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Did I just waste 3 years?

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#521

Post by ijpoijpoihpiuoh »

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…

Yes. For most gamers these days, time is the bottleneck, not money. In a world where Infinitroid and Hollow Knight exist, one hundred out of one hundred people are going to spend the time on Hollow Knight.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#522

Post by foobiekr »

WalterBright wrote: post #249
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…

This isn't new. It happened before the internet to books, music and film. The internet has just amplified it.

It’s also in the process of starting to hit indie development in general and startups. It’s an interesting process but life for your typical indie or startup SaaS is going to get as tough as life for the typical “App Developer” got a few years ago.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#523

Post by the_af »

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…

> "PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer"

I have to disagree with this (well, the second part of your assertion anyway; I absolutely agree it's a cool and unique game!). Just reading the premise of Papers Please was enough to hook me. I just knew I would like it, and wasn't disappointed when I actually bought it.

Also, all of Lucas Pope's games are visually distinctive, and Papers Please is no exception. I absolutely cannot think of any other game with a similar visual style which wasn't also made by Pope.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#524

Post by jondubois »

eru wrote: post #491
jondubois wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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

There is a significant delay before the newly created money affects wages. Shareholders benefit from the new money instantly (since the market reacts to it quickly and it drives up the value of their stocks) but wage earners won't benefit from the new money until they get their annual 2% salary raise at the end of the year. That delay is significant because it allows shareholders to compound their ROIs several times before wages catch up.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#525

Post by seventhtiger »

baud147258 wrote: post #468
seventhtiger wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice. You need to find a niche and hit it hard. Maybe that used to be metroidvania, but that's long over. Visual novels have been on the rise for a while, so are rougelikes and card games, but those are saturated now. You want to get in before the big streamers and reddit frontpage and ride the wave. Who knew a Harvest Moon clone would be the biggest indie suc…

> Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice. You need to find a niche and hit it hard. I'd say you need both: you need to want to do a game you'd want to play, because you'd have an easier time recognizing if you're doing something that would appeal to at least one person. And if it's in a niche, you'll have a better chance to get coverage and buyers. But if you just try to hit a niche hard witho…

I disagree with that, but it's just my opinion. I think artists must move beyond their own taste. A sushi chef doesn't really have to like squid.

I think using your own taste is a crutch. If you get good at it, you should be able to know it's good regardless of your own feelings.

We see this when game developers are shuffled around and work on ones that are completely different from their passion projects. The good ones still excell.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#526

Post by bcyn »

bighi wrote: post #494
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.

I don't think he said that to imply he deserved success. The way I read it: he mentioned it to disqualify those factors (not working hard enough or not having enough discipline) as reasons the game flopped.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#527

Post by badpun »

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…

> If big companies are so inefficent, why then are they able to generate so much profit from the economy?

On the one hand, no one has yet figured out how eliminate inefficiences out of large organizations. They're all like that, usually the bigger the more inefficient (the government, because of its size, being obviously the worst offender).

However, it seems that it just takes dozens (if not hundreds) of thousands of employees to run say a top tier car or microprocessor company. You just can't do it with less, so the inefficiencies are the cost of producing such advanced stuff as say BMWs or Intel processors.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#528

Post by ijpoijpoihpiuoh »

bodas wrote: post #495
fileeditview wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quality is subjective, just like beauty or really anything else. But it turns out a lot of people share the same subjective views of a lot of things. A game that would be subjectively appealing to most gamers will generally do much better than a game that does not. A sufficient amount of marketing might be able to offset some of that effect, but not always, and only at great expense.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#529

Post by acjohnson55 »

hannasanarion wrote: post #299
amelius wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this simply a rephrasing of "winner takes all"?

No, because a "winner take all" industry is one that trends towards monopoly, that's not the same thing. No one person will ever have the entire video game pie. "Superstar industries" follow extreme power law distributions, where, due to the low barrier to entry, high ceilings, and limited consumer base (there are only so many hours people can spend on entertainment), the pie isn't growing and new entrants aren't goi…

People break through all the time. But there's no formula for it. It's luck + talent + zeitgeist + social connection. You don't need all 3, but it helps a whole lot. And you can have a whole lot of any of them and still not have lasting success. This is how the music industry has been for a long time, although the dynamics are always, well, dynamic.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#530

Post by cableshaft »

bighi wrote: post #494
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.

I'm a smart guy too. You know what you hear all the time growing up when you're smart? "Oh, you're smart, you're going to be rich and famous someday."

You hear it enough times and you might start to believe it too, that you're so smart you'll make all the right decisions and you can't fail. But then you become an adult and throw yourself into a passion or product and send it out there and realize the harsh truth that the market doesn't give a shit if you're smart or not, or even if what you made is "good", or even "great".

And it's impossible for you to know everything about everything, so somewhere along the line you will make a suboptimal choice, or choose the wrong time to release it, or release it on the wrong platform, or the people you hired to do X for you (development, marketing, distribution, qa, whatever) screwed up and leads to you getting terrible press (or no press coverage), or all sorts of crap that you have little control over or can't foresee.

I've personally worked for three game studios that made multiple games that flopped hard upon release. It gets depressing and frustrating when the creative products you spend months and months of your time working on didn't even make enough back to pay back your own salary for that time, let alone anyone else who worked on the project, and where you might as well never have spent that time in the first place.

The guys in the article only had a couple of failed games, and one monster success that continues to bring in millions of dollars in revenue. My only big success was a free flash game (before in-app purchases even existed) that I released 13 years ago....so yeah, no money there, at least not directly. I've worked on at least 8 failed games professionally, and many other failed or cancelled apps or enterprise software, since then.

For example, a year ago I wasted 6 months on a project at work that was supposed to sell to two major Fortune 100 clients and didn't, so it was killed without ever being used once. Even my biggest failed game projects I worked on at least had a few fans.

I've easily worked on more failures than even minor successes. It starts to drain on you. My confidence in my ability to make a successful anything in the future is pretty shaken.

Anyway, long story short, I was led to believe that my life would be easy and I'd find success after success by many people in my life, parents, teachers, fellow students, etc. And so far pretty much my entire adult life, with a couple of exceptions, has proven that what I was told was total bullshit and I'm just as capable of making bad decisions and getting unlucky as people half as book-smart as I am.

So maybe some of the people that do make those assumptions or have heard those same things as they grew up need to be told that it doesn't matter.

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