Guest Blog: Kate Russell

I’ve been writing about gaming and technology since 1995, the year the dot-com boom started. Back then, less than 1% of the global population was connected to the web – today that figure is around 40%. There are 6.5 billion mobile connections globally – almost one for every person on the planet.
Today’s gamers live in a hyper-connected online world where community and the ability to play together, and against each other, are often at the heart of enduring success for a game. The human desire to connect, be social, be part of the creation process, to interact and not be restricted by narrative or geography, manifests today in the phenomenon of live streaming on platforms like Twitch. 

I am one of over 13k streamers who earn a living playing games for others to watch. Last year Twitch had half a million average concurrent viewers devouring 459,366 years’ worth of video, with viewers on average watching over 7 hours of content per month. Those kind of sticky numbers are metrics traditional broadcast and entertainment producers can only dream of. And they are liquid, trackable gold to the advertising industry.

More and more indie game studios are approaching influencers on these platforms to tap into their audience for up and coming games, getting their support for crowd funding campaigns by providing early release download codes to whip the audiences up into a storm that often raises hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you’re in the process of developing a game or looking for funding and support, you’d be a fool to overlook these avenues. But it’s not just shouting about your vision and hoping people will hear. ‘If you build it they will come,’ does not always work. Building a strong online community is a real art form that begins by understanding your audience and finding ways to relate to them.

You’re going to need to be friendly, interesting, honest and transparent. You’re going to have to involve your fans in conversations about the development process and as a result will likely be put under constant pressure to get it right. And you’re going to have to learn to take criticism on the chin. 

But get it right and you stand to gain a rock solid army of supporters, promoters and friends behind you, who are personally invested in seeing you succeed; emotionally as well as financially.

And that is a pretty good engine to build the success story of your future on.

I’m going to be talking more about this in my upcoming Develop keynote in Brighton on 14th July. During the session I’ll be revealing some of the tricks I’ve learned along the way - having successfully ran my own crowd funding campaign and being a partnered Twitch Streamer for almost a year. I’ll also be suggesting a few ways you can structure your own community activities to increase engagement and motivate your fans to campaign on your behalf. 

If you have a game to promote or get funding for, I hope to see you there.

Journalist, reporter and author, Kate has been writing about technology and the Internet since 1995. Appearing regularly on BBC technology programme Click she is also a partnered Twitch streamer and speaks at conferences and lectures in schools and universities inspiring the next generation of technologists. Her website, KateRussell.co.uk , won the 2015 UK Blog Awards for best individual digital and technology blog, and in June 2016 she was voted the Computer Weekly 13th most influential woman in UK IT. Her debut novel was published in 2014 under official licence to space trading game, Elite: Dangerous, the childhood passion that inspired her love of technology. As part of the licensing deal she got to name a planet in the latest release, Elite: Dangerous. She called it Slough.

Guest Blog - Going it alone without going it alone

As I sit with a thick pink milkshake whilst contemplating the choice of chips on the menu, there is something about the noise of the sports bar and grill just near Marylebone station that reminds me of the underlying chatter broken with occasional exclamations of joy or dismay that filled the huge open plan office I used to work in; an environment quite different to the calm and comfort of my home office. It’s not something I miss, but something I know I shouldn't forget.

 

Natalie* is the familiar face in the crowd and as she orders her milkshake, talk quickly turns to work. We share discreet updates on what we’re working on, we chat over industry news and events, then we pick over the similarities and differences of being in-house and freelance PR professionals whilst considering how we approach different situations and projects. Early on in our monthly mentoring meetings, it became clear that corroboration, and pooling our knowledge, our contacts, and our vision together made us more confident, and helped increase our ability to deliver great work.

This is more than two friends casually chatting about work; this is two industry practitioners mutually mentoring each other and sharing best practice so we can be better in our roles.

It was here in the grill that after months of deliberation and weighing up all the pros and cons, and of hearing what it was like from the other side, that I decided the time was right to go it alone. We all have people (and to some extent games and studios) who inspire us, but it was thanks to the power of mentoring that I finally reached a very personal point of knowing the exact nature of work I wanted to do in this industry, and more importantly felt empowered to go after it. I learnt in detail about the risks and challenges I would be taking on, knowing I had a support net of expertise, advice, and friendship beneath me.

This is going it alone without going it alone.

It’s evident in some of the more successful studios founded with people who are familiar with each other’s work, many of whom at one time or other have been part of AAA studios, and who have broken away to follow their own paths and hearts’ desires whilst committing themselves to helping each other through whatever lies ahead.

Knowing what you can do alone is just the beginning – actively finding the right people who can help you when and if you need it should become an important part of your work. Knowing those people WILL help you is the key to your success. This isn't just advice for start-ups. Bill Campbell, a sounding board to many of Silicon Valley’s chief execs sadly passed away this month yet his reputation and legacy as a mentor has, and will continue to have a resounding impact on the tech and games industry globally.

When I started my new company I knew I had mentors I could actively call on to help me get over any hurdles and I continue to call on them. Being elastic in what I can offer clients has already given my business a boost. Natalie is an expert at understanding and driving communications for community-led development, my skills lie more in delivering corporate and social communications for start-ups. Having the option of combining our skills has allowed us to offer a deeper level and range of expertise and support to meet our clients’ needs so we all benefit from this collaboration. I consider my mentors to be some of the most valuable assets to my business.

Let’s shed our thick skins here; the value of your reputation and skills is important, but combining your abilities with other talented people who are aligned with and can contribute to your business can have a dramatic impact – there’s a reason the Avengers assembled!

Mentoring and collaboration encourages future entrepreneurs and studios to create work within our industries and leads to an unrivalled matrix of expertise where everyone can enjoy success. Having a mentor should be one of the most important tools in your box. Plus, making your office a place where they serve milkshakes and chips is no bad thing…

Tracey McGarrigan is founder and CEO of Ansible PR & communications 

*Natalie Griffith, CEO Press Space Ltd

Guest Blog - It’s Risky, That Game Development

No-one likes risk in business. Consumer surveys, consumer testing for products, pre-screening for films and other ways of delving into the customers mind are big business because no-one wants to invest flipping great wodges of cash into Batman V Superman and then find out it’s a turkey – whoops.

Risk as a greater concept however, is actually a rather wonderful thing. The experiences that really matter in life are the new ones – starting school, travelling abroad, falling in love – and they’re all full of potential danger and therefore risk. But, once completed, regardless of the result, you may feel vindicated, courageous, alive. You may have bruises (to both your body and your ego), but it was worth it for the stories you can tell afterwards. Risk is what makes life worth living, right?

I worked as a games designer for 15 years in total, on titles including LittleBigPlanet PSP, Need for Speed: Most Wanted plus lots more that never saw the light of day, because the title was seen as a risk. And that’s the bit that really sticks in my mind: ‘what if?’ What if the title had been saved/fixed/put into full production? What if it had been a hit? How can you know a game’s playability value when no-one outside the building has actually played it? I believe that there’s an ‘A’ class bug (not a feature) in the process used my large developers aiming to create epic triple A console games: risk aversion. This is understandable because of the stakes: large budgets and hard-won reputations. But surely, getting the game in front of consumers while still at the early stages of designed sheds light and clarity upon a player’s experience, right? If the only people who play the game are those who see it every day for several hours then there’s no fresh perspective. Is becoming more and more familiar with your own work really an advantage? Or does it mean your view becomes narrower and narrower?

The further any developer goes through the production process, the larger the collection of work becomes, so the more painful it is to let go of it, and the further they are along the road of committing to a particular style and set of resources. Consequently certain parts of it – and this is true for all sorts of projects from graphic design to West End productions – remain purely because so much time, money (and love) were invested in them, and NOT because they merit inclusion by contributing meaningfully to the final product. Then it comes out, gets a 7/10 on metacritic and the process starts all over again, with a determined ‘THIS time we’ll get it right’ muttered by those in charge. Repeat.

However, the lumbering giant of large developers can eaily be out-manoeuvred by the champion of Game Creation Agility*: indie devs.

Indie devs are nimble creatures. Being able to quickly test prototypes on consumers means useful feedback at a point when changes can be made easily – like at the pencil sketch stage before the painter commits to oils – because it’s only bare bones, and the work of a handful of people, not a team of 100. Plus, your test case player doesn’t expect a polished product at this early stage because, well, you’re an indie developer. No offence, but there isn’t a well-known reputation and anticipated budget associated with it.

*’GCA’ should be an industry term. It isn’t, but it should be.

The indie dev answers to no-one (until they receive investment, which is a different kettle of ball games) so is able to get vital feedback early on from potential players (the people who matter), instead of receiving feedback at the end of the production process, when tons of hours of work has been resigned to the bin, hearts broken and dreams shattered on the opinion of one or two people who probably won’t play – and certainly won’t pay for – the game as a consumer.

This is the beauty of experiencing games from the indie dev scene at events like Develop – you can play something in production that is still evolving, and created with utter love and devotion, not as the result of a several meetings about the company’s target player demographics and what the marketing strategy is for the company approaching Q3 2018.

I can’t wait to play the indie games at Develop, to talk to the people who are actually creating them, and to continue to be utterly inspired by not only their hard work, but their dedication to embracing that scariest creature of all: risk.

Jon Torrens is a communications coach and will be talking about pitching skills at the Pitching & Funding Workshop on Tuesday 12 July.