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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)

#271

Post by Shaanie »

raincole wrote: post #85
ilyt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a massive mistake in game like this tho, the mistake many other games like that died by. Appeal of buying essentially party game where you need other people in same room to get the most of it (games like that are rarely good singleplayer) is very low, even worse in pandemic. Not saying it would make game succeed, as that's still 90% marketing in oversaturated indie market, but it is a thing that would make me…

I'm still quite surprised by the fact that Overcooked succeeded without an online multiplayer mode. *I don't know how successful Overcooked was, but it was successful enough for them to make Overcooked 2

I think overcooked has a quite different audience, being cooperative rather than competitive. I won't buy a competitive local multiplayer game nowadays, whereas I've bought a lot of cooperative ones to play with my SO, and that's probably fairly common?

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

#272

Post by sam0x17 »

MattRix wrote: post #124
sam0x17 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is really not true.

I've literally never seen one that isn't doing well though

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

#273

Post by thewebcount »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #247
thewebcount wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s just stupid. If someone sings off key, I have every right to say that person is singing off key and it sounds bad even if I also cannot sing on key. If I see a bad movie or read a bad book, I have every right to criticize it even if I cannot direct a movie or write a book myself. I don’t need to have attempted any of those things to know that what I experienced was sub-par. I’ve heard better singers, seen…

At the same time, most people aren't saying "he's singing off key", they say "he's a hack, can't sing, and is a bad person". At some point the criticism isn't just useless, it's spiteful and just an excuse to get in your own soapbox. That's why the stereotypical Karen isn't exactly praised for their "criticisms". If they left it at "this steak is done and I wanted medium rare", such stereotypes wouldn't exist.

Yeah, that's fair. I get the frustration with that sort of criticism.

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

#274

Post by japhib »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #67
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…

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…

https://twitter.com/TylerGlaiel/status/1670853553026658304?s...

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

#275

Post by skeaker »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #251
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 storie…

Anecdotal, but Lawbreakers wasn't nearly as good of a game in any respect. Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition. Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.

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

#276

Post by johnnyanmac »

fileeditview wrote: post #270
johnnyanmac wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well I actually do quite some digging myself. I like certain niches that are not really mainstream (e.g. roguelikes). However I never found a game where I thought this should be a bestseller and it wasn't (compared to the audience). Now I sure still might have missed some.. however I am convinced that games that are truly exceptional will be successful. Because they are (still) rare. Good is not good enough. I stand…

>I am convinced that games that are truly exceptional will be successful.

To be cynical, I think the last "truly exceptional" indie I played was Disco Elysium, and before that Terraria and Minecraft. If that's the bar than there is basically zero way any game can be successful. "truly exceptional" for me are once in a decade experiences that either flip the industry on its head or make me consider my own life perspectives. Not many games do that (nor do they need to, especially on a price point of $0-20).

Thankfully I'm wrong and there's plenty of "good games with good success". and even "mediocre (IMO) games that went viral). But I've also seen plenty of "good games go unnoticed". But if your POV is "good isn't good enough", then we may be talking past each other, or have different scale. I think 'good' should deserve a few thousand sales and a few mumbling on social media. Not exactly a high bar these days, but one so many indies still can miss.

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

#277

Post by johnnyanmac »

skeaker wrote: post #275
johnnyanmac wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 storie…

Anecdotal, but Lawbreakers wasn't nearly as good of a game in any respect. Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition. Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.

> Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition.

It wouldn't have zero competition in 2015, and I'm not talking about it coming out a decade prior, before Team Fortress 2. two years isn't even half a generation (or a quarter, in gen 8's eyes). I think your metaphor is a bit slanted here.

Also, I'm not saying Overwatch wouldn't have overtaken it anyway; But a year of being around would be enough to establish an audience and keep the game around. For a live service game this is key.

-----

>Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.

Sure, and pong was successful because it came before brickbreaker. Well, brick breaker is Lawbreakers in this case, the difference between cultural phenomenon and "but you HAVE heard of me" (which is an increasingly harder bar to clear).

And as a tangent, this is also why I'm never a fan of naming games in conversations. I don't think Overwatch is nearly as good a game as people think, it just got all that viral fan art and (previous) goodwill from a company gamers (previously) trusted. But there's some just world fallacy going on mentally in that I am inherently "wrong" when bashing a successful game and also inherently "wrong" when I praise a non-successful game. Because surely if a game fails it must have been bad right?

our perceptions are influence not just by quality, but by the zeitgeist around the games. Especially when we can't truly define why those games are "fun" to begin with.

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

#278

Post by ecnahc515 »

jawilson2 wrote: post #134
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with "$thing Simulator" (there was a 'gas station simulator' on Steam recently) or (in the 90's) "Sim $something" or "$something Tycoon) (sim city, sim ant, sim skyscraper, sim hospital, apparently there's a huge list [0]). Or "$something Online", because every franchise had to be turned into an MMO; Lord of the Rings Online, The Elder Scrolls Online, Eve Online, you name it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li…

> sim city > [rollercoaster] Tycoon Ok, I'm going to have to stop you there. These are two of the greatest games of all time. ALL TIME.

Exactly, but everything else with those names is terrible.

Their argument is that games that use titles like this, tend to be using these names to try to take advantage of the success of other titles with similar names. If your game is named "like another game", then your basically marketing it as "$y is like $x but better", but $y is rarely ever better than $x based on most people's experience. Once you pick up on that, anything marketed as $x tycoon is going to be viewed as "yeah it's probably terrible, like the other $z tycoon I already tried".

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

#279

Post by stoniejohnson »

robertlagrant wrote: post #161
stoniejohnson wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the term 'non-creative' was just used as a practical distinction when discussing 'creating ' versus 'porting '. I don't think the author intended to comment about the quality or even creativity of any developer's work.

Why not call the drawing the non-creative bit, then, if it's purely a distinction? (-:

No, I meant a lot of work (programming, 3D modeling, level design, sound engineering, etc.) was done to create the game.

Then someone had to port the game, which doesn't involve 3d modeling, level design, sound engineering, or writing game's core code from scratch.

Nothing to do with creativity.

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

#280

Post by maribi »

MattRix wrote: post #129
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.…

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…

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