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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)

#251

Post by johnnyanmac »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #139
MattRix wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you name a few? Not trying to challenge I’m actually really curious how the bar has shifted over time. (It also makes me curious if it means newbies have an increasingly high bar to clear and eventually pushes out young people?)

Among us and Fall Guys are the definition of games that just happened to be at the right place at the right (and completely unpredecent) time. Among us especially was one that was released for years before it became viral. Party games are a whole is a hard genre to crack (especially on console) but COVID had people stuck and seeking such content

For a AAA example, Lawbreakers is probably one of the more recent stories. It was a game made by a director behind the acclaimed Gears of War (Epic's biggest series until Fortnite) thst was like Overwatch, but released a year after. Of course the game wasn't made in a year. But had it released 2 years earlier it might have been able to reach a bigger crowd rather than slowly fade into a niche cult following.

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

#252

Post by johnnyanmac »

somenameforme wrote: post #102
cubefox wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there are some successful indie games! But the only relevant thing is the probability that any one game will be successful. That chance is very small.

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…

Until someone can define "a good game developer", then I would rather poll a census than rely on a filter based on a sentiment no one can agree on.

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

#253

Post by johnnyanmac »

strken wrote: post #241
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the Twitch viewership on the chart you can see that it led player count significantly even before the massive blow up. There's a 26k viewer spike in 2019 then consistently 2k+ viewers in 2020 before it went vertical. Without content creators spotlighting it I highly doubt the game would have gone anywhere. The developers even say "we're really bad at marketing": https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/09/among-…

I think you're taking about two different things: a game rising from a small number of players to a massive phenomenon, and a game getting that small number of players to begin with. The HN analogy is a SaaS company struggling to become profitable vs struggling to find the first ten or hundred users. Profitability is very hard, finding a big enough niche is very hard, but...ten users?

Most indie devs would define "success" as "profitable". And those costs include personal labor. even if a single person made a fully open source video game, it's hard to ration that 10 people buying a $10 game made even over 6 months is "profitable". If only because Steam takes $100 to publish a game, and then 30% of revenue. You're down $30.

This is an overly literal exaggeration, but the example remains true even at a more realistic (and still pailtry) 100-200 sales. 1000 users is where it starts to maybe become a side hobby. Before then, You could be mowing lawns and make more revenue (without a 30% platform cut).

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

#254

Post by johnnyanmac »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #228
TylerE wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Stardew is blatantly, ahem, "inspired by" the Harvest Moon series. It was mainly successful because it wasn't a Nintendo exclusive.

I know that, but most people compare such titles to Stardew and not harvest moon.

Yes. As you probably also know, "Harvest Moon" the name is no longer "Harvest Moon" th inspiration behind Stardew and many other crafting games. The actual devs behind it lost the rights to the name while "Harvest Moon" the IP devolved into generic crafting game #1243. The devs continued on under the new name (in the West) of "Story of Seasons"

That branding cost a lot of noteriety in the West.

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

#255

Post by johnnyanmac »

flohofwoe wrote: post #98
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, TLoU, etc. are all amazing games and impossible to make on a small budget. You only list successes, but it's exactly this type of story-driven block buster games that can sink a development studio if just one thing goes wrong (and it doesn't even have to be the fault of anybody involved with the game). Enjoy this type of game while it lasts, because this era is coming to an end, it's…

I'm not really that pessimistic about the future of "story driven blockbusters". Especially when they are relying on existing IP's to drive them some 80% of the time. Uncharted was probably the last really successful original IP of that moniker and it came out 2007, at time where games wanted to showcase the advent of what we now know as modern 3d graphics.

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

#256

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

rasz wrote: post #231
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a one that immediately comes to mind: Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, d…

CGA, trauma inducing palette doenst exactly scream wide audience accessibility. This game has a very strong and distinct art style.

I don’t know what CGA means in this case, but you don’t have to match colors if you’re concerned about colorblind ness. Distinct art styles are a standout in many extremely popular indie games (Cassette Beasts just came out with a ton of fanfare and distinct style, Cult of the Lamb is also a new indie game with distinct style, Cuphead if you want to go back a few years…)

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

#257

Post by johnnyanmac »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #156
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the main problem with indie games is the amount of value you get for your money. Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game. However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is…

You're right, this is a problem. However you can look at the same logic from a different perspective: If you're playing an AAA game, you're playing a game made for everyone - and therefore for no one. This is why some people (including me) aren't fans of AAA games. Imagine the world (future) where material costs of most things are insignificant and majority of the cost of your food will be paying the designers of thi…

To be honest it depends on the person. If you don't make food a large part of your life you will stick with the "easy" food. Maybe every now and then you dabble in some Gordon Ramsey, but it's just there as a means.

That's how modern gaming is. There's a lot of "free" stuff out there, but outside of Hogwarts Academy those players aren't looking for niche premium games. So you're no longer catching thst general audience, rather those seeking that certain design of game.

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

#258

Post by johnnyanmac »

fileeditview wrote: post #160
gareve wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits. If there's 5 indie games that fit that description, people can easily enjoy, & more importantly, remember them. What happens when 20, 30, 50 games fit that description? There's no way no good games fall through the cracks. The amount of games developed in a year increases while people's retention rem…

Of course there might always be exceptions but I doubt that games like Stardew Valley or Papers, Please! could fall through the cracks.. but who knows. I think there is a general saturation problem. I won't have the time to play 20, 30 or even 50 games a year. I don't need more games but better ones (in general.. there are of course great games).

That's the neat part of it all. They fall through and you don't know unless you spend a good amount of time digging yourself. Or finding a similarly aligned curator who dig for you.

In other words, all games you liked were good. But you haven't played all good games.

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

#259

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #232
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t compare Chicory with Stardew: for one, Stardew was genre-defining (as some people call things soulslikes, a whole heap of games are trying to capture Stardew). Replay ability of Stardew is part of its specific genre niche, where Chicory is again more like Zelda, in which replay ability isn’t a huge selling point to the game (although I find chicory just as fun as a Zelda to replay). Additionally stardew ex…

I have no hidden agenda here, so I compared, I admit, peaches to oranges, Chicory to Stardew, just because Stardew was the first popular indie game I found to compare with. Feel free to choose a successful indie game within the same genre as the Chicory, and then we can try to analyze the differences again. > Stardew was genre-defining What is the argument here, that it was very good? That's exactly my point, it was…

My point is merely to counterpoint the claim that no one can cite specific good games that simply fall through the cracks of popularity even though on its merits they are quite excellent quality. Chicory is arguably in that category and then I followed up with a few more. If I wanted to lower my standards to stuff that I found charming but not deeply moving, I could name a few more after that.

Good indie games are ignored all the time. I tend to seek out indie games explicitly because I don’t have a huge attraction to most “triple a” style games (I dislike fps, sports, 4x, mmo, puzzle, and sex appeal. So I’m mostly limited to not-Witcher open word rpg. Platformers, roguelikes, metroidvanias, horror survival etc. tend to be indie.) So basically I’m usually stuck with “why doesn’t anyone scream about this game more”. Rain World was like that until Downpour came out, finally some fucking attention to it!

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

#260

Post by johnnyanmac »

barrysteve wrote: post #62
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…

The market is saturated with remakes and games with nothing to say. This is the exact problem Norbet Weiner described in the 1950's book Human Use of Human Beings. Computers are characterized as a Spiritual Filter in that book and the aim is to get a message through the filter. These games aren't selling, cause everyone can tell they've got nothing to say. The know-how that goes into making them is very good, but the…

>These games aren't selling, cause everyone can tell they've got nothing to say.

On the contrary they are selling more than ever. RE4 remake isn't too old yet and is smashing records set by what was an evergreen title 20 years ago. What major blockbuster remake bombed in the last few years?

>Steam's most played is plastered with games from 2015-2019 because nothing has knocked them off the throne yet.

The most played games are very specific, multiplayer genres, designed to be played for years on end. I see Counterstrike (Fps), DOTA (RTS), Rust (survival),TF2 (Fps), Call of Duty (FPS, and a Remake to boot), GTA V (the 2nd highest selling game of all time, from 2011), etc.

If you don't value those 3 genres or have already played 3000 hours of GTA V and are done, I don't see how this list is of value.

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