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Comment by shapefrog | Hacker News Reader

Best thing to ever happen to them.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/

Write a postmortem, publish it to gamedeveloper dot com and capitalize on all the Stadia drama while it's hot to boost sales for your original game release. Make a YouTube video talking about the pain you went through, all the things you learned that you didn't get to give to people, and see what kind of hype you can salvage.

Or just get it on HN and tell people where they can buy your game?

View on HN

No way the exposure from this outweighs the 5 months of wasted dev time.

It's salvaging a silver lining from a shitty situation, nowhere near a good thing yet alone "best thing to ever happen to them".

edit: Elaborated on this in a reply to a reply, here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034563

Actually this is the game industry. Very reasonable indie titles die on Steam with sales in the dozens, all the time. Everything is about marketing and buzz, everything. So yes, I think this absolutely has made the game more successful than it would have been given its very-neear-zero median expectation.

I'm speaking with 15+ years experience in the games industry, often explicitly in marketing.

It's very possible that I'm wrong: obviously we don't have the knowledge of what their expectations from Stadia were, nor is it possible for anyone to now know how successful or not their Stadia launch would've been if Google had decided to keep trying to make Stadia work, nor do we know how many sales the game will get from this exposure.

But I still stand by my view despite agreeing with your first few sentences about the industry generally.

edit: It's mainly coming from gut instinct, so I've tried to think more about why my gut says that. I think the main thing is that the exposure is going to people who are interested in games industry business, or tech industry, or Google specifically. That's what everyone is discussing, not whether or not the game is actually worth playing (and unlike if it was some planned PR, there's not even any subtle suggestion within the story that the game is worth playing - nor to be fair that it's not worth playing).

Sure, a few people might click onto the steam page out of curiosity, or buy the game out of sympathy to the poor people getting screwed by this situation, but it would be surprising (to me at least) if the amount of people converting is more than if they actually just had a marketing person spend a day writing a piece of content for Hacker News / GamesIndustry.biz with the goal of being both interesting tech content and featuring mentions of what makes the game worth playing. And that's just thinking about doing targeted marketing to not-very-good target audiences (for promoting indie games - sure there are some areas where HN traffic is incredible and businesses that would love a front page post, indie games not so much).

SteamDB's data on the game doesn't seem to suggest that I'm wrong here, but maybe with time I'll become wrong. (Side note, while writing this comment I couldn't remember the name of the game we're talking about, so I had to go look it up... because the name of the game wasn't the interesting bit when I read about this earlier!) https://steamdb.info/app/1787630/graphs/

All that said, this is probably bigger outreach then they were going to get with a Stadia launch.

Attention in the games industry likely doesn't drive sales for this title, but could lead to contacts and development for future titles, etc. (if the game shows promise)

Some games (very few) have growing sales from word of mouth, this news could get that started. (if the game is good)

I agree with the other reply here. I think you are directly comparing 5+ months with the value of this exposure. In reality you should contrast what they would have got from 5+ months of work and launching onto Stadia. They were already doomed when they put 5+ months into a doomed platform.

It is entirely possible that my purchase of this game doubled the number of sales the game had experienced - it is also entirely possible that it was the 1 billionth $2 purchase they had.

5 months of dev time was to place the game on another platform and generate revenue, with an expected return of X. If they make more than X (ignoring the knowledge gained along the way) then in every way possible the exposure from this outweighs the 5 months of wasted dev time

My constructive feedback: on Steam, the "Jump Challenge!" trailer [0] (2m51s, way too long, not snappy) sucks and the in-game screenshots 3..12 are way too dark and static-looking. This is the developer's main chance to attract customers - compare to rockstar trailers like "Bubble Bobble" [1] which hook you within 5 seconds. Things that are painfully missing: zoom-to-closeup on the characters e.g, on level completion or when they complete a key move, add big captions, animation, color to the trailer, screen transitions/dissolves/fades (compare to the (static) screenshots for "Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved"[2], they superbly use neon glow/fade to convey tons of fast-and-furious movement). In the trailer, the human voiceover (excessively chatty/jokey) and clipart (plain irrelevant) instead of in-world captions (like "Bubble Bobble") don't work for me, it feels too much like QVC; don't waste our time saying cheesy infomercial-grade stuff like "Now we've got your attention..." or "You will love it". Take a chainsaw to the first 0m35s of trailer (well maybe a 3-second splash screen for your studio's name, like Taito/Bubble Bobble does) and start on an actual game screen, already. RIP Stadia, but get on with a compelling kickass trailer for your Steam store, already - you only have 15 seconds tops to attract and hook the user. It doesn't take 5 months to make a compelling trailer. Based on the current trailer I wouldn't even download this. Fix it, already.

The game is (mis-)tagged "4 Player Local" but also "PvP"; I don't see anything in the trailer showing how multiplayer is supposed to work, either adversarial or cooperative. ("4 Player Local" sounds mistagged; it conjures up memories of "Gauntlet"). The voiceover says there are many ways to play the game; that's too open-ended "Either play solo or challenge up to 3 friends, local or remote", overlaid on an animation showing exactly that, is way clearer. I don't even get the tag "Battle Royale", it seems irrelevant, if it isn't then you need to add to the static screenshots and trailer to show why this is "Battle Royale". Own your listing's tags and delete the misapplied ones.

I find it hard to get useful information from Steampowered. Curiously, "Jump Challenge!" does not appear anywhere in Steampowered's 17 hits for "Jump Challenge!" (?!) [3]. Probably downweighted by sales rank/popularity.

Does Steam provide the developer with analytics on how many users viewed the trailer and bounced? by demographic, by OS, by genre of Steam titles purchased, by referring channel/URL...?

Also, I tried crossbrowsing by the tags used for Source Byte Franchise > "Jump Challenge!"" "Action/Casual/Racing/Battle Royale/Parkour/4 Player Local/Multiplayer/Local Co-Op/Platformer/Arcade/Co-op/PvP/Pixel Graphics/Runner/Exploration/2D Platformer/Puzzle Platformer/Funny/2D/Rhythm"

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787630/Jump_Challenge/

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1287030/Bubble_Bobble_4_F...

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/8400/Geometry_Wars_Retro_...

[3] https://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=Jump+Challenge%2...

The is "No way" that a fontpage HN post to a popular reddit post can generate more sales then Stadia. If it was that successful even Google wouldn't be closing it down.

This comment is confusing. Presumably Stadia is being shut due in part to poor sales?

Porting the game in the first place was 5 months of wasted dev time. By the time they had fully committed to the decision to port a game to Google Stadia, they had then taken the time, money, and resources of developers and put it in a burn barrel and set it on fire. It was the "best thing that happened" because it made what would've been a guaranteed worthless waste of time anyway into something that could actually help them.

Surely Google was funding this, right? 5 months ago no body in their right mind would have been investing their own money/resources into porting or building for Stadia, right?

Some people are masochists.

Trust Google, get burned.

I could be wrong, but I don't think cloud-driven graphics processing is dying. The knowledge gained by the dev team making it work will serve them well going forward, in addition to the marketing considerations being discussed.

I mean, stadia had like 5k active users. More likely HN is better. Edit: The 70k mentioned is just an estimate from Reddit.

A quick Google search gave between 75,000 and 150,000 paying customers for Stadia as of June...

Why even assume the "5 months of work" part is not a lie? Unless you spent the majority of time during these 5 months waiting for feedback from Google, I can hardly believe it. Entire AAA game engines have been ported to different graphics APIs in less time...

My bet is that there was not even an intention to do it, and just made this post for the clickbait. Wouldn't be the first time.

it is totally realistic. took us over a year to port to switch.

it takes 1 click to port your game to linux/vulkan using unity, wich is what stadia is, linux + vulkan

the inability for people in this website to see through this PR scam is mind boggling

the website for VCs? yeah sure

What game have you personally ported to Stadia in one click?

Honestly, it might. Marketing is expensive and very unpredictable.

Based on past posts about what happened after getting front-paged on HN, I don't think it's necessarily the case that the surge of interest will pay off 4 months of development work:

https://nicklafferty.com/blog/what-happens-when-you-re-on-th...

18,000 website visitors.

400+ LinkedIn Profile Views

15+ connection requests

100+ newsletter subscribers

Numerous emails from people all around the world. If you sent me an email, thank you! I’ll do my best to get back to everyone but it’s been an overwhelmingly positive response.

But they weren't going to pay off the development work by launching on Stadia either is my contention. Even if it had stayed open. So in the grander scheme of things they are probably better off than if they had launched. So I contend that they will get more sales from this publicity than they would have got on Stadia - even if it had stayed open.

Wow, the short promo video brings back so many memories from Icy Tower (2001). Such a great, simple game by probably the most productive developer in the Allegro scene back then.

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

I loved Free Lunch Design as a kid since good free PC games were slim pickings back then.

Icy Tower, Operation Spacehog, and Happyland Adventures were all amazingly high quality for software that was given away for free.

Oh yeah. My first instinct on checking their steam page is same. Surprisingly, it doesn't mention icy tower in description. Would have worked to its favour

Why would they port to stadia at all? The hardware requirements are very low. Seems like a misguided move.

$3? Sold! With the weekend ahead this game is a no-brainer for my living room/Steam link setup.

...love me some papi-jump!

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