Earlier quoted context omitted.
i meant in general.
Ah. Did you have any opinion on the article?
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Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
221–230 of 280 posts
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#222I just started gaming again after 10 years not doing it. I got a Switch, though I usually would have gamed on a PC. It has really narrowed in my reason to game: The story.
Usually, I would not have bought into franchises, but I am giving in. The fact that Zelda already has so much culture, makes it a hit for me.
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Among Us was released in November 2018, saw regular and rapid gains in users for nearly every month that it was released, and then went to the moon (briefly) after it became a streaming fad. I just don't think this is even an appropriate example?
Keep in mind the way that word of mouth works, it's about the percentages - not the userbase size. Your active userbase growing 30% a month doesn't look impressive when that translates to 3 new people, but so long as that 30% is reflective of organic word of mouth spread, that's going from 10 users to 5500 in a couple of years. Their userbase had increased by orders of magnitude before streamers came, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't not have continued to grow rapidly.
And that's one of the great things about games. People love to talk about them, share what they're playing, and also of course seek out those hidden gems. Players do this for fun, others like publishers do it with a big profit motive. If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it.
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#224First 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…
They only have a single programmer...
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#225The 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…
I should've said first that this is comment was a rant about the general state of the indie game dev industry and not related to the article but i can't edit my comment for some reason
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#226When 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.…
It is objectively a good game yes, but you're glossing over how it also released with _extremely fortuitous_ timing for the type of game it is: a casual small-group-multiplayer survival exploration builder that leans more toward a lighthearted experience as opposed to the sweaty/hardcore experience which is/was the norm for these types of games.
Valheim dropped early 2021, just into the 2nd year of real COVID measures including lockdowns and an overall social atmosphere of "stay hunkered down at home and don't go anywhere". It was absolutely perfect timing, and I am 100% convinced it would not have done _nearly_ as well if it released 1 year earlier or 1 year later.
It's hard to make a shitty game successful without a AAA marketing budget sure, but it's also hard to make a good game successful without either a AAA marketing budget, or great luck/timing.
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Among Us was released in November 2018, saw regular and rapid gains in users for nearly every month that it was released, and then went to the moon (briefly) after it became a streaming fad. I just don't think this is even an appropriate example? Keep in mind the way that word of mouth works, it's about the percentages - not the userbase size. Your active userbase growing 30% a month doesn't look impressive when that…
If you look at the Twitch viewership on the chart you can see that it led player count significantly even before the massive blow up. There's a 26k viewer spike in 2019 then consistently 2k+ viewers in 2020 before it went vertical.
Without content creators spotlighting it I highly doubt the game would have gone anywhere. The developers even say "we're really bad at marketing": https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/09/among-us-improbable-rise-t....
The whole article is a goldmine: “We stuck with Among Us a lot longer than we probably should have from a pure business standpoint,” said Willard. “We tried to quit and should have quit several times.”.
It's clear they got lucky here. This kind of organic growth doesn't happen often, even with very good games.
> If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it
The market being inefficient doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to exploit. A publisher is far better positioned than I am to "[make] a killing off of it".
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ex…
Huh? Stardew is blatantly, ahem, "inspired by" the Harvest Moon series. It was mainly successful because it wasn't a Nintendo exclusive.
I know that, but most people compare such titles to Stardew and not harvest moon.
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. That seems to me to be true of most (every) industries / areas of human endeavor?
It probably is, but because games are such a new medium, the rate it’s advancing (not just in terms of tech, but also in design and audience expectations) is quite rapid. It means if you work on a single game for a few years, by the time you release it the demands of the market may have changed dramatically.
Re: Releasing an indie game on 3 consoles at once and failing financially (2016)
#2302 years spend on Ouya Flash looking game. No, it wasnt the title or marketing.
This comment is a little mean-spirited. This looks like an indie game that I would have expected to have launched during the time period that this was written, and it's a pretty good post-mortem on how the game was made, marketed, and where it failed.
Its realistic and factual. Game was made for Ouya by a studio specializing in Flash games. Its still $10 after 7 years, would you pay $10 for this game?