Skeletons Aren't Real, Says Upstart Indie Gaming Fund
push to talk #24 // victoria tran takes us to mars and spreads conspiracy theories
In last week’s post I casually mentioned that Innersloth’s Victoria Tran is a smart person who I regularly steal marketing ideas from.
Then she and Innersloth co-founder Forest Willard showed up on stage at Summer Game Fest to announce their new games fund: Outersloth.
I love the look of the games in the Outersloth portfolio, so this week I bring you the official PTT interview with VT.
That Q&A is below. But first, this week’s spiciest games industry news links:
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
Steam Next Fest Features ~1,500 Playable Games - From now until the 17th, there’s an impossible tidal wave of demos for upcoming games on Steam. Some of the ones I’m most excited about personally: Caravan Sandwich, Divine Frequency, Metal Slug Tactics, DEATHGRIP, Tiny Glade and I Am Your Beast, the last of which seems to be a monster breakout hit which—let it be noted—I predicted when I wrote about lead developer Xalavier Nelson earlier this year for this newsletter. (Next Fest on Steam)
Phil Spencer Thinks Xbox Should Have A Handheld - I can’t help but cover these weekly Xbox executive statements. Phil and co talk about their strategy so openly, so earnestly, that you can’t help but want to see them to pull it off. So the question is, where’s the handheld, Phil? My Steam Deck is the best gaming console I’ve ever owned. Give me a reason to buy some Xbox hardware, Spence! (GameSpot)
Riot says the League of Legends skin price backlash is “justified” - Listen, Riot Games employees, I know you’re reading this. I have two things to say to you about this PCGamesN article. 1) Link Push to Talk in Slack and tell everyone to subscribe. 2) Just tell the gamers it’s whale-hunting season, okay? They’ll understand, I swear. They love it when you’re brutally honest. And the only proper explanation for this Ahri skin is “some of y’all got MONEY money and we want a slice.” Just own it, summoners. You can trust my take on this one—after all, my dormant Riot-flaired Reddit account still has more karma than Marc Merrill’s and Phreak’s. (PCGamesN)
The Funniest Tweet About the Doom: The Dark Ages Trailer - An intrepid X.com user put together a two-clip montage of a couple of dudes reacting to the trailer for the new Doom game in very different ways. One of them ain’t feeling it, and one of them really is feeling it. I don’t have a lot to say about this one other than it made me laugh. (@OhNoItsAlexx on X)
Skeletons Aren't Real, Says Upstart Indie Gaming Fund
The first thing you should know about Victoria Tran is that she used to catfish people on Ragnarok Online.
Not, like, on purpose. Because Tran was only 10 or 11 when she first started playing games like Tibia, Ragnarok, and Habbo Hotel using the free PCs at her local public library. But her older brother was wise in the ways of the internet, and advised her to never give out real information online.
“So when guys would ask ‘ASL?’ I'd respond with ‘16/f/cali’ every single time,” Tran says. “The bad news is uh, well, I accidentally ended up catfishing people because they'd ask me ‘out’ and I'd just say yes, thinking it was a friendship thing. Sorry!”
Tran says she “thinks” (lol) she “might have” (LOL) taken “some guy's sapphires in Tibia because he had a house and I found out I had access to it as his ‘girlfriend.’ It's all very blurry but I apologize.”
This is the kind of hijinks kids could get up to using a dial-up internet connection in the early ‘00s. I did the same thing—catfishing randos in Guild Wars and getting free gold by playing as a lady necromancer ranger. Should we all be cancelled for this? Probably. But it was a simpler time. “The internet” was a magical place where unsupervised children could log on and watch Salad Fingers, then lie about their age to strangers for in-game currency. We all did it!
And for Tran, these games connected her to a world totally unlike her real life. “Because we didn't have money, I played anything that was free,” she says. “Flash games, but also a lot of free MMOs and/or virtual chatrooms.
She loved using an avatar and text chat, because while she didn’t consider herself a good speaker, she had advanced reading and writing skills from a young age. “You get really good at reading complicated sentences when you have to translate government and school documents for your non-English speaking parents,” she says.
In between the shameless catfishing and document translation work, Tran made some real friendships online, and that, she says, is “where a lot of the interest in online communities came from—it's where I grew up and where nice people taught me a lot about life once they realized how young I actually was. Every game I played had a different ‘culture’ and I found it so fun to be able to explore different interests based on what game I was on. I could play mock America's Next Top Model in Habbo Hotel or spend time killing monsters with my guild members in Ragnarok.”
There are some gaps between this account of Victoria’s Ragnarok days and her future career on the world wide web, supporting games like Boyfriend Dungeon, Unboxing, Dwarf Fortress, and leading communications on Among Us.
But that story is for another day.
Today you got the VT origin story. Now let’s bring it up to the present.
Victoria, together with Innersloth founder Forest Willard, is funding incredible indie games like Mars First Logistics via their new fund, Outersloth. They’re not quite a publisher, and definitely not venture capitalists—but they have money, and they’re giving money to cool devs using a recoup-and-revshare model.
I love the idea, so I hit up Victoria with a few questions about the fund.
A short Q&A with Victoria (and also one response from Forest!) below:
PUSH TO TALK: I understand that an Outersloth is a giant blue sloth in outer space but now I'm wondering what an Innersloth is??
VICTORIA TRAN: It's a common misconception we all have a skeleton inside of us. However science has actually discovered we are powered by a tiny sloth. Source: trust me bro.
I know Outersloth isn't a full-service publisher—which obviously makes sense given it's just you and Forest running it. But you guys have also never had a publisher either. Do you think the old-school publishing model is maybe on its way out?
I actually roped in Forest for this question—that's one of his favorite questions and I told him I'd give him any of the ones he wanted with press requests lolololol:
I don't think the model is on the way out. Full service still has a place and it makes plenty of sense to partner with externals you trust for QA, porting, etc. to reduce your management overhead. I've spoken with devs who worked with publishers, had huge success, and would by no means need one for their next game. But some still plan to continue using the same publisher because they got along well and the publisher did everything they needed. Some devs feel a publishing deal is worth not having to handle the services provided, and that's completely understandable. We need different models for different situations, and treating them as a monolith doesn't help anyone.
That said, I've heard too many horror stories about publishers sneakily forcing poor services or terms onto devs, and creating almost impossible scenarios for the dev to make a profit for themselves. And I don't particularly believe in the cuts taken for such haphazard services either. In a perfect world, Outersloth can create a race to the bottom where publishers pay for their misdeeds by missing out on the best games and need to fight each other to give better deals to devs.—Forest Willard, Programmer & Co-Founder, Innersloth
Looking at the games funded so far, it's a super eclectic group of cool-looking titles. Would you say the main criteria is that the game is something that gets your team personally excited?
Yep! Admittedly, if I put my "brand marketer" hat on, it'd be smarter to have a running theme rather than going off of "cool vibes bro" for the way we sign our games. (Okay, we do also check if production and budgets make sense.) But as a team and as creatives, there are just so many different avenues we want to explore that it felt suffocating to try and shove ourselves into a box. All the games had their own twist on something we thought was worth supporting, even if Forest or I have different interests.
How many projects are you hoping to fund by the end of the year? What's the dream for scaling this thing up, long term?
There's no set number—it's more of a set budget every year that I can't tell you (sorry). However, the dream is that the success of Outersloth continues and all the money it makes goes back into funding more and more games. As we said—full service publishing has its place and we don't think we're replacing that, but we do want to create alternative methods of game creation and offer a way for indie developers to become self-published if that's their dream. If all goes well, we'll have a friendly collective of developers that can all help each other out and share advice too!
I noticed you're asking folks to NOT submit VR projects, which surprised me given the success of Among Us VR. I’m curious if the reasoning had anything to do with Innersloth's experience with that game.
Not really! Working with Schell Games on Among Us VR made it quite smooth, it's more that Forest and I are not well attuned to the VR market and find it difficult to test builds. Sorry to any VR projects out there!
One question about you specifically: You've worked on a bunch of cool games, which has given you a pretty wide-ranging view of the indie games scene. Are there any lessons you've learned that you think more indie devs should take to heart when working on their own projects? Common mistakes to avoid, things to consider, etc.
Oh noooo where do I start haha. I'll narrow it down to two...?
First: Make your first game smaller and faster. I've seen enough (heartbreaking) stories where someone spent 5+ years on their game and it just didn't end up going anywhere, and there's a lot to learn from a first release even if it flops. This is of course, very blanket advice that requires nuance and you're free to prove me wrong and be like "Ha! Victoria knows nothing!!!" But sometimes your dream game can be your second or third one, once you've gained a little more experience. Among Us was Innersloth's third game, for example!
Second: This is biased advice because it's my field, but try marketing your own game. Please! You don't even have to do it well or forever! Learning how to pitch, position, and market your game will only help you in the long run. It'll make your pitch stronger to publishers because you'll know how to talk about your game and get them excited. It'll help you see when a publisher or agency is not doing their job well. It'll open doors with different partners that can increase your future success. And it'll give you a stronger understanding of what makes your game exciting to people.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go blast Lynyrd Skynyrd and haul some gas tanks on Mars.
See you next Friday.