7DRLs[1] are a good example of prototyping gameplay. Some of them ultimately go on to become full fledged games. Cogmind [2] is an excellent example of this.
Both are prepared from a completed game. Except for some very specific genres, it's impossible to make a demo without building the whole game behind it. That's not a format you use to test a game idea.
Releasing a basic game with the same mechanics/concepts before expanding on it through updates?
Well, that seems to be how many multiplayer games are released nowadays anyway. Look at ARMS or Mario Tennis Aces on the Nintendo Switch, or Pokemon GO, or Sea of Thieves* on Xbox. Released in very basic states, then slowly expanded upon via regular updates. You could even possibly say Minecraft went the same way.
That said, this sort of 'Minimum Viable Game' idea may not work as well here as it does for business products or web services. People are practically spoilt for choice when it comes to what games to buy, and a game that leaves an initial 'meh' impression (due to a lack of content/replay value) can often die out before the updates ever come. And the critics will certainly not be kind to it either...
* Admittedly, that one took four years to develop, which may not have been the best setup given the lack of content.
Other ways this is sometimes done are:
1. By releasing demos on a regular basis to test the waters
2. Splitting the game up into episodes and selling them one at a time. Valve did this with Half Life, but it was arguably TellTale Games who ran with it.
3. Or by running a beta test for the game and gauging reactions from that.
Of course, all the above assumes you can build at least a somewhat sizable portion of the game in a reasonable timeframe. If you want to know whether a completely untested idea will be viable... well good luck with that in this industry. You'll always need at least a core gameplay loop setup to know whether the idea is fun, and you'll need much more if you want to know whether anyone will buy it.
Looking at the industry they also have the approach of announcing or teasing things which then never get build. So thats probably a way big companies test too
"Papers, Please" indie game wikipedia: Pope publicly shared details of the game's development from its onset, leading to high interest in the title and encouraging him to put more effort into it; though he initially planned to only spend a few weeks, Pope ended up spending about nine months on the game.
Don't start by trying to test your idea. That's already getting ahead of yourself. Instead, start by identifying and checking the assumptions behind your idea.
For example, let's say you want to make a retro platformer. The assumption is that many people would be interested in a new retro platformer. That's easy to check: browse through Steam's new releases, find the 10 newest retro platformers, and see how much interest they get. Heck, even imagining that exercise could be enough to make you change course.
And yet Shovel Knight is doing so so great. Cuphead too. Turns out retro platformers can do great. But way too many indie retro platformers are just trash with nothing to save them.
I don't think you can gauge success by looking at existing titles. It's like asking if there's a market for scifi novels. What do you find? People like scifi novels, and there are lots of scifi novels that suck and nobody reads them. Do people like metal music? There's tons of successful metal bands, and there's an ocean of trash.
I think the point is that it doesn’t matter what SAT scores the author got. If you’re older than about 18, a 1500 on your SATs and $4 will get you a cup of coffee at Philz.
Additionally, high SAT scores don’t prevent you from making dumb decisions, like say, spending 2,600 hours developing an indie game and thinking you’ll make money on it.
Not sure what OP's background is, but if he's not in the tech industry and wrote a complex C++ game engine, plus a website with Flask+SQL on his own, I'd say he has a potential career as a software developer there.
Regardless of sales, this game demonstrates all sorts of wonderful qualities that successful studios are looking for in an employee, and its development was undoubtedly much more educational than any computer science program. It is never wasted time to do what one is passionate about.
I am kind of in the same boat doing something different. I do agree you learn a ton more than working for someone else or completing any computer science degree.
But whether companies look for this type of employee, I am unsure that is true. The truth is, most companies look for employees without gaps in their resume. They are looking for signals such as having worked Google or Facebook. They care much less about your startup than most people think. If you don't hit those checkboxes, you are going to have a hard time looking for a job.
I work at a AAA games studio and if this guy came to us with nothing else on his resume but this game he would definitely get a chance.
I mean, in terms of chances in the industry - I got in by completing a 4 year CS degree. If he gets in by spending 3 years building his own game then I'd say it was worth it.
That's great, but would you say its industry wide? Because I have also heard (non-gaming) the exact opposite. Also, would he get through HR? They are more often than not, the real gatekeepers. It would require someone to vouch for him personally to go through, and that isn't very scalable when applying for jobs.
Hiring in both gaming and non-gaming is about your resume, phone screen, and interview. The first two are gating factors for the interview. The interview is how the actual decision is made. References are of much less significance, often go unchecked, and are usually focused on simply confirming the truthiness of your resume.
If you spent 3 years of your life working on a game, it's not a gap on your resume. In fact, it's the shining achievement on your resume, and it should get you that phone screen. If you can't tell a good story about hard work and technology mastery from that experience, your problem isn't an HR department, it's that you don't know how to write a resume.
Yes and no. You are still at a disadvantaged even if you write a good resume. As an HR, when I need to fill a job, I search my existing database for candidates. I input keywords such as Unity3d, Unreal Engine, UI, etc. If I know another AAA studio has a specific department with those skillset, I input that studio name (disadvantage #1).
Let's say the candidate pool comes back with 30+ results. I will only interview 10 candidates realistically because I have other jobs to fill too. I will rank those candidates by experience and background. People that work at existing AAA studios always goes on top of the pile because I know their chances of filling the job is much higher (disadvantage #2). If there are more than 10 candidates from AAA studios, then too bad for you. Indie game developers goes to the bottom pile unless their skill set matches exactly what I need. Even then, he/ she is an unknown, for the simple reason, they might exaggerate their experience and AAA studios can guarantee the candidates quality.
As an HR, I need to meet quotas. And I have only so many hours to spend per day interviewing candidates. Each candidate takes an hour. Interviewing an indie game developer takes more time because I need to make sure he know his stuff. If I keep on passing indie developers that are not up to par to hiring managers, they will reflect that back to my manager.
> Even then, he/ she is an unknown, for the simple reason, they might exaggerate their experience and AAA studios can guarantee the candidates quality.
This has not been my experience at all. The opposite, in fact. I briefly did hiring at a medium sized game studio. We preferred to hire indie devs with completed games over those with AAA studio pedigree specifically because we can verify that the indie dev actually built stuff himself. He could provide code when asked and talk intelligently about it.
AAA studio developers couldn't share any code (for obvious reasons) and it can be hard to pin point exactly what they did on any given project. When a studio can put anywhere from 10 to 100 developers on a single project, authorship gets fuzzy.
That said, I would discourage the indie dev in question from pursuing a job in the industry. Why would you jump aboard a sinking ship? 1000 people in the games industry have been axed in the last year alone[0].
I don't know why you created this account in order to post your fake story.
But anyone who has ever worked anywhere professionally will see that you have no idea how it works or even what your job title is. (Hint: it's "recruiter".)
I used to work at Blizzard. A designer found an app store game he liked and reached out to the dev with an interview offer. Attending GDC, I've heard from at least a dozen hiring managers that personal projects look better than degrees.
That said totally not a waste of time. It shows you have the wits to bring something to market and the ability to ship. You coded the whole damn thing which is insanely involved. This is no small feat. However the market is generally the hardest critic and it doesn't matter how many hours you spent or how many lines and bugs you solved.
Super Metroid is literally my favorite game, and I don't really have a strong urge to play this.
Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generation takes a big dump on any sense of familiarity, which is a big part of the reward for exploration.
In fact, the _only_ games I've played where procedural generation were good for the game are story-building games, such as Rogue-likes and Dwarf Fortress. They reward you for building a story, not for traversing obstacles. In every other game, they are just a weak thematic obscuration of the underlying mechanical goals. The Dryad's name in Terraria doesn't matter. Dig deep enough and you'll find diamonds in Minecraft. Kill a boss enough times in Borderlands, and you'll get a good gun. There's no story about achieving these goals. Procedural generation doesn't participate in making the goals more interesting to achieve, it's a forgettable and incidental fact about something almost wholly unrelated.
Game developers need to stop trying to lean on it as a substitute for content. A game is what people can expect from it each time they play it, and if all it is is a bundle of mechanics and throw-backs, then there's not going to be much appeal.
I'm curious about where the story happens? I've played a rogue-like (Pixel Dungeon), while I found it fun, I didn't think it had much of a story. Are others better?
In say nethack you can pick up random overpowered or weird items that change the game or get into crazy adventures when you meet some weird rare creature.
I kinda like games like nethack and brogue but my only problem with them is since it's extremely easy to die, it emphasizes attention a bit too much imho. I'm not a very attentive person and when I play games I'd much rather it be a bit more relaxed. When I know that even if I play the game for a whole Saturday, one floating eye can just randomly kill me for no reason, it kinda demotivates me...
It works like gambling. You play the game 100 times and you just lose most of them, but on the rare occasion you get very lucky... and you walk away with an unforgettable story about how you defied all the odds and did something wonderful and amazing. That's where procedural generation shines the brightest.
I suppose that's true. But one can imagine a game just like nethack except it's not as easy to die so after, say 20 run, you learn the ropes and can enjoy the game every time you play it. Obviously, eventually you'll get bored (unlike playing 100 times and losing every time) but that few times you beat the game would be enjoyable.
Not nethack, I was talking about a hypothetical clone of nethack where you can supposedly make a whole run without "surprises" that can randomly kill you, like floating eyes (or Jelly monsters in brogue). I think such a game would be very enjoyable first few times you play, but then since not challenging would be boring. Entirely different genre but Universal Paperclip might be a good example, extremely interesting story but the game is almost too easy after you learn to reliably win it. I think nethack is "boredom proof" because it's so challenging. I must be honest, I never finished brogue nor nethack (but I suck at video games because I play them once a year or so) but every game still gives the same rush of enjoyment every time. Still, though I don't keep playing it because the "demotivation" thing I was talking about earlier stops me from starting a new game (I'll lose anyway).
That's right, Tariru has won 61 times in a row. So that makes my 100 losses 'avoidable' in some sense, which spurs me on to do better. It only requires luck if you play inattentively :)
In Sproggiwood, the story takes place around dives into the dungeons. Each dive is "rogue like" but the overall progression outside each dive is persistent.
I think this is the best way to do a random dungeon roguelike with a story.
That said, I wouldn't sell Sproggiwood on its story in particular, just the arrangement of everything. The game is fun because it's a good bite size style of roguelike for a phone with interesting/fun mechanics in play.
At the risk of sounding like an elitist - Pixel Dungeon isn't a "real" roguelike. Check out something like Nethack, or ADOM, or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Or maybe Tales of Maj'eyal if you want something with lots of graphical polish (this one also has a decent amount of actual scripted plot).
These games have the extra depth and detail that cause the kinds of emergent gameplay and "storybuilding" that people are talking about.
I would recommend Rogue Survivor. Pixel Dungeon is an ok game, but it doesn't really encourage you to get attached to your character or environment. There's very little backtracking or foreshadowing in it, so learning the lay of the land or remembering where things are just isn't very important.
I would say it is a perfect example of a story-building game. The specific details that drive the main gameplay mechanics are based on the circumstantial arrangement of procedurally generated components. Where any two players are in the world matter to the events that subsequently play out, and those relationships are based on proc gen.
If you are aiming for a game that people play for more than 1000 hours, sure. Commercially, this would be a terrible segment of the market to aim for. The people who play the same title for that long are unlikely to buy your game, because they don't have time to play it. Unless you happen to find a niche first, you will end up with a few players, but supporting them for a long, long time.
Shorter games are fine, and sell to people who want novelty over repetition. Don't make the game longer than its content, and price accordingly.
It doesn't make a game better, it just superficially defers the realization that the game is played out. Yatzee's only claim to being a game is that you roll dice... if you didn't, people would immediately see it as the pointless activity it really is. Video games are no different. If you put 1000 hours into a game, you will see it for what it is, and proc gen is not even a factor at providing interesting gameplay at that point. A game ultimately succeeds based on the merits of the structure it actually has.
Now, if the proc gen is sufficiently complex, we're talking about something else, (but that is rare if it exists at all.)
Yeah, the entirety your comment pretty much mirrors what I'd have to say in reply to his post.
The only other thing I'd add for Luke is - do you enjoy playing this game? As in, have you sunk a whooole bunch of hours into playing it, simply because it's the only game available (that you made precisely because there's nothing else) that scratches this very particular itch?
I'm afraid this was my first thought having watched the video — does it look fun?
I'd like to think that the foundations are in place to make it such, but from what I saw, I saw a lot of [highly capable] box ticking, but not a lot to make me want to take it on.
That was my first thought too. The author talks about the indie explosion, but I don't think they realize they are part of the problem. Clearly the author is a great programmer, as coding something like this definitely isn't trivial, but it lacks in other places, such as design, art style and sound effects.
I understand programmers often like working on their own projects, and sometimes we end up with complete packages like Stardew Valley, but maybe it's better to work in a team where everyone has their own strengths. I see so many games with fantastic code, going to waste because of really underwhelming story, art style or sound.
I consider myself as a big fan of Metroidvanias, I'm even the kind of person who actively looks for new games in this genre, and those were my thoughts as well.
I would even say that this game manages to hit the 3 points in which I avoid on a Metroidvania:
1. Rogue-like. I really dislike rogue-like, no special reason, just a personal preference
2. Lack of a plot. I appreciate the feeling of exploring a world the feels alive, even if it's a very simple one. Going through levels for the sake of going through them, it's not much of a fun experience to me.
3. Huge resemblance to the original Metroid. If I wanted to play Metroid... I would be playing Metroid.
Also... no Linux version? Really? That excludes me entirely from this game.
You're criticizing an indie game developer who feels he just wasted 3 years of his life making a failure, for not spending the extra year or whatever it'd take for it to be cross-platform?
I think in OPs case a Linux port could have a non-trivial affect on sales because he's on the front page of hackernews and people that see this post and feel sorry for him will buy his game and not play it because he supports Linux.
When was the last time you paid for an indie humble bundle though? I think it proved that for a short moment a very small percentage of users were supporting games at a higher rate than the majority in order to support a cause, but once the novelty wore off they went back to not caring. I just don't think there are enough Linux users out there that are also regular gamers to make Linux support worth it for most titles. Sure there are exceptions especially if you're building a game that disproportionately appeals to that audience (like KSP or Zactronics), but in most cases its not really worth it.
>When was the last time you paid for an indie humble bundle though?
Some years ago, but that is explained by a sharp decline in the quality of games included in their offers (which was about the time they dropped ensuring that their bundles were compatible with the three platforms). A better question would be when I last spend money on (game) software for linux. The answer is 28 hours ago.
I concur that the market is small. But when your sales are small too, it is not smart to throw away access to a market with a higher proportion of dedicated users and consumers. From the perspective of tech, less time may have been "wasted" on infinitroid if the developer used more off the shelve solutions that would help with multiplatform targeting.
In the end we are just basing our arguments on our gut feelings. I doubt very much that Valve would push as hard for gaming on linux as they are doing if they didn't see the potentials of sales for the platform in their data. But time will tell.
There's not a ton of information available on the breakdown of sales by platform, but the data that is out there shows Linux sales usually compromise ~2-4% for cross-platform games [1]. If you get linux support "for free" by utilizing an engine, then absolutely go for it, but even major companies with massively popular games are still skipping out on first-class Linux support [2], due to the low market share.
It's also exponentially harder to make a Linux port for a AAA game than for an Indie game, for many reasons. The most obvious ones being that most indie games are made with an off the shelf cross platform engine (Unity, unreal), and that AAA titles require a lot more hardware resources, and optimization of this usage is often platform specific (what helps OpenGL might not help DirectX, etc).
With engines like Unity and Unreal, supporting multiple platforms (including modern consoles like PS4, Xbox One and Switch) has a level of complexity of writing a portable Electron app.
As an indie developer, you need to maximize that market coverage (and develop with portability in mind).
Having said that, it's probably not the primary reason why his game failed.
- Linux desktop market share is tiny. My own app supports Linux, but I'm 100% aware that I'm doing it at a loss in every possible way, it's a passion project. Bang for buck is terrible, so you need to justify as a labour of love.
- The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop to work as it should is huge, and there are several competing packaging providers with no clear winner, and all have very much hidden gotchas that they do a poor job of explaining ahead of time.
- Making a cross-platform Electron app that behaves well and up to to snuff on Windows, Mac and Linux is not even close to easy. The fact that JS theoretically works on all three platforms buys you way less than most people think.
Source: I'm making a cross platform Electron app that supports Linux.
I disagree with your assertion Linux desktops are hard to set up.
You plug in your Ubuntu drive and install it, it detects your video card and install the drivers.
Everything just works, when people rag on Linux desktops they are talking about Linux from 6 years ago.
A ton of effort has been put into making the experience smooth and there are multiple projects to make it even more user friendly like elementary os and popos
The market may be tiny but it is a lot easier to sell copies of a (decent) game because Linux users will love you for supporting their platform.
You also don't need to support every distro on the planet. Just focus on Ubuntu. With proper planning and choosing your game engine wisely it's not the biggest deal to build for Linux.
My experience (though I'm not a game developer) is the opposite. Linux users are very demanding, and instead of being thankful that your app works well on Linux, they'll take the fact that it works and works well on Linux for granted, and will resent you for charging money for it.
If you support Ubuntu+Debian (1.15% user base globally on average), the next feature request you'll get will be Xubuntu, Arch, and then some smaller distros which has their own undocumented quirks, they'll ask for 32 bit versions (0.0015%) to run on ancient machines that aren't really powerful enough to run the app anyway, and there goes the rabbit hole.
(In the meanwhile, Windows users are 85%, Mac OS is 13%. We're talking about fractions of fractions a percent here when you move out of Ubuntu x64)
These features will be framed as "You're supporting Ubuntu, getting it to work on this {{similar_distro}} is so close, you should do it and you'll have a lot of users". It's not that they're wrong or malicious — it's just that their concept of a lot of users is a whopping multitude of three people.
I'm also purposefully ignoring the more acrid side of the Linux community where they'll call you names, find your personal email, and make sure it's the first thing you read in the morning for not pulling heroics to make it work for their distro of choice (0.0000075% user base).
All in all, not worth it, really. Not financially, not logically. Not from a human point of view, either.
Here are a few things I've found helpful if you're making a desktop app for Linux:
- Consider charging Linux users for support. This is justifiable because for every Windows support request, there are likely 10 people that experienced the problem and haven't written to you about it, for Mac, 2-3, but for Linux, very likely you're only helping that single guy only. This is the best way to do this, but since my app is free, I don't really want to set up a payment infrastructure.
- Make your app free, and ask Linux users to either make their own builds from unpacked releases, or pay for support for their distro on a rolling basis. You don't really expect anyone to take the latter, but it does wonders to cut down on requests in which people demand you support their favourite obscure distro of choice with no help or support from them.
That said, I still provide Snaps, as it's the closest I can get to a universal Linux runtime. This exposes me to requests to provide AppImage, Flatpak, and some other stuff even then, but it's way better than trying to support distros directly. [0]
[0] I tried to support AppImage, I gave up after a full day of trying. Flatpak had similar issues. One of the core developers of AppImage reached out trying to debug, and I helped him as much as I could — but the point is, while the intentions are pure, and I'm glad for the effort, this is deeper and deeper into the red in terms of price / performance.
I agree that Linux users can also be a pain to deal with :)
But yea from my experience the game market is a little different because there is a growing group of people that rather would not boot Windows for gaming and instead stay on their platform. This group of people is very thankful for ported games.
What I heard third hand from game developers has been that it’s fairly hard to get games to perform well on Linux, and that most of the complaints come because of performance reasons outside the developers’ control.
This is true, but also the game in question was coded entirely from scratch, which is part of the problem: the majority of those 3 years were probably spent duplicating the work done already by Unity and Unreal. If you want to make a living as a carpenter, you don't start by planting walnuts.
I agree, C++ projects are quite easy to get running on Linux. I've done cross platform C++ game stuff and almost always had more trouble with Windows than I ever did with Linux. MacOS was pretty annoying in some cases too, actually...
#1 and #2 are strongly related. Procedural generation makes it much harder to create a sense of a coherent world, rather than a series of disconnected mini-games.
And yet Dead Cells does the Metroidvania Roguelite thing and has a plot.
In fact being a Roguelite is woven into the plot, characters aren't surprised to see you, after all you were just here last session, the mounds of festering corpses prompt you to remark that they're all the same... They're all you.
I don't know if I'd agree about your dislike of the graphics being because of your own personal preference. The human brain has evolved to find certain harmonies of shapes/colors attractive while others are not. The author undoubtedly has a lot of grit—but, he's not an artist, and his game suffers because of that. Metroid has superior graphics because they had dedicated artists, and surely put a lot of time/thought into the look and feel of the game.
Also, the design scheme between different 'blocks' which make up the platforms in the game is not uniform, which makes the design feel much more disjointed.
I have some sympathy, having made an indie game that gave a return of about £0.07/hour. Sold a few thousand copies, learnt a lot, made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun, but it certainly wasn't a great financial decision. And that was 10 years ago when it was a lot easier!
Games industry is like the music industry - if you do it for anything other than the love, you're likely to be disappointed. Your chances of 'making it' are astronomically small.
He doesn't mention how many hours he spent marketing it. I suspect not that many. I fully sympathize with his struggle, but this is a trap most programmers fall into so easily. Market need/fit > Marketing > Design > Programming when it comes to software products. You can't just build it and expect that they will come, unfortunately.
If the game concept doesn't sell itself as an elevator pitch, then it doesn't matter how good the implementation is.
I once met an indie dev who was surprised that their Space Invaders mobile clone didn't sell on Windows Mobile, "despite its amazing particle effects."
It's hard to context switch between marketing and programming. You can spent many hours marketing with little return, especially without a product. Programming by itself is slow, but there is a definitely return in terms of progress. So many people choose programming first before marketing. But I get what you mean. Its though.
In "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup," Rob Walling states three wrong reasons to launch something:
1. Having a product idea
2. To get rich
3. Because it sounds like fun
This and other books on launching your own thing stress that you first have to find a market, then fill that market's needs. In the world of indie games I can't even imagine what that would be.
There are even now niches in gaming that are under served, and games in these niches are much easier to market.
You can engineer a relatively high chance of success but it requires two things:
1) Actually picking an under served market. Meteriodvania style games are not one of these, there are a ton of game out there fulfilling that need.
2) Really really understanding the audience. You have to know what details of the previous games in the genre were actually important, and what were not which you can innovate in. Even the tiniest details can be super important.
The easiest way to find an underserved niche is to find a beloved series that died, or has been on life support for 10+ years with devs that just continuously drop the ball and can't recreate the magic.
See: Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, etc.
I'm very keen to see how Ready or Not does, when it releases. Everyone I know who played SWAT 4 back in the day loves it, and there hasn't been a comparable game since.
To throw out an example of an "available" niche: I think the first dev to bring out a modern version of Need For Speed: Underground, with decent car physics (similar to something like Grid: Autosport), is going to strike an absolute gold mine. NFS was literally all anybody at school talked about for years and years when U1, U2 and MW were coming out. Every game since has been complete rubbish, the new ones have physics so bad it feels like you're just gliding around on a magic carpet with a car body attached to it.
It is obvious what finding a market in indie games means and that you can't imagine it shows that you aren't particularly creative. There are a couple of different approaches to finding a market. Find a game that is fun or popular but doesn't have a polished or commercial version and make that. Find a set of users that would like to play games but doesn't have many games that appeal directly to them and make a product for them. Find an old game or genre that hasn't had a release and make a game in that style. Release a lot of small experiments and prototypes, build a small audience around one of them and iterate, killing ones that don't catch on, etc. Finding product market fit with and indie game might not always be cheap or easy, but there are a variety of ways to do it and it's definitely not unimaginable.
Not just programmers, many creatives and makers in general. Same rule applies whether you're running a startup, creating a video game, making movies, writing books/articles or playing in a band. The ones who succeed realise they've got to market their work, whereas the ones that don't still believe in the build it and they'll come mentality.
I was going to say: this "moment" on HN might increase the sales more than all of previous efforts did.
Today, the market is so saturated that even if you have the funds and interest (as a player / fan of genre), there is no way you can discover or keep up with all new releases. Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview, publications have now way of keeping up, streamers only have so much time.
The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about.
Finally, your game needs to be either hyper-polished or have some sort of novel angle. No disrespect, but looking at the trailer of this particular game, it seems its about 70% of the way their. Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish. The alternative is putting yourself into a niche and marking the hell out of everything, see e.g. the success of Cogmind, whose creator has been really good at Tweeting, posting on reddit, on HN, and so on...
> The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about.
There are no "off days". There is no "solution" for this title, except maybe a total visual makeover, which is probably out of the question. Some titles fail, end of story.
> Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish.
It doesn't look okay, it looks bad. Few people will tell this to someone's face, and that's part of the problem. Programmers often can't tell.
"More polish" is the last thing the game needs. It needs a makeover or be shelved. Just call it "done" and use it as a portfolio piece, it's good enough for that, any more polish is a waste of time.
I'm talking about that particular title, which is one Metroidvania amongst many Metroidvanias. It's not a unique concept, that's a given.
Even with a unique concept, Factorio started out when there were 20x fewer indie games being released and it took five years to gain traction. Today, such success would be even more unlikely.
> Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview
I would love to download a list of all games on Steam in .csv (or other simple tabular data) format. Is it possible to write a scraper? I want name, link, genre, price, platforms, and votes/installs if available.
The problem now is that all the people using that thought process are producing games that look and feel the same, and use the same ideas, because there are only a handful of prominent markets and sets of needs. (For example, why does almost every popular need to use the same oversaturated color palette?) You're discouraging the kind of artistry that indie dev needs to truly succeed.
Its not necessarily marketing in the sense of A/B testing his game play or fictional background or artwork or whatever, but consider general user experience stuff.
So I hear its a cool rogue-like but unlike the fifty indie rogue-likes I have languishing unplayed in my steam account already, I can play this one in the browser, whoa cool, technically impressive and maybe fun too.
So I go to the web page expecting a slither.io like experience where I'll be playing in 10 seconds.
And there's too many choices. First its a wall of text I can already be playing slither.io before I figure out what to do here in a RPG-adventure-IRL sense. Second there's confusion I should click on "Update Try it now on the play page" or the button "Join early access to play the game" or the tab labeled "Play Game" or down in the text its got a hyperlink to "play online" in the "play online, in-browser" section. Or they're different or the same or cognitive load thats un necessary. Is one link free and one link paid, or they all go to the same place but I better check them all first?
Then the choice confusion continues. I click on one of many widgets to get to the same place, "join early access". No I don't want to join I want to play. And more decision problems crop up, I can pay $7.50 for the free steam key (huh?) or there's a note from Luke that I can skip the payment section and get an account anyway wonder if it comes with a steam key or not what if I change my mind this is all so confusing and I want to make in-game decisions not the second page between me and the game experience. And the page is full of three ways to pay or its also free or the steam key is free or what all is going on here why am I stopping to research this and why am I researching instead of playing. I got a tab open with slither.io to make this stream of consciousness post and its calling to me... What if I don't like it and want my money back what if I make a free acct and later decide to toss some cash in its just all so overly complicated.
There is another interesting impedance bump where there' three federated ways to pay, via amazon, paypal, or stripe CC, which is convenient, I'm not complaining at all. The point is just above that there is no federated login or account generation at all; I have to provide my email for harvesting (come on, I know Luke is a good guy, but I've been on the internet for longer than most kids have been alive; I know better than to provide my email address "for free" it ain't 1990 anymore so say hi to vlm@example.com). Then I need to create yet another username and password to forget because there's no federation. I must have created over a thousand logins in the last couple decades; tired. You integrated three payment processors how about one-click login via google / FB / whatevs.
After all this uphill battle in the user acquisition phase, the tab with slither.io is beckoning to me...
Note that I'm exclusively complaining about the new user acquisition process; everything else is pretty cool! Its just a lot of work and cognitive load to get to play compared to the competition in the market (the fifty unplayed indie roguelikes in my steam account, or .io style instant casual web games)
My constructive suggestion: One page one click login via federated accts and don't forget "click here to play as anonymous coward" then in the UI "click here to sign up or give us piles of cash". The competition can get them playing in one click and 10 seconds...
Interesting marketing mechanic that some might say is evil, whatevs, in game while playing as "anonymous coward" click here to have a federated account (play with your facebook or google acct) and get a minor in-game reward for signing up. Not so ridiculous that people claim its cheaty, but something at least amusing or an in-game joke or something making it a trade in users min...
This is exactly why I fell off of the aquisition pipeline as well. I actually went looking to find out what the game was about. Cool, a play now link! Err...I'm not playing yet and there's a barrier to entry and lots of text and nah! Back to HN.
Put up some screenshots, even a game play video, give me the short version and let me get playing.
Edit: went back and found the screenshots on the home page, so apologies for missing that. Though missing them was quite easy, perhaps consider putting others on some of the play now pages, etc
It's interesting that you're using slither.io as an example. I've played hundreds of io games. Almost all of them are trash but figuring out the mechanics and finding the surefire way to win and then moving on to the next game was what I found interesting. So far there is only one good .io game that I actually keep coming back to and that is starblast.io.
My takeaway is: If your game fails then it simply wasn't good enough and making good games is hard.
My thoughts exactly! I'm a sucker for roguelikes and support a lot of indie developers that try slightly new angles at it, but there was too much of a barrier here.
Even if it's early access at least make it Steam early access. From the demo video it looks like the game would be in a good enough state to get it on there.
He also mentioned that even the guy(s) who made Super Meat Boy don't get a pass anymore just because they once made something that earned millions.
You can't build it and expect them to come. But you also can't even build it and have someone be your dedicated marketer, because you STILL can't expect them to come. There is no market right now, just people getting lucky.
Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Walking away now might mean throwing away 3 years, but that’s still better than working for another 3 years, still not succeeding, and wasting 6 years.
That's clearly not entirely true though, because there are hits. They're just extremely rare, but extremely visible. You can read interviews with the Stardew Valley guy all over where he talks about spending 4 years working solo on his game, refusing to give up on realising his artistic vision. Then he releases and it's a mega-hit. That's a very seductive story.
This isn't a problem unique to indie games. Every creative field has an overabundance of hopefuls, all chasing a tiny chance of turning it into a success. The problem, as Daniel Clowes observed back in 1991[1] is that everyone thinks that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
You may have missed the nuance in the comment you're replying to. Everyone knows that it's possible to win the lottery. But the best advice you can give is to tell people they're never going to win the lottery.
People who are super passionate about making indie games I'm going to do it regardless, so this is good advice.
I don't think Stupidcar was disagreeing, I think their point was just that you can tell people a million times that the chance of it working out for them is 1 in a million, and they'll still be out there trying to be that 0.0001%.
Of course I agree that if they can do it because it's something they really want to create, and not worry about whether it makes money, then they'll be much better mentally (and financially!) prepared.
"Best advice" why? Accurate, perhaps. But do you really find going around telling people that they're not going to win the lottery makes them stop playing? Even after they read an article about someone who won $100m and has quit their job to sail around the world?
I think such advice misunderstands the psychology of why people gamble on very long odds. The primary drive is emotional, not rational. The rational brain only has to be convinced that a theoretical possibility exists. After that, it's a matter of emotional appeal, and culture is very good at presenting seductive narratives based on rare occurrences.
An actual lottery is usually low-effort: you buy a ticket, scratch something or pick numbers, that's all. So even though you'll probably never win, you don't lose much. Working thousands of hours is not like that.
The equivalent of lottery with video games would be spamming app markets with shitty games made in a week-end, hoping it catches up somehow. One day someone will make another Flappy Bird, but it will probably not be you.
There is a problem unique to games if you view them as software: a very narrow window of promotion.
You can gradually improve overall visibility of a regular software by working on SEO and sales. But if a game wasn't picked by the press or at least some YouTube celebrity – it's over.
This is even worse for mobile games where a few store curators decide your fate.
Something I've noticed among indie devs is that they not only are terrible at marketing but they have this weird mindset about marketing that if they just make the best game possible then word of mouth will sell their game for them and they don't need to put more than the bare minimum into marketing. For some, reality sets in after release and they realize marketing matters. For others, they blame external forces and keep plodding down the same path.
Another good take on the phenomenon is (the insufferable) Taleb's discussion of "Black Swan" professions. History (from culture to natural disasters) gets defined by exceptional cases, but your own life in these professions will probably get defined by the typical case. Unfortunately, the industry is set up to stoke and profit handsomely from people mis-assessing their own chances.
The people I've known (actors and writers, mostly) who deal with this most healthily get a lot from their craft other than either outward success or personal fulfillment. There's also a community around their craft that gives them companionship, love, visibility to day jobs etc. Does that exist in the same way or indy devs? It seems like the solitary aspects of coding would work against.
Here are some things you can sell to indy devs while they are working: dev tools, hardware, books or online media w/ ads, conferences, certificate programs focused on game dev, marketing opportunities.
Then, when they are done, you get to skim big chunks of their revenue with app store, payment processing, etc. Don't forget to sell additional advertisements, to other game devs, on top of the places where you list their games!
All of the profit streams above scale with the number of devs and the total size of their market - not with the success of the average/median dev.
Same with the music industry. Professional for profit schools for audio engineering jobs that don’t exist, tons of home recording gear you must have, publishing companies to distribute your music, expensive studio time. So many ways to throw away your money, so many hobbyists willing to play for free or cheap (I’m guilty) that music venues don’t need to spend a dollar to book shows every night. Music sucks for most independent musicians and they have to hustle really really hard to make a living wage. Otherwise they just have to teach lessons to earn money which can really take away time from further developing your craft.
I’ve been a hobbyist and am increasingly exposed to professionals, people trying to make it and I feel sorry for them. Way more skilled at music than I will ever be at programming, yet struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
I doubt most of these tool companies make much of their money from small indies. For one, a lot of these small indies seem obsessed with writing their own tools (there was a good article on here a few months ago about "how to take seven years to ship your indie game"). For another thing, a lot of the biggest tools are moving a model where you pay out of royalties rather than up front (Unreal Engine being a recent high profile example). Precisely because so many indie devs want to use these tools but can't afford them, so this payment model allows them to pay off the back end rather than up front.
Dev tools are for all intents and purposes at this point free. Unity is free, Unreal is free, several other engines are free or close to free. "online media w/ads" is somehow exploiting devs? That seems really reaching. App stores might be over priced but they are world wide. Compared to before app stores when there was no way to reach a global audience. It's easy to argue both ways. As for ads they aren't special to games people mis-assessing their own chances. They're just ads.
I said "stoke and profit off of", not "exploit" - devs have free choice and simply need to get informed about where their incentives are (mis)aligned. I also never said these platforms don't do anything to create value. The issue is that they can prosper even if the typical dev is throwing his time into the meat grinder, and devs should realize this rather than assuming that because a market is large it is viable for the average (or even above average) participant.
Biggest example is the terrible working conditions of games developers in industry. These are some of the brightest, most dedicated coders out there, but they accept less money and crazy long hours.
It's the same thing with other professions where people provide their own sense of mission and self-fulfillment: teachers, home health aides, VFX artists in hollywood... These are important, in-demand professions, yet they get paid poorly because their drive and passion is counted against their compensation.
no sure what terrible working conditions of games developers in industry has to do with people mis-assessing their own chances. People mis-assessing their own chances are people working for themselves so by definition they are not "games developers in industry". Those that are in the industry are just getting a salary and being overworked, they aren't expecting to get rich from a hit
I think a more insightful analysis than (the insufferable) Taleb's one is the "Winner takes it all" one:
> In our 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society, Philip Cook and I [=Herbert Frank] argued that top salaries have been growing sharply in virtually every labor market because of two factors – technological forces that greatly amplify small increments in performance and increased competition for the services of top performers.
That might combine with the "saliency" cognitive bias - it's easier to think of successful actors, writers, game authors, than of unsuccessful ones.
If it's Pareto-distributed market winning then a lot of the same logic as to why you should do a startup – either do it because it needs to be done, or do it because you want to do it AND can endure all of the hardships, possibly because of how much you want it – should apply. Not everyone can or should do startups.
This is my observation (most likely to earn higher amount of money to least likely):
cherries aside;
- business (general)
- financial
- medical/law (only private sector)
- politicians
- social sector (government, law, medical)
- shitjobs
- everything concerning art (music, games, sculpting, painting etc. etc.), which ironically, when succesfull, make the most money. The duality of it all..
If u think politicians is low, it's because they get most of their wealth from the job before/after their run, and due to lobby nature, these tend to be wealthy companies.
Programming of the list, because this is highly dependent on where and what u program. This game dev is a good example, he is a programmer, but in the group of art. He probably will make more stable cash writing trivial database queries for any company.
Yep, and this makes perfect economic sense. In general, a given job pays roughly just enough to equal the costs of doing it (after all, if it paid more then why wouldn't new people be joining the market for this job and driving the wage down?). And by costs I of course mean net costs. Not just financial outlays but the intangible benefits of doing the job that offset the financial outlays.
And the fact is many people find making a game so intensely enjoyable that the net cost of making it is zero and they do it even when they're making no money or stand to lose money in expectation. Of course, there's huge variance in both directions, for every ten thousand indie game devs there's one Notch! And in reality I'm guessing being an indie game dev is at least slightly profitable in expectation. But the joy of doing it seems to drive their wages down to basically subsistence level.
Couple of things came to mind from reading this. First if your latest game doesn't sell despite past successes, you might have bungled your marketing, namely company branding. Most AAA game developers heavily invest in this, because if gamers like their current game, they might be interested for the next one, but only if they know who you are, not just your games. Consumers in games industry work just the same as they do in every other industry, indies just seem to think that because core gamers know who they are and engage with them, that the average consumer does too, but they don't.
Second one was that quote about lack of interest from games media. They do work as gate keepers, and most of them are heavily advertising driven, so the problem here is the same as above, indies suffer because they don't have marketing budgets. When the industry grows so large that it has to start attracting casuals, that always means spending marketing dollars, and indie industry has grown and saturated the core gamer group through, and casual interest just isn't there without marketing.
Game development always scared me as one of those studies that you hope your kids don't get interested in. Another one is manual drawing, especially when it is Anime (what are the chances that someone from a small European country is going to excel at such a job?).
> Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in.
Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you keep coming back, trying to level up by grinding boring quests. "You are not done yet, but the end is in sight!".
As a good game dev, in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets.
>in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets.
As a low income indie dev without the academic credentials to get past HR gatekeepers for stable full time work, I can't help but feel studying ML is about as wishful as creating a hit game. I have started studying ML this summer, and although I find the NLP applications really interesting since I have a social science background that exposed me to some literary theory and linguistic ideas that overlap with NLP at times, I think making a living wage doing it is just as much of an unrealistic dream as writing some killer app. The jobs all require PhDs, and the data science competitions have literary thousands of people with PhDs and industry experience competing for five figure prizes. When one is poor with no prospects these kind of pipe dreams feel so good to get caught up in as that sweet haze of hope numbs the critical thinking, but in a clear moment it looks like the ML gold rush is exactly the same as every other tech hype. That's not going to stop me from geeking out on PyTorch and trying to wring sentiment out of blocks of text or whatever, but I won't be able to honestly write a blog post about it in a few years asking if I wasted my time. I already know the answer.
Likely influenced in part by survivor bias. I don't have a PhD either. You can say I have a more practical than theoretical understanding of dropout.
The way to get past HR gatekeepers is to bypass HR. If you ask an employee: "Hey, I'd really like to work at your company for a while now. Can you share some resources/tips that would help me prepare for function x?" and you don't get useful feedback, you don't want to work there. If you send a data science lead a notebook where you solve a problem that is relevant to their business and you don't get a job interview, you don't want to work there (or need to brush up on your presentation and analytics skills).
Do the fast.ai courses. I promise you there are more profitable jobs available in ML than in indie game dev. Become good at using ML tools and data science (Python) and/or data engineering and data infra (Scala, AWS, Docker).
Millions of people taking ml courses. Very few get jobs because for every 50 devs you need one data scientist. It's like design but way overhyped. Also from my experiences the ones that get hired are not the best or knowledgeable but the ones with good sales qualities that can continuously bullshit the employer. I'm talking about your average software company not FB/Google.
ML is like painting, writing... it's good to know but not to make a career of it
I wrote this controversial tweet on the matter a while back (embedded here for convenience [1], controversial because it uses averages!)
Which might make things seem more or less bleak depending on your perspective, but an important note from this data is that the 2017 median sales were about 2000 units per game (yikes).
Good question, I dont have the data on me anymore (I extrapolated it from Steamspy, and I don't subscribe to it anymore). To get a (potentially) more accurate picture, I would instead look at all games that sold more than X units. I think if a game sells about 20k units, its probably a more serious contender (not that some good games have not had extremely poor sales).
Could someone explain what this trend even shows, other than making a cool looking curve? It seems to be a layer of abstraction over the graph in the blog (showing the indie explosion), but which adds nothing of value.
Graph in the blog is number of games released. My data is actual unit sales (approximated), which is important data as well. In other words, if more games were released on steam, but they were still as profitable per game, it would not be a huge issue. But the trend clearly shows the average sales per game going down. However, there is also a huge uptick in shovelware, so this could be a problem as well.
> But the trend clearly shows the average sales per game going down. However, there is also a huge uptick in shovelware, so this could be a problem as well.
doesn't this imply that shovelware is actually taking away some of the sales? In other words, making a large number of low-effort shovelware is a better money making scheme than making 1 (or few) mediumly good game?
You are looking at lifetime sales of games that have been on sale for different periods of time. All of these should be divided by number of years of sales, which gives you:
2017: 49k, 2016: 36k, 2015: 37k, 2014: 39k
2013: 120k, 2012: 89k, 2011: 73k, 2010: 48k
2009: 35k, 2008: 27k, 2007: 75k, 2006: 48k
2005: 43k, 2004: (this really just means Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike): 820k
With the sales normalized by year, and noting that 2004 did not actually allow third party games on sale, there is not an appreciable drop or trend across the entire time range.. I suspect the crazy spike in 2013 can be attributed entirely to Dota2 and 2012, Counterstrike Global Offensive causing mean skew.
great point! would be interesting to see the average sales drop-off over time. Typically games have sales spikes during the early release and then later during sales, but it tends to drop off over time. "Classic" or "must play" games, however, like Portal, tend to sell pretty well over their entire life.
median would definitely be better. As noted, median for 2017 was 2k units sold per game, but I lost the rest of that data. Regardless, average still carries some meaning. :)
Dividing by the number of years is wrong in the other direction: most games will sell far more copies in year 1 than year 10. Restricting each to first-year sales would be a much more realistic adjustment.
7672 games released in a year still seems so, so low to me. How many books are published in a year? How many albums?
I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed, yeah?
> I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed, yeah?
Yes. In the 90s there were not so many people with the skills and equipment to create games. Nowadays is a global market where everyone can give it a try. From cheap computers to Unity3D it is easier and cheaper than ever to create games.
Is that apples to apples? A 'movie' release could be anything from a quick short on YouTube to a $x00 million blockbuster, and everything in between. The same goes for games.
Here's what a publisher is for: to shoulder the risk. They have (presumably) umpteen different games (or whatever they're publishing) going, not only they can (if they do they job right) shoulder a few flops, and can hire marketing staff that wouldn't make sense for a single project. They can, finally, hire PR that would shield the developers from the public angry over the framerate or presence of women or something.
And yes, they haven't been doing their job right, they had too much power, they played it too safe and mistreated the developers.
But instead of supporting game developers who wanted to unionise, instead of supporting social projects (like basic income!) that would reduce the risk an independent takes, we asked people to go indie, and just shoulder that entire risk themselves. Good job, everyone!
> I’ve had a lot of fun building and sharing the game. But I did have some hope of creating something that a lot of people would check out and enjoy, and making some return on my time investment, perhaps enough to keep doing this as an independent career.
I wrote a video course on Amazon Machine Learning [0]. I spent about 80 hours researching, writing the outline, putting together the material, recording and re-recording the 105 minute course. I think I've made about $200 from it, directly.
But, I've done several talks on it (which were non paying, but sharpened my presentation skills), wrote half a book on it, and got one consulting opportunity around it. I also got a bit of schwag from AWS because someone noticed my forum contributions, which was cool.
If everything you do is a hit, you aren't taking enough risks. However, I will say that 2600 hours without market validation is far more commitment than I would make.
'Infinitroid is a roguelike (or rogue-lite) sci-fi platformer with procedurally generated levels and deeply customizable weapons"
The problem is that the "roguelike" "metrovania" "platformer" genre is oversaturated with so many indie games, so if you're going to grab some money with it it's better gotta be absolutely perfect. From my first impression I don't know if the mechanics are solid, but the art and sound seems too... generic? Maybe if the game had some unique style in it (and some marketing too) it shouldn't have bombed this much...
This is a problem, but it's not the problem honestly. Every game that fails, there's something about it that people can point to as obviously why it failed. And just about every game that succeeds, also has something about that they could have pointed out as why it failed, had it failed.
Some games are so unpolished or uninspired that they were never going to succeed, but always picking apart "why it failed" makes people think that "if I just do x and y and z, my game will succeed!" Which right now honestly just isn't true; there's too much luck and random chance involved (plus of course other concrete factors like marketing effort etc).
The next argument is usually "well, then why don't I see really good games that aren't successful?" A few years ago that was a sort of reasonable argument, but there are plenty of great and unsuccessful games on Steam now. They just don't show up anywhere.
On the other hand, sometimes it's very much not chance. Take stardew valley. It's not like Barone hit some sort of jackpot with his game. It really is head and shoulders above the competition, and that appears to be entirely due to his hard work on it. My evidence for this is that after I played Stardew Valley I was thirsty for more similar farming games, so I played or looked at every single one on steam (there's only about a dozen or so that qualify) and none of them are half the game that stardew valley is. If there were some diamond in the rough, stardew valley-quality game out there that through happenstance never went viral I would have hoped to find it, but no, there really isn't.
The first one I see is "Fantasy Farming: Orange Season"[1]. Looks very similar to Stardew Valley, review average is 96% positive, but it only has 61 reviews (a good general indicator of sales) vs Stardew Valley's 86,000.
I'm sure it's probably not as good as Stardew Valley, but one has probably 1400x the sales of the other.
It did also release after Stardew Valley which is a problem. You can certainly benefit from being a first to fill a niche that people are missing. I wonder if the Stardew Valley dev had taken another year to release and Fantasy Farming had released first, if things would be the same.
Ah cool, I thought I recognised that username. I used to work across the room from you back at UR. I hope all is well. I was impressed with how well your kick starter went.
Small world. Yeah, the Kickstarter was good. Not good enough to finish the game as full-time work unfortunately, but that was my bad estimating of how long things would take.
The experience on it got me another good job when I needed to go back to work on something that'd actually pay money, but I still want to finish it (for the people that have bought into it, and for myself), so I'm doing bits when I can. Working on a hopefully fun singleplayer mode that'll help alleviate the fact that there's no-one on the multiplayer.
It's also immediately obvious that it's just an RPG Maker game with very little effort put in to conceal that fact. RPG Maker games generally don't do well, because 99% of them are garbage, and those that aren't go to great lengths to distinguish themselves visually, like Yume Nikki, and I don't know if that title ever was a commercial success.
Nevertheless its review score average is equal to Stardew Valley's. Although I concede that people's expectations may be lower when buying this game, and that may make them less likely to leave a negative review.
Yeah the name isn't very good. And yeah the base engine is RPG maker (re the other comment here).
But this is kinda my original point. Making a game with a good name, or a different engine, isn't going to mean it's successful. You can always point out something in terms of "well it's clearly failed because X". Hell, people even say the Unity3D logo scares them off. But people really like that game. They like it as much as they like Stardew Valley. And it's probably sold less than 0.1% as much.
I think you're putting too much stock in the steam reviews. Just because a game has the same % positive rating as another doesn't mean it's of the same quality or even that people like it the same amount.
It's like rotten tomatoes. 2001: A Space Odyssey [0] has 93% on RT, Pick of the Litter has 100%. I'm sure Pick of the Litter is a fine film, but clearly there's a sense in which it's a lesser movie compared to 2001 by general consensus, despite what the percentages would indicate. Now the case of stardew valley and "the other farming simulators on steam" is not so extreme but that's what I'm getting at.
You may be right that a good name or a different engine won't save a game, but I don't think the game you chose as your point is one to demonstrate that.
> But people really like that game.
It seems most people haven't played it.
And there are often game with, say, awful graphics, that are awesome to play. It happens. That doesn't mean you should bank on it.
Apparently you can try that game in the browser for free, but you have to create an account first. And they wonder why they don't sell any licenses! If someone manages to shoot themselves in the foot in such an epic way I am not surprised they never sold anything.
I don't mean to poopoo how hard it is to succeed as an indie game maker now, but I can barely find /any/ press or information about the game when I search for it. It's rarely enough to just build something and cross your fingers, especially in a saturated market.
Coding heads down without any marketing or validation (like selling early release steam copies) and hoping it'll see viral growth is a mistake, for both startups and indie games.
> I’m kinda floundering right now and not really sure what to do
release it
focus on marketing for a while
Treat it as a purely hobby project
Make it into an ethical game experiment
pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety
As someone who's gone through this, put years into a software startup, nearly had it fail completely after spending a lot of my own money to keep the family afloat while I goofed around thinking I was building something great...
I feel like there is only one right answer here, and it's just glaringly obvious. Marketing is the thing that needed doing before starting, during the project, and after it's done. Regardless of the trends on Steam, in fact even more so because of the trends on Steam. None of the other options will solve the problem. Releasing it won't help, and making an ethical experiment won't get anywhere without an audience. Pouring more time into graphics will result in greater loss without first gaining an audience.
Indeed, that's very true. I've experienced first hand trying to market something that I haven't finished imagining. But that's the whole point, you have to start before you've finished, even though it is hard.
It's difficult to market in general, at any stage of doneness. Marketing can be hard, boring, frustrating, and not fun. It's especially tempting as a dev to think that if you just make the product better, people will see it, and recognize its amazingness, and it'll go viral and market itself. It's tempting to keep adding features and making the product better. But that strategy doesn't work, it's important to buckle down and do the marketing, otherwise nobody will ever know about your game or product, no matter how good, and no matter how done it is.
Find someone who is good at marketing and believes in your game enough to get 30% of all revenue in exchange for marketing it. In other words, find a business partner with a clue.
The indie game marketplace has a massive discovery problem that is not whatsoever met by current tools. Humble Bundle tried to solve this for a while but I just checked their site and it's filled with AAA titles to include Overwatch, Assassin's Creed, and COD: Black Ops.
Assuming you have a tight budget (no budget for marketing or user testing) pick someone, yourself, a friend, or relative, then make some concept arts, and show it to them, if they like it, continue iterating, if they are not interested you have to pivot. Note that the user can also be yourself. It's unlikely that you would make a game that you yourself love to play but no other one does. It's however likely that you love developing it much more then playing it, then you are not the user! And you have to find an actual user. Test the game/product on your target user(s) throughout the development process to see what works and what doesn't. If the "users" are engaged they will have suggestions, actually you will get flooded with suggestions, so it helps if you also is a user yourself so you can prioritize features according to your vision and not just the most popular.
Website with preorder/newsletter sign up (maybe stretching it a bit to interpret "user" as "interested potential customer"?
but even if the answer is "for this kind of product it's impossible to get a user before writing code" it's not necessarily a bad heuristic -- maybe the conclusion could be "don't build this kind of product, pick something else"
I love gaming. I’m glad that people make the video games that I buy and play.
I would never ever consider actually becoming involved in the space as a programmer, not in a million years. I advise any potential programmers to stay way the hell away from it too.
Yeah, it's like the equivalent of using the default in iMovie.
Very little thought given to art direction. Has the effect of making this seem like a Unity game, even though he built the engine from scratch. Seems like he played Axiom Verge, said "I could do that!" and then put his nose to the grindstone for three years without asking anybody else for input.
581 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 382 ms ] thread[1] - http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=7DRL
[2] - http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Cogmind
This probably depends on your ratio of story/art to engine/game mechanics[0] your game would have.
It seems games that do not require continuous player progress (ruling out RPGs entirely) can be a good fit.
e.g. Episodic story-telling games and then something like Hitman, so action games can be done that way too.
But you could easily release TBS games this way too, many "mission"-based games would lend themselves to this format.
[0] In a broad sense.
- Finish the first 20% and presell the unstarted 80% as a Season Pass
- Launch a basic version with DLC
Well, that seems to be how many multiplayer games are released nowadays anyway. Look at ARMS or Mario Tennis Aces on the Nintendo Switch, or Pokemon GO, or Sea of Thieves* on Xbox. Released in very basic states, then slowly expanded upon via regular updates. You could even possibly say Minecraft went the same way.
That said, this sort of 'Minimum Viable Game' idea may not work as well here as it does for business products or web services. People are practically spoilt for choice when it comes to what games to buy, and a game that leaves an initial 'meh' impression (due to a lack of content/replay value) can often die out before the updates ever come. And the critics will certainly not be kind to it either...
* Admittedly, that one took four years to develop, which may not have been the best setup given the lack of content.
Other ways this is sometimes done are:
1. By releasing demos on a regular basis to test the waters 2. Splitting the game up into episodes and selling them one at a time. Valve did this with Half Life, but it was arguably TellTale Games who ran with it. 3. Or by running a beta test for the game and gauging reactions from that.
Of course, all the above assumes you can build at least a somewhat sizable portion of the game in a reasonable timeframe. If you want to know whether a completely untested idea will be viable... well good luck with that in this industry. You'll always need at least a core gameplay loop setup to know whether the idea is fun, and you'll need much more if you want to know whether anyone will buy it.
Stardew Valley primarily gathered early adopters through regular blog updates about dev progress.
For example, let's say you want to make a retro platformer. The assumption is that many people would be interested in a new retro platformer. That's easy to check: browse through Steam's new releases, find the 10 newest retro platformers, and see how much interest they get. Heck, even imagining that exercise could be enough to make you change course.
I don't think you can gauge success by looking at existing titles. It's like asking if there's a market for scifi novels. What do you find? People like scifi novels, and there are lots of scifi novels that suck and nobody reads them. Do people like metal music? There's tons of successful metal bands, and there's an ocean of trash.
Every work is unique.
I guess if you go deeper you can get a qualitative idea by judging how good a game is before including it as a data point
These outliers don't refute the rule that different markets have different odds of success.
Lol ok.
To a mathematician this is a funny quote. But then I consider myself dumb most of he time.
Additionally, high SAT scores don’t prevent you from making dumb decisions, like say, spending 2,600 hours developing an indie game and thinking you’ll make money on it.
But why did he do that to start? Seems like focusing time on the content instead of the engine would’ve made him feel like he ‘wasted’ less time.
But whether companies look for this type of employee, I am unsure that is true. The truth is, most companies look for employees without gaps in their resume. They are looking for signals such as having worked Google or Facebook. They care much less about your startup than most people think. If you don't hit those checkboxes, you are going to have a hard time looking for a job.
I mean, in terms of chances in the industry - I got in by completing a 4 year CS degree. If he gets in by spending 3 years building his own game then I'd say it was worth it.
If you spent 3 years of your life working on a game, it's not a gap on your resume. In fact, it's the shining achievement on your resume, and it should get you that phone screen. If you can't tell a good story about hard work and technology mastery from that experience, your problem isn't an HR department, it's that you don't know how to write a resume.
Let's say the candidate pool comes back with 30+ results. I will only interview 10 candidates realistically because I have other jobs to fill too. I will rank those candidates by experience and background. People that work at existing AAA studios always goes on top of the pile because I know their chances of filling the job is much higher (disadvantage #2). If there are more than 10 candidates from AAA studios, then too bad for you. Indie game developers goes to the bottom pile unless their skill set matches exactly what I need. Even then, he/ she is an unknown, for the simple reason, they might exaggerate their experience and AAA studios can guarantee the candidates quality.
As an HR, I need to meet quotas. And I have only so many hours to spend per day interviewing candidates. Each candidate takes an hour. Interviewing an indie game developer takes more time because I need to make sure he know his stuff. If I keep on passing indie developers that are not up to par to hiring managers, they will reflect that back to my manager.
This has not been my experience at all. The opposite, in fact. I briefly did hiring at a medium sized game studio. We preferred to hire indie devs with completed games over those with AAA studio pedigree specifically because we can verify that the indie dev actually built stuff himself. He could provide code when asked and talk intelligently about it.
AAA studio developers couldn't share any code (for obvious reasons) and it can be hard to pin point exactly what they did on any given project. When a studio can put anywhere from 10 to 100 developers on a single project, authorship gets fuzzy.
That said, I would discourage the indie dev in question from pursuing a job in the industry. Why would you jump aboard a sinking ship? 1000 people in the games industry have been axed in the last year alone[0].
[0]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-...
I don't know why you created this account in order to post your fake story.
But anyone who has ever worked anywhere professionally will see that you have no idea how it works or even what your job title is. (Hint: it's "recruiter".)
Not sure about how big gaps in employment are.
Games these days are a lot about marketing and huge budgets. The indie ones that do well need to be targeted as well as refreshing.
Some hard thoughts just watching the video and reading a bit about the game:
1. I don't really like the graphics as much as I liked the original Metroid. This is probably just a personal preference.
2. It mostly screams low quality "Metroid clone" and not something cool I'd tell my friends about.
3. Procedurally generated levels doesn't sell me. I don't really care.
That said totally not a waste of time. It shows you have the wits to bring something to market and the ability to ship. You coded the whole damn thing which is insanely involved. This is no small feat. However the market is generally the hardest critic and it doesn't matter how many hours you spent or how many lines and bugs you solved.
Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generation takes a big dump on any sense of familiarity, which is a big part of the reward for exploration.
In fact, the _only_ games I've played where procedural generation were good for the game are story-building games, such as Rogue-likes and Dwarf Fortress. They reward you for building a story, not for traversing obstacles. In every other game, they are just a weak thematic obscuration of the underlying mechanical goals. The Dryad's name in Terraria doesn't matter. Dig deep enough and you'll find diamonds in Minecraft. Kill a boss enough times in Borderlands, and you'll get a good gun. There's no story about achieving these goals. Procedural generation doesn't participate in making the goals more interesting to achieve, it's a forgettable and incidental fact about something almost wholly unrelated.
Game developers need to stop trying to lean on it as a substitute for content. A game is what people can expect from it each time they play it, and if all it is is a bundle of mechanics and throw-backs, then there's not going to be much appeal.
And then there are some players who can win virtually every game they play: https://alt.org/nethack/ascstreak-360.html
That's right, Tariru has won 61 times in a row. So that makes my 100 losses 'avoidable' in some sense, which spurs me on to do better. It only requires luck if you play inattentively :)
I think this is the best way to do a random dungeon roguelike with a story.
That said, I wouldn't sell Sproggiwood on its story in particular, just the arrangement of everything. The game is fun because it's a good bite size style of roguelike for a phone with interesting/fun mechanics in play.
These games have the extra depth and detail that cause the kinds of emergent gameplay and "storybuilding" that people are talking about.
They have either:
A) Multiplayer
B) Procedural Generation
If you don’t want to do A, and you hope to make something people will play for a long time, then you have to do B.
Procedural generation has no value for getting players interested, it only matters for keeping players long term.
But it does matter a lot.
Shorter games are fine, and sell to people who want novelty over repetition. Don't make the game longer than its content, and price accordingly.
Now, if the proc gen is sufficiently complex, we're talking about something else, (but that is rare if it exists at all.)
C) have 1000 hours worth of manually created content
Think about games like witcher 3, tes, fallout. Those things are huge and replayable.
The only other thing I'd add for Luke is - do you enjoy playing this game? As in, have you sunk a whooole bunch of hours into playing it, simply because it's the only game available (that you made precisely because there's nothing else) that scratches this very particular itch?
I'd like to think that the foundations are in place to make it such, but from what I saw, I saw a lot of [highly capable] box ticking, but not a lot to make me want to take it on.
In contrast, Mario looks fun and jolly and silly.
I understand programmers often like working on their own projects, and sometimes we end up with complete packages like Stardew Valley, but maybe it's better to work in a team where everyone has their own strengths. I see so many games with fantastic code, going to waste because of really underwhelming story, art style or sound.
It's like the old adage: You're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.
I would even say that this game manages to hit the 3 points in which I avoid on a Metroidvania:
1. Rogue-like. I really dislike rogue-like, no special reason, just a personal preference
2. Lack of a plot. I appreciate the feeling of exploring a world the feels alive, even if it's a very simple one. Going through levels for the sake of going through them, it's not much of a fun experience to me.
3. Huge resemblance to the original Metroid. If I wanted to play Metroid... I would be playing Metroid.
Also... no Linux version? Really? That excludes me entirely from this game.
You're criticizing an indie game developer who feels he just wasted 3 years of his life making a failure, for not spending the extra year or whatever it'd take for it to be cross-platform?
Also, it is a legit thing to point out when and developer complains about the lack of sales.
I have personally used hundreds of dollars on linux compatible games.
Some years ago, but that is explained by a sharp decline in the quality of games included in their offers (which was about the time they dropped ensuring that their bundles were compatible with the three platforms). A better question would be when I last spend money on (game) software for linux. The answer is 28 hours ago.
I concur that the market is small. But when your sales are small too, it is not smart to throw away access to a market with a higher proportion of dedicated users and consumers. From the perspective of tech, less time may have been "wasted" on infinitroid if the developer used more off the shelve solutions that would help with multiplatform targeting.
In the end we are just basing our arguments on our gut feelings. I doubt very much that Valve would push as hard for gaming on linux as they are doing if they didn't see the potentials of sales for the platform in their data. But time will tell.
[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/linux-game-sales-stat...
[2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/president-of-blizzard...
As an indie developer, you need to maximize that market coverage (and develop with portability in mind).
Having said that, it's probably not the primary reason why his game failed.
- The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop to work as it should is huge, and there are several competing packaging providers with no clear winner, and all have very much hidden gotchas that they do a poor job of explaining ahead of time.
- Making a cross-platform Electron app that behaves well and up to to snuff on Windows, Mac and Linux is not even close to easy. The fact that JS theoretically works on all three platforms buys you way less than most people think.
Source: I'm making a cross platform Electron app that supports Linux.
You plug in your Ubuntu drive and install it, it detects your video card and install the drivers.
Everything just works, when people rag on Linux desktops they are talking about Linux from 6 years ago.
A ton of effort has been put into making the experience smooth and there are multiple projects to make it even more user friendly like elementary os and popos
You also don't need to support every distro on the planet. Just focus on Ubuntu. With proper planning and choosing your game engine wisely it's not the biggest deal to build for Linux.
If you support Ubuntu+Debian (1.15% user base globally on average), the next feature request you'll get will be Xubuntu, Arch, and then some smaller distros which has their own undocumented quirks, they'll ask for 32 bit versions (0.0015%) to run on ancient machines that aren't really powerful enough to run the app anyway, and there goes the rabbit hole.
(In the meanwhile, Windows users are 85%, Mac OS is 13%. We're talking about fractions of fractions a percent here when you move out of Ubuntu x64)
These features will be framed as "You're supporting Ubuntu, getting it to work on this {{similar_distro}} is so close, you should do it and you'll have a lot of users". It's not that they're wrong or malicious — it's just that their concept of a lot of users is a whopping multitude of three people.
I'm also purposefully ignoring the more acrid side of the Linux community where they'll call you names, find your personal email, and make sure it's the first thing you read in the morning for not pulling heroics to make it work for their distro of choice (0.0000075% user base).
All in all, not worth it, really. Not financially, not logically. Not from a human point of view, either.
Here are a few things I've found helpful if you're making a desktop app for Linux:
- Consider charging Linux users for support. This is justifiable because for every Windows support request, there are likely 10 people that experienced the problem and haven't written to you about it, for Mac, 2-3, but for Linux, very likely you're only helping that single guy only. This is the best way to do this, but since my app is free, I don't really want to set up a payment infrastructure.
- Make your app free, and ask Linux users to either make their own builds from unpacked releases, or pay for support for their distro on a rolling basis. You don't really expect anyone to take the latter, but it does wonders to cut down on requests in which people demand you support their favourite obscure distro of choice with no help or support from them.
That said, I still provide Snaps, as it's the closest I can get to a universal Linux runtime. This exposes me to requests to provide AppImage, Flatpak, and some other stuff even then, but it's way better than trying to support distros directly. [0]
[0] I tried to support AppImage, I gave up after a full day of trying. Flatpak had similar issues. One of the core developers of AppImage reached out trying to debug, and I helped him as much as I could — but the point is, while the intentions are pure, and I'm glad for the effort, this is deeper and deeper into the red in terms of price / performance.
But yea from my experience the game market is a little different because there is a growing group of people that rather would not boot Windows for gaming and instead stay on their platform. This group of people is very thankful for ported games.
In fact being a Roguelite is woven into the plot, characters aren't surprised to see you, after all you were just here last session, the mounds of festering corpses prompt you to remark that they're all the same... They're all you.
Also, the design scheme between different 'blocks' which make up the platforms in the game is not uniform, which makes the design feel much more disjointed.
Games industry is like the music industry - if you do it for anything other than the love, you're likely to be disappointed. Your chances of 'making it' are astronomically small.
If the game concept doesn't sell itself as an elevator pitch, then it doesn't matter how good the implementation is.
I once met an indie dev who was surprised that their Space Invaders mobile clone didn't sell on Windows Mobile, "despite its amazing particle effects."
1. Having a product idea
2. To get rich
3. Because it sounds like fun
This and other books on launching your own thing stress that you first have to find a market, then fill that market's needs. In the world of indie games I can't even imagine what that would be.
You can engineer a relatively high chance of success but it requires two things:
1) Actually picking an under served market. Meteriodvania style games are not one of these, there are a ton of game out there fulfilling that need.
2) Really really understanding the audience. You have to know what details of the previous games in the genre were actually important, and what were not which you can innovate in. Even the tiniest details can be super important.
See: Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, etc.
I'm very keen to see how Ready or Not does, when it releases. Everyone I know who played SWAT 4 back in the day loves it, and there hasn't been a comparable game since.
To throw out an example of an "available" niche: I think the first dev to bring out a modern version of Need For Speed: Underground, with decent car physics (similar to something like Grid: Autosport), is going to strike an absolute gold mine. NFS was literally all anybody at school talked about for years and years when U1, U2 and MW were coming out. Every game since has been complete rubbish, the new ones have physics so bad it feels like you're just gliding around on a magic carpet with a car body attached to it.
Today, the market is so saturated that even if you have the funds and interest (as a player / fan of genre), there is no way you can discover or keep up with all new releases. Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview, publications have now way of keeping up, streamers only have so much time.
The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about.
Finally, your game needs to be either hyper-polished or have some sort of novel angle. No disrespect, but looking at the trailer of this particular game, it seems its about 70% of the way their. Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish. The alternative is putting yourself into a niche and marking the hell out of everything, see e.g. the success of Cogmind, whose creator has been really good at Tweeting, posting on reddit, on HN, and so on...
There are no "off days". There is no "solution" for this title, except maybe a total visual makeover, which is probably out of the question. Some titles fail, end of story.
> Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish.
It doesn't look okay, it looks bad. Few people will tell this to someone's face, and that's part of the problem. Programmers often can't tell.
"More polish" is the last thing the game needs. It needs a makeover or be shelved. Just call it "done" and use it as a portfolio piece, it's good enough for that, any more polish is a waste of time.
Even with a unique concept, Factorio started out when there were 20x fewer indie games being released and it took five years to gain traction. Today, such success would be even more unlikely.
I would love to download a list of all games on Steam in .csv (or other simple tabular data) format. Is it possible to write a scraper? I want name, link, genre, price, platforms, and votes/installs if available.
So I hear its a cool rogue-like but unlike the fifty indie rogue-likes I have languishing unplayed in my steam account already, I can play this one in the browser, whoa cool, technically impressive and maybe fun too.
So I go to the web page expecting a slither.io like experience where I'll be playing in 10 seconds.
And there's too many choices. First its a wall of text I can already be playing slither.io before I figure out what to do here in a RPG-adventure-IRL sense. Second there's confusion I should click on "Update Try it now on the play page" or the button "Join early access to play the game" or the tab labeled "Play Game" or down in the text its got a hyperlink to "play online" in the "play online, in-browser" section. Or they're different or the same or cognitive load thats un necessary. Is one link free and one link paid, or they all go to the same place but I better check them all first?
Then the choice confusion continues. I click on one of many widgets to get to the same place, "join early access". No I don't want to join I want to play. And more decision problems crop up, I can pay $7.50 for the free steam key (huh?) or there's a note from Luke that I can skip the payment section and get an account anyway wonder if it comes with a steam key or not what if I change my mind this is all so confusing and I want to make in-game decisions not the second page between me and the game experience. And the page is full of three ways to pay or its also free or the steam key is free or what all is going on here why am I stopping to research this and why am I researching instead of playing. I got a tab open with slither.io to make this stream of consciousness post and its calling to me... What if I don't like it and want my money back what if I make a free acct and later decide to toss some cash in its just all so overly complicated.
There is another interesting impedance bump where there' three federated ways to pay, via amazon, paypal, or stripe CC, which is convenient, I'm not complaining at all. The point is just above that there is no federated login or account generation at all; I have to provide my email for harvesting (come on, I know Luke is a good guy, but I've been on the internet for longer than most kids have been alive; I know better than to provide my email address "for free" it ain't 1990 anymore so say hi to vlm@example.com). Then I need to create yet another username and password to forget because there's no federation. I must have created over a thousand logins in the last couple decades; tired. You integrated three payment processors how about one-click login via google / FB / whatevs.
After all this uphill battle in the user acquisition phase, the tab with slither.io is beckoning to me...
Note that I'm exclusively complaining about the new user acquisition process; everything else is pretty cool! Its just a lot of work and cognitive load to get to play compared to the competition in the market (the fifty unplayed indie roguelikes in my steam account, or .io style instant casual web games)
My constructive suggestion: One page one click login via federated accts and don't forget "click here to play as anonymous coward" then in the UI "click here to sign up or give us piles of cash". The competition can get them playing in one click and 10 seconds...
Interesting marketing mechanic that some might say is evil, whatevs, in game while playing as "anonymous coward" click here to have a federated account (play with your facebook or google acct) and get a minor in-game reward for signing up. Not so ridiculous that people claim its cheaty, but something at least amusing or an in-game joke or something making it a trade in users min...
Put up some screenshots, even a game play video, give me the short version and let me get playing.
Edit: went back and found the screenshots on the home page, so apologies for missing that. Though missing them was quite easy, perhaps consider putting others on some of the play now pages, etc
How can you complain about lack of sales for an unreleased game! Fuck off! All sympathy instantly gone.
My takeaway is: If your game fails then it simply wasn't good enough and making good games is hard.
Even if it's early access at least make it Steam early access. From the demo video it looks like the game would be in a good enough state to get it on there.
You can't build it and expect them to come. But you also can't even build it and have someone be your dedicated marketer, because you STILL can't expect them to come. There is no market right now, just people getting lucky.
There is no market.
Let that sink in.
- call the game finished and walk away now you finished the dev work
- call the game a hobby to excuse the sales now you finished the dev work
- code some arbitrary addition to be ethical just to be coding something cause dev work is probably the only work that exists
- keep iterating cause you can always invent more dev work to do
- get a different project going for another type of dev work
All of these will successfully waste those 3 years and more if you don't focus on converting your nascent product into income.
how do you know what the opportunity cost of continuing is? It's hard to know either way.
The OP has a product almost ready on his hands. It should be easy to test it and check if it's worth investing any more time or not.
Throwing it away before he knows, just to go invest his time on another dubious thing doesn't sound wise.
You will lose money. That's it. There's no magic message here.
Source: an indie dev. I keep my passion for my project because it's something I truly want to do.
This isn't a problem unique to indie games. Every creative field has an overabundance of hopefuls, all chasing a tiny chance of turning it into a success. The problem, as Daniel Clowes observed back in 1991[1] is that everyone thinks that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
[1] https://artinfiction.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/asc-3.jpg
People who are super passionate about making indie games I'm going to do it regardless, so this is good advice.
Of course I agree that if they can do it because it's something they really want to create, and not worry about whether it makes money, then they'll be much better mentally (and financially!) prepared.
Likewise, if you are going to put your heart into something like this... do it because you want to...
if you win? great. but it'll be the exception to the rule.
I think such advice misunderstands the psychology of why people gamble on very long odds. The primary drive is emotional, not rational. The rational brain only has to be convinced that a theoretical possibility exists. After that, it's a matter of emotional appeal, and culture is very good at presenting seductive narratives based on rare occurrences.
Not 100% successfully, but of course it helps. Why don't you go around and ask some people why they don't play the lottery?
I think such advice misunderstands the psychology of why people gamble on very long odds.
It's why I don't gamble. It's why lots of people don't gamble. People aren't completely rational, but they're not completely irrational either.
Helping people put understand the true odds of what they're engaged in is a good thing.
What do you have against people knowing the facts?
The equivalent of lottery with video games would be spamming app markets with shitty games made in a week-end, hoping it catches up somehow. One day someone will make another Flappy Bird, but it will probably not be you.
You can gradually improve overall visibility of a regular software by working on SEO and sales. But if a game wasn't picked by the press or at least some YouTube celebrity – it's over.
This is even worse for mobile games where a few store curators decide your fate.
The people I've known (actors and writers, mostly) who deal with this most healthily get a lot from their craft other than either outward success or personal fulfillment. There's also a community around their craft that gives them companionship, love, visibility to day jobs etc. Does that exist in the same way or indy devs? It seems like the solitary aspects of coding would work against.
how so? how does the industry profit from people mis-assessing their own chances?
Then, when they are done, you get to skim big chunks of their revenue with app store, payment processing, etc. Don't forget to sell additional advertisements, to other game devs, on top of the places where you list their games!
All of the profit streams above scale with the number of devs and the total size of their market - not with the success of the average/median dev.
I’ve been a hobbyist and am increasingly exposed to professionals, people trying to make it and I feel sorry for them. Way more skilled at music than I will ever be at programming, yet struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
It's the same thing with other professions where people provide their own sense of mission and self-fulfillment: teachers, home health aides, VFX artists in hollywood... These are important, in-demand professions, yet they get paid poorly because their drive and passion is counted against their compensation.
> In our 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society, Philip Cook and I [=Herbert Frank] argued that top salaries have been growing sharply in virtually every labor market because of two factors – technological forces that greatly amplify small increments in performance and increased competition for the services of top performers.
That might combine with the "saliency" cognitive bias - it's easier to think of successful actors, writers, game authors, than of unsuccessful ones.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/12/how_...
You might not be the next star musician, but even big artists need session players, there's teaching, arranging, etc
Artists and writers can find some work in commercial endeavours.
It might not be a big market but it exists.
cherries aside;
- business (general)
- financial
- medical/law (only private sector)
- politicians
- social sector (government, law, medical)
- shitjobs
- everything concerning art (music, games, sculpting, painting etc. etc.), which ironically, when succesfull, make the most money. The duality of it all..
If u think politicians is low, it's because they get most of their wealth from the job before/after their run, and due to lobby nature, these tend to be wealthy companies.
Programming of the list, because this is highly dependent on where and what u program. This game dev is a good example, he is a programmer, but in the group of art. He probably will make more stable cash writing trivial database queries for any company.
And the fact is many people find making a game so intensely enjoyable that the net cost of making it is zero and they do it even when they're making no money or stand to lose money in expectation. Of course, there's huge variance in both directions, for every ten thousand indie game devs there's one Notch! And in reality I'm guessing being an indie game dev is at least slightly profitable in expectation. But the joy of doing it seems to drive their wages down to basically subsistence level.
You are only asking to have people point out possibilities that you didn't.
But in your heart of hearts, you know you did.
That doesn't mean you didn't have fun. I suspect you need to revisit what 'waste' really is for you though.
Second one was that quote about lack of interest from games media. They do work as gate keepers, and most of them are heavily advertising driven, so the problem here is the same as above, indies suffer because they don't have marketing budgets. When the industry grows so large that it has to start attracting casuals, that always means spending marketing dollars, and indie industry has grown and saturated the core gamer group through, and casual interest just isn't there without marketing.
> Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in.
Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you keep coming back, trying to level up by grinding boring quests. "You are not done yet, but the end is in sight!".
As a good game dev, in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets.
As a low income indie dev without the academic credentials to get past HR gatekeepers for stable full time work, I can't help but feel studying ML is about as wishful as creating a hit game. I have started studying ML this summer, and although I find the NLP applications really interesting since I have a social science background that exposed me to some literary theory and linguistic ideas that overlap with NLP at times, I think making a living wage doing it is just as much of an unrealistic dream as writing some killer app. The jobs all require PhDs, and the data science competitions have literary thousands of people with PhDs and industry experience competing for five figure prizes. When one is poor with no prospects these kind of pipe dreams feel so good to get caught up in as that sweet haze of hope numbs the critical thinking, but in a clear moment it looks like the ML gold rush is exactly the same as every other tech hype. That's not going to stop me from geeking out on PyTorch and trying to wring sentiment out of blocks of text or whatever, but I won't be able to honestly write a blog post about it in a few years asking if I wasted my time. I already know the answer.
The way to get past HR gatekeepers is to bypass HR. If you ask an employee: "Hey, I'd really like to work at your company for a while now. Can you share some resources/tips that would help me prepare for function x?" and you don't get useful feedback, you don't want to work there. If you send a data science lead a notebook where you solve a problem that is relevant to their business and you don't get a job interview, you don't want to work there (or need to brush up on your presentation and analytics skills).
Do the fast.ai courses. I promise you there are more profitable jobs available in ML than in indie game dev. Become good at using ML tools and data science (Python) and/or data engineering and data infra (Scala, AWS, Docker).
I'd read it in a heartbeat. Your vivid writing style is fascinating.
And once you learn to press Enter key more often[0], a literary career may not be out of the question.
[0]Walls of text are hard to read.
[1] https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/967249172804943872
Average number of units sold per game on steam by year (note many games have long tails)
There is simply so much shovelware/copy and paste games.
doesn't this imply that shovelware is actually taking away some of the sales? In other words, making a large number of low-effort shovelware is a better money making scheme than making 1 (or few) mediumly good game?
2017: 49k, 2016: 36k, 2015: 37k, 2014: 39k
2013: 120k, 2012: 89k, 2011: 73k, 2010: 48k
2009: 35k, 2008: 27k, 2007: 75k, 2006: 48k
2005: 43k, 2004: (this really just means Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike): 820k
With the sales normalized by year, and noting that 2004 did not actually allow third party games on sale, there is not an appreciable drop or trend across the entire time range.. I suspect the crazy spike in 2013 can be attributed entirely to Dota2 and 2012, Counterstrike Global Offensive causing mean skew.
Median would be much more interesting.
I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed, yeah?
But I guess it will be fair to compare also with Movies. As some games have budgets on that scale.
That is around 730 movies per year for USA and Canada. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
> I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed, yeah?
Yes. In the 90s there were not so many people with the skills and equipment to create games. Nowadays is a global market where everyone can give it a try. From cheap computers to Unity3D it is easier and cheaper than ever to create games.
Is that apples to apples? A 'movie' release could be anything from a quick short on YouTube to a $x00 million blockbuster, and everything in between. The same goes for games.
And yes, they haven't been doing their job right, they had too much power, they played it too safe and mistreated the developers.
But instead of supporting game developers who wanted to unionise, instead of supporting social projects (like basic income!) that would reduce the risk an independent takes, we asked people to go indie, and just shoulder that entire risk themselves. Good job, everyone!
I wrote a video course on Amazon Machine Learning [0]. I spent about 80 hours researching, writing the outline, putting together the material, recording and re-recording the 105 minute course. I think I've made about $200 from it, directly.
But, I've done several talks on it (which were non paying, but sharpened my presentation skills), wrote half a book on it, and got one consulting opportunity around it. I also got a bit of schwag from AWS because someone noticed my forum contributions, which was cool.
If everything you do is a hit, you aren't taking enough risks. However, I will say that 2600 hours without market validation is far more commitment than I would make.
0: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/amazon-machine-learning
The problem is that the "roguelike" "metrovania" "platformer" genre is oversaturated with so many indie games, so if you're going to grab some money with it it's better gotta be absolutely perfect. From my first impression I don't know if the mechanics are solid, but the art and sound seems too... generic? Maybe if the game had some unique style in it (and some marketing too) it shouldn't have bombed this much...
Some games are so unpolished or uninspired that they were never going to succeed, but always picking apart "why it failed" makes people think that "if I just do x and y and z, my game will succeed!" Which right now honestly just isn't true; there's too much luck and random chance involved (plus of course other concrete factors like marketing effort etc).
The next argument is usually "well, then why don't I see really good games that aren't successful?" A few years ago that was a sort of reasonable argument, but there are plenty of great and unsuccessful games on Steam now. They just don't show up anywhere.
The first one I see is "Fantasy Farming: Orange Season"[1]. Looks very similar to Stardew Valley, review average is 96% positive, but it only has 61 reviews (a good general indicator of sales) vs Stardew Valley's 86,000.
I'm sure it's probably not as good as Stardew Valley, but one has probably 1400x the sales of the other.
It did also release after Stardew Valley which is a problem. You can certainly benefit from being a first to fill a niche that people are missing. I wonder if the Stardew Valley dev had taken another year to release and Fantasy Farming had released first, if things would be the same.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/416000/Fantasy_Farming_Or...
The experience on it got me another good job when I needed to go back to work on something that'd actually pay money, but I still want to finish it (for the people that have bought into it, and for myself), so I'm doing bits when I can. Working on a hopefully fun singleplayer mode that'll help alleviate the fact that there's no-one on the multiplayer.
Should've coded it in Umajin. ;)
I mean, just look at the name, for starters.
Yeah the name isn't very good. And yeah the base engine is RPG maker (re the other comment here).
But this is kinda my original point. Making a game with a good name, or a different engine, isn't going to mean it's successful. You can always point out something in terms of "well it's clearly failed because X". Hell, people even say the Unity3D logo scares them off. But people really like that game. They like it as much as they like Stardew Valley. And it's probably sold less than 0.1% as much.
And that's just the first game I saw on the list.
It's like rotten tomatoes. 2001: A Space Odyssey [0] has 93% on RT, Pick of the Litter has 100%. I'm sure Pick of the Litter is a fine film, but clearly there's a sense in which it's a lesser movie compared to 2001 by general consensus, despite what the percentages would indicate. Now the case of stardew valley and "the other farming simulators on steam" is not so extreme but that's what I'm getting at.
[0] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1000085_2001_a_space_odysse...?
[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pick_of_the_litter
You may be right that a good name or a different engine won't save a game, but I don't think the game you chose as your point is one to demonstrate that.
> But people really like that game.
It seems most people haven't played it.
And there are often game with, say, awful graphics, that are awesome to play. It happens. That doesn't mean you should bank on it.
Furthermore, a simple Google of the game reveals very, very few results. As others have stated, nothing markets itself.
Coding heads down without any marketing or validation (like selling early release steam copies) and hoping it'll see viral growth is a mistake, for both startups and indie games.
Also doesn't have any screen shots, info about the game, etc
It's actually hostile to someone coming across the page trying to check out the game
Edit it's possible the note about "You can skip the payment section below" was literally just added
I feel like there is only one right answer here, and it's just glaringly obvious. Marketing is the thing that needed doing before starting, during the project, and after it's done. Regardless of the trends on Steam, in fact even more so because of the trends on Steam. None of the other options will solve the problem. Releasing it won't help, and making an ethical experiment won't get anywhere without an audience. Pouring more time into graphics will result in greater loss without first gaining an audience.
it's difficult to market what you haven't finished imagining.
It's difficult to market in general, at any stage of doneness. Marketing can be hard, boring, frustrating, and not fun. It's especially tempting as a dev to think that if you just make the product better, people will see it, and recognize its amazingness, and it'll go viral and market itself. It's tempting to keep adding features and making the product better. But that strategy doesn't work, it's important to buckle down and do the marketing, otherwise nobody will ever know about your game or product, no matter how good, and no matter how done it is.
If you can't convince somebody to market your game, how can you convince somebody to buy it from you directly?
but even if the answer is "for this kind of product it's impossible to get a user before writing code" it's not necessarily a bad heuristic -- maybe the conclusion could be "don't build this kind of product, pick something else"
You can have backers, but even then you probably want hundreds of them before embarking on a three year development journey.
I would never ever consider actually becoming involved in the space as a programmer, not in a million years. I advise any potential programmers to stay way the hell away from it too.