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Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

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Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#161

Post by jaggederest »

vunderba wrote: post #144
bavell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just get some popular streamers/channels to do a review/let's play and if they like it you'll get tons of free exposure. I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on indie games in the last year or so from first seeing them on a gaming channel and then pulling it up in steam. Channels like Splattercat are a great resource for indie gamers & studios alike: https://youtube.com/@splattercatgaming

"Just get some popular streamers/channels to do a review/let's play" Just is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

You give them money. It's not a very heavy lift except for the wallet.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#162

Post by hwbunny »

bnralt wrote: post #149
hwbunny wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are in their own bubble and believe everything that people say to them on the internet. People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit. That game is built on already outdated foundations. You need to give something to users that will stimulate them.

> People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit The places I frequent say that about games all the time. For instance, though the game I mentioned gets highly praised there, almost everyone trashed the author’s previous RTS game. Some places might give every game universal acclaim, but plenty of places have people who will openly call a game garbage.

List those places please...

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#163

Post by bnralt »

somenameforme wrote: post #157
bnralt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being passionate doesn’t guarantee a game being a success, though. Look at a game like Knights of the Chalice 2. It's definitely a labor of love, and many people who play it think it has the best DnD combat of any game out there, and maybe some of the best turn-based combat as well. It has mediocre graphics, though, and a high price point, so it’s had extremely slow discoverability. It also has a somewhat niche audie…

That price point is one of the most ridiculous I've seen, and is just lighting money on fire! The game looks great (erm.. so to speak) - clearly extremely heavily influenced by the Gold Box games, but I have no clue at all what the dev was thinking with that price. I am his demographic, and I'm not even considering the game at that price.

Yeah, the developer is a bit eccentric, which seems to be common when it comes to these passion products. At one point I believe some of the really big fans of the game were pushing him for a price reduction to increase the amount of players (it comes with a NWN style module creator, so a bigger community is important). From what I recall the response was something like, “You know, you’re right, I’ll go ahead and make a 10% discount during the next Steam sale.”

Or you have developers like Iron Tower Studios (Age of Decadence, Colony Ship RPG). The lead developer actually seems to have pretty good business acumen, and is pretty open about the studios finances. But he’s also a perfectionist, and the huge amount of time between games means that the studio requires a lot of sales to stay afloat. The last update from them I saw was that the launch of Colony Ship was good, but it’s still unclear if it’s good enough to support them for several more years while they make another passion project.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#164

Post by stale2002 »

itishappy wrote: post #155
stale2002 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> getting Disney upset is another. They don't mess around with people appropriating their IP. I am not sure why everyone repeats this line so confidently when it is so clearly wrong. Have you been on the internet? Do you understand how common copyright infringement is? Especially related to Star Wars? Its ubiquitous. Its everywhere. People make fan art of star wars. They write stories. They make fan games. They make…

> They make fan games. This is the subject at hand. Got any examples?

Absolutely. That is a great question, and I am glad that you asked.

I have lots of examples.

Here you go:

https://www.google.com/search?q=play+star+wars+fan+game+onli...

https://www.google.com/search?q=star+wars+fan+mod

https://www.google.com/search?q=star+wars+conversion+mods

Just go to those links, and then at those links start clicking at random anywhere on the page. I'm sure you'll find some.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#165

Post by Jensson »

nameless912 wrote: post #146
tavavex wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your needs are extremely specific and necessitate replacing most of the engine, Unity is probably not limiting your capabilities. The default packages are extensive and allow for basic game-making without writing that much actual code, but large developers will almost certainly swap default Unity components for their own for parts that need them, while the engine manages other parts like sound and input handli…

I would bet that more than 0% of that perception, at least from developers, comes from how _fucking awful_ the Unity editor is. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. The games you can make with Unity are absolutely very impressive, but the tools Unity provides are just awful, and give a lot of newbie developers the perception that Unity is a hacked together pile of garbage (which...it is, but so ar…

The unreal engine editor is way worse than unity though, unreal doesn't even let you move around files without a massive headache, while in unity moving files is trivial and almost never causes issues. Not to mention that C++ in unreal is horrible to work with and blueprints lacks a lot of features, unity C# is far superior to both for productivity.

If your game doesn't do anything complicated so you don't need to code a lot, then sure unreal could work since by far the biggest problem is iterating on code for the different components and actors. Adding or removing or renaming fields or refactoring folder structure and then go and update them in the blueprints takes forever while in unity that is really easy.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#166

Post by delusional »

EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

The act of marketing a game isn't separate from making the game unless your ubisoft and have 3k people working on your game.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#167

Post by Jensson »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #104
bavell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just get some popular streamers/channels to do a review/let's play and if they like it you'll get tons of free exposure. I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on indie games in the last year or so from first seeing them on a gaming channel and then pulling it up in steam. Channels like Splattercat are a great resource for indie gamers & studios alike: https://youtube.com/@splattercatgaming

This has been known for more than a decade, you can bet the competition does that too

Competition doesn't have excellent games. There aren't that many excellent games released per year, if you have an excellent game just getting noticed is enough.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#168

Post by Jensson »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #94
admax88qqq wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really just depends on your definition of "excellent" You have defined it to mean "high brow"

> You have defined it to mean "high brow" Both in - "high brow" - niche genres categories (which I both gave as examples) you will likely find quite some games that that are excellent, but won't make a lot of money. But don't pick too much on these categories since my central point is "Making an excellent game takes quite different skills than creating a commercially successful game".

The main games in niche can easily sell 100k copies, that is a lot of money for a couple of indie devs.

And no those games are far from excellent, I play a lot of such niche games but they all suck quality wise compared to mainstream games with similar sales, I play them for new experiences but I never expect quality from them. So it is much easier to sell well enough to maintain an indie team by making niche games than by making mainstream games since the competition for niche markets is so much smaller.

Maybe you think that "100k" copies is a failure since it didn't sell millions, I have seen people thinking along those lines. But no, 100k copies is a massive success, even 10k copies is more than enough for a 1 person indie game, so those "indie gems" hardly failed at all.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#169

Post by vohk »

hwbunny wrote: post #122
jayd16 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games are boring and unoriginal because it's incredibly hard to make original, engaging content no matter who you are.

I don't think that's the case. Just look at the 90s, early 2000s.

I think that might be survivorship bias talking. We tend to forget all the shovelware and only remember the gems.

I remember playing a ton of awful shareware games as a kid, on floppies and disks packed with a few dozen each. Same thing later on, bringing a game home from the store only to realize I'd chosen poorly.

And it's easy to get a bit jaded after years of experience and look back with a rose tint. I loved the hell out of that junk as a kid, because it was still the best stuff I'd yet seen and I had time to spare. Today I'm a little pickier.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#170

Post by TulliusCicero »

aredox wrote: post #3

What a neat idea! Next: a strategy game where you give orders in plain text, instead of hundreds of clicks per minutes

Tons of strategy games don't need or even really 'allow' high APM, but people still act as if they don't exist.
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