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Did I just waste 3 years?

infinitroid.com

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#81

Post by savanaly »

rocky1138 wrote: post #15

If you are interested in making an indie game, do it only because you want to not because you think you'll make money. You will lose money. That's it. There's no magic message here. Source: an indie dev. I keep my passion for my project because it's something I truly want to do.

Yep, and this makes perfect economic sense. In general, a given job pays roughly just enough to equal the costs of doing it (after all, if it paid more then why wouldn't new people be joining the market for this job and driving the wage down?). And by costs I of course mean net costs. Not just financial outlays but the intangible benefits of doing the job that offset the financial outlays.

And the fact is many people find making a game so intensely enjoyable that the net cost of making it is zero and they do it even when they're making no money or stand to lose money in expectation. Of course, there's huge variance in both directions, for every ten thousand indie game devs there's one Notch! And in reality I'm guessing being an indie game dev is at least slightly profitable in expectation. But the joy of doing it seems to drive their wages down to basically subsistence level.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#82

Post by BoysenberryPi »

ivm wrote: post #39
stupidcar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's clearly not entirely true though, because there are hits. They're just extremely rare, but extremely visible. You can read interviews with the Stardew Valley guy all over where he talks about spending 4 years working solo on his game, refusing to give up on realising his artistic vision. Then he releases and it's a mega-hit. That's a very seductive story. This isn't a problem unique to indie games. Every creat…

There is a problem unique to games if you view them as software: a very narrow window of promotion. You can gradually improve overall visibility of a regular software by working on SEO and sales. But if a game wasn't picked by the press or at least some YouTube celebrity – it's over. This is even worse for mobile games where a few store curators decide your fate.

Something I've noticed among indie devs is that they not only are terrible at marketing but they have this weird mindset about marketing that if they just make the best game possible then word of mouth will sell their game for them and they don't need to put more than the bare minimum into marketing. For some, reality sets in after release and they realize marketing matters. For others, they blame external forces and keep plodding down the same path.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#83

Post by walterbell »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #69
tokyodude wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the industry is set up to stoke and profit handsomely from people mis-assessing their own chances. how so? how does the industry profit from people mis-assessing their own chances?

Here are some things you can sell to indy devs while they are working: dev tools, hardware, books or online media w/ ads, conferences, certificate programs focused on game dev, marketing opportunities. Then, when they are done, you get to skim big chunks of their revenue with app store, payment processing, etc. Don't forget to sell additional advertisements, to other game devs, on top of the places where you list the…

This also applies to many small offline businesses. The B2SB supply chain profits from selling picks & shovels to a steady stream of new hopefuls.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#84

Post by village-idiot »

I love gaming. I’m glad that people make the video games that I buy and play.

I would never ever consider actually becoming involved in the space as a programmer, not in a million years. I advise any potential programmers to stay way the hell away from it too.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#85

Post by povertyworld »

5minbreak wrote: post #20

Game development always scared me as one of those studies that you hope your kids don't get interested in. Another one is manual drawing, especially when it is Anime (what are the chances that someone from a small European country is going to excel at such a job?). > Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in. Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you ke…

>in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets.

As a low income indie dev without the academic credentials to get past HR gatekeepers for stable full time work, I can't help but feel studying ML is about as wishful as creating a hit game. I have started studying ML this summer, and although I find the NLP applications really interesting since I have a social science background that exposed me to some literary theory and linguistic ideas that overlap with NLP at times, I think making a living wage doing it is just as much of an unrealistic dream as writing some killer app. The jobs all require PhDs, and the data science competitions have literary thousands of people with PhDs and industry experience competing for five figure prizes. When one is poor with no prospects these kind of pipe dreams feel so good to get caught up in as that sweet haze of hope numbs the critical thinking, but in a clear moment it looks like the ML gold rush is exactly the same as every other tech hype. That's not going to stop me from geeking out on PyTorch and trying to wring sentiment out of blocks of text or whatever, but I won't be able to honestly write a blog post about it in a few years asking if I wasted my time. I already know the answer.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#87

Post by skybrian »

Retra wrote: post #42
jtchang wrote: post #9

What is the target market for the game? I played Metroid when I was a kid on NES and the original gameboy. Games these days are a lot about marketing and huge budgets. The indie ones that do well need to be targeted as well as refreshing. Some hard thoughts just watching the video and reading a bit about the game: 1. I don't really like the graphics as much as I liked the original Metroid. This is probably just a per…

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…

I'm curious about where the story happens? I've played a rogue-like (Pixel Dungeon), while I found it fun, I didn't think it had much of a story. Are others better?

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#88

Post by woolvalley »

I learned this painful lesson 8 years ago indirectly, working a mobile app studio. The app store, like games and music are superstar markets and the vast majority will fail, even if you've spent 3000 hours on it.

That what makes stardew valley so crazy, because the %99 outcome of someone who works like him is failure and wasting 3-4 years of your life.

At this point, I would do the 'test if there is demand method' before seriously making a game. You make a MVP of a game, as a hobby, promote it a bit and then commence with marketing it with a kickstarter or patreon. If it gains enough traction, then you commence working on it seriously, otherwise stop or keep it as a pure hobby. Once your done release the full version for free or a nominal price. Add time release tiers for early access and so on to incentivize subscribing and supporting.

This probably means for games you need to do a whole bunch of art first more than programming.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#89

Post by the_duke »

notafraudster wrote: post #71
gavanwoolery wrote: post #22

I wrote this controversial tweet on the matter a while back (embedded here for convenience [1], controversial because it uses averages!) Which might make things seem more or less bleak depending on your perspective, but an important note from this data is that the 2017 median sales were about 2000 units per game (yikes). [1] https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/967249172804943872 Average number of units sold per game on…

You are looking at lifetime sales of games that have been on sale for different periods of time. All of these should be divided by number of years of sales, which gives you: 2017: 49k, 2016: 36k, 2015: 37k, 2014: 39k 2013: 120k, 2012: 89k, 2011: 73k, 2010: 48k 2009: 35k, 2008: 27k, 2007: 75k, 2006: 48k 2005: 43k, 2004: (this really just means Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike): 820k With the sales normalized by year, and…

Isn't mean probably very, very skewed for this?

Median would be much more interesting.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#90

Post by savanaly »

Nition wrote: post #67
lasagnaphil wrote: post #49

'Infinitroid is a roguelike (or rogue-lite) sci-fi platformer with procedurally generated levels and deeply customizable weapons" The problem is that the "roguelike" "metrovania" "platformer" genre is oversaturated with so many indie games, so if you're going to grab some money with it it's better gotta be absolutely perfect. From my first impression I don't know if the mechanics are solid, but the art and sound seem…

This is a problem, but it's not the problem honestly. Every game that fails, there's something about it that people can point to as obviously why it failed. And just about every game that succeeds, also has something about that they could have pointed out as why it failed, had it failed. Some games are so unpolished or uninspired that they were never going to succeed, but always picking apart "why it failed" makes pe…

On the other hand, sometimes it's very much not chance. Take stardew valley. It's not like Barone hit some sort of jackpot with his game. It really is head and shoulders above the competition, and that appears to be entirely due to his hard work on it. My evidence for this is that after I played Stardew Valley I was thirsty for more similar farming games, so I played or looked at every single one on steam (there's only about a dozen or so that qualify) and none of them are half the game that stardew valley is. If there were some diamond in the rough, stardew valley-quality game out there that through happenstance never went viral I would have hoped to find it, but no, there really isn't.
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