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Lucky Kat Studios offers 4 tips for becoming a profitable indie

Be nice and be unique

Lucky Kat Studios offers 4 tips for becoming a profitable indie

As part of Pocket Gamer Connects London 2017, Herdjie Zhou, Co-founder & CEO of Lucky Kat, gave a talk on tips to becoming a profitable indie.

He started by suggesting indies "build a great network", saying that you need to make friends within the gaming community because "the mass audience doesn't care about you and your game."

To do this, Zhou recommends attending large events, interacting with people online, and if all else fails, try to work with a publisher.

His second tip was to "try to be unique" since "no one wants to play your Flappy Bird clone" – but you can't look to the past for inspiration either, since "what worked in 2016 won't work again in 2017."

Uniqueness also extends to marketing, pointing to the studio's Facebook Live Video campaigns that involved building new versions of the games that could be played by thousands of people simultaneously.

Zhou then moved on to money management, saying that if you're only in the industry to make games and not care about money, "that's just a hobby."

His advice was to create a cash flow statement, which will allow you to think about budgets, deadlines, and calculate earning forecasts.

His final piece of advice was to "always hustle", but that you should always be nice to people – "it won't cost you anything and it'll guarantee a nice return."


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Ric is the Editor of PocketGamer.biz, having started out as a Staff Writer on the site back in 2015. He received an honourable mention in both the MCV and Develop 30 Under 30 lists in 2016 and refuses to let anyone forget about it.