Silksong has sent ripples through the indie game world simply by existing. Just last week, all manner of mice and men were on the verge of deploying their best laid plans, but now with the long-dormant juggernaut suddenly days away from release, everyone else has run for the hills – even bigger names like Baby Steps, the new game from Getting Over It creator Bennett Foddy, and Demonschool, a promising-looking Persona-esque tactics RPG by a team of indie vets. These games are nothing like Silksong; were they really in danger of getting steamrolled? On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk to Demonschool’s creative director about retreating and living to fight another day.
This time around, we’re joined by Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft to discuss the aforementioned delay and the climate surrounding it. While Demonschool’s publisher, rather than development team, ultimately made the call, they’re far from alone in rolling out the red carpet for the long-awaited indie darling and then sprinting full force in the opposite direction. Will Silksong really suck all the air out of the room, though? Or are developers overreacting?
Then we talk about two pieces of news in what has proven to be a banner week for unions: IGN workers, worn down after multiple rounds of layoffs, have resolved to do their jobs – and no more – for the next six months. Meanwhile, the hundreds-strong dev team behind Diablo has formed a union of their own, and they’re hoping to secure layoff and AI protections, as well as pay equity. Finally, we reminisce about the last time we dug a hole.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can dig an even deeper hole.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: Y’all’s publisher made the announcement that Demonschool was delayed, and the impression I got is that that was not necessarily your preferred decision.
Brandon: Yeah, we had a discussion with them about it, so they didn’t just blindside us. We talked about it, and I was more in favor of staying, but I understand why they wanted to move. Our game, Demonschool, is an RPG, basically. It’s an RPG with tactical battles, so you could argue that it doesn’t intersect with Silksong – which is sort of what I was arguing [with the publisher]. But the fact is, if you want to make decent money off your game – which, at this point, when you’ve been working on it for a bunch of years, you have to. I wish we didn’t live in a capitalist society, but guess what? We do. So I’ve gotta make a certain amount of money, we’re gonna run out of money, etc.
If you want to [make money], your best shot is at being the indie game of the week that is getting discussed. And if that doesn’t happen, you’ll lose out on all the curious people.
Nathan: There’s that whole school of thought that if you’re not competing directly with a game genre-wise on Steam, then you’re not necessarily in the clear, but you’re probably OK. For the piece I wrote last week about people contemplating delaying their games, I talked to Simon Carless, who does a lot of analysis of Steam and discoverability more generally, and that was his larger thesis. He was like “Well, I think that indies sort of overrate how important your release window is, especially relative to other games.” If Demonschool was a Metroidvania, that’d be one thing, but why delay something like Demonschool, which is substantially different than Silksong if conventional wisdom – at least from one guy who looks at a lot of numbers – is that you don’t necessarily need to?
Brandon: One of the weird things about games is, not that many other industries do this thing where we try to get out of each others’ way. So there’s an argument that maybe you don’t have to. Film industry does it. Books don’t. Music doesn’t. But games are really long; they take a lot of time. So mindshare can last a long time. And like I said, it is ultimately about the people who are just curious. You want to break out into people who like games in general – not just the genre fans. The people who like games in general are gonna be looking at the most popular thing at that time.
But I felt like, yeah, maybe people could buy two games. Maybe there’s people who don’t want to play Silksong. Maybe there’s people who want to play something else, and maybe it’s a good opportunity for us to be that other thing. But the problem is, you can’t prove any of those without A/B testing it, which you can’t do, because you either release it or you don’t.
It’s hard to know what to do, so you’ve just gotta use your best judgement and your best guess. And in a way, the delay is good for us. It’s annoying, but in a way it’s good because the publisher’s paying for it, so we get paid for a little longer, and we’re able to really polish stuff.
Nathan: I remember, last week especially, when the first delay announcements were starting to trickle in, some people were saying, “Oh, developers don’t seriously think they need to delay their games; they’re just doing it for the free press. They’re doing it because it will get them mentioned in articles alongside Silksong, and then they’ll gain more visibility.” My impression is that that was not really the case?
Brandon: Nobody was doing that. The gains you get from that are so minimal compared to anything else, like a Steam Next Fest or something. Announcing a delay is not a positive news beat. We got some wishlists out of it, and we tried to turn it into a positive, but what you wind up getting on social media is a bunch of people dumping on you, basically. There were a lot of people who were nice about it, but it’s hard not to focus on the ones who are saying mean things or being like “I don’t care.” There’s the whole spectrum of stuff you get from existing on the internet. So I don’t think it would be anybody’s first choice as a promotional vehicle.
Nathan: It also goes back to what you were saying earlier, where you kind of naturally incur more costs if you delay, because that’s time that you’re not making money off the release.
Brandon: Yeah, and it’s more copies that we have to sell. The more the game costs, the more we have to make back in order to break even. That’s also a factor, and that’s why we try to self-fund as much as possible as well, so that we don’t have to have a big amount to recoup. It’s very scary. When you have a publisher, you’re not going into actual debt, because they’re paying for it, and if it doesn’t sell, they’re on the hook for that.
But there is an emotional debt that at least I feel, where I feel a responsibility to make that money back. And maybe that’s weird and naive, but I just want to do right by people who have tried to believe in me and the team, and I want them to succeed as well off of this. And so we’ve gotta sell 100,000 copies to break even.
Nathan: Is that the real number, or just a hypothetical one?
Brandon: That’s a real number.
Nathan: Wow, that’s a lot of copies.
Brandon: We’ve been working on it a long time! When you’ve got a team of five-to-seven people, and they make a bare-minimum-to-survive-in-a-city type of wage, that’s a lot of multiplication that you do on numbers to keep that thing going.
Nathan: Then you have to take into account the overall economics of Steam. How many games these days sell that number of copies? It can’t be a lot.
Brandon: It’s not. There’s a lot of pressure to make sure you’re presenting the game in the way that will sell the most, because there’s so much to make back – so many copies you have to sell. Obviously the first thing you have to do is make the game good, but then there’s so much other stuff around that that has to happen in order for your game to be seen and positioned in such a way that people will know to buy it, know that they want to buy it, know that it exists at all.
It’s frustrating because we’ve really tried very hard to let people know that this game exists, but all the promotional vehicles have scattered to the four winds. It used to be that you could go viral on Twitter, and there you’d be. Now Twitter’s a nazi hellscape. Someone can do great on TikTok, but you can’t manufacture that; someone who’s already popular has to pick you up and do something cool. There’s all this nonsense that you have to think about.
