Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
goplexian.com
goplexian.com
No thanks.
If you had just said "Shut up and make your own game" I could respect that sentiment even though it is quite rude and basically shuts me down from having an opinion which (strangely) I thought was one of my rights.
But suggesting that I start making viral games for Facebook after I go through the trouble of writing an article explaining that I hate those types of games is just stupid.
On the other hand, if you make one of these simple, crappy games and it is successful, you will have millions of dollars that you can use to fund any type of game development you want.
I suppose you see that as compromising your principles or something. In any case, the fact that you "hate it" is an artificial barrier to your own success. If you really believe it's easy for you to make one of these games (and therefore easy to make millions of dollars), why wouldn't you?
I'm sure you'll rationalize it by saying "I don't want that kind of success" or "If I have to compromise my beliefs about game design even once to be successful, I don't want it."
Well, alright, that's fine, but you should see how you're limiting yourself strategically. The market is screaming right now, "HEY! MAKE THESE GAMES!" You're free to ignore it.
As for being rude, well, your article insulted a lot of quality game designers I know whose work, I'd wager, has touched more lives than yours ever has or will. So I'm not too worried about being rude, especially since I think your attitude is what's crappy, not these games.
Indie games come from a few places. There are non-games industry and games industry creators. Those from the games industry obviously needed to work on some game before going Indie. They get experience, connections, and money from working on games just like farmville - without that industry start, who can say if we would have ever received World of Goo or others.
Likewise, those not from the games industry needed to know videogames exist. Maybe farmville will start a teen on the path to becoming someone on the caliber of Cactus.
What goes on in pop culture influences Indies, but it definitely doesn't control nor destroy them. Does it get more people exposed to videogames? Then I can't see it hurting the Indie scene. Note: it may "damage" mainstream games to some, but that is what you should complain about.
They aren't just throwing dung at the wall and seeing what sticks: they're very, very good at what they do. For every FarmVille there are tens of thousands of games which you have never heard of: their viral growth coefficient was .95 instead of 1.05, kaboom, that is all you need to fail. The platform is getting harder to develop for, as early entrants used techniques which were what SEOs might call "a wee bit grey" to gain traction, and these are either impossible now or will result in a new entrant getting hit with the banhammer. (For example, early social games maximized their viral coefficient by adopting a spam-early spam-often policy to user notifications, which ticked off a lot of Facebook users, causing Facebook to take a number of countermeasures. Ask somebody who builds for it to describe the specifics, but there are now throttles and some sort of system where you earn the right to use the viral channels.)
All of that is going away in five days. No more requests, no more notifications, etc.
Nobody knows what will happen! Pandemonium! Haha.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Developer_Road...
So, anyone who hasn't factored this into the development model yet is, well, dead or going to die the next time it happens. :)
Sometimes only a handful of games satisfy these requirements a month, out of 100+ a day.
Social games I imagine are much the same .... you have to get a lot of things right first time, and your list of things that were right yesterday aren't necessarily so right today.
Really a lot of things are the same ... the difference between making a product your friends like vs. your town vs. your city vs. your state vs. your country vs. the whole world .... probably far below 1% of 1% of 'stuff' makes it to the top.
It has always been about two things - getting lucky, and moving fast.
Playfish tried to do a lot of games "right the first time" but weren't set up to quickly fix their mistakes and have ended up performing terribly.
On ratings-focused sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds we might literally only have hours to measure, judge and react to feedback and bugs before our game slips off the new games page or the ratings-damage is too great to recover from. And that's if we're lucky enough to be given a reason why "this game sucks 1/5" heh.
On the rest of the internet we have the issue of games being distributed beyond our control, once a game goes 'wild' it gets to 100s of sites and there's really only a couple of options for pushing out updates - hot load an x megabyte swf to millions, or Mochi's LiveUpdate system which requires their ads (sometimes we're not allowed to use ads).
I paid $70 for this game when it was called Final Fantasy 13 and had a development budget in the upper eight figures (in dollars, not yen). If you want this from a game with a development budget in the five or lower six figures which is only paid for by 1% of all players and does not have a viral loop baked into its DNA, you apparently want to be disappointed.
...in the context of indie games. Context is important.
Maybe take a look at Braid or Machinarium.
I can cite many examples of people who have abandoned PC gaming for XBLA, PSN, Wiiware, Flash gaming, Unity web gaming, or the iPhone, I don't know of a single guy who has jumped onto Facebook. So the fundamental thesis of hardcore indie developers being tempted by the lucrative cash piles to be had in Facebook apps seems pretty dubious.
The other contrarian point I'd like to make is that Facebook has actually been really kind to indie developers. Facebook Pages are huge for self promotion: Facebook is consistently a top referrer for our game, even though it is a traditional, PC/Mac/Linux downloadable game (that's not even released yet).