"How do you feel about monkeys?" I was in a conference call with a major publisher. We had the head of marketing on the line from Chicago, the VP of development in Vancouver, the head of European acquisitions in London, and were genuinely having a conversation in which that sentence came up. It was late last year and I was sat shivering in my car, shouting into my mobile and trying to pretend Hello Games owned a conference line and a meeting room. I decided it best not to mention that I was racking up a huge mobile bill as three grown men discussed the importance of monkeys to the digital download demographic. "We've been talking a lot about this, Sean. You know we love you guys and we love Joe Danger. I'm just not sure how other people feel about it. It's a cute game, so marketing are thinking maybe a cuter character... like a monkey. We're loving monkeys." I wish I could say I hung up the phone immediately. I wish I could say that, but I didn't. It was the latest in a long line of procrastination, knee-jerk reactions and constant reconsideration. Hello Games had spent the previous nine months looking for a publisher for Joe Danger, and it was about to kill us. At the time, we were trying to balance a dozen publishers who loved the game but were unsure about the platform, or the DLC plan, or Joe's backstory. Or his species. I came back in and gently broke the news to Grant. We needed to mock up a monkey on a motorbike. I was expecting the normal heated argument, but instead got a grim, knowing acceptance. He had run out of fight. We all had, and it wasn't surprising. We were spending all our energy trying to please people who didn't even know what they wanted, and I suddenly realised it had been a long time since we had discussed a new feature with enthusiasm. We took a stroll down by the river that runs near our studio to have a chat. I laid out the plan that had been brewing since I sat freezing in the car five minutes earlier. I thought we should publish the game ourselves and I wanted to sell my house to help us do it. The only reason we were even talking to publishers was because of the incredibly high costs involved in releasing a game ourselves. From localisation to testing, certification to marketing. It costs tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds. We discussed how we had no experience with anything that publishing involved. We discussed how we still wouldn't be able to afford marketing or PR, and knew nothing about such things even if we could afford them. We discussed how we were already struggling just to develop the game ourselves. We soberly agreed that it was a bad idea. Then, later, drunkenly agreed that, in fact, it was a great one. We had been trying to pretend we were something we weren't, an established studio. We’d been investing all our effort into impressing publishers, printing business cards and making PowerPoints, and had stopped thinking about the people who play games like ours. It was time to do what we always wanted to, what we had left our jobs to do in the first place - even if that meant betting everything on an unannounced game that publishers had questioned and doubted until our heads had spun. Sheer bloody-mindedness saw us in a car a couple of weeks later on the way to show some press and first announce Joe Danger to the world. In the next few months, everything changed. We got to see our game in magazines and websites, we got three IGF nominations, our first trailer went out on TV in the States, and we went to GDC, Eurogamer Expo and PAX to show real people. We got our game rated, localised, certified and tested ourselves (well apart from that bug about our credits featuring just four names). Something magical has happened, too. We spend our time now trying to impress real people who play games and might actually play ours. They look at Joe Danger and think, "Do I like this? Will I buy it?" We no longer have to try to impress people who try to guess, "How many people will buy this? How can I change it?" Most games I’ve worked on had a character model or car or weapon that had a hundred iterations, at the hands of a dozen uncertain external forces. My theory is: nobody really cares. The average gamer doesn’t actually give a monkey's about the colour of the lead character’s hair, or if zombies are hot right now. They want good games that play well and have some personality. And monkeys.Hello Games contributes a when-it-can-squeeze-it-in-during-crunch column to Edge and is a small, new independent game developer based in southern England. Its first game, Joe Danger, for PSN, will be released just as soon as it feels right. Let’s say summer.