Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020.
Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.
Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.
And I think making an excellent game is a lot like reaching product-market fit. It takes fast iteration with user feedback to find the fun, then a ton of polish to make it extraordinary. It has to be so good that, out of those 73,000 games and counting, I’ll spend some of my money and time on it.
The way GenAI can help here, I think, is the first part of this problem. Help me iterate quickly to find the fun.
Then, let me export to Unity / Godot / Unreal to begin the polish process.
Making an excellent game takes quite different skills than creating a commercially successful game; just compare "pop culture" (optimized to be commercially successful) vs "high-brow culture".
Even if you are not the "extremely high-brow taste" kind of person, there exist quite some video game genres in which excellent games are produced, but the audience of these games is a quite small (but sophisticated) niche audience, so that just by volume, games of these genres likely won't make a lot of money.
You have defined it to mean "high brow"
Both in
- "high brow"
- niche genres
categories (which I both gave as examples) you will likely find quite some games that that are excellent, but won't make a lot of money. But don't pick too much on these categories since my central point is "Making an excellent game takes quite different skills than creating a commercially successful game".
And no those games are far from excellent, I play a lot of such niche games but they all suck quality wise compared to mainstream games with similar sales, I play them for new experiences but I never expect quality from them. So it is much easier to sell well enough to maintain an indie team by making niche games than by making mainstream games since the competition for niche markets is so much smaller.
Maybe you think that "100k" copies is a failure since it didn't sell millions, I have seen people thinking along those lines. But no, 100k copies is a massive success, even 10k copies is more than enough for a 1 person indie game, so those "indie gems" hardly failed at all.
I understand your point, but I hope people are seeing the irony of making such arguments under a post detaliing how the median game on steam can barely pay rent.
I don't think even if you filtered that data for "overwhelmingly positive games" that it'll suddenly average $500k+ revenue.
>Maybe you think that "100k" copies is a failure since it didn't sell millions, I have seen people thinking along those lines. But no, 100k copies is a massive success, even 10k copies is more than enough for a 1 person indie game, so those "indie gems" hardly failed at all.
really depends on team size. 100k is good, but divided among a team of 10 and after steam cuts, a $5 game is getting roughly 35k for a dev. You know, minmum wage in high COL areas. likewise for a solo game that made 10k sales.
My definition of success is as simple as "can the studio sustain itself from the sales of its games?". Maybe in a day where rent wasn't $3000+, but not these days in the US.
Channels like Splattercat are a great resource for indie gamers & studios alike: https://youtube.com/@splattercatgaming
Just is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Remember, Microsoft gave Ninja a $55m contract to stream on the now dead Mixer. And ofc Ninja mostly streams the most mainstream of mainstream games anyway. These top streamers are way more expensive than any ad program to just approach and inquire to.
anyways, to answer my rhetorical question: I hear the rule of thumb is either $0.10-0.20 per video view, or $1 per concurrent view as a starting point. you can use that to guestimate whoever you had in mind when you were thinking of paying a streamer.
Then the division of labour was to find the editor or the producer to take your work to the next level.
Does this matter? There are lots of big budget games that don't feel big budget.
I would even go as far as to say it's easier to distribute indie games to different platforms, for a lot of reasons. Mainly that you have a lot less people to pay and you're likely using an engine that can do a lot of that technical work for you instead of an in house engine.
Source: I worked in game distribution.
Maybe if your goal is to "win", to be the biggest and most profitable game. But most of the best games become so because they don't try to rise above the noise. Do something very very well and you can abandon all the trappings of the top-tier games. I just paid 20$ for a game about puzzle boxes. It isn't flashy. It is just a fun game about a very niche topic. It will never top any steam charts, nor is it trying to do so. It is just a fun game for people that want to do puzzle boxes. It is still "great" imho because, frankly, I bought it and don't regret paying for it. That alone puts it above 99.99% of games on steam, all those games I would never consider paying a dime for.
There's a large, large gulf between "the biggest and most profitable game" and "I spent months of my life working on this, and made less than a month of rent."
The puzzle box game may be awesome and well-worth your $20. The developer still might rightly have concluded that "damn, this was a huge waste of time. Gotta go back to my Wal-mart job."
I think a lot of smaller developers are misled by things like game jams. Get a highly enthusiastic group of people in a room and the games they're going to respond well to, and the feedback they're going to give is going to be utterly worthless. What's fun to play in a highly social setting with lots of other hyper enthusiastic people, for 5 minutes at a time, does not translate at all to what people are interested in buying and playing at home.
Can you list some here?
Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545990/Deadeye_Deepfake_...
Tandis: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1297210/Tandis/
Nidus: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2372170/NIDUS/
Recursed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/497780/Recursed/
HyperRogue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/342610/HyperRogue/
Can Of Wormholes: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295320/Can_of_Wormholes/
Mosa Lina: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2477090/Mosa_Lina/
Sigma Impact: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654890/Sigma_Impact/
Wilmot's Warehouse: https://store.steampowered.com/app/839870/Wilmots_Warehouse/
Filcher: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1355650/Filcher/
Magicube: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2216120/Magicube/
Stick It: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1828900/Stickit/
There are a ton of indie multiplayer games that at one point would have appeared on this list, but as small multiplayer games are starved of population they enter a death cycle where new reviews are negative as a result.
I decided to look up Tandis first. First off the game has been featured on Ars Technica [1], Rocker Paper Shotgun [2], and lots of other places. So it's definitely not like nobody heard of it. But it just doesn't really seem to drag people in. The reviews, positive as they are, all seem to stop playing after an average of around 3 hours. In fact a huge number of the positive written reviews have less than 1 hour of lifetime gameplay, which is pretty weird for a game that comes at a relatively premium price. And the peak players, a month after release was 7. [3] I'm guessing the players that moved on after such short timeframes probably weren't actively recommending this game outside of those reviews. Would you have actively recommended it, outside just filtering your library and seeing it there?
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/tandis-review-the-ult...
[2] - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/geometry-puzzle-game-tandis...
https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-s...
This article explicitly mentions that that ratio only holds for hit games, and mentions that the ratio for smaller games is roughly 1:20, which is still a high ratio compared to figures I've heard in post mortems.
Assuming a game with 1,000 reviews that takes ~3 years for 1 developer to make and support that sells for $15 at a 1:20x ratio. We're looking at 210,000 after steam's cut and before taxes, this developer at top of our review range is making ~70k a year before taxes that are calculated on one year of income. Many small indie developers lose ~35% of their income to taxes alone on game sales and so even under nearly ideal conditions for this 1000 review max constraint we have a developer earning <$50,000.
Note that many of the games I listed are highly rated but have less than 200 reviews
EDIT: I often reccomend Tandis to people, it's a great puzzle game that builds geometric intuition, and it's designed to distill that intuition into a roughly 5 hour play time.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=steam+reviews+to+sales+rat...
[2] - https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/ann...
https://steamdb.info/app/1545990/charts/
Note that many of the highly rated games I shared had sub 300 reviews, so even if you were to have a great 60:1 ratio for a game with 300 reviews priced at $15 you're looking at a $185k gross after steams cut and before taxes for potentially 3+ years of development and support.
I really hope I'm wrong here because I would love a meritocratic indie game scene to keep flourishing, but the greater trend I see is a bifurcation between indie games that synergize with streaming and social media to become breakout hits and excellent games that prove more difficult to market that struggle to tread water.
[1] - https://vginsights.com/insights/article/further-analysis-int...
---
Indie - 65:1 sales:reviews
$10-$20 - 65:1
>90% (review positive) - 51:1
250-1000 reviews - 89:1
Casual (genre) - ~70:1
---
The only thing that contradicts my 60:1 claim is the date datum, but I would take it with a grain of salt due to a endless quite obvious biases. For instance that article is based on the data 'leaked' up to 2018, but that leak was closed in June 2018. So you not only are missing half the year's data, but the two most critical holidays. There's also lots of different demographics that will have different purchasing/reviewing trends. For instance many people don't buy new releases, or buy them and only play/review them much later, and so on. There's just lot of biases in date alone.
On this site we often get a very unrealistic sampling of economic reality, because a lot of tech stuff is based in locations with extremely high local inflation both in costs and in compensation. For the US as a whole, median personal income is $41k, about $55k exclusively for full time workers. [1] $185k with ongoing passive income is doing wayyyy better than average even in America. And of course with independent development, you're not tied to any location. You could move to anywhere in the other 95% of the world where $185k would spend much closer to something like a million dollars. Places like San Francisco and Seattle are absolutely pricing out small scale entrepreneurship of all forms, but all that means is that we'll instead see things coming disproportionately more frequently from the other 95% of the world.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
Picking your first example, Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum has about 460 reviews, roughly 20,000 copies sold, an estimated revenue of about $120,000 while it's still in early access, and apparently a developer team size of 1. I'd guess that this game will net the developer several hundred thousand dollars over the next 10 years.
(Regarding multiplayer games: yes, these are a different case because they need to reach some critical mass to have a chance.)
1. He isn't working on this exclusively. In the update notes, he mentions that he's making the game in parallel to a job. He recently finished his degree and sometimes takes time off for his next project. In 2021 he said, 'As I’ve mentioned before, game development is not a full time job for me, it’s just a hobby that consumes a lot of my nights and weekends.' Obviously this must be considered when evaluating the revenue.
2. After he finishes the game, it will still have a long tail of sales over the following years. He can develop another game, whose long tail will overlap with the first one, then with a third game, etc. But I don't know how to estimate these long tails after the first couple of years.
3. It seems to be his first game on Steam.
This is actually a very interesting case. I think he does most things right (though he doesn't seem to do enough marketing on Twitter). I assume that he'll arrive at a place where he has the option to go full-time sooner or later.
I've found steam review percentages to be one of the biggest tells of a games quality, and so many games don't even have good reviews.
Steam early access launched with only 12 games in 2013 and Kenshi was one of them! This is not evidence of the algorithm working, it's evidence of Valve employees personally going out of their way to try to sell this game to you!
95% of my game purchases are based on:
- reliable 4 player co-op play PvE. Can opt-out PvP if it's there.
- reasonable reviews. Doesn't have to be fantastic, we've been around and seen some shit.
- released for 6 months with patch fixes to match
This cuts down the number of games I care about on Steam considerably. We often struggle to have something new to play and go back to the favs.
[snip growing rant, try to stick to the point here]
if you believe in the social media discuourse, "making a good game" is enough, and Steam algorithms + word of mouth will boost it up for you. I think that's highly unrealistic, but I do think making "a really good game" will guarantee a certain minimum sales on Steam.
I also don't think that minimum sales is close to sustainable compared to a minimum wage job, but that's always the part of the conversation left out. $10k in a year is a great side hustle and well above the median. It's a complete failure even for the most humble game dev that lives in a carboard box and survives off of potatoes.
A hit in gamedev is not easier than creating a hit in the music industry really. Even the veteran composers are not able to replicate (or even achieve) creating a hit. Possibility of success depends on many factors which change constantly, and success hinges on your ability to "read the room" which is the sound palette and the persona (for the artist that "performs" the music) millions of people are likely to find interesting at any point in time.
If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke. Same is with gamedev. Your passion project most probably is not the thing most people want at this point in time. No amount of marketing will solve that problem. Your efforts at marketing are doomed to have negative ROI. Maybe you are a year too late? A decade too late? Maybe a couple years too early? Maybe what you think is fun is not really fun in the general sense and will never be?
I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. In the same vein, I'd struggle to find a hit game that succeeded because of marketing. No amount of marketing effort can beat thousands of people finding what you do interesting and sharing their opinion in person, on social media, youtube etc. If you have pockets as deep as Coca Cola, you may influence the culture through your marketing efforts, influence what "should" be popular - but if you are not that, you need to be an expert at reading culture of your target audience and cater to that. When you do that, "marketing" will be a walk in the park. Or else, even if you spend enormous efforts in marketing, it will only generate negative ROI.
You're punching too high. Music is a passion for many people. Same as game dev. I would expect >95% of game devs to be perfectly happy if they can make a living creating indie games. Of course it's nice to make a hit that makes you tens of millions of dollars, but most game devs would be happy to make enough to pay themselves a salary to live on.
Now, if we're not looking to make a hit, but we're looking to make a living, there are a lot of composers out there who can consistently achieve that (e.g. beatmaking for rappers advertising on youtube and such).
> I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing.
I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example.
> I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example.
Flappy Bird is a bizarre exception: it was a massive viral hit before it was voluntarily withdrawn by the developer feeling guilty over its success. It was then cloned a lot.
Steam reviews are a great way. Lots of folks, including myself, try or tried to seek out these hidden gems on Steam. And Steam provides some great tools to try to find them. [1] It just turns out that there simply aren't many games at all with genuinely high reviews, but very low player numbers.
There's a whole bunch of great games in the ~200 reviews category with high reviews, but I'd generally consider that successful. The average game gets something like 60:1 sales:reviews, so 200 reviews is around 12,000 copies sold. You're not going to be getting rich off those numbers, but that's more than enough to live an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world.
I guess you don't live in the US or Canada these days. Even if the game was $20, 12k copies sold is $168k raw revenue, after steam's cut. if you have 2 people working on it, you make above average revenue, for one year.
If you have 3 people working on the game, that is below median income for the US. And it gets worse for any assets you buy or contractors you need.
Even with 2 people, you have to remember that you don't get benefits from being a full time indie. so even 80k in this situation if it's a true 2 person team may not be so much much better off than flipping burgers with healthcare/dental built in. It's a rough economy right now.
Medicine and other stuff is similarly reasonable. I had the first cavity in my life fairly recently. A dentist trip, cleaning, filling, and related care cost a bit more than $10. And that was at a private provider, so nowhere near the cheapest. And then on top of this taxes are way lower, and the first $250k (for a couple whose earnings are split) are US tax free - the US has the distinction of being literally the only country in the world that insists expats continue to pay US taxes.
So you have this thing where an indie developer living in San Francisco is probably going to end up homeless, whereas on the exact same income they could be living an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world - 'Asia', India, Eastern Europe, South America, even some places in Africa are starting to develop pretty reasonably. Wherever, there's something for basically every taste and desire somewhere.
That's a nice sentiment for those who live in the not-US. But sadly most game development is in fact located in the US and Japan. For the US, many of the developer scene is in fact in higher cost of living areas like California, for the same reasons those areas have top tech companies and universities.
So I'm not just speaking for myself when I say that your estimates do not compare to most minimum wage work, which has itself already ceased to be a "living wage". It could certainly shift, but those are the current breaks. Your favorite indie games are likely made by North Americans as of now, and their survival depends on their ability to survive in North America. The one exception I can think off the top of my head is Team Cherry in Australia, which is not in a much better CoL situation if they are in the cities.
American or not, I don't think the solution to finances for online development is to emigrate out of your home country, away from your community, life cultures, and overall lifestyle. Tech is a big enough part of the US economy that everyone doing it would weaken the dollar itself, and then everyone loses given the current way the world economy works.
I don't know how to get meaningful stats on game development locations (because you need to exclude shovelware), but I know that in my library of games - American companies are few and far between except for big AAA titles, though even there things are getting a lot more diverse. For instance Kerbal Space Program is Mexican, Starpoint Gemini is Croatian, Space Rangers is Russian, Conquest of Elysium/Dominions is Swedish, Endless Legend is French, Lost Castle is Chinese, Crusader Kings is Swedish, Battle Brothers is German, and so on endlessly.
And in my experience lifestyles only improve abroad. All the niceties you're used to still exist in pretty much every semi-major hub around the world, and then much more on top. As do large communities of other expats. If somebody just wanted to be in a mini America, or even Silicon Valley, each and every day - they absolutely could. Think about how in the US basically every major city has a little 'China town.' It's the exact same thing abroad with Westerners, often with a tech bias.
Generative AI notwithstanding, in order to make a game you will hire some artists, and the best artists are "getting paid in USD" already, to use the words from this discussion thread. They may be talent living locally, but they work on-line, too.
Thus, successful indie games usually have budgets "in USD" and sales "in USD". I mean, making one is still a first world problem.
Among Us is a good example. It was out for over a year before it exploded.
It got found by streamers and that slowly spread in that space before even the biggest ones were playing. [1]
It’s not about challenges in finding success, so much as, at least in music, artists don’t want to follow a formula. They want to create songs and melodies that are personal and meaningful to them and their fans.
They know this, too. They budget so that their 1% massive hits pay for the 99% that nobody cares about.
Inorganicly chosen winners is a problem, but in the music industry, the end product itself doesn't exploit the listener beyond just that.
Games are ultimately tech. And games grew along with the internet. It was inherently going to be run more like a tech company than a media conglomerate for that reason. I see it less as games being exploitative than a double edged sword, like the internet itself. It can be a lot more exploitative. But it also opened up entire mediums of ideas and arguably tore down world borders.
only if you're looking at the most general audiences. That's the advantadge of targeting a niche. Not everyone will buy furry art, but the ones that do have high demand (and apparently, deep wallets). Indies can't afford to be "for everyone", and even AAA games are struggling.
But if you want an obvious example of the latter: Raid Shadow legends. Literally spends millions upon millions on advertising a year, and I can't imagine many would organically find and talk about such a game themselves. But even after 6 years they seem to have the funding to get every youtuber under the sun to talk about it. You very much can outadvertise a mediocre game as long as you have the right monetization scheme (which spoilers: is not "buy one copy of $10 game).
Or we can acknowledge that making a great game is extremely difficult and expensive, and not dismiss the whole industry
There are 1 million subscribers at the gamedev reddit. It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike answers.
The places I frequent say that about games all the time. For instance, though the game I mentioned gets highly praised there, almost everyone trashed the author’s previous RTS game. Some places might give every game universal acclaim, but plenty of places have people who will openly call a game garbage.
Or you have developers like Iron Tower Studios (Age of Decadence, Colony Ship RPG). The lead developer actually seems to have pretty good business acumen, and is pretty open about the studios finances. But he’s also a perfectionist, and the huge amount of time between games means that the studio requires a lot of sales to stay afloat. The last update from them I saw was that the launch of Colony Ship was good, but it’s still unclear if it’s good enough to support them for several more years while they make another passion project.
That the dev spent tens of thousands of hours on a very niche genre, and that it was better to sell to 10k fans @$45 than to risk selling 25k copies @ $20 (random sales numbers).
It's a common strategy in Japanese game development. Some games are just very niche, so lowering the price doesn't necessarily increase sales proportionately. It just means less money from financially inflexble fans. So keep the price AAA level and target those fans.
Compare Etrian Odyssey (SEGA) with Disgaea (NIS). Both games are a fairly comparable genre, with fairly comparable production values, targeting the same demographic, and both were also PC ports/remakes of older classics. Disgaea is less than half the cost and has is pushing an order of magnitude greater sales. Also I think the concept of "niche" is somewhat obsolete.. kind of circling back to the point that none of us a snowflake. The market is so huge and diverse. Even for the most niche titles, there tends to be huge market potential, because "niche" markets now a days are larger than the whole market not that long ago. Games like Mount and Blade are just niche Eurojank embodied, yet has sold millions. Siralim is another great niche game. It sells excellently, especially considering the dev keeps releasing pretty much the same game ever couple of years.
Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers. Region pricing kind of adapts to this, but not really. In terms of exchange rates it's extremely favorable, but what really matters is PPP - how much a unit of currency is "worth" in domestic prices. So for instance the $45 game is sold for about 1000 rupees. I don't live in India but a quick search turns up a rent-by-day place in the cheaper parts of India can go as low as 100 rupee a day. So even though $45 exchanges for like 4000 rupees, it's worth far less (in terms of how far it goes in America) than even the 1000 rupees that the game is sold for India. So when you set the price of your game high in dollar terms, you're setting it to just LOL terms for most of the world.
The market is larger, yes. I don't think it's gotten that much easier to target your marketed towards those audiences. the privacy changes on IOS/Android are great, but it has an unfortunate consequence that these more intimate styles of ads are now nearly impossible to channel to the right person. So you have to go to the good ol' fashioned social media blitz. Something everyone else is also trying to do. It's never been harder to get a person's attention.
Essentially, those titles you mention relied heavily on word of mouth (except Mount and Blade, but that was from a different era of gaming). I'm not sure I trust WoM enough to stake my entire livelihood on it. Gamers can be fickle, or timing can just take some cruel turns and ruin all that trajectory built up.
>Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers.
I don't disagree. But the top factors still apply. Very few are going to risk losing the USD to try and get more rupees/yuan. Russia and China in particular are pretty infamous for their piracy rates.
On top of that, getting a good localization can be too much for a smaller indie, and even those who afford it can never assure quality. Localization is a very hard process for games that need more than simply UI text to be done.
I remember playing a ton of awful shareware games as a kid, on floppies and disks packed with a few dozen each. Same thing later on, bringing a game home from the store only to realize I'd chosen poorly.
And it's easy to get a bit jaded after years of experience and look back with a rose tint. I loved the hell out of that junk as a kid, because it was still the best stuff I'd yet seen and I had time to spare. Today I'm a little pickier.
>It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike answers.
This isn't limited to r/gamedev. Reddit is asking the blind to lead the blind, and maybe once in a blue moon you get an actual expert to help. They often leave once they realize everyone else is blind and questioning their experience, though*.
Sadly, the best place to find the best answers is to find people live. Be it in town, during a conference, or just hoping they accept a cold invite on their social media and choose to respond.
>I don't think that's the case. Just look at the 90s, early 2000s.
yes, you neede to know someone at Nintendo (or later, Sony) just to get your game in there, know how to make your own assets and levels without a high grade commercial engine, and get Nintendo/Sony to approve it. There were a lot of gatekeepers to making an indie game back then, so there were almost none.
Meanwhile, Shareware was hard to profit off of on PC (remember, it was not commonplace to have a digital wallet back then). There may be some great games, but few would be profitable without launching on console, being on store shelves, and overall supporting a propreitary machine.
(*me being an example. Though calling myself an "expert" is an overstatement. 10 years in industry isn't nothing, but also is far from authority level in any technical field).
This is entirely you hallucinating an opinion they never expressed. The op said:
> Making a game
not a _good_ game.
AI makes standing out harder; we're not ready for the sludge era of having seven billion people and ten billion games.
The next thing isn’t a never-ending list of AI generated games stored somewhere that we’ll have to sift through somehow.
The next big thing will be ephemeral games, created on the fly based on the context and the preferences expressed, both explicitly and implicitly, by the player’s (or players’) past behaviour (and, for multiplayer games, that of their social graph).
That and perhaps, if we manage to preserve it and keep it alive, an industry of hand-crafted games made by people trying to beat the odds.
Start-off with generic, "one size fits all", generated content, using a few parameters such as rough area, time of day, time of the wear, what’s currently popular at that time in that area, what’s popular with the person who created the link if they got in through that, etc.
Then, use the player’s actions (playtime, engagement, sharing, whatever) to infer preferences, and fine-tune the model using both context (time of day, location, other players if multiplayer, etc) and those preferences.
Again, recommendation engine, applied to generative models.
I wouldn’t wager on how distant or close that future will be.
I don’t think it’s doable today, but it’s so obvious that I am certain people are currently working on it. And perhaps some duct tape (sorry, heuristics and expert systems) may be able to somewhat fill the gap in current or near-future models’ capabilities.
But I’m certain (unless copyright laws end up killing such use cases), that it’s the future for both streaming platforms (Netflix, Disney, Spotify & all), content-driven "social" media platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram,…), and video games. Most of them anyway. Some might doubt it can rival with the greatest movies, books, or games, but it doesn’t need to. It just needs to be as good as the cheap filler content these platforms are mostly filled with.
I just hope we’ll find a way to preserve those industries so we can keep getting great new things.
There will still be professional developers who figure out the gameplay mechanics, design style, difficulty balance, progression, and more. Maybe there will be more customization around the edges due to AI, but most players want to grab a ready to go game and get playing.
(And that's why I stopped making games :P)
I used to be able to make a game in a few weeks from my dorm, add Mochi ads, upload it to Newgrounds, and then it would spread to thousands of sites and get played by hundreds of thousands of people.
In general, the revenue you make from a game seems to be related to it's production value.
I say no because that isn't marketing. But I say yes because its what makes it easier to market.
Literally no one who has ever made a game says this. Making games is so incredibly hard that the phrase “making games is hard” is a running meme!
The sentiment here is true of all software and always has been. However, it does not mean that making a game/software isn't hard, it means that marketing it and selling it is a different problem space that people underestimate.
Why do you think publishers invest in new games instead of just hunt for diamonds in the rough?
Especially now with ever increasing rates of ADHD and other stuff, having an old school genre like an RPG have that type of stuff as a "reward" for beating a level or whatever reinvigorates a genre that felt outdated due to a lack of a proper reward structure.
Fact of the matter is, if you as a game dev want to make money, better lose your inhibitions real fast, because the consumers, want more choices in their game, even if it's just romance for the most part.
Look at stardew valley, I would never have played it if I hadn't found out you could literally date and marry a girl in the game, it just added a layer of reward to the gameplay.
Consumers don't want pornography in their games, they're completely different products: visual novels are closer to a slideshow than a game
People buy good games and they consume pornography, conflating the two doesn't help us analyse the market.
That said, I agree there is probably more money in pornography than in making indie games (which explains the explosion of the genre)
Yes obviously no one is saying elden ring will have pornography, but there are a lot of games that did sell or would sell more with more romance and to a stronger extent sex stuff in them.
For example take an RPG, like Witcher, Cyberpunk, etc. They skirted the line but it's obvious that people want to get to that point in the in-game relationships, it is what it is, it might offend certain people but fact of the matter is, I don't think the people offended are a majority.
You can always have that content as a DLC and sell it separately and or to block it from countries that don't allow it, but let's not pretend like it doesn't sell.
Larian very very lightly did this in divinity 1 and I was kind of bummed out that it wasn’t fleshed out playing with my wife.
I kinda do. I just want them to be more than a fade to black implication or awkward not even colliding meshes with low res genetalia.
It's a landmine, so no AAA dev is doing any of that, and it's really high tech to do convincingly so few indies can pull it off. That's why 2d works like VN's tend to be the best compromise. a gif loop or a few still frames and a seductive voice can be just enough to sell the scene.
> they're completely different products: visual novels are closer to a slideshow than a game
most western ones. They're "expensive" to westerners, but if you ever buy a decent Japanese VN you can understand the appeal. full voice acting, multiple different scenes and poses, an actual attempt at a narrative (we can argue all day if it's good, but so many western ones have shifted to "haha quirky meta" as a substitute for substance), good music, etc. Some even have some surprisingly addicting gameplay, which makes you question why it's categorized as a "visual novel". But that's marketing for you.
I don't blame you for your opinion, but I assure you it can be done right.
Interesting reason. But I guess everyone's different.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of most romances unless it's a central point. They just feel so superfluous because you need to rely on very strong charaterization to make it work. Hard to do if you also need to focus on making a good core game.
The number of games you listed just highlights how little Steam filters.
At the end of the day, much of success just hinges on luck. There is no law of the universe that says that great art must be appreciated.
For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.
7/10 on Steam and Metacritic. Reviewed by major publishers. Over 100 reviews.
Not sure what you mean by "no traction". But I'm sure it did fantastic in some alternate universe because Sean Carroll.
Based on the number of years it took to develop the game, it wouldn't be considered one that achieved "15 minutes of fame". 100 reviews is quite a far cry from your example of Balatro with 33k. I'm not sure where you plan to draw the line on "success", but I think this is a broadly reasonable contrast.
I only have 40 steam friends.
Secondly, these sorts of discussions usually don't define any concrete amount of success that a game is supposed to achieve. What is "no traction" supposed to mean? Aegis Defenders has 1,656 reviews at the moment. There's the assumption floating about that you can roughly multiply this by 50 to get the number of owners, which would turn out to about 80,000. The price point is fluctuating between $19.99 and $4.99. Will it net the developer/publisher less money over its lifetime than its development cost?
In any case, I think that one of the biggest factors is not merely the game's quality, but whether there are a lot of players hungry for a game's specific concept and genre. Making an "excellent game" in an oversaturated genre, or in a genre where games require some network effect to take off (any multiplayer game), is much more risky. Don't just make something good; make something that a lot of people want even when the product is less than perfect.
EDIT: VG Insights estimates $770k gross revenue. That's just for the Steam version. The game was also published on PlayStation 4 and Switch. The developer team seems to have been small.
Based on your reply to the sibling comment, you're just pointing out the "contrast" to the success of Balatro? I honestly don't get the point. I don't think the particular amount of success that break-out hits achieve matters to the discussion. If Balatro had a million reviews, would you expect Aegis Defenders to also have a lot more reviews and sales? I think this isn't relevant to the question whether excellent games will succeed (for me this means: enable the developers to make a good living) with some predictability or whether it's due to luck, and whether there exist a lot of excellent but unknown games.
It's very falsifiable. Just not by us, as we have no acccess to the sales data, nor enough public sales points to make a proper statistical analysis. The best ones out there are either based on estimations (especially reviews to sales ratios) or non-public data you pay the NPD or someone similar thousands to access (and obviously you're not allowed to share that data). So someone truly curious can pay a lot of money to get an answer.
There are a lot of games exactly like that, but haven't had the person with the viewerbase to boost them up. Nor will they ever.
Such as? Just name one so we can all know. This is your time to help them out no matter how little and there are "a lot" apparently so it shouldn't be hard.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1727180/NeverAwake/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1372210/Dap/
[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1400910/Soundodger_2/
[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084220/Cavity_Busters/
Failures are games with 50 or less reviews or a bit more if they have much lower price points, there aren't many gems at that level. Note that a large majority of indie game developers don't live in USA, indie gaming isn't dominated by American developers unlike the regular software industry.
The game is multiplayer which is a whole other layer of complexity.
Based on my experience in this market, I really doubt the author is happy with the outcome as anything other than a stepping stone to something more sustainable.
I think you're an order of magnitude too low setting the bar at 50 for professional developers where this is their full time job - even outside of the US.
I hope that this doesn't come across as moving the goalposts, but for me it's a given that popular Youtubers can multiply the success of a game, and that this depends to a large extent on luck. For me, the crux of the matter in discussions about game development profitability and survivorship bias is not how much luck influences the maximum possible success of a game.
For me the relevant question is: If you develop a carefully crafted, fun game based on a game concept you have reason to believe will have a decently sized target audience, will you make enough money for a living with some kind of predictability, or does even this depend on luck?
Now when looking at The Void Rains Upon Her Heart, I'd like to know the sales figures before the jump in popularity. You can filter Steam reviews to the period before the game's popularity surged in June 2023. At that time, there were 561 reviews (or 338 reviews for copies sold via Steam). Using the common sales estimation trick of multiplying the number of reviews with 50, we get approximately 28,000 (or 17,000) owners before June 2023. I think the price fluctuated between $9.99 and $6.99. Assuming that after Steam's 30% cut and taxes there are about $3 left on average for each sold copy, then 3 * 25,000 = $75,000. According to the game's credits on MobyGames it was made by a single person. Depending on how long he took, maybe it is reasonable to assume that the game was en route to profitability anyway?
A analgous statement like, "There are actors with world class talent who never became successful" is one that pretty much everyone would intuitively agree with, outside of maybe an internet agrument. Whether or not I can come up with some talented obscure actors on the fly doesn't disprove the statement.
Also low success rate comes from the fact that most of these games are asset flips. But we can conveniently ignore that fact so we can believe in the imaginary.
No disrespect to Balarto, but you just know that if it sold 1k copies, people on Reddit would tear it apart with the usual armchair criticism.
> this looks like a free mobile game > why are you selling a game about gambling? don't use poker cards > use a real engine like Unity/Unreal > rougelites AND card games are oversaturated, pick a better genre
Seen the same things over and over again for years. There's a huge "rule of cool" effect and popularity bias influencing such opinions that suddenly shift when a game is "a success".
>God exists. I can't show you God. But believe me God definitely exists.
I wouldn't call Gabe newell "God", but I guess others would.
But sure, you're free to message him, and he can definitely defy all ethics to show you the sales figures for every game on steam just so you can see how little the average indie game earns. I believe all of that is real. Not feasible, but not outside the realms of reality.
And again, survivorship bias.
I mean it's malicious
You get no credit for sitting on the sidelines and whining about how hard it is out there. And it shouldn't be regarded as an especially intellectual point to state facts like the size of the market or the relative success the average game makes.
We're not entitled to any sort of success of the things we make. All we can do is make the best shots we can and keep at it.
To be able to make a bunch of games easily that just you and your friends can enjoy without having to code seems like a good use case.
You're right, devs aren't as picky with tools as gamers are with games. As long as it works and is proven to save time, it'll sell. But the downside is that you're audience is much less.