War of the 3D Engines
irrlicht3d.org
irrlicht3d.org
90% of developers are releasing shitty or niche games with no sense on how to market or monetize to the audience. It's the #1 problem of the indie game developer right now- they're building games that they themselves want to play, instead of the games that actually work for the market.
It's the difference between a professional and a hobbyist. If you want to make money, stop being a hobbyist and turn into a professional.
For professionals, none of these engines are cheap by any means. Unity is $4500 per developer once you add Pro, iOS, and Android. Unreal / Cryengine are potentially going to cost you a whole lot more than that given the 5% gross revenue share.
For hobbyists, yes, the price is low and probably not sustainable, but for professionals I think it's priced perfectly.
Usually it's a mix of both that makes it happen, you start with what you want to play and adapt it so others want to play it too.
They have to think what the sponsors want, not what they or the players want.
They are most often targeted at casual gamers with a huge focus on micro-transactions. Most hardcore gamers stay far, far away from such games.
Most of the mobile development I see is as you said, for the publishers/sponsors to make money rather than for the consumers to enjoy. Rather sad indeed.
And the top 100 lists have usually been an instant-avoid for me, as they have tended to be either freemium-milk-the-user games, or brand-name-port of something that would be better on PC. So I guess at the end of the day, I'm no longer a target demo lol.
I get the feeling that they targeted some arbitrary demographic and worked through a checklist of features and finished when that was completed rather than iterating on an idea until it was good and working out from there.
1) you're bang-on-correct.
2) that why i only read industry analysis from folk who are making money for a living doing it. not a guy who hasn't shipped a game. not a guy who's only tinkered with small libraries.
3) more to your point, a hobbyist can't even USE unreal or cryengine. how many posts of "why doesn't this look better? i'm using unreal!" have you seen? "well, for one thing, you don't know a lightmap from a bumpmap and your game stutters because your objects have 50,000 tris and you're doing 200 draw calls on each one...."
It's the difference between a professional and a hobbyist. If you want to make money, stop being a hobbyist and turn into a professional.
This kind of thinking is the reason why the contemporary video game ecosystem is so dull. When you orient everything around profit and "working for the market" (appeasing to the lowest common denominator), you make crappy products that sell, but fail to leave a lasting impression.
It's the reason why demos are no longer released, a few levels or even core game functionality is shipped as DLC, games no longer ship with mod tools and why you get tons of microtransaction-focused games with predatory mechanics. Among other things...
I agree with the 90% thing, it is Sturgeon's law. But to say that the root cause is indies not exploiting their players for $$$ is ridiculous. We need visionaries and hobbyists who develop games they want to play.
It's the same reason why 90% of the cars coming out of the major manufacturers look like identical bars of soap and come in shades of black, white, silver, red, and blue. The market's taste is generally very dull, and people want cars with styling that doesn't vary far from the norm.
The further you get from utilising the core functionality of each engine the harder of a time you're going to have, and this constrains the genres you can work in. This is the main reason that a lot of 2D titles developed in Unity purely for iOS <-> Android portability have performance problems (things like the alpha cutout stuff goes a long way to helping here), while their showpiece games, such as those by Madfinger, that simply use the built in physics run perfectly. Sadly I can't be specific, but I have run into some amazingly simple games that ran like absolute dogs thanks to their inappropriate choice of middleware.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/mozilla-and-epic-games-brin...
Afterwards, in each case when the economics make sense businesses pay large amounts to buy additional premium version licensing, training, integration, and add-on tools. As primarily customer hosted software the additional cost of free riders is low, at least as low as the advertising costs required to grow the paying customer base by the same rate.
What you see here is what's called "A healthy market" its an attribute of capitalism, and its great for customers, and its great for their customers customer. Another "phenomenon" that comes out of a "healthy market" is innovation. People come up with better features, when price alone is not enough to stand out, people will search for something new.
We're either going to see A. Bankruptsy from a bunch of old engines or B. Some really great new features that make the product stand out in a unique way.
Unreal / Cryengine = 5% (Negative responses of high cost) But they actually provide the tools and are makers
Apple/Google = 30% for providing an app that lets you support their OS (What's an OS without Apps)
So basically you would distribute the same way as in PC. You buy the install files in physical/digital form and install it. Then enter cd-key or something.
And of course somebody would come and make some kind of store to make the purchasing easier just like on PC. (for example Steam)
And yeah. Its ridiculous when Apple/Google take shares of the profits, comparing to what UE4 for example takes.
That's how you used to buy apps for phones. And you know what? Not many people bothered; it was a pain in the ass.
And heck, you can still do that on PCs, but most people go through Steam—because it's a much better buying experience.
"Valve captures 75 percent of the global market for digital PC games through its Steam store, researcher IHS Screen Digest has estimated."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-04/valve-lines-up-cons...
And also:
"Publishers earn a gross margin of around 70% on Steam, compared with 30% via retail stores."
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe-newel...
Apple gives you a market place to provide marketing, handles the "do I trust them" problem, makes the pain to pay nearly non-existent (another CC form?), and handles the installation process for you. Ditto for most other platforms.
The platforms are more acting like Publishers than frameworks now, so directly comparing these prices is a bit hard.
UDK was a great platform, but the scripting language was hell. It was like being given a helicopter and flying it with your feet. This was really the reason why we moved to Unity, because it was so much easier to code inside their sandbox.
Game tech companies need to realize that developers love fully featured software, and we are willing to pay for it, we just don't want to pay out the ass for it per dev. It looks like Epic sees this and is jumping on it, CryTek following suite, I wonder how Unity will step up to the plate?
Edit: added a missing word.
Based on industry knowledge, the AAA flat rate game licencing costs don't seem to be going down.
One reason might be that once you have a few Unreal engine / Cryengine games under your belt, the cost to switch engines is HUGE. You're basically locked in unless you want to re-hire / re-train the majority of your programmers.