How to Start an Indie Game Studio – Lessons From Joe Dietsch, Director Turned Wolf Haus Games Founder:

Figuring out how to start an indie game studio is not a question most people answer the same way twice. Joe Dietsch answered it by directing two feature films first, spending years in commercial and music video production, and then discovering one afternoon that Unreal Engine was free to download.

Joe is the founder of Wolf Haus Games and the creative director behind Join Us, a doomsday cult simulator heading to PC, Xbox, and PlayStation as a day one Xbox Game Pass title. He joined Ash Cason, Head of Marketing and Community at IndieGameBusiness®, on the Indie Game Business podcast to walk through the full path: from teaching himself game development through YouTube tutorials and late-night Unreal sessions to landing funding from Lifeline Capital and Krafton and building a twelve-person studio in Montreal.

What he shared is one of the more honest and specific accounts of how to start an indie game studio without a traditional industry background, without an existing network in games, and without a clean plan from the beginning.

The Origin Story – Film School, Feature Films, and a Free Game Engine:

Joe’s creative instincts go back further than film school. His first game was a missile command clone programmed on a TI-83 graphing calculator in math class. He got in trouble for it and decided the programming was more interesting than whatever the class was supposed to be teaching. That impulse never fully went away, but film felt more accessible. You had a camera, some friends, and you could just go make something.

He went to film school, graduated, built a career in commercials and music videos, and co-directed Happy Hunting, a feature that landed on Netflix in 2018. A second feature, Manifest West, followed. Then in 2021, he assumed Unreal Engine cost around three thousand dollars and had never bothered looking into it. The day he found out it was free, he downloaded it.

From there the pattern was simple: he kept waking up excited to go work in it. Some days the goal was figuring out how to build an exploding barrel, which in Unreal is not complicated but was a full day of learning at the time. The excitement did not wear off. That sustained excitement is something Joe returns to as one of the clearest early signals that he was pointed in the right direction.

How to Start an Indie Game Studio With No Industry Connections:

One of the most common questions around how to start an indie game studio is how to find the people to build it with, especially when you are coming from outside the industry. A community question submitted to the IndieGameBusiness® Discord asked exactly this, and Joe’s answer was direct about both what worked and why it was hard to generalize.

He had almost no games industry contacts when he started. His network was in film. So he worked with what he had: the few people he knew who were adjacent to games, and trusted them to introduce one specific person they thought should see the project.

The chain looked like this:

• Joe showed an early proof-of-concept to his long-time film collaborator Michael Abbott
• Michael introduced him to a writer who had worked on Assassin’s Creed, Army of Two, and Arkham Origins
• That writer introduced him to Reed, who runs Raccoon Logic in Montreal
• Each person either joined or introduced one more person they believed would genuinely connect with the project
• Nobody blasted the project to their whole network. Every introduction was deliberate and personal

This process eventually produced six co-founders and a team centered in Montreal. From late 2023 through early 2024, everyone worked nights and weekends while holding other jobs. There was no registered company and no money. Joe’s observation on that period is worth taking seriously by anyone researching how to start an indie game studio on limited resources: having no money means having no burn rate, which means having no artificial runway forcing a premature decision.

He watched other projects, including film projects, get burdened by taking on small amounts of capital too early. When people put money in before the timing is right, they tend to believe they still have a say in the direction even after their moment has passed. His recommendation is to wait for the right funding partners, even if those conversations take over a year. Lifeline Capital was the very first group Joe ever pitched. They did not invest immediately. They watched the team for more than a year to see whether the founders would still be working well together. Then they came in. Joe said he would have made the same call in their position.

The Concept Behind Join Us and Why the Tone Mattered More Than the Mechanics:

Join Us started as something much more contained. The original concept was a simple base-builder: a doomsday cult compound, ATF agents showing up in waves instead of zombies, rebuild during the day, defend at night. Something small enough to show a few friends.

Then the map started growing. A road appeared. A fishing hole appeared. A handcrafted open world roughly eighty percent the size of the Fallout 3 map took shape. None of that was planned. It emerged from building in three dimensions in an engine that makes spatial expansion feel natural.

The final concept is more specific than a survival game with a cult skin. You begin as a member of an already-thriving doomsday organization, get called up by the cult leader, and are sent to a small rural town to start a franchise. Nobody knows you. Nobody trusts you. You have to build something from nothing in a place that would rather you were not there.

The tone was the thing that determined whether people got on board or did not. In early pitches, there would be a moment around slide five where the room shifted. People stopped being unsettled by the subject matter and started laughing. The game takes something genuinely strange and presents it with a completely straight face. A cultist riding a pig while firing a flamethrower is funnier when the world around it looks like it takes itself seriously. The team identified that tonal contract early and protected it deliberately across every design decision.

What Film Experience Taught Him About Making Games:

Going from film into game development came with some accurate assumptions and at least one significant miscalculation.

The miscalculation: Joe assumed a game studio would feel like post-production in film, where editors work in isolated bays and everything is compartmentalized. He planned around that. What he found was that the team wanted to work together on an open floor, desks connected, people around each other all day. The energy was much closer to a film set than a post house. He adapted quickly, but the gap between his mental model and the reality was real.

What transferred well from film was the instinct to tell stories economically. Join Us communicates a large portion of its narrative through radio transmissions from the cult leader, who is never physically present. The player builds a relationship with this voice over time without the production cost of animating every scene. That was a deliberate choice rooted in years of thinking about how to do more with less, which is exactly the kind of thinking that commercial and independent film work tends to build.

The other major difference was temporal. In commercial work, if the sun goes behind a building in five minutes, you have five minutes. In games, you are on a multi-year timeline where tasks are non-linear and almost nothing is truly lost forever. Joe found this liberating rather than frustrating, but it required a genuine mental shift in how he thought about urgency and pacing.

Scope, Map Size, and the Feature Creep They Did Not Regret:

A twelve-person team building an open-world cult survival game with base building, follower AI, a handcrafted six-square-kilometer map, and fully modular construction systems is not a small undertaking. Joe acknowledged freely that the team probably should have cut more scope and did not. The game is built on feature creep in ways the team is honest about internally.

But the decisions that drove scope were not arbitrary. The map size is a good example. Six square kilometers is large enough to support exploration, multiple bases, distinct stories, and genuine discovery. It is also a size that a twelve-person team can fill entirely by hand with no procedural generation, which means every piece of it can be made genuinely interesting. A bigger map filled with grass and trees is easy to make in Unreal. It is also empty in the ways that matter.

The base building system went through significant evolution. Early versions used large pre-assembled structures that players assigned followers to. The team eventually moved to a fully modular system where individual components, planter beds, fences, decorations, large effigies, can each be placed and managed independently. Players can tend crops themselves or assign followers. The follower AI handles the same tasks the player can handle. It made the development work harder. It made the experience substantially more alive.

How Wolf Haus Runs a Twelve-Person Studio Without Bureaucracy:

Wolf Haus Games operates with minimal management layers. Joe is CEO and creative director, but the organizational structure is deliberately flat. When a team member who had come from a much larger studio pushed back on a system decision, Joe agreed on the spot and moved on. The team member was visibly surprised that a decision at that level could be made that quickly without escalation or review.

That speed is realistic at twelve people and may not survive a significant expansion without adding vertical management. For now, the practical habits that make it work are:

• Meetings happen when actually needed rather than on a default recurring schedule
• Quick questions go into private Discord rooms and take five minutes instead of consuming a calendar slot
• Everyone knows what everyone else is building because the team is small enough that full transparency happens naturally
• Decisions that belong to the person managing a system get made by that person, not routed through multiple approvals

This structure lets the team move quickly, correct bad directions fast, and implement good ideas without waiting for the process to catch up. Joe is clear that it is a function of scale and plans for it to evolve as the studio grows.

The One Thing He Would Tell Someone Starting Out:

Ash asked Joe what he would tell his earlier self. His answer came with the caveat that a much better version of it would probably surface at two in the morning.

The actual answer: prioritize the build. When you are figuring out how to start an indie game studio, there is a pull toward initiatives that feel important in the moment and rarely matter in retrospect. Company setup tasks, exploratory conversations, peripheral decisions, all of it can consume the time that should be going into the product. Joe’s personal test for anything generating stress or eating attention: if he will not care about it in three years, he should not care about it now.

He was clear that some of what pulled attention away from the game was genuinely necessary. But on balance, more time on the game and less time on everything surrounding it would have been the right call. For anyone working through how to start an indie game studio of their own, that is probably the clearest and most honest thing he said in the entire conversation.

Where to Find Join Us and Wolf Haus Games:

Join Us launches on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation as a day one Xbox Game Pass title. The game appeared in the Xbox showcase alongside Fable, Halo, and State of Decay, which Joe described as genuinely surreal to experience from the back of the theater with two teammates.

The Wolf Haus Games Discord is the best place to follow development and is linked directly from the Steam page. The Steam page also hosts a series of development blogs covering music, two-dimensional art, storytelling, and production details for anyone who wants to go deeper. TikTok and Instagram carry the most frequent new content and story updates heading toward launch, and Joe responds to DMs personally on both platforms.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Joe and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Indie Game Publishing Latin America – How Indie Hero Is Building a Global Indie Game Ecosystem From Brazil:

Juliana Brito runs more businesses than most people have projects on their backlog. As co-founder of Indie Hero, Game Jam Plus, Plugin Plus, and a growing indie publishing label, she has spent five years building one of the most active and internationally connected game development ecosystems in Latin America, and increasingly beyond it.

Juliana joined Jay Powell, Founder of IndieGameBusiness®, for a fireside chat covering how all of these businesses started, why the original business model failed, what she has learned about publishing and marketing games with almost no budget, and the practical approaches that have actually moved the needle for the small studios she works with.

How Game Jam Plus Started and Why the Original Idea Fell Apart:

Game Jam Plus is celebrating its tenth edition this year. The origin story is not what most people expect. It did not start as a game jam. It started as a crowd testing platform where game developers could submit games, other developers could playtest them, and everyone would benefit from cheaper, higher-quality feedback before launch.

The problem was getting enough people onto the platform to make the testing valuable. The solution was to run a game jam that would bring developers in, generate leads, and funnel those participants into the testing platform. The game jam worked. The crowd testing platform never did.

After five years and genuine effort, the testing platform was dropped entirely. The game jam, which had started as a marketing tool, had become the actual business, growing from a small Brazil-only event to a global competition running across fifty countries with thousands of participants each year.

Julia’s reflection on that arc is worth sitting with: the original ideas were not good. What she and co-founder Ian turned out to be skilled at was recognizing the opportunities that appeared as things evolved and saying yes to them even when they had no prior experience in that area. An event manager hired them to bring studios to a conference. They did not do that yet, but they figured it out. A government agency wanted an accelerator program. They built one. The business that exists today grew out of saying yes to those opportunities, not from executing a plan they had written at the start.

Why Indie Hero Exists and What It Actually Does:

Indie Hero was created specifically to be a commercial engine for the ecosystem that Game Jam Plus was building. The original model was intermediation: connecting publishers and investors with studios and taking a cut of the deals that resulted.

In five years, they closed five deals. The revenue from those deals was negligible. The model did not work.

What they learned from watching those deals fail was that the problem was not access to publishers. The problem was that the studios were not ready. Pitch decks were poorly constructed. Business models did not hold up to basic scrutiny. A studio asking for three hundred thousand dollars to make a game whose best-case comparable sold three hundred thousand dollars total had not done the math. Indie Hero started running classes to fix those fundamentals, teaching pitch deck construction, financial modeling, and the basics of how publishing deals actually work.

From there, the business continued to evolve:

• Government agencies hired Indie Hero to run accelerator and incubation programs for game studios
• Event managers hired them to organize B2B events and bring qualified studios to conferences
• The Brazilian Game Festival grew to sixty-five thousand attendees
• B2B events were built with MeetToMatch infrastructure to manage the matchmaking between studios, publishers, and investors
• A small publishing label was added two years ago when Julia realized the knowledge developers needed was available but they were not willing to use it themselves

The Publishing Label and What It Has Taught Her About Self-Publishing:

The publishing operation started from a specific frustration. Julia had spent years pointing developers toward publicly available resources, the Steam documentation, how-to-market-a-game websites, the IndieGameBusiness® community, and watching most of them ignore those resources and insist on finding a traditional publisher instead.

When a developer told her he would give her a share of his game if she did the publishing work herself, she took the deal. The label launched. Two years in, it has published approximately twenty games with ten more lined up to launch in the near term. Games have sold thirty to forty thousand copies. The operation is close to breaking even. None of the games are large budget productions. Most cost a thousand to two thousand dollars to make and are designed to generate a positive return on that investment rather than to be breakout hits.

The studios she signs tend to be games that would never find a traditional publisher, not because the games are bad, but because traditional publishers are not structured to work with small, niche titles that will sell a modest but real number of copies. A game that sells thirty thousand copies to a dedicated niche audience is a success for a micro-publisher. It does not fit the acquisition criteria of a publisher looking for titles with million-copy potential.

One standout example: a studio from Italy received a grant of approximately half a million euros from the government to build a beautiful open-world adventure game. Two years of searching for a publisher produced nothing. The game was too close to The Legend of Zelda’s territory for any publisher to take a chance on it commercially. Indie Hero signed it, brought in PR partners in Japan and Europe, hired influencers in Asia, and is handling Latin distribution directly. The budget for the entire marketing operation is small. It still made more sense for the Italian studio than two more years of rejection.

What the Steam Documentation Actually Contains and Why Developers Do Not Read It:

One of the most consistent themes in Julia’s work with developers across all of her programs is the gap between what developers know about the platforms they are launching on and what is publicly available in those platforms’ own documentation.

She asks developers the same question in every talk she gives: how many of you have read the Steam documentation? In a room of fifty developers, she typically sees one hand.

Steam drives approximately fifty percent of sales for most indie games. The documentation covers how the algorithm works, how the platform surfaces games to new players, how tags and keywords affect discoverability, and how the recommendation system responds to different player behaviors. That information is updated every six months and is publicly accessible. Most developers launching on Steam have not read it.

Julia’s characterization of what she has learned from actually reading and applying that documentation:

• Understanding the Steam algorithm is more valuable than spending money on influencers. Influencer campaigns she has run have accounted for as little as five percent of total sales on some titles.
• Getting tags, keywords, and localization right consistently outperforms paid promotion in terms of return on effort.
• Localization is not just translation. The way a game is sold in Germany requires different framing than the way it is sold in the United States. In Brazil, games without meme content underperform with local audiences.
• Steam behaves differently from social platforms like Instagram. Rather than daily algorithmic distribution, Steam functions on peaks. When a large number of players engage with a game at the same time, the algorithm amplifies that activity disproportionately. Campaigns that concentrate engagement in short windows rather than spreading it across weeks produce better results.

A-B Testing Thumbnails Before Steam Next Fest:

One of the most concrete and immediately actionable things Julia shared was her approach to Steam thumbnails, which she described as something almost no developer in the indie space was doing before campaigns, despite it being standard practice in every other content industry.

Before submitting a game to Steam Next Fest, Julia runs A-B tests on five different thumbnail variations, putting each through paid ads to measure which version converts better at a click level before committing to a campaign. The difference between the best and worst-performing thumbnail often appears small, but the compounding effect inside Steam’s algorithm means a thumbnail that converts at a slightly higher rate produces meaningfully better outcomes when the Next Fest traffic peaks hit.

She referenced The Diary of the CEO podcast, which tests between one hundred and two hundred thumbnail variations before publishing a single episode. That level of testing feels extreme in the games context, but her point is that even testing five variants is being held up as unusual in the indie game space. The bar is very low. Basic testing discipline alone puts a developer ahead of most competitors.

The variables worth testing according to her experience:

• Warm versus cold color palettes and which performs better for the specific genre
• Two-dimensional versus three-dimensional art representation of the game in the thumbnail
• Character-forward versus environment-forward thumbnail composition
• Whether text overlays on thumbnails help or hurt conversion for the target audience

How to Get Reviews in the First Twenty Four Hours:

Launch-day reviews are one of the clearest signals Steam uses to determine how aggressively to surface a new game. Julia’s approach to generating early reviews is not a paid strategy. It is a community strategy built over the months before launch.

Her logic is direct: if a developer has built a genuine community around their game, even a small one of a hundred engaged Discord members, those people already care about the game succeeding. They are not passive followers. They are active participants who have been watching development, providing feedback, and identifying with the project. If those people are asked directly and personally to leave a review on launch day, most of them will do it.

A developer who coordinates that request thoughtfully, aligning timing across their community so reviews land in a concentrated window, can generate a meaningful number of reviews in the first day through community alone. That initial burst of concentrated review activity sends a strong signal to the Steam algorithm at exactly the moment when the game is most visible.

The underlying requirement is that the community needs to exist before launch. Building community is not a launch-week activity. It is a development-period activity. Developers who arrive at launch without a community have no base to activate and are dependent on organic discovery alone, which puts them at a structural disadvantage in the early hours when Steam’s algorithm is forming its initial read on the game’s momentum.

Whether GTA VI Is a Threat to Indie Publishers:

Jay asked directly whether Grand Theft Auto VI’s release represents a threat to the indie games Julia publishes. Her answer was grounded in how she actually thinks about market competition.

She is not trying to sell a million copies of anything. The games her label works with are targeting thirty to fifty thousand copies sold to audiences who are specifically interested in those genres. A player who is deeply attached to horror games or a specific niche genre is not going to stop buying games in that niche because Grand Theft Auto VI released. The audience overlap is minimal.

Her concern is not with titles directly competing in the same genre. Her concern is with large general-audience games that might pull casual players away from browsing new titles during a specific window. For a niche indie game with a dedicated audience, the release calendar impact of a cultural phenomenon like GTA VI is real but limited.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Juliana and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Quit Your Job to Make Games? – What Charlie Brandick Learned Going From Teacher to Valorant Game Director to Indie Founder:

A lot of people want to quit their job and make games. Fewer people think carefully about what that actually requires before they do it. Charlie Brandick, founder of Quetzal-Core Games, has been on both sides of that decision, spending over a decade moving from elementary school teacher to junior game designer to Valorant game director before stepping out to build his own studio.

He joined Dan Long on the IndieGameBusiness® podcast to talk about what he knows now that he wishes he had known at the start, what the games industry actually requires of people who want to work in it professionally, and what separates developers who build something that lasts from those who burn out or stall out before they finish.

Passion for Games Is Not the Same as Doing It as a Job:

The first thing Charlie addressed directly is the gap between loving games and being prepared to make them professionally. His point is not that passion does not matter but that passion alone does not translate into the skills and habits the work actually demands.

When you are passionate about something, you can pick it up and put it down. You can be as excited about it as you want on your own terms. When it is a job, you need to plan. You need to execute. You need to collaborate. You need to manage time, people, budgets, documentation, and scope. None of that disappears just because the thing you are building is a game.

He named a few things developers commonly bring into their early outreach that signal they have not yet made this shift:

• Saying you are passionate about games on a resume. Everyone applying for a games job is passionate about games. It is not a differentiator.
• Claiming you have a great idea. Everyone working on a project believes their idea is great. What matters is whether you can execute on it and what tangible skills you bring to a team.
• Saying you have been a gamer since childhood. Being a longtime player does not translate into being able to build, ship, or maintain a game professionally.

What does matter is being able to point to something concrete: a completed game jam project, a working prototype, experience organizing people under pressure, skills that transfer from another field. Charlie’s background in audio production and Photoshop gave him immediate contributions to make at Seismic even before he had formal game development experience. His organizational habits and people skills from teaching turned out to matter just as much as technical ability once he was inside a studio.

Work on Other People’s Projects Before Your Own:

One of Charlie’s most consistent pieces of advice is something many aspiring developers resist: before you try to recruit people to your project, go work on someone else’s.

His reasoning is practical. Everyone in early game development has their own idea they are excited about. Walking into that community and expecting others to get excited about your idea, do your work, and subordinate their own projects to yours is a misread of how the community actually operates. The people who build real relationships and accumulate real skills early on tend to be the ones who show up and offer help first.

That is how Charlie got in. He did not start with his own project. He found someone working on something and offered his time. He did not get paid. He learned. The skills he picked up in that experience, Git, Unity, how development teams actually structure work, turned out to be the exact skills the studio later asked him about in what turned out to be a job interview.

Beyond getting in, working on other people’s projects exposes you to habits and systems you would never develop on your own:

• How other teams structure their Unity hierarchies and why it matters for collaboration
• How experienced developers handle Git commits, naming conventions, and version control in a way that makes large codebases searchable and manageable
• How different people run meetings, write documentation, and organize files, showing you both what works and what to avoid
• How teams handle scope, disagreement, and failure, which are skills you can only learn by being in the room when those things happen

Charlie’s wife, a technical rigger with AAA experience, looked at how his team was handling Git commits on the current Quetzal-Core project and suggested a simple bracket-based naming convention that made the history dramatically easier to search. She learned it at her job. He adopted it immediately. That kind of knowledge transfer only happens when you are actively working with people who have more experience in a specific area than you do.

Understanding Platforms Before You Commit to One:

Charlie has developed on practically every platform available: mobile, VR, AR, PC, console, theme park rides, and AAA titles. That breadth gave him a clear-eyed view of what each platform actually demands and where the realistic audiences for each live.

His take on platform choice for developers trying to reach the largest number of people is straightforward: go where people already are. Players already have phones, computers, tablets, and consoles. The barrier to playing something on those platforms is essentially zero. Newer or more experimental platforms, VR and AR in particular, carry structural barriers that are not about the quality of the games but about the hardware, the setup requirements, the physical toll, and the affordability of the experience.

He described VR as persistently five years away and AR in games as even further out from mass adoption. His view is not that these platforms are bad but that developers who want to work in those spaces need to be motivated by a genuine belief in the platform itself, not just a desire to make a game. If the platform does not have the carrying capacity to sustain itself, there is no future for games built on it regardless of quality. Making a game that brings new people to VR is a different, harder, and more valuable goal than making the game you personally want to play in VR.

When to Seek a Publisher Versus Self-Publishing:

A question that came in during the live session asked when a small team or solo developer should seek a publisher versus self-publishing. Charlie gave a thoughtful answer that resisted a simple formula.

His starting point was that the right answer depends on what you have and what you understand about your market. Before you can make a meaningful decision about publishing, you need to be able to answer a set of questions honestly:

• Who are your market comparables and how many copies do those games sell?
• What is the realistic market size for your genre and audience?
• What is the typical time to market for games in your category?
• How often do comparable games update after launch and what does that require from the team?
• Do you have the ability to do user acquisition or run a soft launch in a small region to gather early feedback?
• What needs to be true visually or interactively for someone to understand your vision well enough to fund it?

For some games, a handful of strong screenshots and a clear comp set are enough to communicate the vision to a publisher. For others, especially puzzle games or experiences with mechanics that are hard to read in static images, a playable demo is not optional. A publisher considering funding a project needs to be able to understand and get excited about the vision, and whatever you show them needs to be enough for that to happen.

He also pointed to a growing trend in the indie space: building a compressed vertical slice or mock gameplay footage in a short window, then spending five to fifteen thousand dollars marketing it through platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and jester.gg to test wishlist response before committing to full production. This approach treats early marketing as product research rather than promotion, giving developers real market signal before they have invested years of work.

His core recommendation regardless of which path a developer chooses: talk to people who do this for a living. Marketing firms, publishers, fellow developers, community members with relevant experience. Gather multiple perspectives, ask specific questions, and make a judgment call based on actual information rather than assumption.

Having Realistic Expectations of the People Working With You:

One of the most human parts of the conversation was Charlie’s advice on working with collaborators, especially in early development when monetary compensation is not yet in the picture.

His central point is that every person working on a project has a life outside of it with real needs, real constraints, and real circumstances that change over time. A developer who recruits collaborators without thinking carefully about what those people actually need to sustain their involvement will eventually find themselves abandoned, and the departure will feel sudden even though the conditions that caused it were visible the whole time.

Specific guidance he shared:

• Do not try to recruit someone who tells you they need health benefits and stable income if you cannot provide those things. They may get excited in the short term, but they will leave the moment a paying opportunity appears.
• Check in regularly with anyone working without monetary compensation. Ask how they are doing, whether their availability has changed, and whether the project is still a realistic fit for them.
• Be genuinely grateful for the time people give you. Someone helping out of belief in the project is offering something that is not contractually obligated, and treating it as though it is will erode the relationship.
• When something goes wrong or someone leaves, examine whether your expectations were realistic before concluding that the other person failed.

He reflected on his own early career tendencies: high expectations of the people around him, frustration when those expectations were not met, and a slow realization that not everyone had the same skill breadth he had built up and that expecting them to perform as though they did was not fair. His approach now is to identify what a person does well, support them through their weaknesses, and look for opportunities to help them grow rather than measuring them against a fixed standard.

The Advice Charlie Wishes He Had Received at the Start:

Asked what he would tell his earlier self about the game development journey, Charlie returned to the theme of understanding where other people actually are rather than measuring them against your own expectations or experience.

Everyone in game development is trying hard. Sometimes that is not enough, and that is okay. Sometimes it is exactly enough, and you need to be grateful for it. Sometimes it exceeds what you expected, and you need to temper your assumptions accordingly.

His closing advice for anyone starting out or considering making the leap:

• Reach out to people. Reach out to fellow developers, community members, people whose work you admire. Ask questions and actually listen to the answers.
• Be excited about other people’s ideas, not just your own. The developers who get the most out of early-stage communities are the ones who show up to help, not just to recruit.
• Give more than you receive. When working with collaborators, aim to give them the better end of the deal. The relationships you build that way are the ones that actually hold together under pressure.
• Know what you know and know what you do not know. Being honest about your gaps is not a weakness. It is what lets you fill them.
• Support people through their struggles rather than around them. The most important thing in collaborative work is taking care of each other as people first.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Charlie and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Why indie games fail – The Marketing Framework Every Indie Developer Needs to Understand:

Bayonetta launched in January 2010 with a Metacritic score of ninety percent, a five-and-a-half-million-dollar marketing budget, and the backing of a legendary developer in Platinum Games. It sold three hundred and forty-three thousand units in its first six months. Dante’s Inferno, a game with a Metacritic score of seventy-three and a smaller budget, moved seven hundred and eighty thousand units in the same window.

The uncomfortable question is obvious: why did the best game lose?

Darren Williams spent years inside Sega’s marketing operation and was directly responsible for the Bayonetta campaign. He has since founded MinMax Game Consulting and joined Dan Long on the IndieGameBusiness® podcast podcast to walk through a condensed version of the postmortem he wrote after Bayonetta’s launch. What came out of that conversation is one of the most detailed, honest breakdowns of why games fail commercially despite being genuinely excellent, and what developers at every scale can do differently.

The Awareness Trap – Why High Visibility Did Not Translate to Sales:

One of the first things Darren shared was a metric that should have been good news: by launch day, Bayonetta had the highest awareness of the three competing games. GameSpot page views on release day showed almost one hundred and forty thousand views for Bayonetta, compared to around one hundred thousand for Dante’s Inferno and sixty thousand for Darksiders.

The problem was purchase intent. When tracking a proto-wishlist metric available on GameSpot at the time, showing how many users opted into receiving updates about a game, the picture flipped completely. Dante’s Inferno and Darksiders consistently converted awareness spikes into purchase intent spikes. Every major marketing beat they had sent measurable numbers of people into the opt-in funnel. Bayonetta’s purchase intent stayed nearly flat despite its awareness growing.

The conclusion Darren drew from this data is one that applies directly to how indie developers often think about marketing:

• Awareness alone is not a success metric
• High awareness with low purchase intent means you are reaching the wrong audience or saying the wrong thing to the right audience
• Nine out of ten games with the highest awareness sometimes sell the fewest copies
• Steam wishlists are a reasonable proxy for purchase intent, but they require the same scrutiny. Wishlist numbers that do not convert at launch often signal a messaging or targeting failure, not a quality problem

The Diffusion Curve and Why It Still Matters:

Darren’s presentation is built on a framework rooted in Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory from 1962, applied to games marketing through the lens of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. The core concept is that any market is made up of distinct audience segments that adopt new products in sequence, and that each segment has fundamentally different motivations, behaviors, and ways of responding to marketing.

The five segments Rogers identified are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. For the purposes of game marketing, Darren focused on the first four:

• Innovators are the first people to try anything new. They are driven by curiosity rather than social proof. They love technical details, benchmarks, and behind-the-scenes content. They believe themselves immune to marketing influence, which means obvious promotional content tends to repel them. They live in niche communities and self-identify as being ahead of the market.
• Early adopters are the tastemakers. They adopt new things because it reinforces their self-image as visionaries who are ahead of the curve. They respond to content that frames a game as something worth being associated with early, something that conveys performance advantage or social standing. They create content, share opinions, and provide the word of mouth that reaches the next group.
• Early majority are pragmatists. They follow buzz, check review scores, and respond to social proof. They are not following a game from announcement to launch. They hear about it from people they trust, look for validation from critics and communities, and need to feel that the decision to buy is a safe one. This is where the majority of commercial success lives.
• Late majority are conservative consumers who follow established brands and popular opinion. They buy what they know or what everyone else is playing. They respond to popularity as a form of social proof and are most likely to be motivated by price, value editions, and the feeling that they are joining something that already has momentum.

The Chasm and Why It Destroyed Bayonetta’s Campaign:

Geoffrey Moore’s central insight, which Darren applied directly to the Bayonetta postmortem, is that the transition from the innovator and early adopter segments to the early majority is not natural or automatic. There is a chasm between these groups that most campaigns fail to cross.

The reason is that what appeals to innovators actively repels the early majority. Innovators want technical detail and the feeling of exclusivity. The early majority wants social proof and reassurance that the decision is safe. A campaign that speaks to both simultaneously often fails to reach either effectively.

Bayonetta’s campaign leaned heavily into its quality and its association with Platinum Games, a beloved studio. That messaging resonated with people who already knew why Platinum Games mattered. It did not give the early majority a reason to care. Dante’s Inferno, which was built on an existing literary IP, had a built-in cultural reference point that the early majority could latch onto without needing prior knowledge of the developer.

The lesson Darren draws from this is not that Bayonetta failed because it was too niche. It failed because its campaign did not shift messaging at the right moment to cross the chasm. Darksiders had an additional advantage: pre-existing comic book IP attached to Todd McFarlane generated early purchase intent before the game was even officially announced. That is why Darksiders appeared to start with unusually high wishlist-equivalent numbers from the beginning.

What a Campaign Actually Is and What It Is Not:

Darren was direct about a pattern he sees constantly in developer marketing, including at large publishers: treating tactics as campaigns.

A tweet is not a campaign. A Discord announcement is not a campaign. A single influencer video is not a campaign. A campaign is a sequential series of steps, each one designed to build on the previous one and move a specific segment of the market toward purchase intent and then conversion.

The sequence Darren described for a well-structured campaign looks roughly like this:

• Target innovators first with detailed, behind-the-scenes, technically rich content. Animation tests, rejected character designs, early wireframes, quirky bugs. Anything that gives this group the sense of being invited backstage.
• As that group forms and starts generating conversation, shift toward content that frames the game as something worth being associated with early. This is where early adopter content lives: benefit-focused, vision-forward, status-relevant.
• Once you have sufficient word of mouth building from the first two groups, shift toward social proof content. Review scores, quote cards, coverage from press, evidence that the game has momentum. This is the bridge to the early majority.
• The early majority needs to feel that the decision to buy is validated by people they trust. If you have not done the work in the earlier stages, the early majority will not cross the gap regardless of how good the game is.

The specific timing of when to shift messaging is difficult to quantify precisely. Darren acknowledged this is more art than science. But the principle is clear: treating the entire marketing period as one undifferentiated push with a single consistent message will reach some of your audience and miss the rest.

The Problem With Chasing Awareness Over Purchase Intent:

One of the most counterintuitive things Darren shared is that Bayonetta’s highest awareness numbers came at exactly the wrong time: launch day. That spike was driven by review coverage, which landed on launch day as it typically does. By that point, the purchase intent work should already have been done during the campaign leading up to launch.

A developer who watches their wishlists closely and sees good numbers heading into launch, then assumes conversion will follow automatically, is making the same mistake Sega made with Bayonetta. Wishlists show that your early adopter and innovator work is landing. They do not guarantee that the message has crossed the chasm to the early majority who make up the bulk of the market.

Darren pointed to Black Panther as a positive counterexample. Marvel understood that the early majority needed different content than the innovators and early adopters. At Comic-Con, they would show roadmaps and exclusive footage to hall audiences of ten thousand passionate fans, then hold that material for days before releasing it publicly. The delay was deliberate: it allowed the most engaged segment of the market to create the word of mouth that would then travel up the curve to broader audiences.

What Sega Did Differently After Bayonetta:

After the Bayonetta postmortem, Sega made changes to how they marketed games. Darren listed the results that followed:

• Sonic Colors: seventy-eight percent Metacritic, three point three million units
• Aliens vs. Predator: known IP, two point one million units
• Alpha Protocol: a new RPG IP with seventy-two percent Metacritic, one million units
• Sonic Generations: four point one million units, driven by finally understanding what Sonic fans actually wanted

The Sonic Generations case is particularly instructive. Sega had spent years making Sonic games that alienated the core audience, giving Sonic guns, open worlds, and mechanics that did not fit what the brand meant to people. The postmortem mindset that followed Bayonetta pushed the team to ask what Sonic fans actually valued, then deliver that rather than what the studio wanted to experiment with.

Practical Advice for Solo Developers and Small Studios:

Dan asked Darren directly: what do you tell a solo developer or small team with zero or close to zero marketing budget?

Darren’s answer focused on two things: finding a clear message and delivering it to the right people first.

His practical starting points:

• Practice your elevator pitch until you can explain your game’s emotional proposition in twenty seconds or less. Not features. Not mechanics. The feeling or idea that makes the game worth caring about. The original Gears of War pitch was linebackers in space with chainsaws. That is enough to provoke thought.
• Do not try to answer every question about your game in your marketing. Try to provoke questions instead. Content that makes someone think, wait, what does that mean, is more valuable than content that explains everything.
• Talk to fellow developers before you start broadcasting. Refine your message through real conversations before you commit to a public campaign direction.
• Do not chase uniqueness as a goal in itself. Uniqueness that confuses people is not a strength. Have a clear message that is intended for the audience you are trying to reach, then deliver it consistently.
• Lean into what you actually are. Indie developers have an authenticity advantage that large studios cannot replicate. An honest, opinionated, personality-driven presence on social media will reach innovators and early adopters far more effectively than polished promotional content that looks like everyone else’s.
• Speed is your structural advantage. A large studio has to route everything through approval processes. You can respond, iterate, and post the same day. Use that.

Darren pointed to Joe Game Dev on social media as a practical example of someone doing this right: original opinions, process documentation, personal perspective, and consistency. Not every post about the game itself, but a voice that people follow because it is interesting and distinct.

Four Books Worth Reading Before Your Next Campaign:

Darren closed his presentation with a short reading list for developers who want to go deeper on the frameworks he covered:

• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, which is the core text for understanding how products move from niche adoption to mass market success
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, which covers how ideas and products reach critical mass and what causes them to spread
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin, which is about differentiation and why being remarkable is the only marketing strategy that survives in a crowded market
• A fourth book focused on messaging, which Darren mentioned was not covered in detail during the session but is available for discussion through his consultancy

How to Connect With Darren Williams and MinMax Game Consulting:

Darren Williams is the founder and CEO of MinMax Game Consulting. His background spans QA at MicroProse, brand management at THQ, eight and a half years at Sega including the Bayonetta campaign, time at Unity, Havoc, Harmonix working on Rock Band, high-end book publishing, Glu Mobile, EA, and Two K where he worked on Civilization and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. He now consults with studios of all sizes, with a particular focus on mentorship and helping developers understand marketing at a structural level.

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