Did I just waste 3 years? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#441

Post by test1235 » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:03 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #417

kbenson wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

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.…

>so the bar for watching something new is super low

I think you mean the opposite: the bar is super high because the chances of watching something new are low ... it's more difficult.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#442

Post by varjag » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:04 AM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #437

projektir wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#443

Post by detritus » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:10 AM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #440

Pimpus wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. loa…

...and what about all the other countries?

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#444

Post by fiblye » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:15 AM UTC

fileeditview wrote: post #430

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…

>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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#445

Post by soylentgraham » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:18 AM UTC

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

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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#446

Post by code_duck » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #249

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…

This isn't new. It happened before the internet to books, music and film. The internet has just amplified it.

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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#447

Post by rolleiflex » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:23 AM UTC

fileeditview wrote: post #426

rolleiflex wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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…

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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#448

Post by krapp » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

seventhtiger wrote: post #403

krapp wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not actually competing with the whole world, though, just whatever else is similar to someone's interests. In this case... "metroidvania" is a very oversaturated market, and a lot of games do it better.

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 suc…

>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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#449

Post by Theodores » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #351

Theodores wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adele? 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…

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 ach…

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.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#450

Post by Clomez » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

Click the link to find information (screenshots, maybe video) Play now button, but im not on computer to play with, just hanging around in HN while eating at work.

Soo i got lots of text and links but no pictures of game or video whatsoever. All the information i have is what i pieced around in comments, seems like rogue-like metrovania.. this dosent really sell me the game. Sure there is play now but that also lead to page full of text.

Bad marketing