Kicking off day 2 of GDC Europe were Simon Flesser and Magnus 'Gordon' Gardeback (aka Simogo).

The two-man Swedish studio has built its reputation on its indie style, hence they were talking on the subject of 'Success through not doing what everyone tells you to do'.

Of course, the definition of success is open to subjection.

'It's not short term financial success but long term sustainability (which may involve financial success),' commented Flesser.

Still, Simogo has been fairly successful in terms of downloads, with Bumpy Road having done 170,000 sales while Beat Sneak Bandit has done 80,000 sales, both on iOS.

"You can become a prisoner of your own success," Flesser argued. "We've had modest success which gives us creative freedom."

Doing it differently

The company's first game - Kosmo Spin - was a by-the-rules casual game.

Priced at 99c, it was below 20 MB in size, simple to play and constantly updated, but it turned out to be what Flesser called 'A fart in space'.

With Beat Sneak Bandit, Simogo trusted its own gut instinct and took a different approach.

It was a music-based game that didn't have visual clues (i.e. requires you to play with sound on), and it was made deliberately difficult to play.

As with all of Simogo's games, it was developed with Unity, even though this created its own technical problems.

"The FMOD API wasn't exposed in Unity so you're not in full control of the audio, which required some creative programming," commented Gardeback.

Fierce freedom

Talking about the business side, Flesser said that it didn't want to things just for money.

"We didn't make Bumpy Road 2 even though it would have made money."

Similarly Gardeback said, "We don't do any analytics. We'd rather spend time making games than reading graphs."

Another big decision was pricing. Beat Sneak Bandit was $2.99.

"I think we should have priced it higher, because it was more niche and gamey that we expected," Flesser said.

"We don't do cross promotions. It feels cheap. And we don't like adverts in game.

"We didn't do any updates either. We didn't have anything significant to add. We didn't and we aren't planning to do any sales. We don't want to treat our customers that way."

Finally, all of Simogo's games are only available for iOS.

"We've been asked to port all our games to Android, but we'd rather spend our time on new things," Gardeback explained.