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Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

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Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#141

Post by mrangle »

epolanski wrote: post #54

The amount of negativity and criticism in the comments here is sad. Not only I think it's way too easy to criticize other's work and choices (in hindsight), but there's also a total lack of empathy. We should cherish many small developers and entrepeneurs that share their experiences with such honest and thorough posts about the experience as they offer unique and valuable inputs and reflections.

In general, a socially and personally healthy life choice is to refrain from pointed criticism of anyone's work whose specific profession one is not in. Apart from instances when their performance has directly impacted you.

If for no other reason than the fact that you haven't attempted it and therefore don't actually know.

After that, the next level of karmic adjustment is to refrain from posting bad reviews of restaurants.

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#142

Post by Etherlord87 »

ilyt wrote: post #72
flohofwoe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a marketing's game now. Making games break even always was 90% marketing though, maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own, but that definitely wasn't the case for "non-indie" games since at least the late 90's (the way how game marketing is done has changed dramatically though).

> maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own That was never the case. Just that some indie that made "good enough" or "great" game got lucky that they got picked by "right" streamer or youtuber that liked it and it got virally popular off it. Like I doubt Minecraft would explode as it did if Yogscast…

Who is convinced by such argumentation I wonder? If there's a hypothesis, and there's multiple examples disproving the hypothesis, and not even a single example proving the hypothesis is provided - how can you be a fan of the hypothesis?

It may be a matter of marketing and luck to make money on a "good" game, but a brilliant game is destined to spread like wildfire, because the gaming community is enthusiastic enough to look for such gems and announce the findings.

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#143

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #135
freeCandy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you fuel your argument with some examples? I hear the argument in similar forms a lot, how a lot of good games failed because of bad marketing or just no luck. But I never see any examples. The response I get to my question is usually "I don't know of an example precisely because it never got popular", but I find it very fallacious - if there's thousands of good games out there, that failed to be popular, surely…

I have a one that immediately comes to mind:

Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, difficulty settings, runs like butter, and is all in all a super polished game. IMO this was GOTY shit and I don’t know why it didn’t take off.

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#144

Post by xwdv »

This has all the hallmarks of typical soulless, extra juicy hyper stimulating arcade games that are so common and commoditized. The name of course is just randomly chosen words thrown together that aren’t too offensive and implies some kind of vague theme. Don’t know who Toto is, why there’s a temple and what makes this so deluxe from the original Toto Temple, but also seems like it doesn’t matter.

And this is what I tell most indie devs: you’re probably going to be a failure. So don’t go down making some bland cookie cutter game trying to make a few bucks. Make something truly unique, shocking, strange, something that no producer would touch, because you’re independent and can do whatever you want. You might not make money, but you might win some real fans. And in the end, what matters on this journey is the friends you make along the way and touching people’s lives with your game.

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#145

Post by Etherlord87 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #90
bigger_inside wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't forget Rimworld. One guy making a huge and sprawling game that ignored the studio sensibilities and became hit (and a couple of memes).

Rimworld (and I'm sure Stardew will also be mentioned) came out years ago though; sure, the indie market was hopping back then too, but it's gotten worse since then.

> Rimworld [...] came out years ago though;

Rimworld was released in 2018, two years after the article was written (2016)

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#146

Post by rfrey »

rawbot wrote: post #60
epolanski wrote: post #54

The amount of negativity and criticism in the comments here is sad. Not only I think it's way too easy to criticize other's work and choices (in hindsight), but there's also a total lack of empathy. We should cherish many small developers and entrepeneurs that share their experiences with such honest and thorough posts about the experience as they offer unique and valuable inputs and reflections.

This was 7 years ago. What good would vapid praising comments do?

It's interesting that you think seven-year-old positive comments are vapid, but seven-year-old negativity is not.

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#147

Post by mycocola »

keyle wrote: post #25

When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out. The whole indie market thing was hot. But at a certain point, thanks to the free availability of game engines and their overal quality, the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games and releasing top quality indie games. It became a game of marketing. And sadly that's where w…

> There are about 30-35 quality titles being put out on steam alone, every day of the week, weekends included.

Absolutely not. The vast majority of games released on Steam are not good. You can verify this yourself by looking at new releases. Maybe one or two out the ones released the 19th of June are _potentially_ interesting.

Quality, defined as well-produced games in unsaturated niches, is really the only thing that matters, but marketing can be a multiplier of that quality. I've seen many games that blame marketing for their failure, and I have seen many games that fail despite their marketing. Usually those games are not compelling, and reviews will confirm this. It's rare to see games fail despite their high quality.

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#148

Post by rfrey »

Etrnl_President wrote: post #104
epolanski wrote: post #54

The amount of negativity and criticism in the comments here is sad. Not only I think it's way too easy to criticize other's work and choices (in hindsight), but there's also a total lack of empathy. We should cherish many small developers and entrepeneurs that share their experiences with such honest and thorough posts about the experience as they offer unique and valuable inputs and reflections.

[flagged]

Not always. I'm pretty sure MY failures in life are because I'm bald. Certainly they have nothing to do with my own choices.

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#149

Post by robertlagrant »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #132
robertlagrant wrote: post #130

> 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" and "Un-creative" don't have to mean "Good" and "Bad". "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.

I don't think it is good and bad; I just also think that creating things is creative.

Writing a video game story or drawing its assets aren't the only type of creativity, and in this case it sounds like the creative workload on the technical person was fairly extreme.

Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)

#150

Post by ZephyrBlu »

somenameforme wrote: post #133
cubefox wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Among Us would be the most famous example of this.

The game was unknown for ~2 years (Released 2018, picked up ~2020) until it got picked up by streamers and was catapulted into the spotlight.

Why is it so hard to believe there are more games out there like this? These kind of markets are nowhere near efficient.

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