No one can afford to make Myst games anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#81

Post by jayd16 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

hnuser123456 wrote: post #14

WJW wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.

The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back th…

You dump the 100m first and then you get to see if its fun to play. That's a bit hyperbolic but especially for big games, they really don't come together until the end.

Now, normally you could use pedigree to make smart bets about who can make a game but there have been so many buy outs and shake ups that a lot of the AAA studios have been gutted. Who is a hit maker now?

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#82

Post by cubefox » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

1. Approximately every software engineer secretly dreams of developing an awesome video game instead of the boring software he actually makes.

2. Consequently, there are way too many people wanting to develop video games relative to the commercial demand for them.

3. Consequently, it is incredibly hard to get funding for a video game project.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#83

Post by maccard » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

uxhacker wrote: post #9

thataccount wrote: post #3

Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?

What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team. What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies.

The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (players, publishers, executives, developers) go through the roof. It’s very hard to look at those projects and not compare them to projects that are 4/5x that.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#84

Post by sgt » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

volkk wrote: post #19

sgt wrote: post #11

Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.

i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!

I actually did build a game (with my 5 year old boy) recently. https://apps.apple.com/no/app/b%C3%A5tspillet/id6791630382

We had a lot of fun building it and I used Lua and LÖVE2D to basically build a game engine for a boat game in an isometric world.

But to take something like that to something that pays the bills... mindboggling.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#85

Post by maccard » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #68

uxhacker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team. What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

> What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large. Seems no one has written "The Mythical Man Month" for the game industry yet.

It’s predominantly artists, and art pipelines are usually fairly scalable .

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#86

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

uxhacker wrote: post #9

thataccount wrote: post #3

Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?

What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team. What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

[deleted]

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#87

Post by Theodores » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #46

I wonder how much increasing fidelity requirements are the main culprit here? Myst was made by a team of about 7 people (only 4 of them full-time), in just about 2 years, and cost under a million (adjusted for inflation). Riven had a team twice the size, took twice as long, and cost 10-15x as much. Apart from Exile, which was handed to a more experienced developer who got it done faster and cheaper, the remaining seq…

They sold six million copies and made a big profit from Myst, which they presumably invested in the company, to make the next game, with the profits from that (and the diminishing returns from Myst) topping up their coffers.

At some stage of the journey they took so much money out of the company that they could not fund development without taking on loans, albeit as advances from publishers.

Why does every business have to be based on debt, even if it is a financial success?

With automotive, we have car companies that have been going for a century or more, and some of them have 'Open AI/SpaceX' levels of debt in the hundreds of billions, even though they have had a century to work out how to make cars. For example, VW. Sure they have had to buy many other brands, expand in China, pay for diesels that lied and much else, however, is it not possible for a single business to be financed by debt?

Even the money printing machine that is Apple has untold billions in debt. They don't even make their own products. There are reasons for this, however, this stock market thing seems all about making debt, not 'money'.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#88

Post by Ekaros » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #34

volkk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!

This is the hard-pill-to-swallow meme truth. If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make. Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well. If…

I am not sure Myst actually is a great game. And I mean that as a game which audiences enjoy or want to play. It is great as in sense it did something special at certain point of when technology was available.

I just don't believe there would be many gamers with modern sensibilities who would play it or like it. And the more casual audience have found other things. So you do not need the showcase of multimedia spectacle to justify buying an computer...

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#89

Post by bitwize » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

HeavyStorm wrote: post #64

tsimionescu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).

As a professional coder, I both agree and deeply hate this position. And code indeed has its values. See all algorithms invented by Carmack like BSPs, z-fail, etc.

Carmack didn't invent BSP trees. He read about them in a paper and produced an efficient implementation that could render a 2D map in 3D using integer math on 386-class CPUs. He has always envied the mathematicians who actually come up with this stuff.

I think he did come up with "Carmack's Reverse" (a dynamic lighting algorithm) independently. But not even the "fast inverse square root" was his; that, oddly enough, came from what is currently probably the premiere AI company: NVIDIA.

But his implementations of these algorithms were indeed beautiful. I suppose AI could do something similar today, because the likes of Carmack had come before. But using AI for code is hobbling the creation of new Carmacks; and humans have the remarkable property that they can learn from other humans and still push the boundaries forward. When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#90

Post by watwut » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #82

1. Approximately every software engineer secretly dreams of developing an awesome video game instead of the boring software he actually makes. 2. Consequently, there are way too many people wanting to develop video games relative to the commercial demand for them. 3. Consequently, it is incredibly hard to get funding for a video game project.

Meh, no not true. Plenty of software developers dont even like playing games.

And making a game is not all that much more fun anyway. A lot of that work is plain boring.

Fun software project and flashy outcome are two different things.