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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)

#121

Post by sam0x17 »

freeCandy wrote: post #109
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.…

Valheim and such games are very much exceptions to this, for every successful indie game released, there is an ocean of unsuccessful games out there and that may be equally as good, or even better than Valheim.

That said, procedurally generated games have a much harder time failing.

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

#122

Post by WeylandYutani »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #89
epolanski wrote: post #54

The amount of negativity and criticism in the comments here is sad. Not only I think it's way too easy to criticize other's work and choices (in hindsight), but there's also a total lack of empathy. We should cherish many small developers and entrepeneurs that share their experiences with such honest and thorough posts about the experience as they offer unique and valuable inputs and reflections.

I mean, even if the developers did everything right, that's no guarantee for success; there's a ton of competition, and a lot of indie hits are more by chance than design.

Indeed. Art/entertainment is not an exact science. There is no code to crack.

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

#123

Post by reddit_refugee3 »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #76
ilyt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value. So what non-multiplayer AAA game you played 400 times as long than an 10 hour indie experience ? Or did you had 400x the fun playing it? That's very MBA way to look at it. Game's budget is only vaguely correlated with how good it is as a game . Sure prettier blah blah blah, but we had plenty of big games coming out mediocre and just bein…

> if I look at the top amount of spent time in game (the "value" per spend money) it's some small dev management games (Factorio, Banished, Rimworld, X4) I don’t care for those kinds of games at all. That’s the problem with most indie games: they rely solely on gameplay. Me, personally, I’m more into story driven games, and that additional budget buys you better writers, actors, mo-cap, etc. > the type of game that m…

You are making quite a few generalizations that I don't think are necessarily accurate these days. Indie games don't always "rely solely on gameplay". That's just not true.

In fact, I would say one of (if not the) greatest narrative games I have ever played, Disco Elysium, would absolutely be considered "indie" by just about every metric.

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

#124

Post by MattRix »

sam0x17 wrote: post #121
freeCandy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valheim and such games are very much exceptions to this, for every successful indie game released, there is an ocean of unsuccessful games out there and that may be equally as good, or even better than Valheim.

That said, procedurally generated games have a much harder time failing.

This is really not true.

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

#125

Post by Xen9 »

cubefox wrote: post #105
somenameforme wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what the average would matter, because not all games are created equal. It's kind of like the Steven King / Richard Bachman experiment [1]. The question he was answering was not how likely a random author was to succeed, but how likely a good author was to succeed. So it seems that the important question is what are the odds of a genuinely good game going unrecognized, flopping completely? What are the od…

I think the probability is quite high that even fairly good games will flop, because there are so many indie developers, and because the tools are so advanced. So only the best of the best will succeed, or those which satisfy some unique niche, or which somehow already have an established brand.

I agree with you and Keyle.

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

#126

Post by MattRix »

somat wrote: post #94
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.…

Valheim is not an indie game, it is published by coffee stain studios. Now it is a small dev team, and they defiantly take the slow burn approach to development. Both common traits to independent developers. And good for coffee stain publishing to let them develop this way. But... I don't think I am being too pedantic in saying indie means independently published, and if you have a company publishing your title... yo…

Indie is about whether some other company is controlling what you make. This means you can make an indie game even if it is published by another studio (like with Valheim).

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

#127

Post by ZephyrBlu »

somenameforme wrote: post #53
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…

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

"build it and they will come" is almost always a lie, and the times it's not (I.e. organic viral growth) are not replicable.

If you're making something you have to solve for distribution. Just making the thing isn't enough for it to succeed.

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

#128

Post by Aaargh20318 »

stereolambda wrote: post #115
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a quick look and it looks really low-budget. The thing is, I have limited time to play games, so I can be very selective what I spend that time on. This means I can limit myself to games that do everything right, not just one thing. That means story, but also production value. Good acting, good mo-cap, good graphic, a good sound track, etc. Why would I spend the limited time I have for gaming on games that don'…

Just for another perspective, there is a limited space of games story- and gameplaywise that can get major funding. If you want something outside this, you have to go indie. You can be also satisfied with the AAA games. Just as there are great independent films and Hollywood classics. They should be able to coexist in the market. But honestly I don't play AAA titles because they are expensive (don't feel worth it for…

> For story and visuals I prefer films.

I like films, but the problem with them is that they have to cram a story into 2 hours, maybe 3. With games being 20-40 hours, there is much more room for in-depth storytelling and world building. Also, being in control of the main character makes a story hit differently from passively experiencing it.

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

#129

Post by MattRix »

somenameforme wrote: post #53
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…

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.…

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 if released today.

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

#130

Post by robertlagrant »

> The process of porting the game was hard by itself, but following up a year of non-creative work with a launch that doesn’t make much noise, nor sell a lot, was pretty hard on all of us.

I think classifying the one (!!) programmer's work as uncreative when he got the game running on multiple consoles is completely wrong. That guy is your main asset, and probably your most creative team member.

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