Dark Blue Monkey talks with an Indie Team about their experience of going through Kickstarter, being a boss, releasing on Steam, and why they’ll never ever do it again.
Our guest today went through the full Indie Dev experience; working full time, doing a Kickstarter campaign, hiring a developer, and then finally releasing onto Steam.
While this may seem like the ultimate dream for most of us, unfortunately for the team the experience proved to be far from the utopia we imagine it to be. Just as their project reached fruition, they fell victim to the now infamous review bombing while the game was still in early release, still at launch price.
Trying to do the right thing, they tried to sidestep the clunkiness of Steam’s forums and help players directly who were having problems by giving them access to Skype and email. This resulted in mounting numbers of unpleasant messages following them into the real world. For this reason, they’ve chosen to share their experience anonymously.
This is a tale of caution, and hopefully will help any aspiring indie developers to avoid the same pitfalls.
