m3mnoch

i keep seeing posts like this:

"we made a quality game and it's not selling"

"the app store is a disaster"

"it's a lottery"

no -- none of that is the problem. the issue is that all of the easy, low-hanging fruit is gone and to get workable revenue out of a game, you need to make a quality game.

that's quality without the quotation marks.

and, i'm sorry, but the games in the original post are nothing compared to the likes of papers please, don't starve, or guacamelee! -- much less amazing upcoming indies like no man's sky or ori and the blind forest.

you are kidding yourselves if you think something like "catch the monkey" is going to sell. i was floored to see it actually made $7k in revenue. i would have guessed $1500.

you -- yes, you with your fresh copy of unity and an mvp-fail-fast-idea -- are not going to cut it on the app store. you need to put out a real, honest-to-god, high-quality game.

catch the monkey or a is for app? really?

your game is going to be in the app store next to ori and the blind forest. your game is going to be in the app store next to white night. the player is going to look at both of your games and spend their money on those -- not yours.

the app store is not a disaster -- your game just looks like a disaster sitting next to those titles.

and swapping to pc? have you browsed through the greenlight options? you think your game is going to make it there when you couldn't cut the quality bar on the ios store?

let me help you with that decision: http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight?appid=765&browsesort=pe...

is your game more amazing than anything on that list? better than jotun? better than bounty hounds? probably not.

sure, there are some mediocre games that catch fire and shoot to the top. that's where the lottery is. chances are those 304 apps released on the app store are all crap and don't have a chance in hell of real traction anyway so their only option is catching hold of the lottery tail. if you want to be part of that viral-dependent circus, more power to you, i suppose.

quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now.

however, if your game is legit, you'll do just fine.

that's the key takeaway, make a real, value-for-the-player, interesting game and you'll do just fine. if you can't do that, accept it as a hobby or get a different job.

sure, sure. remember the context is "not a lottery".

first, blow up the top-grossing date range to "all time".

if you look at the trending data for 2048, it's in freefall. they're down and off the bottom of the charts now for us:overall and us:games. a non-craftsmanship game that's a lottery winner can't pull out of this spiral because the game isn't deep enough to re-engage their audience.

if you look at the trending data for threes, you'll see even with their latest price bump, they still haven't fallen off the us:overall charts. even then, they have levers like "more content" and "price drops" and "in-game events" where they can get bumps to put them back up in the, say top 400 in us:overall two weeks ago. quality game, earning their revenue.

not to mention threes still hasn't fallen out of the top 100 for us:puzzle where 2048 hasn't seen that since april.

because, note: "downloads" are neat. "registered users" are neat. but those are vanity metrics. "can you earn enough money to sustain your business" is the most important metric to an indie game developer. can you keep doing what you love and stave off working for someone else yet another day?

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

fyi - i can't downvote. not enough karma or something. /shrug

so, it's not me.

oh, and it just occurred to me that i might not be clear on describing the bridge that's joining the gaps you're talking about.

the reason i bring up the promotion parts (ltv! k-factor! arppu!) is that i have stanford friends who were knee-deep in that business (you should see the multi-variant testing we could do) and spoke very much like you do with the "marketing is everything, just measure, adjust the product for fit, promote!"

it was very, very objective.

they were frustrated with the creatives telling them "no!", so they left and started their own gigs (more than one person, not singling anyone out here) where they could launch and iterated -- all of them were abject, bankrupting failures.

marketing (promotion, as everyone reading this is thinking) is important, yes, but having the right creative is more important to an astounding and unbelievable extent.

seems to me you're lumping everything into marketing. i can understand that from a scholarship perspective, of course.

however, i would bet that if you told game designers (product development) they were marketing schleps and not part of the dev team, well... let's just say cliffyb might bring back bulletstorm.

heh. if only i had the power to downvote. even then, i wouldn't downvote folks who simply disagree with me. i love to argue with them too much!

again, you're conflating "marketing" with "coverage for hitting the lottery".

from this article: http://www.haaretz.com/business/start-up-of-the-week/1.59991...

  They decided to release the app to the App Store, 
  and people slowly started hearing about it. The 
  first serious buzz happened when blogger ad technical 
  Robert Scoble wrote about Yo after a visit to Israel. 
  He called it “the stupidest” but “most addicting” app.

  Thus the Yo app became the conversation of the day 
  among the startup crowd in Silicon Valley and New 
  York, who tweeted how excited they were at using it. 
  As interest burgeoned, Arbel moved to San Francisco 
  last week.

so, you're going to tell us that "yo" isn't the very definition of hitting the app lottery?

edit: and i believe you're conflating "marketing" with "coverage for hitting the lottery".

yes -- hexiled is a great example of a quality game done right with very little (need for) marketing.

i'm cheering for you! go, man, go!

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?

yessir. i am in the game industry. and, i'd love to share my numbers, but we've since been snapped up by disney and i bet they'd frown on my giving out the secret sauce they've paid for.

edit: oh, and for the 10,000 hours thing -- that's not a literal thing. i was just using that as a stand-in for "you must be an expert in".

marketing failures?

how would you differentiate them with marketing? "yet another color bubble popper!" "yet another side-scrolling shooter where you kill the undead!" "yet another match three with fruit!"

i'm not sure i agree with your assessment as to marketing failures. if you said me-too-market-fit, however, i'd say you were on to something.

their level of polish is pretty nice, so they should step out of the lottery and make a non-me-too quality game. i bet they would be pretty successful with it. in fact, if they keep with it, i'd put money on it they'll eventually be very successful.

> So how do you differentiate?

> Marketing.

again, no.

while i feel your pain and the cognotive dissonance associated with "it can't be that i don't make decent games! it has to be someone else's fault!" -- i have hard, objective data that disagrees with you.

i have assembled the funnel-and-churn data. i've put together the reports greenlighting games because the ltv has exceeded the cost of acquisition. i've used average instead of median so our whales inflated the reports. and after all of that, i've seen their 30-day retention numbers still stagnate.

i lived that for two years.

then, the retention bottom fell out. we burned through all of the naive and all that was left was a cadre of seasoned "me too" recognizing gamers.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

complain about clash of clans' business model all you want -- it's a quality game.

also please note, i'm not saying marketing isn't important, it's just not even close to "the most important" especially depending on the situation. if you have a giant budget with a ton of developers, it's pretty important. if you are a small shop where everyone has day jobs and you can endure slower, organic growth? it's not worth the money.

personally, i think this is a good call on his part. abstract planets are more "casual friendly" than magic in a dungeon. especially as a guy who's seen first-hand several neat games with sword and sorcery theming meet grisley, limited-market death by attrition.

like others have said, absolutely, thank you for writing this up.

a few observations for my fellow hope-laden game developers.

tl;dr: anyone can use today's tools to make crappy, me-too games. you need to make good games to succeed. to do that, you're going to need your 10,000 hours of game programming (not the same as web programming), 10,000 hours of game design (not just playing games), and 10,000 hours of all manner of art.

1) the marketplace is a "bloodbath"

while, yes, there are tons and tons of other apps out there, to be frank, that's just fine for quality indie developers, because the majority of those games all look like your apps. you cannot with any serious expectation, for example, think to sell like hotcakes something like "wordgrid" or "letters". i mean, the reason "tetra" got any traction at (i would bet as i haven't read the reviews) all was for its multiplayer component.

you cannot expect to have sales numbers like incredible-art-having sworcery or the incredible-paradigm-busting papers please with average-looking, average-playing, average-genre games.

if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional.

just because you can't throw a rock without hitting an amazingly easy toolset does not mean you'll build amazing games. it just means that everyone without the talent to build such games has an equal chance to show off the fact they can't build amazing games.

2) marketing is everything.

no. no it's not.

i'm part of the zynga/playdom facebook games generation where we instrumented, measured, and then poured on users. we thought virality was king and users were something you bought. push that k-factor through the roof!!!

come to find out, retention was king. this is why zynga is ... um ... having issues. come to find out, you need a good game.

if you have a good game and that game is easy to share, you'll get users from both channels -- app review sites and word of mouth -- without a lot of dough. you'll grow more slowly, but give people a reason, the method, and the content to share and they will.

that's not to say marketing isn't important -- it is. it's just not the most important thing by far.

3) it's a lottery.

only for simplistic, easy-to-copy games. take the "threes vs. 2048" conflict as an example:

awful 2048 grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/...

still substantial threes grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/...

if you make something that anyone with a keyboard can make, you'll need to have an extrodinary amount of luck (2048 from ketchapp, flappy bird, etc.) that looks like a lottery.

if you make something interesting that people want to play, you'll be just fine. especially these days when everyone is looking to discover the next minecraft or spelunky.

so, if you don't have the ability or team to make a good game, yes, you will need the lottery. and every time i hear about "the lottery" that is the app marketplace, all i can think of is nate silver's "the signal and the noise" book.

if you think it takes a lottery to succeed on the app store, you have a massive blindspot and that blindspot is: you don't have the ability -- yet -- to make quality games. you only think you do.

don't give up. keep going. you'll get there eventually.

weird. i think he's gone. i guess we'll never find out what it does now.

ah! got it. thanks, man.

> This is the harsh reality for most independent game development teams, except for a few super-star-teams which are able to negotiate non-cut-throat contracts. The publisher pays production cost in advance, and recoups production + marketing cost before the developer sees any royalties

i don't understand this.

isn't the definition of an "indie developer" a developer without a publisher?

i would guess it's the difference between "making revenue since day 1" and "profitable since day 1".

it's hard to imagine that you recouped all of your time/money/expenses not to mention that going forward, you can work on it full time -- all as of day one.

i just finished listening to brandon sanderson's "words of radiance" as read to me by my digital personal assistant during my work commutes. in the ivona amy voice, of course as she's pretty good with crazy names like "urithiru".

moving on to his "warbreaker" now. apparently, they're all tied together in an uber-epic.

i was coming here to make this exact remark along with suggesting more of a coverage map approach.

meaning, "1 mile radius" seems pretty arbitrary, so why not just grab a square mile of real estate based on lat/long? you could do all kinds of localized things with social venues that way -- local events, restaurants, concerts, etc.

except flappy bird retained users which led to more ad impressions. i guarantee you the retention for 2048 is crap.

three quick thoughts here.

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...."

in a word? retention.

of the magical kpi beast, that's the single, most important metric. this is something i cut my teeth on hard as an mmo guy -- you wouldn't believe the amazing realtime monitoring of these numbers going on by homegrown services like soemon in the mmo space.

anyway, the growth-hacking startup crowd gets all riled up about install numbers where the game folks are only concerned about retention. because, if it retains? you can charge money for it. if it retains? it can go viral. if it retains? your ltv will lift. retention is key.

while 2048 is hot for the moment (it's got virality), it doesn't have any retention. i would bet that if you looked at their 7-day retention, it's terrible. everyone discovers the "corner strategy" or gets lucky and drops a big score or beats it. "oh, this isn't hard." it's the opposite of the flappy bird effect.

if you guys want to set a calendar reminder to go back and look at 2048's numbers on april 27th, you'll see it being a shadow of its former self.

building on what zemo said, craftsmanship gets your retention where lean gets you market fit and growth. personally, like i said, i'm a fan of both tactics and i believe they can happily coexist at a lifecycle perspective.

p.s. this is the same phenomenon where folks show their google analytics charts with one, giant spike on the day their post went viral. that's called growth without retention.

yup. making no money.

and, as the threes guys point out, with no longevity. it won't be at the top of the heap for long. then, unlike threes, it will crash out the bottom instead of hanging around.

so, again. meh.

technically speaking?

as a fellow dev with feet traditionally in both worlds (indie and startup), i can heartily say "meh" about both the rant and its the whole "ripoff" thing. you are absolutely correct about the indie guys being different from startup guys by wanting:

1) enough money to keep doing what they love.

2) recognition for what they do.

the threes guys? in the ios app store, their app was in the top 100 grossing list for a month and are still top 300. they've ranked #1 in downloads in 28 countries. and they're still crushing it on downloads.

http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/...

the 1024 guys? their downloads suck. their ratings are a full point worse. they're only lifting to the top 100 in countries that traditionally don't monetize worth beans anyway.

http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/823499224/rank-history/...

yeah.

i choose data over ranty "you hurt my feelings" stuff every time. and, based on said hard, objective data, the threes guys are doing just fine.

*edit - i missed that last '0' on their top grossing stat. whoops.

oh. sorry. just saw this comment.

and, no. i don't use sat nav for my morning commute. i've written a few applications enabling my phone to read books, news and other bits of information to me as i drive into the office.

blink blink

um. have you used java?

indeed. +1 for plainTasks. i've been using it for a month now. it's like freeform task tracking with syntax highlighting, magic dates, and automatic formatting. it's exactly what i've been looking for for years now.