Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
juicybeast.com
juicybeast.com
Not only I think it's way too easy to criticize other's work and choices (in hindsight), but there's also a total lack of empathy.
We should cherish many small developers and entrepeneurs that share their experiences with such honest and thorough posts about the experience as they offer unique and valuable inputs and reflections.
Even ignoring that this is a very old article, what sort of feedback do you expect people to give?
Something higher quality than the most common bike shedding comment in history. Names are important but not tue end all be all.
It's also useless feedback becsuse as you said: it's a very old article and the author already acknowledged 7 years ago that the name and genre it got assumedly stuck into didn't help. It's not only not useful feedback, it shows people did not read the article.
I think there's a lot of empathy in putting yourself in his shoes and trying to help his game succeed, via deconstructing/criticizing the game's weaknesses.
And if he's around making indie games again, he'll want to know what current devs think of the market..
Lots of the comments contribute the failure to quite a few reasons, and emphasize on the effect of the reasons. But the real thing is this actually can imply that the failure can be narrow down to "a few simple obvious fixes".
To me it make me feel good since "a bad title" can be a very simple excuse to think that "what if I fix that, things would get better" and ignore more problem in depth.. Since I can never go back in time and retry it in the exact same setting.
Things like "It's OK, you have tried your best" is the real negativity to me, since it implies that I have reached the best I can do in potential/capacity, and can be quite discouraging. But it is quite helpful sometimes since I can recogonize my limits and try to improve myself or pivot.
I don't see it that way at all. It simply means you played the best hand you felt you could at the time. My best in college isn't the same as my best now, Some 7 years into industry.
I'll agree it's not necessarily constructive. But fluff encouragement can be reassuring. Non-constructive insults is almost never valid.
I’m sure everyone has seen beautiful looking and sounding games that were downright boring or broken
Even though I wasn't a game dev I really enjoyed reading these, as most contained info applicable to other teams as well.
edit: Oh wow, I had assumed they had gone the way of the Dodo after being bought way back, but seems they're still going: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/search?q=post%20mortem
If for no other reason than the fact that you haven't attempted it and therefore don't actually know.
After that, the next level of karmic adjustment is to refrain from posting bad reviews of restaurants.
I don’t need to have attempted any of those things to know that what I experienced was sub-par. I’ve heard better singers, seen better movies, and read better books.
If what you said were true, only movie directors would be able to criticize movies. That’s not helpful.
I see gps sentiment more often than I can understand, and it horrifies me. Especially as regards creative mediums (music, art, etc) where the point is to entertain. I may not know exactly what's wrong with a work, but I'm obviously qualified to critique it.
But even in other areas. It's easier to tell if something is good than to make a good thing. With a limited number of exceptions, I can tell if something someone did is crappy or not with a fairly limited understanding of their field.
At some point the criticism isn't just useless, it's spiteful and just an excuse to get in your own soapbox. That's why the stereotypical Karen isn't exactly praised for their "criticisms". If they left it at "this steak is done and I wanted medium rare", such stereotypes wouldn't exist.
If you wrote your app from the start to be cross platform, it's not that much extra work to port it across.
Apps don't normally have to care that deeply about UI latency, high cpu usage, various quirks of performance hits across platforms, VRAM, controller variations, achieving a solid 30-60 FPS minimum, battery life impact, etc. Unity, for example, is great at giving you the tools to do exactly what you suggest from day one, but it by no means solves the above for you.
But at a certain point, thanks to the free availability of game engines and their overal quality, the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games and releasing top quality indie games.
It became a game of marketing. And sadly that's where we failed.
Steam says that there is no better or worse day of the week or month to plan your release... That should be your first red flag. There are about 30-35 quality titles being put out on steam alone, every day of the week, weekends included. Other markets are a bit of a joke, they hardly fly on the revenues radar, unless you have a special deal with them for increased visibility.
You see the title you've worked on for the last 6 months solid just fly off the list quicker than you can say woof.
I know for a fact (we talk) that most indies don't make a 10th of their budget back. It's a marketeting's game now. So you probably want a publisher to be in charge of that... and we're back to the old days of non-indies, or essentially small studios.
"True" Indie games are dead, by the law of numbers and algorithms. Even people that saw success in the past are now having a hard time pushing signal through noise.
The line between indie game and zero budget side project/potential small business often gets skewed in these sorts of discussions. Anyone in the startup scene eventually learns the distinction between a startup legitimately chasing high growth and a small business caught up in a trend.
Sometimes you should just be a small business, not simply because you as a person are not capable of making something high growth, but because your own circumstances, team, effort, and product simply aren't much beyond a niche play.
There's nothing wrong with running a small business, plenty of people live fulfilling lives fully supported by one, but if you really want to be something more (like topping console charts absent a lottery viral win) it's going going to take plenty of chutzpah and commitment. Otherwise as a business model it's way more profitable and time saving to be realistic.
I don't think that's true. Not because I think an indie game can succeed without marketing, but the opposite. I think most indie games would still fail even with incredible marketing. They'd just lose more money because they'd have an additional cost. You can't always advertise your way to success in a completely saturated (or over-saturated) market, especially if your competitors are trying to do the same thing. You can either get lucky or fail.
> When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out.
> It's a marketeting's game now. So you probably want a publisher to be in charge of that...
Fact: Jonathan Blow, one of the devs featured in the movie "Indie Games", signed a contract with Microsoft way before Braid (one of the games featured in the movie) came out.
You want a publisher, or just someone else, to be in charge of something, if you're not very good at or interested in something. Big news, I know.
You are right that it became a marketing game. It was a hype and everyone started to call its product an indie game. The solution however is not more marketing. It will automatically solve itself. Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits.
If there's 5 indie games that fit that description, people can easily enjoy, & more importantly, remember them.
What happens when 20, 30, 50 games fit that description? There's no way no good games fall through the cracks. The amount of games developed in a year increases while people's retention remains constant.
I think there is a general saturation problem. I won't have the time to play 20, 30 or even 50 games a year. I don't need more games but better ones (in general.. there are of course great games).
In other words, all games you liked were good. But you haven't played all good games.
Now I sure still might have missed some.. however I am convinced that games that are truly exceptional will be successful. Because they are (still) rare. Good is not good enough. I stand by the fact that this is not a marketing issue. Of course you need some exposure.. if you never release a gem and never show it to anyone of course it won't find an audience.
To be cynical, I think the last "truly exceptional" indie I played was Disco Elysium, and before that Terraria and Minecraft. If that's the bar than there is basically zero way any game can be successful. "truly exceptional" for me are once in a decade experiences that either flip the industry on its head or make me consider my own life perspectives. Not many games do that (nor do they need to, especially on a price point of $0-20).
Thankfully I'm wrong and there's plenty of "good games with good success". and even "mediocre (IMO) games that went viral). But I've also seen plenty of "good games go unnoticed". But if your POV is "good isn't good enough", then we may be talking past each other, or have different scale. I think 'good' should deserve a few thousand sales and a few mumbling on social media. Not exactly a high bar these days, but one so many indies still can miss.
In my opinion now is currently the absolute golden age for indie development of all sorts. But the catch is you actually need to make really good stuff. Just making a functioning game isn't really sufficient. There's even still a huge market for stuff that looks like it came from a 24 hour game-jam codeathon, but it needs to be fun. Check out Forager [3] for instance. As a warning, play that game for an hour - and you'll be playing it for 10 (or 100) because it's really just insanely fun.
And that's really all it is. The "problem" is that it's just become really (relatively) easy to make games. And so just making a functioning complete game is no longer any sort of real achievement. It needs to be fun. Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/
Rimworld was released in 2018, two years after the article was written (2016)
I mean, it's strongly 'inspired' by dwarf fortress, so any heterodox design credit mostly belongs there
Basically I'm arguing that there is no black swan. It's not really hard to refute it, if I'm wrong, because all you need to do is point to one. I suppose the inevitable outcome might be we then hem and haw back and forth about whether something is "good", but well - at least it's a reasonable evidence based starting point, yeah?
The game was unknown for ~2 years (Released 2018, picked up ~2020) until it got picked up by streamers and was catapulted into the spotlight.
Why is it so hard to believe there are more games out there like this? These kind of markets are nowhere near efficient.
Keep in mind the way that word of mouth works, it's about the percentages - not the userbase size. Your active userbase growing 30% a month doesn't look impressive when that translates to 3 new people, but so long as that 30% is reflective of organic word of mouth spread, that's going from 10 users to 5500 in a couple of years. Their userbase had increased by orders of magnitude before streamers came, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't not have continued to grow rapidly.
And that's one of the great things about games. People love to talk about them, share what they're playing, and also of course seek out those hidden gems. Players do this for fun, others like publishers do it with a big profit motive. If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it.
Without content creators spotlighting it I highly doubt the game would have gone anywhere. The developers even say "we're really bad at marketing": https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/09/among-us-improbable-rise-t....
The whole article is a goldmine: “We stuck with Among Us a lot longer than we probably should have from a pure business standpoint,” said Willard. “We tried to quit and should have quit several times.”.
It's clear they got lucky here. This kind of organic growth doesn't happen often, even with very good games.
> If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it
The market being inefficient doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to exploit. A publisher is far better positioned than I am to "[make] a killing off of it".
The HN analogy is a SaaS company struggling to become profitable vs struggling to find the first ten or hundred users. Profitability is very hard, finding a big enough niche is very hard, but...ten users?
This is an overly literal exaggeration, but the example remains true even at a more realistic (and still pailtry) 100-200 sales. 1000 users is where it starts to maybe become a side hobby. Before then, You could be mowing lawns and make more revenue (without a 30% platform cut).
At 1000 users on SteamCharts you are making some very serious revenue, especially if you happen to be a solo dev.
I also think he may be being slightly coy there. Most games, especially indie, do spike and tail because they receive a bit of initial interest and new release type promotion, people try it, and move on. But what matters is not most games, but successful games. And there's an increasingly dramatic shift towards long-tail revenue. And there your games does spike, people try it, word of mouth happens, and then your real growth pattern starts. Reach a sufficient threshold and you get a big bump because you end up getting featured on Steam pages, and from there the sky's the limit.
I think there's a blurry line that separates indie games to non-indie games. Sure stardew valley is an indie game and God of War is not. But those are the extremes of the spectrum.
Is Hades an indie game? It is developed and published by Supergiant Games, but at this point is really well known and funded.
But yes, my pedantic side insists that if a large well funded game(or movie or song) uses the same legal entity to fund the game as was used to build it. They are independent and may fairly use the term "indie". Steam is a weird kink in the rules, because they are technically publishing all these games. But I hand wave that away by claiming that they are a market not a publisher(the difference being that a publisher takes on risk by paying you before the work is done).
Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, difficulty settings, runs like butter, and is all in all a super polished game. IMO this was GOTY shit and I don’t know why it didn’t take off.
If I compare Chicory, A Colorful Tale (A) to Stardew Valley B:
A: 97%/1987 B: 98%/483781 on Steam
A: 93.2%=2317 B: 97.33%=562`831 on Steam.db
I don't know where the disparity comes from, but those 4 % are significant. And here's something even more important:
A: 8 in game B: 36`293 in game
8/1987 = 0.4%, whereas 36`293/483781 = 7.5%! Stardew Valley, it seems, has 18.75× more replayability (which absolutely makes sense just based on genre).
Also price:
A: $14 to $20 B: $7.49 to $15
Shouldn't be surprising a game that is considerably cheaper, is more fun and provides that fun for an order of magnitude more time, sells better. It also was released earlier, so it got more sales from the "tail" sales, as well as it provided more value in the form of updates. In fact when I look now at the player count history, it's uneven, perhaps driven by updates, but the tendency is that it grows!
One more thought: maybe Stardew Valley makes for a better streaming content for some reason?
Perhaps Chicory deserves less sales than Stardew Valley, but still considerably more than it got? Maybe its good reviews come from the fact the game reaches the niche very well, it's clear what you do in the game (paint), but maybe this niche is just small?
I can admit I never heard about this game, despite its very high rating.
Now that I’m looking at my steam library I have some other games I think deserve more attention:
- Citizen Sleeper is not unlike Disco Elysium or a visual novel. But its mix of space opera and cyberpunk dystopia is extremely compelling. Excellent OST, and heartfelt characters. You get a real sense of the desperation and humanity of the impoverished, the undocumented, the refugee. The word building is deep and expansive (a sequel is coming, to not enough fanfare imo).
- Umarangi Generation is a photography game where you are playing as a propagandist during an ecologically-vibed apocalypse. You explore scenes of war, poverty, luxury, and terror, taking photographs all the while for the cause. The capacity to tell a deeply layered story with multiple political factions and economic groups merely through environment is stunning. The expansion is absolutely seething with anger.
That branding cost a lot of noteriety in the West.
> Stardew was genre-defining
What is the argument here, that it was very good? That's exactly my point, it was very successful because of how good it was (rather than lucky).
Good indie games are ignored all the time. I tend to seek out indie games explicitly because I don’t have a huge attraction to most “triple a” style games (I dislike fps, sports, 4x, mmo, puzzle, and sex appeal. So I’m mostly limited to not-Witcher open word rpg. Platformers, roguelikes, metroidvanias, horror survival etc. tend to be indie.) So basically I’m usually stuck with “why doesn’t anyone scream about this game more”. Rain World was like that until Downpour came out, finally some fucking attention to it!
One thing you have to keep in mind is that we're all snowflakes to some degree. And so it can feel unfair when a game that really hits our preferences just doesn't receive as much attention as we think it deserves, but that may not necessarily be because people are unaware of the game, but simply because our preferences are not necessarily widely shared.
It's kind of like how in writing a Dan Brown is always going to be vastly more popular than an e.g. Dostoyevsky. It's simply that one author has much more mass appeal than the other. It can feel like a shame for fans of the latter, but it's the way society has always been and probably always will be.
This is offtopic but the forager lead dev is often criticized for claiming to be a solo dev and taking credit for other people who worked on the game.
I.e. "make a fun game that has organic viral growth"
As if developers don't want to do that. You have not provided any information of value here.
Organic viral growth is extremely rare, and "fun" is a useless descriptor for someone trying to replicate "fun" in their own game. Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?
"build it and they will come" is almost always a lie, and the times it's not (I.e. organic viral growth) are not replicable.
If you're making something you have to solve for distribution. Just making the thing isn't enough for it to succeed.
Of course nobody wants to make a game that isn't fun. But I know just how easy it is to get caught up into the "hustle" mentality where all you're focused on is getting the features complete. Once you're in this mindset, it becomes very easy to realize that your own game isn't even fun to you. This simple reminder is huge, should be repeated often, and is great advice.
Make a game that you would enjoy playing for hours on end, and you'll likely gather an audience of people that also enjoy it. It really is amazing at how easy it is to forget this and end up building a game that even you, the creator, don't enjoy playing very much.
Likewise, it's very easy to focus on small slices of gameplay and ignore the cohesiveness of the entire game. If different mechanics are super fun, but aren't fun together, you will have created a game that isn't fun.
Many games aren't fun, but many games are fun enough or are marketed well enough. You won't stand a chance without going above and beyond in one of the two executions.
I mean, why do people want to write buggy software? It's not on purpose, they're just not good enough to deliver quality in a timely fashion.
My experience with most indie games cannot deliver on a core gameplay loop that's satisfying, even when that loop is not the draw of the game in which case I'd expect them to ape something competent.
IMO an example of a studio that doesn't mess this up is Giant Games. I've liked some titles more or less but the core gameplay loop has always been competently designed.
I'm criticizing the shallowness and lack of information in the comment. Everyone knows games should be fun. Saying "[the game] needs to be fun" has literally 0 bits of information and is a lazy explanation for why games don't succeed.
art has to risk failure or it’s not art. perhaps has to even be near certain to fail.
no one should be depending on art to feed their family.
no one should be making art for any reason other than love.
art must be beautiful.
as many have pointed out, blockbuster movies and triple a games are interesting, but they are not art.
So "the game isn't fun" needs a lot more context on who is saying it, and is useless otherwise. Do they like your genre? Are they miscommunicating what sounds like a game design issue when it could be an art/sound issue? Did they just grab your game in a bundle/gamepass and weren't really in the mood to play your game?
It's all speculation. And it's probably better to find better feedback than try to psycho-analyze every comment that way.
Cognitive dissonance and inertia, among other reasons. When asked if the game (which this topic is about) was fun, the author beat around the bush. Even the positive reviews on Steam make it clear people didn't often really want to play the game more than once. The top review on Steam [1] is some guy talking about, "Had a LONG night of playing this yesterday with my mates..." with less than 2 hours played, lifetime.
The developer clearly knew, deep down, that the game wasn't really fun, but he convinced himself it was. And that's really really easy to do. This is one of the few things the mega-studios get right. They're more than happy to cancel big games they've already sunk millions into if they're just not working out right. As an indie developer you either have to have some crazy degree of introspection, or a few friends who understand that absolutely tearing down what you've spent thousands of hours on is the biggest favor they could ever do for you.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/342920/Toto_Temple_Deluxe...
You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales if released today.
That seems to me to be true of most (every) industries / areas of human endeavor?
In fact, I'd argue that, having managed to kill the assumption that "newer game == more lifelike graphics" (possibly still valid for AAA, but only there), has dramatically lowered audience expectations in recent years.
There are a dozen rogue-lite survival zombie games released on Steam every week. (Only a slight exaggeration).
For a AAA example, Lawbreakers is probably one of the more recent stories. It was a game made by a director behind the acclaimed Gears of War (Epic's biggest series until Fortnite) thst was like Overwatch, but released a year after. Of course the game wasn't made in a year. But had it released 2 years earlier it might have been able to reach a bigger crowd rather than slowly fade into a niche cult following.
It wouldn't have zero competition in 2015, and I'm not talking about it coming out a decade prior, before Team Fortress 2. two years isn't even half a generation (or a quarter, in gen 8's eyes). I think your metaphor is a bit slanted here.
Also, I'm not saying Overwatch wouldn't have overtaken it anyway; But a year of being around would be enough to establish an audience and keep the game around. For a live service game this is key.
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>Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.
Sure, and pong was successful because it came before brickbreaker. Well, brick breaker is Lawbreakers in this case, the difference between cultural phenomenon and "but you HAVE heard of me" (which is an increasingly harder bar to clear).
And as a tangent, this is also why I'm never a fan of naming games in conversations. I don't think Overwatch is nearly as good a game as people think, it just got all that viral fan art and (previous) goodwill from a company gamers (previously) trusted. But there's some just world fallacy going on mentally in that I am inherently "wrong" when bashing a successful game and also inherently "wrong" when I praise a non-successful game. Because surely if a game fails it must have been bad right?
our perceptions are influence not just by quality, but by the zeitgeist around the games. Especially when we can't truly define why those games are "fun" to begin with.
At some point the needle to hay ratio becomes untenable and searching the whole haystack is no longer possible for a single person. You can still randomly sample the stack, though, and rely on the opinions of others to find what you personally missed, and good games with mass appeal do tend to rise a little bit from random players stumbling across them; maybe not to blockbuster status or even profitability, but enough that a game with a marketing budget should get more than 21 Steam reviews if it's genuinely appealing. There's really not a lot of cream at the very bottom.
And that isn't just some sort of academic point I'm making. Seemingly the overwhelming majority of indie success stories are achieving long-tail success now a days. Increasing numbers of indie games released like a decade ago are having better play figures today than they did at launch. This includes both the extremely well known titles like Terraria [1], as well as those that are still relatively unknown like Kenshi [2].
Valheim dropped early 2021, just into the 2nd year of real COVID measures including lockdowns and an overall social atmosphere of "stay hunkered down at home and don't go anywhere". It was absolutely perfect timing, and I am 100% convinced it would not have done _nearly_ as well if it released 1 year earlier or 1 year later.
It's hard to make a shitty game successful without a AAA marketing budget sure, but it's also hard to make a good game successful without either a AAA marketing budget, or great luck/timing.
Making games break even always was 90% marketing though, maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own, but that definitely wasn't the case for "non-indie" games since at least the late 90's (the way how game marketing is done has changed dramatically though).
That was never the case.
Just that some indie that made "good enough" or "great" game got lucky that they got picked by "right" streamer or youtuber that liked it and it got virally popular off it.
Like I doubt Minecraft would explode as it did if Yogscast didn't pick it up and made a popular YT series about it, which also made modders jump on the then-barren game, making it even more interesting.
Pretty sure before Yogscast there was already the rollercoaster minecart video released and on Kotaku (and other sites) that made Notch a millionaire overnight.
Yogscast may have helped shoot it into the moon, but Notch had already joined the mile high club by then.
It may be a matter of marketing and luck to make money on a "good" game, but a brilliant game is destined to spread like wildfire, because the gaming community is enthusiastic enough to look for such gems and announce the findings.
These games aren't selling, cause everyone can tell they've got nothing to say. The know-how that goes into making them is very good, but the content itself is hollow.
Steam's most played is plastered with games from 2015-2019 because nothing has knocked them off the throne yet. We all should be wary of making "a game" or "an game" or "a remake" and only make a game when we have something worth saying in a game format. The premise is so underrated lately.
We know what happens when the games market is saturated with hollow, empty games. 1983 video game market crash.
It's okay with me if it crashes. My core ethos is that cream rises to the top. It should be hypothetically possible to make a video game that sells in the great depression or whatever economic nightmare. I wouldn't try to do that, because it's basically insane to try... but if you're going to make a game, don't half-ass it. Have something to say!
It has to be worth playing and buying even in hard times.. Just making "AN game" isn't enough. The Hollywood screenwriters would beat a premise to death before green-lighting it. I only say that to point out that the phenomena exists in other industries too.
So much this. This same theme repeats itself all over the place. Humans have an amazing BS filter. We can detect ingenuity even when we don't understand it. That's why I'm not too worried about AI.
With almost every aspect in life--just focus on being a real, genuine person and the rest will work itself out.
It won't, at least not in terms of money. Most people's indiosyncracies aren't conducive to making enough money to sustain oneself - that's why we have the job market, where people sell their time, and spend it doing stuff that other people actually want to pay for.
On the contrary they are selling more than ever. RE4 remake isn't too old yet and is smashing records set by what was an evergreen title 20 years ago. What major blockbuster remake bombed in the last few years?
>Steam's most played is plastered with games from 2015-2019 because nothing has knocked them off the throne yet.
The most played games are very specific, multiplayer genres, designed to be played for years on end. I see Counterstrike (Fps), DOTA (RTS), Rust (survival),TF2 (Fps), Call of Duty (FPS, and a Remake to boot), GTA V (the 2nd highest selling game of all time, from 2011), etc.
If you don't value those 3 genres or have already played 3000 hours of GTA V and are done, I don't see how this list is of value.
Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game.
However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is expected to sell 5M copies is going to have a much larger budget than a game that is expected to sell 10k copies. Add to that the lower price of indie games and there is a huge budget difference.
The end result of this is that as a gamer I can choose between a €20 indie game representing maybe €500k of development effort, or an €80 AAA game that represents €200M of development effort. The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.
So what non-multiplayer AAA game you played 400 times as long than an 10 hour indie experience ? Or did you had 400x the fun playing it?
That's very MBA way to look at it. Game's budget is only vaguely correlated with how good it is as a game. Sure prettier blah blah blah, but we had plenty of big games coming out mediocre and just being bought coz of market inertia of average non-internet-scouring user buying next AAA title from big publisher and not even looking at the smaller ones or indies.
Like, if I look at the top amount of spent time in game (the "value" per spend money) it's some small dev management games (Factorio, Banished, Rimworld, X4), the type of game that most AAA developers just refuse to make in the first place. Most of "singleplayer story driven ones" I've played also fall out of AAA space because while 20 years ago industry was busy making games like Baldur's gate or Fallout, now anything similar only happens in sub-AAA space.
I don’t care for those kinds of games at all. That’s the problem with most indie games: they rely solely on gameplay. Me, personally, I’m more into story driven games, and that additional budget buys you better writers, actors, mo-cap, etc.
> the type of game that most AAA developers just refuse to make in the first place. Most of "singleplayer story driven ones" I've played also fall out of AAA space
I’m mainly a PlayStation gamer and they release a lot of story driven single-player games. It’s the may reason I stick to PS. God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, TLoU, etc. are all amazing games and impossible to make on a small budget.
I have yet to see a story as good as the Blackwell series. Perhaps you have made up your mind that indie games do not have good story lines, so you are not looking for them. I don't know.
The thing is, I have limited time to play games, so I can be very selective what I spend that time on. This means I can limit myself to games that do everything right, not just one thing. That means story, but also production value. Good acting, good mo-cap, good graphic, a good sound track, etc.
Why would I spend the limited time I have for gaming on games that don't check all the boxes ? There may not be a lot of games that do, but there are enough for me to only play those kinds of games.
But honestly I don't play AAA titles because they are expensive (don't feel worth it for me, so similar argument as yours), and are designed for long immersive sessions and not 20 mins here and there. There are secondary factors like Linux compatibility and disliking the companies. For story and visuals I prefer films. Second hand I hear that mainstream titles are either designed stupid easy, or in a small niche with spiteful level of difficulty, but this is probably exaggerated sentiment.
I like films, but the problem with them is that they have to cram a story into 2 hours, maybe 3. With games being 20-40 hours, there is much more room for in-depth storytelling and world building. Also, being in control of the main character makes a story hit differently from passively experiencing it.
because they were first. Look at later games from the list http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/games/
Gemini Rue, Primordia, Technobabylon, Shardlight, Strangeland, but especially Unavowed!
Clifftop Games Whispers of a Machine and Kathy Rain are also good https://store.steampowered.com/developer/clifftopgames/#brow...
This in effect is why you're indirectly picking games with massive advertising budgets - they're far more likely to reach you than the average lower budget indie game.
It's fine that you like games with high production values, but don't just cast the lower production ones into this 'low-value' bucket and never look at them. AAA games might be diamonds, but you might just find other types of rare stones in the other buckets.
You only list successes, but it's exactly this type of story-driven block buster games that can sink a development studio if just one thing goes wrong (and it doesn't even have to be the fault of anybody involved with the game).
Enjoy this type of game while it lasts, because this era is coming to an end, it's just not sustainable. Eventually each studio will produce an expensive flop, and it's much harder to build an AAA development team then to destroy one.
Do you also think blockbuster movies are not sustainable? Because AAA games have a very similar business model. Actually in some ways games are more attractive due to the possibilities with DLC.
In fact, I would say one of (if not the) greatest narrative games I have ever played, Disco Elysium, would absolutely be considered "indie" by just about every metric.
The fact is game taste is quite subjective and different people value different things.
My most favoure genre is roguelikes/roguelites which is just not present in AAA titles.
I... guess? If your only calculation of value is how much money was spent making the latest edition of a cookie cutter experience like 90% of AAA games are (because execs aren't willing to risk budget coloring outside the lines). And frankly I find that pretty sad, but looking at sales numbers I guess that's the majority of the gaming market.
However you can look at the same logic from a different perspective: If you're playing an AAA game, you're playing a game made for everyone - and therefore for no one. This is why some people (including me) aren't fans of AAA games.
Imagine the world (future) where material costs of most things are insignificant and majority of the cost of your food will be paying the designers of this food. Would you want to eat the same, bland (can't be too spicy, can't have particular ingredients-allergens, has to be safe for children…) stuff everyone else eats? Or would you develop a taste for something more niche?
Due to high budgets, the companies also don't want to take risks, that's why indie games are innovative (and that's why indie games fail more often?).
That's how modern gaming is. There's a lot of "free" stuff out there, but outside of Hogwarts Academy those players aren't looking for niche premium games. So you're no longer catching thst general audience, rather those seeking that certain design of game.
Welcome to selling pretty much anything.
"Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise." - Ted Turner
Absolutely not. The vast majority of games released on Steam are not good. You can verify this yourself by looking at new releases. Maybe one or two out the ones released the 19th of June are _potentially_ interesting.
Quality, defined as well-produced games in unsaturated niches, is really the only thing that matters, but marketing can be a multiplier of that quality. I've seen many games that blame marketing for their failure, and I have seen many games that fail despite their marketing. Usually those games are not compelling, and reviews will confirm this. It's rare to see games fail despite their high quality.
I mean if a handful of quality games are buried within tons of shitty games, what do people do? They buy a few random cheap games at first, then realized most of these cheap games are shitty and end up not looking at non AAA games after a number of deceptions. Instead they wait for AAA games to go on sales.
That is what at least what I did, instead of finding a gem among indies, I just wait for well reviewed AAA ones to lower in prices because I have other things to do than reading hundreds of reviews to make up my mind and find the gem among a huge pile of poo.
Additionally there are so many games entering the market that all of them cannot be reviewed so there is little chance your very nice indie game will be reviewed.
Another major problem is how long today's high budget games are. Not only the multiplayer "live service" casinos that are designed to addict their players and keep them playing in perpetuity but the modern single player open world RPGs that seemingly average around 100 hours of playtime. If somebody is playing 300 hours of that extremely bloated Assassin's Creed game about Vikings, they're not playing other games in that time and presumably have less interest in buying them. Likewise, stuff like GamePass and the new tiers of PS+ that offer access to an enormous number of games for a small subscription fee have to be cutting into game sales. And new games are also competing with 50 years worth of old games.
I wonder if many of the indie games, especially story driven games, might be better off as movies. Given how everybody carries a camera in their pocket these days, Hollywood movies are formulaic garbage and no actors are stars anymore, there's probably a market for innovative low budget movies shot in the woods on a single phone camera by a few friends and with little to no special effects. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than game development plus you'd get to be outside doing interesting things rather than just sitting at a computer for years working on a game that will most likely be played by a few dozen people.
I wonder if many of the low budget films, especially narrative focused films, might be better off as games. Given how everybody has a computer these days, AAA games are formulaic garbage and games aren't centered around a single developer any more, there's probably a market for innovative low budget games made in a basement on a single computer by a few friends and with little to no art assets. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than movie production, plus you'd get to spend time on the internet researching interesting technical problems rather than just sitting in a movie editor for years, working on a movie that will most likely be watched by a few dozen people.
tl;dr: I don't think a good movie is any easier to make than a good game.
I honestly like this kind of games (and buy copies of them). But as far as I am aware (I read quite some articles about this topic) such games typically have a very small audience that is highly positive about such games. This means: such avant-garde games, if they are good, do have their niche of people who will buy and highly praise them, but outside of this group, which is quite separared from other types of gamers, hardly anybody is interested in such games. In other words: you will sell some copies and get great ratings if the game is good, but you won't sell very many copies.
If you want to make a movie, it's never been easier! Grab your smartphone, write a script, grab some friends and have them read it, then post.
But from experience, actually making something passible (much less "good" or "great") takes years of dedicated practice, which is more accessible thanks to the above, but still doesn't really make the years any shorter.
The oft-quoted figure is that the production cost of the original Paranormal Activity was $15,000, and that was made before the advent of smartphones.
Besides, even if you did make the next paranormal activity somehow and it got a billion views on YT, you're maybe seeing a few hundred thousand in revenue at most (I'm being very generous there). The way to make real money in movies is still controlled by getting a theater chain to give you the time of day.
One gameplay critique I think this post-mortem missed was that the keep-away mechanic at the heart of the game is a zero-sum mechanic. One player is keeping away, and having fun; while all other players are being kept away from, which is frustrating. They addressed this a little in the fuller release but I think keep-away itself is mechanically bankrupt so even a gorgeous coat of paint can't bring it around.
All of the other local multiplayer 'successes' from this period were distilled fighting games - Towerfall, Nidhogg, Killer Queen, Duck Game, etc. These allowed for new players to enjoy themselves even in defeat. For Toto Temple, a game of mixed newbs and vets would turn into a vet running circles for the full time limit and then someone suggesting we switch to Towerfall.
Well this sounds like fun. Like the old social arcade experience, but made of people playing fresh indie multiplayer games. Even in prototype form.
Why not make THAT a business model? If my town has a little cafe with a few bit screens and controllers, and every night (or even once a week), I could turn up with a bunch of gamers and were all playing novel small games together, that could be really fun.
The games could be in varying stages of completion. It wouldn't matter. Because it'd feel like an intimate setting of people just hanging out and socializing and playing things.
Also in PDX: Retro Game Bar, Ground Kontrol, Quarterworld... there are others that host fighting game tournaments etc...
Unfortunately, it just doesn't make money for the people putting in work developing the game.
Throughout the article I kept coming back to how generic the name sounds. It conjured pictures if the digital slot machines that are free mobile games, with gameplay loops mostly consisting of waiting or paying money to skip wait timers. The name "Toto" being associated with gambling sure doesn't help either. I would've never clicked a link with that name no matter how good you make your game look.
A lot of genuine effort and care went into this but with an uninviting name and, by their own admission, a complicated control screen, no amount of art or advertising would've convinced me as a consumer to buy it.
This would've been a smash hit on a flash games site, and it would've probably sold well if Ouya had succeeded.
One thing I find interesting is that online multi-player wasn't added as a feature during development. I understand how overworked the lone dev must've been, but adding an easy way to play with friends would've surely boosted sales.
I also wonder if the game would've gotten more sales on a handheld. I think the 3DS might've made this a great little party game, especially if you follow the "stream a limited version of the game to your friends" model that made DS local multi-player so interesting. Now, with the Switch out, with its built-in local multi-player features, the game might've gotten a popularity boost as well.
It's sad to see a game made with so much love fail, but with problems in do many key areas I'm surprised it took them this long to admit defeat.
We kept improving the game afterwards and released the final version
of Toto Temple Deluxe on PS4, Xbox One, Wii U and Steam on September
29th 2015.
I can't decide if that's better or worse than Xbox. Xbox One isn't the original Xbox? And do I want Series S or X?
That said all the jokes at the time likely helped make it clear to everyone that the Xbox One was the new model. And Series S/X is just two letters, nobody seems too confused by that.
Just look at these names:
one, one S, one X, series X and series S
I had so much trouble figuring out which xbox was “the new one” when I considered buying one last year.
Though, Microsoft is never one for making names simple.
Not sure that you do, especially when offering "just add multiplayer". Clear sign that you are not a solo game developer.
Appeal of buying essentially party game where you need other people in same room to get the most of it (games like that are rarely good singleplayer) is very low, even worse in pandemic.
Not saying it would make game succeed, as that's still 90% marketing in oversaturated indie market, but it is a thing that would make me go "nope" if I saw what I like then read that it is local-only, hell, it did in many cases.
*I don't know how successful Overcooked was, but it was successful enough for them to make Overcooked 2
The PS4 was well ahead of any other console in sales long before the game was released onto the Wii U. I don't know their exact sales distribution, but I think a better game on PS4 and maybe Xbox One would've sold a lot more copies.
DAE this sounds like somebody mocking a siren?
They still paid for the initial development, so it is hard to argue that was a bad place to start.
I feel like "get the goat" was just screaming to the be the name of this title. (they even use this term in some of their marketing)
Maybe it's okay for a game that has lots of DLCs and a Deluxe version that comes with all (or the most important) DLCs. But nothing else.
But from initial launch? Just no, that is just stupid.
I agree that the name of the game contributes a lot to this confusion, although even "get the goat" fails to describe what is going on in the game.
I think when people see a game and are contemplating purchasing it they envision what kind of fun they will be having with it. And gameplay footage with unclear goals just isn't enough here.
"Keepaway" style games aren't super common (maybe it's in a Mario Party minigame? I've also played a version of this with my kid in roblox [1], where it's one minigame among many). Maybe along those lines this title would have succeeded with more variety.
At least for me, the name is an immediate "no".
* The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Deluxe
* Assassin's Creed 2 Deluxe
* Mass Effect 2 Digital Deluxe
When the fast cognitive System 1 [1] has to make an initial impression on a title, it uses all biases available to waste as little energy as possible to come up with an answer. "Unknown Deluxe" is very fast labeled as " janky cloned 5-minute games with 50c in the discount bin". "Assassin's Creed Deluxe" is just as easily labeled "some newer / improved release of Assassin's Creed".
New biomes were kinda interesting, but were they really needed?
Ok, I'm going to have to stop you there. These are two of the greatest games of all time. ALL TIME.
Their argument is that games that use titles like this, tend to be using these names to try to take advantage of the success of other titles with similar names. If your game is named "like another game", then your basically marketing it as "$y is like $x but better", but $y is rarely ever better than $x based on most people's experience. Once you pick up on that, anything marketed as $x tycoon is going to be viewed as "yeah it's probably terrible, like the other $z tycoon I already tried".
It was an interesting deconstruction though. The bit about the different trailer variations they needed to create is a great example of the value a good publisher can add. It seems like this team did a lot right though, just not the right game at the right time.
And this is what I tell most indie devs: you’re probably going to be a failure. So don’t go down making some bland cookie cutter game trying to make a few bucks. Make something truly unique, shocking, strange, something that no producer would touch, because you’re independent and can do whatever you want. You might not make money, but you might win some real fans. And in the end, what matters on this journey is the friends you make along the way and touching people’s lives with your game.
They were talking how from the get go their mentality was - if we're going to make a horror game, it has to be the most fucking horrifying game anyone has played. If we make a horror game that's kind of scary but not that extreme, then what are we doing?
I've strived to carry that mentality in all my projects since.
I actually played the game with the OUYA and then on PC. I think it failed simply because it wasn't super fun. We consistently got bored after 10mins of playing it.
Compare it to Towerfall. Also local multiplayer only and released initially for the OUYA. We played it for hours on end and I think it was a great commercial success.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2014-04-29-towerfall-tiny-sales-ouy...
I tried for a long time time do the indie dev thing, but i just didn't have the commitment to stick with it after a full time job.
The friends I went to school with who DID end up in games are not working on Dark Souls 3. They tend to work on shitty mobile games with barely any game play, and make half as much as I do with a way less portable skill set.
Personally: I am happy with how it all turned out. I prefer building actually useful tools and applications over building shitty video games.
After reading enough of these indie game funerals, I have come to the conclusion that there just isn't a market there anymore. I think the data agrees with me here.
I also make music in my free time, and it is a similar issue. I pour work into my music, and for what? For nobody to care or to listen to it. So it goes.
I think classifying the one (!!) programmer's work as uncreative when he got the game running on multiple consoles is completely wrong. That guy is your main asset, and probably your most creative team member.
"Creative" makes me think someone who is working on story, art assets, gameplay mechanics, etc.
Engine work can be good but it is not creative from the player's perspective. Maybe from the programming-for-the-sake-of-programming perspective it is.
Writing a video game story or drawing its assets aren't the only type of creativity, and in this case it sounds like the creative workload on the technical person was fairly extreme.
Then someone had to port the game, which doesn't involve 3d modeling, level design, sound engineering, or writing game's core code from scratch.
Nothing to do with creativity.
I doubt the dev got into game development so he could mess with console APIs and squash bugs.
Yes, but you're not an AAA game! Be small, act small. Smarter. More strategically.
But yeah, games are hard
I wonder how much it would cost to port to Switch as "Get the Goat" (or maybe King Goat, Goat King, Capture the ... Goat, ...). To capture that couch co-op long tail.
It's interesting how the marketing of other games impacts, particularly around naming.
The Stegosaurus tail link was possible more interesting.
(Props to them for their effort and this writeup, of course.)
Cuphead and Overcooked wouldn't come until a couple years later, on the next generation of hardware. It's easy to blend these timelines together in 2023, but at the time these things were worlds apart and not influential over each other at all.
Steam releases in 2015. Some 2200+ titles in total. Lot of them indie.
Notable pick at least Duck Game. For something completing in multiplayer games.
Then I lost track of the game.
It's funny that 2 years after this article, in 2018, Celeste became a triple-I hit using a similar dash move but single-player. Turns out pixel platformers still had some juice left, but couch MP is never coming back.
> we think the biggest factor is because it’s a local-multiplayer game with no online play.
Ultimately it's important to think about who the people on the other end of the console are who buy the game are looking for; in 2023, multiplayer games without online play don't fill a critical niche. I think it's easy to see people at festivals enjoying a game and think it's guaranteed money, but festival games atmosphere is unique, and not necessarily the same as just some dude scrolling thru steam looking for something to play.
There may be a shrinking market for those sorts of games, but I expect there are many people who only play Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. locally and never go online.
Couch coop only is an obvious mistake too because your convincing someone to buy on the off chance people will want to play it with them
Usually, I would not have bought into franchises, but I am giving in. The fact that Zelda already has so much culture, makes it a hit for me.
The trailer is just incomprehensible. I played a lot of PC games, but here I see the same drama like in pompous movie trailers, just 10x faster, and I still didn't get, whom on the screen I'm supposed to play for.
In the article when it gets to the question of whether the game is fun, the developer beats around the bush. 'Well you see...' which is as good as saying, "no." What's "fun" in a hyper-social 'indie fest' type of environment with a bunch of people wanting to like everything, has little relationship to what's fun when you're at home with some friends. In the right environment people can get really hyped and excited over a literal snail race [4]. It doesn't mean those people are watching snail race reruns at home.
Then there's the game itself. You can find the game/discussion of it here [1]. There were many complaints about bugs, misleading labeling, poor/buggy and unremappable controls, and more. There were also somewhat more 'positive' questions like somebody simply asking how to even play local-coop since it seems its not well elaborated on in the game. And the developer chose to completely ignore everything and everybody, making a grand total of 4 posts - including 2 about a negative review.
There is no recipe for success in games, beyond making good games. Games have become easier to make than ever (even back in 2016), players now have to-play queues months to years long, and there are simply a lot of really good games out there and more being released every day. This game, a silly casual party style game, was directly competing, in 2016, with games like Ultimate Chicken Horse [2].
There's also a lot of other problems. The game's theme isn't unique. It feels like a Goat Simulator [3] rip off, in terms of theme, even today. Incidentally Goat Simulator released just a couple of years prior to this game, so it was going to be bucketed there even harder back then. There's also the issue of price. You're going to be compared against games of the same price (such as Goat Simulator, again), and $10 is a relatively hefty price for this sort of game.
The game almost certainly would have well more than 5x the success it did at a price tag like $2, where it can be more comfortably bought as a joke or whatever. And if you want to get into meta-market gimmicking, add Steam cards. There's lots of collectors who will pick up cheap games with cards because in a number of cases, cheap games on discount can be bought for 'profit', where the card values themselves become worth more than the game.
But really most of all, just make a fun game. We live in an era where games can stay purchasable indefinitely on both PC and consoles. If you make a game that people will organically go out of their way to recommend, you're going to succeed. There's an ever increasing number of long-tail successes, and in games I expect this to increasingly become the norm. Even for games like GTA V, it's long tail success [5] is really starting to rival that up-front success that marketing budgets in the hundreds of millions buy.
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[1] - https://steamcommunity.com/app/342920/discussions/
[2] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386940/Ultimate_Chicken_H...
[3] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/265930/Goat_Simulator/
There was an ancient gamedev site in the ancient times of 2000-2001-or-so when the "indie" term first started being used online to describe what up to that point was largely called "shareware games" and the term already a lot of negative connotations attached to it.
I don't remember much about the site because i only found it around when it shut down but there was an advice from someone who actually made a living back then making games i remember that went something like: code, graphics, music, design, marketing are all aspects and elements of your game and they do not add, you can't ignore one and hope the others will pull it up, instead they multiply - fail to pay attention to any of those elements and it will drag down the rest.
I paraphrase a bit (or a lot) since it has been more than two decades since i read that but i think it holds up today as much as it did back then.
Disagree. I think it genuinely looks significantly worse: it's so thoroughly brown, and the blocky level design looks like a zillion super mario clones. That seems like a bigger factor to me; yes, it matters that you can't tell what's going on looking at the gameplay, but that would be much less of an issue if it looked good/interesting.
Consider indie titles like Minecraft and PUBG taking off with completely ripped off assets and game ideas because they made a great version of an existing concept. Minecraft had the visual style of a 2005 bargain bin game and PUBG is the blandest of bland models and art design coupled with a good implementation of their earlier mod. You don't need to be all that original, gameplay or art style wise, to make a game successful.
I don't think this particular art style was all that common on the PS4 or Xbox One. There was a lot wrong with the way they presented and marketed the game, but I don't think the art style is that much of a problem.
The problem is that they often jump over the first step of learning how to make a game and go straight to publish their barely passable buggy mishmash of half baked ideas with no quality control or beta-testing done.
What they first should've done is make and publish a few small but fun games for free, learn from their mistakes and user inputs and use their new knowledge to make a bigger, better game. If enough people tell them that it's worth buying it then they can sell it .
As for the article, it was an interesting read and I almost predicted every raison why the game was a failure but I don't agree with some:
1.The "strike a deal first" one is nonsensical. Get famous enough on one platform and the sales will be as good on the others. 2. Only one console at a time should've been obvious ( currently it's the Switch first, others later)
I also think that a significant part of the failure comes from the fact that the market was saturated with party games at the time as i remember seeing a lot of ads about similar games and then it just stopped. Also, these kind of games are not really that interesting and become repetitive very fast and no single-player / online multi-player killed it before it was even out.
Hey, it worked for Adam Nickerson! Felicia Day and Adam Nickerson play Poosh XL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEbLXKKkvSQ