Hacker News Reader

Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

As someone who lives outside of America, I find the article's implicit assumption that every videogame developer is American makes many of his arguments less convincing.

Like, I understand that $120,000 isn't a lot for a team of 3 Americans. But that's a pretty good amount of money in Poland, Brazil, or Vietnam. So why don't we see these "missing middle" games coming from those places?

Sure, American publishers aren't interested in writing small checks... But what about Chinese or Indian publishers?

View on HN

What’s interesting is that with national markets there’s a bit of product market fit. A good example is Japan; there are a lot of Japanese games developed that have good domestic product fit but zero appeal internationally.

Poland actually had CD Projekt Red, but Cyberpunk 2077 from that studio was perhaps one of the greatest dumpster fire releases of the current decade. Don’t know about India, but a lot of Chinese development is gacha-based with limited western appeal. (It also does not help that the CCP censors are not particularly fond of video games.)

> Cyberpunk 2077 from that studio was perhaps one of the greatest dumpster fire releases of the current decade

That may have been its critical reception but the game was wildly profitable for CDPR: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/04/17/cyberpunk-...

Look, they had me at Keanu Reeves. Still loved the game. It was pretty decent. I think maybe they overpromised before release, if you didn't expect nothing more than "oh cool Keanu Reeves is on this thing!" then you would have enjoyed it like I did.

I think gamers keep expecting groundbreaking games, but there's only so much "new" most games come up with. The really creative games are made by Nintendo I feel like, every other one is once in a blue moon from different studios.

I don't think it was that, it was how amazing their announcement video was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99qJGrPNLs

I still watch that thing sometimes because it was so good. I think people reacted to the potential of the ideas put forth in that trailer.

in hindsight, I'm pretty sure that video was used to gauge interest before they started building the game, but for many of us it was a sign of what could be. And I think a large part of the response to Cyberpunk's release was what it wasn't.

I mean it was also very buggy on release to the point that it got delisted on Playstation, which is not a thing that has happened to a major release before.

It's quite disingenious to talk about the failure of Cyberpunk 2077 while discounting the massive success of The Witcher from the same studio

It’s the most recent release and the Witcher 4 is projected for 2026.

> Don’t know about India, but a lot of Chinese development is gacha-based with limited western appeal.

Is this really true?

My understanding is that the best selling mobile games in the US and EU are largely from Chinese developers and Chinese studios and Chinese publishers.

I believe any mobile game on the App Store that is MMPG and does their ads up in a cartoonish illustrative way (rather than just going with unadorned or loosely adorned screenshots) is Chinese. Tencent has some really popular ones in the west, though it might be an age thing since I don’t know anyone who actually plays them except my wife (who is Chinese).

I don't think we should merge the market of gamers with the market of mobile gamers. The two things can overlap, but the target audience is wildly different.

Microtransactions are frowned upon on Steam, yet we try to consider the two markets as the same group, even though "console/pc" gamers constantly avoid this mechanism.

Didn't blizzard taught us something with Diablo Immortal?

>Didn't blizzard taught us something with Diablo Immortal?

yeah, that it's insanely profitable to make a mobile game with a popular IP. I heard it made on the order of $500m in its first year despite the bad PR. But that doesn't really apply to most games; if you have a valuable IP you can get away with a lot of monetization schemes or simply lack of quality (Pokemon) that would crater most other studios.

I agree with your point but more for the fact of formats rather than monetization. Making a continually updating mobile game is basically untenable for a single developer, but the norm in mobile. So making a game that can target the mobile market properly is an impossible goal from the outset for a small indie team. At least in America (I'm sure some small chinese teams can pull this off given their CoL). Your best bet is keeping a mobile build of a premium game working on the side to make a future port easier to do. Won't make as much money but it is relatively easy side income if you have a successful PC/console game.

Genshin Impact is extremely popular in the west.

Right but that’s not the “missing middle”, that’s the most popular game on the app stores making billions in revenue.

Mid-range stuff has not really come ouy of China. The only game that comes to mind by Chinese indies is My Time at Portia, which had alright gameplay but was noted for janky localization.

Ah, I was just trying to rebut the claim that Chinese developers can't capture western markets in general.

Mihoyo is a juggernaut at this point, which speaks to the worldwide appeal of Chinese game dev but absolutely precludes them from the "mid-range" category, lol.

It’s also a sample size of one. So to me at least it’s still the exception that proves the rule.

> But that's a pretty good amount of money in Poland, Brazil, or Vietnam.

I've never been to Brazil myself, but someone said that an iPhone is $3000 USD in Brazil, so I wouldn't blindly assume that $120k is super amazing to developers there.

Also, I quickly googled and found something that resembles an family house and it is very expensive at $280k[0]. I could very well be googling incorrectly so HN Brazilians can hopefully add some context.

[0] https://www.realtor.com/international/br/alameda-ezequiel-ma...

120k is definitely a lot there. According to Glassdoor that's almost 10x the average software developer salary in Brazil. You can see people making 25k-50k, but that is not really normal, unless you're working for a foreign company. iPhones are expensive for other reasons, people just gotta sacrifice other things in order to buy them.

This house is definitely way up in the upper range. It's not where a middle class developer would live. I just sold a couple flats in a big city there (60m2 / 80m2) and made around 80k.

So who are the wealthy in Brazil? If software developers are making peanuts, what is the road to financial success? I hope it's not just inherited money.

Probably. Maybe a CEO or CTO? I don’t know those people. Maybe my parents who bought their house cheap in the 90s?

But don’t get me wrong, software developers do incredibly well there compared to the rest of the population. But income inequality is off the charts, so you have people earning nothing and also those million dollar houses that few can afford. An engineer working for an USA company remotely could probably rent it.

Not having software developers being able to afford million dollar houses isn't a problem, as long as they actually have a chance to buy a house and live reasonable middle class lives.

Yeah, completely agree.

The wealthy are never software developers. Software developers can hit upper middle class but that is it.

The wealthy that were software engineers founded startups and became CEOs.

(Yes Silicon Valley salaries seem ridiculous but cost living is jaw dropping)

No matter where you are, you can still embrace adtech and get your work monetised through that route. I personally know of a team in India that spent 2 years working on some mobile game, which was plain garbage after all that time investment. I don't think they even released it. Smaller games churned out every quarter would have been so much better for them. Working for years on the same project with no reward would likely drain most people and turn them away from any profession.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com