This reminds me - that developer shortage that the big SF companies keep going on about, needing h1b indentured servants working a third under market value to fill positions - ever consider how there are a billion iOS games made every day in a hugely saturated market? You know, thousands of developers and dev companies not making any money. Probably good at what they do if they are upstarting their own projects like that. Might consider working for you if you aren't fixing wages for a decade.
The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
111–120 of 184 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The gold rush was almost over before it started on mobile - it did not take more than a year for things to become extremely competitive. Flash games suffered a similar fate. Consoles have not generally been indie-friendly but Playstation is now making a better effort on that front, although they are still mainly catering to indie devs who have already "made it." Greenlight is becoming quite competitive (there were 17…
I agree. I think one of the worst things to happen to indie devs on mobile was the concept of the App Store(s) itself. When I open the App Store, my brain just...drifts off. Its a bunch of icons with little context. It's like looking at the rack of magazines and trinkets while you checkout at the grocery store. While Moore's Law marches on, I'm hoping the days of AAA titles for mobile are just around the corner. It's…
I think one of the worst things to happen to indie devs on mobile was the concept of the App Store(s) itself.
I'm old enough to remember mobile dev before the App Store(s). No matter how bad they are, they are thousands or times better than how it used to be.
For example, typical returns to a developer back when you had to sell via a Telco was less than 30% of the price the consumer paid. And you felt lucky to get that 30% - that was a high point of the whole experience.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we are headed for the dark ages of PC gaming. Before, the top AAA studios made games with mods in mind. This allowed massive genres like Dota and Counter-Strike to come into existence. Nowadays AAA studios see modders as leeches and try to cut them out of the game so they can sell DLC and skins to whales. You can see this happening everywhere. - No modding in Blizzard's new games. - No modding in Dota2. - CS:…
Most of the good mods from the last generation (CS, DoD, TFC, DotA, etc.) were less mods and more total conversions. And you don't need to mod a game to do that these days. The Source engine is free. Unity is free. The Unreal engine is cheap. We have more tools for making fully-fledged games at our disposal than we ever had in the past.
This is false. Nearly 100% of the assets from Dota 1 came from Warcraft 3.
I am not familiar with the other games to know how much original content there was, but I remember that both CS and TFC used a number of assets from the original.
Source is not free. Saying Unity is free and Unreal is cheap completely ignores the cost of modeling.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
:) Yes, pretty much. DotA was created as a small mod, and now look at the commercial explosion it has spawned, with tournaments containing $2+ million in prizes and everyone wanting to make MOBAs. I think in the past 20 years, we actually have not made as many breakthroughs in game mechanics (of course, this was easier in the early days). Games are still fairly similar to those of the 90s, only technically more compl…
I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now. Genres completely abandoned by AAA developers ages ago are seeing a resurgence thanks to crowdsourcing. Space sims have been all but dead since Freelancer in 2003 but now there are several to play and look forward to. Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL. Hell, even the im…
I wouldn't describe DF as "impenetrable", exactly, but rather as a wormhole that teleports you from Friday evening to Monday morning.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
One note about Monument Valley though: When they added new levels and charged for it, there was a big backlash at first. Luckily there was a counter backlash but it still shows the expectations of most gamers in the apps store. Especially on Android.
There's a huge sense of entitlement with respect to iOS and Android apps. People want the world for free, and $1 means they OWN you. The race to the bottom with free being the default has spawned this attitude. And the economics work out so that an indie developer can't really break even on free; you need 10s of millions of users to produce a reasonable income from ads. You can be a critically acclaimed indie game an…
> There's a huge sense of entitlement with respect to iOS and Android apps. People want the world for free...
Available substitutes affect the price of goods, and the internet has brought us endless hours of free distraction. (Also, prices can trend towards the marginal cost of production over time.)
Supply and demand determine pricing, not the amount of labor that goes into production.
The labor theory of value is tempting, but flawed. Suppose I pedal a bicycle all day to generate electricity. Then say I demand you buy my day's single kilowatt at a price that provides me a living wage. Keep in mind that I live in California, a mecca for startup bicyclists, and support a family of four. So I'll be asking $177 per kilowatt. You decline, noting that you can usually buy a kilowatt for around 16 cents. Is it fair for me to call you "entitled" because you expect energy at market prices?
If game developers demand that consumers pretend other ways to spend time don't exist, or claim immunity to fundamental laws of economics, then they're the ones acting entitled, not their users.
[1] http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/bicyclepower.html [2] http://livingwage.mit.edu/states/06 [3] https://www.pacificpower.net/about/rr/rpc.html
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now. Genres completely abandoned by AAA developers ages ago are seeing a resurgence thanks to crowdsourcing. Space sims have been all but dead since Freelancer in 2003 but now there are several to play and look forward to. Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL. Hell, even the im…
> I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now. Not really. Its golden Age was in the late 80s, early 90s, where games were still made by educated people FOR educated people, before the whole thing went mainstream and any sign of complexity went progressively down the drain so that Everyone could start playing games. I miss Falcon's 300 pages manual, or even Colonization's fantastic booklet that went far…
Colonization 1994 manual (135 pages): http://replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.8194
Colonization 2008 manual (38 pages): http://replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.377
Edit: fixed duplicate link, thanks ekianjo.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now. Not really. Its golden Age was in the late 80s, early 90s, where games were still made by educated people FOR educated people, before the whole thing went mainstream and any sign of complexity went progressively down the drain so that Everyone could start playing games. I miss Falcon's 300 pages manual, or even Colonization's fantastic booklet that went far…
Colonization 1994 manual (135 pages): http://replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.8194 Colonization 2008 manual (38 pages): http://replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.377 Edit: fixed duplicate link, thanks ekianjo.
You just posted the same links I think.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how much of the success it attributable to Steam, and how much of it is just a consequence of the times - lots of cheap tech, lots of people using cheap tech, and most importantly, video games being something everyone does. In the 80s and 90s, video games were for geeks. Ha, in my freshman year of college in 2001, my roommates were baffled that I would put on a headset and seemingly talk to my computer w…
Early Access is a crapshoot though, and I'm glad Valve is taking steps to rein it in a bit. Too many developers start with basically a POC, sell it at normal release price points, and then development peters out after that. Godus and DF-9 are good examples of this. Strangely, it seems that you should avoid Early Access when it's for games by [i]established[/i] developers (Peter Molyneux and Tim Schafer are behind God…
Too many developers start with basically a POC, sell it at normal release price points, and then development peters out after that.
It seemed like this happened with Minecraft, it was just popular enough that the POC was good enough.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we are headed for the dark ages of PC gaming. Before, the top AAA studios made games with mods in mind. This allowed massive genres like Dota and Counter-Strike to come into existence. Nowadays AAA studios see modders as leeches and try to cut them out of the game so they can sell DLC and skins to whales. You can see this happening everywhere. - No modding in Blizzard's new games. - No modding in Dota2. - CS:…
THIS so much. One of the more 'interesting' gaming communities is the PAYDAY 2 community. It's a fiercely competitive multiplayer game with lots of levelling up (why does EVERY game want to be an RPG these days.... I digress) yet all the play has been sucked out of the competitive part. There's this massive conflation between 'modding' and 'griefing' where the attitude to people experimenting with the game is openly…
Uh, there's a difference between modding and cheating in a game. I should know, I used to do both (the days of hooking the DLLs OpenGL calls... though I mainly did it for the technical challenge, it's no fun playing a game where you get to win no matter what); modding and hacking are entirely different. One is building things on top of the engine, the other is exploiting it (and ruining others enjoyment of the game). How you can conflate the two is beyond me.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now. Genres completely abandoned by AAA developers ages ago are seeing a resurgence thanks to crowdsourcing. Space sims have been all but dead since Freelancer in 2003 but now there are several to play and look forward to. Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL. Hell, even the im…
> Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL. I actually trace this to Diablo II and Torchlight. Yes, they aren't strictly rogue-likes—among other things they're realtime—but they raised excitement for the genre just the same.
I don't think Diablo and Torchlight had any influence at all on the current surge of roguelike-likes ushered in by Spelunky and FTL, though. They basically draw on completely different aspects of the roguelike tradition: the former takes the superficial D&D-esque dungeon crawling, plus lots of high-grade polish and minus the permadeath and much of the variety. The latter instead focuses on a wildly different experience for each runthrough, with permadeath as a matter of course, and can draw the superficial surface from anything (Indiana Jones-esque platformer, top-down crew management sim...)