Is it worth to be a indie game developer?

Hi, i've become an indie developer around 2 weeks ago. I've been involved in game industry since 14 years old. I started working as a professional game developer for more than 6 years. I come from a successful game studio focused on Mobile (Google Play/iOS) where i been able to learn enough and gather enough experience to think about making my own games.
Now i made my own path and i'm having my first experiences as a self game developer publishing my first game which i made alone. I'm having a lot of issues reaching bigger audiences. I can't avoid seeing TONS of projects in different markets, that they die because they reach no users, no matter if they are good or bad games. So its very hard to accomplish a game that makes enough income to live from it.
The purpose of this thread is to share your own experiences as indie developers and how you reached success or which things you did to fail.

 

Been an independent developer (two person team) since 2000. I'm not even sure if it's worth it anymore but it's pretty much the only thing I'm confident enough in to make a living with, so I keep doing it. Still planning my great escape, though. Anyway, welcome to the club. I wish you the best of success.

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO!

 

IMO, making games should be your passion if want to be an indie. Only with passion you have a chance to get anywhere. If making games is your first love, then you will be happy making them even when you make modest money.

 

My hypothesis is that the best chance of being a successful game developer is if you're going to do something new and/or that pushes boundaries. There's far too much cloning and reproduction going on in this business, and I think the evidence of this is that despite the fact that most devs struggle to make a living, it seems players are ready to throw insane amounts of money and become fervent believers in anything that seems like a revolution in game design. It's not easy though to design anything new, much less deliver.

The other option is that you can set your soul on its merry way and go and learn about rapid reskinning, IAP and how to design Skinner boxes.

Sure there's a point somewhere in between where you design 'good' games and make a decent living, but that requires an unshakeable belief in the non-monetary value of simply being a game developer.

 

The problem with "pushing boundaries" is that in order to do that you need to reach first "state of the art". Most indies struggle greatly with delivering ANYTHING worthy of notice. For ex. no indie developer has a chance to "push boundaries" in RPG, FPS or MMO development, since it's so damn hard to even enter the market for those types of games.

 

after watching these streams, http://proindiedev.com/
clearly the suggestion was,
if you want to make money, get a real job..(confirmed paycheck every month!)
if you want to have fun, can make games..(if can afford, and/or do it in the side from day job)

 

I don't exactly agree. No Mans Sky for example wasn't even close to state of the art in terms of survival mechanics, and I don't think they were aiming to be the best at it anyway. But I think they still could easily have delivered something really special that would have satisfied a lot of people.

Pushing boundaries can be simply finding a technique to scale up the size and scope of a game while giving it the sort of indie character that AAA games find hard to monetize. For example I think that a studio which manages to use the kind of procedural tech used in NMS, capture the spirit of Star Citizen and instead of falling into the trap of multiplayer/survival, create an immersive singleplayer experience, will be extremely successful. That's probably why squadron 42 did not die, in fact.

Another example: it's not clear that Pokemon Go was out of reach of a small group of indies.

There are a lot of things which can be solved to, in effect, do something new. I think that very sophisticated game AI (not sophisticated at shooting you, but sophisticated in the types and depth and flexibility of interactions it can have with you) is very undervalued. Multiplayer will never replace the desire to have a 'hero' experience that involves other characters with realistic, consistent and varied roles and attitudes, which is pretty much impossible in multiplayer. I think there are a lot of gamers who would be very excited to see what the next generation of Knights of the Old Republic sort of games would bring if character AI took a few more leaps.

RPG is an exception, because that can mean a lot of things and is hard to monetize by AAA. But FPS or MMO I pretty much agree with you. Because those are either fairly clearly defined and have been perfected by big studios, or are simply too big targets (not simply in terms of achieving but maintaining in the face of competition) and don't play to the strengths of indies.

 

Also, as crazy as it sounds, and despite the fact that I'm aware of how much of a snail VR has been for a while now, I think that if you're an innovative sort, it's a far better thing to try to crack it than to do what everyone else has already been doing while expecting a different outcome. I would be far more comfortable working on making the first 'really good' VR experience than trying to make some kind of survival rpg or other, even in terms of my expected likelihood of success.

 

The way I look at it, if you want to make something, just make it. If you get rich, then congratulations. I can't stand it when people say you can't do this or can't do that. Statistically it isn't great. But at the same time, statistically all it takes is one time and you can be an overnight success raking in millions in no time.

If you want to make your company into a business (pure profit), then treat it as a business, if you want to do it for the love of doing it, treat it as that. if you want a mixture of both worlds, then treat it as that.

So much of this stuff is mental challenges, not really luck, the truth of the matter is, 99% of games never see the light of day simply because developers aren't mentally ready. There's never been a single challenge in the world that never had an obstacle in your way. Video games, movies, or anything else, is no harder or easier to sell than anything else. But you'll never sell anything if you aren't mentally ready to do so, like any other market or brand in existence.

But keep in mind, success to me, you, or someone else can be entirely different.
Too someone just selling one copy might be success. Others might view 100 dollars a month as success. Others might view 25 million in first month release as success, or just others releasing a game in general is success.


Now there's a keen difference between Insta MMO button in Editor, and Asset Flips, and a genuine game that is worthy of success. Now granted if you can make an Insta MMO Button in the Editor, you will be rich lol.

 

You are not serious when you mention No Man's Sky and Star Citizen. NMS went WAY beyond state of the art in terms of 3D procedural generation. There is a handful of programmers in the world who could make something like that. Consider Mass Effect: Andromeda debacle. They spent 2 years in preproduction. Then they spent 3 years making their "world machine". They failed and then made everything by hand in the remaining two years. You VASTLY underestimate difficulties of using procedural generation. Mentioning Star Citizen is even more silly. It has budget of 150 MILLION dollars. With this kind of money you can hire a huge team full of world class developers. On top of that they have as their leader one of most acclaimed and experienced designers of all times. Both projects you mentioned are going beyond state of the art. Both projects are elite projects which are completely out of reach for 99% of indie developers.

"Pushing boundaries" directly implies going beyond "state of the art". When you push boundaries you are moving the frontiers of said state of the art. This is the proper definition of "pushing boundaries". There is no way around it. The same is true for AI. If you want to push boundaries of AI, then you have to START with the best in the world and then improve upon it.

The reality is than 99% of indie developers can't even get close to state of the art. That's why you see on Steam an endless stream of crappy 2D games and only a handful of decent 3D projects. That's because doing a 2D game requires know-how level from the 90s and that's where most indies are stuck.

 

Exactly. My point is not that you don't need to do something great, but that your game does not have to be in any sense the 'state of the art' in its genre. No Mans Sky is not state of the art in the survival genre, not even close.

Maybe I misunderstood your point, but I thought that you said that to be able to push boundaries, your game has to be state-of-the-art in terms of its genre. Like, NMS would have to be a great survival game before it could succeed at being what people expected it to be.

If your point is that to push boundaries, you have to exceed state-of-the-art in terms of the thing that you're trying to push boundaries in, that's self-evident.

I wouldn't say that exactly. Of course it's very hard, but of course it is or someone would already have done it. I think the main reason no one had done it to that level before was that it's incredibly difficult to hold up art quality and integrate sufficiently good level design with it, and arguably they failed at the latter too.

There could be any number of reasons for that. In all likelihood the biggest obstacles were in delivering the kind of game that was expected of them as a AAA company, in the format that NMS was created with. It might be relativey easy to get procedural stuff 75% of the way there in quality, but the last 24% is going to be very very hard or even impossible. NMS could take pretty much any shortcut they had to.

You completely missed the point. Star citizen was originally funded at $500,000 in less than a week, for a story-driven completely singleplayer experience (if I'm not mistaken). That's the kind of thing that people jumped at, and it's something indies could potentially manage. That's what I meant by the 'spirit' of star citizen, the desire for an epic space tale RPG experience. I still think that indies could compete in this space even now, because Star Citizen has not exactly owned what it originally succeeded at attracting people to.

Agreed. So I must have misunderstood your point as I explained above.

I agree with this completely. And unfortunately there's no way to change the fact that succeeding is going to be very difficult. But I think there are avenues that indies can take that make their chances of success dependent on the ability to break barriers and push boundaries, rather than the ability to a) attract through nostalgia or b) stay with their heads just above water by barely profiting with decent games.

 

Well of course building games its a passion.. the problem is how do you make a living with that! You can dedicate a lot of time making a project you would like to play or you thought that was going to be a good idea, but if there is no income how can you support doing more projects?
My first biggest barrier is user adquisition. Just uploading a game in a market is not enough! One way i see is spending money to advertise the game and then check further results. I've tried little things in social media like forums, facebook, etc but the audience is too small. I've seen many horrible games reach millions of users and also beautiful games reach almost no users..
You can also think about investment platforms like Kickstarter, but you get into the same problem. You post a new project idea and its really hard to reach the correct audience that would be interested in investing in the game!

 

I think you need to have money before becoming an indie dev. I am working on AR startup, last summer we did some really simple demos the business guys went on dragons den - they got 3 out of 5 dragons to agree to invest in them -- the insane thing is any indie could have done these demos -- but then you wouldnt be an indie.

 

Um...what does KotOR have to do with revolutionary AI? I love the idea of revolutionary AI (that's one of my projects), and I love KotOR, but the two have nothing in common. AI is pretty much Bioware's Achilles Heel.

Highly debatable. A significant part of the SC push was and is extremely high fidelity. Example from the Kickstarter:

"​

• 10X the detail of current AAA games

​

Most current gen “AAA” games have around 10,000 polygons for a character and 30,000 or so for a vehicle. In Star Citizen, the characters are detailed at 100,000 polygons, the fighter at 300,000 and the Space Carrier 7 million! This allows unparalleled detail, making the visuals more immersive than has ever been achieved before."

Again, this isn't something that developed as the scope grew. This was a fundamental part of the pitch and a huge factor in getting so many whales to donate. And this is only one example. They mention "hundreds of sub-components" on space ships as another, and there are a few others like this.

This really is not in the scope of an indie.​

 

All much ado over nothing.

Are you going to follow your passions, or not?

Yes? Then you will find a way.

Finding the way, that is a different question. It is a specific question. My advice? Get luck on your side. You do that by exposure. Only make friends, never enemies. Help every person you can. Forget about yourself, and focus on doing good work. Eventually, good things come around.

Well, for me it's been that way. Some people complain that bad things happen to good people, but I'm not sure I trust people who say that. I've been in all kinds of dangerous/terrible situations, and I can honestly say that I have been so lucky that I get superstitious if I think about it very long.

Disclaimer -- I'm not a successful indie dev. But I do make a comfortable living while working full time on developing 3d art skills. The key is I got life taken care of before chasing pipe dreams. Now I am able to fully invest myself into my pipe dreams.

 

I think at the moment it's hard to be positive. $118 billion was made on games in 2017, 50% of that went to the top 25 studios. The industry is growing though, and that means that if you can keep the business side in sight, you should be able to grow with it.

I think the biggest challenge for indie studios is making sure they run as a business with passion, not a project with passion. To win, you will have to focus at least half of your time growing your business - for studios, that means getting attention and getting customers. I think very few studios invest enough in doing that, plus it can be hard to do.

 

Just base off of things I've read, it's too high of a risk with to little reward to go full time indie. For every winner you get 100 losers. If not more. But that's just my 2 cents

 

If that's what they advertised with, then I have to say it's one of the dumbest sales pitches I've ever heard.

 

I'm simply trying to tie in my point about what AI could do, with an immersive, character-driven game with a lot of NPC interaction options (at least in dialogue) like KOTOR is fondly remembered as being a benchmark of.

The idea is that when people played KOTOR, just think, what did they imagine to be the 'future' of that sort of game? It's an old game and not incredibly sophisticated in any way, and as you pointed out has probably nothing in the way of proceduralism or advanced AI, but it was something that I think signalled an avenue for games to go which has hardly been explored in much more detail since. It was handcrafted and limited because of that, but imagine what could be done with AI interaction if it was possible to make a move toward proceduralism?

Skyrim for example is not even close to KOTOR in terms of that sort of thing. Superficial, repetitive dialogue without any real attempt to move beyond the most basic interaction seems to be quite the norm. The Left4Dead series seems to have developed the most advanced form of semi-procedural character expression that I know of, but it's hardly a quantum leap in anything. And it's not an indie doing it.

​

Fair point. I still think that a lot of the success was based on the nature of the game though, rather than specifically the level of detail.

Spoiler

I don't think the relative lack of detail hurt NMS really either, so I still think that using the tech to create a large, immersive, highly interactive world like 'skyrim in space' would be a huge success. If NMS and the original Star Citizen pitch had met halfway, I think the result would have been far more successful than either of them would be on their own, and perhaps, as you pointed out, with some changes to make it within the scope of indies, would be a huge success.

Star Citizen is trying now to go in the direction of proceduralism, but it's a different beast now and I believe that without a much better implementation of sort of 'singleplayer within multiplayer' it's in danger of becoming a slightly boring 'FPS in space with infinite maps' which I don't think has longevity.

Anyway I'll try to sum up my idea of what I mean exactly by 'pushing boundaries'. I mean that if you were playing games in the late 90s and early 2000s, what type of experiences did you imagine would be possible in 2018, 20 whole years later?

I think that it's disappointing, as Quingu pointed out, that indies seem to have sort of become stuck in the past recreating pseudo-nostalgic experiences (that it seems to me they themselves often did not experience originally!), while AAA pursues narrow, lucrative avenues that aren't revolutionary, and few people are trying to continue the trajectory in the direction that it used to be pointing. Even just taking a really great game from the past and trying to take a single step forward with it, using new techniques and hardware capabilities to add scope, is pretty rare.

 

Hmm. I have to disagree significantly. Nothing about KotOR's dialog was in any way more unique than anything Bioware's done in the proceeding 13 years. And the main thing that bothers me here is your use of the term "AI," because, again, the game essentially has no AI outside of combat. Nothing remotely in the sense of a dialog AI. And again, the game's dialog is identical to literally every Bioware game that has come out since, at least in its complexity. Skyrim is a really poor example--anything Bethesda is. Their wheelhouse is not character dialog, it's immersive sim-esque explorable worlds. The closest examples would be Obsidian, inXile, or Larian, and they're all equal or better than KotOR (Bioware began to shift towards characterization-based dialogue especially with ME and DA, and I personally think that's their unique strength in the industry, but KotOR was still mainly focused on the old style of RPG dialogue that Obsidian, inXile, and Larian are all doing today).

KotOR is just not an example of anything related to AI at all (if you still feel that way, I'd love a specific example from the game of what you're talking about). Ironically, Skyrim or Oblivion would be--not as much in execution, but as you said, in potential.

I definitely agree that part of SC's success was related to the game concepts themselves. But a significant part of it was indeed the absurd fidelity promises, celebrity actors, all that.

I personally didn't mind the NMS we got at all, I rather enjoyed what I played, but it seems like the main complaints were, aside from the lies/unreasonable hype, that the loop didn't really feel that meaningful. Which I can understand.

I haven't been keeping track of SC ever since I tried out 3.0 for about 45 minutes and found essentially nothing to do. But back then it didn't seem like they were focusing hugely on proceduralism. They're making the planets procedurally, sure, but I don't think they're focusing all of the game content around that. It seems like they're trying to add lots of different things to do in the game. Things like mining or exploring or taxiing people around.

I'm extremely skeptical on the game, and I think their vision seems bloated at this point, but I've seen little to make me think it's completely off the mark like that. Certainly not "FPS in space with infinite maps." But I haven't kept track for months.


And I certainly don't disagree with your overall point. Just these specific examples.

 

I make about 250-300k USD a year on my dayjob, on my game I have made about 50-75k USD in 2 years. Yet, I sit everyday on my dayjob waiting to get home so that I can work on the game

 

No, but ironically.

 

I didn't say it was. It's just the earliest example I've played first-hand of what I consider to be a state-of-the-art of rpg character interaction, that hasn't changed much since.

That's exactly the point.

That's exactly the point. It doesn't have AI. It's all handcrafted state machines. But imagine what this game could be if the boundaries were pushed a bit on procedural context-sensitive npc expression? If you look at the video of left4dead I put in the spoiler, you can see just how fun it is when a character starts to react to objects around them, making comments and having a semi-procedural conversation flow between members in a group of npcs.

I think this is one of the few cases where actual AI (as in, a learning algorithm) might be applicable to games. Because you could have characters learning about the world around them, commenting, discussing, shaping their point of view and the way they react to new events. It's got the potential to make it possible to have RPG character interaction at a much higher fidelity. I think that's something thats incredibly interesting.

My point is not that there are games with significant character expression AI at the moment, but what it potentially could be, compared to the superficial stuff we have now. I think it's a good type of thing for indies to investigate. It's a shame that all the fun stuff seems to be coming out of AAA (e.g. valve with left4dead).

Was the original pitch so much focused on that though? I think a large part of it was just the feeling that the Wing Commander guy could make something with real substance, something with a good old-fashioned atmosphere, and not just the boring stuff people were getting used to. Scaled up, brought into the 21st century. I'm not sure they were exactly expecting a sort of Destiny-style fps, although there doesn't seem to have been a huge backlash so maybe I'm wrong.

Well this is exactly my point. They should have married the tech with a large-but-finite, immersive, story driven game - and they would have a winner. Maybe someone still can do it.

I am too. I personally find the game somewhat jarring to watch, there's very little in the way of making people feel like they're in space. It's a bit like you took a pretty call of duty game and added a space skybox. And it feels like the gameplay is a bit too standard compared to the overall vision.

Probably not the best examples, certainly star citizen and indie in the same sentence is hard not to choke on. But I was really just referring to what I perceived as the 'sentiment' that the backers on that kickstarter had originally, not what it's grown into.

But KOTOR I think is a good example of where there's a lot of room for indies to take things further. Although it's an old game, it's still pretty much a benchmark for a certain type of character-interaction-driven RPG that I think should have been far exceeded a long time ago, and maybe an AI-driven, or at least procedural, interaction/expression system is the way to do it.

So my point is that there are still a lot of ways to do something new as an indie, something a bit pioneering that will get people really interested, rather than just trying to be a player in the game (so to speak) that doesn't prosper, but doesn't die either, by making 'good enough' games.

 

Is being a writer worth it? Is being a musician worth it? Is being a hired hitman worth it?

Yes! answer is always yes. Doesn't even depend on anything.

 

I think it depends on what you define "it" to be worth.
Time? Money? Pride? Success? Fun? Challenge? Collaboration? Etc.

 

The writer's tears stained the page. He knew that he was only half done with his magnum opus as the lyrics of his demise crossed his addled wits. This final hit would prove to be his last...

 

“I don’t even have any good skills. You know like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!”

 

If you like to be paid in retweets and upvotes then indie dev is definitely worth it!

 

i guess if you are one of the few indies who actually make money, yes
if not, it really depends
if you like eating instant ramen every day, maybe

 

I understand a bit better now. I'm probably getting too hung up on the details. It's just that for me personally, playing KotOR or a Bioware game didn't really make me think of moving in a procedural direction with character interaction. But I do understand your point.

Playing SC doesn't feel at all like COD to me, though I haven't played COD since literally the first one so I'm out of touch. It does feel like a big world you're interacting with. You walk up to a row of consoles, call your ship it, then walk outside where it's waiting for you. You hop in and take off, and you can go anywhere. The scale really is impressive.

Just doesn't feel like there's much of anything to do yet--and it's so buggy and slow it's practically unplayable.

I think if they manage to get these other types of gameplay in--like being a hauler or taxiing people around--they have a shot at something that feels unique.

But not really all that revolutionary, except for scale. Kind of like Witcher 3. Witcher 3 has had a tremendous impact on the industry--but it didn't really do anything different. The one difference between Witcher 3 and other RPGs is the quality of the writing, and quantity of that quality writing.

SC seems similar to me. The only boundary it's pushing is fidelity. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't see it as revolutionary.

 

It's not really pushing that either. As it's a game as a service pretty much, they won't be able to keep the fidelity up and it will cost too much. Pretty soon, other stuff will (if not already) look better.

It's called progress and it's best done in bite sizes. Look at world of warcraft struggling to keep up visually. It can't. Even with the billions of blizzard.

So no, it's not pushing any boundaries either. It's just a product for money. If something takes longer than a hardware revision or gpu cycle, there's a game made in a fraction of the time that looks better around every corner.

 

Crossy Road?

Stardew Valley?

Some of the coolest (arguably most innovative) indie titles released the past several years have been 2D games. This is why we see so many (good) 2D titles coming out - because they can be DONE by a small team or solo developer in a 'reasonable' amount of time
Ori ...
CaveStory
Cuphead
DeadCells
Dont Starve
Gun Point
Heat Signature
Caveblazers
HollowKnight
Iconoclasts
Let Them Come
RainWorld
Tesla vs Lovecraft
The Mummy Demastered
Thimbleweed Park
Vagante
Wulverblade
Slain
Heroes of Hammerwatch
Broforce
Crawl
HyperLightDrifter
PartyHard
Pinstripe
RiskofRain
Starbound
Among others.

 

I don't play games much in the past 5 years or so, and I almost never play 2d games. But I sense peoples pessimism about this subject is in part a reaction they have when they realize that small, low-funds teams cannot make massive, 3d, AAA level blockblusters.

So everything becomes crap to them.

 

Well I said the "best chance" is doing something that pushes boundaries. I think it's hard to design the success of a game like crossy road. But I think there are fairly clear directions that indies can take that are very hard to do, but if you succeed you're almost certain to get attention and interest.

At least for me, it's much easier to strategise success based on doing something at least partly based on scale or complexity (the good kind), than it is to do something simple and handcrafted to perfection. Maybe it's because I don't 'get' simple games so much, but I think it's also that everyone is trying to do stuff that's closer to simple than it is to complicated.

 

It did for me. At least, for me those games represent a point where characters become meaningful to the extent that I want to have a more dynamic/nuanced interaction.

There's something going on that makes space stations, ships, planetside cities and even space itself feel awkwardly the same, as if you just swapped the scene objects surrounding the player. The main one I remember was the presentation where they hijacked a ship, leaving their own ship to drift over and board another one. The whole thing was utterly boring to me for a reason I can't exactly describe. That's why I call it an 'FPS in space' or perhaps more accurately 'FPSController in space'. You can almost see the 'rigidbody.gravity = 0' code being set.

 

I agree totally - the stars aligned for that game imo. I will not take anything away from the developers - they did an excellent job and the polish is great in that title - but if anyone would have pitched "recreating frogger with more characters" they would have been politely shown the door. Luck and connections = free promotion, plus quick plays which are easy to 'show' and a fair amount of high polish resulted in success of a damn good game.

The unspoken point of my post was to point out - quality in 2D is ongoing - and the realization smaller less complex games can be accomplished by smaller teams, faster - and innovation at that level is less costly and time consuming - which could result in a hit.

 

I gotcha. I can see that.

That may be a consequence of the lack of almost any meaningful interaction in the game thus far. We'll see what happens.

That aside, it's hard for me to say it's pushing any meaningful boundaries. I definitely agree that NMS did, but I'm not really seeing it for SC.

 

I don't think it did, but I do think that an updated Freelancer concept (which is sort of how the original pitch came across to me) marrying NMS tech would have the potential to be a great mega-openworld space rpg. Especially if the procedural tech focused on the RPG elements as well and not just on the environment.

To put it another way, I don't think there's such a thing yet as a great procedurally-generated RPG game, and I think this is because procedural generation of meaningful level design, NPCs and RPG elements in general such as story and dialogue is practically non-existent. A survival game is even much easier to do, since you're mostly just on your own inside a database, and I would say NMS failed to deliver even an average one at launch. So there's a lot of open space here for indies to fill.

Everyone making procedural stuff is doing multiplayer, because they only then have to worry about environment building. But given how AAA have abandoned large-scale immersive RPGs for the monetization potential of multiplayer, and the fact that procedural RPG stuff is incredibly hard, I think this is wide open for indies to take on.

 

Not to get sidetracked from the original post, but Bioware games did for me, too. I developed Love/Hate specifically in response to a comment that an NPC made in Mass Effect when I accidentally ran over too many space monkeys. Much like the entire influence system in Kotor 2, this was a hard-coded event based on a number that could change during gameplay based on other hard-coded events. Love/Hate was designed to do the same thing in a more universal, procedural way. Bioware had an army of writers. Clever use of procedural content generation is one way that indies can compensate to hopefully increase the odds of staying afloat financially.

 

My advice would be, If you are new to the game industry or just started into game dev, don't quit your current job and work in games as part-time hobby to get experience and sharp your skills.
Even being an Indie with plenty of experience and skills does not guarantee any success with your game. Every market is overcrowded, competition is ferocious. Mobile market is now taken by behemoth companies pumping out zillions cute addictive games every month. All this "indie" game revolution is getting to an end, if not already happening.

Call me pessimist, I see it more like "realist" but If I was you I would start working out a plan B already.

 

Yeah that's basically what I'm doing. I'm developing a game just because it's something I want to do, not because I think I'll strike it rich. And if it so happens that people like what I put out, then perhaps I'll do it again with a higher priority.

 

@Cucci_A ,
Indeed. We've made a couple of what I can call barely "successful games" that still enjoy and love btw since I Ieft Gameloft Montreal but to be honest, we've also made a lot of money working out for other companies/people's games. Is also good, inspiring and refreshing when you work on new things.
Bare with me, keep that pasion and flame for making games but don't leave your current job. Pitch your prototype and ideas early to the crowd and see how people respond, if no one is interested (this will probably be 99% of the time with your first game) then keep improving and working out new ideas. If people like it then you can take more risks and try to hit a homerun with.

 

Big AAA studios use more and more procedural, it's not specific to indies the need to automate creation using procedural tools.
https://80.lv/articles/procedural-technology-in-ghost-recon-wildlands/
https://www.slideshare.net/guerrillagames/gpubased-procedural-placement-in-horizon-zero-dawn
It's a big time saviour otherwise you could not do so much manually.

 

I think it's better to find larger studio. Take a look at this talk.
http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/...ve-into-how-games-are-selling-on-steam/856785


On a weekly basis, Mike Rose of publishing label No More Robots ('Descenders') and previously of tinyBuild ('Punch Club', 'Party Hard'), hears from developers who believe their upcoming PC game will sell tens of thousands of copies, yet up-to-date Steam sales figures show that this would be a bit of a miracle. Using deep sales data and an understanding of the Steam Marketplace, Rose is ready to help developers get realistic about how well PC games are truly selling.


Takeaway

Attendees will come away with a better understanding of how their PC game might sell on (and off of) Steam, and be able to apply that knowledge to their future plans.

 

@konsic
Can't see the talk, it's already available?

 

Doesn't seem to be available yet.

https://www.gdcvault.com/browse/gdc-18

 

Probably soon.

I think that smaller indies should merge into larger teams and release close to AA games.

 

Why, exactly? I ask because a lot of indie titles are from the very people who escaped AAA to begin with, or do it on the side! These are known as premium indie and pretty much do that.

Of developers that have no experience or are coming from a non-industry background, the chances here for success are wildly lower. It does happen though so don't be disheartened, just the whole point of supporting these strange quirky games, I think that value doesn't actually work with blockbuster graphics.

I'll try explain: adding a ton of cutscenes and AAA content music is not going to improve Undertale for example. It would actually break it.

Real world example:

I play Into The Breach at the moment. It's a retro styled turn based game. Would it be better with AAA everything? I think it would be a worse game and I would have less fun. I'll explain why:

- the almost zero sec pick up and play load n close behaviour would be lost. It would take an eye rolling couple of mins to get started and at least 10 seconds to bugger off.

- each turn would no doubt have a million anims of giant robots doing their thing in an almost raytraced sort of epic yet repetitive xcom - on - steroids thing.

- every action would be longer, every result a mindless cutscene.

That's not improving the very close-to-metal barebones feeling of raw strategy and enjoyable gameplay. TLDR? I don't need AAA, in fact AAA does not even make sense any more in entertainment. Your most common customer is going to go "I haven't heard of that one" or "I have heard of that one". She or he is not going to be thinking about production values or anything but if its fun or not. They probably have no idea what "AAA" is meant to represent.

AAA is not the authoritative answer to anything at all. It has it's place along a curve. And there are lots of places along that curve how much media makes or ruins a game.

 

Skinner Boxes? I'm afraid of those things.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner