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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

19 million? For a game developed by just two guys (iirc) over the span of two years, that's hitting the jackpot. I'm seeing several projects that make a lot of money for a little effort - DayZ comes to mind, an early access game that costs $35 and has sold millions of copies already, but still feels like a rather bad mod, with little development effort going into it (seemingly).

I'm still on the fence about Star Citizen; the demos they've shown so far are promising, but I'm going to wait until there's an actual game.

In contrast, there's Elite: Dangerous, which had a successful kickstarter at about 1.5 million, was built and released, and is still under active development, with few bugs to speak of (atm, experiences from retail version over half a year after first release)

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Don't forget minecraft which finally sold to microsoft for 2b. Developed by one guy (then he added employees after the game took off).

These are all exceptions to the brutal world of indie game development.

Mostly, these developers don't make anything. They spend months and years in almost solitude making something no one will play. Games take a huge time investment to make before anyone is at all interested.

It's the starving artist profession of the nerd world.

>>> Mostly, these developers don't make anything. They spend months and years in almost solitude making something no one will play. Games take a huge time investment to make before anyone is at all interested. It's the starving artist profession of the nerd world.

Yeah, the Indiepocalypse.

The thing is, a lot of indie games... simply are not fun to play. And that's ok, it's hard to make a game which is fun to play. It's fine. [0]

You can treat indie games as a hobby, just have fun, call it 'starving art', whatever, but don't be shocked that people are not paying money.

On other hand, treat it like a business, with a solid product, market research, plenty of feedback from the outside (echo chamber is no good for a product that you are working on for years), marketing plan and some marketing budget. Even then, you have a chance of failure, where failure is that the revenue does not cover the costs. However, the odds are more in your favor.

These two extremely distinct segments (hobby v business) are both under the 'indie' label, however, their chances at succeeding are extremely different.

[0] I won't even talk about the platformers (there are dozens, if not hundreds, of them released every week) and they all are largely the same.

It's true that there are two kinds of game development going on. I wouldn't call the mostly mobile, metrics driven game dev 'indie' but at the same time that kind of game development has a lot to do with the same business model.

These metrics driven developers risk more cash up front and take less creative risks. Like a Hollywood movies, they pick a genre that is already successful and twist it a little. They likely even spend more on marketing than on production.

Still, even those games (like hollywood movies) remain hit driven so you'd better have a big budget backer to smooth out the edges.

True, but there are also a lot of really well made and unique indie games that struggle because of lack of exposure. Things are much better than they used to be (but they used to be terrible), but still a lot rides on whether some popular Youtubers decide to make a video about your game, and there's still a tendency for media outlets to pretend they're evenhanded by trashing games that haven't found an audience yet.

You can go even further back to the early days of id Software with John Romero and John Carmack making millions on their titles.

> 19 million? For a game developed by just two guys (iirc) over the span of two years, that's hitting the jackpot.

It's actually 10 people, if the Wikipedia page is accurate. Prison Architect is developed by Introversion Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software

> I'm seeing several projects that make a lot of money for a little effort - DayZ comes to mind, an early access game that costs $35 and has sold millions of copies already, but still feels like a rather bad mod, with little development effort going into it (seemingly).

I would agree with you. DayZ spawned a lot of survival genre indie/kickstarted games that are all more or less broken. Even DayZ itself has taken years to add features that were present in the free mod. This might be judgmental but I think the kind of people who primarily buy these games just don't care, because I don't think they're naive enough to believe in the "everything will get better once it's out of alpha/beta" thing that gets thrown around a lot (rarely true).

Even Minecraft is pretty poor in terms of development. Performance has gotten better lately but for the longest time it used to run awfully regardless of the hardware you ran it on. Not only that but there wasn't (and I'm not sure there still is) a proper modding framework so most people just use patched jars and hack the game itself. In Minecraft's case it is understandable though, as it was basically a hobby coding project that exploded in popularity. The only thing that would have saved it from that fate is a complete rewrite, which to my understanding is exactly what Microsoft is doing with it right now since they bought it (C++ rewrite).

> I'm still on the fence about Star Citizen; the demos they've shown so far are promising, but I'm going to wait until there's an actual game.

This is just my opinion, but in my eyes it's vaporware. Too much money, too many promises, and not a lot to go by. I'm sure it might come out in some shape or form but it will never justify the hype and many will be left disappointed. /opinion

I love the guys over at Introversion Software, Uplink was one of my favourite games out there for quite a while. Not at all realistic in any shape or form, but the tension/suspense it generated was incredible. Nothing really came close for a good while until FTL came out.

Defcon in multiplayer is pretty darn good as well. Easily one of the best strategy games out there.

Star Citizen.

Really interests me. I believe it is the next version of EvE so been keeping my eye on it for ages. However I do think they are going to have massive issues bring it all together. At present they have lots of modules that are pretty standalone. Yes it is very pretty but I not sure if they can make it work as a single Shard MMO

I am rather behind on news but last I heard someone left and the FPS part was delayed.

There are concerns from ExDevs highlighting the game on kickstarter might never be released http://news.softpedia.com/news/star-citizen-development-supp...

I think they will turn it in to a single player game with some light MMO features, or they will have to mass shard it, at which point i lose interest.

The fact that just last week they release another ship worth $300, and the above news pieces indicates they are down to 8mil out of the 82million pleged might show how they are running out of money.

Note above minecraft: Notch used minecraft to learn. The code in it was never great, and you are completely right that it generally ran like shit but it is getting better, and the development are stream lining the code but they cannot re-write it because some of the things that make minecraft good was the odd behavoir that a recode would most likely lose.

> Note above minecraft: Notch used minecraft to learn. The code in it was never great, and you are completely right that it generally ran like shit but it is getting better, and the development are stream lining the code but they cannot re-write it because some of the things that make minecraft good was the odd behavoir that a recode would most likely lose.

Yeah I actually went back and edited my post to say about the same thing as you did. It used to frustrate me but honestly you can't blame Markus, and Mojang has done an amazing job at making it run pretty well nowadays.

Introversion is a bit bigger than just two people IIRC.

They also predate the post Steam indie boom: they have a longish history of creating interesting, innovative games that weren’t always that commercially successful going back to around the year 2000.

So they may have hit a smallish jackpot, but they’ve worked long & hard for it if so.

Exactly. They got early support because of a strong brand they worked hard to create over the last decade. They backed their idea with market research and created something which could be enjoyed from the very beginning. These are important ingredients in their success.

Elite: Dangerous is a gorgeous game... The game's team is something like > 100 people (Frontier Dev is nearly 250 - 300 employees).

They solded more than 850k copies, but the revenue per employee is indeed much less than Prison Architect.

Here's a talk at AWS Invent 2015 about the network architecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvJPyjmfdz0

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