Comment by jlees | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlees | Hacker News Reader

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I mean you have an (open) product, put it out there, advertise it however you want (personally or outsourced) and hope that those that experience it think its worth continued funding.

It sounds so easy in theory, doesn't it?

Getting a game in front of people who enjoy it enough to give you money is hard. Very hard. Raph's ideas from 2006 around direct relationships and celebrity are still very much on target today -- that's how most successful creators seem to manage it, beyond the randomness of viral outbreaks. (I count entering/winning the IGF as a form of celebrity.)

Beyond that, advertising it is a spray-and-pray that will likely suck up more of your money than you'll ever make, and net you a bunch of high-churn players who don't give a toss about what you've created. Not every game has an obvious niche audience to go after, not every creator welcomes or invites celebrity, and sometimes the weirdest, most un-game-like things hit a nerve nobody was expecting.

My mind keeps circling back to the 'people who bought x also liked..' problem, as mentioned by Greg Costikyan [1]. Discovery is broken, and so on, but it's not discovery - as in players actively seeking out games - I open any store on any platform and I'm inundated with choices. It's being discovered that's broken, being discovered by an audience who will truly appreciate what you've created.

The hard part is slicing the gaming landscape, and individuals' different experiences of the same game, to such depth that a Pandora-like algorithm could work effectively -- or relying on independent curation and journalism to step in and highlight the gems among a sea of overwhelming noise.

(If anyone wants to hack on the recommendations side of things, let me know!)

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GregCostikyan/20140324/213784...

Google Play Store does do "people who bought this also bought...". It's useful to me in discovering things I want.

I'm a little skeptical of that rant you linked. Anyone blaming the audience's "lack of taste" is going to have a hard time of it, in games or music or books or movies or whatever. You just don't get to do that. You have to make things that satisfy you and the audience both. If you don't, that's your failure, not anyone else's.

It is true that the audience has no taste, though. We haven't made any concerted effort, as an industry, to help them cultivate taste. Games are still too new and too generally mediocre/same-y for the typical player to develop anything resembling taste - they very rarely encounter an example of a game that's truly worthy of respect or enthusiasm.

If the only games you've ever played are shitty clones at the top of the free list on iOS, how would you possibly know enough to spot a high quality game at a glance? It's not a failing of the players, it's a failing of the industry.

Companies operating storefronts have a responsibility to do better, by offering more useful data that's less vulnerable to these issues. For example, instead of basing recommendations on the masses, prioritize recommendations from what your friends play, so that people can benefit from each others' experiences with the few less-popular games they play. Prioritize games with overall low sales that have high average ratings, are played by a large number of your friends, or are in the same genre as many of the games you play. Randomly show them games that don't match in any sense (or only match in one or two categories), and gather that data to identify 'hidden gems' that you can push up the rankings.

These are all random ideas that might help bring low-ranking games up towards the top, increasing variety in the top lists and increasing engagement (not to mention revenue). It's embarassing that all 3 major store operators (Apple, Google, and Valve) have an utterly lazy approach to discovery, where they literally just do a sort based on one or two values and dump a list onto your screen.

Is there any system for discovering games in a specific niche? I agree that a large issue is games are placed in one of 10 - 20 categories and there are no ways to niche down to find types that you'll enjoy.

In say music you can go into say the metal genre and find all kinds of super specific niches like death metal, viking metal, black metal etc each with their own hardcore fan bases who you can appeal to and target on sites specific to them.

Gaming doesn't have the same niching and with the explosion of indie and mobile games it really needs it. I for example love multiplayer sim games (anno series) and multiplayer tower defense games (tower wars, sol survivor) and instantly buy any games in these genres that I hear of (I bought a 4 back of sol survivor and 3 pack of tower wars as soon as I heard of them).

Now that I'm developing my own multiplayer tower defense game (http://www.towerstorm.com) I'd like to reach others like me who enjoy this genre but am finding it very hard to do so. I either have to market it to the masses or reach out to specific people via social media.

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