highlighted:

Effect of GDC Sales on our iOS Game

What we couldn't do was figure out a way to say:

    3.  "We have a limited following! Please check out our demo!" 

For better or worse, we decided to launch our game a week before GDC. If we had a previous game, we probably would have gone with option #3. Regardless, we're pretty satisfied with our decision.

Pocket Gamer Party
This was an intense mobile gaming meet-up that happened during GDC. We got wind of this while following 148Apps:

http://www.148apps.com/news/gdc-2013-month-meet/

The moment we saw this we added ourselves to the Eventbrite page. Here’s a quick list of the type of people we met here:

We met a ton of people, made many new friends. This was important to us because we could talk to them and ask them about their view of the industry. Many people were willing to tell us about their experiences and what made them jump in. 

Meeting the people that have been there and done it before, is easily the biggest justification for us to attend GDC. It's important to note that exhibiting made no impact on our ability to attend. It was open to everyone.

Indie Mobile Speed Pitch
We also attended the Indie Mobile Speed Pitch, it’s kind of like Speed dating but you pitch your apps to media Journalists. www.148apps.com were the ones to set it up. Each group had to get a limited ticket from EventBrite. When the event started each group had 5 minutes to present themselves to the Journalists before leaving for the next table.

http://www.148apps.com/news/gdc-2013-month-meet/

These media journalists were in attendance:

This led to much needed awareness for Nameless:

Press Lists from GDC
As an exhibiting member of GDC, you not only get the kiosk, but you also get a press list for all press that have registered themselves for GDC and opted in to be contacted. We were emailed by GDC early March and we immediately started milling out emails.

Again though, this may have been too late to have a strong impact on pre-awareness. All of these emails were effectively “cold-emails” during a time when everyone else was probably already bombarding them.

Many of them were not focused on mobile or were not Apple iOS related. Even so, a good number of them emailed back. We attribute our cold-email response rate to a video we found by Ben Kuchera from Nov 2011 on RunJumpDev:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiqyFfsSUDA

We followed this advice while aggregating other things we learned online.

GDC Play Kiosk Mailing List Image

The press list also led to an interview with “Action” (that’s his name) from IndieGamePod. His site is titled “Experimental Game Dev Podcast Show”. Here's our interview with Action:

http://www.indiegamepod.com/?p=3071

Effects on Sales: That's it? Lessons Learned
It's important to note that Nameless is a paid premium game in a niche JRPG segment that isn't highly sought after on the iOS store. We feel that if we had a freemium game, each of these media posts would have resulted in many more downloads.

Also, if we had the ability to do so, it would have been better to hold our game while giving exclusives to Journalists for one big push. We found out later these are called "Media holds". We didn't ask for this because we had already launched our game.

We imagine, if we better understood the Journalism landscape we could have given them a slow drip that may have built up a fan/hype base. If we could have compounded our original downloads from our silent launch with the power of multiple media sites on the same day, we would have been in a better position.

At our highest rank under All Games, we reached 120th. We wonder if we had better coordinated and planned our launch if we may have broken the 100th rank barrier.

Events and Networking
Similar to other industries, we recognized that simply exhibiting will not work. You must attend all the other events. You need to schedule meetings. This takes time and planning. Here's an additional list of everything we did as well:

Our Thoughts on GDC

Next Upcoming Topics
We have the following topics we'll be also touching on in a few days. It takes a while to make these, we'll be posting until we're done.

We're adding a few more to the list since everyone seems to be enjoying this.

Check out our website: BoxCat Games

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Feel free to ask us anything in the comments. =)