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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)

#181

Post by prmoustache »

burntalmonds wrote: post #168
mycocola wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That doesn't mean this is a massive opportunity to sell.

I mean if a handful of quality games are buried within tons of shitty games, what do people do? They buy a few random cheap games at first, then realized most of these cheap games are shitty and end up not looking at non AAA games after a number of deceptions. Instead they wait for AAA games to go on sales.

That is what at least what I did, instead of finding a gem among indies, I just wait for well reviewed AAA ones to lower in prices because I have other things to do than reading hundreds of reviews to make up my mind and find the gem among a huge pile of poo.

Additionally there are so many games entering the market that all of them cannot be reviewed so there is little chance your very nice indie game will be reviewed.

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

#182

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Trailers are important and this one doesn’t convey what’s going on or why someone should be interested.

Couch coop only is an obvious mistake too because your convincing someone to buy on the off chance people will want to play it with them

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

#183

Post by prmoustache »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #67
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…

For me the main problem with indie games is the amount of value you get for your money. Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game. However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is…

And you forget the depreciation. 20$ small indie game compete with 4 or 5y old AAA games with much bigger content that are now sold at 20$.

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

#185

Post by _gabe_ »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #127
somenameforme wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed I.e. "make a fun game that has organic viral growth" As if developers don't want to do that. You have not provided any information of value here. Organic viral growth is extremely rare, and "fun" is a useless descriptor for someone trying to replicate "fun" in their own game. Why would developer…

> Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?

Of course nobody wants to make a game that isn't fun. But I know just how easy it is to get caught up into the "hustle" mentality where all you're focused on is getting the features complete. Once you're in this mindset, it becomes very easy to realize that your own game isn't even fun to you. This simple reminder is huge, should be repeated often, and is great advice.

Make a game that you would enjoy playing for hours on end, and you'll likely gather an audience of people that also enjoy it. It really is amazing at how easy it is to forget this and end up building a game that even you, the creator, don't enjoy playing very much.

Likewise, it's very easy to focus on small slices of gameplay and ignore the cohesiveness of the entire game. If different mechanics are super fun, but aren't fun together, you will have created a game that isn't fun.

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

#186

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #166
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wouldn’t compare Chicory with Stardew: for one, Stardew was genre-defining (as some people call things soulslikes, a whole heap of games are trying to capture Stardew). Replay ability of Stardew is part of its specific genre niche, where Chicory is again more like Zelda, in which replay ability isn’t a huge selling point to the game (although I find chicory just as fun as a Zelda to replay). Additionally stardew expanded multiple times throughout its development. I’m certain chicory’s devs would’ve done the same had it had it’s deserved attention at launch.

Now that I’m looking at my steam library I have some other games I think deserve more attention:

- Citizen Sleeper is not unlike Disco Elysium or a visual novel. But its mix of space opera and cyberpunk dystopia is extremely compelling. Excellent OST, and heartfelt characters. You get a real sense of the desperation and humanity of the impoverished, the undocumented, the refugee. The word building is deep and expansive (a sequel is coming, to not enough fanfare imo).

- Umarangi Generation is a photography game where you are playing as a propagandist during an ecologically-vibed apocalypse. You explore scenes of war, poverty, luxury, and terror, taking photographs all the while for the cause. The capacity to tell a deeply layered story with multiple political factions and economic groups merely through environment is stunning. The expansion is absolutely seething with anger.

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

#187

Post by falcor84 »

sbm_au wrote: post #49
fomine3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They solved it on 360. Its successor should be 361.

They could have used increasing rotational degrees - Xbox 360, 540, 720, 900 and so on. Just like action sports, very extreme.

Of course, and then, when they're ready to go all-in, they'll backfill Xbox 180 /s

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

#188

Post by Quarrelsome »

a13o wrote: post #111

I was deeply involved in the indie scene during this time and played many of these local multiplayer games at GDC indie events, weekly barcade meetups, game jams, Indiecade, etc. I think this misled many developers. Your peers are together often, able to play local multiplayer games, and giving you a false sense of market. I played hundreds of hours of these games in that setting, but never once booted them up at hom…

[dead]

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

#189

Post by falcor84 »

pier25 wrote: post #180

> At the end of the day, we think the biggest factor is because it’s a local-multiplayer game with no online play. I actually played the game with the OUYA and then on PC. I think it failed simply because it wasn't super fun. We consistently got bored after 10mins of playing it. Compare it to Towerfall. Also local multiplayer only and released initially for the OUYA. We played it for hours on end and I think it was a…

Seems that even though Towerfall was indeed the best-selling game on the OUYA, it only sold 7000 units there, while making actual money on other platforms [0].

[0] https://www.engadget.com/2014-04-29-towerfall-tiny-sales-ouy...

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