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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

#241

Post by johnnyanmac »

kibbi wrote: post #110
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why I mentioned Flappy Bird is that it originally wasn't a massive viral hit. It was on the app store for like a year with basically no-one playing it. And then it became a viral hit. So it's a good example of how a good game with no marketing doesn't get picked up (until it gets lucky and eventually does get picked up; you can imagine a timeline where that never happens).

I think that extreme outliers like Flappy Bird (which the developer developed over a couple of days and probably didn't expect any significant return) just muddle these discussions. They're irrelevant if you want to suss out what happens in the usual case.

I agree, but when talking with these "where the hidden gems" audience, any example I point out will be "an exception". it makes the entire conversation a bit tiring, no matter how much you research the market these kinds of people have their opiions set, with no skin in the game.

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

#242

Post by johnnyanmac »

somenameforme wrote: post #153
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual case of good games which fail commercially because of bad marketing? How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"? The reason I talked about Flappy Bird is that the game's late success proves that its early failure was due to bad marketing. If you only want to talk about games which never succeeded commercially, then I have no way of proving to you that any of those were "good" games.

> How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"? Steam reviews are a great way. Lots of folks, including myself, try or tried to seek out these hidden gems on Steam. And Steam provides some great tools to try to find them. [1] It just turns out that there simply aren't many games at all with genuinely high reviews, but very low player numbers. There's a whole bunch of great games in the ~200 reviews categ…

>You're not going to be getting rich off those numbers, but that's more than enough to live an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world.

I guess you don't live in the US or Canada these days. Even if the game was $20, 12k copies sold is $168k raw revenue, after steam's cut. if you have 2 people working on it, you make above average revenue, for one year.

If you have 3 people working on the game, that is below median income for the US. And it gets worse for any assets you buy or contractors you need.

Even with 2 people, you have to remember that you don't get benefits from being a full time indie. so even 80k in this situation if it's a true 2 person team may not be so much much better off than flipping burgers with healthcare/dental built in. It's a rough economy right now.

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

#243

Post by antifa »

Tade0 wrote: post #43
bloopernova wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried to create an LLM based crew on the bridge of a ship or spaceship? Being able to delegate tasks to competent subordinates would be very helpful.

Even a failed attempt at this would be great - imagine your crew frequently misunderstanding your orders and the ensuing chaos.

System Prompt: You are a helpful crew member for the user's space vessel. You attempt to follow every detail of every command the user provides or question the user asks. If any detail is left ambiguous or unspecified, assume the worst possible interpretation.

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

#244

Post by johnnyanmac »

antifa wrote: post #225
jarjoura wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, but the pop star success formula is actually meticulously detailed and very repeatable. The producers and song writers know exactly how to do it. It’s not about challenges in finding success, so much as, at least in music, artists don’t want to follow a formula. They want to create songs and melodies that are personal and meaningful to them and their fans.

That probably involves more of a corporate marketing vanguard that picks winners more so than it organicly finds them.

And you think Games are different?

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

#245

Post by johnnyanmac »

hwbunny wrote: post #38
barbariangrunge wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that’s true, I invite you to sort steam games by release date and to simply buy the most recent 10 of them in the categories you like that aren’t free to play. I mean, they’re all equally good, right? Making good games is easy. Assuming those low review counts are only due to bad marketing? It will even save you money, compared to buying the titles you normally would Or we can acknowledge that making a g…

95 % of games are boring, and unoriginal. Why? Because most of these people, who create these games are entrepreneurs. They only see the possible money from these. These games have no heart whatsoever, why? Because good games need passionate people, not blue collar suits. There are 1 million subscribers at the gamedev reddit. It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike…

most games are made by entrepreneurs because the best creators are either in industry, too broke to afford to create and took some different job, burned out of the industry for a myriad of reasons, or are one of the few gems out there (which may or may not be hidden).

>It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike answers.

This isn't limited to r/gamedev. Reddit is asking the blind to lead the blind, and maybe once in a blue moon you get an actual expert to help. They often leave once they realize everyone else is blind and questioning their experience, though*.

Sadly, the best place to find the best answers is to find people live. Be it in town, during a conference, or just hoping they accept a cold invite on their social media and choose to respond.

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

yes, you neede to know someone at Nintendo (or later, Sony) just to get your game in there, know how to make your own assets and levels without a high grade commercial engine, and get Nintendo/Sony to approve it. There were a lot of gatekeepers to making an indie game back then, so there were almost none.

Meanwhile, Shareware was hard to profit off of on PC (remember, it was not commonplace to have a digital wallet back then). There may be some great games, but few would be profitable without launching on console, being on store shelves, and overall supporting a propreitary machine.

(*me being an example. Though calling myself an "expert" is an overstatement. 10 years in industry isn't nothing, but also is far from authority level in any technical field).

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

#246

Post by Auracle »

password54321 wrote: post #44
kibwen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is subject to survivorship bias. Balatro is a great game that deserves its success. But it's easy to imagine a universe where it simply never got any traction, anywhere, and died in obscurity. Conversely, this suggests that in our current universe, many games just as great as Balatro have quietly passed without ever getting their 15 minutes of fame. At the end of the day, much of success just hinges on luck. The…

I immediately knew someone would claim "survivorship bias" but at the same I knew that they would fail to come up with a single counterexample.

Vampire Survivors and Among Us were both out for years until they got traction, IIRC. That could have easily continued forever for both of them.

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

#247

Post by stubish »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #156

I think a part of the reason why I'm kind of dismissive of AI when it comes to creative endeavors is that I haven't seen it do something that isn't already possible using a "not-intelligent" solution. For example, AI website builders. It's impressive as a tech demo that you can prompt an AI to make a website for you, but otherwise I don't think this is going to be disruptive to the web design industry since it's alre…

> haven't seen it do something that isn't already possible using a "not-intelligent" solution

This is dismissing time and resources. I think things like this game maker project are extremely impressive, because it enables an individual to do in hours what it would take a team to do in months. Just '5 different cats' is impressive, because most game studios would just do one and repeat it, because their time is limited.

I don't know if this experiment will end up producing 'real' games, probably not by most people's definitions. But I can see it being used as an amazing toy by individuals, such as kids. Generating a custom game in hours, much like they can already do in months or years using other products like RPGMaker.

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

#248

Post by [deleted] »

bnralt wrote: post #45
hwbunny wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95 % of games are boring, and unoriginal. Why? Because most of these people, who create these games are entrepreneurs. They only see the possible money from these. These games have no heart whatsoever, why? Because good games need passionate people, not blue collar suits. There are 1 million subscribers at the gamedev reddit. It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike…

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…

[deleted]

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

#249

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

>I am his demographic, and I'm not even considering the game at that price.

That the dev spent tens of thousands of hours on a very niche genre, and that it was better to sell to 10k fans @$45 than to risk selling 25k copies @ $20 (random sales numbers).

It's a common strategy in Japanese game development. Some games are just very niche, so lowering the price doesn't necessarily increase sales proportionately. It just means less money from financially inflexble fans. So keep the price AAA level and target those fans.

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

#250

Post by johnnyanmac »

dev1ycan wrote: post #25
jncfhnb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of those games are now visual novels / pornography.

which shows how bad puritan culture is, most people don't care about your puritanism in their room, they want to play a game, see a hot char, and be able to do stuff with them in the game. it's the harsh truth that people seem to get mad at. Especially now with ever increasing rates of ADHD and other stuff, having an old school genre like an RPG have that type of stuff as a "reward" for beating a level or whatever re…

>I would never have played it if I hadn't found out you could literally date and marry a girl in the game

Interesting reason. But I guess everyone's different.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of most romances unless it's a central point. They just feel so superfluous because you need to rely on very strong charaterization to make it work. Hard to do if you also need to focus on making a good core game.

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