Lessons after 8 years as indie developer

January 26, 2024 marked eight years since the moment I’ve left my job and decided to work for myself. At the moment of writing this, Coldwild Games, the company I’ve founded, company consisted of seven people. You can find my last year’s summary here.

A tough year

It’s been a tough year expense-wise. Expenses were way higher than income and it took a few miracles to get this far. Big thanks to our previous games that helped us stay afloat.

Am I tired of games?

At one point, I started having an identity crisis. I’ve been running the studio for 8 years and developing games for more than that. I noticed that I don’t enjoy playing games as much, except for very rare exceptions. Does it make sense to make games with an attitude like that? Should I just treat it as a business and milk it entirely? In the end, I got diagnosed with depression and after a treatment course, things are starting to look up again. I don’t really doubt that I want to have my life devoted to making games, I just want to figure out the extent of how invested I am going to be in this.

I definitely became much less social and outgoing. Running a business, with its successes and failures, affects all spheres of my life.

My own personal goal does not change: I still want Coldwild Games to be an umbrella of talent; so that no one would need to leave Latvia if they want to make indie non-mobile games. I don’t have any vision or drive for the new games; it does not mean that I don’t care. I want games to be part of culture and I want to place my country on the map as an indie hub.

Stories from the Outbreak results

For almost two and a half years we were working on a zombie roguelite game called “Stories from the Outbreak.” It’s about a group of survivors trying to leave Riga, a capital city of Latvia, and reach the ferry heading out to North Sea. This is the highest quality game we’ve made.

The launch has been a flop. I got overconfident and decided to do the game I wanted despite getting mixed signals. We had ~20k wishlists on early access launch and close to 30000 wishlists for full release, but it still was not enough to sell at least 5000 copies total up to date.

Some valuable lessons for myself:

Stick to one year projects
Stick to wholesome / cozy games
Don’t expand unless you are confident that you are going to get twofold returns; small studios can’t afford getting employees to fill specific roles, you need to become a generalist of sorts
Porting games to consoles helps

Belarus Simulator

I published my story on how valve decided to stonewall my anti-war game and simply ghost me. It did not get a lot of traction, but I’ve been getting private messages on how ridiculous that is. In short, my idealistic side definitely got a hit. In my opinion, Valve is there for transactional relationships with the devs and they will tolerate you as long as you make them money and not put them at risk, even if you are not doing anything illegal. It’s no longer a company that I look up to, more like a business thing that I need to get my games out there. It definitely influenced my game-making drive for the worse though.

Studio Expansion

When we had 2 good projects in a row, expanding the studio felt like a good idea. The studio went from 3 employees in late-2020 to 7 employees by late 2021. We always wanted to create bigger games so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to start doing that. Unfortunately, I did not read the market correctly and taking Stories from the Outbreak off the ground turned out to be a challenge, despite everyone doing their best.

It’s a major financial loss for the company, but ultimately I’m glad that I decided to give it a try: I always wanted to make larger scale games. It’s just my dreams and expectations from the process did not match reality. Managing the team that makes games is not the same as making games.

I think a lot of bigger developers fell into the same trap. The industry can’t just expand indefinitely: having bigger teams adds so much pressure into making successful games and it’s not always possible. I think it would make sense for experienced studios to budget for 3-5 games and expect 3 flops, one break-even and one success.

What’s next?

We’re not closing down, but we are going to stick to smaller projects. Non-combat, wholesome games are going to return as a main focus. We are renewing our search for freelance jobs, mainly pixel art. Check out our portfolio of latest games if you want to hire a pixel artist: