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A well-known figure in the indie scene, Callum Underwood took part in the discussion panel titled "Getting Funded for Small and Niche Projects", and right after that he caught up with our own David Caballero in Lisbon to talk about money, long-tail strategies, indie scouting, and more.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, this is day 2 at the DevGAMM Lisbon and I'm here joined by Callum, who just had a panel.
I think you had two of them in this event.
Okay, so you discussed different topics."
"One of them was how small indie projects can find funds.
So which would you say are the main sort of pieces of advice you shared with indie developers gathered here?
Yeah, so for small projects, we're talking $50,000, maybe up to $100,000.
I actually think the amount of people funding those games is a lot more than there was a few years ago."
"We all know that the market is really bad at the moment and it's hard to get funding in games, but if you want a smaller amount, people like us, Uwu Biz, we're doing it.
Future Friends, who were a marketing agency and are now a publisher, they're doing it.
Oro Interactive, who just shipped Easy Delivery Co., they have small amounts of funding."
"And then you've got even a lot of successful developers giving out smaller amounts to people they know and so forth.
So whilst the industry isn't in a great place, there are lots of places to find smaller amounts for games that want to be commercial and want to be successful.
I think that's the key difference."
"Finding it for purely an artistic game, that doesn't really exist in games like it does with film and TV, with patrons and philanthropy and charity money from rich patrons.
So in games, really you need to be in a place where you think the game could make money.
Do you think that is actively affecting or impacting creativity?
Or as we are seeing around, we still see many small, very fresh, very unique ideas."
"No, I think it's a problem.
I think it's easy to go too far the other way.
Where in film and TV, there's a lot of projects that purely rely on grants and charity, or philanthropy, sorry, to get made."
"But I think it stifles innovation and it stifles creativity if every game has to have a goal of making money specifically by being sold to people, rather than being able to kind of do something new or show a message or something like that.
So yeah, I mean, we're not lacking for innovative, good indie games for sure."
"But do I think more money should go back into games rather than come out of games when people have success?
Absolutely.
Okay, and talking about generating money, one of your areas of expertise is the long tail."
"So yeah, same as I asked about funding funds.
What can you tell me are the modern techniques you have to keep in mind or you can try out with your projects for them to keep generating money in the long run?
Yeah, so if you're already making money, A, you're in a good spot, that's nice."
"But B, it means that you have a lot more work to do.
It kind of depends if you have engineering teams available or if you only have kind of your own biz dev self, right?
So if it's just yourself, the lowest hanging fruit is sorting out your discount and sales planning better."
"Most successful indie devs that we see don't even put discounts on Switch properly because it's kind of difficult to put discounts on Switch.
Everyone does the four big sales on Steam, but you can be doing custom 14-day sales pretty often."
"So like sorting out your geo pricing as well.
Most of the games we see have bad pricing in Poland where it's more expensive than in the US, which obviously makes no sense.
So yeah, there's things like just being data-led in terms of people buying the game."
"And then there's the rest of, you know, the cool things like merch, physical releases.
It might not make much money, but it's kind of nice to do as a dev and it's nice for people to be able to buy those things.
Console porting, you know, DLC, even just content updates."
"It kind of depends how much you want to spend on the game versus how much you can do sort of passively.
But yeah, sorting out discounts, making sure you're under the platforms.
That's kind of the lowest hanging fruit."
"And then it just depends if you still have a team willing to do dev to do the rest.
All right. Can you give me a couple of examples or study cases or real cases that you've worked on, perhaps on IndieBi?
If I'm correct, I don't know, Slay the Spire, Stray, or something else that you want to bring up now, something specific that you worked on in terms of long tail."
"Yeah, so IndieBi manages kind of...
Bi? You say Bi, okay.
Like Business Intelligence. It's a bad name, but you know, we're stuck with it now.
So yeah, we manage Among Us, we manage Gang Beasts."
"You know, Slay the Spire.
And that is mostly focused on pricing and discounts.
So it's making sure that the game is on discount at the right time, at the right places, and the pricing in each country is correct."
"And about every six months or four months, we'll do a review of kind of global economy and check, you know, has anything crashed? Is Turkish pricing gone wrong?
Has the Argentinian pricing gone wrong?
And, you know, Steam and Valve, I love them, right?
They've made my career."
"But they're a little bit slow on updating their pricing matrix, which is why, you know, if you go with the standard Steam matrix right now, likely your Poland price will be too expensive.
So you're pricing yourself out of the market."
"So that's also what we do for a lot of games.
We're managing around a billion dollars worth of sales each year now, which is insane.
But yeah, just focused on kind of going into back ends."
"On my team, kind of, we've got analysts and data researchers and all of the data because of IndieBI.
And, you know, publishers use it for their own data.
But then we've also got the people who go in and kind of actually put the discounts in."
"And if you're a publisher with a large portfolio, or even a dev who just wants to work on your next game, like Slay the Spire, like, it's just hand it to us and we'll do it for them."
"So yeah, it's been a surprising business model.
We didn't make IndieBI with that in mind.
We made it in mind of giving people access to the tool.
But no matter how many tools you give to people to make more money, a lot of these people, they just want to make video games, right?
So they do that."
"So what's the difference with the other company that you just mentioned?
Is that it's more of an investor side of things, the UwU company?
Yeah, UwU Biz is a much more kind of hands-on consultancy.
So my last company was Robot Teddy before I sold that to Thunderful."
"And Robot Teddy was one of the first kind of post-success agencies.
So we're doing similar at UwU Biz.
So rather than just managing long-tail revenue, we're doing deals with Game Pass, we're managing merch, we're figuring out physical distribution, we're managing co-development partners, we're dealing with the lawyers, kind of fractional CEO support stuff, I guess."
"It's hard to explain because it's very, very personal and it's kind of a very hands-on approach from me to my clients.
I'm back working with Gang Beasts again, which I was doing in 2017, 2018."
"And for them, it's a lot of just making sure things are still happening, making sure someone's on the ball and talking to the platforms and things like that.
So there's a nice crossover between IndieBI and UwU Biz, but my goal for UwU Biz is keep it very small."
"When I sold Robot Teddy, there were 16 of us and it was great, but I was a bad boss and a bad manager.
I much preferred doing the actual work.
So there's just a couple of us now with a couple of freelancers and I like that pace a lot better."
"Okay, and finally, another thing you do is scouting, for example, for Kepler.
We have to do some scouting here to sort of pick the interesting indie projects and I guess you do the same.
Kepler is an interesting beast, isn't it?
They have their own games, they're very selective, they don't pick many games a year."
"We recently saw Blightstone in Spain in the Barcelona Game Fest, which was a really interesting game to release next year.
So what can you tell us about that scouting job you have for them and the specific relation with such a peculiar publisher?
Yeah, so I was working with the founding team of Kepler Interactive back in 2018-2019 when they were doing Kowloon Knights."
"So it's a lot of the same people ended up going to do Kepler Interactive.
So I've known Alexei for a good few years now.
My job mostly around Kepler is a little bit more like headhunting projects.
So there's a real good team run by Matt, John and Anlu, who manage the scouting."
"So they're the people who'll read the emails that come in, they'll go to every event, they look at everything, they're very, very good at it.
My role is a little bit more, oh hey, we've seen this game, seems to be getting a bit of hype or it seems to be very interesting, how do we get in touch?
We don't know who they are, how do we go and find them?
And so my job becomes a little bit more like..."
"The other way around, towards them.
So it's a little bit more headhunting of going out specifically to pick up a certain project.
But being somewhere like this at DevGAMM, there's a couple of games that I've seen that have kind of piqued my interest."
"Whether for Kepler or to hand over to other friends and publishers, the Haunted Paws game seems to be doing really well on Wishlist.
So just from a pure commercial point of view, I'd love to be like, hey, what's up, do you need some help?
But then I saw DDoD, which is kind of like a top-down Diablo stalker game."
"And it just looks very, very cool.
So that's one that I'd be willing to kind of...
Or have the desire to follow up with and be like, what are you looking for? Are you looking for a partner?
So even when I'm out at shows like this, I'm still keeping an eye on what looks interesting."
"And there's usually one or two each.
You cannot help it, right?
I mean, I was scouting for a lot of years.
I used to scout for Raw Fury."
"And when I was at Raw Fury, I was very much hands-on.
It was, you know, reading 30 pictures a day, going to every show.
Johan does that now."
"Yeah, it was the other way around.
But now it's a little bit more narrow, a little bit more focused.
And I think because I'm just part-time and do a few hours a week, it's better that the main kind of core Kepler team handles the main business."
"I'm just sort of, every now and again, I'll try and find something interesting.
But it's, you know, it's rare.
It's hard out here, right?
So, yeah."
"Yes, it is.
Fantastic.
We're going to check those out before the DevGAMM Awards later today.
Thank you so much for your time, Callum."
"Looking forward to meeting you again in these sort of events.
Thanks so much.
Thank you."
