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Comment by karpierz | Hacker News Reader

Analogously:

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.

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Games market is rough but I'd take it any day of the week over the YouTube black hole.You're not finding your beloved indie film even if you type the name in verbatim.

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.

You can only play so many small narrative focused games before you realize they're pretty boring. Especially if you're saying they have few art assets. People say these things are great, but part of that appreciation is for the novelty of a game being so stripped down and devoid of gameplay that it feels interesting.

> You can only play so many small narrative focused games before you realize they're pretty boring. [...] People say these things are great, but part of that appreciation is for the novelty of a game being so stripped down and devoid of gameplay that it feels interesting.

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.

I really like narrative games and don't think they're boring, but the ones I play have hundreds of thousands of words of dialogue paired with reasonable gameplay loops, e.g. Failbetter or Spiderweb Software rather than critically acclaimed walking sims.

those games are not small narrative games. they're fairly large. I've only played sunless sea, which, tbh, I thought was dreadfully boring. I would have liked just reading the narratives but the forced tedium of sailing combined with ease of death was awful

The issue is that filming in meatspace is still often less complicated than trying to make those graphics on a computer (assuming your low budget movie has little to no CG). And if you want voices, you still need labor.

If you want to make a game, it's never been easier! Download Unity, download a bunch of free sounds/textures/models/etc, and then write some simple code to your things around.

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.

I think for most of the general public, a movie shot on your phone represents a significantly smaller burden than programming.

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.

But games and movies are very, very different mediums that don't substitute for each other very well.

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