Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
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Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#2My response to this sentiment is: STFU, then, and make one of these crappy games. Then you'll have millions of dollars to make whatever kind of other awesome games you'll want forever and ever.
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#3This guy probably plays farmville and loves it.
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#4This guy obviously has no idea how hard it is to make one of those hit games.
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#5Although this guy is correct in saying that FarmVille, Mafia Wars, etc are really crappy, game-play wise (but excellent slot machines), I think Facebook games hold massive promise for indie developers; they're bringing casual games to a massive new audience, and I think there's a lot of money in games that provide engaging gameplay and leverage the social aspect.
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#6This guy obviously has no idea how hard it is to make one of those hit games.
Explain.
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#7I want games with substance and style, richly textured and thickly layered, with real character development and breathtaking artwork. I want games which remind me of good books.
I paid $70 for this game when it was called Final Fantasy 13 and had a development budget in the upper eight figures (in dollars, not yen). If you want this from a game with a development budget in the five or lower six figures which is only paid for by 1% of all players and does not have a viral loop baked into its DNA, you apparently want to be disappointed.
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#8The author appears to have either a few false assumptions or simply wanted to rant against FarmVille and thought mentioning Indie games was required.
Indie games come from a few places. There are non-games industry and games industry creators. Those from the games industry obviously needed to work on some game before going Indie. They get experience, connections, and money from working on games just like farmville - without that industry start, who can say if we would have ever received World of Goo or others.
Likewise, those not from the games industry needed to know videogames exist. Maybe farmville will start a teen on the path to becoming someone on the caliber of Cactus.
What goes on in pop culture influences Indies, but it definitely doesn't control nor destroy them. Does it get more people exposed to videogames? Then I can't see it hurting the Indie scene. Note: it may "damage" mainstream games to some, but that is what you should complain about.
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#9This guy obviously has no idea how hard it is to make one of those hit games.
Explain.
Zygna (of FarmVille fame) has one of the most sophisticated testing and metrics operations on the Internet today. From externally observable evidence they're probably better at it than WoW and WoW is large enough to be its own national economy. (Zynga is a lot like IMVU or for that matter Toyota: I don't care if you have no interest in their product, their processes are worthy of study.)
They aren't just throwing dung at the wall and seeing what sticks: they're very, very good at what they do. For every FarmVille there are tens of thousands of games which you have never heard of: their viral growth coefficient was .95 instead of 1.05, kaboom, that is all you need to fail. The platform is getting harder to develop for, as early entrants used techniques which were what SEOs might call "a wee bit grey" to gain traction, and these are either impossible now or will result in a new entrant getting hit with the banhammer. (For example, early social games maximized their viral coefficient by adopting a spam-early spam-often policy to user notifications, which ticked off a lot of Facebook users, causing Facebook to take a number of countermeasures. Ask somebody who builds for it to describe the specifics, but there are now throttles and some sort of system where you earn the right to use the viral channels.)
Re: Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years
#10This guy obviously has no idea how hard it is to make one of those hit games.
Explain.
He seems to discount the difficulty in harnessing the virality of Facebook, especially now with the locked down channels. I think virality is far harder to get right than good art, or a good story, or good game mechanics.