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Did I just waste 3 years?

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#431

Post by Negitivefrags »

Retra wrote: post #42
jtchang wrote: post #9

What is the target market for the game? I played Metroid when I was a kid on NES and the original gameboy. Games these days are a lot about marketing and huge budgets. The indie ones that do well need to be targeted as well as refreshing. Some hard thoughts just watching the video and reading a bit about the game: 1. I don't really like the graphics as much as I liked the original Metroid. This is probably just a per…

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 generati…

Think of games that players play for more than 1000 hours.

They have either:

A) Multiplayer

B) Procedural Generation

If you don’t want to do A, and you hope to make something people will play for a long time, then you have to do B.

Procedural generation has no value for getting players interested, it only matters for keeping players long term.

But it does matter a lot.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#432

Post by slavik81 »

azernik wrote: post #284
gmueckl wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The tooling market is hard.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#433

Post by invalidusernam3 »

kahoon wrote: post #244
invalidusernam3 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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). Was this orders from clients or did you create some SaaS?

Most of it (more than 90%) ad revenue, some SaaS.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#434

Post by Pimpus »

jondubois wrote: post #425
Nokinside wrote: post #150

Game industry is the economics of superstars. The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1] >Abstract >Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fna…

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.

Interesting, can you expand on this?

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#435

Post by macspoofing »

malkia wrote: post #185
Nokinside wrote: post #150

Game industry is the economics of superstars. The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1] >Abstract >Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fna…

Haven't read the paper, but kept me thinking about twitchers, youtube streamers and such...

You'll see the same thing: a tiny minority of streamers making most of the money, and a large majority making little to no money.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#436

Post by macspoofing »

drb91 wrote: post #306
chongli wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, making money just off of novels seems impossible these days (you gotta hold out for HBO); there’s still a good deal of difference.

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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#437

Post by macspoofing »

projektir wrote: post #208
Applejinx wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[1]https://www.remic.ca/real-estate-sales-person-vs-mortgage-ag...

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#438

Post by bildung »

chii wrote: post #366
kiostech wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, marketing is very important!

But is standing out _just_ marketing? Or is standing out something that requires originality in idea (as well as marketing to allow buyers to see the originality)?

Marketing isn't just ads, it means customer research and creation of offers users actually want. So marketing a game starts with researching niches and creating a game people actually want to buy. And then of course also target them with ads.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#439

Post by baud147258 »

azernik wrote: post #284
gmueckl wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#440

Post by jondubois »

Pimpus wrote: post #434
jondubois wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, can you expand on this?

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.

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