I need some advice about developing (choosing) my first Steam game

Hi there!

I set myself a deadline by the end of the year to decide which one of my game ideas I'm going to go with for my first commercial (Steam) game. Ideally, that will be the game that will "launch" my game studio which has been a dream of mine. I've been mostly researching and testing during the last few months and I came up with 3 ideas. I'd be very grateful for any advice that you can give me on the matter.

GAME #1: Multiplayer Turn-based Strategy

Pros:
- Best ROI and commercial viability in the long run (according to my research)
- I have the full game scope (GDD) ready and also have tons of ideas for future expansions/DLC/updates/new versions
- I've been fine-tuning that idea for years and even tested a few mechanics/rules
- Replayability

Cons:
- Multiplayer (never done this before; I'm not concerned about server cost too much since it's a turn-based game. I'm more concerned about lack of experience, learning curve and dev time).

====================================================================

GAME #2: 2D Platformer Puzzle where you control a boy who speaks in rhyme (riddles) while telling the story and giving you the puzzles

Pros:
- Solely singleplayer
- Prior experience with 2D Platformers
- While I don't have the GDD completed, I have a decent amount of content figured out (puzzles and riddles)
- Rich story

Cons:
- Commercial uncertainty (it's not really a niche category, very risky category according to my research and vision)
- I'll need a good artist as a partner to make this the way I envisioned it

====================================================================

GAME #3: 2D Top-Down Puzzle Sci-Fi game where you control a spaceship, exploring in space and searching for a Wormhole

Pros:
- Solely singleplayer
- I always had a strong interest in astrophysics and this game will give me the chance to apply a few concepts (both real-word and fiction) that I love
- Rich story
- Sound. Space games give you so much room for creativity on the sound front.

Cons:
- While I see this more viable than #2, I doubt it can be as successful as #1.
- Relatively new idea, therefore I don't have it fully figured out


Thanks in advance for any comments and advice!

 

If you thinking about studio, and making profit anytime soon, I would go first for something simpler (single player).
Try yourself first, if this indeed is, what you want to do. It will allow to explore all required aspects for publishing game.

For multiplier, you need players which are going to play. But who will play, if no one knows you yet?

How long you want take, for first release? Full time 3 months, halve year, year+?

 

Attractive small game might take you a year to develop.

If it is your first game and you want to gain experience + some money, than I would go for simple 3d game.
For example "escape room" first person perspective.
Such a simple game could be also released on different platforms without struggle.

 

"You can't play an idea".

Pick whichever one you think you can actually develop and start working on it. If you've never developed a complete game before (from zero to release) then I wouldn't waste time thinking about market research, profitability, or any of that stuff right now. Personally I also think GDD's are a waste of time. Just start working on one of the game ideas. Maybe work on all 3 and see which one takes off and go with that.

 

Making money in 2019 in game dev is really tough. Get a release under your belt (or two or three) then start to consider the market.

If you compare the ROI on any of those ideas against like working minimum wage (us), you are much better off flipping burgers. If you want to do it for fun - go for it. If you want to build towards being able to run a business, go for it. If you are going into this expecting to be able to make even $5/hr - I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Realistically, until you are highly skilled and competent (in all aspects of dev, including pr), I would expect game dev to lose you money.

 

Thanks everyone for jumping in!

In terms of ROI estimates are mainly based on Steamspy data. I've been following several indie competitors since launch and several non-AAA big fishes. I'm making my calculations based on my promotion/marketing plan.

In terms of development, I feel confident that I can develop any of these 3. I must say that I don't have any experience with multiplayer and that's why #1 is the only one I can't have realistic estimate on.

In terms of timeframes, I don't plan on working full-time, although I am a freelancer and since I charge relatively high rate on my main job, I can afford to only work ~ 20 hours. I'm not in a rush, I'd rather spend 3 years developing a viable game, than waste 1 year on one that wasn't the right choice (although I appreciate that risk of failure is involved no matter what I think is the right choice).

In terms of distribution, marketing and promotion, I have some experience in a similar market which I hope can be handy to a certain extend. I am always willing to learn, capture & analyze data and pay for consultancy when needed.

As arrogant as it may sound, I believe that most developers and studios who can't make the cut are ones that lack creativity when it comes to marketing, or who don't know their niche well enough. Of course, my sample is relatively small on this matter (based mainly on people who I know or follow), so I might be wrong.

 

Multiplayer makes a game much more complex and time consuming, and the testing required for the game is much greater than a single player game.

Of those choices I'd choose #3. It sounds like the type of game where you could choose an art style where you could use simple graphics you can make yourself (maybe even primatives done creatively) or 3rd party assets. Good luck!

 

Whichever you do it will be a lot of work. I would choose the project you are most passionate about. Good luck!

 

Have you finished a game before? If not then I suggest picking the smallest non-trivial idea you've got and just doing that, for the reasons others have stated. Skill at creating games isn't the only thing that matters, but it's a pre-requisite for everything else.

This doesn't mean you can't get some practice in at the other stuff along the way. In fact, it's great to see you researching this like a business, so thumbs up for that. It's a creative industry, though, so your foundation has to be solid creative work.

Are you only looking at success cases in your research? Also, what do you consider to be a success?

Lets be clear here: they are all commercially uncertain. This is a risky business to be in. People who work in games generally don't do it just for the money. The smart ones realise that money is also important and they make it a part of their priorities, but if you're here just for money then I suggest broadening your research to other potential industries.

 

Just be aware that the majority of developers on Steam aren't even making minimum wage with their games. I highly recommend watching the following video and setting your expectations to a realistic level rather than just reading the numbers off of an analytics website which can be misleading.

Spoiler: GDC 2018 - A Realistic Dive into Steam Sales

 

If you still have the courage to forge ahead after all that, Ryan Clark has good advice on how to choose which game idea to develop:

 

It is extremely difficult for most indie devs to release multiplayer games on Steam. Not just the technical challenges, either. I am actually talking about the marketing challenges. Steam players expect game developers to make sure there are plenty of online players, and that is really hard for indies. So my general advice is to focus on delivering single player experiences.

As for choosing which game idea to build, you should make a small prototype of each one and then release a YouTube video of each of them. See which idea generates the most excitement. This should give you a general idea how well the ideas might come across when influencers play them on YouTube or Twitch. If one of your ideas creates measurably more buzz in early prototype videos, it is likely it could do well in future videos as well.

For these early videos, make them short (maybe 30 seconds), and build them as quickly as possible. Don't worry about building and polishing a working game. Just try to build some part of the idea to show it off, so you can get relative feedback regarding the ideas.

 

I would go with idea #3, though I don't think any of these ideas are great from purely market perspective.

Idea #2

Worst idea. 2D platformers are everywhere, and every man and his dog has one on steam, each one more achingly beautiful and painfully unprofitable than the last. See this video:

Specifically this slide:



as well as articles such as these:

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanHayes/20170106/288790/PONCHO__A_Postmortem.php

Idea #1:
Multiplayer is a bad idea. You'll be listening to the crickets on your servers, fielding negative reviews saying that servers are dead (which makes people steer clear and the servers get even deader), and frantically trying to put together a single player version before your game is completely old news, so you can scrape together a deposit for a loan to replace all the money you lost.

That said, the niche (turn based strategy) is strong and small enough that you have a chance of building a community of enthusiastic people, although I wouldn't count on pulling it off.

Idea #3:
Best of the three, top-down is a better bet in my opinion than 2D platformer. I don't think 2D is a good idea though at all. But the concept of exploring a large world is essentially a good one, though it might not sound like it. Let me explain.

My philosophy for making a successful game is very simple. You have to do something that not many people are doing. Forget clones of standard 2D games, runners, platformers and all that. If you really want to stand out, you have to choose something with a high barrier to entry.

Now, the barrier you choose has to fit in with your strongest skill set. You say you are into astrophysics, I'm going to guess you are good at mathematics and are either already a programmer or wouldn't have a hard time learning to program if you wanted to. You also say you will 'need an artist' so I imagine that's not your strong suit.

My suggestion would be to create a large-scale space exploration game that runs more along the lines of a simulation than a drama. These kinds of things are not easy at all to make from a technical perspective for the average developer, and they fit right into the sort of interests you say you have, so motivation shouldn't be terribly difficult. There are also some very successful (despite being in my opinion quite artistically deficient) games in this space such as Avorion, and players tend to be more interested in being able to do a lot of things than in appearance, which fits your programming strengths.

My own game is more of a balance between art and programming (a space combat/trading game of the Rebel Galaxy sort) because I can do both reasonably well. Combined they definitely have a high barrier to entry (I've done a lot of research and haven't found many well-made games of this type, and some relatively popular despite not being, in my opinion, very well made). In fact creating a technically demanding game with good visuals seems to be a very hard barrier in itself.

So that's my perspective. I know many people will say "start off with an endless runner" or something similar, and the point definitely has merit from a purely statistical standpoint of your likelihood of being able to finish the game (motivation notwithstanding) but I assume you are looking for a bigger kind of success, so if you have a high pain threshold I say tackle the bigger beast and you'll have a better chance of actual profitability.

 

I'd be curious to see what you're using as a baseline comparison w/ steamspy.

My guess is that you're being incredibly generous with your comparisons.

The genres of games you're talking about are super easy to produce and relatively low effort. The genres are flooding at the moment on steam. For example, the market for platformers has pretty much been destroyed in the last two years by the steady influx. There are a crazy number of puzzle platformers being released. I wouldn't be surprised if multiple are released per day at this point.

Steamspy is not going to produce good numbers for the scale of release you are likely to have and how you recalculate income based on steamspy units is probably wildly optimistic.

I could be mistaken, but if you had a more solid grasp on the subject I seriously doubt you'd be asking this kind of question here in the first place.

 

You've told us nothing at all about these games aside from the most barebones details. What differentiates these ideas from the loads of other games in these genres out there?

 

To be fair, you can make money with a completely derivative project. What matters most is quality of execution.

That's another reason that it's very hard for amateurs right now, the quality floor is going up because of so much competition.

 

I mean, you can, but that's exceptionally rare for a first commercial release. Like, moreso than making money on your first commercial release at all.

 

I disagree. I think that a first release is much more likely to make money with a close to pure clone of an existing game than otherwise.

Truth is, game design is very difficult, and if you're also learning production skills - having to make so many difficult design choices while also learning the ropes on everything else is much more likely to result in a terrible product.

Using an existing game as a 1-1 template (with some degree of reskin) will probably make you like ~$10k on a first release if you do a borderline competent job. I would expect much less from something novel.

Like, if you can get a 75% positive, you're ok - dropping into mixed you're DOA. Much more likely to drop into mixed reviews if you're taking on too much game design without core competency.

 

Ok, but how much skill does it require to get "a close to pure clone" of a good, polished game? You mention a 1:1 template... that's a heck of a lot of work, and in the case of most successful games you're going to have to replicate stuff made by a team of people far more experienced than you. That's not easy for a first timer!

 

The alternative is to do all the stuff you mention while also tackling game design.

Despite what most people think, game design is extremely hard to do well. Especially without years of experience, and seeing the whole production cycle through multiple projects.

 

Is it? You're talking about competing on quality as if it's the only option. There are other ways to compete. Making a unique product, targeting a niche audience, etc. I completely agree that game design is hard, but I don't agree that it is harder than a first timer taking on experienced developers head-to-head at their own game in an established market. That sounds like madness to me.

Do you think that Call of Duty is made by teams of hundreds with budgets of millions because they want to? No, they do it because that's what's required to compete on quality at their level of the market. A game like Super Hot can still come along and make a big splash, and they didn't do it by going toe-to-toe with established competitors. They did it by being niche, and in doing so making sure that they didn't need Call of Duty levels of anything to succeed.

 

The alternative to that, however, is "why would I play this when there's all these other games that do this one thing but much better." I will always go with "space shooter inspired by Sinistar where you have to land on him and destroy him from the inside on foot" even if it's a janky mess over "space shooter inspired by Sinistar."

 

Derivative products of swamped genres are very hard to take to the races, because the level of skill required to pull them off usually means you're going to be a veteran anyway.

The truth is that at the top level of any genre you will make tons of money. There is no bad genre to choose when you have the ability to create a very, very good game. Otherwise the genre wouldn't exist. People do not buy games in proportion to the fraction of the market that they make up. They buy them in proportion to how much better they are than their competition. And the amount of competition and the level of quality at the top are correlated.

There are however bad genres when a game is 'good enough'. This is why for a relative beginner who is able to do a specific thing that is difficult for most people really well, I suggest using that to enter an area where there is relatively much less competition. And plotting competition level to game difficulty is not linear, not by a long shot.

Everything that an indie does must be targeted toward differentiating themselves and putting themselves in the spotlight. Unless you're learning the basics of Unity, or you really, really like those games, stay away from making endless runners and platformers just so you can say you aren't one of the statistics of devs who aimed too high and burned. Nobody is handing out revenue for playing it safe.

 

Can we get some input from some industry vets? And/or those with industry jobs? All I hear is indie/hobbyist devs saying negative things about how profitable game dev is... games industry is $10x Billion a year these days, where could all that money be going?

 

Like in many industries most of the money goes to the big names (i.e. Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, King, Tencent, Niantic, etc). The OP is not saying they have garnered 10 million in investment to establish a publishing company or big studio, they are looking to build something mostly by themselves augmented with some freelancers as needed, i.e. they are an indie.

Most of the people posting have exactly that experience themselves, freelancing, building and releasing their own games, etc. Thats far more relevant than hearing from someone who has a nine-to-five in a studio (although there is plenty of that experience here too).

The OP isn't going to be producing a blockbuster AAA console title, they will be making niche indie games, and competing with literally millions of other developers releasing thousands of games daily. Its rather naive to think that none of these thousands of releases have 'creating marketing', and naive also to think that there is more than a moonshot chance of a first release being successful*.

(*Collective wisdom suggests the most reliable indicator of indie success is how many games you released before the current one.)

---

That said, to the OP I say, if you have the time and inclination: go for it! Worst case you learn something, and maybe you will have just the right mix of quality, marketing and luck to make some cash along the way.

 

I don't see it as negative. There is always opportunity for those who face the circumstances of what needs to be done to achieve it. There is 10 billion dollars of opportunity out there, waiting for whoever wants to come and get it. It's just not loaded toward the beginning of the graph in terms of difficulty and hard work.

 

This. Outside of the rare cases where a game made far more than it was worth (eg Minecraft), the only developers making millions are the developers able to invest and market millions. Indie developers are typically limited to thousands invested and many don't even market so the return is going to be in the thousands.

This is one of the reasons I like to point towards Jeff Vogel and his success as an indie developer. Because even though he's been at it for decades and has built himself an audience he's still not making millions. Only thousands. That said he might just achieve it right before he's ready for retirement.

 

These are some great points and suggestions. Thank you all!

 

Here is some of the background for the superhot team:

(https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/375798653/superhot)

There's like 4 more members of this studio, how many total releases does this team have between them? 20? 40? This is not remotely an amateur team or an amateur project.

This isn't to say that its impossible for an amateur to come up with some novel design and build out a successful game this way, but I think that in practice this is the worst way to go if you want to put out a title that gets finished, released and finds good reviews.

I think people in general deeply misunderstand just how derivative games are in general. Almost all successful games are largely clone + reskin, and the markets for those reskins is just tremendous. I'm using terminology like "clone" and "reskin" that are generally seen as pejorative, but stop for a minute and really look at game design.

• The core element differentiating most games is aesthetic and theme. Not design.
• The second most important element differentiating most games is the level design.
• The third most important element is content design (abilities, skills, special moves).
• Finally we have actual mechanics.

The simplest path for an amateur developer to releasing a new title is to take an existing title, and vary it slightly across a couple bits. For example, reskinning can dramatically change the aesthetic, this alone more or less makes it an entirely different game to most audience. Custom level design (even if largely derivative) is another low hanging fruit.

Fundamentally this assumes that all players are familiar with all games. There is a huge wealth of very good, but largely unknown games that you could clone that almost nobody would recognize.

The reality of the matter is that there is a huge audience on steam of collectors, who have hundreds or thousands of titles, and they'll buy your game if it meets some minimal criteria (generally a review score that is above mixed).

-> As long as your production is reasonably competent, they'll buy your game.
-> The simplest path to a competent production is derivative work.

Its that simple.

 

I wasn't trying to imply that they're first timers, I was using them as an example of competing on something other than quality. They didn't try to be better looking and faster and more badass than Call of Duty, or by being more dynamic than Battlefield, they did it by making a fundamental change to mechanics and looking distinct.

And yes, they're an experienced team. If you want to be successful as an indie that's the level of experience and skill you need to get competitive with, unless you plan on being lucky.

 

I've been thinking on this bit for a while. Were these games profitable?

For games where the answer is "yes", then being profitable despite being "largely unknown" suggests that they did a great job of satisfying a niche. If you're trying to replicate it then you'll either have to compete in that same niche, or pick a new niche and update the overall design accordingly. Both of these paths definitely have potential, no argument there. However, I think it's naive to think that you'll be successful just by releasing a competently developed clone.

For games where the answer is "no" then, short of being a better marketer or sales person, why would you expect cloning an unsuccessful game to result in a successful one?

No worries there from me. I am all for reusing things that work as long as you can provide a new experience overall, and you're absolutely right that in many cases you can do that with relatively small changes and/or different presentation. Doing so is also a great way to learn and/or improve as a designer, even if you're "just" reskinning (because presentation and mechanics are often linked).

Plus, in many cases there are audiences who like particular mechanics, and often what they want is more content based on those mechanics.

 

Largely unknown games aren't going to suddenly become a hot product unless you have the ability to discern whether or not people will actually want to play them, and that's really not something you're going to be able to bank on for your first project.

This isn't really a reality at all. These people are rare and even then most of the time your first commercial product will have so few reviews that it won't even show up in searches. On Steam, this is generally between 50 and 100 reviews. If you're making a derivative product, odds are people are less likely to leave a review in the first place aside from the odd "well, it gets the job done" but even that's rare. The average turnover rate from purchase to review is pretty low.

This assumes a lot too. Plenty of competent games get completely ignored because they're competent but not interesting.

This is... not really true at all? Competency and derivation aren't overlapping circles at all unless you already understand why the product you're deriving from is any good in the first place. We have reached a saturation point for many, many years now where selling a derivative product isn't really something that's going to work super well unless you're targeting the specific audience of "people who don't play games super often" like Jake Birkett does.

 

A friend of mine is also a developer and spent 3 years in researching and getting good 2 to 3 releases under this belt. But it didn't work out with him. He was targeting a small mmo type game. He created the best environment, weapons had amazing physics, camera rotation and everything was so smooth. I played it with him when it was on a launch phase for bugs and other anomalies. But the hosting S*** got him f$#Cked.

 

@Murgilod @angrypenguin

So I think we have disagreement largely due to two differences in perspective.

1 - I think you're both assuming we're talking about cloning successful top end releases. I'm absolutely not. Again, there are literally thousands of games you could clone that almost nobody would recognize. The most egregious clones usually target top sellers, but I'm not talking about that.

For example, I was thinking about cloning a very old game called Chaos Overlords (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Overlords). The mechanics of the game are very good, overall the game is pretty simple. It was released in 96. You could clone this, update the graphics / theme a bit, maybe tweek some out dated mechanics slightly and have a title almost nobody would know was a clone.

2 - You're both assuming I'm talking about "hits" or big sellers. I'm not. The odds on an amateur's first release being a hit is like lotto level bad. I'm talking about pulling a "positive" rating and collecting a couple thousand sales. That would ballpark to around $10-20k in gross sales. Is $10-20k a success? It purely depends on your time/costs.

Finally,

I'm not saying they are overlapping circles, I'm saying that there's less you can f**k up on if you work on a largely derivative work.

Think of it like this, by cloning a game - you're basically outsourcing the "designer" role. If you're still learning the ropes on production, and working solo (or in a very small team) - outsourcing that labor to a known and successful source means that you can focus on a smaller subset of the work. This outsourcing is especially valuable if you lack experience.

It's the outsourcing that increases your odds of a competent result. You simply have more ability to focus on a subset of the work and polish it up.

 

• If you can do anything else besides make games, do that instead.
• If you want to actually make good money with games, work your way up and get into upper management.
• If you want to start your own dev business, then find a niche that you have a good understanding of, that no one else is really touching, and that has a core base of potential players who will devour everything you give them.
  
• If you want to have a good chance of actual success with your own business, get a few years in the trenches with large studio(s), preferably AAA. The percentage of indie successes who started with AAA experience is quite high (raises hand).
  
• If you don't want to go out of business within five years, then stay in business for six. Keep going from there.
• Yeah, do something else.
• Your mileage may vary. This is just my opinion. I'm going to go have some sake. Because it's just about Christmas. Have a nice one.

Source: Six years experience at studio level (AAA before it was AAA), twenty years independent.

 

I choose my steam games by perusing my recommendation lists.

 

#1 Needs very solid execution, good professional or otherwise very nice art. Needs marketing. Has to be free to play.
#2 Almost a dead genre. You need some very good hooks to succeed. Some original and very interesting elements.
#3 Most viable. Of course also needs interesting unique elements.

 

You need to have done at least 1 game with sufficient complexity and basic quality.

Then you need to find a starved community and understand their code and wishes.

Do something that appeal to that community by doing frequent iteration and play test to design the game.

Hope that community is big enough to make return on money.

Being part of said community help knowing what trigger them.

(that's how indie got off really)

One way is to release very short concept and prototype, and get more complex over time the people react to it, up until you start full production after a threshold of complexity.

 

"Top end" seems pretty ambiguous to me, but I did directly address this area generally in my discussion about whether or not the games were profitable.

Nonetheless, your follow up on that is a solid one. Whether or not the game was profitable, if it's old enough that you can introduce it to new audiences, there's potential interest, and nobody else has done it yet then that's a good opportunity, a "market gap".

Furthering that tangent of discussion, though, do you think you can really "outsource the designer role"? I agree that a lot of it is already done for you, but I think there'll be a lot that still needs to be done.
- Old games won't use today's control or UX conventions, so you'll have to update that stuff. That's design work.
- You're going to have to update the art. A game's art needs to communicate it's mechanical design, and/or your design may need to be updated based on available artistic resources. Stated differently, most artists either do some of the visual aspects of a game's design, or they work closely with designers.
- The game may have been designed for platforms that don't work like today's platforms, and need updates arising from that. You could work around this by filtering out those games, though I expect it'll signficantly shrink your pool of potential titles.

I'll agree that this is a decent target to aim for. It's probably worth clarifying up front exactly what you mean when you tell people how to "make money". ;-)

People knowingly play games derived from other games all the time, including myself, so personally I wouldn't even worry about that bit. At the same time, though, I wouldn't make a game based on an existing game without making it my own as I went, so it'd be more "inspired by" than "cloned from".

 

"Using an existing game as a 1-1 template (with some degree of reskin) will probably make you like ~$10k on a first release if you do a borderline competent job. I would expect much less from something novel."

I stand by that comment made many posts back. Also, "make money" is relative to the time commitment, if you can roll out a game in 2-3 months and make 10-20k that's a reasonable income. If it takes you a year to produce the same result that's not a good income.

For anyone aiming to "make money" - a game you can turn around very quickly is almost certainly your best bet. Keep your costs in check.

As to the question of "can you outsource the designer role completely?" - this is more nuanced and you raise excellent points. I agree with most of these, although I think you exaggerate difficulty.

 

Fair enough. Personally I'm not confident of it, as I've seen competent games which didn't get close to that. I haven't done a broader market survey to find out what real figures look like, though.

(Edit: This is further discussion, not disagreement.)

It also depends on the amount of money you spend on it. There are loads of skills I don't have, and getting them covered well in a project is going to involve either profit sharing, buying stuff or paying people to do stuff. A profit share means I don't get even less of the generated income, and buying stuff / paying people means there's an up-front outlay that must be recovered before you're making money.

That's not to mention a bunch of costs that everyone is implicitly covering and often get overlooked. Hardware is a significant one, and paying for your space, electricity and internet connection are others. Many people look at me blankly and say "but I've already got that stuff", and that's true, but if you want to make games financially sustainably then you need to start covering those at some point, too.

Then there's opportunity cost, which is a rabbit hole of its own. Basically "if you didn't spend that time making games, what is the value of the best other income generating activity you could have been doing instead?" I can't speak for other parts of the world, but here $10k a quarter is less than a graduate programmer can get paid, and once you've got that job being paid doesn't require above average performance in highly competitive marketplaces.

Unlike @Ony I don't recommend that people keep away, in jest or otherwise. But I really do want people to realise what they're getting into and make informed decisions. I do this stuff myself, so clearly I don't think it's a bad idea in principle. This kind of stuff is why I so often ask people if they want to make games as a profession or a hobby. If it's the latter then you can ignore most of the businessy stuff and just have fun.

 

.... I believe asking strangers to select YOUR first project for YOUR game studio is a fundamentally bad idea. Because the studio and the project are both supposed to be yours and not ours.

If none of the ideas makes you feel excited, and none of them makes you want to start working on them, then.... how do you expect to finish the project?

Pick simplest idea you actually LIKE, then start working. I also recommend to assume that the project will not make any money.

 

It's not so much that I want people to stay away, it's that I want people to stop believing it's the easiest thing in the world to do, just because they can download a free game engine. I'd rather people do stay away unless they are really and truly ready for it. So my advice stands: "Don't do it. Unless you are going to do it." There's typically too much talk about doing and not enough actual doing, but I guess that's what was to be expected when the engines went free.

 

What do we want?
A cure for procrastination.
When do we want it?

Spoiler

Soon . . .

 

@angrypenguin,
Based on most of my communications with other people who have released small solo/duo games (of good quality) but with zero PR/advertising the figure that tends to come up is around 1-2k sales. These releases come across the last 3 or so years though. Steam grows more competitive every day, so although 1-2k sales is a reasonable target for small releases, its harder today than it was.

It's worth noting though, that all of the releases I'm talking about were competent productions. Low budget, but reasonably well made. Typically solid genre entries in genres that weren't being bombarded by new releases (ie: not puzzle platformer).

You bring up more good points:
- Cost management
- Hardware and other costs people tend to poorly track
- Opportunity Costs

These are 100% correct. I think there's a big problem with a lot of people who want to start game studios, in that they don't think of those studios like businesses. In every business, there are two variables that separate success from failure:

- Income
- Costs

A game can sell 10,000 copies and be a flop or it can sell 10,000 copies and be a wild success. It depends entirely on what your costs are.

I think that a lot of people assume this:
- That if a game isn't doing something new, nobody will want to play it.
- That in order to make income, a game needs to be novel.

I don't think either of those is remotely true. I think that, in general, gamers are very much creatures of habit and comfort, and look for very, very similar experiences to what they know and like. They want the same old thing, spiced up a little.

I tend to think of gamers as people who want to go to a wide variety of restaurants for different atmosphere, but always order the same 3 comfortable dishes over and over.

The game industry as a whole is driven by reskins. It's been like this since the dawn of time.

 

For some reason it reminds me of all the times I tried to tell someone that writing your own engine is a bad idea.

 

Talking gives people a way to stay involved in game development without actually jumping in and risk making mistakes. Most of these folks will never make a game but maybe a few will eventually feel ready to try. My work with folks new to game development has given me some appreciation for the "talking" but I have not yet figured out how to push them off the ledge.

 

Therein lies the rub.

 

Are you familiar with the concept of Degree of Innovation, or Level of Innovation? Basically, there's a lot more to it than "doing something new" vs. not. Plus, doing something new means different things to different people, and you can do something new in different ways.

I very much agree with the "creatures of habit" thing for many audiences, and we can see that by the general success of game franchises. Once a publisher finds a formula that works they can hit it again and again with relatively minor changes and they do keep making sales. However, note that for their audiences they are still "doing something new", even if that mostly just means a new setting and campaign. (I for one would love exactly that for The Witcher.) Note that this is considered a "low" degree of innovation, which is not the same as "no innovation".

It's also just one of many ways to innovate (to any degree), any of which can be successful... if you're able to find an audience. Business wise the audience is really the important bit. Critical. Find one or more audiences, understand them, and then base your decisions on their needs and desires.

In hindsight, I think a bunch of this discussion has been backwards. We're talking about how to approach designing a game to find an audience, where if we're talking commercially it should really be done the other way around. Find people who want something enough to pay for it, then give it to them. Looking for existing games which could fit the bill with a refresh or reskin is a super valid strategy, once you've identified what you're trying to do and for whom.

 

Yeah, which is why I was surprised to see such resistance to the idea. Maybe bad word choice.

At the end of the day, you can go to a thousand restaurants and order a hamburger. Every restaurant has their own personal spin on what a hamburger should be: different buns, different shape patties, different toppings, different fries, different ways to serve ketchup, different color plates, different arrangements.

On one hand, every restaurant is innovative in how they prep and present their burger. On the other hand, a burger is still just a burger.

I used to see each game as new and unique, but more and more I just see the burger on a different color plate.