>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with
information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality
and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.
Yes. At this point, recommending that a 9-5 programmer quit their job to work on an indie game is equivalent to suggesting a PR writer quit their job to write the next Great American Novel.
It was always like that though. Game programming had always been the worst field for programmers, and the industry had and is exploiting the fact that some people like games enough to work on them under horrible conditions.
I don’t think it’s the equivalent to writing the great American novel though, because programming is just a minor part of game creating and arguably one of the least important. Design I’d the most important.
The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.
> 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.
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.
> Where as many much of the unity “shovelware” is exactly the opposite.
I think the difference of interpretation we're having is that I think you are interpreting "Unity shovelware" to mean "If it's Unity it's crap", which nobody who follows that space could easily defend (a lot of high quality well known games and publishers use Unity). But a lot of shovelware uses Unity, because it's easy to get assets for and publish with.
It's sort of like saying "Java enterprise crap-ware". I wouldn't assume that means all Java programs are crap, or that all enterprise software is crap, but that of the crappy software targeted towards the enterprise, a lot uses Java. That's not an indictment of Java, and might actually be the opposite, given that it has qualities that cover up other poor choices.
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.
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.
I get the shovelware feeling from Netflix too tbh; as with the Unity games mentioned, there's a lot of effort and they're high quality, great writing, visuals, direction, they tick all the boxes and we live in a golden age of TV series and films - but there's just so much of it. Not hearing about any of the shows or movies beforehand from my social circles doesn't help either - the network effect is super important. And that's from a service with a fixed fee per month, so the bar for watching something new is super low.
Re. The shovelware bit: Once upon a time, when men were real men, etc, making a game meant writing it from the ground up, writing your own engine and then writing the game logic on top of that engine to make something unique.
Now that game engines are commonplace, free and work better than what any single developer would be able to come up with after a lifetime of hard work the end result is that games have a very hard time to differentiate themselves from each other. There isn't really an unlimited space of game scenarios out there, even in the days of the 2D arcade games after a couple of years it became much harder to come up with something truly unique.
It was never difficult to "come up with something truly unique".
Your unique thing might be rubbish, but that's not the problem for the millions of shovelware Unity asset flips.
Jim Sterling has covered this at length, even running a competition to show that people can take a horribly over-used cheap asset and do great original stuff - if they try. Asset flips don't even try.
The are tens of thousands of games in which you are an elite soldier running around shooting zombies. There are zero games where you're a pot plant using psychic powers to create sculptures.
Like Hollywood the video game industry chases trends until they're beaten completely to death, and then goes one more round just to make really sure.
I think there has been some windows of opportunity for single-developers teams.
- In the 80's and 90's when PC games where simple enough.
- At the beginning of Steam
- At the beginning of the App Store and the Play Store
At those time, there wasn't that much competition so while it was still hit or miss, you still had a decent chance to be successful as a single-person indie developer.
I remember buying games in the 80ies and 90ies, I’d go to a supermarket and rummage through a mixed box with literal hundreds of different $5 games and pick the one that looked the most exciting.
The biggest treasure I found that way was the original x-com.
I don’t think times have changed that much. The upcoming game I’m most excited by is it lurks below, and that’s being developed by a single developer. Stardew Valley released in 2016, after the explosion. Into the breach, though not single developer did well in 2018.
I mean, it’s not uncommon for solo-small teams to top the steam charts, but you really do need both quality and a little luck. I just don’t think that’s different from how it’s always been, and I think the author of this article in particular lacks quality.
What has changed though is the amount of games people own. In the 90ies you didn’t have a backlog of thousands of games that you picked up from a humble bundle where you only really wanted one game. You also didn’t have MMOs or forthnite competing for your attention.
So I agree with you somewhat, it’s become much harder to sell bad-mediocre games in the past few years, and that’s 99% of indie games. And there is obviously always a market for remakes when a new platform/generation arrives.
Novels are their own problem, but it's a similar one; there's hundreds of thousands of great writers and publishing is trivial nowadays (iirc the longest work of fiction ever made is a Super Smash Bros fanfiction published for free), but getting 'mindshare' (or, just some attention - and that's before making a sale still) is hugely difficult.
Is there really a difference? I know an acquaintance that published a novel they worked on for a few years. They didn't share any numbers with me but they were clear, they made no money. I assume there are thousands of people trying to sell their novels, and a tiny minority succeed in making (big) money.
> and a tiny minority succeed in making (big) money.
Who is making big money JUST off novels? Not speaking, not tv deals, writing.
Meanwhile I know several game developers making a living. Setting out to do it still follows a success distribution, but it’s fundementally achievable in a way unavailable to writers entirely.
They exist. But those writers are making money are doing quantity over quality. I.e. they're releasing like 12 pulp novels a year that they churn out once per month, and build up a fanbase over time with every new release, who then buy up their quickly growing backlog of novels.
Seems like urban supernatural or romance (or urban supernatural romance) seems to be the main genres where this is working. My girlfriend follows several writers who make a living this way, and is wanting to give it a try herself, that's how I'm aware of it.
You can't write The Great American Novel or spend years writing your novel and make money this way though. It pretty much requires the momentum and consistent quick releases for it to work. You're making sugary garbage that's consumed quickly and forgotten just as quickly.
I'd think this is more true for a writer than a programmer. You could probably attempt to program a game by spaghetti coding, copy pasting from stack overflow and tutorials, not using version control or tests, and working solo - at the end you'd have a lot of bad habits and not so much that would be useful at a professional studio.
Some people use mistakes as a launch pad to learn a better way. Not always, and not always immediately, but sometimes it takes dealing with the negative consequences to make the better solution obvious when finally encountered.
Sometimes convincing someone to spend the extra 10-20% of time or effort to do something "the hard way" is nigh impossible until they've spend time doing the alternative and know the extended pain that sometimes results.
It's sort of like seat belts. When they were first required in all vehicles, many people still didn't bother with them. Even before cultural indoctrination took over, a lot of people eventually started too. It took some close calls for people or their friends and family for them to finally make the effort, and such a small effort it was. I saw exactly this play out with my own parents and their siblings.
Game development is hard, it seems like it's completely hit or miss, there is no middle ground. I've released 5 games, but I have to say, spending 2,600+ hours on something without doing market research or at least starting small seems crazy.
My most successful game was an app for iOS which made me a grand total of around $30. The difference is I only spent around 80 hours working on it (40 or so for the game, 20 or so on the level editor, and 20 or so making levels). I had no money for marketing, had done no research beforehand, so I pretty much knew it was going to fail but did it as a fun side project to learn some new stuff and for my CV.
Compare that to the various website side projects I've worked on over the years which have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars (over 10 years). Game dev sounds fun, but if you're looking to make money, I would definitely stay away from it.
Instead of making a game for some category on Steam and hoping it sells enough in the first month before sales drop off, I wonder if it could work to make a super-super niche game where the goal would be to rank for a Google search term instead.
You'd try to be very long-lived, steadily selling for years, say just a few copies a week. All traffic would come from people who have some incredibly niche interest they are searching for, say baptism planners discovering your "baptism planner simulator 2000".
If you continued to make games like these say one per month or two, it might be possible to gradually build up a liveable income from them.
I guarantee that if you drop the "planner" that game would sell like hotcakes as soon as a medium sized YouTuber/Twitch streamer notices it.
There is no way a game about dunking babies doesn't get enough shock value to get a decent return on investment, especially if it has wonky physics, "bad" controls or other emergent gameplay.
For a deeper game, maybe bring back the "planner" aspect to add a simulation layer on top. Make a tycoon game where you manage a church and the baptisms are just one of a few minigames.
Would you say that the difference between the games side projects vs the website side projects are the mindset in which you have executed those projects?
Not really. The market is large and fairly mature, it's doing fine and continuing to grow. The video game crash is titled that for a reason, the market shrunk by 97% in a short period.
There are a large number of amateur creators who are trying to win the lottery (either from a fame or monetary perspective), and most won't and will see little recognition and remain obscure or very niche.
This is seen in basically every area of media. Music, books, movies, etc and is perfectly normal.
>In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games". In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year, and promoted its "Seal of Quality", which it allowed to be used on games and peripherals by publishers that met Nintendo's quality standards.
In 2017, 21 games per day were released on Steam and most of them were trash.
The Atari crash was more akin to the .com bubble. Vaporware and no way to tell what was in the bag until you bought it. Video games are a giant mature market dominated by big companies with sophisticated business models. Just like web businesses these days.
I’d say sports, too. TV made it so some players were playing for hundreds of thousands of people nationally while others still entertained only locally.
It’s also in the process of starting to hit indie development in general and startups. It’s an interesting process but life for your typical indie or startup SaaS is going to get as tough as life for the typical “App Developer” got a few years ago.
The problem with games is the amount of effort involved just to determine if it is “fun”. When I was in it cancelling a game 1 year deep with 10 people was normal.
I think this is why minigame-style games (battle royale, fighting games, first person shooter competitive, etc) are so common. You can implement a simple version of your game idea in a weekend and, if your idea was good, people would likely already have fun playing it.
Never really did modern game development, but can you really implement a first person shooter with a twist over a weekend? How would you go about it, create a mod for an existing game?
Almost no one writes their own FPS entirely from scratch in the past decade outside of a handful truly enormous industry players, much as no one really writes the entirety of a web app themselves.
You choose one of the many existing game development frameworks and rapidly prototype a concept, if it works you keep iterating on it etc etc. This works in games as well as any other major software endeavour.
The matter of having the talent to produce a new idea that’s actually fun to play and marketing it successfully is arguably the hard bit here, rather than the technical implementation details. I’d make the argument today that the technical barriers to entry for game development are almost _too_ low now, which is why partly why Steam is filled with so much “indie” junk.
Asset stores allow you to have placeholder mechanics like you used to have placeholder art. So placeholder camera, controller, collision detection, and a placeholder level. Then you get to rig what you want to test on top of that, or just sell it as is which is called an "asset flip".
You could do that or a frramework like Unity takes care of lot of stuff for you.. weekend maybe a bit extreme, but you can get something running and functional in very short time
You can download Unity, purchase and install for example UFPS that will handle most FPS functionality for you (includes basic gun etc model) and you can use Unity networking for LAN connectivity.
Let's say the twist is a Battle Royale game, you just make a Unity terrain and a basic sphere that becomes smaller.
After that coding the extra bits such as HP, HP loss due to sphere etc isn't a big deal.
That's one way, doing it via a mod also works, but you really need knowledge of the product you're modding (although the same is true of e.g. Unity, if its your first week with it it won't be that easy).
What you are saying is true. However, throwing your hands up in the air and saying “I guess I didn’t get lucky” isn’t quite the correct response either. Success is a matter of exposure and conversion rate.
1,016 visits, many of them random and untargeted, is simply not enough to make a statistically significant decision about the viability of this game. Conversion rates for any product tend to vary wildly within specific demographics. Some games perform abysmally with wide audiences, but may have very high conversion rates with specific, well defined groups.
To be sure, there are games that don’t need to look for their niche audience. They become viral sensations because they appeal to mass audiences. They get enormous amounts of “earned media” - viral clicks from people talking about and uploading video of themselves playing - and those are the games we hear about and consider to be “Superstars”. But that in no way means that games that aggressively target some relatively small group of people that the game actually appeals to with paid advertising cannot be very financially successful. Maybe not billion dollar blockbusters, but I’d imagine this author would be happy with a six figure income from his work, which is entirely possible if he finds the right audience and applies the same work ethic he did to developing the game to marketing it.
He needs to figure out who likes the game, what makes them like it, and then use the plethora of online ad platforms and targeting options to find more people like them. His game is not a steaming pile of crap, so he will find a paying audience for it if he looks.
No, because a "winner take all" industry is one that trends towards monopoly, that's not the same thing. No one person will ever have the entire video game pie.
"Superstar industries" follow extreme power law distributions, where, due to the low barrier to entry, high ceilings, and limited consumer base (there are only so many hours people can spend on entertainment), the pie isn't growing and new entrants aren't going to be able to carve out much that hasn't already been claimed.
It's not a new thing, the name comes from the music industry which acts the same way. Anybody can record a song and print it on CDs, but the market is already saturated: you have to either really really really stand out like nobody has in decades (An event so rare I couldn't find any examples), or you have to get the support of one of the big players (game studios or music labels) to lend you their resources and audience.
Nearest example I can think of, mySpace was where she got noticed so that dates her breakthrough to a good decade ago.
Adele was legitimate however others have pretended to have an Adele grade story. Lily Allen also claimed to have been discovered on mySpace but her dad was rock and roll celebrity so her efforts can be dismissed as nepotism. Often these links to rock and roll celebrity are not obvious because performers use stage names that sound like real names. Their children don't use their parents fake surnames.
Adele wasn't self-published though, right? I'm not super familiar, but based on the wikipedia page she got picked up by an XL Recordings talent scout who put her on other albums associated with that label, including appearances on BBC, before even her first album, which had 32 credits.
Being really good and self publishing helps you build your resume in a superstar industry, but it's nearly impossible to actually achieve commercial success without a well-established sponsor. Adele probably wouldn't have gotten far on her own if XL or some other label hadn't picked her up. Her accomplishment before then was a really good resume.
Her mySpace tunes were self published, however, getting XL Recordings on board has parallels with startup culture. It is like the importance of having a co-founder, proof that you have convinced someone to back you, then with that, you can scale things up.
XL Recordings came from the rave scene, the Prodigy were their first big earning group, however, for every Prodigy there were scores of 'Dome Patrol' grade releases that nobody except for DJs ever heard of. XL moved on when the rave scene died to other acts in different genres. They 'pivoted' to use the parlance.
I know Adele worked with a label however it was a genuine thing her getting spotted on mySpace and not some fake back story, as per the Lily Allen example. I don't believe music executives really would listen if I posted my singing efforts to the internets, or if anyone here did likewise. Yet that did happen with Adele.
I'm not saying that Adele's story isn't remarkable or that she isn't talented, but that she didn't break the industry pattern, finding her own slice of the pie without help. XL already had audiences, resources, collaborators, and connections, and a production pipeline that she was inducted into. Her debut product took 32 people to make, on XL's dime. It was not a Stardew-Valley situation.
Justin Bieber was discovered through YouTube. And he helped contribute to Carly Ray Jepsen's career because he saw one of her songs on YouTube, covered it, and helped it go viral. The Weeknd used YouTube at the start of his career as well.
I don't think this phenomenon is limited to one form of media. "The Martian" by Andy Weir was originally published on his website one chapter at a time. The internet has, in general, lowered the bar to publishing any kind of work significantly - be it games on Steam, songs on YouTube, or ebooks on Amazon. There are now new avenues into the wider industry, but the big players are still the big players.
People break through all the time. But there's no formula for it. It's luck + talent + zeitgeist + social connection. You don't need all 3, but it helps a whole lot. And you can have a whole lot of any of them and still not have lasting success. This is how the music industry has been for a long time, although the dynamics are always, well, dynamic.
Indeed, you have to look for niches -- and find the ones that are in
1) high demand (not just high demand in general -- high demand for new/better content by a new entrant);
2) low supply;
3) well paying customers.
I'm sure despite the flood those will still exist, as long as there's still a good amount of differentiation between people's preferences. A niche is a small subset of in the space of products that a small subset of customers have strong preference to. This needs preference differentiation.
This preference difference could be toward many features: cultural setting, story style, gameplay style, aesthetic style, etc.
There's perhaps a combinatorial advantage here: if sensitivity varies significantly across many of those parameters, just choose any unexplored subset, optimizing for 1/2/3 -- there are exponentially many in the number of distinguishing features (if you browse Steam tags you see this is potentially a very large number!).
Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice. You need to find a niche and hit it hard.
Maybe that used to be metroidvania, but that's long over. Visual novels have been on the rise for a while, so are rougelikes and card games, but those are saturated now. You want to get in before the big streamers and reddit frontpage and ride the wave.
Who knew a Harvest Moon clone would be the biggest indie success of its year? Maybe we can systematically analyze old games to identify overlooked gems and valuable revivals.
>Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice.
I don't think it's bad advice, though. If you treat genre and its elements as only means to an end, you wind up with exactly the trends that oversaturate the indie market now, because everyone is trying to "find a niche and hit it hard." Games are entertainment.
I think you should at least learn to want to play the game you're making. At the very least, you should know why the customer would want to play it. Ticking off boxes hoping to find combinatorial success isn't enough... that "battle royale farming simulator" still needs to be entertaining, or at least capture interest.
> Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice. You need to find a niche and hit it hard.
I'd say you need both: you need to want to do a game you'd want to play, because you'd have an easier time recognizing if you're doing something that would appeal to at least one person. And if it's in a niche, you'll have a better chance to get coverage and buyers. But if you just try to hit a niche hard without knowing what makes the games in that niche good, you'll have a hard time making something that'll interest players.
I disagree with that, but it's just my opinion. I think artists must move beyond their own taste. A sushi chef doesn't really have to like squid.
I think using your own taste is a crutch. If you get good at it, you should be able to know it's good regardless of your own feelings.
We see this when game developers are shuffled around and work on ones that are completely different from their passion projects. The good ones still excell.
Even if one is good enough to recognise a good game regardless of one's feelings, I'd say it would be harder to work on a game type that doesn't appeal the artist. I hope that even if a sushi chef doesn't like squid, he like some of the sushi he'll be making.
But you are actually competing with the whole developed world. There may be localised tastes or patterns to follow but your competition is from the whole world.
Sure but I think this really applies to industries under a free market in general however the dynamics in the tech sector are such that a single person with little to no startup capital can create something with paranormal returns and that is really what indies are after (perhaps after having their idea come to life). I wonder if there any other industries that have this same allure
I don't think that it's just technological change which has brought us there. It's also because of the last 10 years or so of Federal Reserve Bank policies. The elites have figured out how to maximise their profits during expansionary economic times and a big part of the elite strategy is limiting the number of winners.
It's pretty clear that a lot of jobs today are useless and if you've worked for enough big companies, you might have realized that big companies are extremely inefficient.
If big companies are so inefficent, why then are they able to generate so much profit from the economy?
The reason is monetary policy. The Fed constantly 'prints' new money out of thin air and injects it into the economy via a combination of 1. loans to the government and 2. open market operations.
Guess who gets the first dips into these two huge pots of newly created money?
In the case of government money (loaned by the Fed), big corporations get a huge chunk of that money pot because they get all the lucrative government contracts.
In the case of open market operations; big finance firms like Goldman Sachs and big traders with insider information are the first to get their hands into that pot.
Basically that money which is meant to 'trickle down' isn't actually doing that; instead it appears to be trickling back up to government officials who are enacting policies that benefit corporations and increased centralization of wealth.
>> New money that is anticipated will lead to anticipated price rises. So it doesn't matter (too much) who gets first dibs.
There is a significant delay before the newly created money affects wages.
Shareholders benefit from the new money instantly (since the market reacts to it quickly and it drives up the value of their stocks) but wage earners won't benefit from the new money until they get their annual 2% salary raise at the end of the year.
That delay is significant because it allows shareholders to compound their ROIs several times before wages catch up.
> If big companies are so inefficent, why then are they able to generate so much profit from the economy?
On the one hand, no one has yet figured out how eliminate inefficiences out of large organizations. They're all like that, usually the bigger the more inefficient (the government, because of its size, being obviously the worst offender).
However, it seems that it just takes dozens (if not hundreds) of thousands of employees to run say a top tier car or microprocessor company. You just can't do it with less, so the inefficiencies are the cost of producing such advanced stuff as say BMWs or Intel processors.
The currencies of developed countries are pegged to the US dollar and so their reserve banks are just copying whatever the Fed is doing; their main goal is to make sure that the value of their currencies doesn't change too much relative to the USD. All countries reinforce the same economic distortions on a global scale.
Absolutely. All things are turning into the economics of superstars so long as they're subject to network effects and the widest, most fluid and well-informed possible market.
Uber drivers will turn into the economics of superstars. Amazon warehouse workers will turn into the economics of superstars. You'll keep on getting individual ultra-high performers who dominate whatever area it is, and more ordinary performers will just plain fail.
I'm not sure how your conclusion follows. Uber drivers and warehouse workers are unlikely to undergo this effect because no matter how good an Uber driver is, they can't be in multiple places at once. Similarly, there's a limit to how much one warehouse worker can do.
Kid of. You'll still see a small minority of Uber drivers making money and a large percentage breaking even or losing money. It's like that in the real-estate market, where a small minority of agents take in most of the profit and a large number breaking even or losing money. This is also why you see trade groups frequently supporting policies to increase barriers for market entry. In real-estate this means higher and higher licensing standards. For example in Canada it costs around $6k and 3 years to get fully licensed [1].. which is crazy. But the real-estate lobby wants it even higher.
Real estate is infrequent high value transactions with high margin/commission. Doubling your real estate sales can well make you rich; doubling your Uber driving would not.
No doubt there are differences between the markets but at a high-level similar forces act on both. That is, in both cases, the vast majority of participants either break-even or lose money. A small minority makes money (and therefore takes in most of the profit to be had). The uber market, because it centralized and has an impartial dispatcher (i.e. Uber corporate), that market will probably be more egalitarian. Overall though, the same dynamics play out.
For real-estate, some numbers that I saw had 51% of licensed real-estate agents making one or zero transaction in the past year.
Amazon warehouse workers are limited by human physiology to move boxes within 10x of the average box moving speed. That disqualifies them from the superstar economy.
After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem.
You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
And if you have a good look at them you should realize that they all are extremely polished and coherent. None of them has realistic AAA graphics but they still look good. None of them is just a "copy" of an existing game. They either bring something totally new or bring something known but with a greater overall quality.
Then you have successful niche games such as Cogmind or the Zachtronics games. They still have the mentioned properties but also target only a subset of players where there are not many games. I think that makes them guaranteed sales.
Now what's wrong with all the stories about failed games? They all are generic. They don't offer something special. And this is what doesn't work in a saturated games market. And I'm not saying the authors didn't work enough. They just don't see what's wrong with their games and continue on their path to demise.
I guess what I'm saying is: to make a successful game you don't need to be the greatest coder or greatest artist. But you need to understand what makes a game great and enjoyable.
Maybe the days (years) will come where I finally will make a (bigger) game of my own and maybe I will totally fail like many have. Maybe I will revoke everything I said here but today this is my opinion. :)
>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
Very much yes.
Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). Papers Please is a truly unique game that was lucky enough to get youtuber coverage. Plenty of equally unique and just as fun games are ignored. I've never heard of Factorio, but looking it up, it's graphically very unappealing. Maybe my opinion would change if I watched a playthrough of it, but it doesn't stand out. Mini Metro might be fun. But so are many of the hundreds of other minimalistic puzzlers released monthly.
There are loads of games that just don't sell but become classics decades later. Earthbound sold horribly in America until the main character appeared in a more popular series (Super Smash Bros). Almost nobody played Killer 7. Panzer Dragoon Saga is considered one of the best RPGs of all time. Nobody bought it. Its popularity mostly grew after people discovered it through emulation.
The game in this article flopped because there are an abundance of games, it falls into an overcrowded genre, and it doesn't stand out, but most importantly, nobody important played it. If pewdiepie played this, it'd see 10000+ sales in a week and likely appear in a humble bundle.
To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.
While I wouldn't disregard the importance of marketing, I think quality, as in both quality of game itself and quality of the idea behind it, matters.
I think having a competitive advantage/value and having unique qualities are not the same thing. For example, before Stardew Valley, an entire genre of "calm, casual, farming oriented games" were mostly unknown to PC gamers. For years I have wondered when someone would notice an entire genre missing. At some point, someone noticed the same thing, and instead of building just another sandbox/crafting game they built a polished Harvest Moon alternative. It turns out, from a pool of millions of PC/XBone/whatever gamers, some people liked this genre of games.
By the way, I cannot stress the importance of polish: great artwork, fluid animations, good UI, proper bg music, smooth learning curve and of course, being generally exciting to play. Most of the games mentioned (maybe Factorio being the exception) have these qualities. Your average gamer has 15sec attention span at best for a new game. Most wouldn't even wait until the end of your launch trailer.
I've gave my full 30 seconds to watch the trailer of Infinitroid (OP's game) and I cannot see why I would choose it over, for example Dead Cells. They are not exactly the same game, but they are competing for the same resources. (entertainment budget and spare time) Just watch trailers of Infinitroid and Dead Cells side by side, the difference you will see cannot be written off as marketing success.
Just my 2cents as an avid gamer and potential customer.
Well I disagree a lot with what you are saying. Marketing is important sure. But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful. Maybe big gaming companies can do that but even they fail often enough. Luck is an important factor and maybe I would even rate it higher than 5%. I find the number of 90% marketing for an indie game ridiculous.
Stardew Valley is based on existing formula but it is incredibly polished and even people not from this genre play(ed) it. It has something special, similar games don't.
However I think that quality trumps for indie games. There are always exceptions and some "shit" games are hyped because of some Twitch or Youtube coverage. And of course there are some (maybe many?) games that have a high quality and fail. You don't just need quality. But you need it. And you obviously can make a good game in a bad time.
As for the game in the article. I don't want to disparage the author because making a game of this scope is incredible!
However watching a video on his game's site instantly gave me two reasons why the game is not successful.
- The movement of the character looks very stiff and unnatural.
- It is missing atmosphere. A lot of repeating textures. No details which makes the whole world uninspiring and uninteresting.
Now these things can be changed and improved still. But in the end the market for this specific type of game really is a hard one. And you compete with game's made by bigger teams and bigger budgets.
I'm inclined to agree. Certainly for games, quality is necessary but not sufficient, and the same goes with marketing. You need them both.
The GP makes a point that pewdiepie picking up this game would result in thousands of sales whereas, although I'm basing this purely on watching the gameplay video, I'd have to say maybe: I don't think pewdiepie, or any other major YouTube reviewer, would pick this up because it's not distinctive enough.
This is especially the case when Infinitroid is going up against games like Dead Cells within the same genre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbfxPptEU6M. Infinitroid is an impressive piece of work but, as a game, I don't think it comes off well in the comparison.
There are markets where quality is of much less importance, such as enterprise software. How else does a company like Deltek survive? Answer: there aren't that many viable competitors and they're all just as crappy. Then it's down to the quality of and investment in the business development and sales process.
> But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful.
This doesn't seem to be a disagreement? Quality is necessary for a successful indie game, but that's very different than being sufficient.
I can easily imagine a world where Stardew Valley failed, but I can't imagine a world where Hunt Down The Freeman succeeded. Given the sheer rate at which new games are released, I expect that a majority of polished, fun indie games fail or at least don't see major Terraria-tier success. Heck, half of my Steam library consists of clever, well-executed indie games from Humble Bundles that got near-zero coverage and sold near-zero copies. Orwell, Antichamber, Distance, and a lot of others all had the quality to sell much better than they did.
And beyond that, I think our standards for quality are usually biased by whether a game succeeded. Factorio is absolutely full of grainy, repeated textures, but took off just fine. Dungeons of Dredmor crashes constantly and went through three major expansions without fixing fundamental bugs like "this skill doesn't function", but it's a hugely successful and widely-praised indie title. Subnautica is constantly criticized for just sort of aimlessly ending. It's easy to look at a failed game and say it didn't sell because it was buggy, or looked ugly, or had a weak ending, but all of those things are present in lots of hugely successful indie games. Above some minimal threshold like "no unbearable flaws, one or more excellent elements", it looks to me like luck and marketing are absolutely crucial factors.
I didn't say that no marketing is needed. I said that you can market all you want if a game is bad it usually won't be successful, with some hype exceptions. I think you are basically making the same point in your second paragraph?!
I don't think to be successful you need to be as successful as Terraria..
As for Factorio.. it's not about graphics. Not every type of game needs great graphics. It's the same as with Dwarf Fortress. Both games offer such a deep complexity that graphics is secondary, especially to the type of player interested in it.
> Both games offer such a deep complexity that graphics is secondary, especially to the type of player interested in it.
Separate to my other comment, I should acknowledge that this seems overwhelmingly true. Dwarf Fortress is famous, but I've learned recently that there are also thriving communities for Cataclysm DDA, Dominions, Aurora, every imaginable Nethack derivative, and half a dozen other equally-opaque games.
As long as the genre or mechanics are new, there seems to be a (limited, but) perpetual apatite for ludicrously deep games with minimal player handholding.
It's absolutely a market but it's a small one. However these niche markets can have great players/customers. Another recent example of this is the game Cogmind.
I think this might be one of those "forceful agreement" situations, yes. I suppose the way to see is to check all four cases: good and bad indie games with and without marketing.
Presumably we agree that bad indie games with no marketing will certainly fail.
It looks like we agree that bad indie games with strong marketing will usually fail, unlike bad AAA games and with a few debatable exceptions. (Mostly, I think, games that preordered well on hype and reputation but crumbled post-release. Clockwork Empires comes to mind.)
For good indie games with poor marketing, I think they'll usually fail, and it sounds like we might disagree? There are exceptions, but I think lots of them are older than the indie boom (e.g. Dwarf Fortress), or followup titles from successful indie devs. This might just be terminology or statistics though, because I agree that a chance favorable RPS writeup could jumpstart a game with no real marketing plan or budget. I guess the question is how often that happens, versus games doing the convention and reviewer circuit to ensure they get seen and written about.
For good indie games with good marketing, I think there's still a decently high chance of failure these days, which might be another disagreement? This probably requires a better definition of 'failure', people definitely bought e.g. Orwell, but if the standard is "makes enough money to release the next similar game" then even Failbetter Games is on the razor's edge, and they're one of the most acclaimed indie studios I know of.
(On that final point, I think I simply misunderstood you. I was noting that indie games can have any of the failings you mentioned and still succeed, but if your point was just that the specific game in this thread was hampered by those issues then we agree.)
> Presumably we agree that bad indie games with no marketing will certainly fail.
> It looks like we agree that bad indie games with strong marketing will usually fail, unlike bad AAA games and with a few debatable exceptions. (Mostly, I think, games that preordered well on hype and reputation but crumbled post-release. Clockwork Empires comes to mind.)
Agreed
> For good indie games with poor marketing, I think they'll usually fail, and it sounds like we might disagree? There are exceptions, but I think lots of them are older than the indie boom (e.g. Dwarf Fortress), or followup titles from successful indie devs. This might just be terminology or statistics though, because I agree that a chance favorable RPS writeup could jumpstart a game with no real marketing plan or budget. I guess the question is how often that happens, versus games doing the convention and reviewer circuit to ensure they get seen and written about.
We probably disagree a little here. I think the problem is defining good games and good/poor marketing. I tried to make the point that some games are just so good in general quality/coherence/details or have have a truely unique approach that they would "always" succeed because players will do the marketing by word of mouth. When I say always I don't mean it literally. There are always exceptions :)
> For good indie games with good marketing, I think there's still a decently high chance of failure these days, which might be another disagreement? This probably requires a better definition of 'failure', people definitely bought e.g. Orwell, but if the standard is "makes enough money to release the next similar game" then even Failbetter Games is on the razor's edge, and they're one of the most acclaimed indie studios I know of.
Again slight disagreement with similar reasoning to the last paragraph. Good != unique and there are many levels of good so it's hard to draw a line.
> (On that final point, I think I simply misunderstood you. I was noting that indie games can have any of the failings you mentioned and still succeed, but if your point was just that the specific game in this thread was hampered by those issues then we agree.)
Yep I was referring to the actual game mentioned in the article and what I instantly found problematic for its success.
It was good discussion (the whole thread) but now I need to sleep!
Quality is subjective but marketing is not. Every person has a different taste, I've played some "good" indie games that bored the socks off me. F you have enough people coming through the marketing funnel then only a truly awful game will fail to find admirers.
There are subjective qualities such as visual quality but there are also objective qualities such as "hours played" or other measurable ones.
Also people will do the marketing for you if your game is good but if it is not you will need to convince them (money most likely). And that is what bigger companies often do (via Twitch streamers e.g.) and what indies cannot (especially solo devs).
Quality is subjective, just like beauty or really anything else. But it turns out a lot of people share the same subjective views of a lot of things. A game that would be subjectively appealing to most gamers will generally do much better than a game that does not. A sufficient amount of marketing might be able to offset some of that effect, but not always, and only at great expense.
>Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon).
>To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.
I strongly disagree.
Stardew valley did well because it is a fun game with good graphics. That's it, it's fun and addictive, graphics are good and it gets the gestalt right. Stardew Valley is just a truly truly fun game in which you say "just one more day" a bit too often. It's just that much fun. The game is FUN and addictive. Did I mention I had a lot of fun playing it? It has nothing to do with marketing it had everything to do with how I played the game and whether I had fun or not. The first time I picked it up I poured in more than 40 hours in a single week! And that's a lot!
I just read this article about the creator who spent 4 years making Stardew Valley and it is a really interesting read:
I think it's also important to point out that Stardew is in an odd place as a "remake". It's one thing to try to make the 10th battle royale that's coming out this year, and another to do what Stardew did: be, as far as I know, the first full-featured Harvest Moon-like to come out for PC, and also come out at a time where it had been a while since ANY good Harvest Moon game had released, even on consoles.
It filled a niche for gamers who had grown up playing HM on Gameboy, but hadn't been able to really scratch that itch. If anything, his choice of genre to work in was genius. It was a passionate and pre-made fanbase that was craving a new game to jump onto, and he happened to make an excellent game as well.
It also helps that HM is a highly generic game/genre. There's very little about what makes the original games popular that is trademarked. I played thousands of hours of a couple of them, and I probably can't name any of the characters any more. You can easily make an "off-brand" remake, and most people won't miss anything specific. You wouldn't be able to just go make a knock-off Pokemon and have it work, even though the demand for it on PC is high.
Word-of-mouth is marketing too. Perhaps you are thinking that marketing === advertising? Because marketing doesn't have to be advertising. Building a community, attending conferences, getting influencers to play your game - these are all marketing activities. If people are talking about the game, it's surely fueled by a quality experience but marketing has to bootstrap that conversation.
Word-of-mouth might be marketing, but it's not something you can work towards. To get that you need a good fun game. IMO that's not a marketing effort, it's a symptom of a good unique game.
I'm not a marketing expert tho, but I can't think of any way to force word-of-mouth onto people.
the game's quality acts like a force multiplier for word of mouth, essentially you're more likely to promote or talk about a game you enjoyed. But you need some critical mass for that to have any real impact. What good is it if each player refers 1.5 others on average, but you only get to 5000 before the game becomes old news? Most games don't continue to sell forever and the hype will die out eventually, so you want that hype to reach a large audience quickly.
And few of those people discovered the game by scrolling through steam. Most found it through a youtube playthrough, word of mouth, and "word of mouth" (i.e. how all content is marketed these days)
> 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.
>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.
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.
Bullshit claim. They did really clever marketing where they provided the beta release beforehand to few prominent twitch streamers, and in my knowledge also did all kinds of other pre-release hype, community building etc. I'm pretty sure also the other titles invested quite a lot of time, smarts and money towards marketing.
Also Notch spammed 4chan with the game anonymously for awhile to drum up some interest.
Also he made a highly viral video of him building a minecart rollercoaster during his paid (but cheaper, I believe it was $13, and he was telling people that was half the price that it would be on official release) beta which he got Kotaku and Penny Arcade to share with their massive audience and suddenly he was a millionaire pretty much overnight.
I personally saw the minecart rollercoaster video while browsing Kotaku and that's how I discovered the game.
Notch absolutely marketed and knew how to market his game. He may have not had an advertising budget, but he made the right type of content and the right type of advertising, then shared it with the right types of promotional avenues to reach his target audience to get enough of a start that word-of-mouth advertising could pretty much take over. And that's all marketing really is.
And since then (especially since Microsoft bought Minecraft) you better believe that game has had lots of money dumped into its marketing.
It's just that most things aren't as sexy as a build-your-own-minecart-rollercoaster-brick-by-brick-and-ride-it-in-first-person and therefore require a lot of money to get it in front of enough people.
Your story is accurate to as much as I remember it too, though a key element often forgotten in Notch's story is he'd already built a lot of small, throwaway games that had pretty much bombed and essentially learnt the lesson of what a lack of marketing could do the hard way before he got to MC.
Sure, I don't doubt that. Failure is one of the best teachers.
I've experienced many marketing failures for video games as well (both games I made myself and games I worked on for other companies), I should be an expert on it by now. Guess that means I should make a new game and apply all those lessons I learned :P.
Factorio works because the gameplay is completely original. It scratches a building + automating + researching loop that no other game has. Many people compare it to programming or electrical engineering design - the satisfaction of automating something that used to take manual effort is great, and very addictive.
The graphics are bland and the early parts of the game feel like a pre-release / beta build, but the addictive gameplay and infinite end-game potential got it a lot of great coverage.
People use the word "graphics" and "sound" often, but that's not all that makes a game. So many indie "ugly" games work out just fine. It's all about the gameplay. You can make the graphics and the sound be a core part of that, but you can also focus on other places.
Factorio and Dwarf Fortress are two examples of those. Can someone say their graphics are amazing? Probably not. Yet they focused on their differentials: the unique gameplay.
I have to agree with the GP. They're always unique in one form or another.
People however overuse the marketing card IMO, saying that you need a lot of marketing. Good games do stand out for being good games. Word of mouth only works if your game is good. Nobody will urge their friends to play a bad game and for indie games, word of mouth is king. You can't "force" word of mouth marketing, so it's not really a marketing effort. It comes naturally with good games.
> You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
Interesting. I think you're right about half of those. I can't see any way that SDV or Darkest Dungeon could have failed. SDV is a great all round game with tons of polish, and DD has 99th percentile art direction and atmosphere for an indie game.
Mini Metro and Papers Please could absolutely have been dead on arrival. Mini Metro is just an above average puzzle game (of which there are tons), and PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer. It's really one of those "you have to play it" games (aka "sells 0 copies in 99 of 100 alternate universes" games...)
I agree that Mini Metro is the one of the listed games that I would be least certain about. I think however it is very polished (more than other "puzzle" games) and it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses.
Papers Please is a very special case. It has a very unique idea and that's what makes it stand out. You are right that you need to play it. However if someone played it he will most certainly recommend it and that's the strength of this game.. the implicit "marketing" it conveys.
You obviously always need some marketing be it a only dev log or whatever to at least get the core group interested. For a game like PP that really should suffice to get the ball rolling.
it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses.
And certainly don't underestimate the number of people who are borderline obsessive with transport networks, trains, and anything involving traffic (myself included). Almost any game that adds a good gameplay element to managing or routing trains or traffic is going to do OK. Cities Skylines has done well with this crowd, too, after SimCity decided to start focusing on "Sims" style games and ditch the traffic aspects.
The trailer of "Papers, Please" was what sold it to me. Really catchy music and a weirdly freaky premise. ("A game about denying immigrants from entering your country? That's such a weird premise it just has to be good, and the visuals are super well done").
> "PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer"
I have to disagree with this (well, the second part of your assertion anyway; I absolutely agree it's a cool and unique game!). Just reading the premise of Papers Please was enough to hook me. I just knew I would like it, and wasn't disappointed when I actually bought it.
Also, all of Lucas Pope's games are visually distinctive, and Papers Please is no exception. I absolutely cannot think of any other game with a similar visual style which wasn't also made by Pope.
This part made me thing OP was focusing on the wrong things:
> I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic
None of that matters to the end result. You might be someone that is not very bright and that never went to college, etc, and still make a very creative and fun game.
Saying that he's smart and whatever makes him sound entitled. Like if he deserved to sell well.
I don't think he said that to imply he deserved success. The way I read it: he mentioned it to disqualify those factors (not working hard enough or not having enough discipline) as reasons the game flopped.
I'm a smart guy too. You know what you hear all the time growing up when you're smart? "Oh, you're smart, you're going to be rich and famous someday."
You hear it enough times and you might start to believe it too, that you're so smart you'll make all the right decisions and you can't fail. But then you become an adult and throw yourself into a passion or product and send it out there and realize the harsh truth that the market doesn't give a shit if you're smart or not, or even if what you made is "good", or even "great".
And it's impossible for you to know everything about everything, so somewhere along the line you will make a suboptimal choice, or choose the wrong time to release it, or release it on the wrong platform, or the people you hired to do X for you (development, marketing, distribution, qa, whatever) screwed up and leads to you getting terrible press (or no press coverage), or all sorts of crap that you have little control over or can't foresee.
I've personally worked for three game studios that made multiple games that flopped hard upon release. It gets depressing and frustrating when the creative products you spend months and months of your time working on didn't even make enough back to pay back your own salary for that time, let alone anyone else who worked on the project, and where you might as well never have spent that time in the first place.
The guys in the article only had a couple of failed games, and one monster success that continues to bring in millions of dollars in revenue. My only big success was a free flash game (before in-app purchases even existed) that I released 13 years ago....so yeah, no money there, at least not directly. I've worked on at least 8 failed games professionally, and many other failed or cancelled apps or enterprise software, since then.
For example, a year ago I wasted 6 months on a project at work that was supposed to sell to two major Fortune 100 clients and didn't, so it was killed without ever being used once. Even my biggest failed game projects I worked on at least had a few fans.
I've easily worked on more failures than even minor successes. It starts to drain on you. My confidence in my ability to make a successful anything in the future is pretty shaken.
Anyway, long story short, I was led to believe that my life would be easy and I'd find success after success by many people in my life, parents, teachers, fellow students, etc. And so far pretty much my entire adult life, with a couple of exceptions, has proven that what I was told was total bullshit and I'm just as capable of making bad decisions and getting unlucky as people half as book-smart as I am.
So maybe some of the people that do make those assumptions or have heard those same things as they grew up need to be told that it doesn't matter.
Yes. For most gamers these days, time is the bottleneck, not money. In a world where Infinitroid and Hollow Knight exist, one hundred out of one hundred people are going to spend the time on Hollow Knight.
>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
One thing about all of those is that they pass a smell test. I don't need to play it to be interested, if I just see an ad or see someone playing or hear someone talking about it then I'm interested. This game did not have that, all I've seen is a genre and some bad graphics. The gameplay itself could be great but it hasn't gotten past the smell test.
You made the mistake of thinking that anyone would care how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. But making a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game. That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
If a lone programmer wants to write tight code for games, they should build game engines or libraries that games can use and then sell those to game developers.
There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.
... or call it a hobby. Just because someone does the same thing they make a living from for fun, doesn't mean it isn't also a hobby. It's weird, that because people pay coders for some of the work they do, expecting money gets wrapped up in what is a hobby for so many.
Programming is fun for a lot of people. They love the process, enjoy the reading and learning, get a kick out of things like optimising code for a speed boost. IMHO that's awesome. So few people have any real interests, so if you have one, indulge it.
Just call it what it is - a hobby - and reframe your thinking. No other hobbies are indulged because we expect to make money directly out of them, e.g. no one playing soccer in a park expects to go pro, they just love playing. Why should hobby coding be different?
Reframing it as a hobby changes the equation from $0.01 an hour, to "OMG, someone, anyone, wanted to give me money to indulge my hobby!" Then what starts as a time and money sink becomes instead what you live for, and a positive in your life.
I think we need to think more along these lines in general; it's going to be needed a lot.
This is the ongoing march towards post-scarcity. We now have enough people with skills, experience and tools necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero. Essentially, these developers are spending (resources: time etc; although sometimes money as well) to scratch an itch.
And trying to recoup at least a part of those losses by selling the result is not unreasonable, but it should be considered a best-effort optimization. In the end, you still end up paying for the privilege of, essentially, having other people admire your work. It reminds me of some sci-fi story I vaguely remember from a long time ago, about a true post-scarcity society where everything is free, except for other people's attention, which therefore becomes currency. There's nothing else to do for humans other than arts, so everyone is doing that - and now you're paying someone to e.g. read your book, and then they can use that money to pay someone else to look at their painting etc.
In general, that is true. I should have been more specific:
> We now have enough people with skills, experience, tools, and free time necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero.
Where "free time" is that not used up by work that pays for food etc.
Which does mean that people for whom art is a hobby are destroying the market the people for whom art is all they want to do, except for truly great artists where the quality of the art is so exemplary that hobby artists just can't compete.
But I'm not sure why it's a bad thing in and of itself - nobody has a fundamental right to earn a living by performing some specific activity and no other. The job market defines what activities translate to paid jobs, and which ones can only be hobbies, and that is going to change over time. At the point of a true post-scarcity, everything becomes a hobby, but it doesn't matter because you no longer need a job.
If you only hang out with people who have enough free time to fulfill their creative desires (mostly in good health, mostly without kids, mostly who have "good" jobs which in most cases means their parents did too, which probably means they aren't taking care of their parents or other family members either) it can seem like a widespread thing. In fact, it's not; most people, in the U.S., and especially globally, are hustling to survive.
post-scarcity can sound nice, but in practice it currently means post-scarcity for the few, while most people live with incredible scarcity. We might have enough for everyone on the planet, but we sure don't share it equally. And that's not going to change automatically.
To be clear, I'm not saying that it is widespread! But it is more widespread than it used to be, IMO - this sort of thing was historically confined to the elites, and now it's slowly creeping its way down middle class. Hence why I called it a manifestation of an ongoing march towards post-scarcity.
When and where the goal would actually be achieved is hard to speculate; I hope to see it in my lifetime, but only out of sheer optimism.
> this sort of thing was historically confined to the elites, and now it's slowly creeping its way down middle class
I'm not sure that's true. I don't see much ongoing march towards giving most people more free time. Inequality is generally _growing_, not shrinking. There is no ongoing march of history, just humans in political struggle for how resources are distributed.
Relative inequality is growing. But in absolute terms, to be poor today is a great deal better than being poor 100 years. Conversely, this means that you are also more productive in absolute terms.
There's definitely a lot more free time available to people today than there were in any industrial economy prior to 8-hour work days and similar advancements in labor rights. If you unwind back to pre-industrial, some argue that agriculture provides for a lot more free time than we're used to, albeit seasonally.
But free time is only one part of the equation - you also need education/skills and tools to create things. These days, many industrialized societies provide education for free, or so cheap that it's accessible to a great deal more people than it used to be - and then, of course, there's the Internet. Tools are also much cheaper; again, think about it in absolute terms, e.g. how a $20 power drill compares to your typical toolset 100 years ago, much less 500.
Our societies have plenty of problems, and I don't encourage rose glasses. But we should also recognize just how immense the advance of humanity has really been, when you look in the rear mirror. Or not even the mirror... if you were born in a developed country, find an immigrant from a developing one, and just ask them how they feel about here vs there.
> But in absolute terms, to be poor today is a great deal better than being poor 100 years.
In the U.S., certainly. In India or Nigeria or Honduras? Not sure.
At any rate, while I agree that in general the health and standard of living of many people is going up -- I lack your confidence that the amount of _free time_, and other resources necessary to produce creative work without compensation, that the majority of people on the planet has is going up or will continue to. It will for some.
Even in the U.S., do the poor have more free time to produce creative work than they did 100 years ago? I seriously doubt it.
Absolutely. I predict that more and more Indy games will be created by the retired, and the starving. Same as happened with novels and other arts like painting and photography.
I wish I remembered it! It's something I've read as a kid, and for the life of me I can't remember either the title or the author, or even most of the plot; just the setting.
Reminds me of MUD games from the mid 1990s. A big MUD might've had three or four talented programmers, a dozen or so level designers, and dozens of administrators. All putting serious time into the MUD, and all without the faintest thought of making money out of it.
Except that it turns out that artists and game programmers are too cheap to pay for tools, even if you can present them with a clear benefit in terms of productivity gain vs. sales price. To make matters worse, big companies that could afford those tools will generally only buy exceptionally well established tools and rebuild the rest from scratch in-house.
The only way to make money with games is to sell games.
They're absolutely not "too cheap" for that - it's just a saturated market. Don't start a new company, look for a job working at Autodesk or Havok or Unity or Crytek or one of the dozen other companies that makes bank off of selling professional tools to professional game developers
Autodesk has laid off about a quarter of its workforce in the past two years. Crytek has had employees regularly complaining about paychecks bouncing; they're clearly inches from bankruptcy. Havok is owned by Microsoft; I'm not sure how they're doing. Unity is probably doing well enough, as they're incredibly popular, but I suspect popularity among hobbyists translates mostly into a lot of people on the free tier.
I can tell you right here and right now that I know that some of the companies you name do not make a bank off of their products. And it's probably not the companies you would expect and not for the reasons you would expect. I have sources for this, but unfortunately I cannot name them.
I'm pretty sure that Crytek has nearly gone under a few year ago, so they're not exactly making a bank with their engine. Rgarding their engine I've heard it's more difficult to use compared to other engines, which has slowed down adoption.
You may be surprised where unity makes the majority of their money... it's not from sales to the general public.
The parent post is correct, the majority of users are cheap, it's a race to the bottom, where a £50 plugin is considered expensive.
There's different framing needed here though - hobbyist developers aren't really buying "tools" in the same way a studio is. You need to think of it as a B2C sale more than a B2B one - you're selling something that will enable them to realise their dreams, not cut 5% off their build times.
When you're committing 1000 hours of your free time to building a game from scratch, spending 30-40 building your own (hacky, not that great) animation pipeline for the learning experience is worth it over a £90 plugin. You don't really win this on cost/benefit over and above getting someone excited by the possibilities of your tool. Worth checking out Buildbox[0] for example.
Obviously studios are a different beast and it make sense for parts of their workflows to be custom. If you want to get a start in the goldrush, sell pickaxes, not JCBs.
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Even that is a lost game, because only professional studios pay for tools, as indies tend to just grab FOSS tools and feel entitled to get their issues fixed.
And in the professional market, the quality bar is pretty high.
A 2D gaming scroller that requires 62,126 lines of code written from scratch? There's tons of libraries out there, game engines you could adopt, etc.
I would argue you could be an awful programmer and use prebuilt tools but have great design aesthetics, vision, music composition, and storytelling, and deliver something far better
How can you criticize the amount of code without knowing how much of that is generic engine code and how much of it is gameplay code (game logic, AI, event triggers...) that would have to exist regardless of the engine being used?
Because in the former case, it's a waste of time, duplicating work that others have done already available online for free, so of course there are no customers
And in the latter case, it's got to be a poorly written mess, no 2d platformer could need so much game logic. That's twice the size of the entire Super Metroid cartrige, engine and assets included.
Wait... did you just compare lines of source code to the size of a compiled binary code of something that was written over 25 years ago and clearly optimized for the size of the deliverable? In that case you might just as well have compared an apple to the Apollo program LAM module. It is just not a valid comparison.
I am sure that if Super Metroid were to be developed today in a high level language with the exact same gameplay logic, the resulting code would be in at least the same ballpark.
It is a valid comparison, because what he made is essentially the same game.
And I said that in response to the guess that maybe the 62,000 lines of code was all game logic, which is absurd.
Game logic, like, "when the player presses the fire button, spawn a missile" and "this enemy goes up 5 units, then goes down 5 units, then repeats". That's not the kind of thing that will change much from one metroid clone to another, regardless of what technology is used to make them. It is practically always the smallest part of the final product. And to have the game logic's source be bigger than the entirety of an almost identical game, with handcrafted levels, art, and engine included? It's absolutely absurd.
It was in service of the point above: that code is probably all the engine, which means that, yes, it probably was a waste of time, since engines made by professionals are available for free. At best, it's a line on a resume.
Adventures and RPGs are the most obvious ones. There, the story-based interactions quickly turn into tons of game logic corner cases that must be handled. Also, the rule sets for RPG character stats and fighting interactions (strengths, weaknesses, immunities, temporary effects, combos...) generally are pretty insane.
Oh, and lest we forget: game logic does not stop once you figured out at a high level that X has to happen. It still needs to set up and drive all the presentation that goes with it on top of the pure bookkeeping. The subtleties of this can be really amazing. To just name some trivial things that come to my mind: doors and elevators should stop when players stand in the way, players and objects should move with the platforms they're standing on (harder than it looks, esp. in 3D), enemies can't just be deleted from memory when their health goes below 0 (but their hitboxes might still go away immediately) and so on.
> It still needs to set up and drive all the presentation that goes with it on top of the pure bookkeeping.
Yup, a lot of "game logic" is in fact bookkeeping, i.e. self-inflicted complexity. It's not necessary, but is what happens when you overdo it (though IMO it's more often a symptom of using more frameworks and libraries than less).
It doesn't take a large team. Look at latest indie hotness Hollow Knight (https://youtu.be/UAO2urG23S4), which was made by 3 dudes, who were artists and animators (http://hollowknight.com/our-team/). I agree that with game engines, making a successful indie game is primarily about artistic prowess, but you probably don't need that many artists. Just 1 or 2 really good ones.
Seeing the forest for the trees as they say. This is why indie games are focused on the simpler style of video games in some cases like Stardew Valley. It still took the developer 8 years (give or take) and you can tell he worked his tail on it.
Stardew Valley is an interesting case in that the developer didn't really need to invent anything. They took a formula (the Harvest Moon series), produced a clone, and then polished the hell out of it in response to community demands until it was hardly recognizable.
None of that really required an act of genius creative talent, though. Learning enough about audio production to create the set of SFX and music you already know you need from the top-down design of the clone-game you already know you're aiming for is effectively "just" grunt work. Sort of like how an actor learning the exact set of martial-arts moves they need to know to look like they know martial arts in one particular shot, which is intensely choreographed, is "just" grunt work. Stardew Valley's creator didn't need to develop the skills to be an amazing artist or musician, they just needed—like the actor—to develop the skills to create a particular pastiche of existing pieces of art and music.
The creator of Stardew Valley is, however, a natural talent at the particular meta-skill of "finding out what people want and tweaking things in response to those wants, never settling for doing 'merely' what they know how to do with the skills they already have, rather pushing themselves to the skill-level required to make people even more happy."
> Learning enough about audio production to create the set of SFX and music you already know you need from the top-down design of the clone-game you already know you're aiming for is effectively "just" grunt work. (...) Stardew Valley's creator didn't need to develop the skills to be an amazing artist or musician, they just needed—like the actor—to develop the skills to create a particular pastiche of existing pieces of art and music.
Would almost agree but you had to bring up this :). I actually talked with SDV developer about his music skills[0]. Turns out, music was his hobby prior to becoming a developer, so he has a lot of experience. So in this case I wouldn't say it's "just', and it definitely wasn't a skill developed for this game.
I don't think so. The author mentioned in one of his interviews that he was the only person to actually play the game until the very late pre-release stages. Even those who signed him haven't really played it.
> how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.
Top notch in any field requires optimizing hidden, underlying dependencies to deliver the best output. Optimizing code is not sufficient but it is usually necessary, especially if others have already solved it, setting the standard of performance that players expect.
The way to avoid optimizing core library code is to use someone else's library and build on top of that. But you can only do that so much. This is just an insanely hard industry to get into.
It's not that optimizations don't have their place, but when your goal is to create a game and make money off of it, then micro optimizing C++ code simply has no place. Also, a 2D platformer simply doesn't require any highly optimized system.
One should spend the time building a game, polishing it, marketing it, presenting it at shows, etc. and not trying to build the most efficient engine, just because engine building is quite fun - as long as the goal is to make money from a game.
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game. That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
I think gameplay and marketing win here. Consider two gamesL one has great graphics but bad gameplay, the other has bad graphics but great gameplay. The great gameplay game is going to win that match up.
The problem here seems to be that supply is geometricly growing whereas demand is largely fixed. To compete and be noticed you need to make a serious investment in marketing or get extremely lucky.
> one has great graphics but bad gameplay, the other has bad graphics but great gameplay. The great gameplay game is going to win that match up.
Yes, in terms of player satisfaction, but no, not in terms of sales. Terrible movies with great explosions out-earn great movies with low budgets every single summer.
Great analysis.. this applies to so many areas of software development. Building games, websites, any thing software ..
> you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers.
> Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really.
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.
> That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
You know, there's an interesting relationship between the graphic-novel industry and the TV/film industry at this point. Many TV/film screenplays are adapted from graphic novels, because a graphic novel is, in a sense, a "sketch" of a film—it's something that communicates most of the top-down spirit of the eventual work, while also being something that is able to be produced by a single creator, and so something that is able to let a single creator's vision and talent shine through.
I'm left wondering why the video-game industry doesn't have at least some sub-sector with an analogous pipeline, adapting (or in this case, "covering") low-budget indie titles that don't have asset-polish into AAA games, by giving them that asset polish.
That's literally Valve's strategy. Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Dota, Portal...
Also even graphic novels are generally two person teams. I think trying to make an indie game with a small team (2-4 people) is way more realistic than doing it solo.
Because asset polish doesn't matter nearly as much as gameplay: the high-res remake will never make as much as the original.
The most successful game of the year, Far Cry 5, has sold 1/20th as many copies as Minecraft has, a game that is ugly as sin and always has been, but it's fun enough that it doesn't matter.
There's no point in adapting a property if the adaptation won't grow the audience. The Walking Dead was a comic book superstar, selling upwards of 500,000 units per issue when it was picked up by AMC for the TV adaptation. The TV adaptation is now reaching 8 million viewers per episode, and that's considered low.
I think you would have to cultivate that market very carefully. Video gaming can be very sentiment driven at times, and there's a fine line between homage and rip-off.
Perhaps the way to do it is to acquire the license for a 'masterpiece edition' ... release it five years after the original.
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".
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.
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.
People always say Minecraft doesn't have good graphics or whatever, but that game's color palette and overall design aesthetic is VERY good. Everything is consistent, and when you're playing it you forget that it doesn't look "real." The game from the article is not in the same league.
It reminds me of those games you'd get in a cereal box, shareware games or maybe with a computer magazine in the early 2000s. Probably due to the visuals being 'pre baked 3D converted to 2D sprites'.
It's almost nostalgic, but nothing I'd buy to be honest.
It's easy to list the games that made it, harder to list the thousand of similar games that didn't and were forgotten. Minecraft didn't make it because it was super well coded (it was decent but I'm sure well-optimized C or C++ could have easily outperformed the JVM), it was mainly at the right place at the right time.
I think the reason Minecraft was successful was first and foremost because of its concept. Looking at the author's game is seems pretty obviously like a Super Metroid clone (at least judging from a video, the level design looks like reskinned Super Metroid levels and many of the powers and enemies are extremely reminiscent of Metroid). I really like Metroidvanias but as far as I'm concerned it's really the art style that kills it, I'm really not fond of this pseudo-realistic tile work.
True. But most people aren't as skilled as Notch, or the Stardew guy. It's still definitely NOT a waste of three years, but the author should not expect to make much money off of an indie game. More graphic design and marketing needs to be put into this endeavor, assuming the gameplay itself is any good.
That said totally not a waste of time. It shows you have the wits to bring something to market and the ability to ship. You coded the whole damn thing which is insanely involved. This is no small feat. However the market is generally the hardest critic and it doesn't matter how many hours you spent or how many lines and bugs you solved.
That was my first thought too. The author talks about the indie explosion, but I don't think they realize they are part of the problem. Clearly the author is a great programmer, as coding something like this definitely isn't trivial, but it lacks in other places, such as design, art style and sound effects.
I understand programmers often like working on their own projects, and sometimes we end up with complete packages like Stardew Valley, but maybe it's better to work in a team where everyone has their own strengths. I see so many games with fantastic code, going to waste because of really underwhelming story, art style or sound.
I consider myself as a big fan of Metroidvanias, I'm even the kind of person who actively looks for new games in this genre, and those were my thoughts as well.
I would even say that this game manages to hit the 3 points in which I avoid on a Metroidvania:
1. Rogue-like. I really dislike rogue-like, no special reason, just a personal preference
2. Lack of a plot. I appreciate the feeling of exploring a world the feels alive, even if it's a very simple one. Going through levels for the sake of going through them, it's not much of a fun experience to me.
3. Huge resemblance to the original Metroid. If I wanted to play Metroid... I would be playing Metroid.
Also... no Linux version? Really? That excludes me entirely from this game.
#1 and #2 are strongly related. Procedural generation makes it much harder to create a sense of a coherent world, rather than a series of disconnected mini-games.
And yet Dead Cells does the Metroidvania Roguelite thing and has a plot.
In fact being a Roguelite is woven into the plot, characters aren't surprised to see you, after all you were just here last session, the mounds of festering corpses prompt you to remark that they're all the same... They're all you.
You're criticizing an indie game developer who feels he just wasted 3 years of his life making a failure, for not spending the extra year or whatever it'd take for it to be cross-platform?
With engines like Unity and Unreal, supporting multiple platforms (including modern consoles like PS4, Xbox One and Switch) has a level of complexity of writing a portable Electron app.
As an indie developer, you need to maximize that market coverage (and develop with portability in mind).
Having said that, it's probably not the primary reason why his game failed.
- Linux desktop market share is tiny. My own app supports Linux, but I'm 100% aware that I'm doing it at a loss in every possible way, it's a passion project. Bang for buck is terrible, so you need to justify as a labour of love.
- The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop to work as it should is huge, and there are several competing packaging providers with no clear winner, and all have very much hidden gotchas that they do a poor job of explaining ahead of time.
- Making a cross-platform Electron app that behaves well and up to to snuff on Windows, Mac and Linux is not even close to easy. The fact that JS theoretically works on all three platforms buys you way less than most people think.
Source: I'm making a cross platform Electron app that supports Linux.
The market may be tiny but it is a lot easier to sell copies of a (decent) game because Linux users will love you for supporting their platform.
You also don't need to support every distro on the planet. Just focus on Ubuntu. With proper planning and choosing your game engine wisely it's not the biggest deal to build for Linux.
My experience (though I'm not a game developer) is the opposite. Linux users are very demanding, and instead of being thankful that your app works well on Linux, they'll take the fact that it works and works well on Linux for granted, and will resent you for charging money for it.
If you support Ubuntu+Debian (1.15% user base globally on average), the next feature request you'll get will be Xubuntu, Arch, and then some smaller distros which has their own undocumented quirks, they'll ask for 32 bit versions (0.0015%) to run on ancient machines that aren't really powerful enough to run the app anyway, and there goes the rabbit hole.
(In the meanwhile, Windows users are 85%, Mac OS is 13%. We're talking about fractions of fractions a percent here when you move out of Ubuntu x64)
These features will be framed as "You're supporting Ubuntu, getting it to work on this {{similar_distro}} is so close, you should do it and you'll have a lot of users". It's not that they're wrong or malicious — it's just that their concept of a lot of users is a whopping multitude of three people.
I'm also purposefully ignoring the more acrid side of the Linux community where they'll call you names, find your personal email, and make sure it's the first thing you read in the morning for not pulling heroics to make it work for their distro of choice (0.0000075% user base).
All in all, not worth it, really. Not financially, not logically. Not from a human point of view, either.
Here are a few things I've found helpful if you're making a desktop app for Linux:
- Consider charging Linux users for support. This is justifiable because for every Windows support request, there are likely 10 people that experienced the problem and haven't written to you about it, for Mac, 2-3, but for Linux, very likely you're only helping that single guy only. This is the best way to do this, but since my app is free, I don't really want to set up a payment infrastructure.
- Make your app free, and ask Linux users to either make their own builds from unpacked releases, or pay for support for their distro on a rolling basis. You don't really expect anyone to take the latter, but it does wonders to cut down on requests in which people demand you support their favourite obscure distro of choice with no help or support from them.
That said, I still provide Snaps, as it's the closest I can get to a universal Linux runtime. This exposes me to requests to provide AppImage, Flatpak, and some other stuff even then, but it's way better than trying to support distros directly. [0]
[0] I tried to support AppImage, I gave up after a full day of trying. Flatpak had similar issues. One of the core developers of AppImage reached out trying to debug, and I helped him as much as I could — but the point is, while the intentions are pure, and I'm glad for the effort, this is deeper and deeper into the red in terms of price / performance.
I agree that Linux users can also be a pain to deal with :)
But yea from my experience the game market is a little different because there is a growing group of people that rather would not boot Windows for gaming and instead stay on their platform. This group of people is very thankful for ported games.
What I heard third hand from game developers has been that it’s fairly hard to get games to perform well on Linux, and that most of the complaints come because of performance reasons outside the developers’ control.
I disagree with your assertion Linux desktops are hard to set up.
You plug in your Ubuntu drive and install it, it detects your video card and install the drivers.
Everything just works, when people rag on Linux desktops they are talking about Linux from 6 years ago.
A ton of effort has been put into making the experience smooth and there are multiple projects to make it even more user friendly like elementary os and popos
This is true, but also the game in question was coded entirely from scratch, which is part of the problem: the majority of those 3 years were probably spent duplicating the work done already by Unity and Unreal. If you want to make a living as a carpenter, you don't start by planting walnuts.
There's not a ton of information available on the breakdown of sales by platform, but the data that is out there shows Linux sales usually compromise ~2-4% for cross-platform games [1]. If you get linux support "for free" by utilizing an engine, then absolutely go for it, but even major companies with massively popular games are still skipping out on first-class Linux support [2], due to the low market share.
It's also exponentially harder to make a Linux port for a AAA game than for an Indie game, for many reasons. The most obvious ones being that most indie games are made with an off the shelf cross platform engine (Unity, unreal), and that AAA titles require a lot more hardware resources, and optimization of this usage is often platform specific (what helps OpenGL might not help DirectX, etc).
When was the last time you paid for an indie humble bundle though? I think it proved that for a short moment a very small percentage of users were supporting games at a higher rate than the majority in order to support a cause, but once the novelty wore off they went back to not caring. I just don't think there are enough Linux users out there that are also regular gamers to make Linux support worth it for most titles. Sure there are exceptions especially if you're building a game that disproportionately appeals to that audience (like KSP or Zactronics), but in most cases its not really worth it.
>When was the last time you paid for an indie humble bundle though?
Some years ago, but that is explained by a sharp decline in the quality of games included in their offers (which was about the time they dropped ensuring that their bundles were compatible with the three platforms). A better question would be when I last spend money on (game) software for linux. The answer is 28 hours ago.
I concur that the market is small. But when your sales are small too, it is not smart to throw away access to a market with a higher proportion of dedicated users and consumers. From the perspective of tech, less time may have been "wasted" on infinitroid if the developer used more off the shelve solutions that would help with multiplatform targeting.
In the end we are just basing our arguments on our gut feelings. I doubt very much that Valve would push as hard for gaming on linux as they are doing if they didn't see the potentials of sales for the platform in their data. But time will tell.
I think in OPs case a Linux port could have a non-trivial affect on sales because he's on the front page of hackernews and people that see this post and feel sorry for him will buy his game and not play it because he supports Linux.
I agree, C++ projects are quite easy to get running on Linux. I've done cross platform C++ game stuff and almost always had more trouble with Windows than I ever did with Linux. MacOS was pretty annoying in some cases too, actually...
Yeah, the entirety your comment pretty much mirrors what I'd have to say in reply to his post.
The only other thing I'd add for Luke is - do you enjoy playing this game? As in, have you sunk a whooole bunch of hours into playing it, simply because it's the only game available (that you made precisely because there's nothing else) that scratches this very particular itch?
I'm afraid this was my first thought having watched the video — does it look fun?
I'd like to think that the foundations are in place to make it such, but from what I saw, I saw a lot of [highly capable] box ticking, but not a lot to make me want to take it on.
Super Metroid is literally my favorite game, and I don't really have a strong urge to play this.
Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generation takes a big dump on any sense of familiarity, which is a big part of the reward for exploration.
In fact, the _only_ games I've played where procedural generation were good for the game are story-building games, such as Rogue-likes and Dwarf Fortress. They reward you for building a story, not for traversing obstacles. In every other game, they are just a weak thematic obscuration of the underlying mechanical goals. The Dryad's name in Terraria doesn't matter. Dig deep enough and you'll find diamonds in Minecraft. Kill a boss enough times in Borderlands, and you'll get a good gun. There's no story about achieving these goals. Procedural generation doesn't participate in making the goals more interesting to achieve, it's a forgettable and incidental fact about something almost wholly unrelated.
Game developers need to stop trying to lean on it as a substitute for content. A game is what people can expect from it each time they play it, and if all it is is a bundle of mechanics and throw-backs, then there's not going to be much appeal.
I'm curious about where the story happens? I've played a rogue-like (Pixel Dungeon), while I found it fun, I didn't think it had much of a story. Are others better?
In say nethack you can pick up random overpowered or weird items that change the game or get into crazy adventures when you meet some weird rare creature.
I kinda like games like nethack and brogue but my only problem with them is since it's extremely easy to die, it emphasizes attention a bit too much imho. I'm not a very attentive person and when I play games I'd much rather it be a bit more relaxed. When I know that even if I play the game for a whole Saturday, one floating eye can just randomly kill me for no reason, it kinda demotivates me...
It works like gambling. You play the game 100 times and you just lose most of them, but on the rare occasion you get very lucky... and you walk away with an unforgettable story about how you defied all the odds and did something wonderful and amazing. That's where procedural generation shines the brightest.
I suppose that's true. But one can imagine a game just like nethack except it's not as easy to die so after, say 20 run, you learn the ropes and can enjoy the game every time you play it. Obviously, eventually you'll get bored (unlike playing 100 times and losing every time) but that few times you beat the game would be enjoyable.
Not nethack, I was talking about a hypothetical clone of nethack where you can supposedly make a whole run without "surprises" that can randomly kill you, like floating eyes (or Jelly monsters in brogue). I think such a game would be very enjoyable first few times you play, but then since not challenging would be boring. Entirely different genre but Universal Paperclip might be a good example, extremely interesting story but the game is almost too easy after you learn to reliably win it. I think nethack is "boredom proof" because it's so challenging. I must be honest, I never finished brogue nor nethack (but I suck at video games because I play them once a year or so) but every game still gives the same rush of enjoyment every time. Still, though I don't keep playing it because the "demotivation" thing I was talking about earlier stops me from starting a new game (I'll lose anyway).
That's right, Tariru has won 61 times in a row. So that makes my 100 losses 'avoidable' in some sense, which spurs me on to do better. It only requires luck if you play inattentively :)
At the risk of sounding like an elitist - Pixel Dungeon isn't a "real" roguelike. Check out something like Nethack, or ADOM, or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Or maybe Tales of Maj'eyal if you want something with lots of graphical polish (this one also has a decent amount of actual scripted plot).
These games have the extra depth and detail that cause the kinds of emergent gameplay and "storybuilding" that people are talking about.
In Sproggiwood, the story takes place around dives into the dungeons. Each dive is "rogue like" but the overall progression outside each dive is persistent.
I think this is the best way to do a random dungeon roguelike with a story.
That said, I wouldn't sell Sproggiwood on its story in particular, just the arrangement of everything. The game is fun because it's a good bite size style of roguelike for a phone with interesting/fun mechanics in play.
I would recommend Rogue Survivor. Pixel Dungeon is an ok game, but it doesn't really encourage you to get attached to your character or environment. There's very little backtracking or foreshadowing in it, so learning the lay of the land or remembering where things are just isn't very important.
If you are aiming for a game that people play for more than 1000 hours, sure. Commercially, this would be a terrible segment of the market to aim for. The people who play the same title for that long are unlikely to buy your game, because they don't have time to play it. Unless you happen to find a niche first, you will end up with a few players, but supporting them for a long, long time.
Shorter games are fine, and sell to people who want novelty over repetition. Don't make the game longer than its content, and price accordingly.
It doesn't make a game better, it just superficially defers the realization that the game is played out. Yatzee's only claim to being a game is that you roll dice... if you didn't, people would immediately see it as the pointless activity it really is. Video games are no different. If you put 1000 hours into a game, you will see it for what it is, and proc gen is not even a factor at providing interesting gameplay at that point. A game ultimately succeeds based on the merits of the structure it actually has.
Now, if the proc gen is sufficiently complex, we're talking about something else, (but that is rare if it exists at all.)
I would say it is a perfect example of a story-building game. The specific details that drive the main gameplay mechanics are based on the circumstantial arrangement of procedurally generated components. Where any two players are in the world matter to the events that subsequently play out, and those relationships are based on proc gen.
I don't know if I'd agree about your dislike of the graphics being because of your own personal preference. The human brain has evolved to find certain harmonies of shapes/colors attractive while others are not. The author undoubtedly has a lot of grit—but, he's not an artist, and his game suffers because of that. Metroid has superior graphics because they had dedicated artists, and surely put a lot of time/thought into the look and feel of the game.
Also, the design scheme between different 'blocks' which make up the platforms in the game is not uniform, which makes the design feel much more disjointed.
The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1]
>Abstract
>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.
[1] The Macroeconomics of Superstars, Anton Korinek Johns Hopkins and NBER, Ding Xuan Ng Johns Hopkins, November 2017 https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-for...
[2] The Economics of Superstars The American Economic Review , Vol. 71, No. 5. (Dec., 1981), pp. 845-858. http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981...
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