One more harsh truth: the easier it becomes to make games, the higher the standard of quality needed to be considered "good". Everybody else benefits from improved tools too, and they're your competition.
Even "indie" games typically take a dedicated team of several people a few years.
If you want to do a game by yourself, you either need a ton of skills or you need to be brutal about cutting the features. For example, a single person can build an interesting ASCII roguelike today. But you're not going to get an AAA look, that's for sure.
Fun, however, is a much harder quality to define.
I think the game industry has a lot of extremely talented “10x” developers that are also underpaid and overworked.
That people are willing to put up with the terrible conditions in the game industry is an example of how interesting and fulfilling work is many times more attractive than a good salary and work/life balance. A boring SAAS company will probably never beat a game company with a fraction of the budget when it comes to hiring/retaining the best devs.
I've got videos for days but this one's short and pretty representative. https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1493974909936189440
I'm shooting for AAA ASCII.
This is a terminology hole that I hope we fill, because I feel like the indie space is definitely rich with games that are certainly not 2022 AAA, but also obviously miles above ASCII Nethack or 2D pixel sprite art (which I like and all, but is not in the same league of difficulty). It feels like there's a lot of stuff in the sort of "pretty good looking for an XBox360/PS3 game" range.
There's definitely tons of ps3 games that look better than any indie games I can think of (mgs4 comes immediately to mind, what a visual feast.) I don't think it's inappropriate to say my game and many other indies are visually competitive with horse racing 2016, a game with a ps4 release.
Hardly AAA competition -- I'm just charting the territory of the bands.
The conversation muddies between talking about rendering features and aesthetic execution. If all we're talking about is rendering capabilities, I'm confident saying this segment here is beyond what a PS3 could do. The fillrate alone! https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1455511983512436737
Regardless, of course it isn't reasonable to outcompete 100+ people teams solo, but we can be scrappy and punch above our weight. :D
There are some. III and AA come to mind.
You will probably have to make a game that is smaller in scope and/or less polished than Banished, or your game will take more than a single technology generation to ship.
Relevant Escapist video about out-of-control rampant copying in Mobile Gaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q30qZSEnI9Q
For example, if the Epic game store became known as a source for good mobile games, customers will stop browsing the App/Play store for games and will instead go to the curated and high quality alternative, because why the hell wouldn’t they.
If Apple and Google are forced to stop suppressing competition on iOS/Android, it may lead to an entirely new mobile gaming industry that’s actually somewhat respectable.
Anyway, I would certainly not choose to develop mobile games, seems like a bad idea for many reasons. But look at PC games: you can make something as absolutely weird (and arguably 'unmarketable') as Disco Elysium, which needed no "lottery", it's simply a masterpiece.
It's a separate discussion, but I believe there's still a "lottery" aspect to indie games. There's a lots of survivorship bias as play there. For every Hollow Knight or Disco Elysium, how many other passion projects run out of funding, or get released and go unnoticed?
People are hunting endlessly for good games. But cannot find them.
Even me! I'm a knowledgeable nerd with time, but I can't find anything worth playing. I know many people in the same situation.
There aren't really unknown gems. Great games don't go unnoticed. Many indie devs just like to think they do because they don't want to accept that their game just isn't very good.
Hollow Knight and Disco Elysium are great examples. These could never have gone unnoticed. These are professional efforts from teams of dedicated, very skilled developers, who did a lot of non-obvious things the right way. Nothing replaces a game like Disco Elysium especially. It was always going to get noticed. (I don't know HK as well but from what I've heard it is also exceptional at what it does.)
I'd be interested if you could name any unnoticed game that approaches either of these two in being compelling to play.
Yep, see any of the 200+ Wordle clones and derivatives out there, only about two months after it went viral.
One of my video games has had at least five clones made that I'm aware of (probably several more than that), and it didn't have anywhere near the same success that a game like Wordle did.
Maybe if you substituted "AAA" for "good". But the plethora of tools for making games have once again made it possible to make some really good games with comparatively small teams.
Hence why you should sell shovels in a gold rush, and why it's a bit of a lie to sell any tool as "be able to do 2x in the same amount of time", since that's only a short term effect until everyone is aware of it and '2x' is the expected new norm.
Good games are good games. You can always sell a DRM-free executable and it'll have the potential to be considered "good" if it's..fun, memorable, clever, challenging, etc etc etc etc