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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)

#161

Post by robertlagrant »

stoniejohnson wrote: post #157
robertlagrant wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the term 'non-creative' was just used as a practical distinction when discussing 'creating ' versus 'porting '. I don't think the author intended to comment about the quality or even creativity of any developer's work.

Why not call the drawing the non-creative bit, then, if it's purely a distinction? (-:

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

#162

Post by belugacat »

xwdv wrote: post #144

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…

One of the most inspiring things I heard was - if I recall correctly - the Dead Space director giving a talk at GDC.

They were talking how from the get go their mentality was - if we're going to make a horror game, it has to be the most fucking horrifying game anyone has played. If we make a horror game that's kind of scary but not that extreme, then what are we doing?

I've strived to carry that mentality in all my projects since.

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

#163

Post by bdw5204 »

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…

Game development has turned into the same kind of nightmare that music is for anybody who wants to go into it. Unless you're really good at marketing/get really lucky, you're never going to make a living doing it because the market is insanely oversaturated and the gaming media focuses most of its attention on a handful of popular high budget games because that's what draws the traffic.

Another major problem is how long today's high budget games are. Not only the multiplayer "live service" casinos that are designed to addict their players and keep them playing in perpetuity but the modern single player open world RPGs that seemingly average around 100 hours of playtime. If somebody is playing 300 hours of that extremely bloated Assassin's Creed game about Vikings, they're not playing other games in that time and presumably have less interest in buying them. Likewise, stuff like GamePass and the new tiers of PS+ that offer access to an enormous number of games for a small subscription fee have to be cutting into game sales. And new games are also competing with 50 years worth of old games.

I wonder if many of the indie games, especially story driven games, might be better off as movies. Given how everybody carries a camera in their pocket these days, Hollywood movies are formulaic garbage and no actors are stars anymore, there's probably a market for innovative low budget movies shot in the woods on a single phone camera by a few friends and with little to no special effects. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than game development plus you'd get to be outside doing interesting things rather than just sitting at a computer for years working on a game that will most likely be played by a few dozen people.

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

#164

Post by diabolo96 »

The problem of indie games is that indie devs with no prior knowledge of programming, no prior artistic talent, either in terms of crafting an enticing narrative and/or graphical design wake up one day, decide to drop of university/quit their job to create their big commercial "dream game".

The problem is that they often jump over the first step of learning how to make a game and go straight to publish their barely passable buggy mishmash of half baked ideas with no quality control or beta-testing done.

What they first should've done is make and publish a few small but fun games for free, learn from their mistakes and user inputs and use their new knowledge to make a bigger, better game. If enough people tell them that it's worth buying it then they can sell it .

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

#165

Post by jeroenhd »

magic_hamster wrote: post #31
jeroenhd wrote: post #12

First the Ouya, which turned out to be a total flop, and then the Wii U, which Nintendo marketed so badly many people thought it was an extension for their Wii. This company sure made some unlucky bets! Throughout the article I kept coming back to how generic the name sounds. It conjured pictures if the digital slot machines that are free mobile games, with gameplay loops mostly consisting of waiting or paying money…

> I understand how overworked the lone dev must've been Not sure that you do, especially when offering "just add multiplayer". Clear sign that you are not a solo game developer.

Of course online multi-player is difficult to pull off but with console sale numbers for the Wii U I think the time spent on porting the game to the Wii U could've been used to get online multi-player to work. They spent an estimated 50% of their two years development time on a console that was pretty much a failure at the time the game came out.

The PS4 was well ahead of any other console in sales long before the game was released onto the Wii U. I don't know their exact sales distribution, but I think a better game on PS4 and maybe Xbox One would've sold a lot more copies.

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

#166

Post by Etherlord87 »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #143
Etherlord87 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, d…

I must admit it's a very good example, overwhelmingly positive on Steam with 1987 ratings, so it's hard to argue the game is bad.

If I compare Chicory, A Colorful Tale (A) to Stardew Valley B:

A: 97%/1987 B: 98%/483781 on Steam

A: 93.2%=2317 B: 97.33%=562`831 on Steam.db

I don't know where the disparity comes from, but those 4 % are significant. And here's something even more important:

A: 8 in game B: 36`293 in game

8/1987 = 0.4%, whereas 36`293/483781 = 7.5%! Stardew Valley, it seems, has 18.75× more replayability (which absolutely makes sense just based on genre).

Also price:

A: $14 to $20 B: $7.49 to $15

Shouldn't be surprising a game that is considerably cheaper, is more fun and provides that fun for an order of magnitude more time, sells better. It also was released earlier, so it got more sales from the "tail" sales, as well as it provided more value in the form of updates. In fact when I look now at the player count history, it's uneven, perhaps driven by updates, but the tendency is that it grows!

One more thought: maybe Stardew Valley makes for a better streaming content for some reason?

Perhaps Chicory deserves less sales than Stardew Valley, but still considerably more than it got? Maybe its good reviews come from the fact the game reaches the niche very well, it's clear what you do in the game (paint), but maybe this niche is just small?

I can admit I never heard about this game, despite its very high rating.

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

#167

Post by dbspin »

somenameforme wrote: post #53
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…

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.…

You're describing survivorship bias. It's impossible for you to know about the great games that you haven't heard about. I'd suggest listening to the devs on this one. I can attest that 'the cream rises to the top' isn't remotely true in areas I know more about - short stories, movies, music. There is indeed lots of cream (in addition to lots more crap with money behind it) at the top. there's also lots of cream, vast gallons to stretch the metaphor, sinking always. Especially now perhaps, in our era of vastly greater content production and a well established arms race of advertising and marketing.

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

#168

Post by burntalmonds »

mycocola wrote: post #147
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 th…

Yeah, I agree. If anything, it's actually surprising how few truly good games are ever released. There is still a massive opportunity for indie games.

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

#169

Post by rideontime »

diabolo96 wrote: post #164

The problem of indie games is that indie devs with no prior knowledge of programming, no prior artistic talent, either in terms of crafting an enticing narrative and/or graphical design wake up one day, decide to drop of university/quit their job to create their big commercial "dream game". The problem is that they often jump over the first step of learning how to make a game and go straight to publish their barely p…

What part of the article gives you the impression that this was the case?

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

#170

Post by jeroenhd »

dehrmann wrote: post #26
jeroenhd wrote: post #12

First the Ouya, which turned out to be a total flop, and then the Wii U, which Nintendo marketed so badly many people thought it was an extension for their Wii. This company sure made some unlucky bets! Throughout the article I kept coming back to how generic the name sounds. It conjured pictures if the digital slot machines that are free mobile games, with gameplay loops mostly consisting of waiting or paying money…

> 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 naming is terrible but at least their target audience seems to know how to keep them apart. I don't think that can be said about Nintendo's audience, which since the Wii has always seemed not as dedicated to console gaming as their competitors' audience is. I've never heard of a die-hard Wii fan, at least, though with the Switch they made up a lot of ground.
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