Business Update & Service Announcement – May 2024
TLDR – This is a text summary of a video we’ve recently published on our YouTube channel. If you’d rather read, scroll past the video below.
It’s time I gave an update on our operations since we haven’t put out any content on our channel for over a year.
I will begin by talking about what we have been up to and continue by giving some facts about the industry we are in. Finally, I’d like to discuss what is coming down the pipe for Viroid Games. Let’s get started.
Summary of Operations
For longer than a year, our game projects have been on hold because of limited resources, mainly the team size and lack of funding.
Securing funding was going to be possible if we could prove a functional team capable of executing our projects. This turned out to be a slippery slope. Building a team takes time, and that eats into the finances that are needed to run the projects. It is a simple, yet real contradiction.
A decision had to be made to sort out this situation. It became more and more obvious that we could outsource our talent while still waiting for funding to clear. Unfortunately, since we made the decision, the financial landscape has also been changing for the gaming industry. We will look at this in the next section.
As far as our operations go, we have switched to functioning as an outsourcing agency. For the foreseeable future, developing our own IPs will have to wait. In the meantime, we are more than happy undertaking other teams’ burden on their art and business needs.
Before we dive into what is next for Viroid Games, let’s check out the state of the industry we are in.
State of the Industry
Things have not been going well in the tech world. According to layoffs.fyi, we witnessed the layoff of more than a quarter of a million people in 2023. The situation has been no better after the first 4 months of 2024 either.
The statistics that compiled these numbers included layoffs in the gaming industry as part of the tech industry layoffs. Although reason would dictate that we keep the numbers separate per industry, it highlights a systemic problem among many industries.
The COVID hiring craze and easy money are gone.
The increase in hiring was because of an increased demand for entertainment while people were waiting out for the crisis to settle. As of 2024, more people have turned back to conventional types of entertainment like concerts, restaurants, sports, etc. Spending on games is no longer everybody’s highest priority. This directly affects employees who got hired for expediting projects, and comparing the numbers to 2023, the rest of 2024 looks like it’ll be par for the course.
And yet, more particularly in a different category, there is another story going on.
This chart represents the number of games released on Steam over the last several years broken down by quarters. As you can see, year after year, the release of new games has not slowed down. That blue dot I circled is where we are now, after the first quarter of 2024.
Although spending is slowing down, and the price of games has been going up because of production and labour costs, the number of games released per quarter tells an interesting story and begs a question. Did anyone check profits?
In other words, if there have been more games out there, and people’s spending habits have been changing for the worse, that means profits should be down overall or profits have been consolidated among bigger and more corporate developers.
In summary, indie developers are being squeezed out by bigger competition and market conditions. Players naturally ask for more content, which inflates production costs that are no longer easily achievable within the means of indie developers. Thus, it will get harder and harder to be funded and continue development.
What can we do about this?
Going Forward
As Viroid Games, one of our goals in the last year has been giving cost-effective outsourcing services to indies. We’ll continue doing so because we believe indies can still leverage outsourcing to improve their development process.
In addition, we will help new indies through consulting. Let me explain. In light of the layoffs, experienced developers and artists who used to work for bigger corporations have now found themselves unemployed, and some are itching to go on their own.
Unfortunately, running your own show is another game, pun intended. Working in a corporate setup where certain things are done for you by other members of your team or other departments is drastically different from having to wear many hats and doing it efficiently in an indie setup. Most who are about to make this kind of transition will need to learn new skills.
This is where Viroid Games would like to focus. In terms of content, we will cover process improvement topics, such as business planning, marketing woes, networking, pitches, and mental health.
We will help you with the planning and execution of your projects. Additionally, we can work on your personal skills. So, you can navigate the game development space mixed with being an entrepreneur a lot easier. Consider this as visiting a business therapist when regular check-ins spread over a long time yield a healthy result.
As far as the format and choice of platform goes, we will try to be versatile since one type of format or one choice of platform may not always be the most ideal way to deliver a particular topic. That being said, expect to see conversations with our peers, presentations, articles, opinion pieces and segments where we share quick tips.
I’d like to conclude this business update at this point since actual content will follow in the next weeks. However, I’d appreciate it if you shared this news with people who might benefit from wanting to handle the business side of game development better.
A few useful things before I go
Indies, have your say in a course we are developing for you – https://viroidgames.com/publications/business-marketing-and-pitching-course/
Get in touch for your outsourcing needs – https://viroidgames.com/contact/
Game Development with Blender and Godot – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1801816026