Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

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>>Any concept simple enough for one person to implement has been done to death by hundreds of other people already. So how do you differentiate?

I don't believe this is true. I think Paper's Please is the best recent example -- we've had the technology to make this game for decades, and it's never been done until now. I suspect there are quite a few concepts out there that are able to be realized by solo developers that just haven't been thought of yet.

In regard to the author, the type of games he made are a dime a dozen. At this point they're unoriginal and uninspiring, and it shouldn't be a surprise that they failed to catch on. I think marketing is extremely important, especially in the app market, but you need to have a product that you can market. This is the biggest problem.

edit: Also, naming. Naming is extremely important. Why would you name your game Letters? Are you trying to make it hard to find on search engines? For anyone making an app or game out there, spend a lot of time on picking a name. Make sure you're the first result in google if someone types in "your_game_name_here game". "Letters game" returns 208,000,000 results on Google, it's not feasible for someone to find it that way, which just hinders word of mouth. It's also hardly rememberable.

Absolutely on naming. I read the article and thought that Letters sounded like a good game so I figured I'd go get it. I went to the app store, searched for 'Letters' and got a million early childhood apps returned (actually around 2300, but I couldn't find it).

I ended up searching for Tetra, wading through a few Tetris clones, finding the author, looking at the other games he had published, then finding Letters in the 'also by' section. Frustrating and a big issue for discoverability - if I wanted to recommend the game to a friend, how do I do that without sending them a link or getting them to wade through my list of games on Game Centre?

indeed. you're totally correct on naming. that's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time.

and, i would love for someone to bring out the counter example -- we've got lots of examples of poorly done games with and without marketing that don't go anywhere. does anyone have the counter example of a brilliant game with no marketing going nowhere?

Eh few people would know that game, by definition.

My best example would be Chronology (http://store.steampowered.com/app/269330/) which did have a bit of marketing that went absolutely nowhere. It is a pretty good game though.

hrm. i think you're right and that's a pretty good whack at it.

they've got a pretty solid environment artist, so it looks nice. concept is interesting. great potential. sophomore-seeming execution. beyond that, the mixed metacritic [1] reviews + the $10 price + the non-sharability are probably why it's not going anywhere.

for what it's worth, my advice for the devs if they happen to see this: add in multiplayer where you can play as the snail or the inventor. get some more content in there even if you have to sell it as iap because two hours of gameplay isn't enough for long-term sustainability. drop the price to between $2.99 and $4.99 and make it an impulse buy.

[1] http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/chronology

>>>> it's never been done until now

Again, we come back to marketing.

Would you bet that it has never been done, or it has been done but no one has ever heard of it?

Just developing a good game and hoping that people will (somehow) discover it is a lottery, same lottery like developing 100 shitty games, just with better odds.

Paper's Please has never been done. We've had a few big indie games released in the past few years which have legitimately not been done before (FTL is another big one that comes to mind).

What's so hard to believe about there being unexplored video game ideas out there? The industry is still relatively young, and it's always had a high barrier to entry until recently (and I'd argue that, for the average person, the barrier to entry is still much higher than that of writing, music creation, photography, drawing, or even movie creation).

>Also, naming. Naming is extremely important. Why would you name your game Letters?

And yet, Dots is a huge hit. Despite the fact that there is a traditional board game named "dots".

Of course there are outliers, but on the whole you want to have a name which is unique, rememberable, and able to be found through google without having to wade through a sea of unrelated items. There are anecdotes of people in this very thread who tried to download the game and couldn't because they were getting too many other games with a similar name. I think it's hard to argue that the name is working for his benefit here.

The bottom line: Picking a name like Letters decreases your chances of success. It doesn't eliminate it (like you said, Dot's is very popular), but it's something that should be avoided, and it's something that is easily avoided.

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