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No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

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Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#171

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #157
Ariarule wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name three reasonable-quality games out there like this that were definitely made in such a way? It costs only $100 to publish a game on Steam, recoupable if you meet a fairly low revenue threshold. You can publish elsewhere with no money up front (e.g. Itch). If this were actually true, and even if 90% of players would just pass based on the AI disclosure (doubtful, and also doubtful that _all_ games made th…

It'll happen. How could it not? It's just too soon. Good example: watch people on /r/stablediffusion goofing around with Minimax-H3. It's clear the model can do amazing stuff including game scenes [1], but it just dropped last week so there's nothing to see yet. If I were inclined to make the next Myst, that's what I'd start with. I'd need taste and talent (which admittedly are showstoppers in my case), but not a lot…

> It's just too soon

And yet you yourself said:

> I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend

Which of these am I to believe?

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#172

Post by inigyou »

You can't assume a sequel to something popular last year will do as well as the original - much less something from 30 years ago.

Each game has to stand on its own. When you discover a winning formula, there may be appetite for more of it. Or there may not be. Your audience is satiated at some point, and that assumes you even keep the quality up and don't just make slop to coast off the original's brand recognition.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#173

Post by inigyou »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #156
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI slop is cringe and bad. (From an artistic point of view.) You can't force people to like it.

Nobody is talking about forcing people to like it. But people hate AI art on principle, even if it’s as good as people. And those same people don’t care about the AI code in the same games.

Why do people prefer free range eggs to cage eggs even if the eggs are identical?

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#174

Post by inigyou »

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…

I've heard - on HN! - that today's kids, who didn't grow up in the graphics wars, don't care all that much about graphical fidelity.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#175

Post by inigyou »

flohofwoe wrote: post #36
freeCandy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to see games differently from other software. Treat games as consumables, that are meant to be finished. Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was. However, players will desire more of that similar experience. Ask anybody who just finished a good game and they'll tell you how finishing it left a void, and that they're lo…

> Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was. I think this has changed a lot since the early 2000s. There are now plenty of "forever games" where players spend hundreds or thousands of hours in, especially MMOs and free-to-play games. And even traditional AAA franchises like CoD or Battlefield are essentially just releasing new ep…

In the early 2000s there were forever MMOs. I think Minecraft is the outlier "forever game" that isn't an MMO. And anyone can get hung up on a specific game and become a glitch-hunting speedrunner. But there really aren't that many.

You said it yourself, CoD and Battlefield have to keep releasing new similar games, not coast off the last one.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#176

Post by inigyou »

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!

It's extremely difficult, but there are enough to show that it can be done. Most people just don't want to. The secret seems to be infinite playtesting of infinite variations.

Factorio and Minecraft each took over a decade, and scrapped and redesigned core game mechanics many times. Half-Life 2 had a completely different storyline one year before release, and Ocarina of Time had a completely different environment. The Witness spent years testing puzzles and layouts in a blocky programmer world before finalizing it and making it beautiful. Baba Is You obviously also spent ages testing and trying a zillion combinations of puzzle elements. And those are just the ones at the top of my head.

You don't need as much to make a slop shooter that's moderately fun and relies on graphics and action gameplay. However, that market is saturated precisely because it is easier.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#177

Post by inigyou »

saulpw wrote: post #93
paulcole wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think that's true. Games are a product of their time and context; if Tetris didn't exist, do you think it would be a massively popular hit today? I can see it being an interesting entrant in the mobile space like a match-3 game, but not something that literally everyone plays. Like we were ready to be Tetrisized in the 1980s but by the 2010s the vibe was more Angry Birds.

I don't think Candy Crush is much different in genre to Tetris.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#178

Post by inigyou »

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…

I don't see why they'd care if the game is fun to play. They care about revenue, and surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#179

Post by hnuser123456 »

inigyou wrote: post #178
hnuser123456 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see why they'd care if the game is fun to play. They care about revenue , and surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.

Fair point.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#180

Post by CamperBob2 »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #171
CamperBob2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll happen. How could it not? It's just too soon. Good example: watch people on /r/stablediffusion goofing around with Minimax-H3. It's clear the model can do amazing stuff including game scenes [1], but it just dropped last week so there's nothing to see yet. If I were inclined to make the next Myst, that's what I'd start with. I'd need taste and talent (which admittedly are showstoppers in my case), but not a lot…

> It's just too soon And yet you yourself said: > I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend Which of these am I to believe?

Let's put it this way: Myst came out in 1993, which coincides with an era in which I was very actively involved in the PC game business at a technical level. If you were playing PC games back then, you were probably running some of my code.

So yes, if we're talking "Myst class" relative to the 1993 release, I'm very confident that I could vibe-wrangle something just like it in a week, using only open models that were released within the last month or so. When I say "It's just too soon," I mean that the capabilities exist now, but they are new enough that no one has had time to do anything interesting with them. And cloning a 1993 game is not especially interesting, at least not to me.

Obviously the Myst franchise hasn't stood still since then. I don't know anything about the newer releases, so I'd have to do some hedging there. You would rightfully complain that any new Myst game that someone hacks in a week would not be competitive with the SotA. But it could certainly stand up to the original.

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