Did I just waste 3 years? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#561

Post by fileeditview » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #554

fileeditview wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that no marketing is needed. I said that you can market all you want if a game is bad it usually won't be successful, with some hype exceptions. I think you are basically making the same point in your second paragraph?! I don't think to be successful you need to be as successful as Terraria.. As for Factorio.. it's not about graphics. Not every type of game needs great graphics. It's the same as with Dwa…

I think this might be one of those "forceful agreement" situations, yes. I suppose the way to see is to check all four cases: good and bad indie games with and without marketing. Presumably we agree that bad indie games with no marketing will certainly fail. It looks like we agree that bad indie games with strong marketing will usually fail, unlike bad AAA games and with a few debatable exceptions. (Mostly, I think,…

> Presumably we agree that bad indie games with no marketing will certainly fail. > It looks like we agree that bad indie games with strong marketing will usually fail, unlike bad AAA games and with a few debatable exceptions. (Mostly, I think, games that preordered well on hype and reputation but crumbled post-release. Clockwork Empires comes to mind.)

Agreed

> For good indie games with poor marketing, I think they'll usually fail, and it sounds like we might disagree? There are exceptions, but I think lots of them are older than the indie boom (e.g. Dwarf Fortress), or followup titles from successful indie devs. This might just be terminology or statistics though, because I agree that a chance favorable RPS writeup could jumpstart a game with no real marketing plan or budget. I guess the question is how often that happens, versus games doing the convention and reviewer circuit to ensure they get seen and written about.

We probably disagree a little here. I think the problem is defining good games and good/poor marketing. I tried to make the point that some games are just so good in general quality/coherence/details or have have a truely unique approach that they would "always" succeed because players will do the marketing by word of mouth. When I say always I don't mean it literally. There are always exceptions :)

> For good indie games with good marketing, I think there's still a decently high chance of failure these days, which might be another disagreement? This probably requires a better definition of 'failure', people definitely bought e.g. Orwell, but if the standard is "makes enough money to release the next similar game" then even Failbetter Games is on the razor's edge, and they're one of the most acclaimed indie studios I know of.

Again slight disagreement with similar reasoning to the last paragraph. Good != unique and there are many levels of good so it's hard to draw a line.

> (On that final point, I think I simply misunderstood you. I was noting that indie games can have any of the failings you mentioned and still succeed, but if your point was just that the specific game in this thread was hampered by those issues then we agree.)

Yep I was referring to the actual game mentioned in the article and what I instantly found problematic for its success.

It was good discussion (the whole thread) but now I need to sleep!

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#562

Post by fileeditview » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #555

fileeditview wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that no marketing is needed. I said that you can market all you want if a game is bad it usually won't be successful, with some hype exceptions. I think you are basically making the same point in your second paragraph?! I don't think to be successful you need to be as successful as Terraria.. As for Factorio.. it's not about graphics. Not every type of game needs great graphics. It's the same as with Dwa…

> Both games offer such a deep complexity that graphics is secondary, especially to the type of player interested in it. Separate to my other comment, I should acknowledge that this seems overwhelmingly true. Dwarf Fortress is famous, but I've learned recently that there are also thriving communities for Cataclysm DDA, Dominions, Aurora, every imaginable Nethack derivative, and half a dozen other equally-opaque games…

It's absolutely a market but it's a small one. However these niche markets can have great players/customers. Another recent example of this is the game Cogmind.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#563

Post by mikeleeorg » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 10:43 PM UTC

Reading this makes me think of all the indie app developers building educational mobile apps. Most of them are parents with the best of intentions. Maybe they started off building an app for their kids. Maybe they saw a need at their local school and decided to fill it. Maybe they themselves always wished for their particular app and decided to build it.

The vast majority of them eventually burn out and leave the field or take on a day job to supplant their income. A small number sell their apps to a larger publisher or get hired by a larger company. And very very very few break through that barrier to generate self-sufficient income, much less growing profits.

They have many of the same business challenges of indie game developers too, it seems. Too many alternatives/competitors, distribution challenges, marketing challenges, lack of differentiation, etc.

I suppose the same could be said for indie developers in many other verticals too.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#564

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 11:21 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #374

marcosdumay wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet it would be wise to try to stablish market fit of the toy he has first, before throwing it away and getting another toy to test for fitness.

> throwing it away and getting another toy to test for fitness. how do you know what the opportunity cost of continuing is? It's hard to know either way.

Do you know? Does the OP know? Does anybody know?

The OP has a product almost ready on his hands. It should be easy to test it and check if it's worth investing any more time or not.

Throwing it away before he knows, just to go invest his time on another dubious thing doesn't sound wise.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#565

Post by Retra » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #431

Retra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super Metroid is literally my favorite game, and I don't really have a strong urge to play this. Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generati…

Think of games that players play for more than 1000 hours. They have either: A) Multiplayer B) Procedural Generation If you don’t want to do A, and you hope to make something people will play for a long time, then you have to do B. Procedural generation has no value for getting players interested, it only matters for keeping players long term. But it does matter a lot.

It doesn't make a game better, it just superficially defers the realization that the game is played out. Yatzee's only claim to being a game is that you roll dice... if you didn't, people would immediately see it as the pointless activity it really is. Video games are no different. If you put 1000 hours into a game, you will see it for what it is, and proc gen is not even a factor at providing interesting gameplay at that point. A game ultimately succeeds based on the merits of the structure it actually has.

Now, if the proc gen is sufficiently complex, we're talking about something else, (but that is rare if it exists at all.)

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#566

Post by Retra » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

Armisael16 wrote: post #314

Retra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super Metroid is literally my favorite game, and I don't really have a strong urge to play this. Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generati…

Is Civilization a story-building game? I certainly don't play it as such.

I would say it is a perfect example of a story-building game. The specific details that drive the main gameplay mechanics are based on the circumstantial arrangement of procedurally generated components. Where any two players are in the world matter to the events that subsequently play out, and those relationships are based on proc gen.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#567

Post by wuyuzhe » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:37 AM UTC

vagab0nd wrote: post #542

wuyuzhe wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your app gets me figuring that it would be nice for a dictionary app to have a feature that, after you look up some word a second time (indicating it's not a rare one), adds it to the "to memorize" list and trigger the notification mechanism you wrote. Also wondering if support for memorizing equations would be straightforward.

Thanks for your feedback. I would say that for the first use case, unless the "memorizing" feature is built in to the dictionary app, it's hard to do it automatically. You could use the OS's "Share" feature to manually add the word to the memory app. I'm actually looking into displaying math equations. There are libraries out there so should be pretty straightforward.

Thanks for your opinion on this. I use Mac's built-in dictionary quite often. Guess the system provides some way to catch the look-up event, though then I also need to think about the notification part. Anyways spaced repetition sounds like a simple idea that could do the trick. The point of doing it automatically in the vocab learning (for foreign languages) case is so that you don't need to decide whether you've search a word before.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#568

Post by njwi332 » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #550

zeroname wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not really true - take a look at the graphics from Factorio 0.1, released in 2012 Yes, that was in 2012 , well before the indie explosion. If you saw this game today, you would assume it is one of the hundreds of crappy 2D Minecraft clones.

I mean, here's Factorio 0.14, which was 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIqPXiM0X0#t=1200 It's better, but it's not that better, and probably something that still looks like a "crappy 2D Minecraft clone".

I think his point is that it was already well known by 2017 and didn't have to struggle to distinguish itself in the current market, because it had built momentum and interest.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#569

Post by laaph » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:42 AM UTC

alain94040 wrote: post #267

dahart wrote: post #70

> I’m kinda floundering right now and not really sure what to do release it focus on marketing for a while Treat it as a purely hobby project Make it into an ethical game experiment pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety As someone who's gone through this, put years into a software startup, nearly had it fail completely after spending a lot of my own money to keep the family…

Find someone who is good at marketing and believes in your game enough to get 30% of all revenue in exchange for marketing it. In other words, find a business partner with a clue.

Where can I find someone like this? I need this help.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#570

Post by int_19h » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:45 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #558

int_19h wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I'm not saying that it is widespread! But it is more widespread than it used to be, IMO - this sort of thing was historically confined to the elites, and now it's slowly creeping its way down middle class. Hence why I called it a manifestation of an ongoing march towards post-scarcity. When and where the goal would actually be achieved is hard to speculate; I hope to see it in my lifetime, but only out o…

> this sort of thing was historically confined to the elites, and now it's slowly creeping its way down middle class I'm not sure that's true. I don't see much ongoing march towards giving most people more free time. Inequality is generally _growing_, not shrinking. There is no ongoing march of history, just humans in political struggle for how resources are distributed.

Relative inequality is growing. But in absolute terms, to be poor today is a great deal better than being poor 100 years. Conversely, this means that you are also more productive in absolute terms.

There's definitely a lot more free time available to people today than there were in any industrial economy prior to 8-hour work days and similar advancements in labor rights. If you unwind back to pre-industrial, some argue that agriculture provides for a lot more free time than we're used to, albeit seasonally.

But free time is only one part of the equation - you also need education/skills and tools to create things. These days, many industrialized societies provide education for free, or so cheap that it's accessible to a great deal more people than it used to be - and then, of course, there's the Internet. Tools are also much cheaper; again, think about it in absolute terms, e.g. how a $20 power drill compares to your typical toolset 100 years ago, much less 500.

Our societies have plenty of problems, and I don't encourage rose glasses. But we should also recognize just how immense the advance of humanity has really been, when you look in the rear mirror. Or not even the mirror... if you were born in a developed country, find an immigrant from a developing one, and just ask them how they feel about here vs there.