He doesn't mention how many hours he spent marketing it. I suspect not that many. I fully sympathize with his struggle, but this is a trap most programmers fall into so easily. Market need/fit > Marketing > Design > Programming when it comes to software products. You can't just build it and expect that they will come, unfortunately.
Did I just waste 3 years?
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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#12Regardless of sales, this game demonstrates all sorts of wonderful qualities that successful studios are looking for in an employee, and its development was undoubtedly much more educational than any computer science program. It is never wasted time to do what one is passionate about.
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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#13If I'm reading it correctly you're considering:
- call the game finished and walk away now you finished the dev work
- call the game a hobby to excuse the sales now you finished the dev work
- code some arbitrary addition to be ethical just to be coding something cause dev work is probably the only work that exists
- keep iterating cause you can always invent more dev work to do
- get a different project going for another type of dev work
All of these will successfully waste those 3 years and more if you don't focus on converting your nascent product into income.
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#14Whats the equivalent of testing your business idea before building a business in the gaming world ?
Does such a thing necessarily exist?
7DRLs[1] are a good example of prototyping gameplay. Some of them ultimately go on to become full fledged games. Cogmind [2] is an excellent example of this.
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#15If you are interested in making an indie game, do it only because you want to not because you think you'll make money.
You will lose money. That's it. There's no magic message here.
Source: an indie dev. I keep my passion for my project because it's something I truly want to do.
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#16Whats the equivalent of testing your business idea before building a business in the gaming world ?
Early access and kickstarter
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#17Yes.
You are only asking to have people point out possibilities that you didn't.
But in your heart of hearts, you know you did.
That doesn't mean you didn't have fun. I suspect you need to revisit what 'waste' really is for you though.
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#18Couple of things came to mind from reading this. First if your latest game doesn't sell despite past successes, you might have bungled your marketing, namely company branding. Most AAA game developers heavily invest in this, because if gamers like their current game, they might be interested for the next one, but only if they know who you are, not just your games. Consumers in games industry work just the same as they do in every other industry, indies just seem to think that because core gamers know who they are and engage with them, that the average consumer does too, but they don't.
Second one was that quote about lack of interest from games media. They do work as gate keepers, and most of them are heavily advertising driven, so the problem here is the same as above, indies suffer because they don't have marketing budgets. When the industry grows so large that it has to start attracting casuals, that always means spending marketing dollars, and indie industry has grown and saturated the core gamer group through, and casual interest just isn't there without marketing.
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#19He doesn't mention how many hours he spent marketing it. I suspect not that many. I fully sympathize with his struggle, but this is a trap most programmers fall into so easily. Market need/fit > Marketing > Design > Programming when it comes to software products. You can't just build it and expect that they will come, unfortunately.
That hierarchy of importance is quite apt.
If the game concept doesn't sell itself as an elevator pitch, then it doesn't matter how good the implementation is.
I once met an indie dev who was surprised that their Space Invaders mobile clone didn't sell on Windows Mobile, "despite its amazing particle effects."
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#20Game development always scared me as one of those studies that you hope your kids don't get interested in. Another one is manual drawing, especially when it is Anime (what are the chances that someone from a small European country is going to excel at such a job?).
> Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in.
Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you keep coming back, trying to level up by grinding boring quests. "You are not done yet, but the end is in sight!".
As a good game dev, in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets.