Bennett Foddy interview – the game changer
His games may make you cry, laugh and scream, but they always keep you coming back for more. We get under the skin of Bennett Foddy to find out what drives him to make the web's most innovative games
PUBLISHING AND PUBLICISING
Once you’ve made your ground-breaking title, you still have to get people to play it. Foddy makes games in his spare time, and doesn’t spend thousands of pounds advertising his titles. Instead, word about his games has spread organically; QWOP became huge when it was linked to by YouTube “comedic vlogger” Ray William Johnson. Johnson has a huge following, and QWOP quickly spread around the internet and became a phenomenon in its own right, with attendees at the Comic-Con convention turning up dressed as QWOP and falling over a lot.
Getting picked up by high-profile YouTube personalities is both unlikely and, in our opinion and Foddy’s, subscribing to YouTube personalities is “cringeworthy”. However, there are other ways to promote your games. How you approach this depends on the platform you are going to use; promoting free-to-play Flash games on an advertising-supported website requires a different approach to releasing games on a mobile app store, such as for Foddy’s iOS versions of QWOP and Little Master Cricket.
According to Foddy, hosting games on your own website causes network effects that just aren’t present on a mobile or tablet app store. This is due to the ease of promoting your other games on your website, so they benefit from the success of another title that has gone viral.
This happened to Foddy when his first game, 2007’s Too Many Ninjas, spread around the internet. There was a brief spike in traffic to his site, which then tailed off, but when he put a new title up with links to Too Many Ninjas on the same page, the network effect meant that the traffic didn’t tail off to the same degree.
Too Many Ninjas was spread by word of mouth
“If I have a new game I tend to promote it on the other games’ pages, so there’s this aggregation effect,” he says. “When I put up Too Many Ninjas, it got featured on Kotaku and Digg, and so what happened was I had a lot of traffic for a day, maybe four days, then it trailed off to as close to zero as possible. Then, when I put Little Master Cricket on, it didn’t quite trail off to zero, but it trailed off to maybe two-to-five per cent of its original. By the time I added QWOP it wasn’t trailing off to zero any more.”
This means that the amount of money Foddy makes from each new game is boosted by increased numbers of people playing his previous titles. This is an effect that works well on a website, but is less effective on an app store. Unless you have the advertising clout to make your app known among the hundreds of thousands already out there, it’s going to get buried.
“I have recurring income on QWOP for iOS, but that’s mainly because it’s advertised on my website, so people keep coming back to it. Most people I’ve spoken to who publish on iOS find that you publish a game, you get like two weeks of income and it’s literally zero for ever after unless you advertise,” he says.
This is mainly due to the fact that Apple’s App Store, while it is good at promoting new and popular apps in its Featured section, doesn’t give you the same kind of aggregation effect as you get with running your own website. On a website, such as www.foddy.net, you can cultivate the developer as a personality. Just as you may want to buy the latest book from a certain author or latest single from a band, you’ll want to keep an eye on your favourite Flash web developer to see if they have released any new games.
The Apple App Store doesn’t help people find other apps by the same developer easily
On the app store, by contrast, the name of the developer is written in a small font under the large, bold name of the app, and you can only see the rest of the apps written by that developer by clicking the Developer Info button, which isn’t even titled “more by this developer”.
“People don’t go on the app store and go ‘I really like this, let’s see what else this guy has made’,” says Foddy. “The app store is not very good for promoting the idea of an artist, whereas you’re free if you run [a website], you’re free to promote yourself as an auteur.”
Despite this, Foddy is positive about the iOS App Store. For a start, the overheads are fairly minimal. It’s $99 a year to join the developer program, and after that all you need is a Mac to run the SDK and an iPhone or iPad to run the software. This means you can start your own programming studio for around £1,000 upfront along with £64 a year, and get a computer and phone or tablet into the bargain.
He’s also keener on developing for iOS than for Android, at least for the moment. Part of this is that it’s harder to make money from Android than from iOS, as users are generally less inclined to pay for apps up front. Foddy doesn’t want to go down the in-app purchase route, either; part of the joy of his games is that you are given everything up front with nothing to unlock, so your success or otherwise depends entirely on practice and skill. The fragmentation of Android is another factor that raises barriers to entry.
“The development costs are much higher as you’ve got to support all these different devices, whereas on iOS basically it works,” he says. “I wrote Little Master Cricket in 2008 for iOS, first iOS game I made, and it still works on the latest iPhone – that’s not the case for Android. I don’t think it’s viable for a solo developer.”
Foddy also feels that one of the most important things about making a game is knowing when to stop. You can debug until the end of time, but you’re best off accepting that a game is good enough for its target audience and moving onto the next; in Foddy’s words, “I don’t want to come back to work that I’ve already put in the can.”
If you’re putting a game on the web for people to play for free, they will tolerate the occasional bug (such as the slightly random nature of PoleRiders’ collision detection). If you’re expecting people to pay up front, though, they’ll expect a more complete product.
“My iOS version of QWOP is still not perfect, but it’s a lot more perfect than the web version. I felt like if I was going to charge people two dollars for it up front, I feel like I owe a more complete and polished product.” Foddy says. “The nice thing about web publishing is you don’t owe anybody anything, if they don’t want to play your game they don’t have to come and play it.”
Well we certainly do want to play his games, and we hope that you’ve enjoyed one or two as well while reading this article. And with the amount of fun we’ve had playing his titles over the last couple of years, we’re certainly glad Foddy spends more time making new games than ironing out minor bugs in the old ones.