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Comment by cevn | Hacker News Reader

Sounds really unfortunate. I also know little about this process, what do the publishers do that we cannot do ourselves? I guess they have pre existing deals with the major console makers that allows them to send things to market with little friction? Maybe that's why some indie devs just target PC, they lock themselves out of the console market but also don't have to deal with publishers?

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First and most important publishers provide funding. To give an example here is a work you need to build a small game and you can imagine how much it costs:

- 1 project manager / year.

- 1 game designer / year.

- 1-2 programmer / year.

- 2-3 months month of sound design / music.

- 3-5 artists / year.

Even if you have a great multi-skill team you need at least 5-6 people for a 6-9-12 months and it's would be very much skeleton crew.

There are cases where team of 1-3 people working part-time without funding can build a great game, but it's require both sticking to specific genres and greater use of ready-to-use assets which means it must be 3D. Game that small indie company will build in 6 month will take 3-6 years with a team working part-time.

Indie devs who self publishing only target PC because commercial porting sertvices cost starting from $10,000-15,000 per platform and it's gonna be way more expensive if game wasnt optimized for gamepad and big screens from beginning. And it's just impractical to port it yourself because it will take many months to pass certifications since know-how for proprietary platforms is not available on stack overflow.

Thanks, this makes a lot of sense, and I learned about how games are really created. It's sad because I see devs like Notch or Zeekerss who somehow go solo and make millions, but clearly these are the exceptions and these medium-sized teams are typically the minimum required to get a real game out the door.

There are no "one size fits it all". Some good games can be built by one person given there are right tools available and your skillset is align well. Problem with solo development is that you can't make a job out of it unless you are already have big community of followers or released something popular.

I sure it's possible to get $100,000 of budget for a new game as team of 5 people to release it within 6-12 moinths. Even without much of track record it's doable if you have cool prototype. But I pretty certain no one will ever give money to yet unknown solo developer to release the same game in 2-3 years.

Yet modern tools become better and better every year and even for $100-500 you can buy enough of assets to build something that look good enough in 3D. There are just certain genres and art styles that just require larger team.

Makes sense, the retro / pixelated style is always going to cost less, but maybe have less wide appeal.

To be honest this is quite opposite. When you make 3D game you can re-use a lot of models and art assets from Unity / Unreal stores and easily hide the fact by using some filters or shading configuration.

When you do pixel art you cant just buy bunch of art packs and expect them to work together. And for anything high-quality you'll be creating all the art from scratch for every project.

Of course I not talking about very basic 8-bit stuff, but about something that is actually looks good and well animated.

Interesting, so seems like asset stores are way bigger than I thought. I guess, when I think of Pixel art games, I'm thinking about indie games like Stardew Valley, Celeste, and Undertale, maybe I am just revealing my own gaming biases.

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