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Did I just waste 3 years?

infinitroid.com

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#411

Post by techsin101 »

int_19h wrote: post #343
mikemotherwell wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... or call it a hobby. Just because someone does the same thing they make a living from for fun, doesn't mean it isn't also a hobby. It's weird, that because people pay coders for some of the work they do, expecting money gets wrapped up in what is a hobby for so many. Programming is fun for a lot of people. They love the process, enjoy the reading and learning, get a kick out of things like optimising code for a sp…

I think we need to think more along these lines in general; it's going to be needed a lot. This is the ongoing march towards post-scarcity. We now have enough people with skills, experience and tools necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero. Essentially, these developers are spending (resources: time etc…

Wow that interesting. I can see it happening.. reversal. People with people skill would be the most up, and born Rich type then

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#413

Post by downandout »

Nokinside wrote: post #150

Game industry is the economics of superstars. The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1] >Abstract >Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fna…

What you are saying is true. However, throwing your hands up in the air and saying “I guess I didn’t get lucky” isn’t quite the correct response either. Success is a matter of exposure and conversion rate.

1,016 visits, many of them random and untargeted, is simply not enough to make a statistically significant decision about the viability of this game. Conversion rates for any product tend to vary wildly within specific demographics. Some games perform abysmally with wide audiences, but may have very high conversion rates with specific, well defined groups.

To be sure, there are games that don’t need to look for their niche audience. They become viral sensations because they appeal to mass audiences. They get enormous amounts of “earned media” - viral clicks from people talking about and uploading video of themselves playing - and those are the games we hear about and consider to be “Superstars”. But that in no way means that games that aggressively target some relatively small group of people that the game actually appeals to with paid advertising cannot be very financially successful. Maybe not billion dollar blockbusters, but I’d imagine this author would be happy with a six figure income from his work, which is entirely possible if he finds the right audience and applies the same work ethic he did to developing the game to marketing it.

He needs to figure out who likes the game, what makes them like it, and then use the plethora of online ad platforms and targeting options to find more people like them. His game is not a steaming pile of crap, so he will find a paying audience for it if he looks.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#414

Post by modernerd »

Reading advice from successful game devs to “my game didn't sell well” -style posts on reddit can be instructive too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9k8wsi/my_games_di...

Jason Rohrer's advice there was essentially:

- Games have to either make an instant emotive connection via their art style or gameplay concept (and be priced well enough for an impulse purchase), or prove that they are deep and long-lasting enough that they'll be worth the investment in time and money.

- Single-player games that don't do the above are especially hard sells, because hit gameplay trends are veering toward multiplayer games: “If your game's initial impression gives people pause, it's already over.”

The Infinitroid developer might learn something from that advice — I checked the trailer at https://infinitroid.com/, and the game looks fun, but I don't feel that instant connection to the art style or gameplay concept in the same way I did with Minit or Monument Valley (both instant impulse purchases), and I don't get the impression that it offers weeks of gameplay like The Witness or Stephen's Sausage Roll do (purchased both later after consideration and persistent appearances in media and social feeds).

It feels like most “my game's a commercial failure” posts I read could have been saved by spending more time on the initial concept and art style, and on testing the market before the three-to-ten year investment in building the full game was made.

Reducing the time to market also seems like a sane strategy. It may have taken five years to build Stardew Valley and 10 years to make Owlboy, but that does not mean every successful game involves holing yourself up for half a decade or more.

Developers also seem to underestimate just how much marketing a successful game needs even when the concept is great. Look at what the Boyfriend Dungeon team did to get traction for their game (5 years of marketing, 10 releases of other mini games on itch.io to build a following, website built 11 months before release, appearance on panels and in game press, months of Kickstarter planning), and check that you're prepared to do the same with your game if commercial success is important to you (it is fine for it not to be):

https://medium.com/@kitfoxgames/years-in-the-making-how-kitf...

Rohrer also mentions that he made 13 games before he had a hit (also happened to be his first multiplayer game), so perseverance and learning from failures seems like a big factor too.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#415

Post by ninjakeyboard »

congrats you made it to number 2 on hn - I'm sure your revenue just went up a lot. The game actually looks pretty cool. I echo the price and platform. It looks like it would appeal to a fairly casual gaming category with a lower price. I'd pay a couple bucks but 7 or 8 seems high but I don't do gaming off of my phone so this game would appeal to me but isn't targeted toward a platform that I use.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#417

Post by Cthulhu_ »

kbenson wrote: post #393
eksemplar wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was always like that though. Game programming had always been the worst field for programmers, and the industry had and is exploiting the fact that some people like games enough to work on them under horrible conditions. I don’t think it’s the equivalent to writing the great American novel though, because programming is just a minor part of game creating and arguably one of the least important. Design I’d the most…

> The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously. Did we read the same article? Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort w…

I get the shovelware feeling from Netflix too tbh; as with the Unity games mentioned, there's a lot of effort and they're high quality, great writing, visuals, direction, they tick all the boxes and we live in a golden age of TV series and films - but there's just so much of it. Not hearing about any of the shows or movies beforehand from my social circles doesn't help either - the network effect is super important. And that's from a service with a fixed fee per month, so the bar for watching something new is super low.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#418

Post by Cthulhu_ »

drb91 wrote: post #306
chongli wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. At this point, recommending that a 9-5 programmer quit their job to work on an indie game is equivalent to suggesting a PR writer quit their job to write the next Great American Novel.

Well, making money just off of novels seems impossible these days (you gotta hold out for HBO); there’s still a good deal of difference.

Novels are their own problem, but it's a similar one; there's hundreds of thousands of great writers and publishing is trivial nowadays (iirc the longest work of fiction ever made is a Super Smash Bros fanfiction published for free), but getting 'mindshare' (or, just some attention - and that's before making a sale still) is hugely difficult.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#419

Post by chrischen »

aphextron wrote: post #137

You made the mistake of thinking that anyone would care how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. But making a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, sh…

PUBG is evidence of the contrary, though the the game is just pure fun.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#420

Post by tonyedgecombe »

echan00 wrote: post #280
IvanK_net wrote: post #246

Hi, my name is Ivan and I made https://www.Photopea.com . After the first 7 000 hours of work, I made $0. Now (after about 10 000 hours of work), Photopea is used by one million of people every month, and I have a decent income just from ads, even without working on it.

Great stuff, sometimes it takes to continue when everybody else decides to quit

It is very difficult to know when to quit, I've had projects (not gaming) that I pursued for far too long.
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