I was hoping to bump into Mike Bithell at GDC, not simply because I wanted to see his new game Volume in action, but because he's a man with his head screwed on right, and advice to share. Such bumping did occur, and after I'd dragged him into an empty side room, the conversation that flowed was one of looking to the future, and how developers will be putting out their games as openness begins to trump curation. Bithell has already grafted for his own badge of honor, but the goalposts are rapidly moving. Here, he discusses how if he were launching Thomas Was Alone now, it'd be a whole different ballgame. Mike Rose: You hear about "the difficult second album" in music all the time. Does this feel like your "difficult second game"? Mike Bithell: It's not my difficult second album - it's like my difficult seventh or eighth album. You just didn't hear the first six. But yeah, the pressure is on now to be open about development, and to share development, and to talk to people about what you're doing. I try to do that as much as I'm comfortable with, but there is that awareness of people watching over your shoulder that wasn't originally there. When I was making Thomas Was Alone, I wish people would have been paying attention. No-one cared, I couldn't get any coverage or interest. And now I post up a video of some raw footage of my new game just to show people where it's at, and that's a news story. I'm still getting used to that - it's a lot of pressure. I'm fully aware that almost certainly [Volume] will be seen as my disappointing game, unless it's amazing. And then god help me with the third game. 
So yeah, it's in your mind, because there's expectations. You work very hard, and all indies work hard to get their first game known, and then it's terrifyingly straight-forward to get coverage from that point on. Thomas Was Alone was out for a while and wasn't getting the greatest amount of traction. Then the PlayStation deal was revealed, and suddenly you had tons of press and players talking about you. It's really interesting, the credibility consoles still have. I think because PC is "the open platform" and anyone can release a PC game, your average gamer who is not seeking out weird indie stuff - for them, me having a PC game coming out doesn't impress them.
"Discoverability is an issue, but it's not the issue. Being given the badge of honor by whoever is the person handing them out is actually crucial, and makes such a difference to how your game is perceived."
It's actually a badge of honor to those people. I know Thomas Was Alone gained an incredible amount of "mindspace," or whatever pretentious bullshit term a marketer would use, because it was out on console. And I saw a ridiculous sales boost just because, the second people saw it was coming to PlayStation, it became a "real game" for a lot of people. What it demonstrates, and it's going be interesting to watch in the next few years - it demonstrates that curation is more powerful than getting people to see your game. Discoverability is an issue, but it's not the issue. Being given the badge of honor by whoever is the person handing them out is actually crucial, and makes such a difference to how your game is perceived. Up until recently, Steam was the biggest deal if you got on it - but with Valve striving to be a more open platform, it feels like that's starting to fall away. Exactly. Steam meant you were going to be sorted, as long as your game was quite small, you'd be sorted for a year or two, bare minimum. I struggle to believe that Thomas Was Alone would have been successful were it to come out now on Steam. It was on the front page of Steam for a week. It was released right before that final moment where being on Steam meant Valve thought you made a great game. That used to be what that meant. Did Thomas Was Alone get accepted before Greenlight was announced? We agreed to get it on Steam at the Greenlight announcement event. It was that tight. Valve do a lot of events for UK indies, and they did an event to tell us about Greenlight just as the press release went out, just so they could talk to us about what that was. After they explained it, I just thought "I don't want to wait for that... that's going to be a lot of work." So I went up to a Valve representative and said "Hi, I'm Mike!" And I thought "Yes! I've just got in by the skin of my teeth." I beat Greenlight - just. And obviously once you have a relationship with them, things get easier - I'm not doing a Greenlight for Volume. I think Greenlight was a great experiment. I don't think it came from anywhere but a place of goodwill. There are flaws and problems with it. I suspect that those problems will get resolved, but I'm still waiting for them to open it up. I thought Steam Dev Days was going to be the announcement of "Everyone can be on Steam." But I think that's what's coming - something like the App Store, with very simple checks to make sure you're not uploading a virus, and that's it.
"I struggle to believe that Thomas Was Alone would have been successful were it to come out now on Steam."
I guess it's not dissimilar to the Nintendo seal of approval they have on the boxed games. Steam meant something at one point, and being on Steam said something to players that allowed a lot of people with weird, esoteric games to get an audience. That's going to be harder to find now. You'll require more traditional marketing and talking to press. I think other curators will come in. Look at YouTubers with their audiences who get ridiculous numbers of views. I know from my own data that they lead to a lot of sales. So I think that's going to come through. It's sort of a return to it being about marketing, and Steam have removed themselves from the equation in terms of them being a curator, which - is it good, is it bad? It means a lot of indies are going to have to find a new way of getting an audience, while a lot of the advice from old-timers like me who used the old system is now redundant and useless. They're going to have to work out new ways of bucking the system. It's either going to be crazy or awesome. One downside to this curation stuff was, the system relied on you impressing someone at Valve. Should the people in Valve's offices by the arbiters of what is good and bad? Maybe this is going to be great because it'll open it up to completely different people and different views. Maybe there are games that Valve would absolutely hate that are going to be ground-breaking and awesome. It's too early to call it, but I'm personally grateful that Thomas Was Alone, being the game that it is, got in before the change. 
It feels a little like PlayStation is at the point that Steam was at a couple of years ago, curating the indies that get onto the platform, but allowing them on in droves and giving them that stamp of approval. Yeah, and I think being open is the end goal for Sony. I think they're working towards making it as easy as possible to make games for their platforms, which is a great plan. Same with Microsoft.
