BLUMGI: My journey on the web — how I reached 100M players in 2 years as an indie game developer
From office to kitchen to beach — My story from a full-time job in a gaming studio to finding success as a solo indie developer on the Web!
After 15 years as an employee in animation and gaming and some success with mobile games that I co-created with some fantastic people (Stickman Hook, Drag’N’Boom, King Tongue…), a question was increasingly occupying my mind:
What if I was able to work on my own games without having to ask permission from anyone? To work from wherever I want? To manage my time as I want? While earning enough money so my family doesn’t have to go without because of my choices?
I had a good job and was working with cool and talented people, but if I were to start my own company, it would be alone at first to limit the risks and so I could see what I was capable of.
The challenges:
> Would I be able to create a game from A to Z when I have always worked in a team?
> How do I get players to discover my games without a marketing budget and no notoriety?
> How can I manage both creation and all the ancillary tasks alone? (Monetization, QA, Marketing, UA)
> How will I generate enough money with my games before exhausting all my savings?
The answer to all these questions for me was Poki.
Discovering Poki
I heard about Poki for the first time through my friend Colin Lane, who was an independent mobile dev at the time, and whose path I so admired. It was going well for him on mobile, and he was starting to port his games to a web platform I did not know (Poki). He seemed very happy with the collaboration both personally and financially.
When Stickman Hook, which I co-created at Madbox, exploded on mobile, I contacted Joep from Poki via Twitter to learn more about the web market. Another team at Madbox did the HTML5 porting and the game quickly became a success on Poki. Madbox then started porting other games from their catalog to the platform.
3 years later, when I decided to leave my salaried job and set up my small gaming studio, I had a well-thought-out strategy and editorial line:
My strengths are having game ideas easily and developing in techniques from my previous experiences in animation and gaming, which are both very quick to implement and with great value perceived by the players. A positive production time / perceived value ratio.
If I could produce a catalog of small, fun, and beautiful games quickly, and if, while working on a new game, the old ones continued to earn money over time, at some point I would accumulate enough revenue to pay myself a salary… hoping that my savings would hold until then.
I would spread the risk across several games while keeping them technically simple as I’m not a good programmer and get bored quickly in general. Therefore, chaining multiple small games would allow me to test new ideas often and feel that I am progressing technically. I might also find a way to make the games reinforce each other. Create links between the games so that when players discover one, they discover the others, and thus create a snowball effect?
I could visualize my creative dynamics well, but I did not yet know on which gaming platform I was going to start:
> Mobile? Saturated, very hard to gain visibility alone.
> Steam or Console? No experience. Too risky to take the time to learn this market from scratch.
So, why not Poki?
Working with Poki
On their site, I saw a lot of mobile game ports, a market I knew well. They had many players, an easy-to-use monetization system, and respect for players with ads that don’t take over the gameplay. Madbox was delighted with the collaboration with Poki during these three years and I was looking for human-sized partners with whom I could build a relationship of trust over time. Seemed to be a fit.
I wrote to Poki and asked if I could come to meet them in Amsterdam at their offices. Nothing beats it to see if we fit together both as people and in terms of business. A few weeks later, I landed in the Netherlands with my approximate English. It was lunchtime when I arrived, and I was invited to join the team at the table. We immediately got along well :)
It’s been almost 2 years since we’ve been working together. I create the games, they do the rest, and we share the revenue. As I write this, I have released six games that I love and am proud of on Poki which are being enjoyed by players worldwide. My games have now been played more than 100M times and generate income that allows me to live comfortably. I regularly visit the team who I have a great relationship of trust and friendship with and the community of developers who make games for Poki is also very nice, with a lot of sharing and mutual aid.
I meet more and more Steam or mobile devs who are surprised that I can make a living by making such small games. My starting strategy worked, I produced quickly. My oldest games continue to be played even though I no longer work on them daily. When I release a new game, they benefit from a visibility bonus and the entire catalog receives new players. Over time, the total number of players of my games increases as does my revenue. The more games I release, the more this dynamic accelerates.
The web today is not well known to indie devs. It is a gaming platform with its own rules; you need to understand the audience and assimilate technical constraints. However, I see it as a great playground to explore where I think there is still plenty of room to innovate. There is not only one way to succeed either. On Poki, different successful games coexist, whether it’s 3D multiplayer online FPS with regular updates, simple little arcade games like mine, and many others.
I am lucky to have found a place at Poki where I feel good, with players who naturally enjoy the games I like to create. There’s the added benefit of not having to chase funding between each game and being able to focus on what I love the most: creating.
The Future
I like to compare Blumgi to an archipelago where each game is an island, and side by side, they create something bigger and more visible in the midst of the ocean.
In the years to come, I wish to add new islands to my archipelago, both tiny islands and larger ones, sometimes alone and sometimes in collaboration with people whose work I admire. I aim to create a nice place to explore for both players and game makers.
I am super excited to see what the web will become in the coming years as a gaming platform and am thrilled to be part of the explorers alongside Poki.
Thank you for reading!
