Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Games don't need venture capitalism

iatia.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 81 posts

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#51

Post by krageon »

klik99 wrote: post #11

5 years ago I would have agreed, VCs invested in games, rather than studios and most games never get released, let alone be successful if they are released. Rovio is a good example of that time period. But so many games people have exited and formed their own VC studios, or hired people who get games, and the focus has switched to investing in teams which is way better. So while it's true that "games don't need VC",…

A VC is an extractor. From the point of view of someone who wants the thing they invest in and the people building that thing, they are a net negative. Literally the only situation in which they're even remotely desirable is if you can't eat at all. And then you accept them with the understanding that they're taking something away from you.

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#52

Post by krageon »

raincole wrote: post #9
jmyeet wrote: post #6

This is ancient Internet history at this point but does anyone remember Rovio? In the early days of the iPhone/iPad they made a large amount of money with the Angry Birds franchise, even licensing the IP to a movie (or was it 2?). In 2011 Rovio took ~$40 million in VC funding and I distinctly remember thinking "well, that's over". Creative ventures don't scale. You cannot reduce them to a magic and infinitely-repeata…

> You cannot reduce them to a magic and infinitely-repeatable formula The formula is: > blockbuster movies every year, 20+ years of superhero movies just rehashing old IP, endless sequelss, annual Call of Duty releases, FIFA/Madden annual micro-transaction hell and so on These are very successful businesses. You might not like them as a gamer, but I don't know why you said it like they're some failures. They're not O…

The fact that they are printing money doesn't make them a success. We aren't earning anything based on this money printing. We're getting a qualitatively worse product for more money, which we accept because in a lot of ways we've been conditioned to believe there isn't any other way.

I feel like you understand they're not a success, because you recognise that "you might not like them as a gamer". This is the target audience.

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#53

Post by jmyeet »

Gigachad wrote: post #12
jmyeet wrote: post #6

This is ancient Internet history at this point but does anyone remember Rovio? In the early days of the iPhone/iPad they made a large amount of money with the Angry Birds franchise, even licensing the IP to a movie (or was it 2?). In 2011 Rovio took ~$40 million in VC funding and I distinctly remember thinking "well, that's over". Creative ventures don't scale. You cannot reduce them to a magic and infinitely-repeata…

I think you actually can reduce a lot of it to a formula. Most major games that come out are basically a modern remake of something that already exists and was popular. Just rehashing the same concepts and improving them is a pretty solid strategy. This strategy won’t create the Minecrafts and Stardew vallies, but it covers the bulk of game development.

I don't really like this argument because it reduces down to "all art is derivative". While true, it's not really useful. It leads to things like there being only 37 possible stories [1] and people pointing out how Shakespeare is derivative, which is a true but essentially useless statement.

Even if a story is exactly the same, like going to see a Shakespeare play, we still do it because the performance matters, the interpretation matters and the direction matters. And that's before you get into reskins of the same story (eg Taming of the Shrew -> Ten Things I Hate About You).

So the structural similarity is wroth noting and examining but it really has nothing to do with the execution, with how the movie or story or video game looks, plays or how it makes the user feel..

[1]: https://www.openculture.com/2020/08/37-possible-stories.html

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#55

Post by noirscape »

minimaxir wrote: post #32
TillE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a couple people refer to BG3 as if it's some out-of-the-blue success. Larian has a strong history of consistent success, and reached another level by licensing an extremely popular franchise. Similarly, nearly every AAA franchise game will do very well. Maybe there are some ups and downs, but overall it's boringly predictable. I can absolutely guarantee that GTA6 will be one of the best-selling games of all…

BG3 was an iteration into a niche genre (CRPGs) where previous iterations in that genre underperformed (Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin). Everyone, including Larian, was surprised.

Disagree. CRPGs back then had been hitting a minor renessaince for a while, notably from Owlcat, and D&D in specific has been on a never ending gravy train of popularity thanks to podcasts like Critical Role (and in spite of WOTCs attempts to break that gravy train by making inane audience alienating decisions).

BG3 whilst undeniably a massive success was likely always going to perform very well for Larian. The suprise was mostly that it ended up being a GOTY title I think.

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#56

Post by hresvelgr »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #50
hresvelgr wrote: post #18

Games in this day and age ideally need generous government subsidy to be successful. I feel we're a long way off universal basic income worldwide so at the very least, something like an artist's living wage provided by the government is a necessity to produce good independent video games. Most professional indie developers tend to survive rather than thrive, barely kept afloat by money from publishers who also have t…

Why would you want it to be divorced from success? Seems like popularity/commercial success is the best measure of "being good" societally that we have for art. People making art/games only for themselves is fine of course, but I don't see why society should subsidize it (as long as we have finite resources - beyond that everything goes of course).

> Why would you want it to be divorced from success?

Because art is not inherently successful, and using commercial success as a metric on whether it's "good" is philistinism. Art that is "bad" is at the very least interesting in more than one dimension. I have come to appreciate art that to most would be off-putting because where it excels and interests me, it does so in such unique ways I would never expect. There's no telling where those seeds of ingenuity will grow to and who they will inspire.

We need "bad" art as much as we need "good" art.

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#57

Post by nottorp »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #36
hresvelgr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My inspiration for the idea was VicScreen[1], an Australian Victorian state government agency that funds film and interactive media projects. In the past they have funded half of a project's development budget but I'm unsure of their procedures as of now. Cult of the Lamb[2] was partially subsidised by VicScreen as an example. There is a selection process but the money comes with few strings attached, mainly attribut…

Art is a sort of enjoyable endeavour for the artist and I certainly wish I would be paid to paint or make a videogame - but the world has way too much art being produced and it doesn't need another one - so I can keep writing crap react app for 300k and my soul or make a game for 50k (or go indie and likely starve). In particular I think fiat currency and inflation drives the industry to stupid investments trying to…

> Until we get rid of governments

Nice to see you taking the eco option. Without governments to provide health care, security and infrastructure the world population is sure to decline drastically and then the biosphere will rebuild itself.

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#58

Post by nottorp »

raincole wrote: post #7
kyriefh wrote: post #2

hiya, author here. Palworld is a wild, wild game (think pokemon meets ark:survival evolved, or simply pokemon with guns), and it follows a number of other super-successful indie games that got made with no VC funding. i myself work heavily within the VC ecosystem, so it got me thinking about how games and VC tie together. while the article is written in an opinionated manner, i don't mean to present it as fact - more…

Palworld's budget is 1 billion yen (6M dollars). If you're willing to invest $6M out of your or your family's pocket yes you don't need VC. For most people $6M budget means VC.

Are they even indie or they had a publisher?

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#59

Post by nottorp »

Madmallard wrote: post #22

They need something. I've been trying to crack into this space for a better part of a decade. Ideas that come naturally to me that I spend hundreds of hours on end up being limited by ludicrous amount of art requirements to be considered acceptable in my mind to the public audience. I'm not interested in releasing an 8-bit (but looks worse somehow) pixel art clone of a popular genre. I want to make something truly in…

> ludicrous amount of art requirements to be considered acceptable in my mind to the public audience

Do you want to do the next Carmack game? Not even Carmack is doing Carmack games any more :)

> releasing an 8-bit (but looks worse somehow) pixel art clone

Good pixel art is harder than it looks and I'm not sure it takes less time. But there is a middle ground between fake 8 bit and high budget with hundreds of artists.

Re: Games don't need venture capitalism

#60

Post by danaris »

bhb916 wrote: post #21
hresvelgr wrote: post #18

Games in this day and age ideally need generous government subsidy to be successful. I feel we're a long way off universal basic income worldwide so at the very least, something like an artist's living wage provided by the government is a necessity to produce good independent video games. Most professional indie developers tend to survive rather than thrive, barely kept afloat by money from publishers who also have t…

Quite the contrary, the world you envision isn't nice to think about at all. It's impractical, inefficient, wildly haphazard, and, worse than that, would produce the exact opposite of what you're looking for. The profit motive might not be aesthetically pleasing to you but it provides the vibrant indie marketplace we see today.

...you think people primarily create indie games because of profit motive?

That seems to me to betray a deep misunderstanding of the nature of human creativity.

Games are an art medium. Humans will always create art, no matter what tangible rewards are possible.

Instituting a universal basic income, such that people can quit their soul-sucking jobs and still make enough money to pay for food, shelter, heat, etc, will absolutely create a huge boom in art of all kinds. That includes indie games.

Post reply on HN