Did I just waste 3 years? | Hacker News Reader

Did I just waste 3 years?

infinitroid.com

905 pointskiostech564 comments

Game industry is the economics of superstars.

The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1]

>Abstract

>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.

[1] The Macroeconomics of Superstars, Anton Korinek Johns Hopkins and NBER, Ding Xuan Ng Johns Hopkins, November 2017 https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-for...

[2] The Economics of Superstars The American Economic Review , Vol. 71, No. 5. (Dec., 1981), pp. 845-858. http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981...

Yes. At this point, recommending that a 9-5 programmer quit their job to work on an indie game is equivalent to suggesting a PR writer quit their job to write the next Great American Novel.

I might use that as my title for my partner case.

Automating (super dull financial industry department) is the industry of superstars

It’s not actually because even if you fail, you’ll be in a better position skillwise.

I'd think this is more true for a writer than a programmer. You could probably attempt to program a game by spaghetti coding, copy pasting from stack overflow and tutorials, not using version control or tests, and working solo - at the end you'd have a lot of bad habits and not so much that would be useful at a professional studio.

Ok don’t do that. I’ve done something similar two year ago (although not working on a game) and it was the most productive time ever.

Your impression may be biased because you're more familiar with bad programming habits than bad writing habits.

Some people use mistakes as a launch pad to learn a better way. Not always, and not always immediately, but sometimes it takes dealing with the negative consequences to make the better solution obvious when finally encountered.

Sometimes convincing someone to spend the extra 10-20% of time or effort to do something "the hard way" is nigh impossible until they've spend time doing the alternative and know the extended pain that sometimes results.

It's sort of like seat belts. When they were first required in all vehicles, many people still didn't bother with them. Even before cultural indoctrination took over, a lot of people eventually started too. It took some close calls for people or their friends and family for them to finally make the effort, and such a small effort it was. I saw exactly this play out with my own parents and their siblings.

Well, making money just off of novels seems impossible these days (you gotta hold out for HBO); there’s still a good deal of difference.

Novels are their own problem, but it's a similar one; there's hundreds of thousands of great writers and publishing is trivial nowadays (iirc the longest work of fiction ever made is a Super Smash Bros fanfiction published for free), but getting 'mindshare' (or, just some attention - and that's before making a sale still) is hugely difficult.

Is there really a difference? I know an acquaintance that published a novel they worked on for a few years. They didn't share any numbers with me but they were clear, they made no money. I assume there are thousands of people trying to sell their novels, and a tiny minority succeed in making (big) money.

> and a tiny minority succeed in making (big) money.

Who is making big money JUST off novels? Not speaking, not tv deals, writing.

Meanwhile I know several game developers making a living. Setting out to do it still follows a success distribution, but it’s fundementally achievable in a way unavailable to writers entirely.

They exist. But those writers are making money are doing quantity over quality. I.e. they're releasing like 12 pulp novels a year that they churn out once per month, and build up a fanbase over time with every new release, who then buy up their quickly growing backlog of novels.

Seems like urban supernatural or romance (or urban supernatural romance) seems to be the main genres where this is working. My girlfriend follows several writers who make a living this way, and is wanting to give it a try herself, that's how I'm aware of it.

You can't write The Great American Novel or spend years writing your novel and make money this way though. It pretty much requires the momentum and consistent quick releases for it to work. You're making sugary garbage that's consumed quickly and forgotten just as quickly.

It was always like that though. Game programming had always been the worst field for programmers, and the industry had and is exploiting the fact that some people like games enough to work on them under horrible conditions.

I don’t think it’s the equivalent to writing the great American novel though, because programming is just a minor part of game creating and arguably one of the least important. Design I’d the most important.

The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.

> The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.

Did we read the same article?

Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort went into. A tiny percentage are hits, but most are forgotten in the deluge.

To me that reads as someone that's fully aware that some people are putting a lot of effort in and making good games (Unity or not), but is upset by the realization that quality doesn't seem to be nearly enough. The problem is not (just) that a lot of crap is being released, but that a lot of everything is being released, good and bad. So much so that even the good things can't make good money because supply has so far outstripped demand.

It's sort of like the Netflix queue problem. I'm continuously adding things to my Netflix queue that look interesting, but my time to actually watch them is such that my chance of getting through even a majority of the queue is almost nil.

To me it reads as someone who disregards unity games, while praising well made indie games in general. And in the light of the rest of the article, the author seem to favor people who did good programming, but the truth is that you don’t need to be a good programmer to make good games.

I think supply is an issue, but I also think the author added to the problem by releasing a game that doesn’t have appealing graphics, gameplay or sound. Where as many much of the unity “shovelware” is exactly the opposite.

> Where as many much of the unity “shovelware” is exactly the opposite.

I think the difference of interpretation we're having is that I think you are interpreting "Unity shovelware" to mean "If it's Unity it's crap", which nobody who follows that space could easily defend (a lot of high quality well known games and publishers use Unity). But a lot of shovelware uses Unity, because it's easy to get assets for and publish with.

It's sort of like saying "Java enterprise crap-ware". I wouldn't assume that means all Java programs are crap, or that all enterprise software is crap, but that of the crappy software targeted towards the enterprise, a lot uses Java. That's not an indictment of Java, and might actually be the opposite, given that it has qualities that cover up other poor choices.

Shovelware typically does not have "appealing graphics, gameplay or sound". It is term used for low effort games and imply nothing special in all aspects.

Shovelware can have appealing graphics and sound by way of licensing premade assets, but you can't really buy a game design and paste that into your own title to get appealing gameplay.

I get the shovelware feeling from Netflix too tbh; as with the Unity games mentioned, there's a lot of effort and they're high quality, great writing, visuals, direction, they tick all the boxes and we live in a golden age of TV series and films - but there's just so much of it. Not hearing about any of the shows or movies beforehand from my social circles doesn't help either - the network effect is super important. And that's from a service with a fixed fee per month, so the bar for watching something new is super low.

>so the bar for watching something new is super low

I think you mean the opposite: the bar is super high because the chances of watching something new are low ... it's more difficult.

Re. The shovelware bit: Once upon a time, when men were real men, etc, making a game meant writing it from the ground up, writing your own engine and then writing the game logic on top of that engine to make something unique.

Now that game engines are commonplace, free and work better than what any single developer would be able to come up with after a lifetime of hard work the end result is that games have a very hard time to differentiate themselves from each other. There isn't really an unlimited space of game scenarios out there, even in the days of the 2D arcade games after a couple of years it became much harder to come up with something truly unique.

No.

It was never difficult to "come up with something truly unique".

Your unique thing might be rubbish, but that's not the problem for the millions of shovelware Unity asset flips.

Jim Sterling has covered this at length, even running a competition to show that people can take a horribly over-used cheap asset and do great original stuff - if they try. Asset flips don't even try.

The are tens of thousands of games in which you are an elite soldier running around shooting zombies. There are zero games where you're a pot plant using psychic powers to create sculptures.

Like Hollywood the video game industry chases trends until they're beaten completely to death, and then goes one more round just to make really sure.

I think there has been some windows of opportunity for single-developers teams.

- In the 80's and 90's when PC games where simple enough.

- At the beginning of Steam

- At the beginning of the App Store and the Play Store

At those time, there wasn't that much competition so while it was still hit or miss, you still had a decent chance to be successful as a single-person indie developer.

true, the first generation of successful iphone and android games that made their authors rich were extremely simple remakes of classic games.

I remember buying games in the 80ies and 90ies, I’d go to a supermarket and rummage through a mixed box with literal hundreds of different $5 games and pick the one that looked the most exciting.

The biggest treasure I found that way was the original x-com.

I don’t think times have changed that much. The upcoming game I’m most excited by is it lurks below, and that’s being developed by a single developer. Stardew Valley released in 2016, after the explosion. Into the breach, though not single developer did well in 2018.

I mean, it’s not uncommon for solo-small teams to top the steam charts, but you really do need both quality and a little luck. I just don’t think that’s different from how it’s always been, and I think the author of this article in particular lacks quality.

What has changed though is the amount of games people own. In the 90ies you didn’t have a backlog of thousands of games that you picked up from a humble bundle where you only really wanted one game. You also didn’t have MMOs or forthnite competing for your attention.

So I agree with you somewhat, it’s become much harder to sell bad-mediocre games in the past few years, and that’s 99% of indie games. And there is obviously always a market for remakes when a new platform/generation arrives.

Haven't read the paper, but kept me thinking about twitchers, youtube streamers and such...

You'll see the same thing: a tiny minority of streamers making most of the money, and a large majority making little to no money.

That's a Pareto distribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

Web, ecommerce, music, film, ticket sales, furniture, search... It's really a stacked deck for the big guys in most industries these days

Absolutely. All things are turning into the economics of superstars so long as they're subject to network effects and the widest, most fluid and well-informed possible market.

Uber drivers will turn into the economics of superstars. Amazon warehouse workers will turn into the economics of superstars. You'll keep on getting individual ultra-high performers who dominate whatever area it is, and more ordinary performers will just plain fail.

Amazon warehouse workers are limited by human physiology to move boxes within 10x of the average box moving speed. That disqualifies them from the superstar economy.

I'm not sure how your conclusion follows. Uber drivers and warehouse workers are unlikely to undergo this effect because no matter how good an Uber driver is, they can't be in multiple places at once. Similarly, there's a limit to how much one warehouse worker can do.

Kid of. You'll still see a small minority of Uber drivers making money and a large percentage breaking even or losing money. It's like that in the real-estate market, where a small minority of agents take in most of the profit and a large number breaking even or losing money. This is also why you see trade groups frequently supporting policies to increase barriers for market entry. In real-estate this means higher and higher licensing standards. For example in Canada it costs around $6k and 3 years to get fully licensed [1].. which is crazy. But the real-estate lobby wants it even higher.

[1]https://www.remic.ca/real-estate-sales-person-vs-mortgage-ag...

Real estate is infrequent high value transactions with high margin/commission. Doubling your real estate sales can well make you rich; doubling your Uber driving would not.

No doubt there are differences between the markets but at a high-level similar forces act on both. That is, in both cases, the vast majority of participants either break-even or lose money. A small minority makes money (and therefore takes in most of the profit to be had). The uber market, because it centralized and has an impartial dispatcher (i.e. Uber corporate), that market will probably be more egalitarian. Overall though, the same dynamics play out.

For real-estate, some numbers that I saw had 51% of licensed real-estate agents making one or zero transaction in the past year.

Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers work don't scale. There is only 24 hours in a day and compensation difference are relatively small.

this is why i feel compelled to think about things that are necessarily localized. how the hell can you compete with the whole world?

You're not actually competing with the whole world, though, just whatever else is similar to someone's interests.

In this case... "metroidvania" is a very oversaturated market, and a lot of games do it better.

Indeed, you have to look for niches -- and find the ones that are in

1) high demand (not just high demand in general -- high demand for new/better content by a new entrant);

2) low supply;

3) well paying customers.

I'm sure despite the flood those will still exist, as long as there's still a good amount of differentiation between people's preferences. A niche is a small subset of in the space of products that a small subset of customers have strong preference to. This needs preference differentiation.

This preference difference could be toward many features: cultural setting, story style, gameplay style, aesthetic style, etc.

There's perhaps a combinatorial advantage here: if sensitivity varies significantly across many of those parameters, just choose any unexplored subset, optimizing for 1/2/3 -- there are exponentially many in the number of distinguishing features (if you browse Steam tags you see this is potentially a very large number!).

https://store.steampowered.com/tag/browse#global_492

Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice. You need to find a niche and hit it hard.

Maybe that used to be metroidvania, but that's long over. Visual novels have been on the rise for a while, so are rougelikes and card games, but those are saturated now. You want to get in before the big streamers and reddit frontpage and ride the wave.

Who knew a Harvest Moon clone would be the biggest indie success of its year? Maybe we can systematically analyze old games to identify overlooked gems and valuable revivals.

>Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice.

I don't think it's bad advice, though. If you treat genre and its elements as only means to an end, you wind up with exactly the trends that oversaturate the indie market now, because everyone is trying to "find a niche and hit it hard." Games are entertainment.

I think you should at least learn to want to play the game you're making. At the very least, you should know why the customer would want to play it. Ticking off boxes hoping to find combinatorial success isn't enough... that "battle royale farming simulator" still needs to be entertaining, or at least capture interest.

> Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice. You need to find a niche and hit it hard.

I'd say you need both: you need to want to do a game you'd want to play, because you'd have an easier time recognizing if you're doing something that would appeal to at least one person. And if it's in a niche, you'll have a better chance to get coverage and buyers. But if you just try to hit a niche hard without knowing what makes the games in that niche good, you'll have a hard time making something that'll interest players.

I disagree with that, but it's just my opinion. I think artists must move beyond their own taste. A sushi chef doesn't really have to like squid.

I think using your own taste is a crutch. If you get good at it, you should be able to know it's good regardless of your own feelings.

We see this when game developers are shuffled around and work on ones that are completely different from their passion projects. The good ones still excell.

Even if one is good enough to recognise a good game regardless of one's feelings, I'd say it would be harder to work on a game type that doesn't appeal the artist. I hope that even if a sushi chef doesn't like squid, he like some of the sushi he'll be making.

Let's agree to disagree then.

But you are actually competing with the whole developed world. There may be localised tastes or patterns to follow but your competition is from the whole world.

Your market is the whole world too.

Game development is hard, it seems like it's completely hit or miss, there is no middle ground. I've released 5 games, but I have to say, spending 2,600+ hours on something without doing market research or at least starting small seems crazy.

My most successful game was an app for iOS which made me a grand total of around $30. The difference is I only spent around 80 hours working on it (40 or so for the game, 20 or so on the level editor, and 20 or so making levels). I had no money for marketing, had done no research beforehand, so I pretty much knew it was going to fail but did it as a fun side project to learn some new stuff and for my CV.

Compare that to the various website side projects I've worked on over the years which have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars (over 10 years). Game dev sounds fun, but if you're looking to make money, I would definitely stay away from it.

> Compare that to the various website side projects I've worked on over the years which have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars (over 10 years).

Was this orders from clients or did you create some SaaS?

Most of it (more than 90%) ad revenue, some SaaS.

Instead of making a game for some category on Steam and hoping it sells enough in the first month before sales drop off, I wonder if it could work to make a super-super niche game where the goal would be to rank for a Google search term instead.

You'd try to be very long-lived, steadily selling for years, say just a few copies a week. All traffic would come from people who have some incredibly niche interest they are searching for, say baptism planners discovering your "baptism planner simulator 2000".

If you continued to make games like these say one per month or two, it might be possible to gradually build up a liveable income from them.

> "baptism planner simulator 2000"

I guarantee that if you drop the "planner" that game would sell like hotcakes as soon as a medium sized YouTuber/Twitch streamer notices it.

There is no way a game about dunking babies doesn't get enough shock value to get a decent return on investment, especially if it has wonky physics, "bad" controls or other emergent gameplay.

For a deeper game, maybe bring back the "planner" aspect to add a simulation layer on top. Make a tycoon game where you manage a church and the baptisms are just one of a few minigames.

Would you say that the difference between the games side projects vs the website side projects are the mindset in which you have executed those projects?

This isn't new. It happened before the internet to books, music and film. The internet has just amplified it.

Do you ever think about getting back into games?

Sometimes. But Empire was a bestselling game, and it still didn't work out to much money. My hourly rate was pathetic :-)

It's 1983 all over again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Not really. The market is large and fairly mature, it's doing fine and continuing to grow. The video game crash is titled that for a reason, the market shrunk by 97% in a short period.

There are a large number of amateur creators who are trying to win the lottery (either from a fame or monetary perspective), and most won't and will see little recognition and remain obscure or very niche.

This is seen in basically every area of media. Music, books, movies, etc and is perfectly normal.

>In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games". In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year, and promoted its "Seal of Quality", which it allowed to be used on games and peripherals by publishers that met Nintendo's quality standards.

In 2017, 21 games per day were released on Steam and most of them were trash.

The Atari crash was more akin to the .com bubble. Vaporware and no way to tell what was in the bag until you bought it. Video games are a giant mature market dominated by big companies with sophisticated business models. Just like web businesses these days.

I’d say sports, too. TV made it so some players were playing for hundreds of thousands of people nationally while others still entertained only locally.

It’s also in the process of starting to hit indie development in general and startups. It’s an interesting process but life for your typical indie or startup SaaS is going to get as tough as life for the typical “App Developer” got a few years ago.

Isn't this simply a rephrasing of "winner takes all"?

No, because a "winner take all" industry is one that trends towards monopoly, that's not the same thing. No one person will ever have the entire video game pie.

"Superstar industries" follow extreme power law distributions, where, due to the low barrier to entry, high ceilings, and limited consumer base (there are only so many hours people can spend on entertainment), the pie isn't growing and new entrants aren't going to be able to carve out much that hasn't already been claimed.

It's not a new thing, the name comes from the music industry which acts the same way. Anybody can record a song and print it on CDs, but the market is already saturated: you have to either really really really stand out like nobody has in decades (An event so rare I couldn't find any examples), or you have to get the support of one of the big players (game studios or music labels) to lend you their resources and audience.

Adele?

Nearest example I can think of, mySpace was where she got noticed so that dates her breakthrough to a good decade ago.

Adele was legitimate however others have pretended to have an Adele grade story. Lily Allen also claimed to have been discovered on mySpace but her dad was rock and roll celebrity so her efforts can be dismissed as nepotism. Often these links to rock and roll celebrity are not obvious because performers use stage names that sound like real names. Their children don't use their parents fake surnames.

Adele wasn't self-published though, right? I'm not super familiar, but based on the wikipedia page she got picked up by an XL Recordings talent scout who put her on other albums associated with that label, including appearances on BBC, before even her first album, which had 32 credits.

Being really good and self publishing helps you build your resume in a superstar industry, but it's nearly impossible to actually achieve commercial success without a well-established sponsor. Adele probably wouldn't have gotten far on her own if XL or some other label hadn't picked her up. Her accomplishment before then was a really good resume.

Her mySpace tunes were self published, however, getting XL Recordings on board has parallels with startup culture. It is like the importance of having a co-founder, proof that you have convinced someone to back you, then with that, you can scale things up.

XL Recordings came from the rave scene, the Prodigy were their first big earning group, however, for every Prodigy there were scores of 'Dome Patrol' grade releases that nobody except for DJs ever heard of. XL moved on when the rave scene died to other acts in different genres. They 'pivoted' to use the parlance.

I know Adele worked with a label however it was a genuine thing her getting spotted on mySpace and not some fake back story, as per the Lily Allen example. I don't believe music executives really would listen if I posted my singing efforts to the internets, or if anyone here did likewise. Yet that did happen with Adele.

I'm not saying that Adele's story isn't remarkable or that she isn't talented, but that she didn't break the industry pattern, finding her own slice of the pie without help. XL already had audiences, resources, collaborators, and connections, and a production pipeline that she was inducted into. Her debut product took 32 people to make, on XL's dime. It was not a Stardew-Valley situation.

Justin Bieber was discovered through YouTube. And he helped contribute to Carly Ray Jepsen's career because he saw one of her songs on YouTube, covered it, and helped it go viral. The Weeknd used YouTube at the start of his career as well.

I don't think this phenomenon is limited to one form of media. "The Martian" by Andy Weir was originally published on his website one chapter at a time. The internet has, in general, lowered the bar to publishing any kind of work significantly - be it games on Steam, songs on YouTube, or ebooks on Amazon. There are now new avenues into the wider industry, but the big players are still the big players.

People break through all the time. But there's no formula for it. It's luck + talent + zeitgeist + social connection. You don't need all 3, but it helps a whole lot. And you can have a whole lot of any of them and still not have lasting success. This is how the music industry has been for a long time, although the dynamics are always, well, dynamic.

The problem with games is the amount of effort involved just to determine if it is “fun”. When I was in it cancelling a game 1 year deep with 10 people was normal.

I think this is why minigame-style games (battle royale, fighting games, first person shooter competitive, etc) are so common. You can implement a simple version of your game idea in a weekend and, if your idea was good, people would likely already have fun playing it.

Never really did modern game development, but can you really implement a first person shooter with a twist over a weekend? How would you go about it, create a mod for an existing game?

You could do that or a frramework like Unity takes care of lot of stuff for you.. weekend maybe a bit extreme, but you can get something running and functional in very short time

Almost no one writes their own FPS entirely from scratch in the past decade outside of a handful truly enormous industry players, much as no one really writes the entirety of a web app themselves.

You choose one of the many existing game development frameworks and rapidly prototype a concept, if it works you keep iterating on it etc etc. This works in games as well as any other major software endeavour.

The matter of having the talent to produce a new idea that’s actually fun to play and marketing it successfully is arguably the hard bit here, rather than the technical implementation details. I’d make the argument today that the technical barriers to entry for game development are almost _too_ low now, which is why partly why Steam is filled with so much “indie” junk.

Asset stores allow you to have placeholder mechanics like you used to have placeholder art. So placeholder camera, controller, collision detection, and a placeholder level. Then you get to rig what you want to test on top of that, or just sell it as is which is called an "asset flip".

It depends on the twist.

You can download Unity, purchase and install for example UFPS that will handle most FPS functionality for you (includes basic gun etc model) and you can use Unity networking for LAN connectivity.

Let's say the twist is a Battle Royale game, you just make a Unity terrain and a basic sphere that becomes smaller.

After that coding the extra bits such as HP, HP loss due to sphere etc isn't a big deal.

That's one way, doing it via a mod also works, but you really need knowledge of the product you're modding (although the same is true of e.g. Unity, if its your first week with it it won't be that easy).

Classic long-tail pattern.

The growth of superstars makes me optimistic enough to look at ETF funds like GAMR. The industry overall seems undervalued.

http://www.longtail.com/about.html

Sure but I think this really applies to industries under a free market in general however the dynamics in the tech sector are such that a single person with little to no startup capital can create something with paranormal returns and that is really what indies are after (perhaps after having their idea come to life). I wonder if there any other industries that have this same allure

What you are saying is true. However, throwing your hands up in the air and saying “I guess I didn’t get lucky” isn’t quite the correct response either. Success is a matter of exposure and conversion rate.

1,016 visits, many of them random and untargeted, is simply not enough to make a statistically significant decision about the viability of this game. Conversion rates for any product tend to vary wildly within specific demographics. Some games perform abysmally with wide audiences, but may have very high conversion rates with specific, well defined groups.

To be sure, there are games that don’t need to look for their niche audience. They become viral sensations because they appeal to mass audiences. They get enormous amounts of “earned media” - viral clicks from people talking about and uploading video of themselves playing - and those are the games we hear about and consider to be “Superstars”. But that in no way means that games that aggressively target some relatively small group of people that the game actually appeals to with paid advertising cannot be very financially successful. Maybe not billion dollar blockbusters, but I’d imagine this author would be happy with a six figure income from his work, which is entirely possible if he finds the right audience and applies the same work ethic he did to developing the game to marketing it.

He needs to figure out who likes the game, what makes them like it, and then use the plethora of online ad platforms and targeting options to find more people like them. His game is not a steaming pile of crap, so he will find a paying audience for it if he looks.

I don't think that it's just technological change which has brought us there. It's also because of the last 10 years or so of Federal Reserve Bank policies. The elites have figured out how to maximise their profits during expansionary economic times and a big part of the elite strategy is limiting the number of winners.

Interesting, can you expand on this?

It's pretty clear that a lot of jobs today are useless and if you've worked for enough big companies, you might have realized that big companies are extremely inefficient. If big companies are so inefficent, why then are they able to generate so much profit from the economy?

The reason is monetary policy. The Fed constantly 'prints' new money out of thin air and injects it into the economy via a combination of 1. loans to the government and 2. open market operations. Guess who gets the first dips into these two huge pots of newly created money?

In the case of government money (loaned by the Fed), big corporations get a huge chunk of that money pot because they get all the lucrative government contracts. In the case of open market operations; big finance firms like Goldman Sachs and big traders with insider information are the first to get their hands into that pot.

Basically that money which is meant to 'trickle down' isn't actually doing that; instead it appears to be trickling back up to government officials who are enacting policies that benefit corporations and increased centralization of wealth.

...and what about all the other countries?

The currencies of developed countries are pegged to the US dollar and so their reserve banks are just copying whatever the Fed is doing; their main goal is to make sure that the value of their currencies doesn't change too much relative to the USD. All countries reinforce the same economic distortions on a global scale.

Any evidence of that pegging?

The relatively stable exchange rates can be explained by entirely orthodox inflation targeting together with purchasing-power-parity pretty well.

The interest rates of developed countries tend to follow each other. Interest rates are one of the main mechanisms used to control the money supply.

New money that is anticipated will lead to anticipated price rises. So it doesn't matter (too much) who gets first dibs.

The Fed mostly buys government bonds, the markets for which are very liquid and efficient.

(The government however does benefit from the Feds buying their bonds, instead of injecting money into the system some other way.)

>> New money that is anticipated will lead to anticipated price rises. So it doesn't matter (too much) who gets first dibs.

There is a significant delay before the newly created money affects wages. Shareholders benefit from the new money instantly (since the market reacts to it quickly and it drives up the value of their stocks) but wage earners won't benefit from the new money until they get their annual 2% salary raise at the end of the year. That delay is significant because it allows shareholders to compound their ROIs several times before wages catch up.

> If big companies are so inefficent, why then are they able to generate so much profit from the economy?

On the one hand, no one has yet figured out how eliminate inefficiences out of large organizations. They're all like that, usually the bigger the more inefficient (the government, because of its size, being obviously the worst offender).

However, it seems that it just takes dozens (if not hundreds) of thousands of employees to run say a top tier car or microprocessor company. You just can't do it with less, so the inefficiencies are the cost of producing such advanced stuff as say BMWs or Intel processors.

After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem.

You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.

And if you have a good look at them you should realize that they all are extremely polished and coherent. None of them has realistic AAA graphics but they still look good. None of them is just a "copy" of an existing game. They either bring something totally new or bring something known but with a greater overall quality.

Then you have successful niche games such as Cogmind or the Zachtronics games. They still have the mentioned properties but also target only a subset of players where there are not many games. I think that makes them guaranteed sales.

Now what's wrong with all the stories about failed games? They all are generic. They don't offer something special. And this is what doesn't work in a saturated games market. And I'm not saying the authors didn't work enough. They just don't see what's wrong with their games and continue on their path to demise.

I guess what I'm saying is: to make a successful game you don't need to be the greatest coder or greatest artist. But you need to understand what makes a game great and enjoyable.

Maybe the days (years) will come where I finally will make a (bigger) game of my own and maybe I will totally fail like many have. Maybe I will revoke everything I said here but today this is my opinion. :)

>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.

Very much yes.

Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). Papers Please is a truly unique game that was lucky enough to get youtuber coverage. Plenty of equally unique and just as fun games are ignored. I've never heard of Factorio, but looking it up, it's graphically very unappealing. Maybe my opinion would change if I watched a playthrough of it, but it doesn't stand out. Mini Metro might be fun. But so are many of the hundreds of other minimalistic puzzlers released monthly.

There are loads of games that just don't sell but become classics decades later. Earthbound sold horribly in America until the main character appeared in a more popular series (Super Smash Bros). Almost nobody played Killer 7. Panzer Dragoon Saga is considered one of the best RPGs of all time. Nobody bought it. Its popularity mostly grew after people discovered it through emulation.

The game in this article flopped because there are an abundance of games, it falls into an overcrowded genre, and it doesn't stand out, but most importantly, nobody important played it. If pewdiepie played this, it'd see 10000+ sales in a week and likely appear in a humble bundle.

To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.

>Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon).

>To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.

I strongly disagree.

Stardew valley did well because it is a fun game with good graphics. That's it, it's fun and addictive, graphics are good and it gets the gestalt right. Stardew Valley is just a truly truly fun game in which you say "just one more day" a bit too often. It's just that much fun. The game is FUN and addictive. Did I mention I had a lot of fun playing it? It has nothing to do with marketing it had everything to do with how I played the game and whether I had fun or not. The first time I picked it up I poured in more than 40 hours in a single week! And that's a lot!

I just read this article about the creator who spent 4 years making Stardew Valley and it is a really interesting read:

https://www.gq.com/story/stardew-valley-eric-barone-profile

the point is that if the game wasn't well marketed, you wouldn't even know it existed in the first place.

Definitely not true, I've never seen an advert for Stardew Valley but it's talked about all over the internet because it's a really good game.

> but it's talked about all over the internet

Word-of-mouth is marketing too. Perhaps you are thinking that marketing === advertising? Because marketing doesn't have to be advertising. Building a community, attending conferences, getting influencers to play your game - these are all marketing activities. If people are talking about the game, it's surely fueled by a quality experience but marketing has to bootstrap that conversation.

Word-of-mouth might be marketing, but it's not something you can work towards. To get that you need a good fun game. IMO that's not a marketing effort, it's a symptom of a good unique game.

I'm not a marketing expert tho, but I can't think of any way to force word-of-mouth onto people.

the game's quality acts like a force multiplier for word of mouth, essentially you're more likely to promote or talk about a game you enjoyed. But you need some critical mass for that to have any real impact. What good is it if each player refers 1.5 others on average, but you only get to 5000 before the game becomes old news? Most games don't continue to sell forever and the hype will die out eventually, so you want that hype to reach a large audience quickly.

And few of those people discovered the game by scrolling through steam. Most found it through a youtube playthrough, word of mouth, and "word of mouth" (i.e. how all content is marketed these days)

I think it's also important to point out that Stardew is in an odd place as a "remake". It's one thing to try to make the 10th battle royale that's coming out this year, and another to do what Stardew did: be, as far as I know, the first full-featured Harvest Moon-like to come out for PC, and also come out at a time where it had been a while since ANY good Harvest Moon game had released, even on consoles.

It filled a niche for gamers who had grown up playing HM on Gameboy, but hadn't been able to really scratch that itch. If anything, his choice of genre to work in was genius. It was a passionate and pre-made fanbase that was craving a new game to jump onto, and he happened to make an excellent game as well.

It also helps that HM is a highly generic game/genre. There's very little about what makes the original games popular that is trademarked. I played thousands of hours of a couple of them, and I probably can't name any of the characters any more. You can easily make an "off-brand" remake, and most people won't miss anything specific. You wouldn't be able to just go make a knock-off Pokemon and have it work, even though the demand for it on PC is high.

Well I disagree a lot with what you are saying. Marketing is important sure. But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful. Maybe big gaming companies can do that but even they fail often enough. Luck is an important factor and maybe I would even rate it higher than 5%. I find the number of 90% marketing for an indie game ridiculous.

Stardew Valley is based on existing formula but it is incredibly polished and even people not from this genre play(ed) it. It has something special, similar games don't.

However I think that quality trumps for indie games. There are always exceptions and some "shit" games are hyped because of some Twitch or Youtube coverage. And of course there are some (maybe many?) games that have a high quality and fail. You don't just need quality. But you need it. And you obviously can make a good game in a bad time.

As for the game in the article. I don't want to disparage the author because making a game of this scope is incredible!

However watching a video on his game's site instantly gave me two reasons why the game is not successful.

- The movement of the character looks very stiff and unnatural. - It is missing atmosphere. A lot of repeating textures. No details which makes the whole world uninspiring and uninteresting.

Now these things can be changed and improved still. But in the end the market for this specific type of game really is a hard one. And you compete with game's made by bigger teams and bigger budgets.

I'm inclined to agree. Certainly for games, quality is necessary but not sufficient, and the same goes with marketing. You need them both.

The GP makes a point that pewdiepie picking up this game would result in thousands of sales whereas, although I'm basing this purely on watching the gameplay video, I'd have to say maybe: I don't think pewdiepie, or any other major YouTube reviewer, would pick this up because it's not distinctive enough.

This is especially the case when Infinitroid is going up against games like Dead Cells within the same genre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbfxPptEU6M. Infinitroid is an impressive piece of work but, as a game, I don't think it comes off well in the comparison.

There are markets where quality is of much less importance, such as enterprise software. How else does a company like Deltek survive? Answer: there aren't that many viable competitors and they're all just as crappy. Then it's down to the quality of and investment in the business development and sales process.

Quality is subjective but marketing is not. Every person has a different taste, I've played some "good" indie games that bored the socks off me. F you have enough people coming through the marketing funnel then only a truly awful game will fail to find admirers.

There are subjective qualities such as visual quality but there are also objective qualities such as "hours played" or other measurable ones.

Also people will do the marketing for you if your game is good but if it is not you will need to convince them (money most likely). And that is what bigger companies often do (via Twitch streamers e.g.) and what indies cannot (especially solo devs).

Quality is subjective, just like beauty or really anything else. But it turns out a lot of people share the same subjective views of a lot of things. A game that would be subjectively appealing to most gamers will generally do much better than a game that does not. A sufficient amount of marketing might be able to offset some of that effect, but not always, and only at great expense.

> But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful.

This doesn't seem to be a disagreement? Quality is necessary for a successful indie game, but that's very different than being sufficient.

I can easily imagine a world where Stardew Valley failed, but I can't imagine a world where Hunt Down The Freeman succeeded. Given the sheer rate at which new games are released, I expect that a majority of polished, fun indie games fail or at least don't see major Terraria-tier success. Heck, half of my Steam library consists of clever, well-executed indie games from Humble Bundles that got near-zero coverage and sold near-zero copies. Orwell, Antichamber, Distance, and a lot of others all had the quality to sell much better than they did.

And beyond that, I think our standards for quality are usually biased by whether a game succeeded. Factorio is absolutely full of grainy, repeated textures, but took off just fine. Dungeons of Dredmor crashes constantly and went through three major expansions without fixing fundamental bugs like "this skill doesn't function", but it's a hugely successful and widely-praised indie title. Subnautica is constantly criticized for just sort of aimlessly ending. It's easy to look at a failed game and say it didn't sell because it was buggy, or looked ugly, or had a weak ending, but all of those things are present in lots of hugely successful indie games. Above some minimal threshold like "no unbearable flaws, one or more excellent elements", it looks to me like luck and marketing are absolutely crucial factors.

I didn't say that no marketing is needed. I said that you can market all you want if a game is bad it usually won't be successful, with some hype exceptions. I think you are basically making the same point in your second paragraph?!

I don't think to be successful you need to be as successful as Terraria..

As for Factorio.. it's not about graphics. Not every type of game needs great graphics. It's the same as with Dwarf Fortress. Both games offer such a deep complexity that graphics is secondary, especially to the type of player interested in it.

I think this might be one of those "forceful agreement" situations, yes. I suppose the way to see is to check all four cases: good and bad indie games with and without marketing.

Presumably we agree that bad indie games with no marketing will certainly fail.

It looks like we agree that bad indie games with strong marketing will usually fail, unlike bad AAA games and with a few debatable exceptions. (Mostly, I think, games that preordered well on hype and reputation but crumbled post-release. Clockwork Empires comes to mind.)

For good indie games with poor marketing, I think they'll usually fail, and it sounds like we might disagree? There are exceptions, but I think lots of them are older than the indie boom (e.g. Dwarf Fortress), or followup titles from successful indie devs. This might just be terminology or statistics though, because I agree that a chance favorable RPS writeup could jumpstart a game with no real marketing plan or budget. I guess the question is how often that happens, versus games doing the convention and reviewer circuit to ensure they get seen and written about.

For good indie games with good marketing, I think there's still a decently high chance of failure these days, which might be another disagreement? This probably requires a better definition of 'failure', people definitely bought e.g. Orwell, but if the standard is "makes enough money to release the next similar game" then even Failbetter Games is on the razor's edge, and they're one of the most acclaimed indie studios I know of.

(On that final point, I think I simply misunderstood you. I was noting that indie games can have any of the failings you mentioned and still succeed, but if your point was just that the specific game in this thread was hampered by those issues then we agree.)

> Presumably we agree that bad indie games with no marketing will certainly fail. > It looks like we agree that bad indie games with strong marketing will usually fail, unlike bad AAA games and with a few debatable exceptions. (Mostly, I think, games that preordered well on hype and reputation but crumbled post-release. Clockwork Empires comes to mind.)

Agreed

> For good indie games with poor marketing, I think they'll usually fail, and it sounds like we might disagree? There are exceptions, but I think lots of them are older than the indie boom (e.g. Dwarf Fortress), or followup titles from successful indie devs. This might just be terminology or statistics though, because I agree that a chance favorable RPS writeup could jumpstart a game with no real marketing plan or budget. I guess the question is how often that happens, versus games doing the convention and reviewer circuit to ensure they get seen and written about.

We probably disagree a little here. I think the problem is defining good games and good/poor marketing. I tried to make the point that some games are just so good in general quality/coherence/details or have have a truely unique approach that they would "always" succeed because players will do the marketing by word of mouth. When I say always I don't mean it literally. There are always exceptions :)

> For good indie games with good marketing, I think there's still a decently high chance of failure these days, which might be another disagreement? This probably requires a better definition of 'failure', people definitely bought e.g. Orwell, but if the standard is "makes enough money to release the next similar game" then even Failbetter Games is on the razor's edge, and they're one of the most acclaimed indie studios I know of.

Again slight disagreement with similar reasoning to the last paragraph. Good != unique and there are many levels of good so it's hard to draw a line.

> (On that final point, I think I simply misunderstood you. I was noting that indie games can have any of the failings you mentioned and still succeed, but if your point was just that the specific game in this thread was hampered by those issues then we agree.)

Yep I was referring to the actual game mentioned in the article and what I instantly found problematic for its success.

It was good discussion (the whole thread) but now I need to sleep!

> Both games offer such a deep complexity that graphics is secondary, especially to the type of player interested in it.

Separate to my other comment, I should acknowledge that this seems overwhelmingly true. Dwarf Fortress is famous, but I've learned recently that there are also thriving communities for Cataclysm DDA, Dominions, Aurora, every imaginable Nethack derivative, and half a dozen other equally-opaque games.

As long as the genre or mechanics are new, there seems to be a (limited, but) perpetual apatite for ludicrously deep games with minimal player handholding.

It's absolutely a market but it's a small one. However these niche markets can have great players/customers. Another recent example of this is the game Cogmind.

Factorio doesn't look very visually appealing, but if you play it for an hour you can pretty much write off your next week because you'll be hooked.

People use the word "graphics" and "sound" often, but that's not all that makes a game. So many indie "ugly" games work out just fine. It's all about the gameplay. You can make the graphics and the sound be a core part of that, but you can also focus on other places.

Factorio and Dwarf Fortress are two examples of those. Can someone say their graphics are amazing? Probably not. Yet they focused on their differentials: the unique gameplay.

I have to agree with the GP. They're always unique in one form or another.

People however overuse the marketing card IMO, saying that you need a lot of marketing. Good games do stand out for being good games. Word of mouth only works if your game is good. Nobody will urge their friends to play a bad game and for indie games, word of mouth is king. You can't "force" word of mouth marketing, so it's not really a marketing effort. It comes naturally with good games.

I'd say the part of marketing is lower than luck, since you'd have to be very lucky to have your game shown by a big streamer/youtuber.

While I wouldn't disregard the importance of marketing, I think quality, as in both quality of game itself and quality of the idea behind it, matters.

I think having a competitive advantage/value and having unique qualities are not the same thing. For example, before Stardew Valley, an entire genre of "calm, casual, farming oriented games" were mostly unknown to PC gamers. For years I have wondered when someone would notice an entire genre missing. At some point, someone noticed the same thing, and instead of building just another sandbox/crafting game they built a polished Harvest Moon alternative. It turns out, from a pool of millions of PC/XBone/whatever gamers, some people liked this genre of games.

By the way, I cannot stress the importance of polish: great artwork, fluid animations, good UI, proper bg music, smooth learning curve and of course, being generally exciting to play. Most of the games mentioned (maybe Factorio being the exception) have these qualities. Your average gamer has 15sec attention span at best for a new game. Most wouldn't even wait until the end of your launch trailer.

I've gave my full 30 seconds to watch the trailer of Infinitroid (OP's game) and I cannot see why I would choose it over, for example Dead Cells. They are not exactly the same game, but they are competing for the same resources. (entertainment budget and spare time) Just watch trailers of Infinitroid and Dead Cells side by side, the difference you will see cannot be written off as marketing success.

Just my 2cents as an avid gamer and potential customer.

> To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck

This seems very logical but indie games really do seem to defy this general rule. Pretty much every single popular indie game out there is really, really good in it's own specific way, and most of them had almost no marketing budget (when they first came out anyway).

Minecraft had no marketing. Terraria had no marketing. Stardew Valley had no marketing. These games spread through word of mouth and quality is the main criteria that causes people to talk about a game.

>Minecraft had no marketing. Terraria had no marketing. Stardew Valley had no marketing.

Nope, nope, and nope.

Stardew Valley has a notable indie publisher. There was marketing on various internet communities (reddit, 4chan, etc) leading up to the months of release. There it can pass off as organic word of mouth. Terraria was marketed months before release. As for Minecraft, Notch himself was throwing his game around a load before it got released and using anonymity to drive interest--it was the most organic of the 3.

Other notable indie games like Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy also had especially significant marketing efforts behind them. And let's not forget Fez.

Most indie breakout hits aren't miracle successes. The just have very clever and modern marketing methods. They're not wasting money on magazine ads and gaming news sites banners like AAA studios do.

Super Meat Boy had the backing of the xBox store (they were promised a feature page release) and several major gaming websites/magazines wrote pre-release articles or reviews for it ... plus they got the tail end too with The Indie Game movie which I'm sure added some later sales numbers for Meat Boy, Fez and Braid.

> Minecraft had no marketing.

... ish.

You can certainly think of the prolonged free alpha (and beta?) as marketing

Also Notch spammed 4chan with the game anonymously for awhile to drum up some interest.

Also he made a highly viral video of him building a minecart rollercoaster during his paid (but cheaper, I believe it was $13, and he was telling people that was half the price that it would be on official release) beta which he got Kotaku and Penny Arcade to share with their massive audience and suddenly he was a millionaire pretty much overnight.

I personally saw the minecart rollercoaster video while browsing Kotaku and that's how I discovered the game.

Notch absolutely marketed and knew how to market his game. He may have not had an advertising budget, but he made the right type of content and the right type of advertising, then shared it with the right types of promotional avenues to reach his target audience to get enough of a start that word-of-mouth advertising could pretty much take over. And that's all marketing really is.

And since then (especially since Microsoft bought Minecraft) you better believe that game has had lots of money dumped into its marketing.

It's just that most things aren't as sexy as a build-your-own-minecart-rollercoaster-brick-by-brick-and-ride-it-in-first-person and therefore require a lot of money to get it in front of enough people.

Your story is accurate to as much as I remember it too, though a key element often forgotten in Notch's story is he'd already built a lot of small, throwaway games that had pretty much bombed and essentially learnt the lesson of what a lack of marketing could do the hard way before he got to MC.

Sure, I don't doubt that. Failure is one of the best teachers.

I've experienced many marketing failures for video games as well (both games I made myself and games I worked on for other companies), I should be an expert on it by now. Guess that means I should make a new game and apply all those lessons I learned :P.

"Stardew Valley had no marketing."

Bullshit claim. They did really clever marketing where they provided the beta release beforehand to few prominent twitch streamers, and in my knowledge also did all kinds of other pre-release hype, community building etc. I'm pretty sure also the other titles invested quite a lot of time, smarts and money towards marketing.

You seem to think "marketing" only means putting ads on the subway or TV commercial or something like that.

These 3 games did a lot of marketing. It was just not the millionaire kind of marketing that EA does.

Incorrect. Factorio is _LIFE_.

https://reddit.com/r/factorio

I have to agree that exposure is probably more important.

I have bought many games after watching popular Youtubers play them.

> being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage

I don't think this is good fortune so much as a good pitch, a good product, and a lot of persistence.

Factorio works because the gameplay is completely original. It scratches a building + automating + researching loop that no other game has. Many people compare it to programming or electrical engineering design - the satisfaction of automating something that used to take manual effort is great, and very addictive.

The graphics are bland and the early parts of the game feel like a pre-release / beta build, but the addictive gameplay and infinite end-game potential got it a lot of great coverage.

> You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.

Interesting. I think you're right about half of those. I can't see any way that SDV or Darkest Dungeon could have failed. SDV is a great all round game with tons of polish, and DD has 99th percentile art direction and atmosphere for an indie game.

Mini Metro and Papers Please could absolutely have been dead on arrival. Mini Metro is just an above average puzzle game (of which there are tons), and PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer. It's really one of those "you have to play it" games (aka "sells 0 copies in 99 of 100 alternate universes" games...)

It's only my opinion and I may well be wrong :)

I agree that Mini Metro is the one of the listed games that I would be least certain about. I think however it is very polished (more than other "puzzle" games) and it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses.

Papers Please is a very special case. It has a very unique idea and that's what makes it stand out. You are right that you need to play it. However if someone played it he will most certainly recommend it and that's the strength of this game.. the implicit "marketing" it conveys.

You obviously always need some marketing be it a only dev log or whatever to at least get the core group interested. For a game like PP that really should suffice to get the ball rolling.

it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses.

And certainly don't underestimate the number of people who are borderline obsessive with transport networks, trains, and anything involving traffic (myself included). Almost any game that adds a good gameplay element to managing or routing trains or traffic is going to do OK. Cities Skylines has done well with this crowd, too, after SimCity decided to start focusing on "Sims" style games and ditch the traffic aspects.

The trailer of "Papers, Please" was what sold it to me. Really catchy music and a weirdly freaky premise. ("A game about denying immigrants from entering your country? That's such a weird premise it just has to be good, and the visuals are super well done").

After your comment I re-watched the trailer and liked it very much. The music is great and the trailer really captures the mood of the game.

I then showed it to my wife who is not a gamer at all. She liked the trailer too but thought the player would be one of the immigrants :)

It's tough to make a perfect trailer..

> "PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer"

I have to disagree with this (well, the second part of your assertion anyway; I absolutely agree it's a cool and unique game!). Just reading the premise of Papers Please was enough to hook me. I just knew I would like it, and wasn't disappointed when I actually bought it.

Also, all of Lucas Pope's games are visually distinctive, and Papers Please is no exception. I absolutely cannot think of any other game with a similar visual style which wasn't also made by Pope.

Since I cannot edit my post. If you are interested in this topic you can test your skill in predicting a game's success here:

https://www.steamprophet.com/

This part made me thing OP was focusing on the wrong things:

> I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic

None of that matters to the end result. You might be someone that is not very bright and that never went to college, etc, and still make a very creative and fun game.

Saying that he's smart and whatever makes him sound entitled. Like if he deserved to sell well.

I don't think he said that to imply he deserved success. The way I read it: he mentioned it to disqualify those factors (not working hard enough or not having enough discipline) as reasons the game flopped.

I'm a smart guy too. You know what you hear all the time growing up when you're smart? "Oh, you're smart, you're going to be rich and famous someday."

You hear it enough times and you might start to believe it too, that you're so smart you'll make all the right decisions and you can't fail. But then you become an adult and throw yourself into a passion or product and send it out there and realize the harsh truth that the market doesn't give a shit if you're smart or not, or even if what you made is "good", or even "great".

And it's impossible for you to know everything about everything, so somewhere along the line you will make a suboptimal choice, or choose the wrong time to release it, or release it on the wrong platform, or the people you hired to do X for you (development, marketing, distribution, qa, whatever) screwed up and leads to you getting terrible press (or no press coverage), or all sorts of crap that you have little control over or can't foresee.

I've personally worked for three game studios that made multiple games that flopped hard upon release. It gets depressing and frustrating when the creative products you spend months and months of your time working on didn't even make enough back to pay back your own salary for that time, let alone anyone else who worked on the project, and where you might as well never have spent that time in the first place.

The guys in the article only had a couple of failed games, and one monster success that continues to bring in millions of dollars in revenue. My only big success was a free flash game (before in-app purchases even existed) that I released 13 years ago....so yeah, no money there, at least not directly. I've worked on at least 8 failed games professionally, and many other failed or cancelled apps or enterprise software, since then.

For example, a year ago I wasted 6 months on a project at work that was supposed to sell to two major Fortune 100 clients and didn't, so it was killed without ever being used once. Even my biggest failed game projects I worked on at least had a few fans.

I've easily worked on more failures than even minor successes. It starts to drain on you. My confidence in my ability to make a successful anything in the future is pretty shaken.

Anyway, long story short, I was led to believe that my life would be easy and I'd find success after success by many people in my life, parents, teachers, fellow students, etc. And so far pretty much my entire adult life, with a couple of exceptions, has proven that what I was told was total bullshit and I'm just as capable of making bad decisions and getting unlucky as people half as book-smart as I am.

So maybe some of the people that do make those assumptions or have heard those same things as they grew up need to be told that it doesn't matter.

Yes. For most gamers these days, time is the bottleneck, not money. In a world where Infinitroid and Hollow Knight exist, one hundred out of one hundred people are going to spend the time on Hollow Knight.

One thing about all of those is that they pass a smell test. I don't need to play it to be interested, if I just see an ad or see someone playing or hear someone talking about it then I'm interested. This game did not have that, all I've seen is a genre and some bad graphics. The gameplay itself could be great but it hasn't gotten past the smell test.

You made the mistake of thinking that anyone would care how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. But making a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game. That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.

Seeing the forest for the trees as they say. This is why indie games are focused on the simpler style of video games in some cases like Stardew Valley. It still took the developer 8 years (give or take) and you can tell he worked his tail on it.

Stardew Valley is insane. The developer did everything. Art, music, sound effects, engine, gameplay, design, writing... everything.

Stardew Valley is an interesting case in that the developer didn't really need to invent anything. They took a formula (the Harvest Moon series), produced a clone, and then polished the hell out of it in response to community demands until it was hardly recognizable.

None of that really required an act of genius creative talent, though. Learning enough about audio production to create the set of SFX and music you already know you need from the top-down design of the clone-game you already know you're aiming for is effectively "just" grunt work. Sort of like how an actor learning the exact set of martial-arts moves they need to know to look like they know martial arts in one particular shot, which is intensely choreographed, is "just" grunt work. Stardew Valley's creator didn't need to develop the skills to be an amazing artist or musician, they just needed—like the actor—to develop the skills to create a particular pastiche of existing pieces of art and music.

The creator of Stardew Valley is, however, a natural talent at the particular meta-skill of "finding out what people want and tweaking things in response to those wants, never settling for doing 'merely' what they know how to do with the skills they already have, rather pushing themselves to the skill-level required to make people even more happy."

> Learning enough about audio production to create the set of SFX and music you already know you need from the top-down design of the clone-game you already know you're aiming for is effectively "just" grunt work. (...) Stardew Valley's creator didn't need to develop the skills to be an amazing artist or musician, they just needed—like the actor—to develop the skills to create a particular pastiche of existing pieces of art and music.

Would almost agree but you had to bring up this :). I actually talked with SDV developer about his music skills[0]. Turns out, music was his hobby prior to becoming a developer, so he has a lot of experience. So in this case I wouldn't say it's "just', and it definitely wasn't a skill developed for this game.

[0] -- https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/4acds9/how_d...

> in response to community demands

I don't think so. The author mentioned in one of his interviews that he was the only person to actually play the game until the very late pre-release stages. Even those who signed him haven't really played it.

If a lone programmer wants to write tight code for games, they should build game engines or libraries that games can use and then sell those to game developers.

There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.

Except that it turns out that artists and game programmers are too cheap to pay for tools, even if you can present them with a clear benefit in terms of productivity gain vs. sales price. To make matters worse, big companies that could afford those tools will generally only buy exceptionally well established tools and rebuild the rest from scratch in-house.

The only way to make money with games is to sell games.

They're absolutely not "too cheap" for that - it's just a saturated market. Don't start a new company, look for a job working at Autodesk or Havok or Unity or Crytek or one of the dozen other companies that makes bank off of selling professional tools to professional game developers

I can tell you right here and right now that I know that some of the companies you name do not make a bank off of their products. And it's probably not the companies you would expect and not for the reasons you would expect. I have sources for this, but unfortunately I cannot name them.

Can you tell us which companies and the reasons? Otherwise, it’s hard to learn from your comment.

Autodesk has laid off about a quarter of its workforce in the past two years. Crytek has had employees regularly complaining about paychecks bouncing; they're clearly inches from bankruptcy. Havok is owned by Microsoft; I'm not sure how they're doing. Unity is probably doing well enough, as they're incredibly popular, but I suspect popularity among hobbyists translates mostly into a lot of people on the free tier.

The tooling market is hard.

I'm pretty sure that Crytek has nearly gone under a few year ago, so they're not exactly making a bank with their engine. Rgarding their engine I've heard it's more difficult to use compared to other engines, which has slowed down adoption.

You may be surprised where unity makes the majority of their money... it's not from sales to the general public. The parent post is correct, the majority of users are cheap, it's a race to the bottom, where a £50 plugin is considered expensive.

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/044-stephanie-hurlburt-...

From Fledgling Founder to 7-Figure Deals with Stephanie Hurlburt of Binomial

Stephanie Hurlburt (@sehurlburt) shares the story of how she went from being an employee to being half of a 2-person startup that sells software to gaming companies, and all the steps in between. Learn how she quit her job, met her cofounder, landed lucrative contracting gigs, built a product, learned about sales, and stayed sane while doing it.

I might be abnormal, but I've bought Asesprite, Tayasui Sketches and Ableton Live just to get better at making games for free for Ludum Dare.

RAD Game Tools has people with ferraris

Anybody else except the owner?

There's different framing needed here though - hobbyist developers aren't really buying "tools" in the same way a studio is. You need to think of it as a B2C sale more than a B2B one - you're selling something that will enable them to realise their dreams, not cut 5% off their build times.

When you're committing 1000 hours of your free time to building a game from scratch, spending 30-40 building your own (hacky, not that great) animation pipeline for the learning experience is worth it over a £90 plugin. You don't really win this on cost/benefit over and above getting someone excited by the possibilities of your tool. Worth checking out Buildbox[0] for example.

Obviously studios are a different beast and it make sense for parts of their workflows to be custom. If you want to get a start in the goldrush, sell pickaxes, not JCBs.

[0] https://www.buildbox.com/

Lots of people make decent money on the Unity asset store.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/

... or call it a hobby. Just because someone does the same thing they make a living from for fun, doesn't mean it isn't also a hobby. It's weird, that because people pay coders for some of the work they do, expecting money gets wrapped up in what is a hobby for so many.

Programming is fun for a lot of people. They love the process, enjoy the reading and learning, get a kick out of things like optimising code for a speed boost. IMHO that's awesome. So few people have any real interests, so if you have one, indulge it.

Just call it what it is - a hobby - and reframe your thinking. No other hobbies are indulged because we expect to make money directly out of them, e.g. no one playing soccer in a park expects to go pro, they just love playing. Why should hobby coding be different?

Reframing it as a hobby changes the equation from $0.01 an hour, to "OMG, someone, anyone, wanted to give me money to indulge my hobby!" Then what starts as a time and money sink becomes instead what you live for, and a positive in your life.

I think we need to think more along these lines in general; it's going to be needed a lot.

This is the ongoing march towards post-scarcity. We now have enough people with skills, experience and tools necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero. Essentially, these developers are spending (resources: time etc; although sometimes money as well) to scratch an itch.

And trying to recoup at least a part of those losses by selling the result is not unreasonable, but it should be considered a best-effort optimization. In the end, you still end up paying for the privilege of, essentially, having other people admire your work. It reminds me of some sci-fi story I vaguely remember from a long time ago, about a true post-scarcity society where everything is free, except for other people's attention, which therefore becomes currency. There's nothing else to do for humans other than arts, so everyone is doing that - and now you're paying someone to e.g. read your book, and then they can use that money to pay someone else to look at their painting etc.

But... you still gotta pay for food and a place to live, start with, at the moment.

If we didn't have to worry about money, then fewer of us would have to... worry about money when making art.

In general, that is true. I should have been more specific:

> We now have enough people with skills, experience, tools, and free time necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero.

Where "free time" is that not used up by work that pays for food etc.

Which does mean that people for whom art is a hobby are destroying the market the people for whom art is all they want to do, except for truly great artists where the quality of the art is so exemplary that hobby artists just can't compete.

But I'm not sure why it's a bad thing in and of itself - nobody has a fundamental right to earn a living by performing some specific activity and no other. The job market defines what activities translate to paid jobs, and which ones can only be hobbies, and that is going to change over time. At the point of a true post-scarcity, everything becomes a hobby, but it doesn't matter because you no longer need a job.

If you only hang out with people who have enough free time to fulfill their creative desires (mostly in good health, mostly without kids, mostly who have "good" jobs which in most cases means their parents did too, which probably means they aren't taking care of their parents or other family members either) it can seem like a widespread thing. In fact, it's not; most people, in the U.S., and especially globally, are hustling to survive.

post-scarcity can sound nice, but in practice it currently means post-scarcity for the few, while most people live with incredible scarcity. We might have enough for everyone on the planet, but we sure don't share it equally. And that's not going to change automatically.

To be clear, I'm not saying that it is widespread! But it is more widespread than it used to be, IMO - this sort of thing was historically confined to the elites, and now it's slowly creeping its way down middle class. Hence why I called it a manifestation of an ongoing march towards post-scarcity.

When and where the goal would actually be achieved is hard to speculate; I hope to see it in my lifetime, but only out of sheer optimism.

> this sort of thing was historically confined to the elites, and now it's slowly creeping its way down middle class

I'm not sure that's true. I don't see much ongoing march towards giving most people more free time. Inequality is generally _growing_, not shrinking. There is no ongoing march of history, just humans in political struggle for how resources are distributed.

Relative inequality is growing. But in absolute terms, to be poor today is a great deal better than being poor 100 years. Conversely, this means that you are also more productive in absolute terms.

There's definitely a lot more free time available to people today than there were in any industrial economy prior to 8-hour work days and similar advancements in labor rights. If you unwind back to pre-industrial, some argue that agriculture provides for a lot more free time than we're used to, albeit seasonally.

But free time is only one part of the equation - you also need education/skills and tools to create things. These days, many industrialized societies provide education for free, or so cheap that it's accessible to a great deal more people than it used to be - and then, of course, there's the Internet. Tools are also much cheaper; again, think about it in absolute terms, e.g. how a $20 power drill compares to your typical toolset 100 years ago, much less 500.

Our societies have plenty of problems, and I don't encourage rose glasses. But we should also recognize just how immense the advance of humanity has really been, when you look in the rear mirror. Or not even the mirror... if you were born in a developed country, find an immigrant from a developing one, and just ask them how they feel about here vs there.

> But in absolute terms, to be poor today is a great deal better than being poor 100 years.

In the U.S., certainly. In India or Nigeria or Honduras? Not sure.

At any rate, while I agree that in general the health and standard of living of many people is going up -- I lack your confidence that the amount of _free time_, and other resources necessary to produce creative work without compensation, that the majority of people on the planet has is going up or will continue to. It will for some.

Even in the U.S., do the poor have more free time to produce creative work than they did 100 years ago? I seriously doubt it.

Absolutely. I predict that more and more Indy games will be created by the retired, and the starving. Same as happened with novels and other arts like painting and photography.

don't forget the rich!

Wow that interesting. I can see it happening.. reversal. People with people skill would be the most up, and born Rich type then

I would love to read this Sci-Fi story -- If anyone knows -- could you share the title (and author)?

I wish I remembered it! It's something I've read as a kid, and for the life of me I can't remember either the title or the author, or even most of the plot; just the setting.

Reminds me of MUD games from the mid 1990s. A big MUD might've had three or four talented programmers, a dozen or so level designers, and dozens of administrators. All putting serious time into the MUD, and all without the faintest thought of making money out of it.

Even that is a lost game, because only professional studios pay for tools, as indies tend to just grab FOSS tools and feel entitled to get their issues fixed.

And in the professional market, the quality bar is pretty high.

> how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function

> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.

Top notch in any field requires optimizing hidden, underlying dependencies to deliver the best output. Optimizing code is not sufficient but it is usually necessary, especially if others have already solved it, setting the standard of performance that players expect.

The way to avoid optimizing core library code is to use someone else's library and build on top of that. But you can only do that so much. This is just an insanely hard industry to get into.

It's not that optimizations don't have their place, but when your goal is to create a game and make money off of it, then micro optimizing C++ code simply has no place. Also, a 2D platformer simply doesn't require any highly optimized system.

One should spend the time building a game, polishing it, marketing it, presenting it at shows, etc. and not trying to build the most efficient engine, just because engine building is quite fun - as long as the goal is to make money from a game.

> It's a natural tendency for all programmers.

Then I'm not a programmer :) Less optimizing means less work! I like spending my free time in all kinds of ways.

Minecraft.

True. But most people aren't as skilled as Notch, or the Stardew guy. It's still definitely NOT a waste of three years, but the author should not expect to make much money off of an indie game. More graphic design and marketing needs to be put into this endeavor, assuming the gameplay itself is any good.

It's easy to list the games that made it, harder to list the thousand of similar games that didn't and were forgotten. Minecraft didn't make it because it was super well coded (it was decent but I'm sure well-optimized C or C++ could have easily outperformed the JVM), it was mainly at the right place at the right time.

I think the reason Minecraft was successful was first and foremost because of its concept. Looking at the author's game is seems pretty obviously like a Super Metroid clone (at least judging from a video, the level design looks like reskinned Super Metroid levels and many of the powers and enemies are extremely reminiscent of Metroid). I really like Metroidvanias but as far as I'm concerned it's really the art style that kills it, I'm really not fond of this pseudo-realistic tile work.

GP is completely wrong on their last assertion. You do not need AAA quality to make it as a game dev. But citing Minecraft reinforces their first assertion.

Minecraft was an underrepresented genre, released early, with an (accidentally) excellent marketing technique. Above all, the code is an atrocious, unoptimized Java pile of crap (Yeah, I used to be into Minecraft dev in the early days).

It's the best proof you can give that "making a game [...] is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming".

SDV is another example; the author himself admitted on numerous occasions that the code is, well, not stellar, and in the community we also had some fun reading through decompilations of the parts of the game.

Yet another proof would be surprising number of very games made in tools like GameMaker - think Nuclear Throne, or Cook Serve Delicious. I actually took a peek at the sources of the latter (they were distributed with some Humble Bundle once), and it's... reinforcing this point.

Yes, many programmers get lost discussing what programming language to use, GC or not, which 3D API to use, instead of what actually matters, gameplay, design, graphics, audio.

I always advise indies to attend local meetups from game design schools, to learn about what actually matters when making a game.

People always say Minecraft doesn't have good graphics or whatever, but that game's color palette and overall design aesthetic is VERY good. Everything is consistent, and when you're playing it you forget that it doesn't look "real." The game from the article is not in the same league.

Minecraft was unique to 99% of people who picked it up and played it.

OPs game looks dated, weird and reminds me of about 30 games I have in my library already.

Terraria seems closest to what he has done, but Terraria is so, so much fun and I've yet to finish it.

It's tough to break into the 2D platform market.

It reminds me of those games you'd get in a cereal box, shareware games or maybe with a computer magazine in the early 2000s. Probably due to the visuals being 'pre baked 3D converted to 2D sprites'.

It's almost nostalgic, but nothing I'd buy to be honest.

> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game. That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.

I think gameplay and marketing win here. Consider two gamesL one has great graphics but bad gameplay, the other has bad graphics but great gameplay. The great gameplay game is going to win that match up.

The problem here seems to be that supply is geometricly growing whereas demand is largely fixed. To compete and be noticed you need to make a serious investment in marketing or get extremely lucky.

> one has great graphics but bad gameplay, the other has bad graphics but great gameplay. The great gameplay game is going to win that match up.

Yes, in terms of player satisfaction, but no, not in terms of sales. Terrible movies with great explosions out-earn great movies with low budgets every single summer.

> Terrible movies with great explosions

They usually have bigger marketing than low budget movies.

> 62,176 lines of code

then I watched the youtube video demo in 2017.

A 2D gaming scroller that requires 62,126 lines of code written from scratch? There's tons of libraries out there, game engines you could adopt, etc.

I would argue you could be an awful programmer and use prebuilt tools but have great design aesthetics, vision, music composition, and storytelling, and deliver something far better

How can you criticize the amount of code without knowing how much of that is generic engine code and how much of it is gameplay code (game logic, AI, event triggers...) that would have to exist regardless of the engine being used?

Because in the former case, it's a waste of time, duplicating work that others have done already available online for free, so of course there are no customers

And in the latter case, it's got to be a poorly written mess, no 2d platformer could need so much game logic. That's twice the size of the entire Super Metroid cartrige, engine and assets included.

Wait... did you just compare lines of source code to the size of a compiled binary code of something that was written over 25 years ago and clearly optimized for the size of the deliverable? In that case you might just as well have compared an apple to the Apollo program LAM module. It is just not a valid comparison.

I am sure that if Super Metroid were to be developed today in a high level language with the exact same gameplay logic, the resulting code would be in at least the same ballpark.

It is a valid comparison, because what he made is essentially the same game.

And I said that in response to the guess that maybe the 62,000 lines of code was all game logic, which is absurd.

Game logic, like, "when the player presses the fire button, spawn a missile" and "this enemy goes up 5 units, then goes down 5 units, then repeats". That's not the kind of thing that will change much from one metroid clone to another, regardless of what technology is used to make them. It is practically always the smallest part of the final product. And to have the game logic's source be bigger than the entirety of an almost identical game, with handcrafted levels, art, and engine included? It's absolutely absurd.

It was in service of the point above: that code is probably all the engine, which means that, yes, it probably was a waste of time, since engines made by professionals are available for free. At best, it's a line on a resume.

> It is practically always the smallest part of the final product.

What do you base this statement on? There are several classes of games where this is definitely not true.

In what class of game?

Adventures and RPGs are the most obvious ones. There, the story-based interactions quickly turn into tons of game logic corner cases that must be handled. Also, the rule sets for RPG character stats and fighting interactions (strengths, weaknesses, immunities, temporary effects, combos...) generally are pretty insane.

Oh, and lest we forget: game logic does not stop once you figured out at a high level that X has to happen. It still needs to set up and drive all the presentation that goes with it on top of the pure bookkeeping. The subtleties of this can be really amazing. To just name some trivial things that come to my mind: doors and elevators should stop when players stand in the way, players and objects should move with the platforms they're standing on (harder than it looks, esp. in 3D), enemies can't just be deleted from memory when their health goes below 0 (but their hitboxes might still go away immediately) and so on.

> It still needs to set up and drive all the presentation that goes with it on top of the pure bookkeeping.

Yup, a lot of "game logic" is in fact bookkeeping, i.e. self-inflicted complexity. It's not necessary, but is what happens when you overdo it (though IMO it's more often a symptom of using more frameworks and libraries than less).

It doesnt matter, game is a generic 2D keep running right ~1986 Amiga with bits of Chip's Challenge thrown in piece.

Great analysis.. this applies to so many areas of software development. Building games, websites, any thing software ..

> you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers.

> Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really.

> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.

> That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.

You know, there's an interesting relationship between the graphic-novel industry and the TV/film industry at this point. Many TV/film screenplays are adapted from graphic novels, because a graphic novel is, in a sense, a "sketch" of a film—it's something that communicates most of the top-down spirit of the eventual work, while also being something that is able to be produced by a single creator, and so something that is able to let a single creator's vision and talent shine through.

I'm left wondering why the video-game industry doesn't have at least some sub-sector with an analogous pipeline, adapting (or in this case, "covering") low-budget indie titles that don't have asset-polish into AAA games, by giving them that asset polish.

I'd buy three beers to hear more about this idea.

Current acquisition model by AAA is buy-kill, rather than buy-subsidize.

Because asset polish doesn't matter nearly as much as gameplay: the high-res remake will never make as much as the original.

The most successful game of the year, Far Cry 5, has sold 1/20th as many copies as Minecraft has, a game that is ugly as sin and always has been, but it's fun enough that it doesn't matter.

There's no point in adapting a property if the adaptation won't grow the audience. The Walking Dead was a comic book superstar, selling upwards of 500,000 units per issue when it was picked up by AMC for the TV adaptation. The TV adaptation is now reaching 8 million viewers per episode, and that's considered low.

I think you would have to cultivate that market very carefully. Video gaming can be very sentiment driven at times, and there's a fine line between homage and rip-off.

Perhaps the way to do it is to acquire the license for a 'masterpiece edition' ... release it five years after the original.

That's literally Valve's strategy. Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Dota, Portal...

Also even graphic novels are generally two person teams. I think trying to make an indie game with a small team (2-4 people) is way more realistic than doing it solo.

It doesn't take a large team. Look at latest indie hotness Hollow Knight (https://youtu.be/UAO2urG23S4), which was made by 3 dudes, who were artists and animators (http://hollowknight.com/our-team/). I agree that with game engines, making a successful indie game is primarily about artistic prowess, but you probably don't need that many artists. Just 1 or 2 really good ones.

PUBG is evidence of the contrary, though the the game is just pure fun.

What is the target market for the game? I played Metroid when I was a kid on NES and the original gameboy.

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.

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.

I don't know about the getting bored part. Some people have been playing nethack for several decades (without winning!).

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).

> 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 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 :)

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.

Is Civilization a story-building game? I certainly don't play it as such.

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.

Think of games that players play for more than 1000 hours.

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.

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.)

OR:

C) have 1000 hours worth of manually created content

Think about games like witcher 3, tes, fallout. Those things are huge and replayable.

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.

The video made me confused. So many options, so many ways for me to get confused and die.

In contrast, Mario looks fun and jolly and silly.

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.

Working on a team without capital is a challenge.

> I don't think they realize they are part of the problem.

It's like the old adage: You're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.

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.

> Also... no Linux version? Really?

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 would say that nowadays is not that difficult to have a game that works on both Windows and Linux.

Also, it is a legit thing to point out when and developer complains about the lack of sales.

Seriously, how many Linux users you know that pay for software? How much would that increase indie's sales? By 2?

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.

The humblebundle sales showed clearly that linux users are ready to pay much more for video games than windows users are.

I have personally used hundreds of dollars on linux compatible games.

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.

[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/linux-game-sales-stat...

[2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/president-of-blizzard...

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

I think your parent meant "The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop [app] to work as it should is huge"

Me and my HiDPI monitor disagree.

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.

If he's using C++ he is probably using a cross-platform library like SDL2. So porting to Linux shouldn't take longer than a day really.

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.

The Binding of Isaac seems to trike a good balance, if you're into that sort of thing.

You're reaching

What does that mean?

minecraft

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.

Axiom Verge is a Metroid-type clone and it did extremely well. There's a market for it without a doubt, but the hurdles to clear are enormous.

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.

Dear all,

I am the guy who shares this post on Hacker News. First and foremost, I wanna said that I am NOT the original author of the blog. Also, I am NOT advertising for the original author. As a software developer in Hong Kong, I am researching articles about game dev and find this interesting case. Therefore, I just wanna share on HN.

The discussion about this blog is really overwhelming. I hope that everybody can learn a lesson from this article. In my personal opinion, from a business perspective, I think to develop a hyper-casual game will have a higher probability of getting commercial success. However, from a more personal perspective, it is very difficult for a game developer to avoid the temptation of spending years to develop a hardcore game. I just wanna say: Game is the modern art form of the 21st century. So if we consider game developer as an artist, you will understand why he struggles about his artwork.

Anyway, I hope that everybody can earn something from this post. I read through all the comments and learn a lot. Thanks.

Also there are about a jillion indie sidescrollers on steam. Standing out is important.

Yes, marketing is very important!

But is standing out _just_ marketing? Or is standing out something that requires originality in idea (as well as marketing to allow buyers to see the originality)?

Promoting a game isn't enough on it's own. To succeed today a game needs to have quality, market fit, promotion, luck, and probably a number of other factors as well.

Marketing isn't just ads, it means customer research and creation of offers users actually want. So marketing a game starts with researching niches and creating a game people actually want to buy. And then of course also target them with ads.

Please don't take offense: Just FYI, 'wanna' is a contraction of 'want to,' so writing 'wanna to' is redundant.

Please do don't take offense: Just FYI, calling out random strangers on the internet for improper or redundant grammar is a waste of your time and theirs.

It depends. Personally I'm happy to have my grammar corrected, as long as it's done with good intentions. Perhaps I'm in the minority. I do normally avoid correcting others though, since it's difficult to tell whether someone will be receptive (or offended).

Op mentioned they’re from HK, it wasn’t a call out as much as a helpful tip to a (probably) not native English speaker. If anything, your comment was far less necessary and rude.

It's not necessarily a waste of time. The poster says they're from Hong Kong, English could be their second language. They may not realize the mistake and if no one points it out they may never have the chance to learn.

I would much rather be told how to communicate effectively by a native speaker than be defended by a white knight SJW who thinks I'm too sensitive about my command of the language to take constructive criticism. Someone should make an SJW version of the C compiler that just compiles random stuff with undefined behaviors instead of correcting me with its trigger-inducing error messages.

Thanks for your suggestions. I just amend my grammatical mistake.

amended

That would be "amended" if we're gonna go all the way with this.

To be a successful indie dev, you need to take an auteur approach: have a singular vision, create a unique aesthetic, and possess a fundamental understanding of the medium (gameplay). You also need to be able to balance all of these qualities with the resources you have at your disposal. If you have a great story, but no gameplay, you shouldn't be making a game. If you have an aesthetic, but can't implement it correctly, you're going to need to pay for assets one way or another. If your gameplay is merely a rehash of something old, you better have some twist to the other elements that makes it stand out. And all of this doesn't guarantee success, merely gets you to the baseline where you can be successful. Being good at programming is probably the least important skill in game development unless your idea is so innovative that you will need complex systems without precedence.

You need marketable differentiation.

Also make sure your game appeals to furries. That's where the real money is in indie game dev.

woah, that certainly took a turn. not that i think it's wrong , just a humorously abrupt shift.

It's kind of funny how true it is. I think development shut down but there was an erotic furry Pokemon-like game in development that was pulling in like $35k a month on Patreon. There is definitely a market there.

There's a lesson to be learned too. Stop making games for the general public. There are too many people trying to reach everyone.

You won't be Minecraft, but you won't waste 3 years for $30 either.

Yes. You did. Sadly.

And it is very little to do with luck or numbers or the state of the industry.

Good indie games:

1. are almost never distinguished by programming (the days of Doom are gone and you are not John Carmack). Far too much time is spent coding. Use existing tools. Code only gameplay.

2. are much more about art. The trailer looks like programmer art: no coherent style, no direction, no class. If this is what you produce. You need a collaborator.

3. are even more about feel. Your character movement is janky. Jumping is floaty. Shooting feels flaccid. There is little sense of gravity, inertia or impact. If it isn't fun to move around a single screen, it's not fun.

4. need a hook. There is almost nothing original about this game. You've got about 10 seconds to hook me. (10 seconds into the trailer you cut to a mostly empty UI.) Find the wow. And zealously focus on it.

5. need to be polished. Ambient animation. Consistent sound effects. Screen shake. Lighting. Particles. UI. These are implemented. But none of them particularly well. And they don't tie together into a whole.

6. need to be marketed. Someone needs to be working on that.

7. needs to catch (or create) a zeitgeist. So many features of this game shout '2014' to me.

8. needs a bit of luck. But beware! The converse is very rarely true. If your game isn't successful, it is probably _not_ because you were unlucky. The game probably wasn't very good. Don't spend your time trying to find alternative explanations. Be brutal with yourself. In game terms, git gud.

So this is harsh I know. I'm sorry. But frank. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years. 99.9% of games fail horribly. But 99.9% of them are not very good. This has absolutely always been the case. It's just that the 'fail point' used to be the publisher pitch. Now you don't need a publisher, you get to fail in public.

So yes three years have been ...um... call it learning. I suggest you do more jams. Figure out what it takes to win. Find a game artist. Use tools. Build prototypes. And start to build a community.

About your number one: I see lots of programmers putting too much thought (and time) into code. As if the code was the important part of anything.

I am a programmer, and I have this PSA for others: Your code is just a necessary evil, not something to be praised and cherished. No customer sees your code, no customer cares about the code.

Agreed! As long as it works well, who gives a damn what it looks like.

It kinda feels like the effort is directed improperly. If graphics programming and tens of thousands of lines of C++ code is your passion, you probably would be better suited to working your way into some of the major gaming framework's shops.

There's definitely a unicorn quality to a developer who wants to work at the framework level. Unfortunately, there isn't really room for Yet Another Gaming Framework. That said, my personal experience is that it's hard to find people who are passionate about working at that level.

Me personally, if I ever did break into the Gaming Industry it would 100% be at the framework level. Transformation matricies, graphics pipelines, shaders, and all that low level stuff interests me way more and plays well to my strengths.

Making an "Indie Game" that stands out is well beyond my skill set. Grinding my life away for next to no money in a non-stop death march to hit a AAA studio exec's deadlines just seems a way to destroy my marriage and mental health.

Can agree with all of these critiques of the game.

In particular, this feels like a game that was created in a weekend or two in Gamemaker. The UI is quite simple, the mechanics (or at least the ones I saw in 10 minutes of poking around) are unoriginal, and the enemies all seem to be variants of "fly/walk towards me".

There's no feeling behind the gun, there's no real feedback when I get hit, I have no idea how much life I have left (yes it's in the UI, but it's not prominent at all).

If I had to guess where the 3 years of effort has gone into, I'd suggest it was the level randomiser. That's a big mistake, and one probably made by a programmer mindset rather than a game design one. The game isn't fun, so it doesn't matter how much replay-ability there is. Whereas if the game were fun but not replayable, I'd probably buy it on the promise of a randomiser coming.

There are absolutely indie games that don't have any of that, and yet are wildly successful.

See: Five Nights at Freddy's and Getting Over It. (You could argue that the hook of Getting Over It is the intentionally annoying controls, but I highly doubt that that much of the market is a bunch of masochists.)

You're 100% wrong about Getting Over It. The graphics of that game are extremely intentional, as are the controls. Bennett Foddy is a veteran who knows exactly what he's doing, and it's no accident that that game hit.

Fair, I'm letting personal bias bleed into my criticism of the game.

Yep. It's certainly true that indie gaming is a harsh place to be in right now, but there's no mystery or deeper reason as to why the writer's game failed.

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.

That hierarchy of importance is quite apt.

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.

Humorously this HN post also kinda acts as marketing... (although a weak, halfhearted one at best)

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.

Yes. Sadly, this is correct.

To be fair, didn't Factorio start out with poor graphics and improved them over time?

Factorio also has some of the most compelling gameplay that almost perfectly fills a niche I've ever seen. OP's game is a Metroidvania in 2018...

I don't disagree, but I'm responding to the parent, which does not mention gameplay.

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.

Try https://steamdb.info

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 minds.

Don't give people a chance to think about doing something else while they're trying to decode the onboarding process. Low friction is where its at.

Think of the "S" in SOLID the single responsibility principle, don't make new users ponder if they're paying for something (what, a free steam key?) or joining a club forum or playing a game or whatnot. Give the new user exactly one single responsibility "play the game". Later on, buddy up with "membership" or "gimmie money" but get them into the game first.

Looks like a fun game, once you get into it. Cool!

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

I read the blog post. Thought, “Sad, maybe I’ll buy the game on Steam just for shits and giggles.” And it’s not released yet!

How can you complain about lack of sales for an unreleased game! Fuck off! All sympathy instantly gone.

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.

Marketing isn't magic, not every game makes it. In fact most do not.

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.

There is no market.

Let that sink in.

'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...

Also for some of us, combinations like "roguelike" and "platformer" require special mental gymnastics just to imagine :-)

The most popular/successful combination of those two buzzwords is probably Spelunky.

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.

I just had a look myself.

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...

You don't happen to be the creator of another indie game Scraps, do you?

Yeah that's me. Still working on it when I get the time - unfortunately I don't have a lot of time at the moment.

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.

Should've coded it in Umajin. ;)

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.

This game looks obvious problematic as far as marketing goes in my opinion.

I mean, just look at the name, for starters.

Stardew Valley didn't do much marketing either.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1000085_2001_a_space_odysse...?

[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pick_of_the_litter

I do think that people have lower expectations for more obscure games, and tend to review higher when they're pleasantly surprised.

But Stardew Valley is a much better name.

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.

> 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.

these projects evolve during their production.

it's difficult to market what you haven't finished imagining.

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.

I initially dismissed this advice. However, when i thought a bit deeper, it makes a lot of sense to do this.

If you can't convince somebody to market your game, how can you convince somebody to buy it from you directly?

Where can I find someone like this? I need this help.

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).

[1] https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/967249172804943872

Average number of units sold per game on steam by year (note many games have long tails)

  2004 - 11.6m

  2005 - 569k

  2006 - 581k

  2007 - 833k

  2008 - 279k

  2009 - 322k

  2010 - 391k

  2011 - 512k

  2012 - 535k

  2013 - 601k

  2014 - 157k

  2015 - 111k

  2016 - 73k

  2017 - 49k

Whats the average numbers if only top 20% are taken. To basically reject newbies in 2017 and recent years.

Problem with that is everyone thinks they are in the top 20%, by definition they likely aren't.

I think if you're spending 1+ year developing something, even if you start as a complete beginner, you're going to be in the 20% of games on Steam.

There is simply so much shovelware/copy and paste games.

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).

These are damning stats for anyone interested in getting into indie game dev.

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?

Any idea what happened in between 2013-2014?

Steam Greenlight, Kickstarter, much more interest in indie games via all the success stories (Minecraft, etc).

Indie Game: The Movie released in 2012, too.

Steam Greenlight: first releases? Greenlight released in 2012 so I'm guessing many of its titles released about two years later.

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.

Isn't mean probably very, very skewed for this?

Median would be much more interesting.

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.

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.

I learned this painful lesson 8 years ago indirectly, working a mobile app studio. The app store, like games and music are superstar markets and the vast majority will fail, even if you've spent 3000 hours on it.

That what makes stardew valley so crazy, because the %99 outcome of someone who works like him is failure and wasting 3-4 years of your life.

At this point, I would do the 'test if there is demand method' before seriously making a game. You make a MVP of a game, as a hobby, promote it a bit and then commence with marketing it with a kickstarter or patreon. If it gains enough traction, then you commence working on it seriously, otherwise stop or keep it as a pure hobby. Once your done release the full version for free or a nominal price. Add time release tiers for early access and so on to incentivize subscribing and supporting.

This probably means for games you need to do a whole bunch of art first more than programming.

Obviously, you've never made a game before. 'test if there is demand method' does not work for games.

Isn't that pretty much the early access model? I've seen indie games started that were mostly incomplete, started getting patreon / kickstarter traction and then fully developed over a few years. There are enough counterexamples out there to prove that it does work.

No traction? Then abandon the project.

It fails to work for many things. What makes me wonder when the niches it works will become saturated?

I used to think that making money was extremely easy. You can make an App, a website, a YouTube channel, etc. How absolutely naive I was. Turns out it's very hard to convince people to pay you.

I adopted a different strategy later on. I try to make things that I use myself. So if it turns out no one else uses it, at least my effort doesn't go to waste. My Android App is now sitting at 10+ downloads but I made peace with it fairly easily since I use the App myself twice a day.

What is the app?

It's a very simple App which helps you memorize and learn items using Spaced Repetition.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nerfsoftwa...

Your app gets me figuring that it would be nice for a dictionary app to have a feature that, after you look up some word a second time (indicating it's not a rare one), adds it to the "to memorize" list and trigger the notification mechanism you wrote.

Also wondering if support for memorizing equations would be straightforward.

Thanks for your feedback. I would say that for the first use case, unless the "memorizing" feature is built in to the dictionary app, it's hard to do it automatically. You could use the OS's "Share" feature to manually add the word to the memory app.

I'm actually looking into displaying math equations. There are libraries out there so should be pretty straightforward.

Thanks for your opinion on this. I use Mac's built-in dictionary quite often. Guess the system provides some way to catch the look-up event, though then I also need to think about the notification part. Anyways spaced repetition sounds like a simple idea that could do the trick. The point of doing it automatically in the vocab learning (for foreign languages) case is so that you don't need to decide whether you've search a word before.

Poking around the guy’s website [0], I’m not surprised his sales are so dismal- it’s a very earnest description of a project its developer obviously likes, but which he describes in terms of other, pre-existing games and game-styles (e.g., metroidvania, roguelike, procedurally generated, crafting, etc)... which reads as “a mashup of other games you’ve already played.” The one differentiating bit, that it’s a metroidvanian roguelike that can be played in the browser is buried a ways down the page (after a paragraph about how skillfully it’s coded- good on you, but players don’t care.)

If he really wants a commercial success, my guess is that he would be well advised to make a concerted, well-advertised run at the in-browser gaming market, and try to find ways to monetize that (likely by scummy micro-transactions.) His chances still wouldn’t be good, but perhaps better. (Getting on the front page of HN is a pretty good tactic too, though. : ) )

[0] Well, I spent about ten seconds reading the site’s front page, but that’s probably more than most of his hits did.

The play-in-the-browser bit should absolutely be his selling point, maybe pay-what-you-want. I've always got an eye out for browser shooters where, idk if there's a gaming term for it, you can walk into a corner and then step away from the keyboard and not get killed.

Hi, my name is Ivan and I made https://www.Photopea.com . After the first 7 000 hours of work, I made $0.

Now (after about 10 000 hours of work), Photopea is used by one million of people every month, and I have a decent income just from ads, even without working on it.

Great stuff, sometimes it takes to continue when everybody else decides to quit

It is very difficult to know when to quit, I've had projects (not gaming) that I pursued for far too long.

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].

[0]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-...

Do you ever suffer from the lack of resumes or are you always trying to filter people out?

> "As an HR"...

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.

Not sure about how big gaps in employment are.

> I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic, and I love what I do. I’m a lifelong learner, always evaluating my work and experimenting with new approaches.

All that and you still believed hard work directly equates to a big pay out. Welcome to the school of hard knocks. Try some different metrics for defining success.

It's not even possible you've entirely wasted 3 years. There's no way you learned nothing or have only created things that could just be used in this project. It's possible you could simply re-skin this thing and make it big the next day. But don't count on it.

I went through a similar situation when I created an Indie game studio with friends. We worked for a year and made a cool $5,000 but it was a "failure" by all sense of the word. We learned a lot and had a ton of fun. Some feedback:

Your website is god awful. Seriously.

The copy doesn't excite anyone to play the game

You make the user jump through hoops to play - if you already are writing it off, make it free to play in-browser without Steam (you want traction at all costs right?)

What did you learn?

Did you have friends or a community playing it as you worked on it? If you didn't, then you really need to look at the Lean Methodology

If I'm reading it correctly you're considering:

- 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.

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.

If someone has spent 1000 days building their MVP and 0 days establishing market fit it's a terrible time to quit.

Realistically they've spent 1,000 days building a pet programming project with little regard to market fit.

Yet it would be wise to try to stablish market fit of the toy he has first, before throwing it away and getting another toy to test for fitness.

> throwing it away and getting another toy to test for fitness.

how do you know what the opportunity cost of continuing is? It's hard to know either way.

Do you know? Does the OP know? Does anybody know?

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.

But is it worse then quitting after 1000 days building and "1000 days establishing market fit."

From a marketing standpoint, the game "feels" amateur in the way it's presented ( very insecure narrative, etc )

But when you watch the demo the game itself "seems cool" but in a way that realizes immediately this is Super Mario Bros reinvented.

Also this blog post was from February 2018 and has sat on the Dev Blog "above the fold" for most of this year. It seems like the game has a dark cloud over it.

If something isn't a labor of love, you should end it. But then there's that quote "you cannot excel at something you do not love" ... which seems like the real thing here. It seems excellent in its own ways, just not entirely original or well marketed. So ask why are you doing it and measure by some other metric than sales and usage.

Probably late to the party but almost a year ago I had my gamasutra blog post about failing to sell 700 copies of my game, to stay in business, featured on HN.

It's been almost a year since then. I kept updating the game, doing quality of life improvements and actively engaged with the people and reviewers playing it. I also kept people up to date with twitter and talked about the game every chance I had.

Hacker News initial exposure helped me sell about 200 copies and by March I passed my 700 copies goal. Enough to stay in business but, by then, I already moved cross-county and got a few consulting gigs happening.

Almost a year later I have over 4700 copies sold on steam with the total amount of copies sold being around 6000. The game was only recently added to a bundle that added ~1000 copies ("retail activations" are still happening). I'm at a point where I am so grateful for the luck I had after the initial HN exposure that now, one year later, I'm releasing the biggest update ever for the game and I finally got a professional artist to help me upgrade the graphics.

What I want the dev to know is that there's still a chance, but in my case, I already managed to secure enough money from my consulting gigs so updating the game and working on it was done on the side and I could afford to do some more marketing and sink time in it. If you are not financially dependent on the game, keep working on it and slowly build up your fanbase and outreach. Take note of people's feedback and if a common theme occurs maybe do something about it.

Hope you'll end up being happy with your project. If it reaches Steam I'll be your first buyer. On your site, I tried purchasing it via paypal and I cannot get pass the re-captcha. I'm trying to click on the "I'm not a robot" checkbox and nothing is happening. Might want to look into that.

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

> but I won't be able to honestly write a blog post about it

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.

Sadly, the author apparently mostly wasted his time pursuing an idea he considered good, based mostly on his high opinion of his own experience. Had he tested the idea with neutral, honest people (kids are great), he might not have been so stubborn.

As for the references to „Superstar economics“: as if modern superstars in the music or film industry weren‘t 100% reliant on test audiences... It‘s why we don’t get much original, experimental stuff these days.

Its probably hard to see this right now but any code you wrote was not a waste of time. You learned something that will become invaluable two years down the line in another role and probably will boost your salary more than the opportunity cost of washing dishes and thus repay itself every year.

Everyone who tackles a project like this should keep this in mind. Its almost certainly not going to make you immediate money, but you'll learn a lot doing it, and that will repay itself down the line.

I've done this twice to myself and it was hard at the time to watch them fail but I now make $500k+/yr at one of the FAANGs and a lot of that salary I attribute to trying build these things, end to end, myself. I just have a much broader context on the industry, on technical stacks, and on software development than if I hadn't.

So, congrats. :)

Well, looking at that youtube demo, although it might be a nice game a lot effort went into, it is nothing conceptually new. I could understand the despair of someone who had an original idea and artistic skill, pulled off a game with unprecedented gameplay and then it didn't float because people didn't get the hang of it. But this game? It is for people who like that kind of games (Metroid inspired games or whatever).

The end user doesn't care you hand built your engine out of C and other beautiful technologies. They care if it's fun. Period.

It's looks like way too much time was spent on an engine when off the shelf would have done better.

I couldn’t agree more. When I read the engine was built in C++ it absolutely knocked me flat.

Why? With perfectly awesome and free technologies like Unity, you’re setting yourself up for failure by spending hundred hours putting together something that has already been created for you.

It would allow you to focus on making the best game possible, instead of wasting countless hours re-inventing the wheel.

IMHO, that’s the first, and largest, mistake this project made.

Furthermore I agree with others that it simply feels ‘uninspired.’ Maybe less hours spent on the engine and more spent on the content would’ve made the game more notable.

For what it's worth, it looks like his initial focus was on making a 2D web game. Unity had only just started supporting HTML5 as a target around the time he began, with plenty of rough edges, so it may not have been an obvious good choice then.

Unity is anything BUT awesome if we are talking big RPGs. (Think Pillars of Eternity 1)

The loading times even on SSD are atrocious.

Market is EXTEMELY saturated for many genres. Metroidvania games are one of the most saturated right now. Feel bad for the guy, but I think he should take his existing tech and experiment with different game modes, or game mutators and see if he can discover some cool experiences that will make his game stand out from the crowd. I'm not saying this will guarantee success, but staying the course on such a saturated genre and not doing something radically different seems like a bad strategy.

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.

Sure.

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.

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!

Ugh. This is the depressing side of the huge wave of indie dev / maker / game creators that has been on the rise in the past few years.

The creativity from everyone is great on the building side, but on the marketing and traction side, there can always be bad luck, like this example.

I think a lot of consumers are just fatigued from too many options - think about how much of instagram and facebook is ads vs what it used to be, even back in like 2010.

Yes.

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.

having worked in the ad business... a conversion rate of 1 in 1,000 of in-market people is fairly standard. having zero sales with just over one thousand visitors is not surprising at all _especially_ if you consider that a good percentage of those people probably aren't in-market for your particular game anyway.

You need _way_ more visitors to have any clue if your efforts are resonating with your potential market or not.

I think the biggest problem with this game is the lack of atmosphere and story. In 201X it's not about the pixels and latencies, it's about the creative part.

The nearest "success" example I can think of is Jets-and-Guns [1]. The guys that made the game partnered with an indie 8-bit rock band that wrote the soundtrack specifically for the game. The story is full of parodies on common cliches and silly jokes that made me replay the game several times.

There's a bunch of other successful indie games in other markets and unless it offers a radically new addictive gameplay (say Minecraft), it has to be about the story. Stardew valley, Papers Please, you name it. Unfortunately, this title simply lacks both of them and is hence doomed to fail.

P.S. It shouldn't take 3 years to find out the lack of product/market fit. There's a funny saying that if you are not ashamed of the v1.0 of your product, you have released it too late. This 100% applies here. Release it with just 1 level based on a commodity game engine, gather feedback, decide onward based on it. Anything more than a couple of months is just wrong if you are doing it for the first time as a 1-person project, IMHO.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEnHolPt8zw

I'd have started this blog post with links to the game, the game title plus cool screenshots.

I completely agree - the lack of screenshots in the article was almost as strange as hearing the author wrote their own engine.

Furthermore, a simple Google of the game reveals very, very few results. As others have stated, nothing markets itself.

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.

Also from this page it simultaneously says the game is free and asks me for money https://infinitroid.com/new_account

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 know, why isn't this on the front page of PC Gamer?

> 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.

0: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/amazon-machine-learning

Whats the equivalent of testing your business idea before building a business in the gaming world ?

Does such a thing necessarily exist?

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.

[1] - http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=7DRL

[2] - http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Cogmind

I believe Super Hot and Receiver came from those sorts of game jams.

It's hard, because novel mechanics are easily stolen. That said, the sooner you get user testing done, the sooner you validate your idea.

Shareware, Demo ?

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.

"Specific genres?"

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.

Early access and kickstarter

- Launch on Early Access on Steam etc selling WIP games

- Finish the first 20% and presell the unstarted 80% as a Season Pass

- Launch a basic version with DLC

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

A public dev log, or a discourse channel where potential players can participate early in the development.

Stardew Valley primarily gathered early adopters through regular blog updates about dev progress.

"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.

Every work is unique.

This makes alot of sense and now i wish there was something like open data from steam sales but for SAAS products !

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

> And yet Shovel Knight is doing so so great. Cuphead too.

These outliers don't refute the rule that different markets have different odds of success.

Portal's team produced Narbacular Drop (spelling?) as a final project that could be seen as a prototype of the idea

If anyone wants to try this without making a login: justchecking/justchecking

Personally I played about two rooms and then got bored. It sure is a tribute to Metroid. With weird, floaty jumping (did Metroid have that? I never played that one very much.). And tiny, dark graphics. Plus I was playing it on the keyboard and not fullscreened which never helps.

> I have a backlog of dozens of purchased-but-never-played Steam games picked up at ridiculously low prices from Humble Bundles, Steam sales, etc. Does the world need any more games at this point?

When I started to find myself with half a dozen of such games, I remembered the year we spent saving money with my brothers to buy a hard copy of Caesar 3. I was just a child. It costed us what would now be 15€. Considering the inflation since then, games were quite expensive.

So, I've decided to stop buying games in those promotions and having games in my library that I will never play. I prefer paying the full price for a game I really want to play, like before. I think it's more honest to the developers. Whether that will mean more money to them in average I don't know. Does someone know if the developers/editors really benefit from the sales on HumbleBundle and the like (the prices really look pretty low)?

>> Does the world need any more games at this point?

It's like asking if the world needs another pop song or pizza joint. There's always room for the next great game and another good place to get a pie.

Are you making this to sell as a fun game, or as something you'd put into a portfolio to advertise yourself to employers?

If you're trying to sell games, your site focuses on all the wrong things.

1) I need a reason to want to play. Some games present themselves as a challenge to overcome (e.g. Volgarr the Viking, Dustforce), while others have some kind of interesting narrative or world to explore (e.g. Metroid/Binding of Isaac.) Some games promise comedy (e.g. Enter the Gungeon.) I can't tell what your hook is. Weapon customization and survival are fine game mechanics, but they're not a reason for me to want to play all by themselves.

2) Artistic theme. Games that age well have a cohesive look-and-feel. My initial impression of your game's theme is "asset store default." Maybe you didn't use an asset store, but that certainly is my first impression

3) When I hear "procedurally generated exploration" I have a negative reaction. It is incredibly difficult to do well, and when done any way other than well, it becomes boring and repetitive almost immediately. On your site, I am given no reason to believe it was done well.

These three things, taken together, mean that I probably wouldn't play your game even if it were offered to me for free with no strings attached.

There's something I see as a mistake that people do over and over. There are fundamentally two markets you can target: niche or popular. The niche market is small but under-served and so it's much easier to stand out, but your potential market is limited. The popular market is huge, but it also tends to be over-served. You need to really stand out. It's going to require much more to be able to compete, but if you do manage to compete then your potential market is enormous.

Metroidvania and roguelike are two of the most crowded markets. And they're full of very good games that can be had for a few bucks. Competing here means you need something that really stands out. This, by contrast, seems very genetic and lacks the production values that can help mask an otherwise generic product. For instance this [1] is a metroidvania roguelike that can be had for about $4 on a sale (and is a great game as an aside). That's what you're competing against.

I think it makes more sense to aim for niche. And there's also the nice outlier that occasionally proves that niche wasn't really niche at all.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/252030/

congrats you made it to number 2 on hn - I'm sure your revenue just went up a lot. The game actually looks pretty cool. I echo the price and platform. It looks like it would appeal to a fairly casual gaming category with a lower price. I'd pay a couple bucks but 7 or 8 seems high but I don't do gaming off of my phone so this game would appeal to me but isn't targeted toward a platform that I use.

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.

That's why addressing a smaller market can be useful. Release your game for Linux and engage with Linux gaming community. You are more likely to be noticed.

Here is an interesting article about it: http://cheesetalks.net/proton-linux-gaming-history.php

In terms of wasting your time, I think it's only a waste of time if you perceive it to be a waste of time. If you had fun developing the game, then I wouldn't beat yourself up over it. Simply because, as you've noticed, releasing a successful game is in general very difficult! The odds are not in your favor. I'm also developing an Indie Game (Ninja Turdle), and will release it to steam but have pretty low expectations on any success. I'm just doing it for fun, with the extra hopes that it could make some extra cash, but if not, oh well, I will have accomplished one of my life goals of releasing a video game. If no one buys your game but you still want to get it out there, maybe just wait another half year or so, and release it as freeware, Then at least people still get to enjoy your game. That in itself is a very rewarding feeling.

Great job on the game, the videos look very smooth and I will be sure to give it a play!

Reading this makes me think of all the indie app developers building educational mobile apps. Most of them are parents with the best of intentions. Maybe they started off building an app for their kids. Maybe they saw a need at their local school and decided to fill it. Maybe they themselves always wished for their particular app and decided to build it.

The vast majority of them eventually burn out and leave the field or take on a day job to supplant their income. A small number sell their apps to a larger publisher or get hired by a larger company. And very very very few break through that barrier to generate self-sufficient income, much less growing profits.

They have many of the same business challenges of indie game developers too, it seems. Too many alternatives/competitors, distribution challenges, marketing challenges, lack of differentiation, etc.

I suppose the same could be said for indie developers in many other verticals too.

That's from back in February but more recently others have been saying similar things:

https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-man...

If you released a game with no market research and under the naive expectation that "if you build it, they will come", you likely learned a very painful lesson.

There needs to be a market for what you're writing, you need to find and reach out to this market, and you need to entice them by providing more value than the spare $X they have in their pocket (plus, you need to communicate this so that they realize this).

You also need to realize that small differences in quality can lead to huge differences in interest, ESPECIALLY given how "copycat" your game seems appears from the homepage. If your game is only 1% worse than the other game I'm interested in, I'll probably give the other game 100% of my free gaming time (others may not be so extreme, but you get the idea).

Marketing/sales folks exist for a reason. You just figured out why.

If you look at successful entrepreneurs (or basically anyone who has gone the less ordinary path and reached some level of success), you'll usually see a list of failure or at least non-successes prior to the success you see them enjoying today. Same goes for artists and entertainers who become "overnight successes". It wasn't overnight for them!

So you've done good work and gotten not the return you expected... it might take one more game or 10 more games. Or this game might lead you to meeting people that can help you be more successful in the future.

It's ok to "give up" and move on too. You can stay the course and probably eventually become successful, but if you have other interesting things to do and less interest in continuing gamedev, then go try something new.

Most of the modern games I have played have no replayibility, very limited in scope and on top of that archaic buisness models.

I understand that it is very hard to make games and 100 times harder to make good games. There must be a sane method for decent compensation waiting to be thought out I hope

You sort of did. Depends on what you expect.

You got half decent at a whole bunch of skills, which you can reapply. I'd say it was equal to going to a school for this, but not an exceptional school. It's a start, and it's a toolset.

Me and my brother make games. I do a brainstormy intuitive thing, and he builds stuff brick by brick. He has a tendency to decide things like 'I will build an Asteroids', build the skeleton of such a thing (with all the effort going into code elegance) and not have anywhere to go from there. I have a tendency to have wild exciting-sounding ideas, implement about a quarter of them, and end up with something that's certainly not like anything else, but isn't necessarily FUN or even a game.

I think I have a slightly higher chance of breaking through into the realm of 'making an actual game', but it hasn't really happened yet and may never happen. Even if it did, there wouldn't be money in it. I'm just not that good a designer, though I AM a sort of nascent designer. Plus, I'm too devoted to open source these days and that would likely be a handicap to market adoption; if nobody else can get rich off it either then it ain't gonna be a hit.

To make a hit thing you have to be able to see how exploitative third parties can get rich off you, and then let them do it and hope you get a cut (or some publicity).

I think the future isn't creative (insofar as popular hit products). It's basically focus-grouped artificial blandness and knock-offs consuming the market, and will not go back (occasional fluke successes will doubtless happen)

The future is learning how to manage these creative exploits as communication, perhaps to a very small audience for whom they're specially crafted. You'll be a craft beer or a hand made cheese. You have nothing to do with the market as we know it, it's all about what manner of distribution you can function under at the scale you will forever remain.

So who did you get to know in that three years? Did you form a community, perhaps of other game makers?

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?

There’s a net addition of ~300.000 games per year in the iOs app store.

Around 2,256,508 books (data is not up to date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe...)

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.

> 730 movies per year

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.

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.

OP, Try contacting some streamers that love trying new games like CohhCarnage. If they play your game for 10+ hours it will be better than any other form of advertising. Also, make sure they pay for your product, don't offer it free.

It's difficult for me to be excited by indie games. Sometimes they can be really great and unique, but a very large amount of indie games are some variation of platformer or roguelike or both. That is great and all, but that area just seems extremely saturated, and maybe there's just no room anymore?

There are plenty of types of games I'd still love to see made or have ideas for, but they require 3D, money, great art teams. Indie games generally cannot pull this, so they tend to be limited to rather rigid subgenres, and there are only so many variations of Metroid you can make before people mostly find what they're looking for.

Making games is an incredibly risky business. Akin to starting a restaurant.

I personally dont think of it like a business at all. I think of it as a vocation. By choosing to make games, I consider myself to have chosen the life of an artist.. My goal right now is to make great games that I want to make, thats it.

I'm living off the savings from my last real job, and being extremely frugal. I moved out to the country, where everything is cheaper (rent massively so). If / when I run out of money I'll do some contracts, worst case scenario is get a fulltime job as an employee again.. But I am extremely happy with my life right now.

This also looks a bit like a less polished version of "The Swapper": http://facepalmgames.com/the-swapper/

You can market a 2D platformer all you want, it's still a 2D platformer in a market absolutely _saturated_ with them.

If you're making one in 2018, it should either be a hobby project, or you should be prepared for very few sales.

The graphics are not great. They’re not bad, but they’re also not on par with most successful indie games. My suggestion, if you don’t insist on going solo, is to team up with an excellent designer.

Click the link to find information (screenshots, maybe video) Play now button, but im not on computer to play with, just hanging around in HN while eating at work.

Soo i got lots of text and links but no pictures of game or video whatsoever. All the information i have is what i pieced around in comments, seems like rogue-like metrovania.. this dosent really sell me the game. Sure there is play now but that also lead to page full of text.

Bad marketing

> Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing

The derivative of an exponential is again an exponential :p

Niche markets may be the way to go. For instance, I would gladly spend $250 for a deep economic simulator game. I haven’t seen one of those in years.

Out of curiosity what titles do you have in mind when you say "deep economic simulator"?

Well, the depth that I’d like has never been done :)

But ... if a game could blend aspects of Railroad Tycoon 3, Patrician, Capitalism, Industry Giant, etc.

As I was reading this post I thought I could be writing it myself... Although I am in the mobile gaming industry (maybe even harder than steam) and I "only" spent 2 years on my project the outcome was similar. Conclusion: don't spend that long on a project with such an unpredictable fate.

Shameless plug: https://www.dinorush.com

I mean, the author got three years to work on something they loved. It's unfortunate they didn't have what it takes to turn it into a career, but the game itself should be enough to get them into a studio or smaller indie shop.

I don't think it was a waste, but maybe the author should be looking for alternative ways to parlay the game into a paycheck instead of ... ... whatever this is.

I really hate when people try to justify them not being successful saying something along the lines of, i'm smart why am I not successful.

If you look at most of the recent smash hit indie games\* they really don't innovate graphically at all, instead they bring something new to the table in terms of gameplay.

Most are "rogue-lite" which is a hot genre right now but all have something that make them stand out.

Rogue like games have the potential to become indie hits because they are very good for twitch/youtube audiences, because in general, up until the moment the player loses, they are winning.

This is great for streamers, no long-drawn out sequences where they know they've probably lost, no ability for audiences to get bored watching the player struggle in a losing fight. Instead the player gets to live out their power fantasy up until the moment that fantasy is betrayed and they lose.

And then it's a quick or instant reset and they're back to the pit / whale / plane and off they go again.

But a rogue-lite platformer? Ok that can work, Risk of Rain did an OK job with really poor graphics. But the gameplay was top-notch to compensate, and that was released before the big indie-deluge, that might not do so well if it were released today and had to go up against competetion from the likes of gungeon or dungreed.

With regards to this game, the graphics are too low to look good but haven't masked that by making the choice of going pixel-art, instead it just looks like it's from a PC gamer cover CD circa 1999.

Compare that to Slay the Spire, which has very basic art but has an engine that is well made, so it's limited art is still delivered very nicely. In the case of slay the spire they compensate with a good soundtrack which doesn't get irritating even on repeat playthroughs and some really solid gameplay.

Those are the smash-hits and a hits-based industry follows a power-law, so there's a vast quantity of mediocre games below there. What hope does a game which appears to mostly replicate previous gameplay with weak graphics stand?

That's not to say it was a waste of time, only the author can judge that.

\* Far too many to list, but I'm thinking along the lines of Slay the Spire, Enter the Gungeon, They are Billions. Even Playerunknown's battlegrounds or fortnite in some way fits the 'rogue-lite' formula of facing ever more difficult challenges up until a sudden and final death and complete reset.

> Compare that to Slay the Spire, which has very basic art

Basic is not what I would call this.

But I think we shouldn't confuse graphics fidelity with quality. You can have an ugly pixel art game or a pretty pixel art game.

Games are a lot like movies industry. #metoo's, low median pay, too many hours put into flops. This kind of effort is best financed by deep pockets that can eat the loss.

One area you might reuse your talents and efforts, is gambling industry. It is another toxic environment, I take antidepressants since 2003 since I worked once with a client of this industry, but the payout is at least certain.

>I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic, and I love what I do. I’m a lifelong learner, always evaluating my work and experimenting with new approaches. Should I be failing this badly?

This paragraph reads like the guy thinks all of this means he deserves success. I can't say I feel bad for this guy.

Anyone who has studied hard, possessing a good work ethic, willing to learn lifelong and open to new approaches does indeed deserve success. What else would you have them do - walk over coals?

I think that unless done for artistic or exploratory reasons, it is better to have a pre built audience for large projects like games. The fact that sales in the indie space are bleak is not news. Try a crowdfunding campaign and if it fails then think hard whether to continue to invest time into the project.

Is this a marketing problem? You mentioned ~1000 visitors to your store page, I'm not surprised there are no sales yet.

Good luck and don't be too disheartened, you've already put in the large amount of work needed, now just spend some time trying to market in order to get some return.

You need to find as soon as possible trusted people that can tell you how bad is your idea/game play/sound/narrative so you can fix it or do something else. Most will just be polite to you or be trolls.

In the gold rush days, it wasn't the miners who made money (other than a very few early miners). It was the people who supplied the miners.

It isn't surprising the internet has been called a gold rush.

I just bought the early access. Interesting what thoughts go through your head after you read such a blogpost. I had to ask myself ten times if I'm not buying it to give parallel-universe-me a leg up...

You should go through your code and try to extract generic abstractions that you can release as resume building projects or as assets that other developers can license and include in their projects.

Releasing a game is as much of a marketing exercise as it is a technical one. It appears that the author focused on the technical aspects and somewhat neglected the business/marketing side.

People should build the game they want to play.

That's really how I view things. I just play nice games, find flaws and things to be perfected, and gather up all those things in a game that could be enjoyed.

If you are interested in making an indie game, do it only because you want to not because you think you'll make money.

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.

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.

[1] https://artinfiction.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/asc-3.jpg

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.

I play lottery occasionally for the entertainment... not because I'll win.

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.

"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.

But do you really find going around telling people that they're not going to win the lottery makes them stop playing?"

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?

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.

> the industry is set up to stoke and profit handsomely from people mis-assessing their own chances.

how so? how does the industry profit from people mis-assessing their own chances?

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.

This also applies to many small offline businesses. The B2SB supply chain profits from selling picks & shovels to a steady stream of new hopefuls.

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.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/12/how_...

Yeah and many other indies worked for 4+ years and got about 10 downloads on release, and you never hear of them.

Well even though it looks like, creative fields are not split only between the top hits and the starving hopefuls.

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.

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.

Wasn't Stardew Valley basically built from the earlier game Starbound?

They're completely different games from different teams on the same publisher. I think Starbound released later too.

Ah, that makes sense. I thought Chucklefish was the pseudonym for the developer. Today I learned.

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.

This is also why it's impossible to make money in the industry (to a first approximation). Because so many people are willing to do the work for free.

I wonder what is the outcome distribution for an indie developer spending this much time building an utility desktop Mac/Windows app. Somehow this seem to have fallen out of fashion.

What was his target audience / market and what need did his game satisfy that an existing game couldn't? Essentially, did he have product market fit?

Yes, but that is only if you didn't learn anything. Problem is not many people appreciate the skills that go into writing your own engine and game.

Market, marketing and basic UED on the site are all issues here.

1. why would I pay 7 bucks for this, when something like PUBG is ostensibly free? There is no easy "trial" download (Do I even down load this?) Does it work on my phone (a lot of the low end game market went there.

2. Selling things is hard when your up against free. I dont like the freemium model but free stuff with ad's makes money - give it away and monetize on the back end.

3. Every one pays for customers. Marketing matters and especially in a competitive market. Your going to need to spend money to make money in todays age.

PUBG is $30: https://store.steampowered.com/app/578080/PLAYERUNKNOWNS_BAT...

OP probably thinking of Fortnite.

I was thinking of the current mobile version! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tencent.ig...

My rant on games:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10955276

reduce addictive qualities of the game...

Not sure if applying this strategy to a game that has sold only 4 copies in 3 years would really help the situation.

That‘s why its usually recommended to fail fast. To not sink in too much without knowing whether there is any product-market fit.

I don't play games - so maybe I have no idea - but why people try to compete solo with big companies?

Having mastered C++ is not a bad outcome for the OP’s future in the software trade, though.

Reading advice from successful game devs to “my game didn't sell well” -style posts on reddit can be instructive too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9k8wsi/my_games_di...

Jason Rohrer's advice there was essentially:

- Games have to either make an instant emotive connection via their art style or gameplay concept (and be priced well enough for an impulse purchase), or prove that they are deep and long-lasting enough that they'll be worth the investment in time and money.

- Single-player games that don't do the above are especially hard sells, because hit gameplay trends are veering toward multiplayer games: “If your game's initial impression gives people pause, it's already over.”

The Infinitroid developer might learn something from that advice — I checked the trailer at https://infinitroid.com/, and the game looks fun, but I don't feel that instant connection to the art style or gameplay concept in the same way I did with Minit or Monument Valley (both instant impulse purchases), and I don't get the impression that it offers weeks of gameplay like The Witness or Stephen's Sausage Roll do (purchased both later after consideration and persistent appearances in media and social feeds).

It feels like most “my game's a commercial failure” posts I read could have been saved by spending more time on the initial concept and art style, and on testing the market before the three-to-ten year investment in building the full game was made.

Reducing the time to market also seems like a sane strategy. It may have taken five years to build Stardew Valley and 10 years to make Owlboy, but that does not mean every successful game involves holing yourself up for half a decade or more.

Developers also seem to underestimate just how much marketing a successful game needs even when the concept is great. Look at what the Boyfriend Dungeon team did to get traction for their game (5 years of marketing, 10 releases of other mini games on itch.io to build a following, website built 11 months before release, appearance on panels and in game press, months of Kickstarter planning), and check that you're prepared to do the same with your game if commercial success is important to you (it is fine for it not to be):

https://medium.com/@kitfoxgames/years-in-the-making-how-kitf...

Rohrer also mentions that he made 13 games before he had a hit (also happened to be his first multiplayer game), so perseverance and learning from failures seems like a big factor too.

It’s the fonts. They look like you’re reading something.

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.

i just looked at the website, went to the main page and watched bits and pieces of the gameplay video.

rogue-lite: check. metroidvania(gotta get that retro street cred) : check. Bland uninspired assets: check. post mortem blog post posted to some link aggregator about how you released the same thing that every other copypasta developer on greenlight has crapped out for the past 3 years and it isn't selling well?: check.

yep. 3 years, down the crapper.

I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores.

Congrats on shipping a product!

Sorry but the reason that your game and others have not sold is because they aren’t new and they don’t offer anything that consumers want. It’s so simple.

The graph of steam sales, as you mentioned, is poisoned with shovel-ware. But it’s also inflated by another kind of game that nobody wants: games that are just remakes of the same old tropes and mechanics — nobody is interested in playing them even though they are implemented with care. It’s a problem that is huge in the programming world: lack of high level thought and consideration. The super meat boy guy who you linked to should have asked himself if anyone really is excited about platformers before sinking all that time into it. There is no indie game problem. It’s a bad ideas problem.

Look at the witness. It did good. It’s because it’s a good game with freshness and insight. Messages are passed from developer to player through every aspect of the game. It is something to sit down and consider for hours. Something to be inspired by. There has to be actual value in the game. This torrent of let’s players and people who use video games and v.g. Culture as some kind of crutch or something to give them identity — endlessly grinding away at meaningless and stupid achievements and 100% completions — all of that is nonsense and it is your own fault for diving into it.

I agree. I'm sorry for being blunt OP; but watching the trailer for this game, it looks boring as hell. It's a basic sci-fi platformer. Why should I play this, let alone pay for it?

OP is right that there are a million games out there. But I still have a hard time finding games I want to play due to the sheer lack of fun-focused concepts out there.

While it could have been said with more consideration, I think this comment tells the core of why the game isn't a success. From my eyes the game does not appear interesting to play. At some point not too long ago, the idea of a remake with a twist would have been interesting (eg, Geometry Wars). But people have come to expect different things from indie games and games in general. It's not enough to rehash old ideas. The idea of revamping a much beloved gsme or genre has lost its novelty as so many developers have done that already.

The games that we love from the past exist. And spiritual remakes of those games exist. It's not enough for a game to succeed based largely on nostalgia. I don't mean to discredit the creator's hard work. This is what I understand from a glance at seeing the preview video.

Don't write a single LOC until you have at least one user.

How exactly would you do that for a platform game like we are talking about here?

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"

What does that even mean? You can't have a "user" without a program.

You can have backers, but even then you probably want hundreds of them before embarking on a three year development journey.

Yes, you did

Games are a great example of how "if you build it, they will come" just doesn't work in crowded market place. You need 2 other things: a way to build a community and a way to convert that community into incoming cash. It's important to understand that indie game devs usually don't have a huge runway of capital, so both of these things are necessary right from the start.

I don't exactly know how you do this because I haven't done it before, but my naive feeling is that it's a huge risk to sit down for 3-4 years and just write code. You have to find a way to engage your potential future audience while you are developing the game. Many of the most successful indy games have the same development ethos of open source software: release early and release often.

Second, I think it's important to ask for money very early on in the process, if that's your ultimate goal. I think the article is good to point out the economics. Users have played 1000 hours (roughly 1 hour per user) and the dev has made less than $30. That's 3 cents per hour. There are plenty of games that cost $4-$5 that have no demo at all. Even at 1/10th of the engagement, you're still talking about $400-$500 rather than $30.

Finally, as others have said, I think the idea that you are going to strike it rich with your first game out of the gate is naive. Indy game development is about the long tail. Don't throw 2K hours into a game. Throw 200 hours 10 times and try to build up a revenue stream. At the very least, it allows you to pivot a lot earlier if you find that your are getting absolutely no engagement.

But at the end of it (and I haven't played the author's game, so I'm making no judgement here), a game has to be fun. You don't need a finished game to demonstrate the fun. That first proof of concept needs to be distilled down to pure fun. Once you've got that sorted, you can start working on the rest. I think it's temping to build a whole infrastructure of code (or write a game engine ;-) ) and then once you are hundreds or thousands of hours in discover, "Wait a minute... this game is actually kind of boring". Only now you have a legacy code base and it's really slow to start trying to morph it into something that is fun.

I was just looking at Kenta Cho's blog the other day and earlier this year he was doing a 256 byte JS Browser game challenge [1]. What interested me about his blog post is that he concentrated entirely on game mechanics. He tried a couple of game mechanics and then tried to mix and match them to find interesting variations. I think this is the kind of thing you need to do very early on in game development. Then once you have a core game mechanic that is really fun, you can start building a game around it.

[1] - http://aba.hatenablog.com/entry/2018/03/07/174528 (Sorry, Japanese only -- but has some interesting gifs)

take your game to decentraland . virgin playing field, it's the future

The game looks bad. You will not get a foot in the door with a game that looks like this in 2018. It looks like amateur/programmer art. There are some people that aren't bothered by that, but when it comes to media the looks are paramount.

If this game had an appealing art style, it might stand a chance in the already saturated market of Metroidvanias.

I completely agree. Every time I see one of these posts bemoaning their sales stats, the game inevitably looks bad. The genre that this game is in is completely saturated, so nobody is going to spend their money on crap when something that looks 10x better is available. While the indie scene is is definitely now over-saturated, the real problem here is the lack of honest feedback to the developer.

Looking at the trailer, personally I think it looks awesome. Nice subtle shading and detail on the environment and enemies that doesn't detract from the overall simplicity, and then you get to light up the whole screen with massive firepower when you start shooting with one of the big weapons. What do you think looks bad about it?

(Not a rhetorical question. I'm not a graphic artist. I'm curious if I am missing something that a professional would spot.)

> What do you think looks bad about it?

If it's not immediately obvious to you, then I can't explain it either, or at least I can't be bothered to try. Some people don't see it. It has nothing to do with being a graphic artist. It's not about technicals, it's not something that comes off a checklist.

That's not really true - take a look at the graphics from Factorio 0.1, released in 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_a8_zxYLik

They've since sold about 20M copies at $20 (now $30) apiece. I started playing in 2017 with Factorio 0.14, when the graphics were better but still decidedly retro and they'd sold maybe 4M copies.

The difference is that Factorio has a unique gameplay concept that is both extremely addictive and not really found in any other games. People will overlook shitty graphics if the game has a compelling concept that they can't get elsewhere.

> That's not really true - take a look at the graphics from Factorio 0.1, released in 2012

Yes, that was in 2012, well before the indie explosion. If you saw this game today, you would assume it is one of the hundreds of crappy 2D Minecraft clones.

I mean, here's Factorio 0.14, which was 2017:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIqPXiM0X0#t=1200

It's better, but it's not that better, and probably something that still looks like a "crappy 2D Minecraft clone".

I think his point is that it was already well known by 2017 and didn't have to struggle to distinguish itself in the current market, because it had built momentum and interest.

Hey, I liked the game. It's really nice looking and I got hooked for 5 rounds just now =)

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.

I just spent 9 months playing poker while my net worth dropped over 40%. Did I waste my time? Hell no.

Yes. Didn't have to read 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.

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