
The daunting aftermath of releasing your dream game - danso
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-daunting-aftermath-of-releasing-your-dream-game-as-told-by-the-devs-of-stardew-valley-owlboy-and-more/
======
Negitivefrags
We released our game in 2012. Since that time we have had 17 expansion
releases.

You might think that by now it would be easy, or at least routine. Nothing can
be farther from the truth.

Every time is a horrible ordeal. I often feel physically sick during the
process.

To start, I will have just completed a bunch of crunch. We try as much as
possible to reduce this for the team, but for the founders and at least a few
key people it’s always right up to the last minute. So we are already in a
super stressful state.

The second stressor is questioning if anyone will even come to play the game.
It’s almost impossible to know.

Next up, will players even like what you made? This is a dread that is hard to
shake, and in our case we have a bunch of players all hyped up for a release
and if they don’t like your new content there will be a lot of anger and
disappointed people. People are brutal towards game developers in comments on
the internet.

And then there are technical issues. We are an online game and it feels like
every release there is some major issue.

When there are 150k people banging on the door and the game has a critical
issue stopping them from playing, it’s very hard to describe the feeling when
you are the responsible person and you have no idea what is wrong.

Debugging in that scenario is like having an anxiety attack.

These 4 issues together make game release seriously awful.

You have the worst aspects of being an Artist, a Business Owner and Live Ops
all in one nice package and right when you are low on sleep and after weeks of
stress before hand.

It’s a perfect storm of hell.

~~~
WilliamEdward
Why did you have so many expansion releases? I never doubt the work it takes
to be a game dev, since you're essentially doing the job of an audio engineer,
graphics designer, programmer, and marketer in one project, but wouldn't you
rather get your game to a stable position, release maybe one expansion, and go
on with the next big project?

Also if you really are the dev of PoE, keep up the great work. I've never even
remotely come into contact with your game yet Ive heard so much about it. That
says something.

~~~
anewone
It has to do with their business model and style of game. As a F2P product
they benefit most from people simply playing the game as much as possible and
occasionally seeing little things like ads or other players' outfits pointing
towards the store. The game is very replayable so it works well with a regular
content schedule to remix the game a bit and keep people coming back each
season.

And I gather that you believe this is The one dev - there is a sizeable team
making this game.

------
DanHulton
Yeah, this all tracks. I made a "simple" Slack RPG because I was tickled about
the concept and the potential pun of the name (Slack & Slash, though Slack
very predictably asked for me to change it to something a little less
affiliated-sounding). I figured I'd drop six months on it and release it and
see if anyone liked it.

Cut forward two years later, a couple of rewrites (from idle game to turn-
based combat, then from a monthly competition to a long-term progression with
multiple classes), and finally I launch. It got approved by Slack, it goes up
on the app directory, I make a couple key reddit posts, and... Like 5 new
users.

I'm sure folks here can tell the problem already - spending 2 years on
development and maybe a couple days on marketing is always a recipe for a
shitty launch.

Over and over again, I read stories like this and think "thank God this is
just a hobby for me and not my main source of income, not something I took out
a loan to achieve." I like to think that if it were a more serious thing, I'd
have been more serious about the marketing, but even still, that's no
guarantee.

Oh, also - I'm up to about 20 daily users these days. Even with that few, I
still get nervous pushing out any new code. Getting very polite "Hey, the game
isn't working" emails while I'm stuck at the day job and can't go fix it is
devastating. I've ended up with a weird release schedule because of it - I
generally only roll out code on Friday evenings, so that I have as much time
as possible to fix potential bugs.

------
vinceguidry
I really wish more people would appreciate the human cost of building things
by themselves instead of just chalking it all up to 'the creative journey' or
some shit. It could potentially open up some really interesting service
business models.

If I start just about any other kind of business other than a creative one, I
can buy products or services that will help me get to market 10x easier than
if I try to go it without. But if I try to venture outside of established biz
modes and start to wander into the creative, I don't have to go far before I'm
in an awkward no man's land of ugly, no one cares kind of having to burn the
candle at both ends in order to push through to some kind of stability, and
this article shows that that stability is a mirage.

The historical answer has always been to collect your efforts into an
industry. And yeah, that option is there. You can go work for EA.

But it would be so much better if the games industry didn't have to eat its
young. Or at least, not _all_ of its young.

Hollywood's answer to the problem has been to double down on the community. If
you want to be a screenwriter, first you need to realize that it's a hard hard
thing to break into, there are always going to be more people looking to break
in than there will be jobs, but you can still at least find a little bit of
glory in the industry through YouTube or temping or whatever while you figure
out what your plan B is. And everyone around you is going to help you figure
these hard things out.

But you want to break into gaming? Haha fuck you buddy. Nobody gives a shit,
go work for EA and get shit out when you finally stop making them quite as
much $$$ as you did when you were young and stupid. Sure, go make your own
games, I don't give a shit, don't expect any kudos from me, better hope you
didn't dare spend any company resources on it because yes, we will sue the
shit out of you for daring to get bigger than your britches.

I guess this is just my fervent hope that every industry can figure out how to
be like craft beer.

~~~
slg
>Hollywood's answer to the problem has been to double down on the community.

Hollywood's answer to the problem is unions. Screenwriters have unions. Actors
have unions. Directors have unions. Even the people who provide food on the
sets of movies have a union. Hollywood doesn't care about "community" any more
than the video game industry. They just realized that there are more people
who want to work in the entertainment industry than there are available jobs
and a union was the best way to protect themselves from being taken advantage
of because of that fact.

~~~
drakonka
I think it's worthwhile pointing out that it isn't like game developers don't
have unions. Maybe if you're talking about the US exclusively sure, but there
are parts of the world where employees in the game development industry do
have active union representation (which as one such employee is very much
appreciated).

~~~
lentil_soup
Curious to know where you are based. I've not heard of game developer unions
in Europe either.

~~~
drakonka
I'm in Sweden, where most people are in a union. It doesn't have to be a union
specific to game development (although I think one may exist, I'm not sure).
I'm in a general union called Unionen. Even though it's not a union specific
to the game development industry, they have a lot of power and work with the
government, companies, and employees to monitor and improve work conditions
and employee protections. For example, last year a series of meetings was held
at our workplace between interested employees and union representatives,
resulting in a new collective bargain agreement which formalised a flex hours
policy and gave us an extra paid week off per year (partly to address the
overtime we tend to do). I've heard of cases where employees called in their
union representative to help them work through issues with the employer,
negotiate better termination agreements, etc. Basically it's a normal union
that does union-y things :)

------
ohiovr
My brother and I spent about 6 months in 2012 to make a game with unity3d to
hit into the app store craze and we bombed pretty badly. The game had good
looks, editors, customization, but lacked good game play. We basically sat
down one day and said wouldn't it be cool if we made a game similar to an old
arcade but with newer graphics and started to work on it. I think the most
ironic thing about our efforts was that we weren't really gamers ourselves.
I'm glad we did it though because we did use unity3d and C# knowledge for
other things besides games (I guess we were pretty lucky). We didn't even make
a single penny from our game. It was pretty depressing. Going for years on a
project that you might not make a single penny on sounds terrifying.

------
egypturnash
This all sounds so familiar.

I don’t make games, I make comics. Four and a half years quietly working.
Another year to do a messy Kickstarter. A year of feeling lost and empty
afterwards. And then, finally, starting up the familiar grind on the next
project, which I’d been kicking around on and off during those two years.

I know a few professional authors. They seem to be able to go from one project
to another fairly easily; they also typically have much shorter schedules. I
kinda envy that sometimes. A lot.

~~~
redisman
You still released a new work of art into the world. It's not a small thing.
99.999% of people give up.

~~~
egypturnash
I tell myself things like that when I’m in the post-release slump. It still
happens. This thing has dominated your life for several years, it’s done, it
doesn’t need any more work, it’s out of your life. Now there’s this big gaping
emptiness where the project used to be.

The solution usually ends up being “a new project”. After a while.

------
rl3
> _Sandberg’s anxiety had continued after launch. He worried about his
> financial security and felt like he’d wasted the last 10 years of his life._

As someone in a similar boat, the burn of "hey, I just wasted my 20s working
on some project that didn't really go anywhere" is an incredibly painful pill
to swallow, and perhaps something you never fully come to terms with. Life is
so very short, don't waste it.

~~~
colordrops
Better than wasting away in a corporate cube hell.

~~~
rl3
Usually corporate cube hell is a means to an end outside of said hell, but HN
is littered with stories of people being utterly consumed (in a bad, soul-
crushing way) by their workplace all the time, so good point.

~~~
davemp
Cube hell isn’t the only possible situation for cube level workers either.

Working with people you like on projects with varying levels of appeal, while
gradually improving your personal situation, can be a very satisfying way to
spend your career. Grandiose goals are a risky way to look for meaning/value
in life.

------
Insanity
I can relate to the feeling of 'emptiness' after release and don't think this
is any different in other software fields.

After working on a project for close to 2 years with 2 other people (at work)
we released it and just waited for the feedback anxiously. With a lot of
crunching and last minute changes as well.

It was "just 2 years" and I already had such a bad feeling of not knowing what
to do next that I can't even imagine what it must be like after 5 or let alone
9 years :o

~~~
WilliamEdward
You have to understand that you don't lose anything, no matter the outcome.
Even if your game/software sucks you can remain sane knowing you gained a
valuable skill (programming, design, w/e) and a working product that you might
change a bit in the future and reintroduce to the market again.

------
grosjona
My first programming experience was in game development (Flash games) but I
never spent more than a few months on any game... Soon, I stopped working on
games altogether and started working on open source developer tools instead.
Games are awesome and exciting but they almost always have a limited lifespan.
I didn't like the idea of spending so much time building something that had a
limited lifespan. My goal is to build a project that will outlive me. That
said I have huge respect for game developers because it's such a difficult
area, game developers are true artists.

------
pmiller2
I kind of expected this to be about Derek Smart and Battlecruiser 3000 AD:

[https://timhowgego.wordpress.com/bc3k/introduction/](https://timhowgego.wordpress.com/bc3k/introduction/)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD)

------
garganzol
Not only games cause such effects on their creators. Any piece of craft-ware
does pretty much the same. I'm an enterprise software creator/publisher and
sometimes I have to go through the very same lows and highs described in the
article.

Doing a product is hard. Much harder that you might initially think.

------
binbag
Games (and books, films, music) exist in an interesting middle ground between
commercial enterprise and pure art. Although I suppose most art these days has
to sustain a business in some form. It wasn't always like this: art used to be
sustained by rich benefactors sponsoring artists. In a way it's good that art
has been somewhat democratised through capitalism, and on the other hand the
stress of having to turn your art into a product must destroy quite a chunk of
the creative freedom and drive. Would be interested to hear what some artists
(not hobbyists who have other jobs to sustain them) would like to see happen
with art in the future and its relationship to society and capitalism.

------
dilatedmind
shoutout to darkfall

[http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/](http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/)

\- was the creators' dream game

\- 10+ years in the making

\- team lost funding, went without pay, and moved from sweden to greece

\- not a commercial success

\- best game ever made.

------
atrilumen
I can't even read about it.

