>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with
information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality
and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.
Yes. At this point, recommending that a 9-5 programmer quit their job to work on an indie game is equivalent to suggesting a PR writer quit their job to write the next Great American Novel.
It was always like that though. Game programming had always been the worst field for programmers, and the industry had and is exploiting the fact that some people like games enough to work on them under horrible conditions.
I don’t think it’s the equivalent to writing the great American novel though, because programming is just a minor part of game creating and arguably one of the least important. Design I’d the most important.
The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.
Game development is hard, it seems like it's completely hit or miss, there is no middle ground. I've released 5 games, but I have to say, spending 2,600+ hours on something without doing market research or at least starting small seems crazy.
My most successful game was an app for iOS which made me a grand total of around $30. The difference is I only spent around 80 hours working on it (40 or so for the game, 20 or so on the level editor, and 20 or so making levels). I had no money for marketing, had done no research beforehand, so I pretty much knew it was going to fail but did it as a fun side project to learn some new stuff and for my CV.
Compare that to the various website side projects I've worked on over the years which have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars (over 10 years). Game dev sounds fun, but if you're looking to make money, I would definitely stay away from it.
Instead of making a game for some category on Steam and hoping it sells enough in the first month before sales drop off, I wonder if it could work to make a super-super niche game where the goal would be to rank for a Google search term instead.
You'd try to be very long-lived, steadily selling for years, say just a few copies a week. All traffic would come from people who have some incredibly niche interest they are searching for, say baptism planners discovering your "baptism planner simulator 2000".
If you continued to make games like these say one per month or two, it might be possible to gradually build up a liveable income from them.
Would you say that the difference between the games side projects vs the website side projects are the mindset in which you have executed those projects?
I’d say sports, too. TV made it so some players were playing for hundreds of thousands of people nationally while others still entertained only locally.
It’s also in the process of starting to hit indie development in general and startups. It’s an interesting process but life for your typical indie or startup SaaS is going to get as tough as life for the typical “App Developer” got a few years ago.
The problem with games is the amount of effort involved just to determine if it is “fun”. When I was in it cancelling a game 1 year deep with 10 people was normal.
I think this is why minigame-style games (battle royale, fighting games, first person shooter competitive, etc) are so common. You can implement a simple version of your game idea in a weekend and, if your idea was good, people would likely already have fun playing it.
What you are saying is true. However, throwing your hands up in the air and saying “I guess I didn’t get lucky” isn’t quite the correct response either. Success is a matter of exposure and conversion rate.
1,016 visits, many of them random and untargeted, is simply not enough to make a statistically significant decision about the viability of this game. Conversion rates for any product tend to vary wildly within specific demographics. Some games perform abysmally with wide audiences, but may have very high conversion rates with specific, well defined groups.
To be sure, there are games that don’t need to look for their niche audience. They become viral sensations because they appeal to mass audiences. They get enormous amounts of “earned media” - viral clicks from people talking about and uploading video of themselves playing - and those are the games we hear about and consider to be “Superstars”. But that in no way means that games that aggressively target some relatively small group of people that the game actually appeals to with paid advertising cannot be very financially successful. Maybe not billion dollar blockbusters, but I’d imagine this author would be happy with a six figure income from his work, which is entirely possible if he finds the right audience and applies the same work ethic he did to developing the game to marketing it.
He needs to figure out who likes the game, what makes them like it, and then use the plethora of online ad platforms and targeting options to find more people like them. His game is not a steaming pile of crap, so he will find a paying audience for it if he looks.
No, because a "winner take all" industry is one that trends towards monopoly, that's not the same thing. No one person will ever have the entire video game pie.
"Superstar industries" follow extreme power law distributions, where, due to the low barrier to entry, high ceilings, and limited consumer base (there are only so many hours people can spend on entertainment), the pie isn't growing and new entrants aren't going to be able to carve out much that hasn't already been claimed.
It's not a new thing, the name comes from the music industry which acts the same way. Anybody can record a song and print it on CDs, but the market is already saturated: you have to either really really really stand out like nobody has in decades (An event so rare I couldn't find any examples), or you have to get the support of one of the big players (game studios or music labels) to lend you their resources and audience.
Sure but I think this really applies to industries under a free market in general however the dynamics in the tech sector are such that a single person with little to no startup capital can create something with paranormal returns and that is really what indies are after (perhaps after having their idea come to life). I wonder if there any other industries that have this same allure
I don't think that it's just technological change which has brought us there. It's also because of the last 10 years or so of Federal Reserve Bank policies. The elites have figured out how to maximise their profits during expansionary economic times and a big part of the elite strategy is limiting the number of winners.
Absolutely. All things are turning into the economics of superstars so long as they're subject to network effects and the widest, most fluid and well-informed possible market.
Uber drivers will turn into the economics of superstars. Amazon warehouse workers will turn into the economics of superstars. You'll keep on getting individual ultra-high performers who dominate whatever area it is, and more ordinary performers will just plain fail.
I'm not sure how your conclusion follows. Uber drivers and warehouse workers are unlikely to undergo this effect because no matter how good an Uber driver is, they can't be in multiple places at once. Similarly, there's a limit to how much one warehouse worker can do.
Amazon warehouse workers are limited by human physiology to move boxes within 10x of the average box moving speed. That disqualifies them from the superstar economy.
After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem.
You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
And if you have a good look at them you should realize that they all are extremely polished and coherent. None of them has realistic AAA graphics but they still look good. None of them is just a "copy" of an existing game. They either bring something totally new or bring something known but with a greater overall quality.
Then you have successful niche games such as Cogmind or the Zachtronics games. They still have the mentioned properties but also target only a subset of players where there are not many games. I think that makes them guaranteed sales.
Now what's wrong with all the stories about failed games? They all are generic. They don't offer something special. And this is what doesn't work in a saturated games market. And I'm not saying the authors didn't work enough. They just don't see what's wrong with their games and continue on their path to demise.
I guess what I'm saying is: to make a successful game you don't need to be the greatest coder or greatest artist. But you need to understand what makes a game great and enjoyable.
Maybe the days (years) will come where I finally will make a (bigger) game of my own and maybe I will totally fail like many have. Maybe I will revoke everything I said here but today this is my opinion. :)
>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
Very much yes.
Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). Papers Please is a truly unique game that was lucky enough to get youtuber coverage. Plenty of equally unique and just as fun games are ignored. I've never heard of Factorio, but looking it up, it's graphically very unappealing. Maybe my opinion would change if I watched a playthrough of it, but it doesn't stand out. Mini Metro might be fun. But so are many of the hundreds of other minimalistic puzzlers released monthly.
There are loads of games that just don't sell but become classics decades later. Earthbound sold horribly in America until the main character appeared in a more popular series (Super Smash Bros). Almost nobody played Killer 7. Panzer Dragoon Saga is considered one of the best RPGs of all time. Nobody bought it. Its popularity mostly grew after people discovered it through emulation.
The game in this article flopped because there are an abundance of games, it falls into an overcrowded genre, and it doesn't stand out, but most importantly, nobody important played it. If pewdiepie played this, it'd see 10000+ sales in a week and likely appear in a humble bundle.
To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.
While I wouldn't disregard the importance of marketing, I think quality, as in both quality of game itself and quality of the idea behind it, matters.
I think having a competitive advantage/value and having unique qualities are not the same thing. For example, before Stardew Valley, an entire genre of "calm, casual, farming oriented games" were mostly unknown to PC gamers. For years I have wondered when someone would notice an entire genre missing. At some point, someone noticed the same thing, and instead of building just another sandbox/crafting game they built a polished Harvest Moon alternative. It turns out, from a pool of millions of PC/XBone/whatever gamers, some people liked this genre of games.
By the way, I cannot stress the importance of polish: great artwork, fluid animations, good UI, proper bg music, smooth learning curve and of course, being generally exciting to play. Most of the games mentioned (maybe Factorio being the exception) have these qualities. Your average gamer has 15sec attention span at best for a new game. Most wouldn't even wait until the end of your launch trailer.
I've gave my full 30 seconds to watch the trailer of Infinitroid (OP's game) and I cannot see why I would choose it over, for example Dead Cells. They are not exactly the same game, but they are competing for the same resources. (entertainment budget and spare time) Just watch trailers of Infinitroid and Dead Cells side by side, the difference you will see cannot be written off as marketing success.
Just my 2cents as an avid gamer and potential customer.
Well I disagree a lot with what you are saying. Marketing is important sure. But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful. Maybe big gaming companies can do that but even they fail often enough. Luck is an important factor and maybe I would even rate it higher than 5%. I find the number of 90% marketing for an indie game ridiculous.
Stardew Valley is based on existing formula but it is incredibly polished and even people not from this genre play(ed) it. It has something special, similar games don't.
However I think that quality trumps for indie games. There are always exceptions and some "shit" games are hyped because of some Twitch or Youtube coverage. And of course there are some (maybe many?) games that have a high quality and fail. You don't just need quality. But you need it. And you obviously can make a good game in a bad time.
As for the game in the article. I don't want to disparage the author because making a game of this scope is incredible!
However watching a video on his game's site instantly gave me two reasons why the game is not successful.
- The movement of the character looks very stiff and unnatural.
- It is missing atmosphere. A lot of repeating textures. No details which makes the whole world uninspiring and uninteresting.
Now these things can be changed and improved still. But in the end the market for this specific type of game really is a hard one. And you compete with game's made by bigger teams and bigger budgets.
>Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon).
>To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.
I strongly disagree.
Stardew valley did well because it is a fun game with good graphics. That's it, it's fun and addictive, graphics are good and it gets the gestalt right. Stardew Valley is just a truly truly fun game in which you say "just one more day" a bit too often. It's just that much fun. The game is FUN and addictive. Did I mention I had a lot of fun playing it? It has nothing to do with marketing it had everything to do with how I played the game and whether I had fun or not. The first time I picked it up I poured in more than 40 hours in a single week! And that's a lot!
I just read this article about the creator who spent 4 years making Stardew Valley and it is a really interesting read:
> To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck
This seems very logical but indie games really do seem to defy this general rule. Pretty much every single popular indie game out there is really, really good in it's own specific way, and most of them had almost no marketing budget (when they first came out anyway).
Minecraft had no marketing. Terraria had no marketing. Stardew Valley had no marketing. These games spread through word of mouth and quality is the main criteria that causes people to talk about a game.
Factorio works because the gameplay is completely original. It scratches a building + automating + researching loop that no other game has. Many people compare it to programming or electrical engineering design - the satisfaction of automating something that used to take manual effort is great, and very addictive.
The graphics are bland and the early parts of the game feel like a pre-release / beta build, but the addictive gameplay and infinite end-game potential got it a lot of great coverage.
> You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
Interesting. I think you're right about half of those. I can't see any way that SDV or Darkest Dungeon could have failed. SDV is a great all round game with tons of polish, and DD has 99th percentile art direction and atmosphere for an indie game.
Mini Metro and Papers Please could absolutely have been dead on arrival. Mini Metro is just an above average puzzle game (of which there are tons), and PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer. It's really one of those "you have to play it" games (aka "sells 0 copies in 99 of 100 alternate universes" games...)
I agree that Mini Metro is the one of the listed games that I would be least certain about. I think however it is very polished (more than other "puzzle" games) and it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses.
Papers Please is a very special case. It has a very unique idea and that's what makes it stand out. You are right that you need to play it. However if someone played it he will most certainly recommend it and that's the strength of this game.. the implicit "marketing" it conveys.
You obviously always need some marketing be it a only dev log or whatever to at least get the core group interested. For a game like PP that really should suffice to get the ball rolling.
The trailer of "Papers, Please" was what sold it to me. Really catchy music and a weirdly freaky premise. ("A game about denying immigrants from entering your country? That's such a weird premise it just has to be good, and the visuals are super well done").
> "PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer"
I have to disagree with this (well, the second part of your assertion anyway; I absolutely agree it's a cool and unique game!). Just reading the premise of Papers Please was enough to hook me. I just knew I would like it, and wasn't disappointed when I actually bought it.
Also, all of Lucas Pope's games are visually distinctive, and Papers Please is no exception. I absolutely cannot think of any other game with a similar visual style which wasn't also made by Pope.
This part made me thing OP was focusing on the wrong things:
> I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic
None of that matters to the end result. You might be someone that is not very bright and that never went to college, etc, and still make a very creative and fun game.
Saying that he's smart and whatever makes him sound entitled. Like if he deserved to sell well.
I don't think he said that to imply he deserved success. The way I read it: he mentioned it to disqualify those factors (not working hard enough or not having enough discipline) as reasons the game flopped.
I'm a smart guy too. You know what you hear all the time growing up when you're smart? "Oh, you're smart, you're going to be rich and famous someday."
You hear it enough times and you might start to believe it too, that you're so smart you'll make all the right decisions and you can't fail. But then you become an adult and throw yourself into a passion or product and send it out there and realize the harsh truth that the market doesn't give a shit if you're smart or not, or even if what you made is "good", or even "great".
And it's impossible for you to know everything about everything, so somewhere along the line you will make a suboptimal choice, or choose the wrong time to release it, or release it on the wrong platform, or the people you hired to do X for you (development, marketing, distribution, qa, whatever) screwed up and leads to you getting terrible press (or no press coverage), or all sorts of crap that you have little control over or can't foresee.
I've personally worked for three game studios that made multiple games that flopped hard upon release. It gets depressing and frustrating when the creative products you spend months and months of your time working on didn't even make enough back to pay back your own salary for that time, let alone anyone else who worked on the project, and where you might as well never have spent that time in the first place.
The guys in the article only had a couple of failed games, and one monster success that continues to bring in millions of dollars in revenue. My only big success was a free flash game (before in-app purchases even existed) that I released 13 years ago....so yeah, no money there, at least not directly. I've worked on at least 8 failed games professionally, and many other failed or cancelled apps or enterprise software, since then.
For example, a year ago I wasted 6 months on a project at work that was supposed to sell to two major Fortune 100 clients and didn't, so it was killed without ever being used once. Even my biggest failed game projects I worked on at least had a few fans.
I've easily worked on more failures than even minor successes. It starts to drain on you. My confidence in my ability to make a successful anything in the future is pretty shaken.
Anyway, long story short, I was led to believe that my life would be easy and I'd find success after success by many people in my life, parents, teachers, fellow students, etc. And so far pretty much my entire adult life, with a couple of exceptions, has proven that what I was told was total bullshit and I'm just as capable of making bad decisions and getting unlucky as people half as book-smart as I am.
So maybe some of the people that do make those assumptions or have heard those same things as they grew up need to be told that it doesn't matter.
Yes. For most gamers these days, time is the bottleneck, not money. In a world where Infinitroid and Hollow Knight exist, one hundred out of one hundred people are going to spend the time on Hollow Knight.
>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
One thing about all of those is that they pass a smell test. I don't need to play it to be interested, if I just see an ad or see someone playing or hear someone talking about it then I'm interested. This game did not have that, all I've seen is a genre and some bad graphics. The gameplay itself could be great but it hasn't gotten past the smell test.
You made the mistake of thinking that anyone would care how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. But making a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game. That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
If a lone programmer wants to write tight code for games, they should build game engines or libraries that games can use and then sell those to game developers.
There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.
... or call it a hobby. Just because someone does the same thing they make a living from for fun, doesn't mean it isn't also a hobby. It's weird, that because people pay coders for some of the work they do, expecting money gets wrapped up in what is a hobby for so many.
Programming is fun for a lot of people. They love the process, enjoy the reading and learning, get a kick out of things like optimising code for a speed boost. IMHO that's awesome. So few people have any real interests, so if you have one, indulge it.
Just call it what it is - a hobby - and reframe your thinking. No other hobbies are indulged because we expect to make money directly out of them, e.g. no one playing soccer in a park expects to go pro, they just love playing. Why should hobby coding be different?
Reframing it as a hobby changes the equation from $0.01 an hour, to "OMG, someone, anyone, wanted to give me money to indulge my hobby!" Then what starts as a time and money sink becomes instead what you live for, and a positive in your life.
Except that it turns out that artists and game programmers are too cheap to pay for tools, even if you can present them with a clear benefit in terms of productivity gain vs. sales price. To make matters worse, big companies that could afford those tools will generally only buy exceptionally well established tools and rebuild the rest from scratch in-house.
The only way to make money with games is to sell games.
Even that is a lost game, because only professional studios pay for tools, as indies tend to just grab FOSS tools and feel entitled to get their issues fixed.
And in the professional market, the quality bar is pretty high.
A 2D gaming scroller that requires 62,126 lines of code written from scratch? There's tons of libraries out there, game engines you could adopt, etc.
I would argue you could be an awful programmer and use prebuilt tools but have great design aesthetics, vision, music composition, and storytelling, and deliver something far better
How can you criticize the amount of code without knowing how much of that is generic engine code and how much of it is gameplay code (game logic, AI, event triggers...) that would have to exist regardless of the engine being used?
It doesn't take a large team. Look at latest indie hotness Hollow Knight (https://youtu.be/UAO2urG23S4), which was made by 3 dudes, who were artists and animators (http://hollowknight.com/our-team/). I agree that with game engines, making a successful indie game is primarily about artistic prowess, but you probably don't need that many artists. Just 1 or 2 really good ones.
Seeing the forest for the trees as they say. This is why indie games are focused on the simpler style of video games in some cases like Stardew Valley. It still took the developer 8 years (give or take) and you can tell he worked his tail on it.
> how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.
Top notch in any field requires optimizing hidden, underlying dependencies to deliver the best output. Optimizing code is not sufficient but it is usually necessary, especially if others have already solved it, setting the standard of performance that players expect.
The way to avoid optimizing core library code is to use someone else's library and build on top of that. But you can only do that so much. This is just an insanely hard industry to get into.
It's not that optimizations don't have their place, but when your goal is to create a game and make money off of it, then micro optimizing C++ code simply has no place. Also, a 2D platformer simply doesn't require any highly optimized system.
One should spend the time building a game, polishing it, marketing it, presenting it at shows, etc. and not trying to build the most efficient engine, just because engine building is quite fun - as long as the goal is to make money from a game.
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game. That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
I think gameplay and marketing win here. Consider two gamesL one has great graphics but bad gameplay, the other has bad graphics but great gameplay. The great gameplay game is going to win that match up.
The problem here seems to be that supply is geometricly growing whereas demand is largely fixed. To compete and be noticed you need to make a serious investment in marketing or get extremely lucky.
> one has great graphics but bad gameplay, the other has bad graphics but great gameplay. The great gameplay game is going to win that match up.
Yes, in terms of player satisfaction, but no, not in terms of sales. Terrible movies with great explosions out-earn great movies with low budgets every single summer.
Great analysis.. this applies to so many areas of software development. Building games, websites, any thing software ..
> you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers.
> Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really.
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.
> That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
You know, there's an interesting relationship between the graphic-novel industry and the TV/film industry at this point. Many TV/film screenplays are adapted from graphic novels, because a graphic novel is, in a sense, a "sketch" of a film—it's something that communicates most of the top-down spirit of the eventual work, while also being something that is able to be produced by a single creator, and so something that is able to let a single creator's vision and talent shine through.
I'm left wondering why the video-game industry doesn't have at least some sub-sector with an analogous pipeline, adapting (or in this case, "covering") low-budget indie titles that don't have asset-polish into AAA games, by giving them that asset polish.
GP is completely wrong on their last assertion. You do not need AAA quality to make it as a game dev. But citing Minecraft reinforces their first assertion.
Minecraft was an underrepresented genre, released early, with an (accidentally) excellent marketing technique. Above all, the code is an atrocious, unoptimized Java pile of crap (Yeah, I used to be into Minecraft dev in the early days).
It's the best proof you can give that "making a game [...] is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming".
People always say Minecraft doesn't have good graphics or whatever, but that game's color palette and overall design aesthetic is VERY good. Everything is consistent, and when you're playing it you forget that it doesn't look "real." The game from the article is not in the same league.
It's easy to list the games that made it, harder to list the thousand of similar games that didn't and were forgotten. Minecraft didn't make it because it was super well coded (it was decent but I'm sure well-optimized C or C++ could have easily outperformed the JVM), it was mainly at the right place at the right time.
I think the reason Minecraft was successful was first and foremost because of its concept. Looking at the author's game is seems pretty obviously like a Super Metroid clone (at least judging from a video, the level design looks like reskinned Super Metroid levels and many of the powers and enemies are extremely reminiscent of Metroid). I really like Metroidvanias but as far as I'm concerned it's really the art style that kills it, I'm really not fond of this pseudo-realistic tile work.
True. But most people aren't as skilled as Notch, or the Stardew guy. It's still definitely NOT a waste of three years, but the author should not expect to make much money off of an indie game. More graphic design and marketing needs to be put into this endeavor, assuming the gameplay itself is any good.
That said totally not a waste of time. It shows you have the wits to bring something to market and the ability to ship. You coded the whole damn thing which is insanely involved. This is no small feat. However the market is generally the hardest critic and it doesn't matter how many hours you spent or how many lines and bugs you solved.
That was my first thought too. The author talks about the indie explosion, but I don't think they realize they are part of the problem. Clearly the author is a great programmer, as coding something like this definitely isn't trivial, but it lacks in other places, such as design, art style and sound effects.
I understand programmers often like working on their own projects, and sometimes we end up with complete packages like Stardew Valley, but maybe it's better to work in a team where everyone has their own strengths. I see so many games with fantastic code, going to waste because of really underwhelming story, art style or sound.
I consider myself as a big fan of Metroidvanias, I'm even the kind of person who actively looks for new games in this genre, and those were my thoughts as well.
I would even say that this game manages to hit the 3 points in which I avoid on a Metroidvania:
1. Rogue-like. I really dislike rogue-like, no special reason, just a personal preference
2. Lack of a plot. I appreciate the feeling of exploring a world the feels alive, even if it's a very simple one. Going through levels for the sake of going through them, it's not much of a fun experience to me.
3. Huge resemblance to the original Metroid. If I wanted to play Metroid... I would be playing Metroid.
Also... no Linux version? Really? That excludes me entirely from this game.
#1 and #2 are strongly related. Procedural generation makes it much harder to create a sense of a coherent world, rather than a series of disconnected mini-games.
You're criticizing an indie game developer who feels he just wasted 3 years of his life making a failure, for not spending the extra year or whatever it'd take for it to be cross-platform?
Yeah, the entirety your comment pretty much mirrors what I'd have to say in reply to his post.
The only other thing I'd add for Luke is - do you enjoy playing this game? As in, have you sunk a whooole bunch of hours into playing it, simply because it's the only game available (that you made precisely because there's nothing else) that scratches this very particular itch?
I'm afraid this was my first thought having watched the video — does it look fun?
I'd like to think that the foundations are in place to make it such, but from what I saw, I saw a lot of [highly capable] box ticking, but not a lot to make me want to take it on.
Super Metroid is literally my favorite game, and I don't really have a strong urge to play this.
Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generation takes a big dump on any sense of familiarity, which is a big part of the reward for exploration.
In fact, the _only_ games I've played where procedural generation were good for the game are story-building games, such as Rogue-likes and Dwarf Fortress. They reward you for building a story, not for traversing obstacles. In every other game, they are just a weak thematic obscuration of the underlying mechanical goals. The Dryad's name in Terraria doesn't matter. Dig deep enough and you'll find diamonds in Minecraft. Kill a boss enough times in Borderlands, and you'll get a good gun. There's no story about achieving these goals. Procedural generation doesn't participate in making the goals more interesting to achieve, it's a forgettable and incidental fact about something almost wholly unrelated.
Game developers need to stop trying to lean on it as a substitute for content. A game is what people can expect from it each time they play it, and if all it is is a bundle of mechanics and throw-backs, then there's not going to be much appeal.
I'm curious about where the story happens? I've played a rogue-like (Pixel Dungeon), while I found it fun, I didn't think it had much of a story. Are others better?
I don't know if I'd agree about your dislike of the graphics being because of your own personal preference. The human brain has evolved to find certain harmonies of shapes/colors attractive while others are not. The author undoubtedly has a lot of grit—but, he's not an artist, and his game suffers because of that. Metroid has superior graphics because they had dedicated artists, and surely put a lot of time/thought into the look and feel of the game.
Also, the design scheme between different 'blocks' which make up the platforms in the game is not uniform, which makes the design feel much more disjointed.
I am the guy who shares this post on Hacker News.
First and foremost, I wanna said that I am NOT the original author of the blog. Also, I am NOT advertising for the original author. As a software developer in Hong Kong, I am researching articles about game dev and find this interesting case. Therefore, I just wanna share on HN.
The discussion about this blog is really overwhelming. I hope that everybody can learn a lesson from this article. In my personal opinion, from a business perspective, I think to develop a hyper-casual game will have a higher probability of getting commercial success. However, from a more personal perspective, it is very difficult for a game developer to avoid the temptation of spending years to develop a hardcore game. I just wanna say: Game is the modern art form of the 21st century. So if we consider game developer as an artist, you will understand why he struggles about his artwork.
Anyway, I hope that everybody can earn something from this post. I read through all the comments and learn a lot. Thanks.
Please do don't take offense: Just FYI, calling out random strangers on the internet for improper or redundant grammar is a waste of your time and theirs.
To be a successful indie dev, you need to take an auteur approach: have a singular vision, create a unique aesthetic, and possess a fundamental understanding of the medium (gameplay). You also need to be able to balance all of these qualities with the resources you have at your disposal. If you have a great story, but no gameplay, you shouldn't be making a game. If you have an aesthetic, but can't implement it correctly, you're going to need to pay for assets one way or another. If your gameplay is merely a rehash of something old, you better have some twist to the other elements that makes it stand out. And all of this doesn't guarantee success, merely gets you to the baseline where you can be successful. Being good at programming is probably the least important skill in game development unless your idea is so innovative that you will need complex systems without precedence.
You need marketable differentiation.
Also make sure your game appeals to furries. That's where the real money is in indie game dev.
It's kind of funny how true it is. I think development shut down but there was an erotic furry Pokemon-like game in development that was pulling in like $35k a month on Patreon. There is definitely a market there.
And it is very little to do with luck or numbers or the state of the industry.
Good indie games:
1. are almost never distinguished by programming (the days of Doom are gone and you are not John Carmack). Far too much time is spent coding. Use existing tools. Code only gameplay.
2. are much more about art. The trailer looks like programmer art: no coherent style, no direction, no class. If this is what you produce. You need a collaborator.
3. are even more about feel. Your character movement is janky. Jumping is floaty. Shooting feels flaccid. There is little sense of gravity, inertia or impact. If it isn't fun to move around a single screen, it's not fun.
4. need a hook. There is almost nothing original about this game. You've got about 10 seconds to hook me. (10 seconds into the trailer you cut to a mostly empty UI.) Find the wow. And zealously focus on it.
5. need to be polished. Ambient animation. Consistent sound effects. Screen shake. Lighting. Particles. UI. These are implemented. But none of them particularly well. And they don't tie together into a whole.
6. need to be marketed. Someone needs to be working on that.
7. needs to catch (or create) a zeitgeist. So many features of this game shout '2014' to me.
8. needs a bit of luck. But beware! The converse is very rarely true. If your game isn't successful, it is probably _not_ because you were unlucky. The game probably wasn't very good. Don't spend your time trying to find alternative explanations. Be brutal with yourself. In game terms, git gud.
So this is harsh I know. I'm sorry. But frank. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years. 99.9% of games fail horribly. But 99.9% of them are not very good. This has absolutely always been the case. It's just that the 'fail point' used to be the publisher pitch. Now you don't need a publisher, you get to fail in public.
So yes three years have been ...um... call it learning. I suggest you do more jams. Figure out what it takes to win. Find a game artist. Use tools. Build prototypes. And start to build a community.
Can agree with all of these critiques of the game.
In particular, this feels like a game that was created in a weekend or two in Gamemaker. The UI is quite simple, the mechanics (or at least the ones I saw in 10 minutes of poking around) are unoriginal, and the enemies all seem to be variants of "fly/walk towards me".
There's no feeling behind the gun, there's no real feedback when I get hit, I have no idea how much life I have left (yes it's in the UI, but it's not prominent at all).
If I had to guess where the 3 years of effort has gone into, I'd suggest it was the level randomiser. That's a big mistake, and one probably made by a programmer mindset rather than a game design one. The game isn't fun, so it doesn't matter how much replay-ability there is. Whereas if the game were fun but not replayable, I'd probably buy it on the promise of a randomiser coming.
About your number one: I see lots of programmers putting too much thought (and time) into code. As if the code was the important part of anything.
I am a programmer, and I have this PSA for others: Your code is just a necessary evil, not something to be praised and cherished. No customer sees your code, no customer cares about the code.
It kinda feels like the effort is directed improperly. If graphics programming and tens of thousands of lines of C++ code is your passion, you probably would be better suited to working your way into some of the major gaming framework's shops.
There's definitely a unicorn quality to a developer who wants to work at the framework level. Unfortunately, there isn't really room for Yet Another Gaming Framework. That said, my personal experience is that it's hard to find people who are passionate about working at that level.
Me personally, if I ever did break into the Gaming Industry it would 100% be at the framework level. Transformation matricies, graphics pipelines, shaders, and all that low level stuff interests me way more and plays well to my strengths.
Making an "Indie Game" that stands out is well beyond my skill set. Grinding my life away for next to no money in a non-stop death march to hit a AAA studio exec's deadlines just seems a way to destroy my marriage and mental health.
Yep. It's certainly true that indie gaming is a harsh place to be in right now, but there's no mystery or deeper reason as to why the writer's game failed.
There are absolutely indie games that don't have any of that, and yet are wildly successful.
See: Five Nights at Freddy's and Getting Over It. (You could argue that the hook of Getting Over It is the intentionally annoying controls, but I highly doubt that that much of the market is a bunch of masochists.)
You're 100% wrong about Getting Over It. The graphics of that game are extremely intentional, as are the controls. Bennett Foddy is a veteran who knows exactly what he's doing, and it's no accident that that game hit.
He doesn't mention how many hours he spent marketing it. I suspect not that many. I fully sympathize with his struggle, but this is a trap most programmers fall into so easily. Market need/fit > Marketing > Design > Programming when it comes to software products. You can't just build it and expect that they will come, unfortunately.
If the game concept doesn't sell itself as an elevator pitch, then it doesn't matter how good the implementation is.
I once met an indie dev who was surprised that their Space Invaders mobile clone didn't sell on Windows Mobile, "despite its amazing particle effects."
In "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup," Rob Walling states three wrong reasons to launch something:
1. Having a product idea
2. To get rich
3. Because it sounds like fun
This and other books on launching your own thing stress that you first have to find a market, then fill that market's needs. In the world of indie games I can't even imagine what that would be.
There are even now niches in gaming that are under served, and games in these niches are much easier to market.
You can engineer a relatively high chance of success but it requires two things:
1) Actually picking an under served market. Meteriodvania style games are not one of these, there are a ton of game out there fulfilling that need.
2) Really really understanding the audience. You have to know what details of the previous games in the genre were actually important, and what were not which you can innovate in. Even the tiniest details can be super important.
It is obvious what finding a market in indie games means and that you can't imagine it shows that you aren't particularly creative. There are a couple of different approaches to finding a market. Find a game that is fun or popular but doesn't have a polished or commercial version and make that. Find a set of users that would like to play games but doesn't have many games that appeal directly to them and make a product for them. Find an old game or genre that hasn't had a release and make a game in that style. Release a lot of small experiments and prototypes, build a small audience around one of them and iterate, killing ones that don't catch on, etc. Finding product market fit with and indie game might not always be cheap or easy, but there are a variety of ways to do it and it's definitely not unimaginable.
It's hard to context switch between marketing and programming. You can spent many hours marketing with little return, especially without a product. Programming by itself is slow, but there is a definitely return in terms of progress. So many people choose programming first before marketing. But I get what you mean. Its though.
The problem now is that all the people using that thought process are producing games that look and feel the same, and use the same ideas, because there are only a handful of prominent markets and sets of needs. (For example, why does almost every popular need to use the same oversaturated color palette?) You're discouraging the kind of artistry that indie dev needs to truly succeed.
Not just programmers, many creatives and makers in general. Same rule applies whether you're running a startup, creating a video game, making movies, writing books/articles or playing in a band. The ones who succeed realise they've got to market their work, whereas the ones that don't still believe in the build it and they'll come mentality.
I was going to say: this "moment" on HN might increase the sales more than all of previous efforts did.
Today, the market is so saturated that even if you have the funds and interest (as a player / fan of genre), there is no way you can discover or keep up with all new releases. Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview, publications have now way of keeping up, streamers only have so much time.
The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about.
Finally, your game needs to be either hyper-polished or have some sort of novel angle. No disrespect, but looking at the trailer of this particular game, it seems its about 70% of the way their. Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish. The alternative is putting yourself into a niche and marking the hell out of everything, see e.g. the success of Cogmind, whose creator has been really good at Tweeting, posting on reddit, on HN, and so on...
Its not necessarily marketing in the sense of A/B testing his game play or fictional background or artwork or whatever, but consider general user experience stuff.
So I hear its a cool rogue-like but unlike the fifty indie rogue-likes I have languishing unplayed in my steam account already, I can play this one in the browser, whoa cool, technically impressive and maybe fun too.
So I go to the web page expecting a slither.io like experience where I'll be playing in 10 seconds.
And there's too many choices. First its a wall of text I can already be playing slither.io before I figure out what to do here in a RPG-adventure-IRL sense. Second there's confusion I should click on "Update Try it now on the play page" or the button "Join early access to play the game" or the tab labeled "Play Game" or down in the text its got a hyperlink to "play online" in the "play online, in-browser" section. Or they're different or the same or cognitive load thats un necessary. Is one link free and one link paid, or they all go to the same place but I better check them all first?
Then the choice confusion continues. I click on one of many widgets to get to the same place, "join early access". No I don't want to join I want to play. And more decision problems crop up, I can pay $7.50 for the free steam key (huh?) or there's a note from Luke that I can skip the payment section and get an account anyway wonder if it comes with a steam key or not what if I change my mind this is all so confusing and I want to make in-game decisions not the second page between me and the game experience. And the page is full of three ways to pay or its also free or the steam key is free or what all is going on here why am I stopping to research this and why am I researching instead of playing. I got a tab open with slither.io to make this stream of consciousness post and its calling to me... What if I don't like it and want my money back what if I make a free acct and later decide to toss some cash in its just all so overly complicated.
There is another interesting impedance bump where there' three federated ways to pay, via amazon, paypal, or stripe CC, which is convenient, I'm not complaining at all. The point is just above that there is no federated login or account generation at all; I have to provide my email for harvesting (come on, I know Luke is a good guy, but I've been on the internet for longer than most kids have been alive; I know better than to provide my email address "for free" it ain't 1990 anymore so say hi to vlm@example.com). Then I need to create yet another username and password to forget because there's no federation. I must have created over a thousand logins in the last couple decades; tired. You integrated three payment processors how about one-click login via google / FB / whatevs.
After all this uphill battle in the user acquisition phase, the tab with slither.io is beckoning to me...
Note that I'm exclusively complaining about the new user acquisition process; everything else is pretty cool! Its just a lot of work and cognitive load to get to play compared to the competition in the market (the fifty unplayed indie roguelikes in my steam account, or .io style instant casual web games)
My constructive suggestion: One page one click login via federated accts and don't forget "click here to play as anonymous coward" then in the UI "click here to sign up or give us piles of cash". The competition can get them playing in one click and 10 seconds...
Interesting marketing mechanic that some might say is evil, whatevs, in game while playing as "anonymous coward" click here to have a federated account (play with your facebook or google acct) and get a minor in-game reward for signing up. Not so ridiculous that people claim its cheaty, but something at least amusing or an in-game joke or something making it a trade in users minds.
Don't give people a chance to think about doing something else while they're trying to decode the onboarding process. Low friction is where its at.
Think of the "S" in SOLID the single responsibility principle, don't make new users ponder if they're paying for something (what, a free steam key?) or joining a club forum or playing a game or whatnot. Give the new user exactly one single responsibility "play the game". Later on, buddy up with "membership" or "gimmie money" but get them into the game first.
Looks like a fun game, once you get into it. Cool!
This is exactly why I fell off of the aquisition pipeline as well. I actually went looking to find out what the game was about. Cool, a play now link! Err...I'm not playing yet and there's a barrier to entry and lots of text and nah! Back to HN.
Put up some screenshots, even a game play video, give me the short version and let me get playing.
Edit: went back and found the screenshots on the home page, so apologies for missing that. Though missing them was quite easy, perhaps consider putting others on some of the play now pages, etc
My thoughts exactly! I'm a sucker for roguelikes and support a lot of indie developers that try slightly new angles at it, but there was too much of a barrier here.
Even if it's early access at least make it Steam early access. From the demo video it looks like the game would be in a good enough state to get it on there.
It's interesting that you're using slither.io as an example. I've played hundreds of io games. Almost all of them are trash but figuring out the mechanics and finding the surefire way to win and then moving on to the next game was what I found interesting. So far there is only one good .io game that I actually keep coming back to and that is starblast.io.
My takeaway is: If your game fails then it simply wasn't good enough and making good games is hard.
He also mentioned that even the guy(s) who made Super Meat Boy don't get a pass anymore just because they once made something that earned millions.
You can't build it and expect them to come. But you also can't even build it and have someone be your dedicated marketer, because you STILL can't expect them to come. There is no market right now, just people getting lucky.
Readit News
The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1]
>Abstract
>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.
[1] The Macroeconomics of Superstars, Anton Korinek Johns Hopkins and NBER, Ding Xuan Ng Johns Hopkins, November 2017 https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-for...
[2] The Economics of Superstars The American Economic Review , Vol. 71, No. 5. (Dec., 1981), pp. 845-858. http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981...
I don’t think it’s the equivalent to writing the great American novel though, because programming is just a minor part of game creating and arguably one of the least important. Design I’d the most important.
The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.
Automating (super dull financial industry department) is the industry of superstars
My most successful game was an app for iOS which made me a grand total of around $30. The difference is I only spent around 80 hours working on it (40 or so for the game, 20 or so on the level editor, and 20 or so making levels). I had no money for marketing, had done no research beforehand, so I pretty much knew it was going to fail but did it as a fun side project to learn some new stuff and for my CV.
Compare that to the various website side projects I've worked on over the years which have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars (over 10 years). Game dev sounds fun, but if you're looking to make money, I would definitely stay away from it.
You'd try to be very long-lived, steadily selling for years, say just a few copies a week. All traffic would come from people who have some incredibly niche interest they are searching for, say baptism planners discovering your "baptism planner simulator 2000".
If you continued to make games like these say one per month or two, it might be possible to gradually build up a liveable income from them.
Was this orders from clients or did you create some SaaS?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
The growth of superstars makes me optimistic enough to look at ETF funds like GAMR. The industry overall seems undervalued.
http://www.longtail.com/about.html
1,016 visits, many of them random and untargeted, is simply not enough to make a statistically significant decision about the viability of this game. Conversion rates for any product tend to vary wildly within specific demographics. Some games perform abysmally with wide audiences, but may have very high conversion rates with specific, well defined groups.
To be sure, there are games that don’t need to look for their niche audience. They become viral sensations because they appeal to mass audiences. They get enormous amounts of “earned media” - viral clicks from people talking about and uploading video of themselves playing - and those are the games we hear about and consider to be “Superstars”. But that in no way means that games that aggressively target some relatively small group of people that the game actually appeals to with paid advertising cannot be very financially successful. Maybe not billion dollar blockbusters, but I’d imagine this author would be happy with a six figure income from his work, which is entirely possible if he finds the right audience and applies the same work ethic he did to developing the game to marketing it.
He needs to figure out who likes the game, what makes them like it, and then use the plethora of online ad platforms and targeting options to find more people like them. His game is not a steaming pile of crap, so he will find a paying audience for it if he looks.
"Superstar industries" follow extreme power law distributions, where, due to the low barrier to entry, high ceilings, and limited consumer base (there are only so many hours people can spend on entertainment), the pie isn't growing and new entrants aren't going to be able to carve out much that hasn't already been claimed.
It's not a new thing, the name comes from the music industry which acts the same way. Anybody can record a song and print it on CDs, but the market is already saturated: you have to either really really really stand out like nobody has in decades (An event so rare I couldn't find any examples), or you have to get the support of one of the big players (game studios or music labels) to lend you their resources and audience.
In this case... "metroidvania" is a very oversaturated market, and a lot of games do it better.
Uber drivers will turn into the economics of superstars. Amazon warehouse workers will turn into the economics of superstars. You'll keep on getting individual ultra-high performers who dominate whatever area it is, and more ordinary performers will just plain fail.
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You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
And if you have a good look at them you should realize that they all are extremely polished and coherent. None of them has realistic AAA graphics but they still look good. None of them is just a "copy" of an existing game. They either bring something totally new or bring something known but with a greater overall quality.
Then you have successful niche games such as Cogmind or the Zachtronics games. They still have the mentioned properties but also target only a subset of players where there are not many games. I think that makes them guaranteed sales.
Now what's wrong with all the stories about failed games? They all are generic. They don't offer something special. And this is what doesn't work in a saturated games market. And I'm not saying the authors didn't work enough. They just don't see what's wrong with their games and continue on their path to demise.
I guess what I'm saying is: to make a successful game you don't need to be the greatest coder or greatest artist. But you need to understand what makes a game great and enjoyable.
Maybe the days (years) will come where I finally will make a (bigger) game of my own and maybe I will totally fail like many have. Maybe I will revoke everything I said here but today this is my opinion. :)
Very much yes.
Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). Papers Please is a truly unique game that was lucky enough to get youtuber coverage. Plenty of equally unique and just as fun games are ignored. I've never heard of Factorio, but looking it up, it's graphically very unappealing. Maybe my opinion would change if I watched a playthrough of it, but it doesn't stand out. Mini Metro might be fun. But so are many of the hundreds of other minimalistic puzzlers released monthly.
There are loads of games that just don't sell but become classics decades later. Earthbound sold horribly in America until the main character appeared in a more popular series (Super Smash Bros). Almost nobody played Killer 7. Panzer Dragoon Saga is considered one of the best RPGs of all time. Nobody bought it. Its popularity mostly grew after people discovered it through emulation.
The game in this article flopped because there are an abundance of games, it falls into an overcrowded genre, and it doesn't stand out, but most importantly, nobody important played it. If pewdiepie played this, it'd see 10000+ sales in a week and likely appear in a humble bundle.
To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.
I think having a competitive advantage/value and having unique qualities are not the same thing. For example, before Stardew Valley, an entire genre of "calm, casual, farming oriented games" were mostly unknown to PC gamers. For years I have wondered when someone would notice an entire genre missing. At some point, someone noticed the same thing, and instead of building just another sandbox/crafting game they built a polished Harvest Moon alternative. It turns out, from a pool of millions of PC/XBone/whatever gamers, some people liked this genre of games.
By the way, I cannot stress the importance of polish: great artwork, fluid animations, good UI, proper bg music, smooth learning curve and of course, being generally exciting to play. Most of the games mentioned (maybe Factorio being the exception) have these qualities. Your average gamer has 15sec attention span at best for a new game. Most wouldn't even wait until the end of your launch trailer.
I've gave my full 30 seconds to watch the trailer of Infinitroid (OP's game) and I cannot see why I would choose it over, for example Dead Cells. They are not exactly the same game, but they are competing for the same resources. (entertainment budget and spare time) Just watch trailers of Infinitroid and Dead Cells side by side, the difference you will see cannot be written off as marketing success.
Just my 2cents as an avid gamer and potential customer.
Stardew Valley is based on existing formula but it is incredibly polished and even people not from this genre play(ed) it. It has something special, similar games don't.
However I think that quality trumps for indie games. There are always exceptions and some "shit" games are hyped because of some Twitch or Youtube coverage. And of course there are some (maybe many?) games that have a high quality and fail. You don't just need quality. But you need it. And you obviously can make a good game in a bad time.
As for the game in the article. I don't want to disparage the author because making a game of this scope is incredible!
However watching a video on his game's site instantly gave me two reasons why the game is not successful.
- The movement of the character looks very stiff and unnatural. - It is missing atmosphere. A lot of repeating textures. No details which makes the whole world uninspiring and uninteresting.
Now these things can be changed and improved still. But in the end the market for this specific type of game really is a hard one. And you compete with game's made by bigger teams and bigger budgets.
>To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.
I strongly disagree.
Stardew valley did well because it is a fun game with good graphics. That's it, it's fun and addictive, graphics are good and it gets the gestalt right. Stardew Valley is just a truly truly fun game in which you say "just one more day" a bit too often. It's just that much fun. The game is FUN and addictive. Did I mention I had a lot of fun playing it? It has nothing to do with marketing it had everything to do with how I played the game and whether I had fun or not. The first time I picked it up I poured in more than 40 hours in a single week! And that's a lot!
I just read this article about the creator who spent 4 years making Stardew Valley and it is a really interesting read:
https://www.gq.com/story/stardew-valley-eric-barone-profile
This seems very logical but indie games really do seem to defy this general rule. Pretty much every single popular indie game out there is really, really good in it's own specific way, and most of them had almost no marketing budget (when they first came out anyway).
Minecraft had no marketing. Terraria had no marketing. Stardew Valley had no marketing. These games spread through word of mouth and quality is the main criteria that causes people to talk about a game.
The graphics are bland and the early parts of the game feel like a pre-release / beta build, but the addictive gameplay and infinite end-game potential got it a lot of great coverage.
I don't think this is good fortune so much as a good pitch, a good product, and a lot of persistence.
I have bought many games after watching popular Youtubers play them.
https://reddit.com/r/factorio
Interesting. I think you're right about half of those. I can't see any way that SDV or Darkest Dungeon could have failed. SDV is a great all round game with tons of polish, and DD has 99th percentile art direction and atmosphere for an indie game.
Mini Metro and Papers Please could absolutely have been dead on arrival. Mini Metro is just an above average puzzle game (of which there are tons), and PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer. It's really one of those "you have to play it" games (aka "sells 0 copies in 99 of 100 alternate universes" games...)
I agree that Mini Metro is the one of the listed games that I would be least certain about. I think however it is very polished (more than other "puzzle" games) and it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses.
Papers Please is a very special case. It has a very unique idea and that's what makes it stand out. You are right that you need to play it. However if someone played it he will most certainly recommend it and that's the strength of this game.. the implicit "marketing" it conveys.
You obviously always need some marketing be it a only dev log or whatever to at least get the core group interested. For a game like PP that really should suffice to get the ball rolling.
I have to disagree with this (well, the second part of your assertion anyway; I absolutely agree it's a cool and unique game!). Just reading the premise of Papers Please was enough to hook me. I just knew I would like it, and wasn't disappointed when I actually bought it.
Also, all of Lucas Pope's games are visually distinctive, and Papers Please is no exception. I absolutely cannot think of any other game with a similar visual style which wasn't also made by Pope.
> I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic
None of that matters to the end result. You might be someone that is not very bright and that never went to college, etc, and still make a very creative and fun game.
Saying that he's smart and whatever makes him sound entitled. Like if he deserved to sell well.
You hear it enough times and you might start to believe it too, that you're so smart you'll make all the right decisions and you can't fail. But then you become an adult and throw yourself into a passion or product and send it out there and realize the harsh truth that the market doesn't give a shit if you're smart or not, or even if what you made is "good", or even "great".
And it's impossible for you to know everything about everything, so somewhere along the line you will make a suboptimal choice, or choose the wrong time to release it, or release it on the wrong platform, or the people you hired to do X for you (development, marketing, distribution, qa, whatever) screwed up and leads to you getting terrible press (or no press coverage), or all sorts of crap that you have little control over or can't foresee.
I've personally worked for three game studios that made multiple games that flopped hard upon release. It gets depressing and frustrating when the creative products you spend months and months of your time working on didn't even make enough back to pay back your own salary for that time, let alone anyone else who worked on the project, and where you might as well never have spent that time in the first place.
The guys in the article only had a couple of failed games, and one monster success that continues to bring in millions of dollars in revenue. My only big success was a free flash game (before in-app purchases even existed) that I released 13 years ago....so yeah, no money there, at least not directly. I've worked on at least 8 failed games professionally, and many other failed or cancelled apps or enterprise software, since then.
For example, a year ago I wasted 6 months on a project at work that was supposed to sell to two major Fortune 100 clients and didn't, so it was killed without ever being used once. Even my biggest failed game projects I worked on at least had a few fans.
I've easily worked on more failures than even minor successes. It starts to drain on you. My confidence in my ability to make a successful anything in the future is pretty shaken.
Anyway, long story short, I was led to believe that my life would be easy and I'd find success after success by many people in my life, parents, teachers, fellow students, etc. And so far pretty much my entire adult life, with a couple of exceptions, has proven that what I was told was total bullshit and I'm just as capable of making bad decisions and getting unlucky as people half as book-smart as I am.
So maybe some of the people that do make those assumptions or have heard those same things as they grew up need to be told that it doesn't matter.
One thing about all of those is that they pass a smell test. I don't need to play it to be interested, if I just see an ad or see someone playing or hear someone talking about it then I'm interested. This game did not have that, all I've seen is a genre and some bad graphics. The gameplay itself could be great but it hasn't gotten past the smell test.
https://www.steamprophet.com/
There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.
Programming is fun for a lot of people. They love the process, enjoy the reading and learning, get a kick out of things like optimising code for a speed boost. IMHO that's awesome. So few people have any real interests, so if you have one, indulge it.
Just call it what it is - a hobby - and reframe your thinking. No other hobbies are indulged because we expect to make money directly out of them, e.g. no one playing soccer in a park expects to go pro, they just love playing. Why should hobby coding be different?
Reframing it as a hobby changes the equation from $0.01 an hour, to "OMG, someone, anyone, wanted to give me money to indulge my hobby!" Then what starts as a time and money sink becomes instead what you live for, and a positive in your life.
The only way to make money with games is to sell games.
And in the professional market, the quality bar is pretty high.
then I watched the youtube video demo in 2017.
A 2D gaming scroller that requires 62,126 lines of code written from scratch? There's tons of libraries out there, game engines you could adopt, etc.
I would argue you could be an awful programmer and use prebuilt tools but have great design aesthetics, vision, music composition, and storytelling, and deliver something far better
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.
Top notch in any field requires optimizing hidden, underlying dependencies to deliver the best output. Optimizing code is not sufficient but it is usually necessary, especially if others have already solved it, setting the standard of performance that players expect.
The way to avoid optimizing core library code is to use someone else's library and build on top of that. But you can only do that so much. This is just an insanely hard industry to get into.
One should spend the time building a game, polishing it, marketing it, presenting it at shows, etc. and not trying to build the most efficient engine, just because engine building is quite fun - as long as the goal is to make money from a game.
I think gameplay and marketing win here. Consider two gamesL one has great graphics but bad gameplay, the other has bad graphics but great gameplay. The great gameplay game is going to win that match up.
The problem here seems to be that supply is geometricly growing whereas demand is largely fixed. To compete and be noticed you need to make a serious investment in marketing or get extremely lucky.
Yes, in terms of player satisfaction, but no, not in terms of sales. Terrible movies with great explosions out-earn great movies with low budgets every single summer.
> you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers.
> Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really.
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.
> That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
I'm left wondering why the video-game industry doesn't have at least some sub-sector with an analogous pipeline, adapting (or in this case, "covering") low-budget indie titles that don't have asset-polish into AAA games, by giving them that asset polish.
Minecraft was an underrepresented genre, released early, with an (accidentally) excellent marketing technique. Above all, the code is an atrocious, unoptimized Java pile of crap (Yeah, I used to be into Minecraft dev in the early days).
It's the best proof you can give that "making a game [...] is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming".
I think the reason Minecraft was successful was first and foremost because of its concept. Looking at the author's game is seems pretty obviously like a Super Metroid clone (at least judging from a video, the level design looks like reskinned Super Metroid levels and many of the powers and enemies are extremely reminiscent of Metroid). I really like Metroidvanias but as far as I'm concerned it's really the art style that kills it, I'm really not fond of this pseudo-realistic tile work.
Then I'm not a programmer :) Less optimizing means less work! I like spending my free time in all kinds of ways.
Games these days are a lot about marketing and huge budgets. The indie ones that do well need to be targeted as well as refreshing.
Some hard thoughts just watching the video and reading a bit about the game:
1. I don't really like the graphics as much as I liked the original Metroid. This is probably just a personal preference.
2. It mostly screams low quality "Metroid clone" and not something cool I'd tell my friends about.
3. Procedurally generated levels doesn't sell me. I don't really care.
That said totally not a waste of time. It shows you have the wits to bring something to market and the ability to ship. You coded the whole damn thing which is insanely involved. This is no small feat. However the market is generally the hardest critic and it doesn't matter how many hours you spent or how many lines and bugs you solved.
I understand programmers often like working on their own projects, and sometimes we end up with complete packages like Stardew Valley, but maybe it's better to work in a team where everyone has their own strengths. I see so many games with fantastic code, going to waste because of really underwhelming story, art style or sound.
It's like the old adage: You're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.
I would even say that this game manages to hit the 3 points in which I avoid on a Metroidvania:
1. Rogue-like. I really dislike rogue-like, no special reason, just a personal preference
2. Lack of a plot. I appreciate the feeling of exploring a world the feels alive, even if it's a very simple one. Going through levels for the sake of going through them, it's not much of a fun experience to me.
3. Huge resemblance to the original Metroid. If I wanted to play Metroid... I would be playing Metroid.
Also... no Linux version? Really? That excludes me entirely from this game.
You're criticizing an indie game developer who feels he just wasted 3 years of his life making a failure, for not spending the extra year or whatever it'd take for it to be cross-platform?
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The only other thing I'd add for Luke is - do you enjoy playing this game? As in, have you sunk a whooole bunch of hours into playing it, simply because it's the only game available (that you made precisely because there's nothing else) that scratches this very particular itch?
I'd like to think that the foundations are in place to make it such, but from what I saw, I saw a lot of [highly capable] box ticking, but not a lot to make me want to take it on.
Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generation takes a big dump on any sense of familiarity, which is a big part of the reward for exploration.
In fact, the _only_ games I've played where procedural generation were good for the game are story-building games, such as Rogue-likes and Dwarf Fortress. They reward you for building a story, not for traversing obstacles. In every other game, they are just a weak thematic obscuration of the underlying mechanical goals. The Dryad's name in Terraria doesn't matter. Dig deep enough and you'll find diamonds in Minecraft. Kill a boss enough times in Borderlands, and you'll get a good gun. There's no story about achieving these goals. Procedural generation doesn't participate in making the goals more interesting to achieve, it's a forgettable and incidental fact about something almost wholly unrelated.
Game developers need to stop trying to lean on it as a substitute for content. A game is what people can expect from it each time they play it, and if all it is is a bundle of mechanics and throw-backs, then there's not going to be much appeal.
They have either:
A) Multiplayer
B) Procedural Generation
If you don’t want to do A, and you hope to make something people will play for a long time, then you have to do B.
Procedural generation has no value for getting players interested, it only matters for keeping players long term.
But it does matter a lot.
Also, the design scheme between different 'blocks' which make up the platforms in the game is not uniform, which makes the design feel much more disjointed.
I am the guy who shares this post on Hacker News. First and foremost, I wanna said that I am NOT the original author of the blog. Also, I am NOT advertising for the original author. As a software developer in Hong Kong, I am researching articles about game dev and find this interesting case. Therefore, I just wanna share on HN.
The discussion about this blog is really overwhelming. I hope that everybody can learn a lesson from this article. In my personal opinion, from a business perspective, I think to develop a hyper-casual game will have a higher probability of getting commercial success. However, from a more personal perspective, it is very difficult for a game developer to avoid the temptation of spending years to develop a hardcore game. I just wanna say: Game is the modern art form of the 21st century. So if we consider game developer as an artist, you will understand why he struggles about his artwork.
Anyway, I hope that everybody can earn something from this post. I read through all the comments and learn a lot. Thanks.
You need marketable differentiation.
Also make sure your game appeals to furries. That's where the real money is in indie game dev.
And it is very little to do with luck or numbers or the state of the industry.
Good indie games:
1. are almost never distinguished by programming (the days of Doom are gone and you are not John Carmack). Far too much time is spent coding. Use existing tools. Code only gameplay.
2. are much more about art. The trailer looks like programmer art: no coherent style, no direction, no class. If this is what you produce. You need a collaborator.
3. are even more about feel. Your character movement is janky. Jumping is floaty. Shooting feels flaccid. There is little sense of gravity, inertia or impact. If it isn't fun to move around a single screen, it's not fun.
4. need a hook. There is almost nothing original about this game. You've got about 10 seconds to hook me. (10 seconds into the trailer you cut to a mostly empty UI.) Find the wow. And zealously focus on it.
5. need to be polished. Ambient animation. Consistent sound effects. Screen shake. Lighting. Particles. UI. These are implemented. But none of them particularly well. And they don't tie together into a whole.
6. need to be marketed. Someone needs to be working on that.
7. needs to catch (or create) a zeitgeist. So many features of this game shout '2014' to me.
8. needs a bit of luck. But beware! The converse is very rarely true. If your game isn't successful, it is probably _not_ because you were unlucky. The game probably wasn't very good. Don't spend your time trying to find alternative explanations. Be brutal with yourself. In game terms, git gud.
So this is harsh I know. I'm sorry. But frank. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years. 99.9% of games fail horribly. But 99.9% of them are not very good. This has absolutely always been the case. It's just that the 'fail point' used to be the publisher pitch. Now you don't need a publisher, you get to fail in public.
So yes three years have been ...um... call it learning. I suggest you do more jams. Figure out what it takes to win. Find a game artist. Use tools. Build prototypes. And start to build a community.
In particular, this feels like a game that was created in a weekend or two in Gamemaker. The UI is quite simple, the mechanics (or at least the ones I saw in 10 minutes of poking around) are unoriginal, and the enemies all seem to be variants of "fly/walk towards me".
There's no feeling behind the gun, there's no real feedback when I get hit, I have no idea how much life I have left (yes it's in the UI, but it's not prominent at all).
If I had to guess where the 3 years of effort has gone into, I'd suggest it was the level randomiser. That's a big mistake, and one probably made by a programmer mindset rather than a game design one. The game isn't fun, so it doesn't matter how much replay-ability there is. Whereas if the game were fun but not replayable, I'd probably buy it on the promise of a randomiser coming.
I am a programmer, and I have this PSA for others: Your code is just a necessary evil, not something to be praised and cherished. No customer sees your code, no customer cares about the code.
There's definitely a unicorn quality to a developer who wants to work at the framework level. Unfortunately, there isn't really room for Yet Another Gaming Framework. That said, my personal experience is that it's hard to find people who are passionate about working at that level.
Me personally, if I ever did break into the Gaming Industry it would 100% be at the framework level. Transformation matricies, graphics pipelines, shaders, and all that low level stuff interests me way more and plays well to my strengths.
Making an "Indie Game" that stands out is well beyond my skill set. Grinding my life away for next to no money in a non-stop death march to hit a AAA studio exec's deadlines just seems a way to destroy my marriage and mental health.
See: Five Nights at Freddy's and Getting Over It. (You could argue that the hook of Getting Over It is the intentionally annoying controls, but I highly doubt that that much of the market is a bunch of masochists.)
If the game concept doesn't sell itself as an elevator pitch, then it doesn't matter how good the implementation is.
I once met an indie dev who was surprised that their Space Invaders mobile clone didn't sell on Windows Mobile, "despite its amazing particle effects."
1. Having a product idea
2. To get rich
3. Because it sounds like fun
This and other books on launching your own thing stress that you first have to find a market, then fill that market's needs. In the world of indie games I can't even imagine what that would be.
You can engineer a relatively high chance of success but it requires two things:
1) Actually picking an under served market. Meteriodvania style games are not one of these, there are a ton of game out there fulfilling that need.
2) Really really understanding the audience. You have to know what details of the previous games in the genre were actually important, and what were not which you can innovate in. Even the tiniest details can be super important.
Today, the market is so saturated that even if you have the funds and interest (as a player / fan of genre), there is no way you can discover or keep up with all new releases. Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview, publications have now way of keeping up, streamers only have so much time.
The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about.
Finally, your game needs to be either hyper-polished or have some sort of novel angle. No disrespect, but looking at the trailer of this particular game, it seems its about 70% of the way their. Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish. The alternative is putting yourself into a niche and marking the hell out of everything, see e.g. the success of Cogmind, whose creator has been really good at Tweeting, posting on reddit, on HN, and so on...
So I hear its a cool rogue-like but unlike the fifty indie rogue-likes I have languishing unplayed in my steam account already, I can play this one in the browser, whoa cool, technically impressive and maybe fun too.
So I go to the web page expecting a slither.io like experience where I'll be playing in 10 seconds.
And there's too many choices. First its a wall of text I can already be playing slither.io before I figure out what to do here in a RPG-adventure-IRL sense. Second there's confusion I should click on "Update Try it now on the play page" or the button "Join early access to play the game" or the tab labeled "Play Game" or down in the text its got a hyperlink to "play online" in the "play online, in-browser" section. Or they're different or the same or cognitive load thats un necessary. Is one link free and one link paid, or they all go to the same place but I better check them all first?
Then the choice confusion continues. I click on one of many widgets to get to the same place, "join early access". No I don't want to join I want to play. And more decision problems crop up, I can pay $7.50 for the free steam key (huh?) or there's a note from Luke that I can skip the payment section and get an account anyway wonder if it comes with a steam key or not what if I change my mind this is all so confusing and I want to make in-game decisions not the second page between me and the game experience. And the page is full of three ways to pay or its also free or the steam key is free or what all is going on here why am I stopping to research this and why am I researching instead of playing. I got a tab open with slither.io to make this stream of consciousness post and its calling to me... What if I don't like it and want my money back what if I make a free acct and later decide to toss some cash in its just all so overly complicated.
There is another interesting impedance bump where there' three federated ways to pay, via amazon, paypal, or stripe CC, which is convenient, I'm not complaining at all. The point is just above that there is no federated login or account generation at all; I have to provide my email for harvesting (come on, I know Luke is a good guy, but I've been on the internet for longer than most kids have been alive; I know better than to provide my email address "for free" it ain't 1990 anymore so say hi to vlm@example.com). Then I need to create yet another username and password to forget because there's no federation. I must have created over a thousand logins in the last couple decades; tired. You integrated three payment processors how about one-click login via google / FB / whatevs.
After all this uphill battle in the user acquisition phase, the tab with slither.io is beckoning to me...
Note that I'm exclusively complaining about the new user acquisition process; everything else is pretty cool! Its just a lot of work and cognitive load to get to play compared to the competition in the market (the fifty unplayed indie roguelikes in my steam account, or .io style instant casual web games)
My constructive suggestion: One page one click login via federated accts and don't forget "click here to play as anonymous coward" then in the UI "click here to sign up or give us piles of cash". The competition can get them playing in one click and 10 seconds...
Interesting marketing mechanic that some might say is evil, whatevs, in game while playing as "anonymous coward" click here to have a federated account (play with your facebook or google acct) and get a minor in-game reward for signing up. Not so ridiculous that people claim its cheaty, but something at least amusing or an in-game joke or something making it a trade in users minds.
Don't give people a chance to think about doing something else while they're trying to decode the onboarding process. Low friction is where its at.
Think of the "S" in SOLID the single responsibility principle, don't make new users ponder if they're paying for something (what, a free steam key?) or joining a club forum or playing a game or whatnot. Give the new user exactly one single responsibility "play the game". Later on, buddy up with "membership" or "gimmie money" but get them into the game first.
Looks like a fun game, once you get into it. Cool!
Put up some screenshots, even a game play video, give me the short version and let me get playing.
Edit: went back and found the screenshots on the home page, so apologies for missing that. Though missing them was quite easy, perhaps consider putting others on some of the play now pages, etc
How can you complain about lack of sales for an unreleased game! Fuck off! All sympathy instantly gone.
Even if it's early access at least make it Steam early access. From the demo video it looks like the game would be in a good enough state to get it on there.
My takeaway is: If your game fails then it simply wasn't good enough and making good games is hard.
You can't build it and expect them to come. But you also can't even build it and have someone be your dedicated marketer, because you STILL can't expect them to come. There is no market right now, just people getting lucky.
There is no market.
Let that sink in.