Could I make a living being an Indie Game Dev?

Exactly. Generally, though, it boils down to the issue of: Does my advertisement banner/text/trailer/whatever manage to pique the interest of my target audience? If the answer is no, the answer is going back to the drawing board and figuring out what could work better. If it still doesn't work, well, then you may really misjudge your target audience or it may not even exist at all. Which sucks - because it means that instead of reevaluating your marketing efforts, you need to go back one step further and reevaluate your business plan.

 

Absolutely. And to be clear I am not a marketing expert for sure. When I write things on here it is based on 17 years ago I released a shareware game and it did not sell many copies. Certainly less than 100 copies total at $7.99 (which crazily seems no worse than average today probably). So I took a break and thought and just played around with dev. Then finally I decided I obviously can't just make a game but also need to understand how to market the game. So I then spent a little over 7 years studying direct marketing and Internet marketing, copy writing, etc to build content websites business with affiliate sales and so forth to generate money.

Anyway yes I tell people the one thing I really took away from that experience is test test test. Only way I know to succeed at this stuff or life in general for that matter. I basically see my whole life this way in all areas. A series of experiments. Do a test. Look at the result. If the result is closer to desired outcome keep that and do another test. If worse then don't do that again. Change and test again. Basically... do a test keep the best axe the rest. A motto for life success in general. Lol

 

I apologize for the misunderstanding. I hope it cleared things up for you, however.

Thank you for your time.

 

I think it just went "cold"; there simply wasn't interest. I have to re-iterate that the news was exposed to hundreds of thousands of individuals, so I can guarantee you that people knew very well about it. Some coverage expressed excitement about it, too. I looked at the traffic on the game page. It has less than 1,000 views on Steam. Less than 50 for every other platform. Clearly people were simply not interested in going to it.

 

This is only the beginning. At the very least if you make a different puzzle game then you'll have two for a bundle which may be more appealing.

I always try to look at this stuff scientifically but every time I see things events that cannot be reproduced very much like Jeff made a point to mention in his video covering their story.

There are so many factors and every time one of those factors is based on a decision made by another person... well that can be seen as "luck" or a fluke because it's outside our direct control. And other people play a huge role in the success or failure besides just the target market potential customers I mean.

So what's next for you?

 

I think I just saw one of the most epic game trailers that I have ever seen!

 

I still think you made a mistake, you targeted your game to the wrong people. (Opinion)
Were you making this to mobile, you would have a much bigger audience, who actually like this type of games and there would probably more response.
It's a casual game play on a more hardcore device on a more hardcore infrastructure (Steam and whatnot).
I would build this game on mobile and maybe (maybe!) put an afterthought to desktop.

 

I am planning to proceed with Update 1.1 regardless of the state of the game, since 1.1 will address some issues that I feel strongly about (you can view the roadmap off the Discussions link on the Steam store page), and I think I will be happier and more satisfied with my game. It won't change sales or anything since there is no interest in the game, but I'll be a bit more proud of it (don't get me wrong, I'm proud of it already, it was very tough to make).

I will also continue making games, but with relatively very low budget (less $1,000 / game, total), and this will only include assets (no marketing / no PR). I have no choice but to scrap the "Future Projects" on my website and replace it with something else.

My next game, I call it "Shooting Blaster: Big Bang Boom" is just a simple game that I am working on leisurely. I will release this either way, regardless of interest - I just want to do games.

I am still planning to proceed with S.E.T. (a tank game) and once I have some fine features in it, I will put it out as an early access game - if there is interest, I will continue - if not, I will move on.

That's what I have. Once all that is done maybe I will try to engage a community to work together with making a game, but I doubt that will generate interest because nobody will have the patience to wait for a game to get done from start to finish.

Universal Star: Nova Phase is a rather large project, so I can only work on that when I no longer have a mortgage to pay (decades) or if anything of the above is successful enough to support my family.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking of right now - subject to change, of course.

How about you? What's next for you?

 

Obviously you won't engage ordinary people to make a game with you, they don't care about making them, they care about playing them. In general. Although you can build a community if you're doing it right.
I think it would be useful to study what and how Quill18 did in his 'project porcupine':
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbghT7MmckI4_VM5q3va043FgAwRim6yX
Basically he was engaging his audience to play along, design and actually mod his game from almost day 1.
It's a long and hard work, especially if you don't have the base audience when you start.

 

Great music and ShadowK would call this worthy of the title Shiny (I noticed he has left this realm). The "best" fishing game I came across in my near daily YouTube checking out games time is a Russian fishing game. Think it was being translated to English and other languages though. The environments... the soundscape gave me flashbacks to all of those times I went fishing years ago. Very nice visuals even with the common debris floating on water surface leaves and such. The game itself seemed quite well done IIRC.

 

That sounds very good. You have your path mapped out for several years to come it seems.

For me... I have been spending most of my dev time creating game template projects/examples and writing some systems that I released for the community over on the AGK forums. Then about 6 weeks ago while finishing up some work on one of those projects I got the urge to complete a game again for release out in the wild. Haven't done that since 2016 or so.

Been thinking I might sell this one. Which will be interesting to see the reaction since it is ultra low rez 128x90. So I've been working on that and am now focusing on wrapping up the demo release to put out for a round of playtesting, feedback & improvements. I started doing some very light marketing of it on Twitter and seems to be some interest. And of course my dev log is over on the forums. I need to set up pages on GameJolt & Itch. Then do releases there. Possibly make some improvements based on their feedback. Then just maybe I will try out Steam.

It's all just for fun just one more of those experiments like I mentioned in an earlier post.

 

Not to take the thread off track... well only briefly... but where is @Arowx? I remember him posting weekly, if not daily, in General and don't recall seeing a post since I have been visiting the past few days or so. Did @Ryiah and the others jump on him so much he finally just said to heck with it? Lol Maybe he is busy making another game. Very productive developer had like 20+ games done as I remember.

 

He posted Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and logged in today according to his profile, I don't think you need to worry yet


Did @ShadowK delete his account? It's not linking to a profile anymore when I @ tag him.

 

Huh! I will have to look around I didn't notice his posts. He used to make a lot interesting threads.

ShadowK is definitely gone. I came here one day a week or two ago to message him. I don't think I ever had his email address but we talked occasionally here. Anyway I pulled up an old conversation and wrote to tell him about the new CryEngine update to check it out. They did a ton of work not only improving graphics but making it a lot simpler to use as well. Chances are he was already aware but wanted to let him know since he is one of you graphics nutz. Lol Anyway it said Deleted User Guest on his old messages.

 

I guess... I might make a transition to mobile some day... Thank you for your input.

 

That makes me sad, I never got around to thanking him for motivating me to get back into making music. He gave me some great feedback about a year ago and it motivated me to invest in new sample libraries and learning resources, and I think I made some real progress in the last year.

 

Understandable. He was a good fella. Granted his obsession with graphics and not completing a small playable game annoyed me (nothing he hasn't already heard from me). But that was just because he obviously has some great skills and I wanted to experience his work firsthand. Just a tiny medieval hamlet micro rpg even. I always thought would be awesome to see what he would create. BUT maybe he is out there somewhere working on a game. I hope he is and wish him only the best in all his ventures.

 

*rant*
yeah, it's nice looking, unless there's been a major update lately, you won't see much of that 'fancy' stuff in gameplay. But, hold on to your CC tight though. very hard to get ahead without real cash to buy stuff,
and the worst part, you can and will lose those items you bought with real money!
Not the kind of Game mechanic direction I'd like to see Game industry go.

Never thought I'd rage quit a nice relaxing game, sticking with Farming, FS19 here I come.
(a bit OT, but I feel better now... )

 

Yeah I despise this model. I see this and several other games are now bringing the mobile market model to Steam. Offering the game for completely free and then charging continually for IAP and so forth. The morons destroyed the mobile markets with that crap and hate to see them do the same on desktop. I guess it is all down to the customers though. Maybe they like this model because it is FREE FREE FREE up front. End of my rant (this particular time).

EDIT: Ah nevermind. I forgot this is the norm now for AAA games even. I haven't bought a AAA game in many years (other than DOOM couple years ago but the boys dropped over for a visit shortly after and I handed it to them "give this a go!" and never got another copy for myself lol they said it was extremely good and didn't mention needing to buy buy buy crap).

When games all have this kind of crap buy buy buy to make any real progress/make the game truly satisfying that is the day I won't buy a game ever again. If a Diablo 4 comes out with this model I'll stick with D3 and D2.

Hopefully Indies will still offer direct one time sale of great games. I've bought about 200 Indie games the past 3 to 4 years.

 

I thought the trend is selling the game at full price and putting the microtransaction bullshit on top of that. Ah, wrote this before I saw your edit, seems like you are aware.

I had some trouble getting into the new Doom game at first, can't say why exactly. But I agree it's pretty good and "refreshingly far away from modern AAA tropes".

Sorry to hear that! But quite interesting to hear the perspective of someone "ragequitting a relaxing game", thanks for sharing. Maybe try Factorio, that is my chill game right now. Minecraft is good too, but I'm burnt out on that a bit.

 

I think that this might be ignoring some of the subtleties of the issue.

As small developers we don't have the marketing budget of, say, Activision, to be able to reach the majority of gamers on any given platform. "Hundreds of thousands" of gamers is only a fraction of a percent of Steam's active user base. So unless you got the message the the right people, there's no reason to expect that to have any meaningful impact outside of random chance. Subtlety number one is that "people" don't matter unless they're a part of your target audience.

 

Absolutely agree. And this is why for all intents & purposes the scenario of launching and missing the target audience is basically the same thing as not even launching at all. Meaning it can be done all over again. I know many people say the opposite... things like "you get one shot" but I don't believe that. Obviously depends on the exact situation but in the case like you are talking about I think there is probably a lot of value in using this as an opportunity to zero in on that target audience and relaunch. Not only valuable for this specific game but the knowledge gained pays huge dividends going forward for future launches. Anyway good stuff I agree.

 

But how could you verify the assumtion that it's not just 100% the game's fault and it is a problem of the marketing targeting the wrong people? The market is starting to get crowded enough that I'm finally starting to "overlook" game releases that could potentially interest me, but on a large scale I have yet to see an example of a large group of people saying "this game is amazing, unbelievable this gem has been hiding from so many people for months, if only we had known earlier that this existed".
In other words, I think launching another wave of outside-of-steam marketing without radically changing the product first seems like a high risk to be a waste of time to me.

I just noticed something looking at your steam banners:







The first one doesn't tell me anything about the gameplay, not even the genre. But the color choices are all over the place, If I looked at this banner, not knowing anything about the game, I would assume it to look like a basic Unity assetflip with zero artdirection and consistency and wouldn't even click on it. I think that needs to be redone. I would even consider showing just one of the 3D blocks with no text (one that isn't in regular Tetris) with some subtle glows and gradients.

The banner is almost worse, because it tells people "this is literally just Tetris" and the USP - the 3D-ness of the gameplay - is not only lost, but actively obfuscated. I think this also needs to be redone.

You said you only got like 1000 views of your storepage on steam, right? Doesn't steam guarantuee you a much bigger number of pageviews, and you can trigger "visibility rounds" till you reach that number? Could you change those two banners before the next update?

 

You can't verify it 100%, and it's a possibility. Still, with so few people even getting to the store page we can be pretty sure that there is definitely a major issue somewhere before that in the "user journey". Too few people are getting to the point where their decision is based on the game.

That's actually the next "subtlety" which I started to write about (sounded preachy, so I deleted it). The post talks about how "the game" isn't holding interest, but at this stage we have no idea whether it's "the game" or the game's marketing. It could go either way. The point you raise about the banner images is spot on.

What's cheaper, radically changing the product or doing some different marketing? Good games often take years to make. I'd rather try varying the marketing a bit before restarting a multi-year or even multi-month clock for my next attempt at some sales.

Also note that it doesn't have to be outside-of-Steam marketing. For instance, if the banner images turn out to be the issue that's a quick and easy fix.

 

Well this might be a bit controversial answer... but in my view... just about anything that a person makes of reasonable quality (and often even of outright poor quality but having other redeeming factors) has a target market willing to pay for it.

The game looks to be well done certainly as much or more than many other games on Steam that have sold far more than 3 copies. And sometimes at a much higher price (although in this case the gimmick of the game concept & the title itself helped a lot in gaining attention) I am not into the puzzle games though so don't have a deep understanding of the market.

What I do know is there are a lot of people who love playing puzzle type games and willing to spend a lot of money. And there are many abstract style puzzle games on Steam that have done very well. It would seem this game fits in well enough to sell more than 3 copies.

Is it perhaps because it is seen as not original due to the Tetris link and perhaps should have been presented as an entirely different game with nothing to due with Tetris and just let players come to that conclusion themselves? I don't know. I think clearly people can see the uniqueness of it on the landing page itself.

Well that's one consequence of oversaturation. Another one is simply not having an appetite at this time for another puzzle game. That's why I asked if there had been a release of another puzzle game around the same time or release of an update or dlc for an existing popular puzzle game around the same time this game launched. People don't have an unlimited amount of money or time to spend. They can't consume an unlimited amount of content regardless if that content is music, movies, books or games.

If you and I both make & release the same kind of game a few days a part it doesn't really matter if one is even better than the other if everyone swarmed on the first one (hungry for a new game & completely unaware of the second game coming in just days later). Some would buy the second game but it will be a lot less due to they just spent money on the first game let's say yours. And because they are still very much into your game. These things do matter. And is why people have heard countless times to engage and build a fanbase before release. If the majority were waiting for the second game to release they wouldn't have swarmed on the earlier release, see?

As you pointed out it might simply be the marketing material (banners etc) are not doing a good job selling the usp of this game. That kind of stuff needs to be tested. And also re question of game not being good enough that should have been tested to already know the answer. I would hope there were some playtesters of the game that gave feedback and enjoyed the game before it was released.

Marketing is the same... it is a series of tests. You can't just make one thing.... one banner one video agonize over it laboring away for hours and call it done. You need to test. Make one test it. Make another test it. Which generates more interest? Keep that one. And you can continue this to you have maximized ctr and sales conversion. But it is tiring oh it is damn tedious & tiring. Lol

As always these are just my views not to be taken as the one truth even though they are quite true. LOL

 

I'm late to the whole steam game that didn't sell thing, but I'll try to add thing that hasn't been discussed in a certain way.

I have looked at the page and my first reaction was: the theming is all wrong.
This is supported by the marketing compain, nobody played the game, which mean the gameplay isn't at fault, and since puzzle game still sells at least something, then it's a presentation issue.

Gameplay is important, but theming is too, people buy bad games because they were compel to buy it first, if your game isn't bought yoiu fail at just this single point. The problem is how does the theming relate to the audience AND the gameplay? What I'm seeing now is random and generic at best, no amount of marketing can salvage it IMHO. I'm pilling abstract box, and there is monster on the back, there is no visual that link the two (like for example completing stuff sending missile on the monster or just a particle effects) they exist as two different visual style, it's just random.

example:
Being a visual person I automatically reskin the game in my head as a bakery game, you are task to line up patisserie to sell, and in the background you have shot of customer, coworker and manager being impacted by your performance, as clear reward/failure feedback, in a visual style close to cooking mama. I even envision a tutorial sequence where a sleepy looking coworker is sending you the same pattern of goods over and over, up until the boss scold him and wake him up to sped up the pace, and depending on your performance praise or offer you advice as you are the newcomer learning the job.
This integrate teh visual and gameplay and offer some sort of "role" to the player. I'm not saying it's the best solution, just a way to show how it can work all together.

 

Also... it's not easy. Not at all. Making a game people say is hard. I've said it's hard but mainly I am referring to the iterations of play testing & tweaking balancing etc and just the work required to create a solid playable game. But making the game is the easy part in the big picture imo.

I think maybe this is what a lot of "new" people confuse (not directed at anyone specifically just saying in general). Making games is easy but it can be a very tedious long tiring process. And a person can make it way harder than it needs to be with their own personal requirements of the game must have code all written to this standard or graphics all to this standard or audio all to this standard or it must have 500 levels or whatever. I am not knocking those things because I kind of see it now like these are just reflections of that individual.

Anyway... making games is the easy part compared to making money from making games... building a business of games. And I think people sometimes forget to look at it that way.

So I think it is important for people to not feel defeated or like "their game just wasn't good enough" when they fail to make money from the game fail to build a successful business. Building a business is hard. It takes time and effort and it is no different in games.

There are plenty of games out there that if success was based solely on the quality of the game the creator(s) would have a thriving business. Yet they don't. They created a great game very well reviewed yet the game failed to sell. Because making the game is just one part of it.

And just off the top of my head because someone will probably ask for an example... the last case I saw was Arcane Golf. I went to visit their website today and sadly it is now closed. Maybe they will return one day. But just saying they clearly put a lot of love into their game crafting 200 unique levels.

And that brings me to another thing where I often wonder if people are trying too hard. They spend so much time doing so much work they need to make a huge amount of sales to justify all of that effort and money invested. Maybe had they made 60 levels or even 30 levels it would have made a difference. I think maybe people are swinging for a home run constantly and it ultimately works against them. Just thinking out loud.

And I'm not saying the game is perfect / flawless by any means. What I am saying is it probably could have been much better all around had it only had say 30 to 40 levels instead of 200. Some people will love it such as many of the Steam reviews and some will hate it but that is the case with every game. I don't know I guess I am starting to see a pattern with people being too ambitious and it works against them. In general not specifically these people. I think maybe start out modest and work up bit by bit and not swing for the trees from the start is a much better approach.

 

Something I forgot to mention. Since the gameplay is not at fault (yet?) since there was no people playing it (not bought). This mean that you still has the engine and gameplay, and you can recycle it with another theme. So that's less works, the thing is what would be the right theme? You can make mock up trailer and test which one works on specific targeted market, and what return you have on them.

 

You've hit on something I think a lot of folks miss. Once you have done all of this work you are right it can be essentially reskinned rethemed repurposed whatever you want to call it and relaunched. It could make a huge difference to change it up as you mentioned previously. It would be seen as something new & fresh with familiar gameplay elements.

 

When you read the only one bad review of the game (perhaps other people didn't wrote a review when they quit playing the game) , you'll find why the game is not so great.

No mouse alone controls and no key rebinds is clearly a mistake design, like no quick restart.
About graphics, they are not attractive, there is no deep pixel work for the tiles and background.
All tiles are stone them, while they could have used wood , ice and many other themes.
There is no appealing characters and story.

This is how i would make such game ( quality over quantity ) :
- better 2D tiles work and wuality, bigger and more detailed, with more contrast
- some transparent sprites to bring lighting on some levels, some 2D ligthing effects
- cool 2D shader effects for water , lava, power ups, lighting and ball effects
- bigger and more visible ball , customizable ball sprite you can unlock through the game
- creatures in the level to make it more dynamic and bring difficulty up, more interesting
- some backgrounds would be a world scene with character or creatures and animations
- involving story mode with some more npc involved, each npc is a region boss
- world map to unlock new regions giving a sense of progression
- skill tree to unlock some power ups and improve ball controls

I see it as another thousand small game without effort on game personality and no real effort on graphics, i don't think it has been so hard and long to make painting 2D tiles to make some challenge.

 

This is entirely subjective personal opinion though. If you go by there being any reviews that are negative as the reason for a game not being good enough then no game is good enough.

Look at any game that has a decent number of people who have bought it... enough to leave a couple dozen reviews. Chances are at least one of them will be negative. The more people who buy it the more neg reviews there will be.

I m guessing they sold maybe a thousand copies but am not sure. To have 22 reviews generally 1 out of 100 sales might get a review but that would be about 2,200 but it fluctuates so much no way to depend on that.

The issue from their perspective is this game took over 2 years time for 2 people and the amount of sales (money generated) didn't warrant the huge amount of effort put into the game. Initially one person started then he teamed up with a best friend formed the company Gold5Games and either fully redid the game from scratch or just redid graphics and other things while making 200 unique levels

The amount of sales generated (most were from a 10% off sale so be $8.09 per sale). So even if it sold 2,000 copies that is only like $11k after Steam's cut. And $11k for 2 people over 2 years is nothing. Certainly nowhere close to being worth doing it as a business. And it might have sold half that even. Which is still much better than many Indie games are seeing. For many people they would probably love to have as much success as this game had.

Well that's true things can always be better in any game. And the updates they were releasing did address some of these issues as that neg review even mentioned. Some has always been in it such as creatures in the levels. It already has a ton of work put in it and many different things in it. And the coverage I have read even the critics mention it has a lot of good going for it but is flawed. Well nearly every game made is flawed in one way or another. lol

But think of all of the stuff you are asking for there. How much of that is in any of the other games that sold a ton of copies?

Necrosphere is seen as a great game and sold very well and is well recommended by many sites. Still there will are negative reviews on difficulty, controls, collision detection or whatever. There are always people who will not like a game no matter how good or how many other people love the game.

Well this is sad I think. Because I can easily see the amount of work & uniqueness that went into the game from the excellent 90s style graphics (that are mentioned positively by most people actually don't recall any review having a problem with the graphics) to the uniqueness of the game itself, the variety of unique levels with natural hazards, creatures, etc.

 

I don't understand two years for making it, perhaps it was sparse work on free time, not full days work.

Anyway, this remains a small very simple concept and arcade game, like there is thousand on steam or mobile, with very simple not attractive pixel graphics, without nothing make it stay apart from all other small games.

To get success you must make a game that really stand out from all the other thousand crappy or almost average games.



Some games gets your attention at first trailer, this is a sign of possible good success.
This is a retro fps game, i think it will get lot of success, at least to get good revenue for the creator and people that helped him.
The game stand out from all other retro pixel fps, it has veriety levels, lot of different gameplay weapons, lot of work has been put on making graphics style appealing, while gameplay stays basic but enjoyable.

 

@zenGarden I had to update my original reply above. Ran out of time this morning. Busy mornings! lol

 

It could be the game was too niche. I definitely think spending over 2 years creating is the biggest problem. I don't understand that either but it is what we see happen again & again.

I think sometimes people just try so hard spend so much time because they either are afraid to release (or simply their own standards make them keep working) until the game feels perfect to them OR they finally just completely burn out. And by the time either of those are reached they have poured so much time into the game it is impossible to ever get money back to cover it all unless it really wins the lottery explodes and sells a massive amount of copies.

It's another example of if the game had been completed in a much shorter period of time say 4 months by having more experience, better dev processes and cutting out 100 levels... it probably would be a success story and they'd be super excited.

Maybe $8.99 was a bit high for the game as well. Perhaps it would have done much better at $7.99 or $7. But I like seeing them charge a decent price for the game rather than putting it out for 99 cents.

Anyway I am not knocking them. They did it. They completed their game and released it. That is a lot more than many people have done.

Warlock looks cool to me. I might buy that one. This does bring up an interesting point though... perhaps if a person wants to make an Indie business they should only ever make FPS and RPG games. LOL! I would highly doubt that is true and certainly hate for it to be true... but I do think it would have a larger potential audience than a puzzle game, etc.

 

Gotta have a sense of who the audience is. You can't target "everyone" very well. People have posted trailers on this thread saying they're the best trailers they've seen. To me..... boring as hell. Not my cup of tea.

 

Exactly. This happens a lot. Just because YOU or ME or WHOEVER doesn't like a particular type of game doesn't find it interesting doesn't mean it is a bad game.
Bad != We don't personally like it. Lol I think people confuse this often.

I don't like most AAA franchises. In a way to me personally they are "bad games" but not really. I know obviously they are great games for the people who like such games. That makes ALL the difference in the world.

 

Not bad, but it looks like thousand other small pixel mobile games.

I think there is so much tons of small pixel games, people just pass and only focus on the best games that stand out and get press attention.


Those indies making full games themselves, that get constant revenue enough in the long term are perhaps 0.0001% from all millions of game developers making games (crappy and good ones).



Sometimes it's better to get good at one domain only like modeling, animation or coding and get a job in some game company, instead as indie company that must have the obligation to make successful games only because that's risky.

 

Necrosphere is an example of a very successful game. The team has 8 people on it. Formed in 2012. Their first game Dino Zone was a mobile game that surpassed 100,000 downloads. They made 4 more games after that before making Necrosphere which was their sort of pinnacle of using all of their experience to make an excellent game and it was a huge success for them. I don't know how many sales total but I think it did like 20,000+ on Steam alone. Maybe another few thousand on itch and GameJolt.

One thing I find interesting is you keep saying things like "looks like one of thousands of other games"... how is that any different from any other game?

Look at the AAA military FPS games for example. Or RPGs... on a surface level Witcher 3 looks like thousands of other games from Skyrim and Oblivion to Indie rpgs etc. I mean they have characters in a medieval style world. NPCs, gear etc. The AAA military FPS all have people running around with guns and voice overs and explosions, etc. LOL

I guess I just don't see how you can lump all games together in such a broad way. But then I tend to do the same for AAA games especially military shooters because I have no interest in them.

 

There is not that many big good RPG games, in comparison to flood of FPS.
You can stitch together basics playable FPS game in few days perhaps. All with that available tons of assets.
Also, FPS have tendency (specially AAA) of releasing sequels every year, which are almost the same as their predecessors.

 

Fair enough. Just wanted to stress that I meant the trailer and not the game. I have zero interest in fishing games, but I thought the trailer was super fun to watch, and considering how boring I would find a fishing game, it created a respectable amount of interest imho.

Maybe this is a thing of needing to have prerequisite knowledge to be able to appreciate nuances, but once you do, they matter a great deal. E.g. if you don't like metal music, you will likely consider both black metal and death metal to be hard-to-listen-to noise, with barely a diference, but for actual metal fans there is a world of a difference between the two, and many like only one of the two, or would have a preference based on their current mood. Or maybe wine and whiskey are more relatable examples, I don't like any of them and can't appreciate their nuances in taste, and yet I see people pay orders of magnitude higher prices for some bottles than others. I can see why to many gamers all the indie pixelart games look the same, and why to you all the military shooters look the same. But from the perspective of someone who can appreciate nuances in AAA graphics, I can tell you that for a fact that there are not 1000 games on the planet that look like The Witcher 3. And I don't even like the Witcher games, I tried part 1 and 2 and found them incredibly boring...

I fully agree, that's not enough to justify the investment. But do you know examples of studios that have actual long-term sustainable success from cranking out PC games with a 3-5 month dev cycle for several years? What I'm getting at is, that I'm still open to the possibility of there just being "no more money in making games", outside of already established studios or IPs, or the odd lottery-style-success-story that has written "outlier" all over it.
E.g. Kojima can make whatever the hell weird stuff he wants, he will have hundreds of thousands of eyes on his work automatically, because of his legacy. Indies don't have that luxury.
Many barriers to enter the market have fallen, but now the barriers to staying longterm financially sustainable are higher than ever before, and most indies have no clue how to tackle those (and neither do I).

 

That's it exactly. It is the whole target market thing. But it goes way beyond just visuals. When I say looks like a thousand of other games I am talking about game structure, gameplay, etc.

I can see clearly the visual quality in W3 is way beyond what I had when playing Skyrim. I mean that is obvious. But THAT doesn't tell me anything about how good the actual game is and I have played countless games through time that had great presentation for when they were released. I actually always enjoyed medieval fantasy style rpgs greatly. Also played Kingdoms of Amalur and Dragons Dogma 2 on PS3 and those were very impressive visually and great games. I forget which now but one was basically kind of boss / mini boss battles throughout which was innovative and cool and a lot closer to what I always wanted from the combat in such games.

And I don't think every game is great simply because it uses pixel art. LOL There are a lot of terrible 2D pixel art games. There are a lot of bad games period. And there are a lot of great games no matter if they look super impressive or not. All I am saying is you cannot tell if a game is good or bad by looking at the visuals. The visuals are not the game just one aspect of the game.

I might buy W3 and play it one of these days. It might really be a great game. But I won't buy it simply because of the graphics but because I like medieval fantasy rpgs. Will it be an even better experience than Skyrim, KoA and DD2? I don't know until I play it. The thing that has put me off getting it is I read it is an extremely long game... people have even said it is too long. And I don't have time to invest in huge long games and prefer shorter experiences for that reason.

Anyway yes you are right on the nuances thing. Just as a person has to look beyond the cover of the book to find the real content find what is really inside the same is true for a game. The target market loves AAA FPS because they see something in those videos that really appeal to them. I don't see it because I am not in that target market. The target market for a 2D pixel art game sees something in the video that appeals to them. It is a very personal thing. Lot of people loved Owlboy when I watched the videos it looked bland and boring to me so I passed on it.

Anyway it's like Rock, Paper & Shotgun said in their review of Necrosphere...To look at the screenshots, you could be entirely forgiven for seeing yet another pixelly 2D platformer, and wondering why we’d even mention it. While I really like Necrosphere’s chunky pixels and minimalist palette, I also recognise it doesn’t surprise. However, that can’t be said for the rest of this utterly splendid game. A game that shows just two buttons is enough to offer an incredibly deep and complicated experience.

And for me that just hits home. I mentioned this is in another thread very recently. I like games where the inside is surprisingly good compared to what one might expect from the outside. Basically I mean I expect from any game to be much better to play than it looks. Certainly be at least as good to play as it looks. But preferrably to have much more depth and interaction and just fun on the inside than what can be seen on the outside.

So if a game is going to look truly awesome on the outside it better be mind blowingly innovative and have awesome gameplay on the inside. Otherwise to me it is just a facade. It's just a personal thing. And maybe other people are the same way and mistakenly assume just because a game doesn't have an awesome candy coated outside it has a terrible inside. And I know from experience that is not true same as a game can have an awesome "skin" but suck.

I will have to get back to this later.

 

In past I did play many RPG games.Then for many years nothing. I knew I can play only one with getting best experience, for time I got. And I picked W3, as I played previous game too. Thing is, I finished with DLC and it is indeed very long, if you want to immerse yourself. Like myself playing hardest level. But either way, game is very good.
There is story mode (haven't tried), where you can skim through game much quicker, without getting into fights etc.

Regarding indie game dev, I think somebody has pointed out, that PC market is one of best bets atm. On mobile market will get peanuts.I think this is simply because, PC market is more demanding on quality / content. While mobile is rather for quick play, on PC you would like to immerse yourself into the game.

Not sure about console market tho for indies. But potential licences involved, may be the extra hoop to jump over, to even get there.

 

I know of many people who are quietly making money consistently while working on what would be considered smaller games but as far as time frames go it is very hard to say. Most people don't seem to track hours or if they do they do not share it and speak in broad terms "1 year", "2 years" etc which has no meaning particularly when often they are working on multiple games at the same time

Honestly I think it is probably the number of people capable of finishing a solid game in 3 to 4 months working part-time is a small percentage and of those they are too busy and too smart to share it on a forum visited by millions of game devs wanting to make money. Lol

I think I am going to put it to the test but honestly if consistently made a solid income from my efforts I think it would be foolish to share it here. Maybe years later sure. I think most people know... if someone came here and said I have been making these tiny games for the past 3 years making a living from it sharing what they do... instantly they would have dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of people copying them. And that is just plain stupid. Do it if you are ready for your business to end. Lol

 

I would consider that to be a very high risk strategy for marketing a game. It would seem more logical to me to try and make as much of the gameplay's appeal visible in screenshots and trailers as possible. Nowadays I would almost go so far as to say, "If a player can't see the appeal of the game from a well chosen 5-second gif, don't bother making it.". That doesn't mean it needs to be "pretty", but I've seen an eye-opening gdc talk recently about a mobile games designer who optimizes the UI design of his games so that people who see someone playing it on the subway, can immediately "understand it", and turn this kind of discovery into a primary marketing vector.



Here is another GDC talk that has some interesting bits in it:

@neoshaman there's a dude in the talk who made a food game, that had some gifs of his experiments go more or less viral, and he then used that interest to launch a kickstarter and actually make it into a proper project. Reminded me a bit of your suggestions for block pit 3d.

@GarBenjamin another dude in the talk makes "hardware games" and rents them out to museums and other venues, some interesting new ways to monetize gamedev work, and one of his games is a minimalist 1-dimensional dungeon crawler - I thought you might like this.

Good point!

 

For business purposes there is true to it. No one really wants additional potential competition. I think some of selfishness is needed, to be somehow successful .

 

Agree completely. I guess I wrote it poorly. What I mean is I expect the game inside to be as good or better than the game outside. Surely the gameplay and reasons for buying the game need to be shared. But I mean things like on Steam I have seen some games that literally have videos of nothing but cinematic sequences for example and people comment on the discussion to show some gameplay. Lol. That is like an extreme example of what puts me off.

But if I see some solid interesting gameplay in a game with modest visuals I feel the odds are better the dev has focused more on gameplay and it may even be better than the videos present it to be. On the other hand if I see a huge focus on visuals I think there is a better chance the video is making the game look better than it really is... covering just the very best parts etc and hiding the bad. And I have encountered this in practice too.

I guess I see it more like don't promise any more than can be delivered. If anything under promise and deliver more than they expect. And for people completely ignoring my ultra low rez games simply because of the visuals that is fine & expected.

Those are the people I don't care about. LOL - I don't mean that in a bad way I mean they are not the target audience so their opinion of the game is irrelevant. I'd encourage them to find other games that have the eye candy they seek.

Not that I would be intentionally making no effort on visuals because I would of course. In my current project I have done 2 or 3 iterations on polish now. But bottom line is will always be an ultra low rez game and I am not going to waste time obsessing over the visuals when I should be spending that time playtesting and improving the actual game itself for the people who took a chance on the game despite the visuals or because they actually liked the visuals as is.

Thanks I will check out the video tonight.

 

Witcher 3 is not the same as Dragon Age 3 , same medieval theme, but very different environments design, very different characters and gameplay.

About indie games i also only notice games that i got interest in and i pass others.

 

I agree. I was using that as a blanket coverage of a game being like thousands of others. Every game is like other games to some degree and will likely be increasingly more so as time passes and more games are made.

Also agree and think that probably every person does this. Occasionally trying out something different but usually not.

EDIT: I snipped out the rambling reflections on the past.

 

I think this is the "sad" truth. I believe @Ony mentioned this recently that truthfully everyone making games (at least for your target market) is a competitor. Definitely agree this is the truth regardless if it sounds selfish or not.

I know there are people who think it comes down to do you have a view of abundance or scarcity. If you have a view of abundance then you will see it like there are so many people there is more than enough business for every person to make a living. And I just think that is a naive view. It is an awesome concept and would be fantastic if it was true. But I think it just doesn't take into account the huge number of people (literally millions) who would be making games for a living if they could.

Any market can only support so many businesses. More businesses can come in but there comes a point where there are so many businesses nobody can actually make a living from it. And there comes a point where so many people are selling in the market even if they are nowhere near as experienced and good at it as the long established businesses they hurt the established businesses just through sheer numbers of them being there.

I actually read a post in a forum somewhere maybe a year or so ago just random browsing a game dev forum seems like it was an HTML game dev forum maybe. Anyway a person was saying exactly this... they had apparently shared something on the forum they were doing to make money and within a few weeks they started seeing whatever it was however they were making money there were dozens of other people all there doing the same thing. They said "that's the last time I post on a public forum trying to help someone out. This is ridiculous".

 

If you're interested, you can look at the music industry to get a glimpse of what the gamedev future can easily turn into. That market is so saturated, most musicians can't get significant numbers of people to listen to their work, even if they give it away for free. The "commercial market value" of music in the public eye has gotten really low. And in the professional film composer circles you might as well give all your tricks away publicly, because in the end, contacts matter so much more for getting jobs than actual skill does.