Political Animals is Looking for Educators!

While Political Animals was made for the retail market, we've always hoped that it could be used for educational purposes.  Part of our goal as a studio is to try to broaden the topics that games are allowed to talk about, and having the game used in classrooms and thesis dissertations definitely aligns with that goal.  

However, Political Animals is a little difficult to pitch to educational institutions.  As a turn-based political strategy game It doesn't easily fall into the genre of “edutainment”, and any lessons to be extracted from it are solely based on the interpretations of a teacher or student.  Lessons that might be learned include weighing the different moral decision you have to make during an event.  There could also be a discussion about campaign strategy, or perhaps the difference between different electoral systems (Political Animals uses straight majority as opposed to the Electoral College). But there are no lesson plans of any sort, or guidelines for how to use the game in this way.

This is why we need your help.  If you are an educational practitioner of social studies, politics, anthropology or any other subject where you feel that there might be some merit in having your students play our game, we would love to hear from you!  To give you an idea of how it might be used, I did an analysis of the most recent US election a few months ago.  I'm sure you could do a much better job than that.

Send us an email at ryan@squeakywheel.ph with the Subject line “Political Animals for Education” with an introduction of yourself, your school or institution and how you'd plan to use the game in your class, and we'll give you a free copy of the game.  In return we'd love your feedback on your experiences and the results, if any.  If all goes well we'd love to release an education site license similar to that done by Democracy 3. Thanks, and we hope you can spread the word to your fellow educators!

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Indie Game Developers Should Sell Games in China (While They Still Can)

China Shakes the (Gaming) World

“The potent lure of the 1.3 billion person market, no matter how illusory it may be, has helped China to leapfrog some of the technology barriers that had stymied several of the Southeast Asian 'tiger' economies in the 80s and 90s" -James Kynge in China Shakes the World

Ever since China opened up its markets to the world companies have invested trillions of dollars into the country, hoping to be the one that reaps the rewards of access to that colossal market. Internet stalwarts like Uber and Ebay have tried and failed, and on the gaming side Sony and Microsoft are still barely chipping away at the market, yet somehow Valve has grown its Steam userbase in China, giving indie developers a crack at the Chinese gaming population.

China is well known in the gaming scene, but common wisdom was that the vast Chinese market was never going to pay for a game. Most people in China's first experience with gaming was through mobile phones, and with the subsequent turn of that marketplace towards F2P, it further entrenched the notion that Chinese gamers were unwilling to pay for premium games.

Even Valve's sideways entry into the market was via free-to-play. An alliance with Perfect World literally forced gamers to download Steam in order to play the Dota 2 in China. In fact many of them protested at having to download a piece of useless “zombie” software. But then a funny thing happened. While the Chinese government was busy banning Gears of War 4, Steam was subject to no such restrictions. The lure of ostensibly banned games being available on Steam seems to have led many Chinese gamers to buy and download GTA V on Steam. Enough of them have bought GTA V that China is the second largest country for GTA V in terms of units sold.

GTAV stats courtesy Steamspy

Steam took notice, and took steps to court the Chinese market by supporting payments in Chinese Yuan via payment services like AliPay and UnionPay, which greatly increased Chinese gamers' access to Steam games. In 2016 Steam also held the inaugural Lunar New Year sale to further embrace the Chinese Market. AAA game development has also taken notice, with increasing numbers adding Chinese language and audio to their games. Indie games like Lost Castle have also made a killing, selling 200,000 of its 300,000 total units in China alone.

There seems to be a growing appetite for paid PC games in China. On reddit commenter even mentioned that there is a sense of obligation on the part of Chinese gamers, saying “I have to buy (gamename)to pay back the debt no matter how bad it is. Because they have played lots of pirate version growing up lol.” And yet surprisingly very few indie developers seemed to be taking the Chinese market seriously, including myself.

Maybe We'll get Banned in China

Personally, as someone from the Philippines, I simply assumed that the Chinese market behaved in a similar fashion as the rest of South East Asia, where I grew up. Players bought pirated games as kids and then transitioned into playing free to play games. The population playing legitimate games was simply too small to mater financially. Our strategy was to try to make it big in Western markets (ie US and Western Europe) and the other markets would follow suit. We even joked that maybe the best thing to happen to us would be to be banned in China, because then at least we'd get some press from it.

So I have to admit when I first received an email from Fall Ark of indienova with an offer to localize the game in Simplified Chinese, it wasn't on the top of my to-do list. I was flattered that he had been following the game on Tigsource for a while and thought it would be worthwhile to localize the game into Chinese, but I simply didn't take the market seriously. In my defense, September and October of 2016 were very trying periods for me. We were flying across the world to present Political Animals to gamers at PAX, EGX, TGS, and BICFest and trying to gauge feedback and finish the game all at the same time. It was probably the most stressful times of my life, and trying to add another language to our localization tasks might have have driven me crazy. But as I'll share with you all in a bit, I now really, really regret not having taken advantage of this generous offer sooner rather than later.

Political Animals in China

In our last blogpost, I mentioned that I was pleasantly surprised at how much our sales in China had picked up after we got localization done. I'll dig in to the numbers to give you some more context.

When I compared the two week period before we announced Chinese localization and 2 weeks afterwards, I realized that there was a 8x increase in the total number of units sold during that time. To take a longer view, I compared the sales for the 5 weeks prior to localization launch to a combined 2 and 3 week period after the launch and 3 weeks in January (excluding the units sold during the Winter Sale, which we’ll get to in a moment) and found a 3.2x increase in total units sold over the course of 5 weeks.

What can we learn from this? The amount of units sold in China was negligible prior to localization. It’s common knowledge that Chinese gamers usually won’t bother with a game if it’s not localized unless it’s massively successful. Adding localization to our game exponentially increased the chances that random Chinese gamers might pick up our game. Interestingly just as I was writing this we sold 4 more units in China, and 1 in Australia.

The only upsetting thing about this is thinking about how many sales we might have gotten on release day when we had front page status on Steam.

Steam Winter Sale

Things got even more interesting during the Steam Winter Sale, which according to Sergey Galyonkin on Steampsy drives the most unit sales of games. As you can see from the graph above, Chinese sales represented 17% of our total sales during the Steam Winter Sale, more than the UK and Canada combined! By comparison Japan and the Russian Federation, both large non-English speaking markets, only mustered 1% of the total sales each.

Obviously these are exciting numbers, but first you have to ask yourselves whether or not these numbers scale. After all, we’re looking at a very small sample size here in terms of units sold and time elapsed. But given the fact that games as vastly different as GTA V and Don’t Starve both have China as their number 2 region in terms units sold, I’m fairly confident that over time, that will be the case for us as well.

One major caveat that I have to mention here is that since Steam suggests pricing of 50% lower for China, that means that while the increase in units may be impressive, the revenue increase will be less so.

How to reach your Chinese Audience

Assuming you’ve bought in to the idea that there is huge potential in the Chinese Market, what do you do? First, localize. We were lucky enough that we were able to get free localization from indienova. They are pretty active about localizing games they like, so go ahead and get in touch with them if you haven’t already been contacted.

If you haven’t been contacted by indienova, there are indie game publishers in China that are actively searching for games to localize and launch in China. Another Indie and Coconut Island Studios are two examples of that. I would actually suggest this path for English speaking indies that don’t have access to someone who understands the Chinese market. These companies have relationships and fanbases that they can use to promote your game much more than you could do so on your own, especially given the fact that Facebook and Twitter are banned in China. Streamers are super big in China but unless you can read Chinese or have relationships with them there's almost zero chance you can get one of them to play your game. We actually pitched our game to Another Indie but they declined due to concerns over the political nature and style of our game (it didn't help that the game hadn't done well so far).

So for the most part we are DIY-ing it. We went and made a Squeakywheel Weibo account since thats what folks use there instead of Twitter/Facebook. We post there every now and then using either Google Translate or asking some Chinese friends to do short translations for us. As for stuff we post, we usually look at either reviews of the game in Chinese or screenshots people have posted of the Chinese version of the game.

This funny review in Chinese got quite a few views. When run through Google Translate it reads:

"Political animal" by the United States Obama team carefully built three yuan super VR games, Obama, Trump, Hillary lead. AD 7, 1427, Azeroth, the mainland decided to elect the next general secretary, and you, as a person elected to be elected as a candidate, where you need to use a variety of moral and moral The way to beat your opponent. such as:
Hard point of a topic, so that people of this constituency to know you
To confuse a second time, so that the constituency of all the people plus one second
In the constituency to find a sister, through the point of praise to pay Po into the harem
Mourning is hereby, ask the constituency of the Tu Hao to Krypton a single
To a PY deal, so that those who do not continue to force a second to see Marx
In this process you can also have a bunch of little brother and thugs to help you fight home robbery, they each have their own good.
Especially for a constituency can put forward a big news rival
Donkey lions can bury your sins to help you cook
Prostitutes from Hong Kong to run particularly fast
Repair the computer can be made welfare
Activists are good at muffled fortune
Dogs feed more boys
Report can be power cuts
Rogue can pull the opponent's brother out of the base
Each character has its own characteristics.
And you need to decide whether you should pay more attention to the motherland's small loli, unemployed female college students, dirty PY transactions, Crystal Palace construction progress, loss of faith lost lamb or the national physical health of these six major issues.
In the course of the game continue to use carrots and sticks to buy people speculation public opinion.
Eventually, all the banknotes will be gone, and you will be honorable to the crowned King

Yeah, we didn't get it either, and when we asked a taiwanese friend to translate it he said it was just full of bad puns!  It's hard to really say how many people we're really getting to click on our link to go to steam, but it's a toehold and we're taking advantage of as best we can.

We've geared up for a 40% discount during Chinese New Year weekend. Luckily it's the year of the rooster, and whaddayaknow we have a rooster on our candidate roster. It won't be as successful as if we had some proper support in China but I'm hoping it will make some impact. I'll report on that in a future blogpost.

The Window may be Closing

I personally want to push this as far as I can to try and see if there is room for markets for us aside from the US and Europe. The larger and more diverse the markets that we can sell our games to, the more indie game studios can survive and thrive. If a game that doesn't do well in the US can thrive in China, that should be celebrated.

However the window may be closing on indie and PC game developers in general. As previously mentioned, the Chinese government takes games seriously. They have a government body that regulates each and every game that is released on consoles, and recently this also affected games that were to be released on the app store. This substantially slows down game launches as publishers and studios have to jump through numerous hoops before to release their games. Publishers and large game companies have representation that can explain to them how best to go through the process, but small indies like us will be shit out of luck.  A recent government pronouncement has already started moving in this direction, so it may not be long before Steam's free pass gets revoked, and it gets much harder to release games beyond the Great Firewall. 

Tech Conglomerate Tencent has muddied up the waters even more as it launched a Steam competitor called TGP and plans to launch a gaming console.  TGP is restricted by the same government rules as Sony and Xbox, but it understands the Chinese market better and has every opportunity to replace Steam as the go-to platform for PC gaming.

In short, if you're an indie developer that feels like they have a shot at the Chinese market, you'd better make your move soon before that window closes for good.

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Political Animals Sales Statistics

Hey everyone,  I know it’s been a while since we last updated you, but enough time has passed that we now have enough stats to share with you after 2 and a half months of selling Political Animals!

Preface

I’ve talked about the launch of Political Animals before, most of which you can find on our blog.  But here’s a little breakdown for the tl:dr folks.  Political Animals is a turn-based strategy game where you are an animal candidate trying to win an election and keep your morals intact.  We worked on it for two years, half of which was funded by our publisher, Positech Games.  Squeaky Wheel is a small Philippine PC game studio that has a bunch of veteran developers in it, and personally the biggest project I ever worked on was Prison Architect, for which I did the art.

The game looked promising in all the events we brought it to, as we even got a staff pick by Eurogamer as one of its EGX games of 2016.  We were on the front page of Steam on launch, and had quite a few people streaming our game, most notably folks like Total Biscuit, NorthernLion, Quill18, etc.  Given all of that, how did we do?

Did we Break Even?

We’ve already mentioned that we’ve had a very poor launch, but it helps to know exactly how badly we did.  During the whole of development our internal “break even” number was always 10,000 units x $15, which is the full price of the game.  This took into account both development costs and marketing as well as taking into account Steam’s 30% cut of the revenue.  So how did we do?
 
As you can see after two and a half months on sale we’re about 30% of the way to breaking even.  Which isn’t so terrible, except this is after the first day sales bump and the Winter Sale.  The way things stand we’ll (or rather, our publisher) be very lucky to break even by the end of the year.  The only silver lining here for the studio is that none of us put our life savings into the game.

Sales per Marketplace

There aren’t any huge surprises here.  Steam is still the dominant digital marketplace when it comes to games.  Humble and GoG combined only make up 10% of our total sales so far.  I don’t really see this changing in the short term, as Steam really just has so many more subscribers than GoG or Humble combined.

Sales by Country

It gets a little more interesting when we look at units per country.  As expected most of our units have been sold in the US.  The UK comes in a distant second, which makes sense given Positech is from the UK and has a bit of a following there.  We’re not surprised that we quite a few sales in France, Germany, and Canada, as strategy games are usually popular in those countries.

Things start to get interesting when you notice that China is right behind Germany in terms of units sold.  When we announced the launch of Political Animals we were contacted by some localizers from indienova offering a translation to Simplified Chinese.  To be honest, the Chinese market was a bit of a mystery to us and it wasn’t high priority, but given our poor launch there was little to lose, especially when they offered to localize pro bono.  Since Chinese players mostly won’t both bother with a game unless it’s localized or super popular, this guaranteed us a few extra sales.  I even took the extra effort to start a Weibo page, though I’m not entirely sure if it really matters.

The process was pretty seamless, but took about a month to iron out the kinks.   The additional sales weren’t mind boggling, but we now had numerous people in China downloading and reviewing our game, and most of them seemed happy with it.  In the two weeks following our announcement of the localization our Chinese sale shot up by 300% (from a very small number) and during the winter sale Chinese sales were second only to the US.  The catch is that Steam’s suggested pricing is 50% off of our regular US price, so every unit sold in China is worth half a unit when it comes to our break even point.

We have localization in the works for Russian and Polish, and we’re hoping they’ll provide a small boost to our sales as well.

Sales by Platform

Once again no surprises here.  Windows makes up the majority of our sales and Mac and Linux combined make up less than 15%.  The only thing worth noting here is that the Linux sales were quite disappointing given how much work it took to get it working.  We used Unity to make Political Animals, and while porting to Mac was relatively trivial, making the game work on Linux’ multiple distros was a bit of a nightmare for us.

Steam Sales and Wishlist Graph

Lastly, here is the traditional reveal of the Steam sales graph! Our sales peaked at launch, as with most games, and shows a steady decline until a small peak during the Winter Sale.  We’d definitely hoped for more of a peak during the winter sales, but given the deluge of games on Steam in 2016 and the fact that we were only 25% off I should have expected that wouldn’t be the case.
 

As you can see with our wishlist graph, we have quite the gap between our outstanding wishes (players who indicated that they want to play the game) and activations (players who actually bought the game).  I suspect what this means is that there are lot of people waiting for the price to go down to an “acceptable” level before they pull the trigger.  We’ll find out in one of the future Stream sales as we slowly increase the discount.

What’s Next?

I think we followed a typical pattern of trying to save our game the best we can by pushing out rapid updates, talking to players, etc.  At some point you have to concede that the effort involved in this will bring minimal returns, so you have to go back to the drawing board and start a new game.  We’re still currently working on a major update to Political Animals that includes local multiplayer, but we’re also hard at work prototyping our next game and thinking about how to release it.  

If you have any additional questions about our stats, please feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer!

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Squeaky Wheel's 2016 Year in Review

This is the first year of Squeaky Wheel’s life as a company, and I thought it would be appropriate to set down some thoughts at the start of the 2017.  We started 2016 with high expectations.  We had just gotten a publishing deal with Positech and we were gonna start rolling on Political Animals full time. A lot has happened since then, and there were some lessons learned. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

We launched a game!  

We launched Political Animals on November 2, a week before the US presidential elections.  As discussed previously, the timing of the launch was pretty terrible.  We had also started the year as one of very few explicitly political games, but once we launched we had been joined by quite a few games of varying quality.  Our niche market was now relatively less niche.
All of this means that Political Animals has struggled since launch.  We have some plans that we think will help keep the game in people’s minds, and elections will always be happening around the world, so we’re betting on a long tail.

While the game has essentially failed financially, we did get some recognition.  We were featured in Rappler's Year in Tech : Games to Forget 2016 By and honored by Haogaamer as Most Original Game of 2016.  

The marketplace is changing

Steam is still the biggest marketplace in town and while getting a game onto Steam still confers a little gamedev “cred” it no longer ensures that your game will be financially viable.  For better or worse, Steam has become a much more open marketplace.  This means a larger variety of games to cater to every kind of gamer, but also a lot more competition.  We knew this going in, which is why we partnered with a publisher that had credibility in the indie space, but it still wasn’t quite enough.

The demographics of Steam are also changing.  The US market is still the barometer of success on Steam.  If you do well there, gamers in other countries will inevitably follow suit.  This is why despite being a studio based in the Philippines, we courted the US market deliberately, featuring the US-inspired Autumn Island on the title screen and setting our launch to coincide with the US elections.  When that didn’t pan out, we were caught flatfooted.

We should have noticed that countries like China and Russia were now powerhouses when it comes to buying games on Steam.  These are also markets that generally do not have a large English speaking population, and will skip on a game unless it’s super popular and worth figuring out.  We’re in the process of sorting that out now (something I’ll discuss in a future blogpost), but I wonder how much of an impact the Chinese and Russian market might have had when we launched and had front page status on Steam?

Are game conventions worth it?

We presented Political Animals at PAX West, EGX, BICFest, and TGS this year.  While BICFest and TGS were relatively low cost for a variety of reasons (geography being one key reason) there were some substantial costs for presenting at PAX and EGX.  Whether or not the cost spent was worth it or not has been something that I’ve been musing over for a while.  
Almost all the feedback we got from PAX and EGX was positive.  Everyone thought it was a GREAT idea to launch during the US elections, and we came home exhausted but happy that what we thought was a niche market seemed much larger than we thought.  Hell, we were even one of the “games of show” for EGX 2016, which is ironic considering the Eurogamer (organizers of EGX) didn’t even do a review of Political Animals when it came out.  

While game conventions are great for meeting fans, networking, and meeting your gamedev heroes, our experience was that they had very little effect on our bottom line.  If we manage to secure funding for another game, I think we’ll be very picky about which conventions we’ll be attending.  

What’s happening in 2017

2016 was rough for me personally.  I’m not inherently entrepreneurial, so starting a gamedev business was well outside the venn diagram of my skillset.  I was thoroughly set on closing up shop if Political Animals was a financial failure.  The emotional stress wasn’t worth it, and if I couldn’t even have the luxury of wiping away my tears with hundred dollar bills (or even 10 dollar bills), what was the point? 

The point is we made a good game.  One that didn’t exist a year ago.  We contributed a cultural artifact to society, and helped to expand the kinds of games our medium is allowed to create.  It sucks that we didn’t make enough money to break even (and beyond), but we still have a little money and a couple of months to work on and pitch a new game.  We’ve gotten this far, so we might as well keep going.

Oh, the new game?  Well, we’re still keeping a lot of it under wraps, but here’s a very early work in progress UI flow in GIF format…

I hope we’ll get to make it!

An Analysis of the 2016 US Election Using the Mechanics of Political Animals

Donald Trump won a stunning victory in the 2016 US Election yesterday.  Regardless of how you feel about the President-Elect, you have to give it to him and his team for tapping into an undercurrent of fear and anger against the Establishment/Elite and utilizing it to win a victory.  When we started making Political Animals, I had a silly dream of political commentators using the game to analyze actual Political events.  Given the game's slow sales, that's not likely to happen, so if you'll indulge me I'll do a little armchair political analysis using my own game.

The Candidates

Candidate Donald Trunk (ha!) understands (some might say panders to) and empathizes with the needs of the citizens in a way that no other candidate (with the exception of Beary Sanders) does.  However, he is criticized for having a potty mouth and poor taste, and thus has difficulty attracting political patrons to his side.  His special ability, while not realistic, is the ability to build a wall around a district and prevent his enemies from coming in.

His platform is Public Works and Employment.  His staff Include an Agent to fabricate scandals, a Lawyer to help cover up his own scandals, and an Activist to further enhance his rallies. His homebase is in the Factory district, which isn't actually true but represents his campaign's strategy to woo Rust Belt voters.

Hillary Clinton (sorry I could not think of a pun) on the other hand is known as an efficient and extremely hard worker but is also one of the most unpopular candidates in recent history, meaning she doesn't do very well at attracting people to vote for her.  Her platform is Health and Employment.  Her staff include a Preacher to help her generate even more logistics to move and operate her staff, a courier that helps her get around and speak to patrons, and an Activist to supplement her lack of charisma. Clinton's headquarters is in the Kapitolyo (aka Capitol) which again isn't entirely true but is emblematic of the perception that she represents the establishment.

Scandals

Donald Trunk had to deal with a lot of smaller scandals on the campaign trail, but showed a remarkable ability to shrug them off with little effect.  Hillary was dogged by a few scandals which had a much bigger impact on her campaign.

The current mechanics of the game allow for a candidate to win despite multiple scandals, so it's very possible for a Trunk-like candidate to win in Political Animals.  It would be even easier if he used a lawyer to settle some of those scandals.

Undecided Voters and Reputation Decay

Political Animals maps the concerns of undecided voters as well.  They're affected by a variety of things including how popular a candidate is in their district, who has more scandals, and who visited their district most often.  It also has a reputation decay mechanic a candidate will lose support in districts that they have not visited for a long time.

There's been much ado about the collapse of Hillary Clinton's Blue Wall, particularly in the State of Wisconsin. She didn't visit it because her campaign assumed she would be a shoo-in there, which proved to be a costly mistake.

Political Patrons

Political Patrons in Political Animals represent a lot of different things, but they are essentially local leaders that hold a lot of sway in their communities or followers.  In the game there are three types of patrons : Influential, Wealthy, and Popular.  These patrons control access to Logistics (efficiency), fund raising, and campaigning, respectively.

In this election Donald Trunk had difficulty attracting the support of patrons like conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes and prominent members of the Republican party.  Clinton, on the other had, not only had Republicans deciding to vote for her but also had celebrities as wide ranging as Beyonce and Lebron James all the way to working class icon Bruce Spingsteen supporting her.

Political Animals uses Patrons as an in-game balance against pure populism.  In some ways we may have given them a little too much importance.  So if the real world mimicked Political Animals, Hillary Clinton might have won the election over Donald Trunk.  But it was not to be, as we'll see when we discuss the issues.

The Issues

I'm not gonna lie, I was surprised at how closely this Issues overlay mapped (the real) Donald's map to victory.  The areas highlighted in blue are generally the areas that he won and the areas in gray map Hillary Clinton's states.  Obviously there are some differences because this isn't really meant to be a map of the US, but still, kind of surprising.

So this is where Political Animals as a simulation kind of falls apart.  We (and the pollsters, apparently) did not expect how much impact the issues would have on these elections.  Our mechanics connect the concerns of a district to the success of a candidate's campaigns, but not to the extent seen during the elections.  It's as if our fake Donald Trunk hacked into the game and adjusted the formula to greatly increase the effect that playing to the issues of electorate had.  

Hillary lost this battle almost completely.  I read recently that former president Bill Clinton had some issues with Hillary's campaign manager about the lack of a clear message (his campaign famously coined "It's the economy, stupid").  I tend to agree, and so does this article.  Towards the end their campaign centered around "Stronger Together", which is nice but pales with "Make America Great Again."  If I was in charge of their messaging, I would have used "Let's Get to Work."  It would have enhanced her workaholic credentials while at the same time assuaging the fears of the millions of blue collar workers that felt left behind in previous administrations.  She could have even struck a Rosie the Riveter pose for campaigns to help cement her as a feminist icon.  

Conclusion

The elections are now over, and it seems it was won primarily on a strategy of playing to the legitimate concerns of people who felt left behind.  It should be mentioned that playing to those concerns also included a lot of hateful rhetoric from the side of Donald Trump, but ultimately it seems that this election was won because of a failure of strategy on the Clinton campaign. That is at the heart of what Political Animals is about.  Politics is hard work, and in many ways the Clinton campaign was outsmarted and outworked by the Trump campaign. 

On quite a few occasions we have been accused of making a cynical game.  I think that's the farthest thing from the truth.  I personally would describe myself as falling somewhere between a pragmatist and an optimist.  We've simply described the political landscape (not only in the US, but around the world) as we see it. We've tried to make it balanced so that any kind of candidate can win.  At the end of the day if you believe in your ideals you have to fight for them during the elections. You cannot simply assume that people agree with or will follow you. 

Lastly, I hope you'll forgive me for being a little sentimental, but if we've convinced even this one person that playing clean is a valid political strategy, all the effort that went into making this little game was well worth it.

Thanks for reading. Political Animals is out! If you're a games journalist or streamer that wants a review copy, please check out our press kit and distribute() link.  If you'd like to be updated on the latest Political Animals news, please sign up for our mailing list, join our Facebook group, or follow us on Twitter.

What Does it Feel Like to Launch a Game?

It's been almost a week that Political Animals has been on sale on Steam/GoG/Humble.  It's been quite the emotional roller coaster.  I wanted to take a week to absorb all the emotions and share it with gamers and gamedevs alike.  My apologies for a lack of stats.  I was hoping to share some in this post, but given I can't be too specific with them as per Steam's rules, there's nothing super interesting to show you right now.  I may do a more stats heavy blog in the future once we have a bigger sample size.

Launch Expectations

Given we're not allowed to share actual Steam data, the best we can do is compare out expectations of launch versus how things actually turned out.  We had reasonable expectations for a good launch.  Our publisher, Positech Games, has a good track record and fanbase fond of political games to draw from.  We had positive experiences from players at PAX and EGX.  We gave out keys to press and Youtubers (This is the funniest LP by far) a week prior to launch and we were getting a lot of positive feedback.  Total Biscuit even responded with a Steam key request right after I blasted my press release, which was quite exciting. And we were able to launch right before the US elections, which was our target all along.

There were some warning signs though.  The Halloween Sale happened right before launch, and that's always a terrible time to launch a game.  It was not quite as big as a summer sale, but it's always bad to chase after customers after their wallets have just been emptied.  We were also having a hard time getting traditional press coverage, which would be an issue later on.  And Positech has had games do poorly before, with Democracy : Africa and Gratuitous Space Battle 2 being the biggest disappointments.  

Launch Results

Given we worked virtually (we all live in different parts of Metro Manila and meet once a week) We'd made a team decision to get together after the launch instead of waiting for it together.  I personally went to watch Dr. Strange (entertaining movie, if you can get past Cumberbatch's strained American accent) and waited up for the launch with some close friends before calling it a night.

Note: because we live in the Philippines, the 10am launch in the US was actually 1am in the Philippines.

After a less than restful sleep, I woke up to immediately check on our first day sales so far. We'd previously been informed that we'd be featured on the front page so I was a little bit excited. I'm struggling to remember what I felt when I finally saw the numbers.  Shock?  Sadness?  Probably a stunned silence.  Surely they couldn't be so low.  I impotently clicked refresh a few times until I was satisfied that this wasn't some error.  When it finally sank in that we were probably Positech's poorest performing game, I was a little surprised at how I felt.  I just sat there for what felt like ages thinking "well, we flopped."  I sank two and a half years of my life chasing this day and we flopped.  I was a little worried about how numb I was feeling.  Shouldn't I be crying or something? Is this what shock feels like?  

I stood up and told my wife the bad news.  We sat for a bit while she comforted me.  But it was a weekday, so she soon left for work while I drifted back to stare blankly at the computer screen to click on refresh yet again.  Then I did only thing that I could do, which was try to figure why exactly we'd flopped so badly.

Why Didn't People Buy our Game?

The Halloween sale probably had a bigger impact than we thought.  It's hard to ask players for more money when they've just shelled out for games.  Double Fine also had their day of the devs bundle out at the same time, providing incredible value for just a few dollars.  While there will always be other games out when you launch, I think we picked a particularly poor time to do it.  

"Looks really cute and could be a lot of fun. But as an American I really don't associate fun with elections right now. Dread, yes."

The above quote was from a comment on GoG.  I'm not putting too much stock in just the one comment, but the electino cycle in the US takes an obscenely long amount of time, and my sense is that at this point most people just want it to be over already. Had we launched a month or more ago this might have been less of an issue.

After noticing some people on our game's discussion page opine that the game A) had great art but B) "looked like a mobile game" and C) lacked strategic depth (despite their not having played the game), I decided to take a look at our Steam store page.  I got really upset at myself at that point.  The store page is the first thing most players will see of your game, so it's important to make a good impression.  Your trailer, screenshots, descriptions and reviews all have to work together to convince the prospective player that your game is worth buying. Our store page had an incomplete description and no links to reviews.  It's no wonder people were making these assumptions about our game.  If we couldn't even put together a proper Steam store page, how could we make a good game?  Sadly, the biggest thing that might have affected our sales was something that was very much in our control, and I dropped the ball.

Lastly, I should say it is entirely possible that the game just feels too expensive for what it is, and that maybe the game just isn't good.  As for the first, I suppose we'll find out in a few months.  We've got a surprising amount of wishlists, and if a bunch of those convert during a sale, then we'll know how much people actually value the game.  As for whether or not it's good, we're happy with the feedback the game got at PAX and EGX so we're pretty confident saying we've made a good game.

Engaging the Community

Now that I'd identified some of the launch day issues, the only thing left to do was to try to rectify them as best as we could.  First, that meant fixing the issues with the Steam store page.  Next, we dived deep into the Community discussions and responded as best as we could to people's concerns. In some ways, this is a dangerous move.  Developers can get very defensive about their work, and it's very easy to get into an argument with a player and become labeled an angry dev.  Any devs who want to wade into community discussions need to approach it with an air of humility.  Always assume that any complaint is a valid concern, even if it seems dismissive.  My father in law once told me that a customer that complains is valuable, because they could just as easily have walked away without letting you know why.  If they're complaining, take that as opportunity to convince them to give you another chance.  Which is exactly what I did with one guy who was on the fence.  I asked what was keeping him on the fence, then we had a short back and forth which ended up with him saying :

"Well, with Steam offering a 2-hour refund window, I decided that I'll go ahead and grab the game and give it a whirl."

How did I do it?  It's not magic.  I never once tried to "correct" his intuition that the game was lacking in strategy.  I merely explained that based on our experience at conventions people were happy with the level of strategy, and also linked to a Eurogamer article about it.  That was enough to persuade them to try out the game, which is all I really wanted.

Aside from that, we took note of what people are saying they want from the game.  They say the game feels a bit unbalanced.  We'll look into that.  A lot of people are asking for multiplayer, so we've penciled that in as an update.  There were a few questions about Linux. Assuming all goes well that will be coming soon. More than anything it's the fact that we're engaging with the community that makes people commit to the game.  They feel like we're not just gonna drop the game and never update it again.  We're also still actively looking for press to cover the game to try to keep it in people's minds and give the game some more legitimacy.  

We've also been approached by localizers in China, Russia, etc. places where games don't traditionally do very well due to piracy and a lack of English speaking players.  Localization is definitely a pain, but maybe taking a broader outlook is the way we can keep the game relevant in the coming months and years.

Conclusion

We're proud of the game we've made.  We're also proud to contribute to the number of Philippine made games on Steam.  That may not seem like a big deal to countries with a wealth of developers and games, but it certainly means a lot to us.  It still seems almost impossible that we managed to put the game out on Steam.  

We regret being such a poor investment for Positech in the short term, but they'll make their money back over the long haul, and hopefully even sooner if we manage to play our cards right.  

As for the team, it was definitely pretty rough.  Our first meeting after seeing the sales numbers was pretty somber, but we ended it with a rousing karaoke session that lifted our spirits, if not our sales.  We'll keep working hard to make sure that this game is the best it can be, and hopefully we'll have a chance to make another one.

Thanks for reading. Political Animals is out! If you're a games journalist or streamer that wants a review copy, please check out our press kit and distribute() link.  If you'd like to be updated on the latest Political Animals news, please sign up for our mailing list, join our Facebook group, or follow us on Twitter!

How I Learned to get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

As I write this I am pushing some last minute changes to our build. If all goes well, we will be handing out Steam keys to press so they can get their hands on our game and stream or review them (if you are interested, please check out our press kit and request a review copy). If all doesn't go well...we rush to put out another fire. A few months ago I would be blaming myself for this predicament, wondering how we could have done better, and why we didn't see it coming. Eventually it would lead to another panic attack as I multiply all the fuckups we've made during the course of development and sink into a spiral of despair. I'm still stressed out, but I'm doing a little better today. Why is that? It's because I finally accepted that I just have to be “comfortable with being uncomfortable”. In other words, its okay that things didn't go as planned. It's okay that some bugs just seem to refuse to go away. It's okay that things seemed to finally come together only a few months before launch.

Now to be perfectly fair, a lot of people have been telling me that. Hell, even our publisher told me something similar at one point. I'd heard the same advice from friends of mine who, while not in game development, are entrepreneurs who have to deal with similar situations. But the human brain is a weird thing, and sometimes it takes a very specific time and place for you to hear something and to have everything click. And that moment for me came from this excellent interview of Amy Hennig on the designer notes podcast. She and Soren Johnson have an epic 2 episode podcast which spans how she got into the industry and how she ended up directing one of the most well known franchises in console gaming. At around 30 minutes they start talking about the intricacies of putting together a giant game like the Uncharted and what it takes to get all of those moving pieces running together in sync. Her broad answer is that despite their best efforts, it often doesn't work in sync:

“I always say, get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because if you try to make it feel more known and more nailed down and more sure, you're probably gonna make something that is kind of dead. But if you just go, this is crazy and it's gonna feel crazy, and it's a tightrope walk and we're doing backwards and blindfolded, let's go...”

Now before anyone jumps on me for defending delayed schedules and mistakes and whatnot, let me assure you that I know that all of these things are not okay. It's not okay to miss deadlines, it's not okay to have a scatterbrained development process, and yes, I know the value of a good producer that keeps an eye out for these things. That's all important, and they are all things I wish I had or I wish could do better. But there's also a line where being self-critical and wanting to do better starts to become emotionally harmful to yourself and the people around you.

I'm not a risk-taker. Which seems crazy coming from someone who cofounded a small PC studio in the middle of nowhere (in terms of PC-only game development we might as well be living in a desert) and is putting out an admittedly niche title, but there you go. It's the reason we wouldn't have moved forward without a publisher. There was no way I'd emotionally be able to handle all that risk.

I'm also a bit of a control freak. It's not that I'm a megalomaniac that needs to control everything mind you, it's just that being able to control certain aspects of my life makes me feel emotionally stable. When my wife and I go on trips to other countries I have our itinerary planned out. Where we're going, how we're getting there, where we're staying, etc. I make sure to leave a little room for serendipity, but generally speaking I don't like flying blind. I just don't. It freaks me the fuck out. Having some control just makes me feel a little better.

And yet both entrepreneurship and game development offer you no control. On the team, I'm probably the most flexible in terms of time, so the stuff that doesn't slip through the cracks usually falls on my plate. So I'm managing our finances including payroll and renting at the coworking space, dealing with our audio contractor, dealing with our publisher, handling any legal issues, all the way down to booking tickets and organizing itineraries for when we go to conventions (at this point a career shift to travel agency seems inevitable). Looking at all these moving parts constantly throughout the course of making the game made me feel physically ill at times. I always kept worrying that something would slip through the cracks, and they inevitably did. Then I would get super depressed and get into a funk that seeped into my personal life.

“You should delegate,” you might say. And trust me, it's advice that I've given out myself. I think that people who's first instinct is to do it themselves because other people wouldn't do it right probably wouldn't be good leaders. But delegating is harder than you think. And some of the soft skills I've learned aren't directly transferable to people. It's just stuff I've passively absorbed through almost 9 years of being a freelance artist and basically running a one-man business. Oftentimes the ball in in my court and I totally drop the ball (how's that for mixed metaphors?) And now I know that it's okay.

Why bring this up now?  As I said in the beginning, we're moments away from sharing the game with press, hoping they'll review it in time for our launch next week(!) and desperately hoping they'll like our game.  I'm scared they won't. I'm scared we fucked up somehow. I'm scared that 2 years of effort will go down the drain.  I'm scared Positech's first experiment with a non-UK company will flop, and I'm carrying all that responsibility on my shoulders.  But for better or worse I know that our little team did its best.  And at the end of the day we put out a game.  Whether or not we are financially successful, that's already an accomplishment.  We'll move forward. We'll try to learn from our mistakes. We'll always be trying to get ahead and make sure that everything is locked down and running smoothly. But despite our best efforts we never will probably never lock it down till we're almost at the end. But we'll never stop trying to be better.

Thanks for reading. Political Animals is launching in one week! If you're a games journalist or streamer that wants a review copy, please check out our press kit and distribute() link.  If you'd like to be updated on the latest Political Animals news, please sign up for our mailing list, join our Facebook group, or follow us on Twitter!

Can Political Games Change the World?

A couple of weeks ago, I did a Rezzed Developer Sessions talk at EGX entitled “Can Political Games Change the World?” Apart from doing the talk, it was also the first time we showed the official trailer for Political Animals, seen above.  Unfortunately there wasn’t any video coverage, although any coverage would probably have been marred by the fact that there was a Destiny shoutcaster literally yelling “DESTINY! DESTINY! DESTINY!” and throwing out swag to cheering crowds every fine minutes of the talk. In lieu of that, I thought it might be interesting to show my slides here with some notes to give you a flavor of what the talk was like.

Slide 1: “Can Political Games Change the World?”

Here I introduce myself and give the flow of the talk, which is to look at six political games along a spectrum and discuss how I think they have an impact on the world.

Slide 2 : Definition of Political Games

Here I address how the term “political games” can mean several different things, but for the purposes of the talk I've defined them as games that are about achieving and exercising positions of governance over a community, particularly a state.

Slide 3 : Spectrum of Games

Political games span a spectrum ranging from propaganda to pure entertainment. Essentially rehash slide 1, but now with a visual of the spectrum of political games. The next slide is when we get to the meat of things.

Slide 4 : Oiligarchy

Oiligarchy is a game by Molleindustria that explores the connection between Big Oil and Big Government. It’s a management game where you explore and drill for oil wells, destroying environments and communities along the way. You contribute money to Big Government by literally throwing money at them and “oiling” government representatives. If you manage to “oil” the president, it gives you access to the secret room, which allows you to do things like destabilize Iraq in order to obtain access to its oil profits.

It’s a really intriguing and pretty game, as are all of Molleindustria’s titles. However, the fact that it is clearly propaganda has a noticeable effect on the game design. It’s super simplistic, and there isn’t much challenge to searching for and drilling oil wells. Perhaps the lack of challenge is a commentary on how easy it is to run an oil company, but the game becomes very tedious after 15 minutes or so due to a lack of depth.

The game sacrifices good design in order to make a heavy-handed point, i.e. oil companies are evil. I suspect this also means that it preaches to the choir and doesn’t really do a good job of changing people’s minds or even opening up a conversation about oil.

Slide 5 : Rody Fight Duterte for Change

Rody Fight Duterte for Change is a minigame collection on mobile by Keybol Games that features a presidential candidate literally fighting for change. It’s an Android minigame collection that was released to coincide with the Philippine elections. It straddles a moral gray area and caused a kerfuffle in the local game dev community because while it doesn't explicitly promote the candidate it quotes the candidate throughout the game and portrays the candidate in a heroic light. Our election laws are too antiquated to handle questions about game as propaganda. Keybol is a well known game dev locally and there are some brilliant moments in the game when I laughed out loud, such as the minigame where the candidate is literally punching red tape to death.

Given the fractious nature of the most recent Philippine elections, it’s hard to say whether this game really had any impact on changing voters’ minds. It could be argued that the developer was also taking advantage of the popularity of the candidate (now president) , especially given the information in my next slide.

Slide 6 : Screenshot of additional Duterte Games

The Philippine president seems tailor-made for mobile games, and even his chief of police has a game made about him. Obviously given his popularity games made about the president are likely to do well locally.

Slide 7 : Democracy 3

Caveat : the creator of Democracy 3 is our publisher so take what I say here with a grain of salt.

Political philosopher and economist Thomas Sowell once wrote that “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs”. The Democracy series of simulation games is the embodiment of this idea. It shows you how policies result in different outcomes across different sections of the population and challenges you to balance these competing interests in your country. The way it abstracts political horse trading into political capital is also a stroke of genius.

At times, however, it suffers from feeling too efficient. Democracy 3 is almost a Utopian vision from a programmer about how governance “ought to be”. Government should logically weigh the pros and cons of a policy and make exact calculations about how to bring about the greatest overall benefit for the most number of people. But people aren’t rational and logical. People are emotional and inconsistent, capable of holding two contradictory points of view at the same time.

Still, it’s a useful teaching tool, and Democracy 3 has already been used at a European Youth Event for young political leaders. It's interesting to note that it’s being downloaded and played in China, where there is a one party system.

Slide 8 : Crusader Kings 2

As a child of a once-colonized country I was basically taught that Kings and Queens ruled absolutely and did as they pleased. This was reinforced by Games like Civilization and Total War, which essentially cast you as an absolute dictator with the sole decision making power over what to build, who to war with, etc. CK2 forces you to negotiate that power structure with the nobles who swear fealty to you. You cannot commit to a war for no reason, and if you do end up going to war your nobles are only obliged to send a certain percentage of their fighting men to you. While governments have certainly evolved (and sometimes devolved) over time, CK2 taught me that governance has and always will be about how society negotiates power with its leaders.

Crusader Kings 2 has no illusions about changing the world, but it certainly broadened my perspective about history and governance in a way that few games ever have.

Slide 9 : Prison Architect

Another caveat : I was the artist of Prison Architect, so obviously I am rather biased towards it.

Prison Architect is the least overtly political game, but touches on a very political topic, which is for-profit prisons. Interestingly, it was critiqued by Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria on the political ramifications of making a game about prisons, which in a way brings the spectrum of political games full circle.

Prison Architect makes no pretension about being a political game. It touches lightly on some political themes in its tutorial, but it makes a clear point of allowing the player to build a socialist utopia or an authoritarian gulag without ever penalizing them for either choice. 

Prison Architect never aimed to change the world, but it did give people a way to interact with a social issue in a way that they never would have been able to before. I would also argue that because it wasn't propaganda it reached a much broader and wider audience, which is shown by these articles from Atlantic and Mother Jones.

Slide 10 and 11 : Lame Answers to Important Questions

Essentially these slides were used to re-ask the original question “Can Political Games Change the World?” and offer my profound answer, “Maybe.” I feel it’s too hard to say one way or the other, and creating change in the world is too much to ask of one game. At best, political games can and should challenge us as individuals and open us up to different ideas. Which then leads us neatly to Political Animals.

Slide 12-16 : Political Animals

Slides 12-16 for the most part describe Political Animals , which is probably something best served by going to the game’s website.

At this point I'd like to go a little more in depth about the more high-minded goals of Political Animals.

The common argument put forth when discussing politics is that all we need are “good people”. If only we had “good people” who weren’t “corrupt” we would have an excellent working government. Yet time and again it seems we elect “corrupt” officials. Why is that? Are we just so unlucky that we live in countries where only bad politicians thrive?

We put forth the argument that bad systems make for bad politicians. If we had better systems in place that encouraged good behavior, we would generally produce better politicians who serve the interests of their people.

We want to throw the player into the election campaign as we currently see it, with the countless interests that constantly compete for your campaign funds. We challenge the player to weigh pragmatic results against tough moral choices. And at the end of the day we ask the player what every politician at some point will have to ask themselves: What are they willing to pay in order to ensure victory?

Will Political Animals change the world, or even our country? Probably not. But we want people to question themselves. We want people to ask if they really would do a better job than their politicians. And we want them to come to the realization that politicians are just like them, just flawed human beings working in a bad system. We want them to think about how to fix that system, because we have no answers.

And as if we weren’t setting the bar high enough for ourselves, we want them to enjoy playing our political strategy game at the same time.

Thanks for reading! Political Animals is launching soon, and if you'd like to be updated on the latest Political Animals news, please sign up for our mailing list, join our Facebook group, or follow us on Twitter!