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Comment by soup10 | Hacker News Reader

Actual business advice: one really good game is better than a thousand OK ones. Gaming is a hits based business.

Making small games and prototypes may be helpful for learning code and game design since there is more experimentation in the early stages of a project. But there's lots of things shipping a larger project will teach as well.

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Actual business advice: creating a really good game is a black swan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory) and multiple attempts will yield better results than a first big one (think very low probability as opposed to very very low probability).

If making games were like spinning a roulette wheel this might be true. Making games is an art though, and part of that art is learning how to make really great experiences for the player. You can't do that without a focus on quality over quantity. Especially as an indie-developer with limited resources, what exactly are you going to make that anyone is going to care about if you're constant releasing half baked stuff and starting new projects?

You're right of course -- to a certain point. Half baked products will not succeed. Still, law of diminishing returns is in full effect here. When to launch? When is the MVP ready? I don't know the right answer.. Some say earlier than gut instinct would compel.

You are assuming quality is correlated with it being a hit, this is not true at all. Thinking of Flappy Bird as an obvious example.

Flappy Bird was extremely well-designed and was very high quality, there was a lot of work put into it. Dong Nguyen has been designing games for awhile and isn't stopping anytime soon.

Quality isn't the be-all, end-all, but there's definitely a correlation. Flappy Bird wouldn't even have gotten off of the ground if there were problems with something like collision detection. Even something as simple as increasing the delay between rounds (by as little as a few seconds) could have hindered its success.

The game is not without merit.

Quality isn't just cool graphics and complex plots and all that. Dong understood how people want a game that is simple to learn but insanely difficult to master. And he understood the need to make controls simple enough (tap anywhere on the screen) so that people can play even in the subway with only one hand free. So gotta give the guy credit

it worked well for jennifer: http://jenniferdewalt.com/

And http://www.lessmilk.com/

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