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Comment by dimgl | Hacker News Reader

I think the whole trope that “making a successful game is close to impossible” is overly cynical.

I’ve found a few people online say that they don’t understand why their game did really poorly even though it’s like X and does Y AND Z. So I ask them to show me their game. I haven’t found a single scenario where the game wasn’t unfinished, janky and/or just plain unfun.

I want to go against the grain here and say if you have a game idea, just make it. But don’t expect people to buy it if it sucks. Like with all good artists, you have to be conscious of whether the thing you’re making is a good product or not. I think the author of this article realized that eventually.

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I see this sentiment a lot on Twitter and Reddit, but it's a an overpressured Copium tank

You can see a ton of polished, fun games that weren't successful by just skimming over lists of games on phones, Steam, or Nintendo Switch. I'm not going to bother linking any of them, since you're just going to nitpick and insult the work of random people you don't know, and it won't be a productive path of conversation.

That said, you can redefine your idea of "success" a little and make a comfortable living: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmwbYl6f11c

> nitpick and insult

Sorry, but this is disingenuous. Valid criticism is not "insulting". Additionally I've already watched that video. That developer purposefully made an extremely niche product that only a fraction of people wanted and was able to make a living doing that.

Which... proves my point. His games don't have mass appeal at all, so they don't make money.

I've been through the Switch catalog. There is so much trash on there that it's unbelievable. In fact, most people will agree that these App Stores are chock full of garbage games. I get ads for garbage mobile games on my Instagram feed all the time.

Making a playable game and making a good game are two different things. Most games are simply not good games.

Edit: I'd argue that you can't give me a good example because they don't exist. If there was a game you truly loved that was an underrated gem, you'd be super quick to show it. And that's what I'm trying to say: this concept of a polished, good game that is inundated and skipped on by the sheer amount of volume of good games, in my view, simply doesn't exist.

It's not valid criticism though. You just said:

> I haven’t found a single scenario where the game wasn’t unfinished, janky and/or just plain unfun.

You could easily find lots of problems even with hugely successful games like Vampire Survivors or Enter the Gungeon. I'm fully confident that given a random assortment of fun, polished, shipped games that didn't go viral, you'll be able to come up with a long list of complaints.

Right but in this argument the onus is on you to find a game that should have been successful, but wasn't, due to the sheer volume of good games, not the other way around. You're making the argument that there lots of games that are polished and deserved some kind of success, and are inundated by other polished games. I'm arguing this simply isn't the case, and most indie devs that have complained about this have not made good, fun games.

Flaws or not, Vampire Survivors and Enter the Gungeon found a market because they were fun games that had some redeeming qualities that wasn't widely available on the market at the time. Other examples: Project Zomboid, Shovel Knight, etc.

Edit: still waiting on ONE game. Just one. Feel free to edit your comment with a game that deserves more recognition.

The best game that exhibits this is Among Us, but not in the way you think.

What you're actually getting at here is a hypothesis that success for a game isn't contingent on circumstances, a variant on the "a truly good game, will sell" hypothesis.

Among Us is a very clear case study to the contrary; it's a clear example that success, even for "truly good games" -- IS contingent on circumstances. Being a good game -- whatever that means -- is necessary, but not sufficient.

Among US was released in 2018 and it was a flop. I know the development team, and before the game released they were ready to call it quits any day.

It wasn't until 2020 that a particular streamer picked it up and that, combined with the pandemic, vaulted it to mega success. If that hadn't happened, it would have been a flop to this day.

This was a multiplayer game, and so if at ANY POINT they had given up the ghost and just shut the servers down -- as they very well could have totally rationally done -- it would have never taken out, and if I were to have shown you Among Us as a game that was good but didn't succeed, I'm sure you'd pick it apart and say, well of course it wouldn't succeed, look how much it sucks.

Do you also know singleplayer games that are examples of truly good games that don't sell? I can totally understand that it's hard to get the ball running with a multiplayer game where it's necessary that enough other players are online at the same time.

I'm sceptical of the assumption that "you can make a truly good game and there's a good chance that it won't sell at all" that can be found in online discussions. Instead, Ryan Clark's approach to consistently make profitable indie games seems very plausible to me.

So I would add a few caveats to the hypothesis that "a truly good game will sell", such as the importance of selecting a viable genre and ensuring that development costs are not overly high, but otherwise I still believe in it...

This is a great anecdote. There's always so much competition in B2C products that there is always some element of luck.

I have to say that although I agree with this example here, I've seen lots of examples of games that, for all intents and purposes, became successful simply because they were good. Games like Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, Project Zomboid, Factorio, Hyper Light Drifter, etc. A lot of these games had insanely small budgets, horrible conditions and/or adversity and yet their creators persevered.

If you make a good product, you will eventually find a market for it. At least, that's my take. But I totally get the other perspective. There's definitely an element of survivorship bias here.

To be fair the market forces that apply to multiplayer games are quite different from singleplayer, on multiplayer you have network effects and such to worry about. I, personally sorta... buy the twitter cope? But I think it obviously doesnt apply to Multiplayer.

Altho, actually going to check my assumptions.. I found that out of 200-ish randomly selected steam games. I could find about 5 that were singleplayer, genuinely unpopular and looked good in screenshots/descriptions. Out of those only 2 didn't review poor to middling, and 1 of those passed the subjective test of "Would I play this?".

(The game was rotatePDF: a corporate tale)

EDIT: This is what I'm talking about. Not a productive conversation. You've convinced yourself that every failed game dev deserved failure, and all you have to do to prove it to yourself is make a half-assed complaint about every game you see.

Send me an e-mail and I'll just message you every game I come across that should have been a hit and wasn't, once you get tired of it you can block me

An example of a game I think should have been a success but wasn't is Counter Spy released for the PS4. It's a really fun game and just stumbled on it in the PS Now catalog.

This is a great example! I took a look at the trailer and I think the artstyle and gameplay looks really interesting. I took a closer look at it looks like reviewers at the time had a lot of technical issues. I wonder if those issues are now fixed. Did you play it on the PS5?

I played it on a regular ps4 and there were no bugs.

> should have been a hit and wasn't

care to share a few of those on here?

Why can't you share it here, on Hacker News, for everyone to see? These games deserve more recognition. Please, I want to be proved wrong here.

How about much of Obsidian's catalog pre-Pillars of Eternity

Do you mean Neverwinter Nights 2? Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_Entertainment#Games

KOTOR II, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas are all well-regarded by fans as cult classics more or less, but suffered from typical Obsidian bugs and poor sales and/or critical reception.

A while back I watched a video on YouTube, and I forget the name and creator, but the basic idea was there are too many "good" games. Good just isn't good enough anymore, there are also too many great games to have time to play them all anyway so why waste your time with merely good games? I tend to agree with that when I look back and think of what games I spent my time on in past decades. Cave Story made a huge splash when it helped kick-start the indie revolution, but would anyone notice it now?

I agree that there are lots of poorly made games that predictably flop. However, it's also worth noting all the bits of a game that matter outside of the executable. Knowing where your audience hangs out and how to reach them, having the ability to make compelling trailers and screenshots, having press contacts to help promote your game, crafting a viable monetization strategy, etc. All these things matter more than most observers would think when differentiating between known and unknown games.

It also really depends how you define "successful". I've put out 3 mobile games in the last few years as a solo or mostly-solo game dev[1]. Each one has been game of the day on iOS and received other prominent featuring. From a critical and editorial standpoint my games were successful. From a "is this a sustainable career that supports me financially" standpoint, not so much.

[1] You can find my games at https://birdcartel.com Let me know if you think they fall into the unfun/janky bucket.

Hey! Cool games! I think mobile is a different beast altogether. A majority of the games I was talking about are on the PC/console market where players tend to have a lot of disposable income and rely on stores (like Steam, Nintendo Shop) to find games.

Mobile is much harder. I think that is one medium where I agree that the OP is right. Because the games tend to be simpler, the barrier of entry is reduced drastically, so it's much harder to have sucecss. Serious gamers won't play mobile game and casual gamers are fickle, so just making a "good game" on mobile doesn't apply. I think it's especially true for word games (I saw you made two).

Nonetheless, your games look cool! I don't think they're games I'd spend more than a couple of minutes on (much less spend money on), but who knows? I think you should keep making more. The last word/numbers game I spent money on was Threes, and that was only because I heard about how 2048 stole the concept from that game. Not sure if that context even helps.

Thanks for sharing and providing some concrete examples.

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