Inkle’s Jon Ingold on why self-publishing is where it’s at

In a talk at the Self-Publishing Toolkit event at the London Games Festival in April, Inkle co-founder Jon Ingold laid out in black and white why the studio has been doing very well all these years without a publisher, thank you very much.

Inkle, which is behind games like A Highland Song, Expelled, and the recently released TR-49, started on its self-publishing journey out of sheer necessity. “We self-published because nobody published us,” Ingold told the audience. “As a writer, nobody published anything I wrote until I published it myself. So it was just a practical way of getting things made, because it reduces the number of barriers between you and finishing the thing and getting it out.”

But even after Inkle had some big hits, like 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, the studio stuck with self-publishing. The reason Inkle still isn’t looking for a publishing deal comes down to evaluating what a publisher can offer versus the freedom and flexibility of going it alone.

“Obviously, they can provide you with technical support,” said Ingold, “but if you learn that stuff yourself, then you don’t need to outsource it to someone else, which allows you to control your own pipeline. We decided that very early on.”

“Publishers can give you distribution and clout, and that’s a difficult one to measure. I get the sense that when Raw Fury put a game out, they have a default level of interest, which Inkle doesn’t have.” But he added that it’s risky to give a game to a publisher in the hope that they have more clout than you do.

“We never localize anything because you need a really large budget to do it”

The third thing is scale, in the sense of having the funds to expand the possibilities of what can be done with a game. “There are aspects of our projects that we simply don’t do because they require an investment of capital upfront, a big one being localization,” said Ingold. “We never localize anything because you need a really large budget to do it, especially when you’re doing a word-based game and you may or may not get that back later down the line. If we had a publisher, that’s probably what they would pay for, and we would consider it. We toy with that one quite often.”

Overall though, Ingold thinks that the freedom and control over your own IP that self-publishing affords outweighs any benefits of signing with a publisher. “We have an enormous ability to make whatever we feel like making, because we’re making those decisions for ourselves. And partly that means we can try quite weird things, which we routinely do.”

He added that it gives Inkle great flexibility in development, too, enabling them to pivot in the middle of a project. “And the speed at which you can change your mind when you’ve done something that doesn’t work, to me, is really linked to the quality of the things you end up making in the end. If you have a very large team, it can be very hard to turn a ship around.”

Plus there’s the fact that Inkle has ultimate control over everything to do with its games. “I love that idea that if somebody approaches me tomorrow about an Overboard TV series, I can just do that,” said Ingold. He also enjoys the flexibility of being able to set prices for Inkle’s games, giving the recent example of selling TR-49 for just seven dollars, much lower than many of Inkle’s previous titles. “That’s worked very well, we’ve sold lots of copies,” he said. “And that’s a kind of experiment we can afford to take, because we don’t have to justify somebody else’s capital.”

Power struggle

Ingold worries that a publisher’s goals might differ from Inkle’s own when it comes to shipping a game. “If I go to a publisher, are they going to want it to be bigger? Are they going to want it to meet some established genre norm? Does it have to suddenly be 3D, because that’s what sells?”

Bigger isn’t necessarily better in Inkle’s eyes. “For me, that idea of trying to crunch a game down to its smallest elements to get it done, to get it made, get finished and out there, to make it live as fast as possible, I find that really engaging and efficient,” said Ingold.

He was critical of the trend whereby publishers now often tend to require a vertical slice of a game before they will consider signing it. “So you have to make essentially the whole game for free off your own bat, and then you don’t get to sell it. You take it to a publisher who says, ‘Well, we’ll get back to you in six months’ time, eight months’ time, a year’s time, a year and a half’s time’, or ‘Can you change these five things and pitch again?’ And you’re totally out of control of that process.”

Ingold believes in cutting out the middleman and selling the game on the marketplace rather than trying to sell it to a publisher. “Because in the market, your game is out there, it’s done, people buy it or they don’t, and if it’s good, it may even sell quite well.”

A publisher, however, might require multiple changes to the game before they will even consider signing it, he said. “They are a single entity who you need to sell the entirety of the game to, which means they have an enormous ability to push you back as many times as they feel like, and then drop you six months later for somebody else – that’s always on the table for a publisher. You can never have a conversation with a publisher across an equal gradient, because it isn’t an equal gradient. They have all of the power in the situation, and you have zero power in the situation.”

“There are three other developers outside waiting to take your place at any given time. In the market, that’s not what’s happening. There are a thousand other games you’re competing with, but there’s also a million players out there.” If Inkle can’t sell its game to one person or one group, there are plenty of others out there who might be interested in buying it, he reasons. “And we found every time we look at that equation, that feels like a much safer bet.”

“They have an enormous ability to push you back as many times as they feel like”

There’s also the factor of speed. Publishers “take ages to decide things,” he said, “because they’re spending enormous amounts of money.” And if their decision is a “no” after a lengthy back and forth, that leaves the developer in a tricky position.

“You get stuck in this cycle where you’re not releasing a game, you’re not selling anything, you’re not earning anything, and you’re not managing to get this publisher contract. And that to me as a creative is terrifying, because once I’m in that loop, I don’t know how to get out of it.”

Humble origins

Inkle is small, but sustainable. “There’s three of us, two founders and one employee,” said Ingold “We’ve made about 15 games in 15 years, something like that. Sometimes they do really well and people hear of them, sometimes they disappear without a trace, but overall we survived, which is the most important thing from my perspective.”

One reason why the studio has kept going is its rigid adherence to project scope and budgets. “We try to design the project to fit the budget that we’re willing to spend in any given moment,” said Ingold. “We do a bigger game after a success, and a smaller game after a failure.”

This is something that has been ingrained since the very beginning of Inkle’s existence. “Our first big title was 80 Days, which took a whole nine months to build, and that was terrifying. And towards the end of that project, we had this spreadsheet which was, ‘This is how much money we have, this is how many months we can survive for’, and it would go red if it got below three. And that spreadsheet ruled every decision we took towards the end of that project.”

Despite his dim view of the publisher model, Ingold recognises that self-publishing is a difficult route for those without access to capital. Inkle is in the privileged position of having a hefty back catalogue that still supplies regular income.

“The reality is if I sit here and say, ‘Self-publishing is brilliant, you should do it’, what I actually mean is, ‘Self-publishing 15 years ago was brilliant, and you should do it 15 years ago’, which is not the most helpful advice.” Inkle’s first game was made on a shoestring budget using savings and the income from Ingold’s part-time teaching job, and it still didn’t make its budget back.

The other side

Even now, after 15 years of successful self-reliance, Ingold still sometimes considers whether pairing with a publisher would be a good move. “We’re looking at a project now that we’re building, [and] I’m still having those thoughts of, ‘Oh right, do I need to wave this past someone in the narrative publishing space?'”

“When a game sells well, how much of that is because the marketing was done well?”

He also recognises the value that a publisher can bring in terms of marketing. “If you’re in a situation where you don’t need a publisher for money, then the marketing is probably the core draw that they can provide. And that’s a really difficult one because it’s very, very hard to quantify.”

“When a game sells well, how much of that is because the marketing was done well? How much of that was because the people selling the game were just really well connected, and they had the personal connections to get IGN to look at the damn thing? How much is that just because the game was great, or it was just the right time? It’s very, very hard to unpick after the fact.”

“I’m extremely conscious with every project that we do, that if we were being published by Fellow Traveller or Raw Fury, we would probably sell quite a lot more than we actually sell, because those guys are extremely good at reaching the kinds of people who play our games.”

“They reliably put out these very, very successful titles. Would I like my games to be that successful? Yeah, I probably would. Is that enough of a reason to go to a publisher? I’m not sure, because I’m not sure what the trade offs are.”

Ultimately, he thinks it’s about considering what a publisher can do for your game. He gives the example of Blue Prince, which developer Tonda Ros spent years working on, fully intending to self-publish, but in the end a deal with Raw Fury helped the game to reach a bigger audience than it potentially might have done.

“I think asking that question of how much marketing can this publisher give is a really important question,” he said. “In the narrative space, there are a bunch of publishers doing exceptionally good work at marketing narrative games, and if you can get with those people, it’s probably worth at least having that conversation. But I would always advocate for having a self-publishing plan ready, and then if you can upgrade that to a publisher who is not trying to rip you off, who is not stealing your IP, who is not giving less value than they’re taking away, and who can get your game to people, that’s definitely a conversation to have – but it isn’t necessarily a magic bullet.”