Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way

In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company’s history and how they’ve managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994.

Jeff Vogel has been making a living building video games since the 90s. A small team of two (husband and wife), they release a game almost every year and have been doing so for about 30 years now. Their focus is on niche rpg games that are built from scratch and remastered every so often. They’ve had many ups and downs, but I never got the feel from the talk that they weren’t living comfortable. They were making about $200k per year with a significant jump once Steam and the indie “movement” went full force. Now they are sitting at around $300k.

What I particularly like about this is their focus on staying in the niche and not shooting for the stars. They are not following any trends and “must dos”. They focus on their community, building on top of their existing work a few small steps at a time.

This right here is what I’d love to be doing. Not in video games, mind you. But I’ve always thought that too many people only care about building large projects. Projects that have to have a huge audience. That’s how, the reasoning goes, you’ll make money. And being in the US, if you aren’t making all the money in the world, then it isn’t worth it.

Now, if I could only find a niche product to sustain me. How hard can it be?

Takeaways

• You can make a living by focusing on a niche that’s not really popular (this has always been something I’ve been aspiring to do)
• A key factor to the indie games sudden interest: people want to support indie developers
• “If you are as frictionless as possible to work with you will be amazed at what opportunities open for you”
• “Never go to sleep on old products” If a game is fun 10 years ago it can still be fun today. Having a back catalog helps a lot (from personal experience this also applies to YouTube Channels).
• “Be so good they can’t ignore you” - Steve Martin
• “Write games that pass the Pee Test”
• Don’t quit your day job until you can afford to
• “A good mailing list is a big red button that you hit and $1,000 appear”
• People are mostly risk averse. When you change something people leave always, but at the same time new people come in. The trick is to have more people come in than leave. Even better if less people leave.
• It’s very important to have source code because there’s always the option of hiring somebody to fix a part you are struggling with
• “Don’t be proud for not getting enough sleep. You need sleep to live”
• “Get a good chair for you back.