131–140 of 280 posts
> The process of porting the game was hard by itself, but following up a year of non-creative work with a launch that doesn’t make much noise, nor sell a lot, was pretty hard on all of us. I think classifying the one (!!) programmer's work as uncreative when he got the game running on multiple consoles is completely wrong. That guy is your main asset, and probably your most creative team member.
"Creative" makes me think someone who is working on story, art assets, gameplay mechanics, etc.
Engine work can be good but it is not creative from the player's perspective. Maybe from the programming-for-the-sake-of-programming perspective it is.
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I don't see what the average would matter, because not all games are created equal. It's kind of like the Steven King / Richard Bachman experiment [1]. The question he was answering was not how likely a random author was to succeed, but how likely a good author was to succeed. So it seems that the important question is what are the odds of a genuinely good game going unrecognized, flopping completely? What are the od…
I think the probability is quite high that even fairly good games will flop, because there are so many indie developers, and because the tools are so advanced. So only the best of the best will succeed, or those which satisfy some unique niche, or which somehow already have an established brand.
Basically I'm arguing that there is no black swan. It's not really hard to refute it, if I'm wrong, because all you need to do is point to one. I suppose the inevitable outcome might be we then hem and haw back and forth about whether something is "good", but well - at least it's a reasonable evidence based starting point, yeah?
I'm not sure why exactly but I see so many " Deluxe" titles out there I just assume they're janky cloned 5-minute games with 50c in the discount bin. At least for me, the name is an immediate "no".
Same with "$thing Simulator" (there was a 'gas station simulator' on Steam recently) or (in the 90's) "Sim $something" or "$something Tycoon) (sim city, sim ant, sim skyscraper, sim hospital, apparently there's a huge list [0]). Or "$something Online", because every franchise had to be turned into an MMO; Lord of the Rings Online, The Elder Scrolls Online, Eve Online, you name it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li…
Ok, I'm going to have to stop you there. These are two of the greatest games of all time. ALL TIME.
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It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.…
Valheim and such games are very much exceptions to this, for every successful indie game released, there is an ocean of unsuccessful games out there and that may be equally as good, or even better than Valheim.
Then I lost track of the game.
It's funny that 2 years after this article, in 2018, Celeste became a triple-I hit using a similar dash move but single-player. Turns out pixel platformers still had some juice left, but couch MP is never coming back.
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It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.…
As someone who has been working as an indie game dev for the past 13 years, I think you’ve got a pretty unrealistic view of the situation. You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales…
That seems to me to be true of most (every) industries / areas of human endeavor?
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I think the probability is quite high that even fairly good games will flop, because there are so many indie developers, and because the tools are so advanced. So only the best of the best will succeed, or those which satisfy some unique niche, or which somehow already have an established brand.
If you're correct, then this would mean there are countless genuinely great games on e.g. Steam going completely untouched that would otherwise be megahits if people simply knew about them. This sets up countless amazing commercial opportunities if you are correct, that are seemingly just going completely untapped. But for the more simplistic purposes of our discussion, can you think of any particularly compelling ex…
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It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.…
As someone who has been working as an indie game dev for the past 13 years, I think you’ve got a pretty unrealistic view of the situation. You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales…
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> Wii U, which Nintendo marketed so badly many people thought it was an extension for their Wii I can't decide if that's better or worse than Xbox. Xbox One isn't the original Xbox? And do I want Series S or X?
Xbox names are the worst. Just look at these names: one, one S, one X, series X and series S I had so much trouble figuring out which xbox was “the new one” when I considered buying one last year.
Though, Microsoft is never one for making names simple.