If this game had an appealing art style, it might stand a chance in the already saturated market of Metroidvanias.

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".

There needs to be a market for what you're writing, you need to find and reach out to this market, and you need to entice them by providing more value than the spare $X they have in their pocket (plus, you need to communicate this so that they realize this).

You also need to realize that small differences in quality can lead to huge differences in interest, ESPECIALLY given how "copycat" your game seems appears from the homepage. If your game is only 1% worse than the other game I'm interested in, I'll probably give the other game 100% of my free gaming time (others may not be so extreme, but you get the idea).

Marketing/sales folks exist for a reason. You just figured out why.

So you've done good work and gotten not the return you expected... it might take one more game or 10 more games. Or this game might lead you to meeting people that can help you be more successful in the future.

It's ok to "give up" and move on too. You can stay the course and probably eventually become successful, but if you have other interesting things to do and less interest in continuing gamedev, then go try something new.

I understand that it is very hard to make games and 100 times harder to make good games. There must be a sane method for decent compensation waiting to be thought out I hope

You got half decent at a whole bunch of skills, which you can reapply. I'd say it was equal to going to a school for this, but not an exceptional school. It's a start, and it's a toolset.

Me and my brother make games. I do a brainstormy intuitive thing, and he builds stuff brick by brick. He has a tendency to decide things like 'I will build an Asteroids', build the skeleton of such a thing (with all the effort going into code elegance) and not have anywhere to go from there. I have a tendency to have wild exciting-sounding ideas, implement about a quarter of them, and end up with something that's certainly not like anything else, but isn't necessarily FUN or even a game.

I think I have a slightly higher chance of breaking through into the realm of 'making an actual game', but it hasn't really happened yet and may never happen. Even if it did, there wouldn't be money in it. I'm just not that good a designer, though I AM a sort of nascent designer. Plus, I'm too devoted to open source these days and that would likely be a handicap to market adoption; if nobody else can get rich off it either then it ain't gonna be a hit.

To make a hit thing you have to be able to see how exploitative third parties can get rich off you, and then let them do it and hope you get a cut (or some publicity).

I think the future isn't creative (insofar as popular hit products). It's basically focus-grouped artificial blandness and knock-offs consuming the market, and will not go back (occasional fluke successes will doubtless happen)

The future is learning how to manage these creative exploits as communication, perhaps to a very small audience for whom they're specially crafted. You'll be a craft beer or a hand made cheese. You have nothing to do with the market as we know it, it's all about what manner of distribution you can function under at the scale you will forever remain.

So who did you get to know in that three years? Did you form a community, perhaps of other game makers?

I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed, yeah?

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.

There are plenty of types of games I'd still love to see made or have ideas for, but they require 3D, money, great art teams. Indie games generally cannot pull this, so they tend to be limited to rather rigid subgenres, and there are only so many variations of Metroid you can make before people mostly find what they're looking for.

I personally dont think of it like a business at all. I think of it as a vocation. By choosing to make games, I consider myself to have chosen the life of an artist.. My goal right now is to make great games that I want to make, thats it.

I'm living off the savings from my last real job, and being extremely frugal. I moved out to the country, where everything is cheaper (rent massively so). If / when I run out of money I'll do some contracts, worst case scenario is get a fulltime job as an employee again.. But I am extremely happy with my life right now.

If you're making one in 2018, it should either be a hobby project, or you should be prepared for very few sales.

Soo i got lots of text and links but no pictures of game or video whatsoever. All the information i have is what i pieced around in comments, seems like rogue-like metrovania.. this dosent really sell me the game. Sure there is play now but that also lead to page full of text.

Bad marketing

The derivative of an exponential is again an exponential :p

Shameless plug: https://www.dinorush.com

I don't think it was a waste, but maybe the author should be looking for alternative ways to parlay the game into a paycheck instead of ... ... whatever this is.

Most are "rogue-lite" which is a hot genre right now but all have something that make them stand out.

Rogue like games have the potential to become indie hits because they are very good for twitch/youtube audiences, because in general, up until the moment the player loses, they are winning.

This is great for streamers, no long-drawn out sequences where they know they've probably lost, no ability for audiences to get bored watching the player struggle in a losing fight. Instead the player gets to live out their power fantasy up until the moment that fantasy is betrayed and they lose.

And then it's a quick or instant reset and they're back to the pit / whale / plane and off they go again.

But a rogue-lite platformer? Ok that can work, Risk of Rain did an OK job with really poor graphics. But the gameplay was top-notch to compensate, and that was released before the big indie-deluge, that might not do so well if it were released today and had to go up against competetion from the likes of gungeon or dungreed.

With regards to this game, the graphics are too low to look good but haven't masked that by making the choice of going pixel-art, instead it just looks like it's from a PC gamer cover CD circa 1999.

Compare that to Slay the Spire, which has very basic art but has an engine that is well made, so it's limited art is still delivered very nicely. In the case of slay the spire they compensate with a good soundtrack which doesn't get irritating even on repeat playthroughs and some really solid gameplay.

Those are the smash-hits and a hits-based industry follows a power-law, so there's a vast quantity of mediocre games below there. What hope does a game which appears to mostly replicate previous gameplay with weak graphics stand?

That's not to say it was a waste of time, only the author can judge that.

\* Far too many to list, but I'm thinking along the lines of Slay the Spire, Enter the Gungeon, They are Billions. Even Playerunknown's battlegrounds or fortnite in some way fits the 'rogue-lite' formula of facing ever more difficult challenges up until a sudden and final death and complete reset.

One area you might reuse your talents and efforts, is gambling industry. It is another toxic environment, I take antidepressants since 2003 since I worked once with a client of this industry, but the payout is at least certain.

This paragraph reads like the guy thinks all of this means he deserves success. I can't say I feel bad for this guy.

Good luck and don't be too disheartened, you've already put in the large amount of work needed, now just spend some time trying to market in order to get some return.

It isn't surprising the internet has been called a gold rush.

That's really how I view things. I just play nice games, find flaws and things to be perfected, and gather up all those things in a game that could be enjoyed.

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.

1. why would I pay 7 bucks for this, when something like PUBG is ostensibly free? There is no easy "trial" download (Do I even down load this?) Does it work on my phone (a lot of the low end game market went there.

2. Selling things is hard when your up against free. I dont like the freemium model but free stuff with ad's makes money - give it away and monetize on the back end.

3. Every one pays for customers. Marketing matters and especially in a competitive market. Your going to need to spend money to make money in todays age.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10955276

Not sure if applying this strategy to a game that has sold only 4 copies in 3 years would really help the situation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9k8wsi/my_games_di...

Jason Rohrer's advice there was essentially:

- Games have to either make an instant emotive connection via their art style or gameplay concept (and be priced well enough for an impulse purchase), or prove that they are deep and long-lasting enough that they'll be worth the investment in time and money.

- Single-player games that don't do the above are especially hard sells, because hit gameplay trends are veering toward multiplayer games: “If your game's initial impression gives people pause, it's already over.”

The Infinitroid developer might learn something from that advice — I checked the trailer at https://infinitroid.com/, and the game looks fun, but I don't feel that instant connection to the art style or gameplay concept in the same way I did with Minit or Monument Valley (both instant impulse purchases), and I don't get the impression that it offers weeks of gameplay like The Witness or Stephen's Sausage Roll do (purchased both later after consideration and persistent appearances in media and social feeds).

It feels like most “my game's a commercial failure” posts I read could have been saved by spending more time on the initial concept and art style, and on testing the market before the three-to-ten year investment in building the full game was made.

Reducing the time to market also seems like a sane strategy. It may have taken five years to build Stardew Valley and 10 years to make Owlboy, but that does not mean every successful game involves holing yourself up for half a decade or more.

Developers also seem to underestimate just how much marketing a successful game needs even when the concept is great. Look at what the Boyfriend Dungeon team did to get traction for their game (5 years of marketing, 10 releases of other mini games on itch.io to build a following, website built 11 months before release, appearance on panels and in game press, months of Kickstarter planning), and check that you're prepared to do the same with your game if commercial success is important to you (it is fine for it not to be):

https://medium.com/@kitfoxgames/years-in-the-making-how-kitf...

Rohrer also mentions that he made 13 games before he had a hit (also happened to be his first multiplayer game), so perseverance and learning from failures seems like a big factor too.

rogue-lite: check. metroidvania(gotta get that retro street cred) : check. Bland uninspired assets: check. post mortem blog post posted to some link aggregator about how you released the same thing that every other copypasta developer on greenlight has crapped out for the past 3 years and it isn't selling well?: check.

yep. 3 years, down the crapper.

The graph of steam sales, as you mentioned, is poisoned with shovel-ware. But it’s also inflated by another kind of game that nobody wants: games that are just remakes of the same old tropes and mechanics — nobody is interested in playing them even though they are implemented with care. It’s a problem that is huge in the programming world: lack of high level thought and consideration. The super meat boy guy who you linked to should have asked himself if anyone really is excited about platformers before sinking all that time into it. There is no indie game problem. It’s a bad ideas problem.

Look at the witness. It did good. It’s because it’s a good game with freshness and insight. Messages are passed from developer to player through every aspect of the game. It is something to sit down and consider for hours. Something to be inspired by. There has to be actual value in the game. This torrent of let’s players and people who use video games and v.g. Culture as some kind of crutch or something to give them identity — endlessly grinding away at meaningless and stupid achievements and 100% completions — all of that is nonsense and it is your own fault for diving into it.

I don't exactly know how you do this because I haven't done it before, but my naive feeling is that it's a huge risk to sit down for 3-4 years and just write code. You have to find a way to engage your potential future audience while you are developing the game. Many of the most successful indy games have the same development ethos of open source software: release early and release often.

Second, I think it's important to ask for money very early on in the process, if that's your ultimate goal. I think the article is good to point out the economics. Users have played 1000 hours (roughly 1 hour per user) and the dev has made less than $30. That's 3 cents per hour. There are plenty of games that cost $4-$5 that have no demo at all. Even at 1/10th of the engagement, you're still talking about $400-$500 rather than $30.

Finally, as others have said, I think the idea that you are going to strike it rich with your first game out of the gate is naive. Indy game development is about the long tail. Don't throw 2K hours into a game. Throw 200 hours 10 times and try to build up a revenue stream. At the very least, it allows you to pivot a lot earlier if you find that your are getting absolutely no engagement.

But at the end of it (and I haven't played the author's game, so I'm making no judgement here), a game has to be fun. You don't need a finished game to demonstrate the fun. That first proof of concept needs to be distilled down to pure fun. Once you've got that sorted, you can start working on the rest. I think it's temping to build a whole infrastructure of code (or write a game engine ;-) ) and then once you are hundreds or thousands of hours in discover, "Wait a minute... this game is actually kind of boring". Only now you have a legacy code base and it's really slow to start trying to morph it into something that is fun.

I was just looking at Kenta Cho's blog the other day and earlier this year he was doing a 256 byte JS Browser game challenge [1]. What interested me about his blog post is that he concentrated entirely on game mechanics. He tried a couple of game mechanics and then tried to mix and match them to find interesting variations. I think this is the kind of thing you need to do very early on in game development. Then once you have a core game mechanic that is really fun, you can start building a game around it.

[1] - http://aba.hatenablog.com/entry/2018/03/07/174528 (Sorry, Japanese only -- but has some interesting gifs)

It's looks like way too much time was spent on an engine when off the shelf would have done better.

And yes, they haven't been doing their job right, they had too much power, they played it too safe and mistreated the developers.

But instead of supporting game developers who wanted to unionise, instead of supporting social projects (like basic income!) that would reduce the risk an independent takes, we asked people to go indie, and just shoulder that entire risk themselves. Good job, everyone!

The creativity from everyone is great on the building side, but on the marketing and traction side, there can always be bad luck, like this example.

I think a lot of consumers are just fatigued from too many options - think about how much of instagram and facebook is ads vs what it used to be, even back in like 2010.

You are only asking to have people point out possibilities that you didn't.

But in your heart of hearts, you know you did.

That doesn't mean you didn't have fun. I suspect you need to revisit what 'waste' really is for you though.

You need _way_ more visitors to have any clue if your efforts are resonating with your potential market or not.

The nearest "success" example I can think of is Jets-and-Guns [1]. The guys that made the game partnered with an indie 8-bit rock band that wrote the soundtrack specifically for the game. The story is full of parodies on common cliches and silly jokes that made me replay the game several times.

There's a bunch of other successful indie games in other markets and unless it offers a radically new addictive gameplay (say Minecraft), it has to be about the story. Stardew valley, Papers Please, you name it. Unfortunately, this title simply lacks both of them and is hence doomed to fail.

P.S. It shouldn't take 3 years to find out the lack of product/market fit. There's a funny saying that if you are not ashamed of the v1.0 of your product, you have released it too late. This 100% applies here. Release it with just 1 level based on a commodity game engine, gather feedback, decide onward based on it. Anything more than a couple of months is just wrong if you are doing it for the first time as a 1-person project, IMHO.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEnHolPt8zw

Coding heads down without any marketing or validation (like selling early release steam copies) and hoping it'll see viral growth is a mistake, for both startups and indie games.

I wrote a video course on Amazon Machine Learning [0]. I spent about 80 hours researching, writing the outline, putting together the material, recording and re-recording the 105 minute course. I think I've made about $200 from it, directly.

But, I've done several talks on it (which were non paying, but sharpened my presentation skills), wrote half a book on it, and got one consulting opportunity around it. I also got a bit of schwag from AWS because someone noticed my forum contributions, which was cool.

If everything you do is a hit, you aren't taking enough risks. However, I will say that 2600 hours without market validation is far more commitment than I would make.

0: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/amazon-machine-learning

Personally I played about two rooms and then got bored. It sure is a tribute to Metroid. With weird, floaty jumping (did Metroid have that? I never played that one very much.). And tiny, dark graphics. Plus I was playing it on the keyboard and not fullscreened which never helps.

When I started to find myself with half a dozen of such games, I remembered the year we spent saving money with my brothers to buy a hard copy of Caesar 3. I was just a child. It costed us what would now be 15€. Considering the inflation since then, games were quite expensive.

So, I've decided to stop buying games in those promotions and having games in my library that I will never play. I prefer paying the full price for a game I really want to play, like before. I think it's more honest to the developers. Whether that will mean more money to them in average I don't know. Does someone know if the developers/editors really benefit from the sales on HumbleBundle and the like (the prices really look pretty low)?

It's like asking if the world needs another pop song or pizza joint. There's always room for the next great game and another good place to get a pie.

If you're trying to sell games, your site focuses on all the wrong things.

1) I need a reason to want to play. Some games present themselves as a challenge to overcome (e.g. Volgarr the Viking, Dustforce), while others have some kind of interesting narrative or world to explore (e.g. Metroid/Binding of Isaac.) Some games promise comedy (e.g. Enter the Gungeon.) I can't tell what your hook is. Weapon customization and survival are fine game mechanics, but they're not a reason for me to want to play all by themselves.

2) Artistic theme. Games that age well have a cohesive look-and-feel. My initial impression of your game's theme is "asset store default." Maybe you didn't use an asset store, but that certainly is my first impression

3) When I hear "procedurally generated exploration" I have a negative reaction. It is incredibly difficult to do well, and when done any way other than well, it becomes boring and repetitive almost immediately. On your site, I am given no reason to believe it was done well.

These three things, taken together, mean that I probably wouldn't play your game even if it were offered to me for free with no strings attached.

Metroidvania and roguelike are two of the most crowded markets. And they're full of very good games that can be had for a few bucks. Competing here means you need something that really stands out. This, by contrast, seems very genetic and lacks the production values that can help mask an otherwise generic product. For instance this [1] is a metroidvania roguelike that can be had for about $4 on a sale (and is a great game as an aside). That's what you're competing against.

I think it makes more sense to aim for niche. And there's also the nice outlier that occasionally proves that niche wasn't really niche at all.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/252030/

Second one was that quote about lack of interest from games media. They do work as gate keepers, and most of them are heavily advertising driven, so the problem here is the same as above, indies suffer because they don't have marketing budgets. When the industry grows so large that it has to start attracting casuals, that always means spending marketing dollars, and indie industry has grown and saturated the core gamer group through, and casual interest just isn't there without marketing.

Here is an interesting article about it: http://cheesetalks.net/proton-linux-gaming-history.php

Great job on the game, the videos look very smooth and I will be sure to give it a play!

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.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-man...

Of course I agree that if they can do it because it's something they really want to create, and not worry about whether it makes money, then they'll be much better mentally (and financially!) prepared.

I think such advice misunderstands the psychology of why people gamble on very long odds. The primary drive is emotional, not rational. The rational brain only has to be convinced that a theoretical possibility exists. After that, it's a matter of emotional appeal, and culture is very good at presenting seductive narratives based on rare occurrences.

The equivalent of lottery with video games would be spamming app markets with shitty games made in a week-end, hoping it catches up somehow. One day someone will make another Flappy Bird, but it will probably not be you.

Likewise, if you are going to put your heart into something like this... do it because you want to...

if you win? great. but it'll be the exception to the rule.

This probably depends on your ratio of story/art to engine/game mechanics[0] your game would have.

It seems games that do not require continuous player progress (ruling out RPGs entirely) can be a good fit.

e.g. Episodic story-telling games and then something like Hitman, so action games can be done that way too.

But you could easily release TBS games this way too, many "mission"-based games would lend themselves to this format.

[0] In a broad sense.

These outliers don't refute the rule that different markets have different odds of success.

I guess if you go deeper you can get a qualitative idea by judging how good a game is before including it as a data point

> In our 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society, Philip Cook and I [=Herbert Frank] argued that top salaries have been growing sharply in virtually every labor market because of two factors – technological forces that greatly amplify small increments in performance and increased competition for the services of top performers.

That might combine with the "saliency" cognitive bias - it's easier to think of successful actors, writers, game authors, than of unsuccessful ones.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/12/how_...

how so? how does the industry profit from people mis-assessing their own chances?

I guarantee that if you drop the "planner" that game would sell like hotcakes as soon as a medium sized YouTuber/Twitch streamer notices it.

There is no way a game about dunking babies doesn't get enough shock value to get a decent return on investment, especially if it has wonky physics, "bad" controls or other emergent gameplay.

For a deeper game, maybe bring back the "planner" aspect to add a simulation layer on top. Make a tycoon game where you manage a church and the baptisms are just one of a few minigames.

There are a large number of amateur creators who are trying to win the lottery (either from a fame or monetary perspective), and most won't and will see little recognition and remain obscure or very niche.

This is seen in basically every area of media. Music, books, movies, etc and is perfectly normal.

In 2017, 21 games per day were released on Steam and most of them were trash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

You won't be Minecraft, but you won't waste 3 years for $30 either.

Factorio and Dwarf Fortress are two examples of those. Can someone say their graphics are amazing? Probably not. Yet they focused on their differentials: the unique gameplay.

I have to agree with the GP. They're always unique in one form or another.

People however overuse the marketing card IMO, saying that you need a lot of marketing. Good games do stand out for being good games. Word of mouth only works if your game is good. Nobody will urge their friends to play a bad game and for indie games, word of mouth is king. You can't "force" word of mouth marketing, so it's not really a marketing effort. It comes naturally with good games.

And certainly don't underestimate the number of people who are borderline obsessive with transport networks, trains, and anything involving traffic (myself included). Almost any game that adds a good gameplay element to managing or routing trains or traffic is going to do OK. Cities Skylines has done well with this crowd, too, after SimCity decided to start focusing on "Sims" style games and ditch the traffic aspects.

I then showed it to my wife who is not a gamer at all. She liked the trailer too but thought the player would be one of the immigrants :)

It's tough to make a perfect trailer..

They usually have bigger marketing than low budget movies.

Also even graphic novels are generally two person teams. I think trying to make an indie game with a small team (2-4 people) is way more realistic than doing it solo.

The most successful game of the year, Far Cry 5, has sold 1/20th as many copies as Minecraft has, a game that is ugly as sin and always has been, but it's fun enough that it doesn't matter.

There's no point in adapting a property if the adaptation won't grow the audience. The Walking Dead was a comic book superstar, selling upwards of 500,000 units per issue when it was picked up by AMC for the TV adaptation. The TV adaptation is now reaching 8 million viewers per episode, and that's considered low.

Perhaps the way to do it is to acquire the license for a 'masterpiece edition' ... release it five years after the original.

Current acquisition model by AAA is buy-kill, rather than buy-subsidize.

In contrast, Mario looks fun and jolly and silly.

doesn't this imply that shovelware is actually taking away some of the sales? In other words, making a large number of low-effort shovelware is a better money making scheme than making 1 (or few) mediumly good game?

Shorter games are fine, and sell to people who want novelty over repetition. Don't make the game longer than its content, and price accordingly.

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

C) have 1000 hours worth of manually created content

Think about games like witcher 3, tes, fallout. Those things are huge and replayable.

There is simply so much shovelware/copy and paste games.

See: Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, etc.

I'm very keen to see how Ready or Not does, when it releases. Everyone I know who played SWAT 4 back in the day loves it, and there hasn't been a comparable game since.

To throw out an example of an "available" niche: I think the first dev to bring out a modern version of Need For Speed: Underground, with decent car physics (similar to something like Grid: Autosport), is going to strike an absolute gold mine. NFS was literally all anybody at school talked about for years and years when U1, U2 and MW were coming out. Every game since has been complete rubbish, the new ones have physics so bad it feels like you're just gliding around on a magic carpet with a car body attached to it.

None of that really required an act of genius creative talent, though. Learning enough about audio production to create the set of SFX and music you already know you need from the top-down design of the clone-game you already know you're aiming for is effectively "just" grunt work. Sort of like how an actor learning the exact set of martial-arts moves they need to know to look like they know martial arts in one particular shot, which is intensely choreographed, is "just" grunt work. Stardew Valley's creator didn't need to develop the skills to be an amazing artist or musician, they just needed—like the actor—to develop the skills to create a particular pastiche of existing pieces of art and music.

The creator of Stardew Valley is, however, a natural talent at the particular meta-skill of "finding out what people want and tweaking things in response to those wants, never settling for doing 'merely' what they know how to do with the skills they already have, rather pushing themselves to the skill-level required to make people even more happy."

OPs game looks dated, weird and reminds me of about 30 games I have in my library already.

Terraria seems closest to what he has done, but Terraria is so, so much fun and I've yet to finish it.

It's tough to break into the 2D platform market.

Yet another proof would be surprising number of very games made in tools like GameMaker - think Nuclear Throne, or Cook Serve Delicious. I actually took a peek at the sources of the latter (they were distributed with some Humble Bundle once), and it's... reinforcing this point.

[1]https://www.remic.ca/real-estate-sales-person-vs-mortgage-ag...

In fact being a Roguelite is woven into the plot, characters aren't surprised to see you, after all you were just here last session, the mounds of festering corpses prompt you to remark that they're all the same... They're all you.

1) high demand (not just high demand in general -- high demand for new/better content by a new entrant);

2) low supply;

3) well paying customers.

I'm sure despite the flood those will still exist, as long as there's still a good amount of differentiation between people's preferences. A niche is a small subset of in the space of products that a small subset of customers have strong preference to. This needs preference differentiation.

This preference difference could be toward many features: cultural setting, story style, gameplay style, aesthetic style, etc.

There's perhaps a combinatorial advantage here: if sensitivity varies significantly across many of those parameters, just choose any unexplored subset, optimizing for 1/2/3 -- there are exponentially many in the number of distinguishing features (if you browse Steam tags you see this is potentially a very large number!).

https://store.steampowered.com/tag/browse#global_492

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 success of its year? Maybe we can systematically analyze old games to identify overlooked gems and valuable revivals.

Your market is the whole world too.

It filled a niche for gamers who had grown up playing HM on Gameboy, but hadn't been able to really scratch that itch. If anything, his choice of genre to work in was genius. It was a passionate and pre-made fanbase that was craving a new game to jump onto, and he happened to make an excellent game as well.

It also helps that HM is a highly generic game/genre. There's very little about what makes the original games popular that is trademarked. I played thousands of hours of a couple of them, and I probably can't name any of the characters any more. You can easily make an "off-brand" remake, and most people won't miss anything specific. You wouldn't be able to just go make a knock-off Pokemon and have it work, even though the demand for it on PC is high.

And in the latter case, it's got to be a poorly written mess, no 2d platformer could need so much game logic. That's twice the size of the entire Super Metroid cartrige, engine and assets included.

Did we read the same article?

Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort went into. A tiny percentage are hits, but most are forgotten in the deluge.

To me that reads as someone that's fully aware that some people are putting a lot of effort in and making good games (Unity or not), but is upset by the realization that quality doesn't seem to be nearly enough. The problem is not (just) that a lot of crap is being released, but that a lot of everything is being released, good and bad. So much so that even the good things can't make good money because supply has so far outstripped demand.

It's sort of like the Netflix queue problem. I'm continuously adding things to my Netflix queue that look interesting, but my time to actually watch them is such that my chance of getting through even a majority of the queue is almost nil.

- In the 80's and 90's when PC games where simple enough.

- At the beginning of Steam

- At the beginning of the App Store and the Play Store

At those time, there wasn't that much competition so while it was still hit or miss, you still had a decent chance to be successful as a single-person indie developer.

There are no "off days". There is no "solution" for this title, except maybe a total visual makeover, which is probably out of the question. Some titles fail, end of story.

> Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish.

It doesn't look okay, it looks bad. Few people will tell this to someone's face, and that's part of the problem. Programmers often can't tell.

"More polish" is the last thing the game needs. It needs a makeover or be shelved. Just call it "done" and use it as a portfolio piece, it's good enough for that, any more polish is a waste of time.

I would love to download a list of all games on Steam in .csv (or other simple tabular data) format. Is it possible to write a scraper? I want name, link, genre, price, platforms, and votes/installs if available.

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; although sometimes money as well) to scratch an itch.

And trying to recoup at least a part of those losses by selling the result is not unreasonable, but it should be considered a best-effort optimization. In the end, you still end up paying for the privilege of, essentially, having other people admire your work. It reminds me of some sci-fi story I vaguely remember from a long time ago, about a true post-scarcity society where everything is free, except for other people's attention, which therefore becomes currency. There's nothing else to do for humans other than arts, so everyone is doing that - and now you're paying someone to e.g. read your book, and then they can use that money to pay someone else to look at their painting etc.

Nope, nope, and nope.

Stardew Valley has a notable indie publisher. There was marketing on various internet communities (reddit, 4chan, etc) leading up to the months of release. There it can pass off as organic word of mouth. Terraria was marketed months before release. As for Minecraft, Notch himself was throwing his game around a load before it got released and using anonymity to drive interest--it was the most organic of the 3.

Other notable indie games like Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy also had especially significant marketing efforts behind them. And let's not forget Fez.

Most indie breakout hits aren't miracle successes. The just have very clever and modern marketing methods. They're not wasting money on magazine ads and gaming news sites banners like AAA studios do.

Bullshit claim. They did really clever marketing where they provided the beta release beforehand to few prominent twitch streamers, and in my knowledge also did all kinds of other pre-release hype, community building etc. I'm pretty sure also the other titles invested quite a lot of time, smarts and money towards marketing.

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

... ish.

You can certainly think of the prolonged free alpha (and beta?) as marketing

The GP makes a point that pewdiepie picking up this game would result in thousands of sales whereas, although I'm basing this purely on watching the gameplay video, I'd have to say maybe: I don't think pewdiepie, or any other major YouTube reviewer, would pick this up because it's not distinctive enough.

This is especially the case when Infinitroid is going up against games like Dead Cells within the same genre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbfxPptEU6M. Infinitroid is an impressive piece of work but, as a game, I don't think it comes off well in the comparison.

There are markets where quality is of much less importance, such as enterprise software. How else does a company like Deltek survive? Answer: there aren't that many viable competitors and they're all just as crappy. Then it's down to the quality of and investment in the business development and sales process.

This doesn't seem to be a disagreement? Quality is necessary for a successful indie game, but that's very different than being sufficient.

I can easily imagine a world where Stardew Valley failed, but I can't imagine a world where Hunt Down The Freeman succeeded. Given the sheer rate at which new games are released, I expect that a majority of polished, fun indie games fail or at least don't see major Terraria-tier success. Heck, half of my Steam library consists of clever, well-executed indie games from Humble Bundles that got near-zero coverage and sold near-zero copies. Orwell, Antichamber, Distance, and a lot of others all had the quality to sell much better than they did.

And beyond that, I think our standards for quality are usually biased by whether a game succeeded. Factorio is absolutely full of grainy, repeated textures, but took off just fine. Dungeons of Dredmor crashes constantly and went through three major expansions without fixing fundamental bugs like "this skill doesn't function", but it's a hugely successful and widely-praised indie title. Subnautica is constantly criticized for just sort of aimlessly ending. It's easy to look at a failed game and say it didn't sell because it was buggy, or looked ugly, or had a weak ending, but all of those things are present in lots of hugely successful indie games. Above some minimal threshold like "no unbearable flaws, one or more excellent elements", it looks to me like luck and marketing are absolutely crucial factors.

Let's agree to disagree then.

If we didn't have to worry about money, then fewer of us would have to... worry about money when making art.

Also wondering if support for memorizing equations would be straightforward.

Nearest example I can think of, mySpace was where she got noticed so that dates her breakthrough to a good decade ago.

Adele was legitimate however others have pretended to have an Adele grade story. Lily Allen also claimed to have been discovered on mySpace but her dad was rock and roll celebrity so her efforts can be dismissed as nepotism. Often these links to rock and roll celebrity are not obvious because performers use stage names that sound like real names. Their children don't use their parents fake surnames.

I'm not a marketing expert tho, but I can't think of any way to force word-of-mouth onto people.

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. loans to the government and 2. open market operations. Guess who gets the first dips into these two huge pots of newly created money?

In the case of government money (loaned by the Fed), big corporations get a huge chunk of that money pot because they get all the lucrative government contracts. In the case of open market operations; big finance firms like Goldman Sachs and big traders with insider information are the first to get their hands into that pot.

Basically that money which is meant to 'trickle down' isn't actually doing that; instead it appears to be trickling back up to government officials who are enacting policies that benefit corporations and increased centralization of wealth.

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!

I've experienced many marketing failures for video games as well (both games I made myself and games I worked on for other companies), I should be an expert on it by now. Guess that means I should make a new game and apply all those lessons I learned :P.

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.

This has not been my experience at all. The opposite, in fact. I briefly did hiring at a medium sized game studio. We preferred to hire indie devs with completed games over those with AAA studio pedigree specifically because we can verify that the indie dev actually built stuff himself. He could provide code when asked and talk intelligently about it.

AAA studio developers couldn't share any code (for obvious reasons) and it can be hard to pin point exactly what they did on any given project. When a studio can put anywhere from 10 to 100 developers on a single project, authorship gets fuzzy.

That said, I would discourage the indie dev in question from pursuing a job in the industry. Why would you jump aboard a sinking ship? 1000 people in the games industry have been axed in the last year alone[0].

[0]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-...

I don't know why you created this account in order to post your fake story.

But anyone who has ever worked anywhere professionally will see that you have no idea how it works or even what your job title is. (Hint: it's "recruiter".)

These games have the extra depth and detail that cause the kinds of emergent gameplay and "storybuilding" that people are talking about.

I think this is the best way to do a random dungeon roguelike with a story.

That said, I wouldn't sell Sproggiwood on its story in particular, just the arrangement of everything. The game is fun because it's a good bite size style of roguelike for a phone with interesting/fun mechanics in play.

What do you base this statement on? There are several classes of games where this is definitely not true.

The first one I see is "Fantasy Farming: Orange Season"[1]. Looks very similar to Stardew Valley, review average is 96% positive, but it only has 61 reviews (a good general indicator of sales) vs Stardew Valley's 86,000.

I'm sure it's probably not as good as Stardew Valley, but one has probably 1400x the sales of the other.

It did also release after Stardew Valley which is a problem. You can certainly benefit from being a first to fill a niche that people are missing. I wonder if the Stardew Valley dev had taken another year to release and Fantasy Farming had released first, if things would be the same.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/416000/Fantasy_Farming_Or...

When you're committing 1000 hours of your free time to building a game from scratch, spending 30-40 building your own (hacky, not that great) animation pipeline for the learning experience is worth it over a £90 plugin. You don't really win this on cost/benefit over and above getting someone excited by the possibilities of your tool. Worth checking out Buildbox[0] for example.

Obviously studios are a different beast and it make sense for parts of their workflows to be custom. If you want to get a start in the goldrush, sell pickaxes, not JCBs.

[0] https://www.buildbox.com/

From Fledgling Founder to 7-Figure Deals with Stephanie Hurlburt of Binomial

Stephanie Hurlburt (@sehurlburt) shares the story of how she went from being an employee to being half of a 2-person startup that sells software to gaming companies, and all the steps in between. Learn how she quit her job, met her cofounder, landed lucrative contracting gigs, built a product, learned about sales, and stayed sane while doing it.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/

As an indie developer, you need to maximize that market coverage (and develop with portability in mind).

Having said that, it's probably not the primary reason why his game failed.

Also, it is a legit thing to point out when and developer complains about the lack of sales.

The relatively stable exchange rates can be explained by entirely orthodox inflation targeting together with purchasing-power-parity pretty well.

Yup, a lot of "game logic" is in fact bookkeeping, i.e. self-inflicted complexity. It's not necessary, but is what happens when you overdo it (though IMO it's more often a symptom of using more frameworks and libraries than less).

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.

It's like rotten tomatoes. 2001: A Space Odyssey [0] has 93% on RT, Pick of the Litter has 100%. I'm sure Pick of the Litter is a fine film, but clearly there's a sense in which it's a lesser movie compared to 2001 by general consensus, despite what the percentages would indicate. Now the case of stardew valley and "the other farming simulators on steam" is not so extreme but that's what I'm getting at.

[0] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1000085_2001_a_space_odysse...?

[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pick_of_the_litter

You may be right that a good name or a different engine won't save a game, but I don't think the game you chose as your point is one to demonstrate that.

> But people really like that game.

It seems most people haven't played it.

And there are often game with, say, awful graphics, that are awesome to play. It happens. That doesn't mean you should bank on it.

And then there are some players who can win virtually every game they play: https://alt.org/nethack/ascstreak-360.html

That's right, Tariru has won 61 times in a row. So that makes my 100 losses 'avoidable' in some sense, which spurs me on to do better. It only requires luck if you play inattentively :)

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 some smaller distros which has their own undocumented quirks, they'll ask for 32 bit versions (0.0015%) to run on ancient machines that aren't really powerful enough to run the app anyway, and there goes the rabbit hole.

(In the meanwhile, Windows users are 85%, Mac OS is 13%. We're talking about fractions of fractions a percent here when you move out of Ubuntu x64)

These features will be framed as "You're supporting Ubuntu, getting it to work on this {{similar_distro}} is so close, you should do it and you'll have a lot of users". It's not that they're wrong or malicious — it's just that their concept of a lot of users is a whopping multitude of three people.

I'm also purposefully ignoring the more acrid side of the Linux community where they'll call you names, find your personal email, and make sure it's the first thing you read in the morning for not pulling heroics to make it work for their distro of choice (0.0000075% user base).

All in all, not worth it, really. Not financially, not logically. Not from a human point of view, either.

Here are a few things I've found helpful if you're making a desktop app for Linux:

- Consider charging Linux users for support. This is justifiable because for every Windows support request, there are likely 10 people that experienced the problem and haven't written to you about it, for Mac, 2-3, but for Linux, very likely you're only helping that single guy only. This is the best way to do this, but since my app is free, I don't really want to set up a payment infrastructure.

- Make your app free, and ask Linux users to either make their own builds from unpacked releases, or pay for support for their distro on a rolling basis. You don't really expect anyone to take the latter, but it does wonders to cut down on requests in which people demand you support their favourite obscure distro of choice with no help or support from them.

That said, I still provide Snaps, as it's the closest I can get to a universal Linux runtime. This exposes me to requests to provide AppImage, Flatpak, and some other stuff even then, but it's way better than trying to support distros directly. [0]

[0] I tried to support AppImage, I gave up after a full day of trying. Flatpak had similar issues. One of the core developers of AppImage reached out trying to debug, and I helped him as much as I could — but the point is, while the intentions are pure, and I'm glad for the effort, this is deeper and deeper into the red in terms of price / performance.

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.