Indie games don't make money
positech.co.uk
positech.co.uk
0) I kept my day job. Coming home to work on the game isn't as hard as it sounds because (see 1)
1) I am making my game for me first. I've always had this world I want to drop myself into so I'm building it for me. If other people want to come along on this journey, that's fantastic. If not, that's okay too.
2) It's a means for me to escape daily life, thus it is relaxing and "time off" in my mind, not work. If I ever feel like it's work, I take a few minutes to analyze why and usually come to the conclusion that I'm focusing on the wrong thing: making the game for someone else, not myself.
3) I have no intentions of striking it rich, playing the indie lottery, or any of those things. I fully understand (after first-hand experience working as a professional game developer) that most games take years to make and when they finally come out, no one plays them. I cry a little inside when I see people quitting their job to become an indie developer and spend more than 90 days working on a single project without getting it released.
4) I set the price of my game based on its value not compared to similar games in the industry. I've had customers complain about this before, but the reality is that I only want players who are truly into the idea to be a part of it. If not, then don't buy it. I'm totally willing to walk away from any sale.
If this all sounds selfish, you're right. It's completely selfish. But I think it's the only realistic way to look at developing a game in today's world. Just like this blog post says, you will lose money, time, and sleep if your intentions are to burn the ships and strike it rich.
Instead, why not work on something for yourself and keep your day job?
If you want to have side projects under those circumstances, I hope you like working in chunks of a few minutes at a time, days-long gaps in between sessions, with the constant threat of interruption looming and an ever-growing pile of things-you-should-probably-be-doing-instead stressing you out.
Sometimes this just means things take longer because I'm working on something after the kids are in bed or off visiting friends, but also I try to get my children involved. As an example; if I'm working through art or animation tutorials (still learning since I'm a programmer) and the kids are around they sit down and do them with me so that it is family time.
I have only one kid, 2 years old, and I have no time for anything. My kid never sits down, never does anything longer than 5 minutes, always wants to do stuff together, always on the run, exploring every pebble on the street, every plant, running around other kids while they peacefully play with their parents. Me and wife on a regular basis get comments on the playground "All your days look like this? Ooops..." Plus, I have no grandparents near by and low chances to be accepted in kindergarten. So we are on our own. On weekends I am taking my kid out full day to get my wife some space, because she would go nuts without it after 5 days in a row - so I have not a single free day whole year. Saying all that, yes, I have 2 hours per day for myself. Right after 22:00 when I am sure the kid sleeps tight. But by that time I am wasted and not even able to read a proper book, because its just too much for my tired brain to grasp. Not even mention any form of creativity.
It's not that people with families or other commitments don't have time to do things. They just make choices on what things are most important to them and do those things instead. And say crummy things like, "I wish I had the time for that".
It's not really the job of some guy that's describing his strategy to account for every other person and their decisions and all the alternate ways they choose to spend their time.
I don't think I could live if I didn't have personal projects. They are integral to who I am.
Of course, people will keep trying, because a) it is fundamentally rewarding in some non-monetary sense to make Real Things, and b) there are enough "I quit my job and now I'm a bazillionaire!" stories out there to entice (largely young, less established) people to play the lottery.
The real money is in owning the content markets (where you get your cut in developer account subscriptions, transaction fees, 30% of sales, marketing costs, etc.) or in providing tools, just as in the Gold Rush of yore.
Don't be fooled. It's always been this way.
In fact, there was a time when content creators didn't get rich at all. If they were lucky they made a living, often due to patronage. Not to mention those who simply inherited or married into wealth.
The millionaire artist is a very modern invention.
I actually wonder how many pre-20th century examples there really are... Artisan artists who made piecemeal works of art - like Rubens, say - could make a comfortable living, but it takes mass media to gain real wealth.
I can only think of a handful of fiction writers who got seriously wealthy just from writing alone back then - Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, maybe a few others.
Michelangelo was very wealthy and paid well for his artworks.
AR is posing to really take off. I mean, I work for the government and I'm not very creative, so these upcoming things might seem lame to a lot of people, but we can basically cover a 15 km radius with slow "internet" (LoraWAN) for around $1000.
In this you can build all sorts of small devices. You can monitor street temperatures and giving the data to the public via open data. You can monitor if elderly people are alive by tracking whether or not an IoT lightbuilb turns on. You can build tourism apps that emit small stories via Bluetooth.
I mean, the options are endless, and it's basically shaping up to be the Wild West that indie games were 10 years ago.
The power problem is the real killer, though. Oculus is only successful because it's tethered to a high-end rig. When you don't have that, you're basically tethering a mobile phone to your eyes. Not only do mobile phones die within a few hours if you play 3D games on them continuously, but their graphics aren't very impressive.
There's a third problem worth mentioning: When you're using AR, you're making an overlay on the real world. The real world is instant. Your overlay has to be at least 90fps to look seamless. That means you have to recognize a target + render the overlay within 11 milliseconds. That recognition step is a long way from being that performant.
I predict Magic Leap will be shown to be an elaborate ruse, and they were able to raise money mostly by tricking investors with tech demos that can't possibly advance any further. It's easy to make this claim, but the fundamental problems with the technology seem insurmountable on our current tech tree. It's not quite the same thing as being negative toward a new startup -- most startups have a chance of succeeding if they get users. But you can't get users with AR without wishing for new advances in technology that seem beyond startups' capabilities for the moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#Twisted...
The reason it won't work is the same reason scratches on your eyeglasses don't appear sharp. Your focus is in the distance, so you won't see whatever dimming has been applied Not unless you use it to darken e.g. an entire quadrant of your lenses.
Interestingly, this problem applies to text rendering too. It seems unlikely that you'll be able to project clearly readable text over anything when it's an inch away from your eye.
AR is a very different beast. In the real world, your focus is usually several feet away, or sometimes across the room. Your focus also changes almost instantly. Yet AR still needs to project light toward your eye from exactly N inches away.
You can simulate this: Find some glasses and put some black tape over part of the lens. You'll notice the tape doesn't appear sharp and crisp. It's a blur.
(Or just close one eye and put a finger close to your other, and look out in the distance.)
I'm not sure AR has any hope of rendering text in a readable way. It'd be like writing some letters on your finger, then putting it up to your eye while looking out in the distance. Even if the letters glow, so that they're a light source, you still can't read it at all.
The bit I was missing is that VR headsets use lenses to adjust the angle of the incoming image to simulate the image being farther away (this is completely different from the depth perception created by sending different images to each eye). This video is a great explanation: https://vr-lens-lab.com/lenses-for-virtual-reality-headsets/
This does make AR much more difficult, since a lens that adjusts the simulated image would also adjust the real image behind it, but I don't think it makes it impossible. There may be a way to simulate a Fresnel lens just for the simulated image or use miniature one-way mirrors to do so.
Edit: I think hololens actually accomplishes this, but its very complicated: http://www.imaginativeuniversal.com/blog/2015/10/18/how-holo...
Even if that turns out to be true, the pattern of 1-2 Minecraft-like winners and 99.9% losers is likely to hold. Existing platforms are already accessible to indies.
Though if your goal is to make it a hobby instead of a living, "losing" on income may not bother you.
The web spoiled us. It's hard problems from hereon out.
These days we do it with IoT. Basically we run our own private and encrypted internet, LoraWAN, and we setup a small $10 door control in each apartment which connects to the main door via our slow private net.
The components and software was developed by a single student at a hackaton.
Similarly we have a lot of town history on record. We've given people access to this, and a group of student went around town setting up 957 little Bluetooth transmitters which emit these stories to their app all over town.
Another example is a medicine cabin that monitors it patients/elders take their meds and automatically alarms staff if they don't which is something we offer today. The plastic bag and electronics that does it were developed by a small local bakery with two employees.
I do agree with you in that some areas are going to require google sized companies. But things like the raspberry pi and all these small/cheap "standard" components which anyone can build themselves are really shaping up to change a lot of things and it's not big companies who are driving it forward.
For every one moderate to major success, you've got hundreds of games, maybe thousands, that didn't make it. One can always believe their game is going to be the next big thing, eventually someone is bound to be right. But pretending like that sort of success is regular and common thing isn't realistic.
Me, I'm fine with making games on the side for now. But if an idea were to come along which I deeply fall in love with, I can easily imagine quitting my day job (being frugal, always putting on the side helps with that) and just work on something for a few years.
Making indie games should be about doing something because you love it. Keep a day job (even part time), then design and build something cool in your spare time. Don't worry about making money, worry about making something people want to play, and it will be much more fulfilling.
The game industry, just like any industry, is all about making money. It's not fun. It's not about self-expression... but doing it as a hobby is often both! Sometimes people who do it as a hobby end up making money, and that's great, but don't go in expecting that, because as the article states, it's very unlikely to happen.
The best experience of my life has been making an MMORPG per that motto. It's now at a point where I get completely absorbed playing it, to the extent where I forget that I'm playing my own game. It's a really awesome feeling.
I don't have any expectations on making money off it, or even have players at all. That other people seem to enjoy it as well is only a bonus.
The bug is fixed but I forgot to branch the repo when I started on the new patch so can't deploy anything right now (since I'm working in master).
It's a browser game that requires no account so normally you would be able to open the link and start playing immediately.
Some media in case anyone is interested: https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/
Keep up the good work!
And yes, it will probably never be finished but that's the beauty of it. It's my own sandbox I can always work on.
Do you have anything to share?
But, the thing is this is basically the same as starting a band. ~90% have fun and lose a little money. ~9.9% brake even and make something between beer money and poverty level earnings. And 0.1% go from reasonable salary to ridiculous money at 0.00001%. Except, you have the vastly better fallback option of writing crud apps.
I know of one person that's done this and it was a brutal affair for them.
(Source: I used to work in the industry and stay on top of the indie scene)
90% of indie devs I know want to do the latter because sharing their game/art/vision and seeing people experience it is the goal. Totally fine to do gamedev as a hobby but that's something discretely different from being an independent game developer.
You're right though that I may not count as a real indie game developer since I do it purely for fun.
Nuclear Throne is something I'd consider "shipped". It's polished, the design is solid and it's currently sustaining Vlambeer commercially. Compare that to their prototype(wasteland) and you'd get an idea on the difference(also ~2 years dev time if I recall correctly).
[edit]
I can also highly recommend watching anything from Rami Ismail of Vlambeer. He's brutally honest about the realities of being an indie developer and the mindset you need to be successful.
[1] https://vlambeer.itch.io/wasteland-kings
[2] http://store.steampowered.com/app/242680/Nuclear_Throne/
People often put this burden on themselves "we must ship and make money" when there is much more enjoyment out of just working on stuff when you feel like it. Learning new things like art, music, game design and sound effects. It's all quite fun if you have the right mindset!
People do this when working on the random open source project, why is this considered weird when you're talking about making games?
It's not much different than writing and editing a novel, or composing, rehearsing, and recording an album. The game industry is very much like the music and literal worlds these days.
You have a pack of companies (fewer and larger over time) and employees thereof who have figured out how to reliably generate cash. Think EA, big record labels, and big publishing houses.
Then you have a vanishingly small number of black swans who beat the odds, get huge, and make a ton of money (usually with the help of the above giant corporations). Think Bieber, Notch, and J.K. Rowling.
And then you have an enormous sea of people toiling in anonymity who will never find much money or an audience. That local band you see loading in at your corner bar. Every game not on the front page of Steam. Self-published fiction on Amazon.
As long as everyone recognizes what group they are in and are OK with it, I don't see the system as being intrinsically bad. Unfortunate that things are so skewed towards the small number of celebrities, but not outright cruel.
Where it gets creepy is when you have companies in the first category sucking money from the last category by promising them that they are in the middle one and encouraging them to make shitty life choices based on that.
There's nothing wrong with doing your weird little creative hobbies without reaching fame or fortune. I've been in local bands and made shareware games. I've written and produced goofy videos. It is all super fun, and I highly encourage anyone to do it. But it would not have been fun if I hung my livelihood on income from them, or defined my person sense of "success" in terms of audience size.
Either way I agree though, it's a brutal space if you aren't aware of the 90/10 revenue split across the industry.
Ten years ago we were promised that personalized recommendations and discoverability of the long tail would make this happen, and we're still waiting.
Doing a hobby and doing it for a living were two totally different things.
Like, if you're an indie game dev you obviously enjoy games, but making your game leaves precious little time left for playing games, and you can frequently feel like that time spent on games is a waste that could have been spent working - even if you know you're feeling burnt out and just need a night relaxing.
I'm definitely not advocating bailing on your job and betting the farm and working through poverty while making Minecraft But With Cars or whatever, but I can totally see why it's attractive.
Source: I've been working on an indie game for the last year and a bit (http://chatandslash.com/) and I'm currently trying to decide if picking up Nier: Automata on sale is worth it because I may not end up allocating time to play it before the next sale.
I got home from an 8-hour day writing code. The last thing I wanted to do was write more code. I wanted to play games, not make them.
Three months of freelancing later, I have a side project and I write code for it every day.
The energy you spend on work is the energy you have available for side projects. Either you have a job that demands nothing from you, or you have a side project that demands nothing from you. Or you compromise. Choose.
I've found that by pacing myself at my work (it's very easy to go too hard, I work in a customer service oriented field) I can retain the energy to make forward progress on my side projects, so I've achieved a balance. This is not easy to do however, it's definitely a challenge for most indies.
I used to pull crazy stuff. I did 36 hours straight coding to meet a deadline once. Stupid. If I'd stopped at 10 hours, got some sleep, and come back to it I would have achieved a better result.
I did burn out (at least I recognise that in retrospect). I had to take a couple of years away from coding. Now I recognise when my brain is fading and I can stop and do something else. It's much better in the long term.
Making the game was a brutal experience. Little to no money because I was taking so much time off work to make the game (I'd work maybe 4-6 hours at my job, then go home to work on the game). Deteriorated health because I sat for 16+ hours PER DAY in front of the computer. Morale was extremely low because few people wanted to help me (building a team is super hard) and more often than not, people I talked to about it just assumed I wasn't even capable of making a video game, much less a video game business.
I basically just trudged through it. Forced myself to complete it and ship it publicly. I was rather happy with the end result - the game wasn't perfect, but it was mine. Player reviews tell a slightly different story for a countless number of reasons.
The day I the game went live I was so excited... but that emotion quickly faded as I realized I wasn't going to even come close to my sales goals. To date, I've sold less than 200 copies. Thousands less than I expected, and not nearly enough sales to make another game. Literally can't even pay rent on my tiny apartment for one month using those funds.
About 4 days after launch, I realized my traffic and sales had flat-lined at zero. I came to the painful realization that I had just spent three years of my life making huge sacrifices of my time and money to build a product that no one knew existed and only I really cared about. All of my efforts merely in vain. Despite numerous post-release product updates, it stayed that way for months, until yesterday with the summer sale. I've sold a few more copies over the last 24 hours, but again, I can totally forget about becoming a full-time gamedev. I literally don't even have the funding or even strength to make another game - as a solo developer who isn't a unicorn, it simply requires too much investment for too little return.
Building my game was one of the most influential and exciting experiences of my life. Trying to make a paying job of it was easily the most depressing path I've ever walked. I even thought my experience shipping a game in a modern engine would help me find employment as a gamedev... NOPE! I literally can't even get a rejection email from most of the hundreds of places I've applied to. Needless to say, I went back to SysAdmin full time because it's a stable, paying career. Which is also depressing because it's not really what I'm passionate about... I'm just good at it.
All the dreams of making a living building video games? Crushed. Forget about it. If you're able to do this and you're still passionate about it, consider yourself extremely lucky.
edit - the game is here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/428980/Ethereal_Legends/
I think a lot of first time game developers are way overly harsh on themselves. Right now the expectations are all screwed up. Very few people go from nothing to writing a smash hit or best seller and the same is true for games. Scope small, ship often and concentrate on the last 20% where you tie the whole thing together because that's where the actual magic happens. Game development is deceptive in that regard and experience helps a great deal.
I certainly won't make that mistake on the next game!
My only advice? Don't give up. Take smaller bites instead. If a project has a 10% chance of succeeding, it just means you have to try 10 times to have an even opportunity. Spend 2 or 3 months on it instead of years.
Because you're absolutely right, it's luck. But to maximize your luck, you have to keep trying.
Thanks for the support!
The pay is garbage and the hours are beyond excessive. Unless you pick a winning studio, stay for 10 years, and that studio has several blockbuster hits your royalties are worthless.
Take your experience doing games and go for a career in regular software development. Plenty of people need to integrate 3D engines into their products and know nothing about it (eg: adding the ability to view a 3d model) and you'll actually get paid for your work.
As others have pointed out, today's content-rich world only rewards the top 1% and that incentivizes repeatedly trying with quick projects. Don't spend years on one thing, slap something together and get it out there. If it isn't an immediate hit move on to the next thing.
I definitely made the mistake and learned my lesson with building Ethereal Legends - scope and speed are key elements. You have to keep it small and ship quickly. Allowing the project to grow beyond my ability made for poor results and long development cycles.
I have 1 question: How is your game unique? This for me is the biggest selling pitch of a game. Which unique experience will I get from playing this game? I think this is one of the reasons PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds is so popular. Although the graphics and physics engine are horrendous, you get this amazing unique feeling playing it with your friends which I could only maybe compare to survival mods on Garrys Mod
In the end, many indies are bad at making games (coding, design) partly because they're inexperienced, but almost all of them are bad at business (marketing, advertising, hiring, finance, strategy).
It's probably important to separate indie studios from "indie games" the genre, which is more about artistic or retro style games that target a more traditional gaming audience. Common themes involve getting featured in the app stores and in traditional gaming media outlets, 'superstar' developers, and very specific genres and art styles. If you want to reliably succeed in this genre you probably want to have a very public social media presence and try to make friends who are on the app review boards or are editors of various publications.
I've never had an app featured in any sort of major store and I don't do tons of UA, I just build solid games and focus on organic growth and exposure. For instance, the first decision I make when it comes to a new game is picking a visual/marketing theme, naming, pre-positioning for keywords, etc. Then I build a solid game that monetizes. Of course, I take into account how long the game will take to build, how difficult it will be to maintain, cost of assets, etc etc too. It helps to reuse game engines to reduce build time and complexity. You know, the kinds of absolutely regular business decisions you make in the course of running any business. It's actually a lot more boring than you'd think making games would be!
Many "indie game" developers have extremely anti-business attitudes when you talk to them so it's not a big surprise to see many fail. The ones who are passionate about the business side of things tend to fare a lot better on average.
I'm interested in finding a good return-on-investment for a very small marketing budget. I've thrown some money at FB ads, but I was paying $1 per click. Most people won't install the game after clicking the ad, and an even smaller fraction are going to actually pay for it.
I really need to fix the beta web version, all the animations and UI are still pretty bad. The android version also has some bugs and crashes I need to fix.
The other problem is my app store listings, because they were very rushed. I don't think my screenshots are very good, and I need to make a trailer video.
My last big marketing idea is to write up a blog post about the things I learned with React Native, and post that on Reddit and Hacker News. I'm not sure what I can do after that. I might create a boilerplate project, or even open source the whole game, but that would be a last resort.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Anyways, here's some of my thoughts/questions:
How many people have you had play and test the game? Of those people, how many would fit your target market of Sudoku or Tetris players? What kind of feedback have you been given? When you say people "seem to enjoy playing it", how are you judging that? My warning sirens go off if I hear someone say "It's cool" or something equivalently generic or brief.
What kind of analytics do you have in your game (e.g. Flurry)? Even though you may not have a lot of users, what do your retention numbers look like? My last company (Backflip Studios) put out a few puzzle games and what we found was that the players that stick around are very dedicated and hardcore (and typically skew older). If you aren't retaining even a few users like this, you need to consider that your game is simply not appealing or you do not yet have enough users to draw conclusions.
Your only monetization method besides ads is to remove them. We tried that strategy as far back as the original Paper Toss, and even with millions of daily active users we barely had income from it. That trend never changed over the years or with new games. Ads can make you decent money, but only when you have a lot of users.
Given your monetization strategy, you will absolutely hemorrhage money if you try and buy users, especially from Facebook. There are other ad networks that are more mobile focused that you might try buying users from if you are willing to buy their crappier inventory.
I would also not rely on a blog post generating any meaningful traffic or sales, though it certainly can't hurt to try -- it's also fun just to share knowledge.
All that said, I will not bullshit you: The odds of this game generating you any meaningful amount of income are very low. Mobile in general is a brutal market and your game does not really stand out visually when viewed in the app store. If your analytics for retention are in the double digits, by all means keep trying to improve the game and market it. At some point however you may need to consider it a learning experience and move on the next project.
I will be redoing the tutorial to make it. That's a good idea about asking the player to drag the first piece, instead of just showing an animation.
I've had around 1,000 people play the game. My favorite feedback so far from was a guy who really enjoyed the game, so he shared it with his father and sister, and now his whole family are playing. But yeah, I also got a lot of "it's cool", which I don't pay too much attention to.
For analytics, I'm using Fabric Answers and Firebase Analytics. Here are some of the stats from iOS: https://imgur.com/a/8zz15
Those retention numbers look really bad, but I can't say I'm surprised. I'm also pretty happy that I made $50 from IAPs, because I've never got this far before.
Maybe my next project should be an RPG or "farming" game that you keep coming back to every day.
I agree that my monetization strategy is not great, but I don't want to advantage of people with purchases for "bags of coins" and stuff like that. But maybe that's the only way to get ahead?
I can understand that your game with millions of DAU might not be able to support a game studio with salaried employees, but if I extrapolate my own numbers then millions of users would be bringing in tons of money for a solo developer. That would be something like $60k USD, which I wouldn't complain about!
In general the world is governed according to power laws. The top 20% of anything gets 80% of the reward. So you should look at the top 20% of indie developers at the very least. Its a lot easier to get into the top 20% than it is to get into the top 1%.
The other consequence of power laws, is that it incentives taking more shots. If you only ever produce one game, then statistically it will probably fail. But if you make 5 games, the chance of one of them ending up in the top 20% is much higher. Just like famous directors will get most of the attention they get from one film they made out of dozens, or famous writers get most attention from one book, etc. Even here on HN, most of my upvotes will come from a handful of comments out of all the ones I've ever written.
No, he takes the median of the _top selling_ indie games. That's a valid measure.
The difference is that if you click to the bottom, you get games with 20 reviews all reading "crashes on load, money back". If your game doesn't crash on 50% of startups, you're already not at the same 'median' as this article.
The vast majority of all media created is terrible. The only reason that mass media (AAA games, blockbuster movies, etc) are less bad is that they've passed through many layers of quality filters before reaching the public.
Those filters are imperfect, which is a real downside. It's all too easy to reject risky ventures in favor of safe ones, or simply misjudge a great work as something bad, or something "the public won't get". It happens all the time, and it's one of the reasons indie works in any domain are so valuable. The lowered barriers to entry bring us brilliant products that would never have seen the light of day in mass media.
But they also bring us an enormous amount of crap. That's predictable, and not a problem with the market or the domain. Even after you take out shovelware that the developers know is terrible, the odds of success are still slow. We can talk about making discovery better (and with Steam we absolutely should talk about that), but the low win rate is not inherently bad.
Now, with a vastly bigger market, unprecedented reach via Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, numerous crowdfunding options, numerous gigantic, low-friction game stores, tools whose power I never could have imagined in the 90's, and 25 years of experience, I literally can't make one single dollar.
But I never feel as actualized as when I'm totally immersed in game dev. It's immensely rewarding, just definitely not in money.
Which kinda goes against the indie mantra of "make what you want to play", but that mantra only holds 100% if you're doing this as a hobby. Otherwise, it's "make games that you're interested in and have a solid chance of being bought by asking potential customers what they think and see how they react to a simple demo you put together".
Kickstarter is kinda nice in this regard, but most games from there fail because the game mechanics aren't conveyed very well to potential buyers, hence why you should really put together a demo for them to play before you start to really seriously consider the idea.
I would also go even further and say that a solid formula is a game that uses familiar and fun game mechanics, but then builds on top of that to make something interesting. Stardew Valley is a great example. It's a Harvest Moon clone but with some pretty interesting characters with unique personalities. That's why it made an estimated revenue under $25 million on Steam (http://www.pcgamer.com/stardew-valley-made-way-more-money-th...)
At the risk of sounding harsh, Positech's games are pretty damn niche in terms of ideas and in some cases mechanics (look at Democracy 3). They're very original, it's just that being very original in indie game development doesn't pay nearly as well as being fairly original.
Not saying you shouldn't bother with market research but when some of the biggest hits have resulted from people just building what they want to play and when big companies with a string of previous successes had done their market research and still released something that bombs I think it's fair to say there's no simple formula to producing a hit.
Building what you want in the hope it's a crazy viral success is not a very good or sustainable business model. Pretending that these behemoths that employ well paid staff don't know what they are doing is just myopic. It's a long standing myth that you cannot know reasonably well what sort of game will succeed or work in such a way as to find it. But it's "selling out" to many, me included and I wish more people could find success on their own terms. That's just not the commercial reality though.
Sure, EA continues to exist because it has more hits than misses (and is helped in that regard by huge, reliable annual franchises like FIFA) but I've seen plenty of projects with relatively low expectations become huge hits (like the original need for speed underground) as well as titles with high expectations crash and burn (I won't name names). The big companies do a good enough job to be fairly consistently profitable but they by no means have a foolproof formula for success. Show me a famous studio without titles that didn't meet expectations.
Even if you don't make any money, you still get a lot of joy from your first few players and sales, and just creating something useful or fun. You also get a lot of experience and knowledge that you can put to use on other projects, or even employment opportunities.
Sure, your game might flop (and mine probably will), but I learned a lot and had a lot of fun. I think it was worthwhile. I just spent the last 3 months developing a mobile game [1]. I tell people that I did it to learn React Native, but it's actually because I wanted it to be successful and make some money. So far I've earned ~$20 from ads, and ~$50 from the in-app purchase to remove ads. It's not much, but I think it could be a promising start.
I do agree with the article though; my next app is not going to be a game.
Be it indie music, indie movies, or various physical artforms, unless you win the lottery by hitting it big (of which a significant factor is pure luck), you ain't gettin' rich.
Is this surprising to anyone?
In judging painting, you don't end up with a lot of complaints about things like "I like the way it looked but it kept falling off of my wall", whereas if you have an unstable game...
Painting can equally be criticised on technical merit, and as with games that can still be very subjective even though many would like to pretend otherwise.
When in reality, companies like Supercell who are huge have been making games for 10+ years before their first hit, pushing out hundreds of games as a collective before finding a recipe that works in a way that let's you suck money out of the market. It all can create this illusion that making successful games can be possible from your home garage, when in reality it's hugely likely in any short time span, maybe if you stick with for 10-15 years you will find your niche and specialize in that enough to stand out.
I've worked at a mobile game company, where they did like 50 games a year, which was crazy, and maybe like 2-3 of those made it even relatively succesful. It's indeed a very risky market. Wouldn't jump it, unless I was part of some team of super game makers who have the potential to really make something beautiful people want to play.
Wouldn't recommend anyone to make games either, I mean, do you really have a super unique idea nobody else has thought of or implemented already ? If you do, go ahead, but yeah. Luckily most people do it for the passion of just creating something, and not expecting money out of it, that I can understand and even is something to celebrate.
Game development is a fast moving business, and the goal posts are constantly moving if you are trying to make money in it. Remember when the only games phones had was 2d snake? Remember when the GameBoy was in black and white? Remember when you had to write your own Game Engine to get anything done? If you don't keep up with the change, you get left behind.
"This is nobodies ‘fault’. Steam didn’t cause it, Unity didn’t cause it. games got easier to make, and more people got access to PCs, development kits, computer skills and broadband."
With the rise of general game engines, game dev truly has never been easier. Thesedays I can pay roughly ~$70 and get a basic FPS game which I can then add to. That is outrageous. But here Cliffski talks as if there is some upper limit to games - but there isn't. If everyone is saving the same amount of time by using more efficient tools, then your only option is to spend that extra time on adding more content to your game than your competitors.
"almost NOBODY covered my latest game (in terms of gaming websites). Its extremely, extremely tough right now."
Cliffski creates very niche games, and it looks like his latest game is a car-themed Factorio, without any of the enemies and just pure stats. In fact, all of his games seem very political or manufacturing based. One trailer even talked about taxes. This stuff just isn't going appeal to a mass market of gamers who want to escape reality for a few hours.
I do agree that if anyone is thinking of becoming an indie dev though, then they need to understand the market they are entering into. For example the VR market at the moment is small, so creating games for that space will result in a bigger splash and potentially more money.
The Linux gaming space is also expanding. Steam stats [1] say about roughly 1% of all users are on Linux, doesn't sound like a lot until you see that in the past 48 hours, Steam had about 13 million concurrent active users, which gives you a potential market of 130, 000 linux users.
There is also the Switch, another new gaming platform which is open for business to indies. Again you just have to keep up with where the market is going.
Yes it's a tough market, but averages lie and if your game is actually quality your odds of making at least a decent return (or break even) are much better than most of the shovelware that inhabits the lesser traveled areas of Steam.
Indie development is somewhere between a crapshoot and a sucker's market. The costs are too high and the rewards are at best uncertain and at worst paltry to nonexistent.
I think it's a good time to point out that the most successful people during the California Gold Rush weren't prospectors - they were the ones who sold food, lodgings, supplies, and other needs to the prospectors, who worked their asses off just to make ends meet.
Indeed, my most successful side project to date targeted developers & designers rather than end-users.
Reminds me of the people in the late 1800s saying everything that had been discovered in physics had already been discovered.
I suspect you'll find that the supporting suppliers in the gold rush made more than a very large percent of prospectors but that the top prospectors still managed to come out on top?
I am a content producer and I hope to eventually make games, someday. Yes, it's tough to monetize. But this sounds more like sour grapes than a substantive piece about the realities of making indie games. The earlier numbers are, at best, incredibly hand-wavy and he essentially admits to making them up whole cloth:
I’d guess 90% of that belongs to maybe a handful, at best 4 people? (I have ZERO idea, this is my guesswork)
It is one thing to infer and have soft figures. It is another to make strong assertions about the entire industry and back them up with numbers pulled out of thin air that don't even qualify as "soft."
I get what you are saying, and I agree to some extent. But I think the key in this post was that the 'average' game (from the very middle of indie top sellers list) makes next to no money. Checking it did not require making many assumptions. And this point is valid.
I am looking at this information as someone who wants to actually make a living doing things online. I don't need to become a millionaire. I just want a middle class income. I used to make $100/day at my corporate job (not $100/hour like a lot of programmers) and I started at above minimum wage. Plus, having that corporate job was incredibly expensive for me. So, I need less than $100/day to compete with my old corporate job.
I am actually looking for hard numbers of "can you reasonably support yourself doing things like this?" Maybe not with making games being the only thing, but as part of the picture.
This article is a little bit like saying "Actors are not capable of supporting themselves at all unless they are big Hollywood stars." Maybe that is true of acting, I don't know, but it isn't actually true of indie games. It can be done, though it no doubt is a tougher market than the one he entered however many years ago.
I was surprised when the article was written they were estimating $2M a day income for the top earning game app (Clash Of Clans).
Personally, I am more interested in finding some sort of meaningful info on how to make money on games or apps at all. Yes, I know it can be done. I am interested in figuring out how it is done.
Finishing and publishing a good game that you enjoy is never a waste of time. Finishing anything, making products, and launching them on your own is a great skill to have, very desired in the market, shipping many games is even better.
But I agree, go in with the assumption that the game may actually lose money in terms of time put in to revenues. Direct revenues of the current title is short-term thinking on something that can help long-term in other ways.
It might be. Even if it isn't, indie games have a lot going for them. The teams are generally far smaller, the games are more unencumbered creatively, and the community is generally very grateful.
You could probably make a similar article called "MMO games don't make money" and make the same comparison against World of Warcraft vs the standard MMO.
This means that you'd need to make a game which is unique against all others, but also clearly better and of higher quality. If you can't do that, you'll be lost at sea.
I would not dare trying to make a game that just look like other games, or if it doesn't have features that makes it unique. What would be the point?
No, this is good games win market. PUBG is actually a very FUN game to play, and appeals to broad market unlike tax return filing emulators author of this article likes to make.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/15/7552899/monument-valley-sa...
This results in a lot of bad deals for consumers, but it's true that the fact that people will buy games in an unfinished state makes a lot more games possible, and makes taking risks with games possible.
I became a hostess. I became a pornstar. I became a regular programmer. Best worst industry ever.