Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
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Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#2During a gold rush, sell shovels. Or be a for-hire artist when everyone makes mobile games.
Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#3During a gold rush, sell shovels. Or be a for-hire artist when everyone makes mobile games.
Or do cyber security when the entire world is digititalizing.
Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#4Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#5Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#6I was planning my future to first get great at Software development, then switch to game development once I got the skills.
During that time I visited a few indie game conferences. I realised quite quickly how underfunded and overworked everyone was, trying to bootstrap companies on subsidies. Not with the intention to become the next unicorn, but just for the love of games. Nothing wrong with that, but I didn't seem entirely healthy. At least most artists still understand the reality that they are doing it for themselves. most gamedevs make games for other to play, that naivety is quite toxic.
Perhaps once I'm retired Ill dust off Unity and start create games that I want to create. Perhaps other enjoy them but hopefully not.
Looking at this post-mortem, think the money and investment was worth it for the creator. 4k and 6 months is not that much for the reality check and experience he got from it. Better value then most art or game dev schools.
Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#7This is quite a confusing post mortem because the overriding failure happened before the project even began. Even a basic understanding of the mobile market would lead you to conclude that only have a few thousand dollars budget is only going to lead to you spending far more than you make. This looms over the entire thing despite the other problems with the project.
Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#8This is quite a confusing post mortem because the overriding failure happened before the project even began. Even a basic understanding of the mobile market would lead you to conclude that only have a few thousand dollars budget is only going to lead to you spending far more than you make. This looms over the entire thing despite the other problems with the project.
Is that so? It seems the mobile market is dominated by big budget free to play games. Personally I find most of them not really fun as they are glorified slot machines and I feel exploited playing them... Anyway we don't see how many of those big games fail.
I would say it is mostly down to luck and marketing. Only a small fraction of games (apps really) make it big, most fail. And even really cheap games can become a sensation (Flappy Bird, 1024, ...). The development budget is not the biggest indicator of success, but rather the marketing budget.
Also, I think that particular game would have worked better as a sold app, or maybe free to play the first level and pay for additional levels and weapons. I mean what fraction of a cent does the developer get when someone views an ad? Add support only works if you have huge numbers.
Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#9I was planning my future to first get great at Software development, then switch to game development once I got the skills. During that time I visited a few indie game conferences. I realised quite quickly how underfunded and overworked everyone was, trying to bootstrap companies on subsidies. Not with the intention to become the next unicorn, but just for the love of games. Nothing wrong with that, but I didn't seem…
When I retire, I'm going to make online board games.
I'm doing it from the ground up with my own programming language: http://www.adama-lang.org/
I'm going to build my own UI kit for canvas: http://www.adama-lang.org/blog/ui-flow-with-adama
(I'm learning rust right now on the side)
For the UI kit, I'm going to build a collaborative editor/IDE: no link yet, it's a thought experiment. The language makes the 'collaborative' super easy.
Then, I'll build out the distributed system for making this a platform.
THEN, after all of that, I'll ship a single game.
Being retired sounds like fun, and then I'll build a lifestyle business SaaS around generic state machine-documents as a service... Or something, no idea.
Re: Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun
#10This is quite a confusing post mortem because the overriding failure happened before the project even began. Even a basic understanding of the mobile market would lead you to conclude that only have a few thousand dollars budget is only going to lead to you spending far more than you make. This looms over the entire thing despite the other problems with the project.
Is that so? It seems the mobile market is dominated by big budget free to play games. Personally I find most of them not really fun as they are glorified slot machines and I feel exploited playing them... Anyway we don't see how many of those big games fail. I would say it is mostly down to luck and marketing. Only a small fraction of games (apps really) make it big, most fail. And even really cheap games can become…
> Is that so?
Yes.
The reason bigger budget games dominate is they spend an outrageous amount of money on customer acquisition. As long as the money coming out the audience is larger than the amount you spent you're still making money. The cost of entry into that part of the market is enormous and dominated by marketing cost.
Going into the mobile space with a small or no marketing budget and relying on luck is a lottery. No one is interested in a post mortem about not winning the lottery because the assumption is you won't.