
Did I just waste 3 years? - kiostech
https://infinitroid.com/blog/posts/did_i_just_waste_3_years
======
Nokinside
Game industry is the economics of superstars.

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...](https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-
forum/session-3-korinek.ashx)

[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...](http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981a.pdf)

~~~
chongli
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.

~~~
eksemplar
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.

~~~
kbenson
> 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.

Did we read the same article?

 _Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to
be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity
shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort went into. A
tiny percentage are hits, but most are forgotten in the deluge._

To me that reads as someone that's fully aware that some people are putting a
lot of effort in and making good games (Unity or not), but is upset by the
realization that quality doesn't seem to be nearly enough. The problem is not
(just) that a lot of crap is being released, but that a lot of _everything_ is
being released, good and bad. So much so that even the good things can't make
good money because supply has so far outstripped demand.

It's sort of like the Netflix queue problem. I'm continuously adding things to
my Netflix queue that look interesting, but my time to actually watch them is
such that my chance of getting through even a majority of the queue is almost
nil.

~~~
eksemplar
To me it reads as someone who disregards unity games, while praising well made
indie games in general. And in the light of the rest of the article, the
author seem to favor people who did good programming, but the truth is that
you don’t need to be a good programmer to make good games.

I think supply is an issue, but I also think the author added to the problem
by releasing a game that doesn’t have appealing graphics, gameplay or sound.
Where as many much of the unity “shovelware” is exactly the opposite.

~~~
watwut
Shovelware typically does not have "appealing graphics, gameplay or sound". It
is term used for low effort games and imply nothing special in all aspects.

~~~
smolder
Shovelware can have appealing graphics and sound by way of licensing premade
assets, but you can't really buy a game design and paste that into your own
title to get appealing gameplay.

------
fileeditview
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. :)

~~~
fiblye
>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.

~~~
bspammer
> 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.

~~~
fiblye
>Minecraft had no marketing. Terraria had no marketing. Stardew Valley had no
marketing.

Nope, nope, and nope.

Stardew Valley has a notable indie publisher. There was marketing on various
internet communities (reddit, 4chan, etc) leading up to the months of release.
There it can pass off as organic word of mouth. Terraria was marketed months
before release. As for Minecraft, Notch himself was throwing his game around a
load before it got released and using anonymity to drive interest--it was the
most organic of the 3.

Other notable indie games like Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy also had
especially significant marketing efforts behind them. And let's not forget
Fez.

Most indie breakout hits aren't miracle successes. The just have very clever
and modern marketing methods. They're not wasting money on magazine ads and
gaming news sites banners like AAA studios do.

~~~
djsumdog
Super Meat Boy had the backing of the xBox store (they were promised a feature
page release) and several major gaming websites/magazines wrote pre-release
articles or reviews for it ... plus they got the tail end too with The Indie
Game movie which I'm sure added some later sales numbers for Meat Boy, Fez and
Braid.

------
aphextron
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.

~~~
aswanson
Minecraft.

~~~
scrollaway
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".

~~~
TeMPOraL
SDV is another example; the author himself admitted on numerous occasions that
the code is, well, _not stellar_ , and in the community we also had some fun
reading through decompilations of the parts of the game.

Yet another proof would be surprising number of very games made in tools like
GameMaker - think Nuclear Throne, or Cook Serve Delicious. I actually took a
peek at the sources of the latter (they were distributed with some Humble
Bundle once), and it's... reinforcing this point.

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, many programmers get lost discussing what programming language to use, GC
or not, which 3D API to use, instead of what actually matters, gameplay,
design, graphics, audio.

I always advise indies to attend local meetups from game design schools, to
learn about what actually matters when making a game.

------
jtchang
What is the target market for the game? I played Metroid when I was a kid on
NES and the original gameboy.

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.

~~~
sweden
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.

~~~
orangecat
#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.

~~~
have_faith
The Binding of Isaac seems to trike a good balance, if you're into that sort
of thing.

~~~
the_clarence
You're reaching

~~~
have_faith
What does that mean?

------
kiostech
Dear all,

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.

~~~
18pfsmt
Please don't take offense: Just FYI, 'wanna' is a contraction of 'want to,' so
writing 'wanna to' is redundant.

~~~
earenndil
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.

~~~
tempestn
It depends. Personally I'm happy to have my grammar corrected, as long as it's
done with good intentions. Perhaps I'm in the minority. I do normally avoid
correcting others though, since it's difficult to tell whether someone will be
receptive (or offended).

------
barbecue_sauce
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.

~~~
gimmeThaBeet
woah, that certainly took a turn. not that i think it's wrong , just a
humorously abrupt shift.

~~~
MrMember
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.

~~~
seventhtiger
There's a lesson to be learned too. Stop making games for the general public.
There are too many people trying to reach everyone.

You won't be Minecraft, but you won't waste 3 years for $30 either.

------
sago
Yes. You did. Sadly.

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.

~~~
bighi
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.

~~~
krinchan
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.

------
acangiano
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.

~~~
VLM
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!

~~~
scaryclam
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

------
lasagnaphil
'Infinitroid is a roguelike (or rogue-lite) sci-fi platformer with
procedurally generated levels and deeply customizable weapons"

The problem is that the "roguelike" "metrovania" "platformer" genre is
oversaturated with so many indie games, so if you're going to grab some money
with it it's better gotta be absolutely perfect. From my first impression I
don't know if the mechanics are solid, but the art and sound seems too...
generic? Maybe if the game had some unique style in it (and some marketing
too) it shouldn't have bombed this much...

~~~
Nition
This is _a_ problem, but it's not _the_ problem honestly. Every game that
fails, there's something about it that people can point to as obviously why it
failed. And just about every game that succeeds, also has something about that
they could have pointed out as why it failed, had it failed.

Some games are so unpolished or uninspired that they were never going to
succeed, but always picking apart "why it failed" makes people think that "if
I just do x and y and z, my game will succeed!" Which right now honestly just
isn't true; there's too much luck and random chance involved (plus of course
other concrete factors like marketing effort etc).

The next argument is usually "well, then why don't I see really good games
that aren't successful?" A few years ago that was a sort of reasonable
argument, but there are plenty of great and unsuccessful games on Steam now.
They just don't show up anywhere.

~~~
savanaly
On the other hand, sometimes it's very much not chance. Take stardew valley.
It's not like Barone hit some sort of jackpot with his game. It really is head
and shoulders above the competition, and that appears to be entirely due to
his hard work on it. My evidence for this is that after I played Stardew
Valley I was thirsty for more similar farming games, so I played or looked at
every single one on steam (there's only about a dozen or so that qualify) and
none of them are half the game that stardew valley is. If there were some
diamond in the rough, stardew valley-quality game out there that through
happenstance never went viral I would have hoped to find it, but no, there
really isn't.

~~~
Nition
I just had a look myself.

The first one I see is "Fantasy Farming: Orange Season"[1]. Looks very similar
to Stardew Valley, review average is 96% positive, but it only has 61 reviews
(a good general indicator of sales) vs Stardew Valley's 86,000.

I'm sure it's probably not _as_ good as Stardew Valley, but one has probably
1400x the sales of the other.

It did also release _after_ Stardew Valley which is a problem. You can
certainly benefit from being a first to fill a niche that people are missing.
I wonder if the Stardew Valley dev had taken another year to release and
Fantasy Farming had released first, if things would be the same.

[1]
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/416000/Fantasy_Farming_Or...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/416000/Fantasy_Farming_Orange_Season/)

~~~
hhjinks
It's also immediately obvious that it's just an RPG Maker game with very
little effort put in to conceal that fact. RPG Maker games generally don't do
well, because 99% of them are garbage, and those that aren't go to great
lengths to distinguish themselves visually, like Yume Nikki, and I don't know
if that title ever was a commercial success.

~~~
Nition
Nevertheless its review score average is equal to Stardew Valley's. Although I
concede that people's expectations may be lower when buying this game, and
that may make them less likely to leave a negative review.

------
dahart
> I’m kinda floundering right now and not really sure what to do
    
    
        release it
        focus on marketing for a while
        Treat it as a purely hobby project
        Make it into an ethical game experiment
        pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety
    

As someone who's gone through this, put years into a software startup, nearly
had it fail completely after spending a lot of my own money to keep the family
afloat while I goofed around thinking I was building something great...

I feel like there is only one right answer here, and it's just glaringly
obvious. Marketing is the thing that needed doing before starting, during the
project, and after it's done. Regardless of the trends on Steam, in fact even
more so because of the trends on Steam. None of the other options will solve
the problem. Releasing it won't help, and making an ethical experiment won't
get anywhere without an audience. Pouring more time into graphics will result
in greater loss without first gaining an audience.

~~~
alain94040
Find someone who is good at marketing and believes in your game enough to get
30% of all revenue in exchange for marketing it. In other words, find a
business partner with a clue.

~~~
chii
I initially dismissed this advice. However, when i thought a bit deeper, it
makes a lot of sense to do this.

If you can't convince somebody to market your game, how can you convince
somebody to buy it from you directly?

------
gavanwoolery
I wrote this controversial tweet on the matter a while back (embedded here for
convenience [1], controversial because it uses averages!) Which might make
things seem more or less bleak depending on your perspective, but an important
note from this data is that the 2017 median sales were about 2000 units per
game (yikes).

[1]
[https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/967249172804943872](https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/967249172804943872)

Average number of units sold per game on steam by year (note many games have
long tails)

    
    
      2004 - 11.6m
    
      2005 - 569k
    
      2006 - 581k
    
      2007 - 833k
    
      2008 - 279k
    
      2009 - 322k
    
      2010 - 391k
    
      2011 - 512k
    
      2012 - 535k
    
      2013 - 601k
    
      2014 - 157k
    
      2015 - 111k
    
      2016 - 73k
    
      2017 - 49k

~~~
notafraudster
You are looking at lifetime sales of games that have been on sale for
different periods of time. All of these should be divided by number of years
of sales, which gives you:

2017: 49k, 2016: 36k, 2015: 37k, 2014: 39k

2013: 120k, 2012: 89k, 2011: 73k, 2010: 48k

2009: 35k, 2008: 27k, 2007: 75k, 2006: 48k

2005: 43k, 2004: (this really just means Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike): 820k

With the sales normalized by year, and noting that 2004 did not actually allow
third party games on sale, there is not an appreciable drop or trend across
the entire time range.. I suspect the crazy spike in 2013 can be attributed
entirely to Dota2 and 2012, Counterstrike Global Offensive causing mean skew.

~~~
the_duke
Isn't mean probably very, very skewed for this?

Median would be much more interesting.

~~~
gavanwoolery
median would definitely be better. As noted, median for 2017 was 2k units sold
per game, but I lost the rest of that data. Regardless, average still carries
some meaning. :)

------
EngineerBetter
I have some sympathy, having made an indie game that gave a return of about
£0.07/hour. Sold a few thousand copies, learnt a lot, made a lot of friends
and had a lot of fun, but it certainly wasn't a great financial decision. And
that was 10 years ago when it was a lot easier!

Games industry is like the music industry - if you do it for anything other
than the love, you're likely to be disappointed. Your chances of 'making it'
are astronomically small.

------
woolvalley
I learned this painful lesson 8 years ago indirectly, working a mobile app
studio. The app store, like games and music are superstar markets and the vast
majority will fail, even if you've spent 3000 hours on it.

That what makes stardew valley so crazy, because the %99 outcome of someone
who works like him is failure and wasting 3-4 years of your life.

At this point, I would do the 'test if there is demand method' before
seriously making a game. You make a MVP of a game, as a hobby, promote it a
bit and then commence with marketing it with a kickstarter or patreon. If it
gains enough traction, then you commence working on it seriously, otherwise
stop or keep it as a pure hobby. Once your done release the full version for
free or a nominal price. Add time release tiers for early access and so on to
incentivize subscribing and supporting.

This probably means for games you need to do a whole bunch of art first more
than programming.

~~~
echan00
Obviously, you've never made a game before. 'test if there is demand method'
does not work for games.

~~~
woolvalley
Isn't that pretty much the early access model? I've seen indie games started
that were mostly incomplete, started getting patreon / kickstarter traction
and then fully developed over a few years. There are enough counterexamples
out there to prove that it does work.

No traction? Then abandon the project.

------
vagab0nd
I used to think that making money was extremely easy. You can make an App, a
website, a YouTube channel, etc. How absolutely naive I was. Turns out it's
very hard to convince people to pay you.

I adopted a different strategy later on. I try to make things that I use
myself. So if it turns out no one else uses it, at least my effort doesn't go
to waste. My Android App is now sitting at 10+ downloads but I made peace with
it fairly easily since I use the App myself twice a day.

~~~
bmc7505
What is the app?

~~~
vagab0nd
It's a very simple App which helps you memorize and learn items using Spaced
Repetition.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nerfsoftwa...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nerfsoftware.memrep&hl=en_US)

~~~
wuyuzhe
Your app gets me figuring that it would be nice for a dictionary app to have a
feature that, after you look up some word a second time (indicating it's not a
rare one), adds it to the "to memorize" list and trigger the notification
mechanism you wrote.

Also wondering if support for memorizing equations would be straightforward.

~~~
vagab0nd
Thanks for your feedback. I would say that for the first use case, unless the
"memorizing" feature is built in to the dictionary app, it's hard to do it
automatically. You could use the OS's "Share" feature to manually add the word
to the memory app.

I'm actually looking into displaying math equations. There are libraries out
there so should be pretty straightforward.

~~~
wuyuzhe
Thanks for your opinion on this. I use Mac's built-in dictionary quite often.
Guess the system provides some way to catch the look-up event, though then I
also need to think about the notification part. Anyways spaced repetition
sounds like a simple idea that could do the trick. The point of doing it
automatically in the vocab learning (for foreign languages) case is so that
you don't need to decide whether you've search a word before.

------
maxander
Poking around the guy’s website [0], I’m not surprised his sales are so
dismal- it’s a very earnest description of a project its developer obviously
likes, but which he describes in terms of other, pre-existing games and game-
styles (e.g., metroidvania, roguelike, procedurally generated, crafting,
etc)... which reads as “a mashup of other games you’ve already played.” The
one differentiating bit, that it’s a metroidvanian roguelike that _can be
played in the browser_ is buried a ways down the page (after a paragraph about
how skillfully it’s coded- good on you, but players don’t care.)

If he really wants a commercial success, my guess is that he would be well
advised to make a concerted, well-advertised run at the in-browser gaming
market, and try to find ways to monetize that (likely by scummy micro-
transactions.) His chances still wouldn’t be _good_ , but perhaps better.
(Getting on the front page of HN is a pretty good tactic too, though. : ) )

[0] Well, I spent about ten seconds reading the site’s front page, but that’s
probably more than most of his hits did.

~~~
bazooka2th
The play-in-the-browser bit should absolutely be his selling point, maybe pay-
what-you-want. I've always got an eye out for browser shooters where, idk if
there's a gaming term for it, you can walk into a corner and then step away
from the keyboard and not get killed.

------
IvanK_net
Hi, my name is Ivan and I made
[https://www.Photopea.com](https://www.Photopea.com) . After the first 7 000
hours of work, I made $0.

Now (after about 10 000 hours of work), Photopea is used by one million of
people every month, and I have a decent income just from ads, even without
working on it.

~~~
echan00
Great stuff, sometimes it takes to continue when everybody else decides to
quit

~~~
tonyedgecombe
It is very difficult to know when to quit, I've had projects (not gaming) that
I pursued for far too long.

------
rfugger
Regardless of sales, this game demonstrates all sorts of wonderful qualities
that successful studios are looking for in an employee, and its development
was undoubtedly much more educational than any computer science program. It is
never wasted time to do what one is passionate about.

~~~
randombrea
I am kind of in the same boat doing something different. I do agree you learn
a ton more than working for someone else or completing any computer science
degree.

But whether companies look for this type of employee, I am unsure that is
true. The truth is, most companies look for employees without gaps in their
resume. They are looking for signals such as having worked Google or Facebook.
They care much less about your startup than most people think. If you don't
hit those checkboxes, you are going to have a hard time looking for a job.

~~~
gambiting
I work at a AAA games studio and if this guy came to us with nothing else on
his resume but this game he would definitely get a chance.

I mean, in terms of chances in the industry - I got in by completing a 4 year
CS degree. If he gets in by spending 3 years building his own game then I'd
say it was worth it.

~~~
randombrea
That's great, but would you say its industry wide? Because I have also heard
(non-gaming) the exact opposite. Also, would he get through HR? They are more
often than not, the real gatekeepers. It would require someone to vouch for
him personally to go through, and that isn't very scalable when applying for
jobs.

~~~
mypalmike
Hiring in both gaming and non-gaming is about your resume, phone screen, and
interview. The first two are gating factors for the interview. The interview
is how the actual decision is made. References are of much less significance,
often go unchecked, and are usually focused on simply confirming the
truthiness of your resume.

If you spent 3 years of your life working on a game, it's not a gap on your
resume. In fact, it's the shining achievement on your resume, and it should
get you that phone screen. If you can't tell a good story about hard work and
technology mastery from that experience, your problem isn't an HR department,
it's that you don't know how to write a resume.

~~~
breabrea
Yes and no. You are still at a disadvantaged even if you write a good resume.
As an HR, when I need to fill a job, I search my existing database for
candidates. I input keywords such as Unity3d, Unreal Engine, UI, etc. If I
know another AAA studio has a specific department with those skillset, I input
that studio name (disadvantage #1).

Let's say the candidate pool comes back with 30+ results. I will only
interview 10 candidates realistically because I have other jobs to fill too. I
will rank those candidates by experience and background. People that work at
existing AAA studios always goes on top of the pile because I know their
chances of filling the job is much higher (disadvantage #2). If there are more
than 10 candidates from AAA studios, then too bad for you. Indie game
developers goes to the bottom pile unless their skill set matches exactly what
I need. Even then, he/ she is an unknown, for the simple reason, they might
exaggerate their experience and AAA studios can guarantee the candidates
quality.

As an HR, I need to meet quotas. And I have only so many hours to spend per
day interviewing candidates. Each candidate takes an hour. Interviewing an
indie game developer takes more time because I need to make sure he know his
stuff. If I keep on passing indie developers that are not up to par to hiring
managers, they will reflect that back to my manager.

~~~
lj3
> Even then, he/ she is an unknown, for the simple reason, they might
> exaggerate their experience and AAA studios can guarantee the candidates
> quality.

This has not been my experience at all. The opposite, in fact. I briefly did
hiring at a medium sized game studio. We preferred to hire indie devs with
completed games over those with AAA studio pedigree specifically because we
can verify that the indie dev actually built stuff himself. He could provide
code when asked and talk intelligently about it.

AAA studio developers couldn't share any code (for obvious reasons) and it can
be hard to pin point exactly what they did on any given project. When a studio
can put anywhere from 10 to 100 developers on a single project, authorship
gets fuzzy.

That said, I would discourage the indie dev in question from pursuing a job in
the industry. Why would you jump aboard a sinking ship? 1000 people in the
games industry have been axed in the last year alone[0].

[0]: [https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-
than-...](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-
than-1-000-jobs-lost-to-studio-closures-over-the-past-year)

------
kgwxd
> I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic, and I love
> what I do. I’m a lifelong learner, always evaluating my work and
> experimenting with new approaches.

All that and you still believed hard work directly equates to a big pay out.
Welcome to the school of hard knocks. Try some different metrics for defining
success.

It's not even possible you've entirely wasted 3 years. There's no way you
learned nothing or have only created things that could just be used in this
project. It's possible you could simply re-skin this thing and make it big the
next day. But don't count on it.

------
markfer
I went through a similar situation when I created an Indie game studio with
friends. We worked for a year and made a cool $5,000 but it was a "failure" by
all sense of the word. We learned a lot and had a ton of fun. Some feedback:

Your website is god awful. Seriously.

The copy doesn't excite anyone to play the game

You make the user jump through hoops to play - if you already are writing it
off, make it free to play in-browser without Steam (you want traction at all
costs right?)

What did you learn?

Did you have friends or a community playing it as you worked on it? If you
didn't, then you really need to look at the Lean Methodology

------
benologist
If I'm reading it correctly you're considering:

\- call the game finished and walk away now you finished the dev work

\- call the game a hobby to excuse the sales now you finished the dev work

\- code some arbitrary addition to be ethical just to be coding something
cause dev work is probably the only work that exists

\- keep iterating cause you can always invent more dev work to do

\- get a different project going for another type of dev work

All of these will successfully waste those 3 years and more if you don't focus
on converting your nascent product into income.

~~~
avianlyric
Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Walking away now might mean throwing
away 3 years, but that’s still better than working for another 3 years, still
not succeeding, and wasting 6 years.

~~~
benologist
If someone has spent 1000 days building their MVP and 0 days establishing
market fit it's a terrible time to quit.

~~~
airstrike
Realistically they've spent 1,000 days building a pet programming project with
little regard to market fit.

~~~
marcosdumay
Yet it would be wise to try to stablish market fit of the toy he has first,
before throwing it away and getting another toy to test for fitness.

~~~
chii
> throwing it away and getting another toy to test for fitness.

how do you know what the opportunity cost of continuing is? It's hard to know
either way.

~~~
marcosdumay
Do you know? Does the OP know? Does anybody know?

The OP has a product almost ready on his hands. It should be easy to test it
and check if it's worth investing any more time or not.

Throwing it away before he knows, just to go invest his time on another
dubious thing doesn't sound wise.

------
decentrality
From a marketing standpoint, the game "feels" amateur in the way it's
presented ( very insecure narrative, etc )

But when you watch the demo the game itself "seems cool" but in a way that
realizes immediately this is Super Mario Bros reinvented.

Also this blog post was from February 2018 and has sat on the Dev Blog "above
the fold" for most of this year. It seems like the game has a dark cloud over
it.

If something isn't a labor of love, you should end it. But then there's that
quote "you cannot excel at something you do not love" ... which seems like the
real thing here. It seems excellent in its own ways, just not entirely
original or well marketed. So ask why are you doing it and measure by some
other metric than sales and usage.

------
BacioiuC
Probably late to the party but almost a year ago I had my gamasutra blog post
about failing to sell 700 copies of my game, to stay in business, featured on
HN.

It's been almost a year since then. I kept updating the game, doing quality of
life improvements and actively engaged with the people and reviewers playing
it. I also kept people up to date with twitter and talked about the game every
chance I had.

Hacker News initial exposure helped me sell about 200 copies and by March I
passed my 700 copies goal. Enough to stay in business but, by then, I already
moved cross-county and got a few consulting gigs happening.

Almost a year later I have over 4700 copies sold on steam with the total
amount of copies sold being around 6000. The game was only recently added to a
bundle that added ~1000 copies ("retail activations" are still happening). I'm
at a point where I am so grateful for the luck I had after the initial HN
exposure that now, one year later, I'm releasing the biggest update ever for
the game and I finally got a professional artist to help me upgrade the
graphics.

What I want the dev to know is that there's still a chance, but in my case, I
already managed to secure enough money from my consulting gigs so updating the
game and working on it was done on the side and I could afford to do some more
marketing and sink time in it. If you are not financially dependent on the
game, keep working on it and slowly build up your fanbase and outreach. Take
note of people's feedback and if a common theme occurs maybe do something
about it.

Hope you'll end up being happy with your project. If it reaches Steam I'll be
your first buyer. On your site, I tried purchasing it via paypal and I cannot
get pass the re-captcha. I'm trying to click on the "I'm not a robot" checkbox
and nothing is happening. Might want to look into that.

------
5minbreak
Game development always scared me as one of those studies that you hope your
kids don't get interested in. Another one is manual drawing, especially when
it is Anime (what are the chances that someone from a small European country
is going to excel at such a job?).

> Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all
> the time I put in.

Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you keep coming back,
trying to level up by grinding boring quests. "You are not done yet, but the
end is in sight!".

As a good game dev, in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI
paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets.

~~~
povertyworld
>in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the
art on a few datasets.

As a low income indie dev without the academic credentials to get past HR
gatekeepers for stable full time work, I can't help but feel studying ML is
about as wishful as creating a hit game. I have started studying ML this
summer, and although I find the NLP applications really interesting since I
have a social science background that exposed me to some literary theory and
linguistic ideas that overlap with NLP at times, I think making a living wage
doing it is just as much of an unrealistic dream as writing some killer app.
The jobs all require PhDs, and the data science competitions have literary
thousands of people with PhDs and industry experience competing for five
figure prizes. When one is poor with no prospects these kind of pipe dreams
feel so good to get caught up in as that sweet haze of hope numbs the critical
thinking, but in a clear moment it looks like the ML gold rush is exactly the
same as every other tech hype. That's not going to stop me from geeking out on
PyTorch and trying to wring sentiment out of blocks of text or whatever, but I
won't be able to honestly write a blog post about it in a few years asking if
I wasted my time. I already know the answer.

~~~
myth_drannon
Millions of people taking ml courses. Very few get jobs because for every 50
devs you need one data scientist. It's like design but way overhyped. Also
from my experiences the ones that get hired are not the best or knowledgeable
but the ones with good sales qualities that can continuously bullshit the
employer. I'm talking about your average software company not FB/Google. ML is
like painting, writing... it's good to know but not to make a career of it

------
lazyjones
Sadly, the author apparently mostly wasted his time pursuing an idea he
considered good, based mostly on his high opinion of his own experience. Had
he tested the idea with neutral, honest people (kids are great), he might not
have been so stubborn.

As for the references to „Superstar economics“: as if modern superstars in the
music or film industry weren‘t 100% reliant on test audiences... It‘s why we
don’t get much original, experimental stuff these days.

------
outside1234
Its probably hard to see this right now but any code you wrote was not a waste
of time. You learned something that will become invaluable two years down the
line in another role and probably will boost your salary more than the
opportunity cost of washing dishes and thus repay itself every year.

Everyone who tackles a project like this should keep this in mind. Its almost
certainly not going to make you immediate money, but you'll learn a lot doing
it, and that will repay itself down the line.

I've done this twice to myself and it was hard at the time to watch them fail
but I now make $500k+/yr at one of the FAANGs and a lot of that salary I
attribute to trying build these things, end to end, myself. I just have a much
broader context on the industry, on technical stacks, and on software
development than if I hadn't.

So, congrats. :)

------
nearmuse
Well, looking at that youtube demo, although it might be a nice game a lot
effort went into, it is nothing conceptually new. I could understand the
despair of someone who had an original idea and artistic skill, pulled off a
game with unprecedented gameplay and then it didn't float because people
didn't get the hang of it. But this game? It is for people who like that kind
of games (Metroid inspired games or whatever).

------
notjustanymike
The end user doesn't care you hand built your engine out of C and other
beautiful technologies. They care if it's fun. Period.

It's looks like way too much time was spent on an engine when off the shelf
would have done better.

~~~
lostgame
I couldn’t agree more. When I read the engine was built in C++ it absolutely
knocked me flat.

Why? With perfectly awesome and _free_ technologies like Unity, you’re setting
yourself up for failure by spending hundred hours putting together something
that has already been created for you.

It would allow you to focus on making the best game possible, instead of
wasting countless hours re-inventing the wheel.

IMHO, that’s the first, and largest, mistake this project made.

Furthermore I agree with others that it simply feels ‘uninspired.’ Maybe less
hours spent on the engine and more spent on the content would’ve made the game
more notable.

~~~
jcl
For what it's worth, it looks like his initial focus was on making a 2D web
game. Unity had only just started supporting HTML5 as a target around the time
he began, with plenty of rough edges, so it may not have been an obvious good
choice then.

------
CosmicBagel
Market is EXTEMELY saturated for many genres. Metroidvania games are one of
the most saturated right now. Feel bad for the guy, but I think he should take
his existing tech and experiment with different game modes, or game mutators
and see if he can discover some cool experiences that will make his game stand
out from the crowd. I'm not saying this will guarantee success, but staying
the course on such a saturated genre and not doing something radically
different seems like a bad strategy.

------
ioddly
Not sure what OP's background is, but if he's not in the tech industry and
wrote a complex C++ game engine, plus a website with Flask+SQL on his own, I'd
say he has a potential career as a software developer there.

~~~
lostgame
Sure.

But why did he do that to start? Seems like focusing time on the content
instead of the engine would’ve made him feel like he ‘wasted’ less time.

------
LaGrange
Here's what a publisher is for: to shoulder the risk. They have (presumably)
umpteen different games (or whatever they're publishing) going, not only they
can (if they do they job right) shoulder a few flops, and can hire marketing
staff that wouldn't make sense for a single project. They can, finally, hire
PR that would shield the developers from the public angry over the framerate
or presence of women or something.

And yes, they haven't been doing their job right, they had too much power,
they played it too safe and mistreated the developers.

But instead of supporting game developers who wanted to unionise, instead of
supporting social projects (like basic income!) that would reduce the risk an
independent takes, we asked people to go indie, and just shoulder that entire
risk themselves. Good job, everyone!

------
fullstackchris
Ugh. This is the depressing side of the huge wave of indie dev / maker / game
creators that has been on the rise in the past few years.

The creativity from everyone is great on the building side, but on the
marketing and traction side, there can always be bad luck, like this example.

I think a lot of consumers are just fatigued from too many options - think
about how much of instagram and facebook is ads vs what it used to be, even
back in like 2010.

------
wildfire
Yes.

You are only asking to have people point out possibilities that you didn't.

But in your heart of hearts, you know you did.

That doesn't mean you didn't have fun. I suspect you need to revisit what
'waste' really is for you though.

------
masukomi
having worked in the ad business... a conversion rate of 1 in 1,000 of in-
market people is fairly standard. having zero sales with just over one
thousand visitors is not surprising at all _especially_ if you consider that a
good percentage of those people probably aren't in-market for your particular
game anyway.

You need _way_ more visitors to have any clue if your efforts are resonating
with your potential market or not.

------
john_moscow
I think the biggest problem with this game is the lack of atmosphere and
story. In 201X it's not about the pixels and latencies, it's about the
creative part.

The nearest "success" example I can think of is Jets-and-Guns [1]. The guys
that made the game partnered with an indie 8-bit rock band that wrote the
soundtrack specifically for the game. The story is full of parodies on common
cliches and silly jokes that made me replay the game several times.

There's a bunch of other successful indie games in other markets and unless it
offers a radically new addictive gameplay (say Minecraft), it has to be about
the story. Stardew valley, Papers Please, you name it. Unfortunately, this
title simply lacks both of them and is hence doomed to fail.

P.S. It shouldn't take 3 years to find out the lack of product/market fit.
There's a funny saying that if you are not ashamed of the v1.0 of your
product, you have released it too late. This 100% applies here. Release it
with just 1 level based on a commodity game engine, gather feedback, decide
onward based on it. Anything more than a couple of months is just wrong if you
are doing it for the first time as a 1-person project, IMHO.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEnHolPt8zw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEnHolPt8zw)

------
andrewstuart
I'd have started this blog post with links to the game, the game title plus
cool screenshots.

~~~
lostgame
I completely agree - the lack of screenshots in the article was almost as
strange as hearing the author wrote their own engine.

Furthermore, a simple Google of the game reveals very, very few results. As
others have stated, nothing markets itself.

------
jmcgough
I don't mean to poopoo how hard it is to succeed as an indie game maker now,
but I can barely find /any/ press or information about the game when I search
for it. It's rarely enough to just build something and cross your fingers,
especially in a saturated market.

Coding heads down without any marketing or validation (like selling early
release steam copies) and hoping it'll see viral growth is a mistake, for both
startups and indie games.

~~~
snissn
Also from this page it simultaneously says the game is free and asks me for
money
[https://infinitroid.com/new_account](https://infinitroid.com/new_account)

Also doesn't have any screen shots, info about the game, etc

It's actually hostile to someone coming across the page trying to check out
the game

Edit it's possible the note about "You can skip the payment section below" was
literally just added

------
mooreds
> I’ve had a lot of fun building and sharing the game. But I did have some
> hope of creating something that a lot of people would check out and enjoy,
> and making some return on my time investment, perhaps enough to keep doing
> this as an independent career.

I wrote a video course on Amazon Machine Learning [0]. I spent about 80 hours
researching, writing the outline, putting together the material, recording and
re-recording the 105 minute course. I think I've made about $200 from it,
directly.

But, I've done several talks on it (which were non paying, but sharpened my
presentation skills), wrote half a book on it, and got one consulting
opportunity around it. I also got a bit of schwag from AWS because someone
noticed my forum contributions, which was cool.

If everything you do is a hit, you aren't taking enough risks. However, I will
say that 2600 hours without market validation is far more commitment than I
would make.

0: [http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/amazon-machine-
learning](http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/amazon-machine-learning)

------
Mortiffer
Whats the equivalent of testing your business idea before building a business
in the gaming world ?

~~~
CM30
Releasing a basic game with the same mechanics/concepts before expanding on it
through updates?

Well, that seems to be how many multiplayer games are released nowadays
anyway. Look at ARMS or Mario Tennis Aces on the Nintendo Switch, or Pokemon
GO, or Sea of Thieves* on Xbox. Released in very basic states, then slowly
expanded upon via regular updates. You could even possibly say Minecraft went
the same way.

That said, this sort of 'Minimum Viable Game' idea may not work as well here
as it does for business products or web services. People are practically
spoilt for choice when it comes to what games to buy, and a game that leaves
an initial 'meh' impression (due to a lack of content/replay value) can often
die out before the updates ever come. And the critics will certainly not be
kind to it either...

* Admittedly, that one took four years to develop, which may not have been the best setup given the lack of content.

Other ways this is sometimes done are:

1\. By releasing demos on a regular basis to test the waters 2\. Splitting the
game up into episodes and selling them one at a time. Valve did this with Half
Life, but it was arguably TellTale Games who ran with it. 3\. Or by running a
beta test for the game and gauging reactions from that.

Of course, all the above assumes you can build at least a somewhat sizable
portion of the game in a reasonable timeframe. If you want to know whether a
completely untested idea will be viable... well good luck with that in this
industry. You'll always need at least a core gameplay loop setup to know
whether the idea is fun, and you'll need much more if you want to know whether
anyone will buy it.

~~~
Mortiffer
Looking at the industry they also have the approach of announcing or teasing
things which then never get build. So thats probably a way big companies test
too

------
egypturnash
If anyone wants to try this without making a login: justchecking/justchecking

Personally I played about two rooms and then got bored. It sure is a tribute
to Metroid. With weird, floaty jumping (did Metroid have that? I never played
that one very much.). And tiny, dark graphics. Plus I was playing it on the
keyboard and not fullscreened which never helps.

------
lgeorget
> I have a backlog of dozens of purchased-but-never-played Steam games picked
> up at ridiculously low prices from Humble Bundles, Steam sales, etc. Does
> the world need any more games at this point?

When I started to find myself with half a dozen of such games, I remembered
the year we spent saving money with my brothers to buy a hard copy of Caesar
3. I was just a child. It costed us what would now be 15€. Considering the
inflation since then, games were quite expensive.

So, I've decided to stop buying games in those promotions and having games in
my library that I will never play. I prefer paying the full price for a game I
really want to play, like before. I think it's more honest to the developers.
Whether that will mean more money to them in average I don't know. Does
someone know if the developers/editors really benefit from the sales on
HumbleBundle and the like (the prices really look pretty low)?

------
markbnj
>> Does the world need any more games at this point?

It's like asking if the world needs another pop song or pizza joint. There's
always room for the next great game and another good place to get a pie.

------
bloaf
Are you making this to sell as a fun game, or as something you'd put into a
portfolio to advertise yourself to employers?

If you're trying to sell games, your site focuses on all the wrong things.

1) I need a reason to want to play. Some games present themselves as a
challenge to overcome (e.g. Volgarr the Viking, Dustforce), while others have
some kind of interesting narrative or world to explore (e.g. Metroid/Binding
of Isaac.) Some games promise comedy (e.g. Enter the Gungeon.) I can't tell
what your hook is. Weapon customization and survival are fine game mechanics,
but they're not a reason for me to want to play all by themselves.

2) Artistic theme. Games that age well have a cohesive look-and-feel. My
initial impression of your game's theme is "asset store default." Maybe you
didn't use an asset store, but that certainly is my first impression

3) When I hear "procedurally generated exploration" I have a negative
reaction. It is incredibly difficult to do well, and when done any way other
than well, it becomes boring and repetitive almost immediately. On your site,
I am given no reason to believe it was done well.

These three things, taken together, mean that I probably wouldn't play your
game even if it were offered to me for free with no strings attached.

------
TangoTrotFox
There's something I see as a mistake that people do over and over. There are
fundamentally two markets you can target: niche or popular. The niche market
is small but under-served and so it's much easier to stand out, but your
potential market is limited. The popular market is huge, but it also tends to
be over-served. You need to really stand out. It's going to require much more
to be able to compete, but if you do manage to compete then your potential
market is enormous.

Metroidvania and roguelike are two of the most crowded markets. And they're
full of very good games that can be had for a few bucks. Competing here means
you need something that really stands out. This, by contrast, seems very
genetic and lacks the production values that can help mask an otherwise
generic product. For instance this [1] is a metroidvania roguelike that can be
had for about $4 on a sale (and is a great game as an aside). That's what
you're competing against.

I think it makes more sense to aim for niche. And there's also the nice
outlier that occasionally proves that niche wasn't really niche at all.

[1] -
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/252030/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/252030/)

------
ninjakeyboard
congrats you made it to number 2 on hn - I'm sure your revenue just went up a
lot. The game actually looks pretty cool. I echo the price and platform. It
looks like it would appeal to a fairly casual gaming category with a lower
price. I'd pay a couple bucks but 7 or 8 seems high but I don't do gaming off
of my phone so this game would appeal to me but isn't targeted toward a
platform that I use.

------
HissingMachine
Couple of things came to mind from reading this. First if your latest game
doesn't sell despite past successes, you might have bungled your marketing,
namely company branding. Most AAA game developers heavily invest in this,
because if gamers like their current game, they might be interested for the
next one, but only if they know who you are, not just your games. Consumers in
games industry work just the same as they do in every other industry, indies
just seem to think that because core gamers know who they are and engage with
them, that the average consumer does too, but they don't.

Second one was that quote about lack of interest from games media. They do
work as gate keepers, and most of them are heavily advertising driven, so the
problem here is the same as above, indies suffer because they don't have
marketing budgets. When the industry grows so large that it has to start
attracting casuals, that always means spending marketing dollars, and indie
industry has grown and saturated the core gamer group through, and casual
interest just isn't there without marketing.

------
shmerl
That's why addressing a smaller market can be useful. Release your game for
Linux and engage with Linux gaming community. You are more likely to be
noticed.

Here is an interesting article about it: [http://cheesetalks.net/proton-linux-
gaming-history.php](http://cheesetalks.net/proton-linux-gaming-history.php)

------
KennyCason
In terms of wasting your time, I think it's only a waste of time if you
perceive it to be a waste of time. If you had fun developing the game, then I
wouldn't beat yourself up over it. Simply because, as you've noticed,
releasing a successful game is in general very difficult! The odds are not in
your favor. I'm also developing an Indie Game (Ninja Turdle), and will release
it to steam but have pretty low expectations on any success. I'm just doing it
for fun, with the extra hopes that it could make some extra cash, but if not,
oh well, I will have accomplished one of my life goals of releasing a video
game. If no one buys your game but you still want to get it out there, maybe
just wait another half year or so, and release it as freeware, Then at least
people still get to enjoy your game. That in itself is a very rewarding
feeling.

Great job on the game, the videos look very smooth and I will be sure to give
it a play!

------
mikeleeorg
Reading this makes me think of all the indie app developers building
educational mobile apps. Most of them are parents with the best of intentions.
Maybe they started off building an app for their kids. Maybe they saw a need
at their local school and decided to fill it. Maybe they themselves always
wished for their particular app and decided to build it.

The vast majority of them eventually burn out and leave the field or take on a
day job to supplant their income. A small number sell their apps to a larger
publisher or get hired by a larger company. And very very very few break
through that barrier to generate self-sufficient income, much less growing
profits.

They have many of the same business challenges of indie game developers too,
it seems. Too many alternatives/competitors, distribution challenges,
marketing challenges, lack of differentiation, etc.

I suppose the same could be said for indie developers in many other verticals
too.

------
Agathos
That's from back in February but more recently others have been saying similar
things:

[https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-
man...](https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-many-video-
games-what-now-indiepocalypse)

------
salembeats
If you released a game with no market research and under the naive expectation
that "if you build it, they will come", you likely learned a very painful
lesson.

There needs to be a market for what you're writing, you need to find and reach
out to this market, and you need to entice them by providing more value than
the spare $X they have in their pocket (plus, you need to communicate this so
that they realize this).

You also need to realize that small differences in quality can lead to huge
differences in interest, ESPECIALLY given how "copycat" your game seems
appears from the homepage. If your game is only 1% worse than the other game
I'm interested in, I'll probably give the other game 100% of my free gaming
time (others may not be so extreme, but you get the idea).

Marketing/sales folks exist for a reason. You just figured out why.

------
blunte
If you look at successful entrepreneurs (or basically anyone who has gone the
less ordinary path and reached some level of success), you'll usually see a
list of failure or at least non-successes prior to the success you see them
enjoying today. Same goes for artists and entertainers who become "overnight
successes". It wasn't overnight for them!

So you've done good work and gotten not the return you expected... it might
take one more game or 10 more games. Or this game might lead you to meeting
people that can help you be more successful in the future.

It's ok to "give up" and move on too. You can stay the course and probably
eventually become successful, but if you have other interesting things to do
and less interest in continuing gamedev, then go try something new.

------
z3phyr
Most of the modern games I have played have no replayibility, very limited in
scope and on top of that archaic buisness models.

I understand that it is very hard to make games and 100 times harder to make
good games. There must be a sane method for decent compensation waiting to be
thought out I hope

------
Applejinx
You sort of did. Depends on what you expect.

You got half decent at a whole bunch of skills, which you can reapply. I'd say
it was equal to going to a school for this, but not an exceptional school.
It's a start, and it's a toolset.

Me and my brother make games. I do a brainstormy intuitive thing, and he
builds stuff brick by brick. He has a tendency to decide things like 'I will
build an Asteroids', build the skeleton of such a thing (with all the effort
going into code elegance) and not have anywhere to go from there. I have a
tendency to have wild exciting-sounding ideas, implement about a quarter of
them, and end up with something that's certainly not like anything else, but
isn't necessarily FUN or even a game.

I think I have a slightly higher chance of breaking through into the realm of
'making an actual game', but it hasn't really happened yet and may never
happen. Even if it did, there wouldn't be money in it. I'm just not that good
a designer, though I AM a sort of nascent designer. Plus, I'm too devoted to
open source these days and that would likely be a handicap to market adoption;
if nobody else can get rich off it either then it ain't gonna be a hit.

To make a hit thing you have to be able to see how exploitative third parties
can get rich off you, and then let them do it and hope you get a cut (or some
publicity).

I think the future isn't creative (insofar as popular hit products). It's
basically focus-grouped artificial blandness and knock-offs consuming the
market, and will not go back (occasional fluke successes will doubtless
happen)

The future is learning how to manage these creative exploits as communication,
perhaps to a very small audience for whom they're specially crafted. You'll be
a craft beer or a hand made cheese. You have nothing to do with the market as
we know it, it's all about what manner of distribution you can function under
at the scale you will forever remain.

So who did you get to know in that three years? Did you form a community,
perhaps of other game makers?

------
iameli
7672 games released in a year still seems so, so low to me. How many books are
published in a year? How many albums?

I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves
suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed, yeah?

~~~
kartan
Around 2,256,508 books (data is not up to date
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year))

But I guess it will be fair to compare also with Movies. As some games have
budgets on that scale.

That is around 730 movies per year for USA and Canada.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-
in...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in-north-
america-since-2001/)

> I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves
> suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed,
> yeah?

Yes. In the 90s there were not so many people with the skills and equipment to
create games. Nowadays is a global market where everyone can give it a try.
From cheap computers to Unity3D it is easier and cheaper than ever to create
games.

~~~
forapurpose
> 730 movies per year

Is that apples to apples? A 'movie' release could be anything from a quick
short on YouTube to a $x00 million blockbuster, and everything in between. The
same goes for games.

------
village-idiot
I love gaming. I’m glad that people make the video games that I buy and play.

I would never ever consider actually becoming involved in the space as a
programmer, not in a million years. I advise any potential programmers to stay
way the hell away from it too.

------
Xenos_Ender
OP, Try contacting some streamers that love trying new games like CohhCarnage.
If they play your game for 10+ hours it will be better than any other form of
advertising. Also, make sure they pay for your product, don't offer it free.

------
projektir
It's difficult for me to be excited by indie games. Sometimes they can be
really great and unique, but a very large amount of indie games are some
variation of platformer or roguelike or both. That is great and all, but that
area just seems extremely saturated, and maybe there's just no room anymore?

There are plenty of types of games I'd still love to see made or have ideas
for, but they require 3D, money, great art teams. Indie games generally cannot
pull this, so they tend to be limited to rather rigid subgenres, and there are
only so many variations of Metroid you can make before people mostly find what
they're looking for.

------
everyone
Making games is an incredibly risky business. Akin to starting a restaurant.

I personally dont think of it like a business _at all_. I think of it as a
vocation. By choosing to make games, I consider myself to have chosen the life
of an artist.. My goal right now is to make great games that I want to make,
thats it.

I'm living off the savings from my last _real_ job, and being extremely
frugal. I moved out to the country, where everything is cheaper (rent
massively so). If / when I run out of money I'll do some contracts, worst case
scenario is get a fulltime job as an employee again.. But I am _extremely_
happy with my life right now.

------
damnmachine
This also looks a bit like a less polished version of "The Swapper":
[http://facepalmgames.com/the-swapper/](http://facepalmgames.com/the-swapper/)

------
bschwindHN
You can market a 2D platformer all you want, it's still a 2D platformer in a
market absolutely _saturated_ with them.

If you're making one in 2018, it should either be a hobby project, or you
should be prepared for very few sales.

------
freyr
The graphics are not great. They’re not bad, but they’re also not on par with
most successful indie games. My suggestion, if you don’t insist on going solo,
is to team up with an excellent designer.

------
Clomez
Click the link to find information (screenshots, maybe video) Play now button,
but im not on computer to play with, just hanging around in HN while eating at
work.

Soo i got lots of text and links but no pictures of game or video whatsoever.
All the information i have is what i pieced around in comments, seems like
rogue-like metrovania.. this dosent really sell me the game. Sure there is
play now but that also lead to page full of text.

Bad marketing

------
jhanschoo
> Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to
> be geometrically increasing

The derivative of an exponential is again an exponential :p

------
afpx
Niche markets may be the way to go. For instance, I would gladly spend $250
for a deep economic simulator game. I haven’t seen one of those in years.

~~~
lfowles
Out of curiosity what titles do you have in mind when you say "deep economic
simulator"?

~~~
afpx
Well, the depth that I’d like has never been done :)

But ... if a game could blend aspects of Railroad Tycoon 3, Patrician,
Capitalism, Industry Giant, etc.

------
ponytech
As I was reading this post I thought I could be writing it myself... Although
I am in the mobile gaming industry (maybe even harder than steam) and I "only"
spent 2 years on my project the outcome was similar. Conclusion: don't spend
that long on a project with such an unpredictable fate.

Shameless plug: [https://www.dinorush.com](https://www.dinorush.com)

------
krinchan
I mean, the author got three years to work on something they loved. It's
unfortunate they didn't have what it takes to turn it into a career, but the
game itself should be enough to get them into a studio or smaller indie shop.

I don't think it was a waste, but maybe the author should be looking for
alternative ways to parlay the game into a paycheck instead of ... ...
whatever this is.

------
Wheaties466
I really hate when people try to justify them not being successful saying
something along the lines of, i'm smart why am I not successful.

------
eterm
If you look at most of the recent smash hit indie games\\* they really don't
innovate graphically at all, instead they bring something new to the table in
terms of gameplay.

Most are "rogue-lite" which is a hot genre right now but all have something
that make them stand out.

Rogue like games have the potential to become indie hits because they are very
good for twitch/youtube audiences, because in general, up until the moment the
player loses, they are winning.

This is great for streamers, no long-drawn out sequences where they know
they've probably lost, no ability for audiences to get bored watching the
player struggle in a losing fight. Instead the player gets to live out their
power fantasy up until the moment that fantasy is betrayed and they lose.

And then it's a quick or instant reset and they're back to the pit / whale /
plane and off they go again.

But a rogue-lite platformer? Ok that can work, Risk of Rain did an OK job with
really poor graphics. But the gameplay was top-notch to compensate, and that
was released before the big indie-deluge, that might not do so well if it were
released today and had to go up against competetion from the likes of gungeon
or dungreed.

With regards to this game, the graphics are too low to look good but haven't
masked that by making the choice of going pixel-art, instead it just looks
like it's from a PC gamer cover CD circa 1999.

Compare that to Slay the Spire, which has very basic art but has an engine
that is well made, so it's limited art is still delivered very nicely. In the
case of slay the spire they compensate with a good soundtrack which doesn't
get irritating even on repeat playthroughs and some really solid gameplay.

Those are the smash-hits and a hits-based industry follows a power-law, so
there's a vast quantity of mediocre games below there. What hope does a game
which appears to mostly replicate previous gameplay with weak graphics stand?

That's not to say it was a waste of time, only the author can judge that.

\\* Far too many to list, but I'm thinking along the lines of Slay the Spire,
Enter the Gungeon, They are Billions. Even Playerunknown's battlegrounds or
fortnite in some way fits the 'rogue-lite' formula of facing ever more
difficult challenges up until a sudden and final death and complete reset.

~~~
projektir
> Compare that to Slay the Spire, which has very basic art

Basic is not what I would call this.

But I think we shouldn't confuse graphics fidelity with quality. You can have
an ugly pixel art game or a pretty pixel art game.

------
epx
Games are a lot like movies industry. #metoo's, low median pay, too many hours
put into flops. This kind of effort is best financed by deep pockets that can
eat the loss.

One area you might reuse your talents and efforts, is gambling industry. It is
another toxic environment, I take antidepressants since 2003 since I worked
once with a client of this industry, but the payout is at least certain.

------
chaoticmass
>I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work
ethic, and I love what I do. I’m a lifelong learner, always evaluating my work
and experimenting with new approaches. Should I be failing this badly?

This paragraph reads like the guy thinks all of this means he deserves
success. I can't say I feel bad for this guy.

~~~
RestlessMind
Anyone who has studied hard, possessing a good work ethic, willing to learn
lifelong and open to new approaches does indeed deserve success. What else
would you have them do - walk over coals?

------
yoz-y
I think that unless done for artistic or exploratory reasons, it is better to
have a pre built audience for large projects like games. The fact that sales
in the indie space are bleak is not news. Try a crowdfunding campaign and if
it fails then think hard whether to continue to invest time into the project.

------
plasma
Is this a marketing problem? You mentioned ~1000 visitors to your store page,
I'm not surprised there are no sales yet.

Good luck and don't be too disheartened, you've already put in the large
amount of work needed, now just spend some time trying to market in order to
get some return.

------
meritt
The indie game marketplace has a massive discovery problem that is not
whatsoever met by current tools. Humble Bundle tried to solve this for a while
but I just checked their site and it's filled with AAA titles to include
Overwatch, Assassin's Creed, and COD: Black Ops.

------
j_coder
You need to find as soon as possible trusted people that can tell you how bad
is your idea/game play/sound/narrative so you can fix it or do something else.
Most will just be polite to you or be trolls.

------
WalterBright
In the gold rush days, it wasn't the miners who made money (other than a very
few early miners). It was the people who supplied the miners.

It isn't surprising the internet has been called a gold rush.

------
Roritharr
I just bought the early access. Interesting what thoughts go through your head
after you read such a blogpost. I had to ask myself ten times if I'm not
buying it to give parallel-universe-me a leg up...

------
pytyper2
You should go through your code and try to extract generic abstractions that
you can release as resume building projects or as assets that other developers
can license and include in their projects.

------
iliketosleep
Releasing a game is as much of a marketing exercise as it is a technical one.
It appears that the author focused on the technical aspects and somewhat
neglected the business/marketing side.

------
jokoon
People should build the game they want to play.

That's really how I view things. I just play nice games, find flaws and things
to be perfected, and gather up all those things in a game that could be
enjoyed.

------
rocky1138
If you are interested in making an indie game, do it only because you want to
not because you think you'll make money.

You will lose money. That's it. There's no magic message here.

Source: an indie dev. I keep my passion for my project because it's something
I truly want to do.

~~~
stupidcar
That's clearly not entirely true though, because there _are_ hits. They're
just extremely rare, but extremely visible. You can read interviews with the
Stardew Valley guy all over where he talks about spending 4 years working solo
on his game, refusing to give up on realising his artistic vision. Then he
releases and it's a mega-hit. That's a very seductive story.

This isn't a problem unique to indie games. Every creative field has an
overabundance of hopefuls, all chasing a tiny chance of turning it into a
success. The problem, as Daniel Clowes observed back in 1991[1] is that
everyone thinks that they'll be one of the lucky ones.

[1]
[https://artinfiction.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/asc-3.jpg](https://artinfiction.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/asc-3.jpg)

~~~
solipsism
You may have missed the nuance in the comment you're replying to. Everyone
knows that it's possible to win the lottery. But the best advice you can give
is to tell people they're never going to win the lottery.

People who are super passionate about making indie games I'm going to do it
regardless, so this is good advice.

~~~
stupidcar
"Best advice" why? Accurate, perhaps. But do you really find going around
telling people that they're not going to win the lottery makes them stop
playing? Even after they read an article about someone who won $100m and has
quit their job to sail around the world?

I think such advice misunderstands the psychology of why people gamble on very
long odds. The primary drive is emotional, not rational. The rational brain
only has to be convinced that a theoretical possibility exists. After that,
it's a matter of emotional appeal, and culture is very good at presenting
seductive narratives based on rare occurrences.

~~~
solipsism
_But do you really find going around telling people that they 're not going to
win the lottery makes them stop playing?"_

Not 100% successfully, but of course it helps. Why don't you go around and ask
some people why they don't play the lottery?

 _I think such advice misunderstands the psychology of why people gamble on
very long odds._

It's why I don't gamble. It's why lots of people don't gamble. People aren't
completely rational, but they're not completely irrational either.

Helping people put understand the true odds of what they're engaged in is a
good thing.

What do you have against people knowing the facts?

------
kachurovskiy
I wonder what is the outcome distribution for an indie developer spending this
much time building an utility desktop Mac/Windows app. Somehow this seem to
have fallen out of fashion.

------
ddtaylor
What was his target audience / market and what need did his game satisfy that
an existing game couldn't? Essentially, did he have product market fit?

------
BatFastard
Yes, but that is only if you didn't learn anything. Problem is not many people
appreciate the skills that go into writing your own engine and game.

------
zer00eyz
Market, marketing and basic UED on the site are all issues here.

1\. why would I pay 7 bucks for this, when something like PUBG is ostensibly
free? There is no easy "trial" download (Do I even down load this?) Does it
work on my phone (a lot of the low end game market went there.

2\. Selling things is hard when your up against free. I dont like the freemium
model but free stuff with ad's makes money - give it away and monetize on the
back end.

3\. Every one pays for customers. Marketing matters and especially in a
competitive market. Your going to need to spend money to make money in todays
age.

~~~
stordoff
PUBG is $30:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/578080/PLAYERUNKNOWNS_BAT...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/578080/PLAYERUNKNOWNS_BATTLEGROUNDS/)

~~~
zer00eyz
I was thinking of the current mobile version!
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tencent.ig...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tencent.ig&hl=en_US)

------
ransom1538
My rant on games:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10955276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10955276)

------
cubano
_reduce addictive qualities of the game..._

Not sure if applying this strategy to a game that has sold only 4 copies in 3
years would really help the situation.

------
DelightOne
That‘s why its usually recommended to fail fast. To not sink in too much
without knowing whether there is any product-market fit.

------
zby
I don't play games - so maybe I have no idea - but why people try to compete
solo with big companies?

------
DrNuke
Having mastered C++ is not a bad outcome for the OP’s future in the software
trade, though.

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modernerd
Reading advice from successful game devs to “my game didn't sell well” -style
posts on reddit can be instructive too:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9k8wsi/my_games_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9k8wsi/my_games_didnt_sell_well_heres_my_advice_for_you/)

Jason Rohrer's advice there was essentially:

\- Games have to either make an instant emotive connection via their art style
or gameplay concept (and be priced well enough for an impulse purchase), or
prove that they are deep and long-lasting enough that they'll be worth the
investment in time and money.

\- Single-player games that don't do the above are especially hard sells,
because hit gameplay trends are veering toward multiplayer games: “If your
game's initial impression gives people pause, it's already over.”

The Infinitroid developer might learn something from that advice — I checked
the trailer at [https://infinitroid.com/](https://infinitroid.com/), and the
game looks fun, but I don't feel that instant connection to the art style or
gameplay concept in the same way I did with Minit or Monument Valley (both
instant impulse purchases), and I don't get the impression that it offers
weeks of gameplay like The Witness or Stephen's Sausage Roll do (purchased
both later after consideration and persistent appearances in media and social
feeds).

It feels like most “my game's a commercial failure” posts I read could have
been saved by spending more time on the initial concept and art style, and on
testing the market before the three-to-ten year investment in building the
full game was made.

Reducing the time to market also seems like a sane strategy. It may have taken
five years to build Stardew Valley and 10 years to make Owlboy, but that does
not mean every successful game involves holing yourself up for half a decade
or more.

Developers also seem to underestimate just how much marketing a successful
game needs even when the concept is great. Look at what the Boyfriend Dungeon
team did to get traction for their game (5 years of marketing, 10 releases of
other mini games on itch.io to build a following, website built 11 months
before release, appearance on panels and in game press, months of Kickstarter
planning), and check that you're prepared to do the same with your game if
commercial success is important to you (it is fine for it not to be):

[https://medium.com/@kitfoxgames/years-in-the-making-how-
kitf...](https://medium.com/@kitfoxgames/years-in-the-making-how-kitfox-games-
played-the-long-game-with-boyfriend-dungeon-hype-debd0338a0dc)

Rohrer also mentions that he made 13 games before he had a hit (also happened
to be his first multiplayer game), so perseverance and learning from failures
seems like a big factor too.

------
rrssh
It’s the fonts. They look like you’re reading something.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Yeah, it's like the equivalent of using the default in iMovie. Very little
thought given to art direction. Has the effect of making this seem like a
Unity game, even though he built the engine from scratch. Seems like he played
Axiom Verge, said "I could do that!" and then put his nose to the grindstone
for three years without asking anybody else for input.

------
davidork
i just looked at the website, went to the main page and watched bits and
pieces of the gameplay video.

rogue-lite: check. metroidvania(gotta get that retro street cred) : check.
Bland uninspired assets: check. post mortem blog post posted to some link
aggregator about how you released the same thing that every other copypasta
developer on greenlight has crapped out for the past 3 years and it isn't
selling well?: check.

yep. 3 years, down the crapper.

------
nadim
I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores.

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russtrpkovski
Congrats on shipping a product!

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nuguy
Sorry but the reason that your game and others have not sold is because they
aren’t new and they don’t offer anything that consumers want. It’s so simple.

The graph of steam sales, as you mentioned, is poisoned with shovel-ware. But
it’s also inflated by another kind of game that nobody wants: games that are
just remakes of the same old tropes and mechanics — nobody is interested in
playing them even though they are implemented with care. It’s a problem that
is huge in the programming world: lack of high level thought and
consideration. The super meat boy guy who you linked to should have asked
himself if anyone really is excited about platformers _before_ sinking all
that time into it. There is no indie game problem. It’s a bad ideas problem.

Look at the witness. It did good. It’s because it’s a good game with freshness
and insight. Messages are passed from developer to player through every aspect
of the game. It is something to sit down and consider for hours. Something to
be inspired by. There has to be actual value in the game. This torrent of
let’s players and people who use video games and v.g. Culture as some kind of
crutch or something to give them identity — endlessly grinding away at
meaningless and stupid achievements and 100% completions — all of that is
nonsense and it is your own fault for diving into it.

~~~
sinker
While it could have been said with more consideration, I think this comment
tells the core of why the game isn't a success. From my eyes the game does not
appear interesting to play. At some point not too long ago, the idea of a
remake with a twist would have been interesting (eg, Geometry Wars). But
people have come to expect different things from indie games and games in
general. It's not enough to rehash old ideas. The idea of revamping a much
beloved gsme or genre has lost its novelty as so many developers have done
that already.

The games that we love from the past exist. And spiritual remakes of those
games exist. It's not enough for a game to succeed based largely on nostalgia.
I don't mean to discredit the creator's hard work. This is what I understand
from a glance at seeing the preview video.

------
z3t4
Don't write a single LOC until you have at least one user.

~~~
chvid
How exactly would you do that for a platform game like we are talking about
here?

~~~
z3t4
Assuming you have a tight budget (no budget for marketing or user testing)
pick someone, yourself, a friend, or relative, then make some concept arts,
and show it to them, if they like it, continue iterating, if they are not
interested you have to pivot. Note that the user can also be yourself. It's
unlikely that you would make a game that you yourself _love_ to play but no
other one does. It's however likely that you love _developing_ it much more
then playing it, then you are not the user! And you have to find an actual
user. Test the game/product on your target user(s) throughout the development
process to see what works and what doesn't. If the "users" are engaged they
will have suggestions, actually you will get flooded with suggestions, so it
helps if you also is a user yourself so you can prioritize features according
to your vision and not just the most popular.

------
Iwan-Zotow
Yes, you did

------
mikekchar
Games are a great example of how "if you build it, they will come" just
doesn't work in crowded market place. You need 2 other things: a way to build
a community _and_ a way to convert that community into incoming cash. It's
important to understand that indie game devs usually don't have a huge runway
of capital, so both of these things are necessary right from the start.

I don't exactly know how you do this because I haven't done it before, but my
naive feeling is that it's a huge risk to sit down for 3-4 years and just
write code. You have to find a way to engage your potential future audience
_while_ you are developing the game. Many of the most successful indy games
have the same development ethos of open source software: release early and
release often.

Second, I think it's important to ask for money very early on in the process,
if that's your ultimate goal. I think the article is good to point out the
economics. Users have played 1000 hours (roughly 1 hour per user) and the dev
has made less than $30. That's 3 cents per hour. There are plenty of games
that cost $4-$5 that have no demo at all. Even at 1/10th of the engagement,
you're still talking about $400-$500 rather than $30.

Finally, as others have said, I think the idea that you are going to strike it
rich with your first game out of the gate is naive. Indy game development is
about the long tail. Don't throw 2K hours into a game. Throw 200 hours 10
times and try to build up a revenue stream. At the very least, it allows you
to pivot a lot earlier if you find that your are getting absolutely no
engagement.

But at the end of it (and I haven't played the author's game, so I'm making no
judgement here), a game has to be fun. You don't need a finished game to
demonstrate the fun. That first proof of concept needs to be distilled down to
pure fun. Once you've got that sorted, you can start working on the rest. I
think it's temping to build a whole infrastructure of code (or write a game
engine ;-) ) and then once you are hundreds or thousands of hours in discover,
"Wait a minute... this game is actually kind of boring". Only now you have a
legacy code base and it's really slow to start trying to morph it into
something that is fun.

I was just looking at Kenta Cho's blog the other day and earlier this year he
was doing a 256 byte JS Browser game challenge [1]. What interested me about
his blog post is that he concentrated _entirely_ on game mechanics. He tried a
couple of game mechanics and then tried to mix and match them to find
interesting variations. I think this is the kind of thing you need to do very
early on in game development. Then once you have a core game mechanic that is
really fun, you can start building a game around it.

[1] -
[http://aba.hatenablog.com/entry/2018/03/07/174528](http://aba.hatenablog.com/entry/2018/03/07/174528)
(Sorry, Japanese only -- but has some interesting gifs)

------
eikenberry
Ep

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arisAlexis
take your game to decentraland . virgin playing field, it's the future

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zeroname
The game _looks bad_. You will not get a foot in the door with a game that
looks like this in 2018. It looks like amateur/programmer art. There are some
people that aren't bothered by that, but when it comes to media the looks are
paramount.

If this game had an appealing art style, it _might_ stand a chance in the
already saturated market of Metroidvanias.

~~~
nostrademons
That's not really true - take a look at the graphics from Factorio 0.1,
released in 2012:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_a8_zxYLik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_a8_zxYLik)

They've since sold about 20M copies at $20 (now $30) apiece. I started playing
in 2017 with Factorio 0.14, when the graphics were better but still decidedly
retro and they'd sold maybe 4M copies.

The difference is that Factorio has a unique gameplay concept that is both
extremely addictive and not really found in any other games. People will
overlook shitty graphics if the game has a compelling concept that they can't
get elsewhere.

~~~
zeroname
> That's not really true - take a look at the graphics from Factorio 0.1,
> released in 2012

Yes, that was _in 2012_ , well before the indie explosion. If you saw this
game today, you would assume it is one of the hundreds of crappy 2D Minecraft
clones.

~~~
nostrademons
I mean, here's Factorio 0.14, which was 2017:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIqPXiM0X0#t=1200](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIqPXiM0X0#t=1200)

It's better, but it's not _that_ better, and probably something that still
looks like a "crappy 2D Minecraft clone".

~~~
njwi332
I think his point is that it was already well known by 2017 and didn't have to
struggle to distinguish itself in the current market, because it had built
momentum and interest.

------
Kenji
Hey, I liked the game. It's really nice looking and I got hooked for 5 rounds
just now =)

------
vibrato
I just spent 9 months playing poker while my net worth dropped over 40%. Did I
waste my time? Hell no.

------
beavisthegenius
Yes. Didn't have to read it.

------
virtualized
Apparently you can try that game in the browser for free, but you have to
create an account first. And they wonder why they don't sell any licenses! If
someone manages to shoot themselves in the foot in such an epic way I am not
surprised they never sold anything.

