On January 26th, 2022, my sixth year of running the indie game development studio, Coldwild Games, is over. The company expanded from 3 to 7 people, published one game in full release and one – in early access and is expecting a year of growth ahead.
Since there has been quite a number of things happening, I don’t expect you to know / remember anything. I’ve added links for context.
Peaceful Games
After the release of Merchant of the Skies in 2020, we wanted to keep working on peaceful games. We’ve made Luna’s Fishing Garden by collaborating with illufinch and other contractors.
Merchant of the Skies sold close to 70000 copies across all platforms and is doing well. Luna’s fishing garden has sold around 16000 copies across all platforms and has not broken even yet, but it’s going to within the next six more months, by my conservative estimates. In the end, I’m just happy that we managed to make a game with 95%+ overwhelmingly positive rating.
While we are not working on peaceful/wholesome games currently, we still have them in mind when planning for our future.
Other games
Lazy Galaxy 2 is one of the games scheduled for release in Q1 2022. With roughly 3000 copies sold, it is currently a net loss, but it’s been gathering wishlists during its early access phase and we are planning to do extra marketing effort for full release. The team is still super enthusiastic about it and we are nearing the final sprint towards the release.
Coldwild Games is also publishing Crown of Pain, an attempt to enter the gamedev scene by a local Latvian developer, Jagit Games. It’s an experimental match 3 RPG game in darker atmosphere. The development took longer than expected, but I’m OK with it and I am happy with what we are getting as the result.
Both of the games are relatively small, but have a lot of heart in it and made me ponder what am I looking for when publishing games.
Data
Yearly income/expense ratio below. Overall, the income has not been as high as before, but still higher than expenses. A significant part of the expenses is related to royalties. This is going to be the case will most of the projects that go beyond breakeven.
Realistically, the chart puts us in a danger zone for this year, but there are still enough savings and passive income, even if we make zero games, which is not going to be the case (hopefully).
Being a head of the studio
Running a 7 people team + contractors is not the same as running a 3 people team. I’m filling more of a producer / business developer role now, but my feelings are mixed on this.
I love the team and every person on it. Honestly, we all work from home, but occasionally meeting every one of them is like a small celebration to me. I love spending time and talking to them. They are all skilled and driven, and I consider this to be the biggest treasure of expanding Coldwild Games.
I am closely monitoring how I feel and if I don’t adapt to the CEO role well enough – I’ll probably be looking for a different head of the company while focusing on the art. Honestly, I’m fairly sure that the company is going to reach the yearly revenue of $1m eventually, but I don’t think this matters since I’ve been doing this for my own satisfaction / feeling. If someone would say “Vladimir, let me buy the company for $1m” – I’d say no to this just a year ago, but now I’d think hard on this offer.
Ideally I see Coldwild Games as a collective of artists who do what they like, but I’m not sure how realistic this is. I would rather think of myself as one of the employees, rather than the boss, but it’s not entirely possible in the environment when I have to take responsibility for the business income and further plans. Larger part of the latest game income ownership is still held by employees, but in order to create new games, a common vision is necessary. People are often interested in making different things which puts these two statements in conflict. I’ve still not given up on this and looking into ways of making this work.
Existential Crisis
I think realization that I’m in my thirties only hit me in 2021. As a way of coping with this, I’ve published my own short interactive story called Late Bird. It’s an experimental piece about birds, movies, suicidal thoughts and not growing up in time where I tried to process my own feelings and the search for the meaning of life.
I don’t really consider myself as an artist, but if I ever made something close to an art by myself – it is this.
What’s Next
Right now I’m trying to establish a routine that I enjoy. I thought that I can handle running two projects at the same time, but 2021 proved me wrong 🙂 After an internal studio discussion, we’ve decided to consolidate our efforts and work on one, bigger thing. Sure, it is riskier. But it also allows us to make something bigger and focus on one thing. What is that thing? The time will tell.
Till we meet again in a year.
Hey, great write-up that’s as always super interesting for me to read, as we’re trying to get to that golden land of creating fulfilling games and earning enough to not do anything else.
1. What did you mean by this?
“A significant part of the expenses is related to royalties. This is going to be the case will most of the projects that go beyond breakeven.” What royalties are those?
2. Regarding being CEO.
I remember when in Next Level we grew from a 4 founder team to an over 15 employee company, I realized that most of my time was spent managing things and very little was left for game development. Admittedly I was rather shitty at my time management and management skills as such then, but still administrative duties if you want to do them well, eat up loads of time. So we hired a friend of mine – a talented administrator, but I feel like it did not work out great in the end, because it removed too much healthy pressure from the founders to take responsibility and learn, and there was the ever-present awkwardness of someone managing their bosses who often were not doing their best.
Nowadays after having worked for 3.5 years in a startup which has deeply cared about its processes and culture, and having left that startup, I’ve been wondering, if our 2 people small studio takes off and grows, what kind of company I would like to create and how would I manage it now after all these experiences.
And honestly I don’t know, but it’s something along the lines of – I would aim for a relatively compact studio with highly creative people which carefully works on its culture and processes.
So the takeaway after all this rambling is – I think it’s possible to carve out a position of being a CEO that’s not that stressful and busy, but it would require quite a lot investment in people and teaching them and building certain independence and responsibility coupled with cooperation and following the same vision. And that’s a difficult task.
Anyway, best of luck, and maybe we can cooperate on something at some time in the future.
Thank you!
1. I’m not sure the royalties is proper term, but the studio project structure works this way: as soon as project expenses are covered, the income is divided between people who worked on development. On newer games, studio gets less than 50% of the income, everything else goes to people who developed the game.
2. I agree that the best way is to teach responsibility and just make sure people you work with share your own values. The culture is the hardest thing to establish within a company.
Thank you for kind wishes and maybe we can cooperate on something indeed 🙂