Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did I just waste 3 years?

infinitroid.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 582 posts

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#491

Post by eru »

jondubois wrote: post #440
Pimpus wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, can you expand on this?

It's pretty clear that a lot of jobs today are useless and if you've worked for enough big companies, you might have realized that big companies are extremely inefficient. If big companies are so inefficent, why then are they able to generate so much profit from the economy? The reason is monetary policy. The Fed constantly 'prints' new money out of thin air and injects it into the economy via a combination of 1. loa…

New money that is anticipated will lead to anticipated price rises. So it doesn't matter (too much) who gets first dibs.

The Fed mostly buys government bonds, the markets for which are very liquid and efficient.

(The government however does benefit from the Feds buying their bonds, instead of injecting money into the system some other way.)

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#492

Post by beaconstudios »

Draiken wrote: post #486
beaconstudios wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it's talked about all over the internet Word-of-mouth is marketing too. Perhaps you are thinking that marketing === advertising? Because marketing doesn't have to be advertising. Building a community, attending conferences, getting influencers to play your game - these are all marketing activities. If people are talking about the game, it's surely fueled by a quality experience but marketing has to bootstrap th…

Word-of-mouth might be marketing, but it's not something you can work towards. To get that you need a good fun game. IMO that's not a marketing effort, it's a symptom of a good unique game. I'm not a marketing expert tho, but I can't think of any way to force word-of-mouth onto people.

the game's quality acts like a force multiplier for word of mouth, essentially you're more likely to promote or talk about a game you enjoyed. But you need some critical mass for that to have any real impact. What good is it if each player refers 1.5 others on average, but you only get to 5000 before the game becomes old news? Most games don't continue to sell forever and the hype will die out eventually, so you want that hype to reach a large audience quickly.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#493

Post by marvin »

BigJono wrote: post #455
fileeditview wrote: post #430

After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem. You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you…

> You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Interesting. I think you're right about half of those. I can't see any way that SDV or Darkest Dungeon could have failed. SDV…

The trailer of "Papers, Please" was what sold it to me. Really catchy music and a weirdly freaky premise. ("A game about denying immigrants from entering your country? That's such a weird premise it just has to be good, and the visuals are super well done").

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#494

Post by bighi »

fileeditview wrote: post #430

After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem. You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you…

This part made me thing OP was focusing on the wrong things:

> I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic

None of that matters to the end result. You might be someone that is not very bright and that never went to college, etc, and still make a very creative and fun game.

Saying that he's smart and whatever makes him sound entitled. Like if he deserved to sell well.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#495

Post by bodas »

fileeditview wrote: post #454
fiblye wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Very much yes. Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't…

Well I disagree a lot with what you are saying. Marketing is important sure. But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful. Maybe big gaming companies can do that but even they fail often enough. Luck is an important factor and maybe I would even rate it higher than 5%. I find the number of 90% marketing for an indie game ridiculous. Stardew Valley is based on existing formula but it is incredibly polished…

Quality is subjective but marketing is not. Every person has a different taste, I've played some "good" indie games that bored the socks off me. F you have enough people coming through the marketing funnel then only a truly awful game will fail to find admirers.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#496

Post by bighi »

bspammer wrote: post #471
fiblye wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Very much yes. Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't…

> To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck This seems very logical but indie games really do seem to defy this general rule. Pretty much every single popular indie game out there is really, really good in it's own specific way, and most of them had almost no marketing budget (when they first came out anyway). Minecraft had no marketing. Terraria had no marketing. Stardew Valley had n…

You seem to think "marketing" only means putting ads on the subway or TV commercial or something like that.

These 3 games did a lot of marketing. It was just not the millionaire kind of marketing that EA does.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#497

Post by rolleiflex »

fileeditview wrote: post #482
rolleiflex wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience (though I'm not a game developer) is the opposite. Linux users are very demanding, and instead of being thankful that your app works well on Linux, they'll take the fact that it works and works well on Linux for granted, and will resent you for charging money for it. If you support Ubuntu+Debian (1.15% user base globally on average), the next feature request you'll get will be Xubuntu, Arch, and then so…

I agree that Linux users can also be a pain to deal with :) But yea from my experience the game market is a little different because there is a growing group of people that rather would not boot Windows for gaming and instead stay on their platform. This group of people is very thankful for ported games.

What I heard third hand from game developers has been that it’s fairly hard to get games to perform well on Linux, and that most of the complaints come because of performance reasons outside the developers’ control.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#498

Post by yboris »

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…

I would love to read this Sci-Fi story -- If anyone knows -- could you share the title (and author)?

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#499

Post by bighi »

sago wrote: post #483

Yes. You did. Sadly. And it is very little to do with luck or numbers or the state of the industry. Good indie games: 1. are almost never distinguished by programming (the days of Doom are gone and you are not John Carmack). Far too much time is spent coding. Use existing tools. Code only gameplay. 2. are much more about art. The trailer looks like programmer art: no coherent style, no direction, no class. If this is…

About your number one: I see lots of programmers putting too much thought (and time) into code. As if the code was the important part of anything.

I am a programmer, and I have this PSA for others: Your code is just a necessary evil, not something to be praised and cherished. No customer sees your code, no customer cares about the code.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#500

Post by jrochkind1 »

int_19h wrote: post #390
jrochkind1 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... you still gotta pay for food and a place to live, start with, at the moment. If we didn't have to worry about money, then fewer of us would have to... worry about money when making art.

In general, that is true. I should have been more specific: > We now have enough people with skills, experience, tools, and free time 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. Where "free time" is that not used up by work that pays for food etc. Which does mean that people for whom art is a hobby are des…

If you only hang out with people who have enough free time to fulfill their creative desires (mostly in good health, mostly without kids, mostly who have "good" jobs which in most cases means their parents did too, which probably means they aren't taking care of their parents or other family members either) it can seem like a widespread thing. In fact, it's not; most people, in the U.S., and especially globally, are hustling to survive.

post-scarcity can sound nice, but in practice it currently means post-scarcity for the few, while most people live with incredible scarcity. We might have enough for everyone on the planet, but we sure don't share it equally. And that's not going to change automatically.

Post reply on HN