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

My resistance is against treating it as the One True Path, not against the concept in principle. Maybe that's not how you intended it, but that's certainly how it came across to me.

Also, the context around what you quoted there is really important. I'm saying it's one valid strategy of many, and that learning about your audience first is highly important. If you don't do that stuff then you're basically picking a game out of a hat, spending months re-making it, and hoping you get lucky with an audience afterwards.

Worth reiterating for anyone jumping in at this point, none of this matters if you're making games for the fun of it.

 

This has been our strategy for twenty years. It works, obviously, but it also leaves us feeling creatively unfulfilled, and honestly, this far along, disenchanted with game development in general. On the other hand, if we'd made the game we originally wanted to twenty years ago (a first person shooter set in Hell), it very likely would have flopped, and I'd be doing something entirely different right now. Even if it succeeded, we'd have either gone about of business a few more games in or been bought out eventually.

Works out similar on either path, I suppose. Spend twenty years doing what you love but not really liking what you do (adult games: we don't play them and never have), or spend a few years doing what you love and then doing something else if and when that fails. Ah well, at least it's been interesting. If anything I've said makes sense, then choose your own path with those thoughts in mind.

 

Not to put words in your mouth but to paraphrase: so you're saying you love game dev but don't get the chance to work on content you enjoy?

I understand that completely. I hold a different position though, perhaps its naivete but I'd be happy creating almost anything if it meant doing what I love and getting paid for it.

Its a very conscious decision. I've been in a bit of a pickle lately because some people don't like my views, even though I am 110% a better engineer and game developer than they had ever been. I'm always fixing problems in their codebase and giving advice they can learn from and then they decide they don't like me for said views. The world is full of assholes and I feel a significant percentage of them are in the software industry.

I rather consciously chose my views not because I fit into some grand identity scheme, but because I feel they are right, just, and honestly in some ways the path of least resistance. I've received open mockery from some for them but don't really give a sh!t.

Identity shouldn't be a factor in your job or job description, and if you're picking and firing people because of that you're a business fool and a jack wagon.

I recently showcased the deletion of significant good work I did for a game company who blocked me on social media and revoked my access to the repo I had been working on. Jokes on them, there was some significant improvements that I had not pushed to their repo yet!

There's legislation in my country which would let me destroy you and your business for this sort of behavior. Best watch out.

 

I'm mostly the same way. While I'd love to create a game of the genres that I enjoy most of my enjoyment comes from analyzing the problems that need to be solved and implementing solutions for them. I blame my love of programming.

 

Pretty much, yeah. I started making my own games when I was 12-13, and started making them professionally at 24. Once that started it was mostly sports games and things I wasn't completely interested in. Don't get me wrong, though. I've had a ton of fun and creative freedom, but in the end I do wish I'd had more of a chance to work on at least one "dream" game.

We started making adult games in 2001 and have done that pretty much ever since, which is certainly not something I would have imagined doing when I started out. It's been rewarding in its own way (I've worked from home with my wife (dev partner) since 2000) but it also meant doing what in hindsight turned out to be less than stellar. Take the good with the bad, though. Ultimately I've really enjoyed myself and have a great life, even if it has meant leaving behind a legacy of games I don't ever talk about in polite company, haha. I'm planning to remedy that in this next stage of life moving forward.

Anyway, cheers to the future, and best of success to you if you continue heading down this path.

 

You're going to stop hanging out with polite company? Or you're going to start talking about it anyway?

 

There is only one true path to success. If you wnat to make money, give them boobs. Otherwise, make whatever you want or go work for the big guys who have market locked down.

Anything else is crap shoot and requires persistance + luck. So if you can't pay for your time dinking around waiting on luck, you got to go with the boobs or work for the man. There is only one common thing all success stories have in common. It's never strategy, it's persistence.

 

lol! As I get even older I'm sure I'm going to start blurting out various, uhm, inappropriate things at the family reunion dinner table. Can't wait.

The true and sad thing regarding our games is that we barely talk about them at all. This is about the only place I am pretty open about it. People follow me on Twitter or whatever expecting info here and there and the most I can offer is a vague "finished the update" every year or so when I feel like posting. I've never liked talking about these games, and that's proven to be difficult after doing them for so long. It was only about two years ago when I came clean on Facebook, etc. to family and friends. It's been a weird journey, for sure.

In our case it was strategy. We'd just finished a big contract with Take Two and were getting ideas together for our dream game, so we started talking to Valve about licensing their engine. Things didn't work out as far as getting a larger team together, so we eventually found ourselves in dire need of doing something. One night soon after, we were sitting around and said, "hey, maybe let's do something with strippers in it, because that will get people's attention". It did. A well known game developer was our first sale (a point of pride, though I won't say who it is), and it was upward from there.

Anyway, that game release was strategy. Continuing in that niche for so many years after that first game, however, that was definitely persistence. It takes a balance of both to be successful, in my opinion.

 

Also i want to clear out the impression that doing innovation is just putting new spin for the sake of it. Especially in a business context, it's not.

You innovate when you solve or perfect the solution to a problem, and in business it is the problem of the client, in game it's the audience. A problem they have or didn't knew they had. And that mean there's a quality threshold to be met, just being new isn't enough if the problem isn't solved satisfyingly.

So when people say you must have something new, they are really asking what problem you are solving, ie what's the value. In (pop) cultural product the first problem is probably boredom, so a new coat of painting is a low value, low effort, low return, product lose value through mere exposition and need constant refresh.

Live services is an innovation that was aimed at solving the boredom problem with the content treadmill. Doom was probably not so different from arena shooter of the time, but 3d solved immersion, and it increased it relative to wolfenstein, which itself was more fluid than dungeon crawler's 3d. Etc...

You don't innovate in a vacuum.

Also when you get older you get better at generalizing, as game designer i see very few difference between game of vastly different genre, it's all about the progression. You had to know your audience, to know what level of generalization can be detrimental, to recognizing at which level they see innovations.