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>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.