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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

#271

Post by Hammershaft »

hiatus wrote: post #189
Hammershaft wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every Kenshi there are many dozens of excellent indie games that languish. The steam algorithm is not as cooperative for surfacing small niche games as it was of Kenshi, and it's harder to get your game seen in a more saturated market. There has been a gradual shift from the 2010's where nearly all great games we're handsomely rewarded.

> For every Kenshi there are many dozens of excellent indie games that languish. Can you list some here?

Sure! Pinning down some shared criteria for quality and obscurity might be a challenge, but I can give it a try. I'll only include games that I've played recently with an overall steam review score of >=%94 and less than 1000 cumulative steam reviews.

Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545990/Deadeye_Deepfake_...

Tandis: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1297210/Tandis/

Nidus: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2372170/NIDUS/

Recursed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/497780/Recursed/

HyperRogue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/342610/HyperRogue/

Can Of Wormholes: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295320/Can_of_Wormholes/

Mosa Lina: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2477090/Mosa_Lina/

Sigma Impact: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654890/Sigma_Impact/

Wilmot's Warehouse: https://store.steampowered.com/app/839870/Wilmots_Warehouse/

Filcher: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1355650/Filcher/

Magicube: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2216120/Magicube/

Stick It: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1828900/Stickit/

There are a ton of indie multiplayer games that at one point would have appeared on this list, but as small multiplayer games are starved of population they enter a death cycle where new reviews are negative as a result.

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

#272

Post by Hammershaft »

daedrdev wrote: post #192
Hammershaft wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every Kenshi there are many dozens of excellent indie games that languish. The steam algorithm is not as cooperative for surfacing small niche games as it was of Kenshi, and it's harder to get your game seen in a more saturated market. There has been a gradual shift from the 2010's where nearly all great games we're handsomely rewarded.

Personally I've dug quite deep into steam and come to the conclusion that there are just a lot of bad games, and that a good indie game most likely will break out eventually. I've found steam review percentages to be one of the biggest tells of a games quality, and so many games don't even have good reviews.

I made a comment here where I went over some of the excellent indie games I've played recently that languish in obscurity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40438001

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

#273

Post by somenameforme »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #249
somenameforme wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

Haha, when I initially wrote my comment I referenced a little inside 'joke' of sorts I have with some friends in games, referring to stuff as 'Japanese pricing.' I decided to snip that off because I figured it might be too esoteric. But I guess none of us is a snowflake, are we? The thing I'd observe is that Japanese pricing fails, hard - even for Japanese games. It seems a handful of Japanese publishers have realized this. NIS is a great example - they publish a huge amount of stuff, nearly all of it's niche, and it sells crazy well - because it's sold at a reasonable price. SEGA is the equal but opposite example. They still seem to think this is 2001 and they're selling games on a ringfenced console to players starved for content. And so their games are completely flopping.

Compare Etrian Odyssey (SEGA) with Disgaea (NIS). Both games are a fairly comparable genre, with fairly comparable production values, targeting the same demographic, and both were also PC ports/remakes of older classics. Disgaea is less than half the cost and has is pushing an order of magnitude greater sales. Also I think the concept of "niche" is somewhat obsolete.. kind of circling back to the point that none of us a snowflake. The market is so huge and diverse. Even for the most niche titles, there tends to be huge market potential, because "niche" markets now a days are larger than the whole market not that long ago. Games like Mount and Blade are just niche Eurojank embodied, yet has sold millions. Siralim is another great niche game. It sells excellently, especially considering the dev keeps releasing pretty much the same game ever couple of years.

Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers. Region pricing kind of adapts to this, but not really. In terms of exchange rates it's extremely favorable, but what really matters is PPP - how much a unit of currency is "worth" in domestic prices. So for instance the $45 game is sold for about 1000 rupees. I don't live in India but a quick search turns up a rent-by-day place in the cheaper parts of India can go as low as 100 rupee a day. So even though $45 exchanges for like 4000 rupees, it's worth far less (in terms of how far it goes in America) than even the 1000 rupees that the game is sold for India. So when you set the price of your game high in dollar terms, you're setting it to just LOL terms for most of the world.

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

#274

Post by somenameforme »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #242
somenameforme wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No I don't, and this is one of the reasons why. When you can work online and get paid in $, that dollar goes so much further in the other 95% of the world. What people who don't travel much may not understand is that it's not just the exchange rate. What really matters is PPP - purchasing power parity. $100 might translate to e.g. 8000 rupees, but those 8000 rupees go far further in India than $100 would in America. I also find that even official PPP figures often understate the "real" difference. So by living outside of America and getting paid in USD you basically just multiply every dollar you make, by a very large amount. That $168k easily becomes a $million+ in the overwhelming majority of the world.

Medicine and other stuff is similarly reasonable. I had the first cavity in my life fairly recently. A dentist trip, cleaning, filling, and related care cost a bit more than $10. And that was at a private provider, so nowhere near the cheapest. And then on top of this taxes are way lower, and the first $250k (for a couple whose earnings are split) are US tax free - the US has the distinction of being literally the only country in the world that insists expats continue to pay US taxes.

So you have this thing where an indie developer living in San Francisco is probably going to end up homeless, whereas on the exact same income they could be living an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world - 'Asia', India, Eastern Europe, South America, even some places in Africa are starting to develop pretty reasonably. Wherever, there's something for basically every taste and desire somewhere.

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

#275

Post by DanielHB »

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…

I think these gen ai will be quite useful in mass produced art, things like video games and animations (3d and 2d). A human creates an art direction with concept art and reference models and then feed into gen AI tools to output large volumes of assets. Assets are then touched up to remove AI weirdness, background assets getting less attention than character models for example.

It will be a massive productivity boost and will kill a lot of jobs.

Another example is 2d animation, 2d animation is usually done in "key frames" and "in-betweens". These two types of frames are often made by different companies (for western animation key frames are usually done in the core studios in the US and in-betweens farmed out to east asian studios). Gen AI will probably get really good at making these in-betweens quite soon and will kill all these east asian support studios.

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

#276

Post by __loam »

rched wrote: post #202
iamleppert wrote: post #188

This is genius! I currently work on attention loop games (the kinds you see ads for on your social newsfeed). A big bottleneck is the number of new games we are able to produce per week. New games generally have a better ROI and get more installs and clicks than older games, which age out. Having the ability to programmatically generate new games would be amazing. It would be great to have the game completely generat…

This is the darkest timeline. You want to leverage AI to automate the cycle of creating low quality games to display in low quality ads that leverage gambling mechanics to entice clicks?

I think they're taking the piss.

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

#277

Post by __loam »

antifa wrote: post #252
viccis wrote: post #134

Wonder how well this will do given that, going by reactions to even fairly anodyne AI usage in games, gamers really really loathe gen AI used to make games and game assets.

I can't think of any high effort, non-cash-grabs, non-asset-flips that were dragged through the mud for using AI.

Which games like that used AI?

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

#278

Post by __loam »

skadamat wrote: post #35
report-to-trees wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by infinite variations here?

I'm guessing they mean with some type of procedural generation or another randomization approach in mind that creates a bunch of new maps, bosses, vehicles even! Advance Wars, if I recall correctly, has a hand-crafted set of maps and battles structured in a campaign story. So once you're done, you're done. Replay-ability is a bit limited. I absolutely loved Advance Wars and my brother and I played the heck out of it…

Replayability is overrated imo. The old advance wars games on gba and ds took hours to beat and had excellent map design. There's also something cool about the no strings attached development model of old cartridge games where the game had to be perfect on release that is very endearing.

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

#279

Post by johnnyanmac »

somenameforme wrote: post #274
johnnyanmac wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

No I don't, and this is one of the reasons why. When you can work online and get paid in $, that dollar goes so much further in the other 95% of the world. What people who don't travel much may not understand is that it's not just the exchange rate. What really matters is PPP - purchasing power parity. $100 might translate to e.g. 8000 rupees, but those 8000 rupees go far further in India than $100 would in America.…

>So by living outside of America and getting paid in USD you basically just multiply every dollar you make, by a very large amount. That $168k easily becomes a $million+ in the overwhelming majority of the world

That's a nice sentiment for those who live in the not-US. But sadly most game development is in fact located in the US and Japan. For the US, many of the developer scene is in fact in higher cost of living areas like California, for the same reasons those areas have top tech companies and universities.

So I'm not just speaking for myself when I say that your estimates do not compare to most minimum wage work, which has itself already ceased to be a "living wage". It could certainly shift, but those are the current breaks. Your favorite indie games are likely made by North Americans as of now, and their survival depends on their ability to survive in North America. The one exception I can think off the top of my head is Team Cherry in Australia, which is not in a much better CoL situation if they are in the cities.

American or not, I don't think the solution to finances for online development is to emigrate out of your home country, away from your community, life cultures, and overall lifestyle. Tech is a big enough part of the US economy that everyone doing it would weaken the dollar itself, and then everyone loses given the current way the world economy works.

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

#280

Post by johnnyanmac »

somenameforme wrote: post #273
johnnyanmac wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 jus…

Haha, when I initially wrote my comment I referenced a little inside 'joke' of sorts I have with some friends in games, referring to stuff as 'Japanese pricing.' I decided to snip that off because I figured it might be too esoteric. But I guess none of us is a snowflake, are we? The thing I'd observe is that Japanese pricing fails, hard - even for Japanese games. It seems a handful of Japanese publishers have realize…

>Also I think the concept of "niche" is somewhat obsolete.. kind of circling back to the point that none of us a snowflake. The market is so huge and diverse. Even for the most niche titles, there tends to be huge market potential, because "niche" markets now a days are larger than the whole market not that long ago.

The market is larger, yes. I don't think it's gotten that much easier to target your marketed towards those audiences. the privacy changes on IOS/Android are great, but it has an unfortunate consequence that these more intimate styles of ads are now nearly impossible to channel to the right person. So you have to go to the good ol' fashioned social media blitz. Something everyone else is also trying to do. It's never been harder to get a person's attention.

Essentially, those titles you mention relied heavily on word of mouth (except Mount and Blade, but that was from a different era of gaming). I'm not sure I trust WoM enough to stake my entire livelihood on it. Gamers can be fickle, or timing can just take some cruel turns and ruin all that trajectory built up.

>Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers.

I don't disagree. But the top factors still apply. Very few are going to risk losing the USD to try and get more rupees/yuan. Russia and China in particular are pretty infamous for their piracy rates.

On top of that, getting a good localization can be too much for a smaller indie, and even those who afford it can never assure quality. Localization is a very hard process for games that need more than simply UI text to be done.

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