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Comment by thataccount | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?

There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.

The problem the article is talking about is that publishers will no longer fund "AA" games with $2-15 million budgets. The game market has bifurcated into low end indie titles (< $1 million budget) and AAA games with budgets in the hundreds of millions. Personally I think this is a huge shame, as "AA" games were a lot of of my favorites during the PS2 and PS3 generations.

The article brings up a few reasons for why this has happened, such as the end of ZIRP and the complete lack of curation on platforms like Steam making it hard for titles to stand out. I guess if you're a publisher, you have a better chance of making a return on investment by funding 20 pixel art or friendslop titles and hoping one of them goes viral rather than funding 1 title like the new Myst sequel and hoping it doesn't get buried on Steam and the Nintendo eshop.

The funding climate for indie games is the worst it's been in a long time and it's been bad for over a year. Lots of publishers have stopped signing deals or are only funding small amounts with really bad terms.

The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.

Indie devs have the time and freedom to pursue any new ideas, and it seems like every couple of months a new indie game goes viral on Steam. But many of them are passion projects that were done in someone's spare time outside of their day job. If devs could give investors more confidence that a game will sell well or go viral if it hits a certain development stage, we could do a better job of directing game dev funding towards indie devs making truly fun games.

> The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.

I know a guy who works with one of those publishers.

According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.

You dump the 100m first and then you get to see if its fun to play. That's a bit hyperbolic but especially for big games, they really don't come together until the end.

Now, normally you could use pedigree to make smart bets about who can make a game but there have been so many buy outs and shake ups that a lot of the AAA studios have been gutted. Who is a hit maker now?

I don't see why they'd care if the game is fun to play. They care about revenue, and surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.

Fair point.

> surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.

Do they? That doesn't seem like a guarantee. Battlefront 2 was the most high profile game in recent memory I can think of. An otherwise fun game that bombed so hard because of microtransactions EA had to remove all of them and basically gave up on developing it.

Might there be so many indie studios competing for the same financing? So they can get financing for smaller games, because investors can just bet on 50 eclectic puzzle games, and if one takes off that will cover their investment, but they can't finance one larger game, because of the risk profile.

What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team.

What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

> What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

Seems no one has written "The Mythical Man Month" for the game industry yet.

It’s predominantly artists, and art pipelines are usually fairly scalable .

For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies.

The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (players, publishers, executives, developers) go through the roof. It’s very hard to look at those projects and not compare them to projects that are 4/5x that.

But the original game was very playable and fun. There are plenty of modern games that only have a tiny bit more game play.

Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.

I think out of the original team there where only 1 and half developers.

I think it's that Myst was released in a hungry, undersaturated market, and the competition is a lot tougher now. I truly love what Cyanworlds is doing, but the fact of the matter is, I'd rather be playing TF2 Classic, or Animal Well, or Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, than Obduction.

Another problem is, their games were popular at a time when most people didn't even have an internet connection, and therefore had far more patience for offline gaming. Their games require a LOT of patience.

Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs. Perhaps as a cheap way to show off CDROM capabilities.

Getting games installed and working in that era was often a chore. So when people sat down to play, it was already there for them.

Myst's sequels didn't sell as well as the first, despite the power of the brand, either. Likely because of competition.

> Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs.

I think every single shareware/demo disc I had also had some variation/sequel to Myst in one way or another too, somehow.

It was a ton of people's first exposure to "interactive multimedia", as I recall it being positioned at the time. I remember seeing both Myst and 7th Guest [0] in similar showcases in computer stores.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest

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