Marketability of Shmups ?

I had thought that shmups weren't very viable, but then I found that Nova Drift has allegedly made some $1.1 million (according to games-stats.com) despite being an Asteroids-style game (yes, really) but with enemy ships (randomly spawned on edges of the single screen) and quick upgrading of the player ship whenever the player wants to experiment with a new layout. Apparently the latter is the main thing players like about the game. Here's its Steam page, where some reviews say it's the best roguelike they've played: https://store.steampowered.com/app/858210/Nova_Drift/

How viable are most shmups, however?

 

That's not a "shmup".

That's a rogue-like arcade with distinct visual style and an upgrade system. It can also be a bullet hell game.

That makes it fairly unique. It is also has very little resemblance to Asteroids.

Here's "Asteroids":

Spoiler

Here's a Bullet Hell game:

Spoiler

 

It's tagged as a "shoot-em-up" and players on Youtube have compared it to Asteroids because the action occurs entirely on one immobile screen where the player is confined, with asteroids floating around along with enemy ships that appear offscreen and then attack the player. It looks exactly like what would happen if someone spiffed up their Asteroids clone by adding upgrades and lots of enemy ships to fight. Roguelikes usually involve exploring a procedurally generated map, whereas this one doesn't have any map - just random asteroids and ships appearing on the sides of the screen.

 

One might avoid the semantic rabbit trail by looking at other games on Steam with the same tag and seeing how many reviews they got, to see if they're anywhere near as popular.

 

Tags are meaningless, as people assign them at random.

"shmup" usually refers to "shoot em up" and for me that would be a first person shooter.

If you check steam, than following game types are marked as "shmups" there:

* First person shooter
* Top down and isometric arcade shooters
* Bullet hell games.
* Side shooters.
* Contra clones.

https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Shoot+'Em+Up

Basically "anything with a lot of projectiles".

 

It depends on where you look, but on steam its a pretty big umbrella.
I personally used to frequent the arcades so i tend to associate it more with shooters like Strikers 1945 or bullet hell such as DoDonPachi, Mushihimesama, or the Touhou project series which you linked in your screenshot.

A quick look at google images and the asset store for "shmup" seems to confirm this still tends to be the common interpretation today as well.

Normally FPS's would be called FPS? and twin stick shooters..... twin stick shooters. Each genre normally already has a commonly associated name which the community recognizes. Of course, you can claim "shmup" usually refers to "shoot em up", then just look at the literal meaning of shoot them up and place practically everything under the shmup umbrella, and technically you might be correct, but its probably not optimal.

In fact, if you think about it, this sort of literal understanding by developers (or just blatantly trying to squeeze in more tags to get more eyeballs) is probably why so many "random" stuff like FPS and the other items you listed are listed as shmup on steam.

 

Yeah, among people who actually use the term "shmup" when talking about video games (as opposed to when debating terminology) I've generally seen/heard it used as @BennyTan describes. As a description "shoot 'em up" is super broad, but as a genre "shmup" generally refers to an arcade game with shooting, dodging and lots of projectiles. I have heard non-gamers describe FPSs as "shoot 'em up" games, but I have never heard anyone refer to an FPS as a "shmup".

Indeed! It's why almost any game with stats that increase is now an "RPG", regardless of whether or not it involves any actual role playing.

You really can't boil the viability of a game down to what genre / tag will be applied to it. As @neginfinity says, there's a lot more to that game than its base genre.

But also, being "viable" for these games doesn't require becoming a mainstream hit. They can be made on a fairly low budget and/or by a small team, so keeping a niche audience happy is often all they need to do.

 

When someone say shoot em up, this is the game I think about

 

You and most everyone else. Shmup has referred to horizontal/vertical/tube/otherwise technically fixed shooters for literal decades at this point and I don't think I've ever heard a definition from the past 20+ years that could encompass first person shooters without having to sit there and argue your case.

Kinda like how some people go "technically ALL games are roleplaying games."

Also, Bob, why are so many of your threads ultimately just asking if a genre is viable? I've seen it at least three times in the last few weeks.

 

There is no one "viable / unviable" type of game. I think from all the threads you have been posting, you are looking into the wrong things. This is not going to yield you anything useful.

 

Yeah the most viable game is one that you are passionate about, so when you keep hitting the inevitable problems during development, you care enough about the project to want to battle through them and find a solution.

So while its reasonable and very sensible to consider the marketing potential of any project and different features, a common trait of successful commercial projects is that they are driven by a passionate team working on them that care about what they are trying to do. (Which is why its possible to create a highly successful game out of an idea that doesn't have obvious broad appeal, or fills a niche).

Therefore the best advice I think that can be given is just to make the game you want to make because you want to play it. Then to get a playable prototype working in a short a time frame as possible, so you can then see if other people also want to play it.

 

I say this, but mostly as a way to justify my extremely rigid definition of role-playing games

(...since you asked, games where you engage in dialogue to express personal opinions about events or game world "lore")

 

Been there, done that, and wished I hadn't done that. The trouble is that some genres are widely recognized to be almost impossible to make money from, one classic example being the horror genre which has a very low median revenue, a very large number of titles, and a very low chance of making any appreciable money even if the game is played by some of the big Youtubers (who often do play them). Even the dev who made "Welcome to the Game II" (which was one of the few that did well) was disappointed by the relatively low sales of his latest game ("Scrutinized") and he said he has no choice but to either get out of horror completely or make only multiplayer co-op horror games. That's because most people prefer watching someone else get scared rather than themselves doing it, combined with the extremely large number of new horror games (usually simple ones) coming out each month, which oversaturates the market. So I think the genre does make a big difference.

 

I know a fair few developers making horror games AND making money off those horror games, a notable one being Puppet Combo, who not only makes and sells what are described as B-grade horror, but also runs a patreon that brings in a theoretical gross minimum of $1700 a month on top of those sales. It's likely more because that assumes everyone pledging is pledging a single dollar.

Looking into Welcome to the Game 2 and Scrutinized, there's a few things I notice that would likely affect things. Let's start with the games themselves that, while popular (both games have over 500 verified reviews on Steam at a Highly Positive rating), but also visually... nothing.

One of these screenshots is from Welcome to the Game 2 (2018) and Scrutinized, which came two years later. Can you tell me which is which without looking it up?





At a glance, these games lack not only anything that makes them visually distinct from each other, but anything that makes them visually distinct from every other indie horror that gets tossed on Steam. To say this game lacks any sort of visual identity would already be enough of a problem, but it also suffers from doing that after 2.5 years of indie horror evolution and the resurgence of the AAA horror title with the new Resident Evil titles since 7 hit. AAA games aren't eating indie horror games, but that coupled with the fact that indie horror was seeing a major boom in 2016-2018 especially, the market was kinda primed for Welcome to the Game 2.

Hell, the dev's other games all look like a lot more than this. Compare WttG2 and Scrutinized to each other, then compare them to the first game and Waiting Room.

The other issue has to do with timing though, but not in the way you think. These games lack any sort of visual distinction even from each other but came out 2.5 years apart. If you're going to make smaller games like this that take about four hours to beat that long apart? You're basically relying on this game either being utterly fantastic and getting a massive audience mostly on its own (a bad idea to begin with), or your personal reputation that has faded away because the internet doesn't have a memory like that.

From where I'm sitting, the reason these games failed have far less to do with horror as a genre than they do reasons more closely related to the game.

Then quit.

If you want to make games but don't want money to be a primary concern?

Be a hobbyist and get a desk job because the only way you're gonna make money otherwise is by pulling a Jake Birkett, which is less about viability and more about finding and serving a niche.

If a failed title has you going "fine I'll just make whatever is most likely to make money," you're more likely to get a Wha Happun? episode in a few years than you are paid.

 

Understanding and analysing things from a market and business perspective is good, and can help you make more informed decisions and increase your chances of financial success. But it has to go a heck of a lot deeper than "what genre is doing well?" And in any case, understand that there are no guarantees.

 

I believe the usual idea in this case is to spam a lot of projects and hope that one of them lands a hit.

Basically, if you take one shot at a target, and if you have 30 shots at the same target, the chance of hitting the bullseye in general is higher if you take 30 shots.

 

At no point did I ever say that the mere act of picking a popular genre will automatically lead to success, nor do I assume that median revenue based on tags is the only factor involved. I've looked at other factors, and I also realize that creativity is often the single biggest factor; but I've also noticed that even the most creative games have often failed to gain much public attention or sales if they aren't in a category that many people search for, whereas plenty of quick, unpolished, amateurish games in certain genres tend to get far more sales. I think this is unlikely to be just coincidence. At minimum, games in certain genres arguably get a lot more public attention - usually - and therefore if you'd release two equally polished and creative games in different genres, it's likely - in general - that the one that belongs to a genre that's 100 times more popular has a better shot at public attention and therefore the climb isn't quite so steep. The reason I mentioned the dev who made "Welcome to the Game 2" is because only a couple years ago he said his goal was to become the top dev in the horror genre, but now he's wondering if he should leave that genre entirely - and it's not just because of a single game's sales since indie horror sales across the board have been in a slump, as he pointed out. Puppet Combo doesn't make anything close to what "Welcome to the Game 2" made (AFAIK) much less the amount made by many devs in more popular genres, so that's not a good example to use.

 

I'm aware of that. I have tried to analyze other factors, such as the amount of competition in each genre, the number of new releases each month, the type of game that's expected in each genre, the amount of time it would take to make typical games in each genre, etc. But it has to start with basic stats.

 

That was my other plan; but trying to produce dozens of variations of the same game as rapidly as possible is: 1) exhausting, 2) produces generic games that can ruin a reputation, and 3) may still fail, especially if the genre is flooded with new releases each month or isn't popular enough to find much of an audience. I think it's probably better to adapt existing code to a genre that at least has a higher median revenue and therefore better odds of success, or a hybrid of several genres including both popular and niche categories.

 

Nobody said "as rapidly as possible" and nobody said "variations of the same game." You've read way more into neginfinity's post and mine while ignoring the bulk of them.

So like... you do know that WttG2 was probably a fluke then, right? Simply saying "I want to be the top horror game dev" doesn't mean jack if your products have ages between them and can't even functionally stand from one another. You've posted multiple "is [GENRE] viable?" threads and a thread that kinda shows that you're ignoring key parts of market research when you asked if it's possible to run a crowdfunding campaign without social media reach.

The simple fact is that horror's viability as a genre (multiple extremely popular indie and AAA games), just like the viability of a shmup (one of the most popular series getting two games this year with its last entry having over 750 reviews bringing its rating to overwhelmingly positive), just like the viability of a farming game (c'mon), is fine. I can not stress this enough that you are fretting over genre while ignoring actual market research.

 

That's not it.

The idea is not to produce dozens of "variations", but dozens of DIFFERENT games.

Variations of the same thing counts as one attempt, people will quickly realize that you're making reskins and will stop buying for new products.

Also no one said anything about "rapidly". If you hurry up too much, the quality will drop.

The idea of trying many different things is to find one that hits the target. And in order to do that you try different mechanics, different stories, etc. If you're making "variations" of the same thing, you're not searching for a thing that works, but are trying to do exact same thing as before while expecting a different results.

I absolutely would not recommend making "variations", as this is a great way to build a negative reputation. The games should be different enough. There can be a common theme, common mechanic, but they should differ.

 

Agreed, at that point you might as well just call it a day and start making asset flips because the line between the "variations" and a "flip" becomes very thin and blurred - granted its not an "asset flip" but it certainly is a "flip"

 

The external stuff is important, but it's not everything. To start with I'd focus on analysing the game itself and who is buying it. Why do the hits hit, and why do the misses miss?

The other thing I'd be doing is critically comparing my own work against other, successful games and honestly appraising whether my stuff is up to scratch or not. You don't have to be amazing across the board, but you want to know your strengths and weaknesses and where you can compete and where you can't.

 

I have to agree with the other recommendations. Don't ask others what genre is viable, ask yourself honestly in which genre you can compete. If there's none, get a different job and try to improve your skills on the side if you can't turn your back on games entirely. The average value of games has plummeted with the crazy oversaturation across all genres. You have to be realistic and empathize with the reality of today's gamers - I already own over a dozen top shelf games that I intended to play "one day", but haven't gotten around to yet. Things like Frostpunk, Axiom Verge, Rage, Remnant, Total War: Troy, Tacoma, Observer, Control, Assassins Creed Syndicate, Ruiner, etc. etc. etc.. It's probably more like 3 dozen or more if I really go through all my lists, I've totally lost track. For me to buy your game, it needs to be more appealing to me than every single one of these. Something like "Untitled Goose Game" promised giving me something that these other games can not. It didn't quite live up to my expectation, but I bought it. You're not just competing within a genre, you're competing for limited available time with every other form of entertainment.

 

I love diorama games in VR like Moss. A shot em up or desert strike type game in VR with a detailed little world to look at.

Could be a winner, also VR consumers are dying for content

 

Spoiler

I guess today is the day the hell froze over, cause I also think this way.

Jungle Strike, RTS games, and isometric RPGs. Supposedly some people managed to run first neverwinter nights through VorpX and claim that it looks amazing.

This is likely an untapped niche. Although we have Arcaxer.

 

Given the responses I'm getting, I don't seem to be having any success explaining my purpose in these posts, so here's something which might make it clearer: Steam's analytics data indicates that most traffic to a game's Steam page usually comes thru Steam's website itself, whether from search, or people clicking on another game's tags, etc, which means that a large part of marketing on Steam requires analyzing what keywords people are searching for or what tags they're clicking on, and similar. This in turn leads to the question: what relation is there between keywords people are typing into the search field and the tags a game has? The "farming" tag only has 71 games but a median revenue of $18,000 despite the fact that many / most of the really big games of that type are not included under that tag. Instead, games like "Stardew Valley", "My Time At Portia", most of the "Farming Simulator" games etc have the tags "farm sim", "agriculture" and "life sim" (for the first two), and all these tags include a lot more games and a much lower median revenue than the "farming" tag. This can't be because those 71 games tagged "farming" just happen to be so much better than the average game with these other tags, so maybe it's because people are typing "farming" into the search field a lot more than these other farm-related tag keywords, thereby driving more traffic to games which have "farming" as a tag? This is one of the reasons I'm analyzing tags right now, not because I'm under the delusion that no other factors matter.

 

I'm pretty sure actively marketing your game is more important than choosing the most optimal hashtags

 

I can not begin to explain how this is absolutely the worst market research possible, especially when factoring in how Steam's tagging system works. You are ignoring actual data in favour of trying to find the best median income for specific tag types and, again, this is the worst possible idea.

We know what you're trying to do and say, and that's why everyone is telling you this is a shortsighted view on market analytics because median revenue does not effectively account for things like consumer purchasing habits in the very tags you're talking about. On top of that, of course Steam traffic mostly comes from Steam as a site/client, because the search function for titles is the most effective way to get to a game on Steam you don't own. The tag search isn't useful because Steam tags aren't properly applied or vetted. You are working with dramatically incomplete data.

Tags are useless and do not represent sales or genre and you're somehow using them to mean both.

 

I'm quite certain that people do not buy games this way. Basically they do not type keywords into search field.

I have way too many games in my steam library, but the most recent purchases were:

• From discovery queue.
• Games I heard of somewhere.
• Sales.
• I think there are also "players like you also like also played" suggestions from steam.

I think that in last year I used search 3 times and that was to look through VR games with official seated support while. I never used a tag.

People also do not exactly think "I want to play a game about <farming>". Instead "I want to play something like Harvest Moon". Then they search for "games like Harvest Moon", then they'll hit 50 sites that list "10 games like harvest moon", there they'll get exposed to game's screenshots and writer's opinion. Or... "I sorta like Farming Simulator 19, but I want a feature X, is there a game like that?".

So, it is not about tags. Valve does track players, but it is unclear how they do that. They appear to be tracking play times, and offer similar items based on the game you recently played. However, there's no information regarding how they determine which title is similar.

Basically, even if you create a game and tag it by farming, even if I like farming, I won't find it unless I either read about it on another site, or steam presents it to me on the front page or in discovery queue. If it makes into front page or queue, basically it'll have on picture to catch my interest. If it catches my interest, I'll go into game page, scroll through screenshots. If I like those, I'll check out few reviews, then videos. I won't ever search for a tag.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if tags were one of the things with the least weight applied to them. My guess is it probably focuses a lot on play time, number of launches, and individual session time as a huge part of its base and then extrapolates that based on the other games you've played relative to the games other people have.

 

Contrary to the posters immediately above, I'll say that this is probably a worthwhile thing to research at some point. However, the emphasis there is on "a" and "some point".

Your opening topic here was "marketability of", and this is only a small part of that. Your first sentence was about "viability", and there will be much bigger factors which will impact that. Starting with "do people want this game in the first place?"

To use a programming analogy, the approach you're taking here seems to be akin to worrying about what operators you're using before you've even settled on a decent algorithm. Sure, it might make some difference, but you've got much bigger things to think about first.

So, first up, props to you for thinking about this stuff and recognizing that it's important, and for not doing that thing where you tell yourself that passion and hard work are all that matters. But also, you're looking real hard at a specific tree without first getting familiar with the forest. Before figuring out how to optimise a specific piece of your overall marketing I suggest first spending some time getting to know, from a high level, broad approaches to marketing games, what works where, and what kinds of games and what type of audience the pros and cons of each aligns with.

I would assume that this is at least in part just dilution of terminology. As an example, many early "RPG"s have some kind of stat-based character progression. That's not the "role playing" part, but it proved to be super popular. So many games focused on that part and dropped the more complicated / less popular bits where there was actual playing of roles, but the name didn't change. The result was games such as Diablo which are labelled "RPG"s despite having more in common with brawlers.

In other words, labels are often more about where the audience came from, or the game's influences, whether or not the original defining characteristic of the label is still around.

 

Where are you getting your data from, how accurate is it and how likely is it to not be misleading? E.g. I've barely ever clicked onto a steam-link to get to a game, since I'm never logged into steam in my browser. I'll always type the name of the game into the steam (application, not website) search field, and buy the game from there. So even if I'm showing up in the stats as coming to the product page via search field, often will I be there because of something I read or saw elsewhere. You're not mentioning artwork at all, imho you'd be better served thinking about that before thinking about keywords. Iirc in the steam backend you can see clickthrough rates of your game compared to other games. It's probably one of the places most worth spending money on would be my guess.

I've briefly looked at the games with the farming tag, and I have a hard time believing those 18k$ median revenue to be true.

There's a good gdc talk about how people buy games on steam, have you seen that?

https://howtomarketagame.com/

 

That video says (among other things) that players are intensely genre-focused and tend to avoid certain genres including horror - which is what I've been saying. A surprising thing in the video, however, was the emphasis on generic similarities to the prospective buyer's preferred genre rather than any unique or creative elements that make a game stand out. I can't believe that players are just looking to play the same game over and over, because it's usually the creative ones that end up getting large numbers of purchases.

 

Please for the love of god do some actual research.

Creative games that end up getting large numbers of purchases are outliers, not the norm. Stardew Valley was a pretty direct successor to the 2D Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games, to the point where you could change the name and you could sell it as one. The most successful horror games for a long while were based on Outlast. For the longest time, first person shooters were called Doom clones, even if they outsold Doom.

You wanna know some real interesting S***? A lot of people who own a lot of games have libraries that look like this:

• Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
  
• Call of Duty: WWII
  
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
  
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
  
• Call of Duty: Warzone
  
• Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
  
• FIFA 14
• FIFA 15
• FIFA 16
  
• FIFA 17
  
• FIFA 18
  
• FIFA 19
  
• FIFA 20
  
• FIFA 21

This is only a minor exaggeration, but most game libraries have a lack of title diversity, not a glut of it, just like how a lot of people only watch romantic comedies or films starring Adam Sandler. There is an upper limit of how unfamiliar a game can be unless it has something that can really hook a lot of people in. This has been a pretty known thing for some time, which is why people bring up serving your niche so often, especially for smaller developers. And each niche has people in it that respond differently to how things are played, which is why there's another common phrase that gets thrown around: know your audience.

 

Also please, for the love of God, put the data you find in context.

While true, this isn't really relevant for typical small studios or solo developers. Looking at what "most" gamers buy is about as useful as looking at how successful a genre is. If one were to be hyperbolic, they could describe it as "absolutely the worst market research possible". ;-)

Unless we have Activision's or EA's budget then we're not going to compete with Call of Duty: N+1 or World Famous Licensed Product '22. Thankfully, small studios or solo developers also don't need the same level of mainstream success as a Call of Duty or a FIFA or any of the other similar examples you could have dragged out, because unless we're stonkingly lucky that's simply not the context we'll be operating in.

 

Honestly, even then it's pretty true. A lot of people only play platformers if they're indies, a lot will only play visual novels, a lot will only play roguelikes. While the example used AAA titles, the reality of the situation is that game libraries are rarely as diverse as expected even in the indie space, owing in a large part to the indie explosion around 2010 pushing indie games into a more mainstream viewpoint, if you buy games anywhere other than on a shelf.

 

I am not arguing that it isn't true*, or that game libraries are diverse. To the contrary, that seems like a pretty unintuitive conclusion for someone to reach.

My point is purely that with the particular example list you posted as a follow up from your previous statements about a lack of creativity, the context is super important.

In the context of Call of Duty N+1, the audience literally wants more content of the same game they played last year, with slightly glossier graphics.

In the context of smaller games there generally is some level of creativity involved, though. Not enough to alienate your audience by making the games too different from what your audience wants, but certainly more than "this year's soccer team roster + updated hair rendering".

It certainly does come down to serving your niche and knowing your audience. But a part of that is knowing roughly how creative you should get, and what areas you can mess with vs. where you just need to nail pre-existing expectations.

* In fact, I specifically said "while true".

 

Tags can be used for search (i do it once in a while, but i'm probably in the minority as you say), but i do think its main use for most developers is as a sort of advertising tool. Such as from your points 1 and 4, "From discovery queue." and "players like you also like also played" suggestions from steam". Tags DO play a role in these and as you attested to, it is probably one channel which potentially leads to purchases (not only from you, but also from me and probably everybody).

Long story short, tags are important, but probably not DIRECTLY in the way OP wants, but still very much worth investing time looking into. Its very much the equivalent of SEO and recommendation optimization for steam. While steam doesn't give the exact algorithm (who does...), it does say the following.

 

I believe its better to make a game you want to make and are passionate about than doing a genre you think is most viable.

 

You listed AAA games from two popular, established series made by big companies that are notorious for cranking out variations of the same thing to please their large existing fan base, whereas I was talking about how indie devs often only get noticed if they produce something creative enough to stand out, and there are many examples of this. One classic example is "Five Nights At Freddy's", which got billions of views on Youtube partly (maybe mostly) because the big Youtubers said it was "incredibly unique" (to quote Markiplier's first video of it) and hence even the simple first game in the series stood out among other (usually generic) horror games. Recent examples include "At Dead of Night" (played by lots of big Youtube channels because they found it unique); "Loop Hero" (a very weird but unique take on several genres), "Nova Drift" (a unique attempt to turn one of the earliest of all video games into a modern roguelike), and countless others. AAA companies get away with cranking out variations of the same game because they already have a fan base and the huge marketing budget needed to get their games in front of other players through advertising, and they can afford the large team needed to make state-of-the-art graphics as a means of getting attention; plus they don't want to take a financial risk by making something that hasn't been tried before. "Call of Duty" fans may certainly just buy the latest similar shooters from the same big companies, but players who buy indie games are often looking for creative games that do something they haven't seen before, and indie devs usually have little choice but to try to stand out by coming up with something like that. That was my only point. Do you think the typical indie dev can make money by producing clones?

 

The "typical" indie dev can't, because the "typical" indie dev can't make enough money with games no matter what they try, because statistically the "typical" indie dev fails horribly when trying to make a sustainable fulltime living from games. Hell, the typical indie dev can't even finish a single game if you factor in the number of abandoned projects.

If they're really good I think they can make money with clones if they're produced cost-efficient enough and if the clones are "more appealing" than the original in enough ways for enough people and they succeed at making sure their audience finds them. This is a good example:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/416680/Zombie_Night_Terror/

It's "Zombie Lemmings" - the familiar puzzle mechanics, but with a Zombie theme where you play as the Zombies. Something familiar that many people know and like, an underserved niche because there aren't a lot of lemmings clones, a nostalgia bonus because the original is so old, and the twist is unique enough that there's a good reason to play this instead of any of the original Lemmings games. I bought it, good game.
The production values are also on a very high level imho, I wouldn't have bought it if it was a typical janky looking solo-project with assetstore- or programmer art.

In contrast all the Jagged Alliance games after part 2, wildfire and the community mod, failed (don't know any stats about what they made financially, but they're all regarded as failures in the eyes of the target audience that still plays JA2 to this day but won't touch any of the newer JA games) because they were neither unique enough nor good enough.

By the way Minecraft was a "clone" of Infiniminer. If you'd look at Infiniminer screenshots you'd think "that's Minecraft with some mod or it's a very old alpha build".

 

oh, a VR lemmings clone would be another cool diorama type game.

 

What's your game's unique selling point going to be?
Why will users want to play your game and not someone else's?

Until you can answer those questions you have no hope of being able to sell it to anyone else, irrespective of what genre the game is.
You need to come up with a hook from which you can build a cool game from, before anything else.
Something that convinces you that you have the edge over the competition to build a game around.

A recent release that springs to mind is Teardown. Unique Selling Point = Fully destructive environments.

You are aware of this feature immediately once you come across promo for the game, quite some time before it even becomes apparent what the story of the game is.
I can imagine that this single concept was devised long before the developer had decided exactly what he was going to do with the tech in gameplay terms.
Could you take that idea and make it a success in different contexts or genres? Of course you can, but you start from a position of having a cool feature or gameplay loop to work with - that's the important bit.

So I think its much better to start by thinking of a core mechanic that you would enjoy building a game around it. If you can come up with the next Gravity Gun, or Bullet Time, then that's going to help you make a hit.

Naturally if you have several solid ideas for a game, all in distinctive genres, it perhaps then makes sense to consider the marketability of each type of game when deciding which has more chance of success, I don't think anyone disputes that.

But you need the cool ideas first, that should surely be the driving force behind any creative project.

 

I think I wrote about it already. Not "clones" but "similar games". Meaning they should have common elements.

Like Martin_H said, typical indie is the one that failed and earned nothing.

If you want to look at successful examples, there's Spiderweb Software, which is tiny team that has been producing isometric RPGs for years. They have their niche, they have their following, etc.

In Horror Genre there's Frictional Games who developed Amnesia and have been working on similar games for 14 years or so.

As for AAA they can get away with reskins due to high budget. Even if mechanics are copypasted, they still need to record new voices, produce new artwork and so on. A good example of that is far cry Primal and Far Cry series. In Primal they reused maps and some models, but still produced plenty of unique content on visual side.

P.S. This article is worth reading, in my opinion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcen_Games Those are guys who made AI War

 

Oh my god they were EXAMPLES OF LIMITED LIBRARY VARIETY which I even clarified in a LATER POST.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that you aren't even remotely interested in what anyone in this thread has to tell you because it isn't validating your preexisting assumptions because everything you've said here when people point out your severely flawed viewpoints and methodology, often in great detail, you just put your hands over your ears and go "NA NA NA NA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

You can keep being childish all on your own, but this thread is obviously not worth the time or effort.

 

Many indie devs have more diverse gaming tastes than the average player, which is quite natural given the level of interest in gaming needed to sustain motivation during development. This leads to having ideas across many genres. so market research to find out which ideas are most economically viable is a good idea.

 

Yeah but thats atleast the other way around, "I would love todo this idea, is it viable"

 

If you look at failed games you'll find plenty of really creative stuff there, too. Not the majority, but it's there. So while I agree that it's an important factor, clearly it's not the only factor.

When you're doing your research you can't look just at the successful things. You need to also look at the unsuccessful ones, too, and get an understanding of why things went how they did.

 

I'm definitely the least qualified in this thread to talk about this with respect to games specifically, but in general I strongly disagree with the claim "unconstrained creativity is inherently better than constrained creativity." Being creative is about working within the boundaries you have, not about there being no boundaries at all.

That's not talking about doing a genre you hate, and of course you need "passion" for what you're working on (though there's a conversation to be had about that as well...), but the concept of "taking ownership," or coming to personally identify with something you didn't necessarily creatively derive yourself, is pretty common.