Marketability of Shmups ?

Im just a Bohemian that likes todo what I like todo.

 

I wouldn't call that a clone since it's a unique take on that type of game, quite a bit different than Lemmings. Similar, yes, but it isn't in the same league as all these clones that are just reskins.

 

How am I possibly being "childish"? I gave you a polite response backed up with examples, whereas you toss out insults and emotional rants (in all caps, no less) while accusing me of being the "childish" one. BTW, the idea of looking at median revenue based on Steam tags was something that Danny Weinbaum (the dev who made "Eastshade") mentioned on Twitter recently - it was his idea - and so I thought I would look into it. I never said it was a foolproof method of doing market research, but I think that the large difference in median revenue based on tag is certainly something to examine. But I know what you're going to say to that, so do us both a favor and find someone else to use as a punching bag.

 

Yes, it's important to look at the failed games in each genre; but when the median revenue is relatively high then there's a reasonable chance that the number of failures is relatively low. Just to use that "farming" tag again, it's surprising how few failures there are in that list (I looked through the bottom ones) compared to almost any other category. No, that doesn't mean that tagging a game "farming" will lead to automatic improved chances of course, but surely there's a reason why certain tags have a much higher median. I'm just curious about why that is, because it seems puzzling.

 

Median revenue gives you no information regarding number of failed titles in the genre, because it does not include every game in existence. There could be thousands of failures you are unaware of.

 

To be fair he said "relative," which it does give you (since median is based on the number of data points rather than their values alone like the mean).

--unrelated to the above--
This just popped up in my discovery queue:

It's possible there are hidden tags I can't see, but it's a "farming game" and it doesn't even have a tag as such.

Additionally, while the idea of looking at tags alone seems fine, trying to parse between "farming" and "farming sim" seems unwise when, as already mentioned, people just don't find games by looking at tags. And arguably Steam has the "intelligence" to merge together similar tags when trying to find recommendations (I think I remember one of their Steam Labs blog posts pointing out something about this). Edit - yes, take a look at this (the "Design Process" section). It implies that Steam groups together things like "Farming" and "Farming Sim" when coming up with recommendations.

 

My guess would be because farming is more more niche and specific tag and less likely to be abused like RPG or FPS where people seem to interpret it however they want interpretation. This leads to a fair number of implications.

1) People actually get what they are looking for hence less failures
2) Its more niche then say RPGs so there maybe higher acceptance rates i.e. beggars can't be choosers.
3) There's actually less random stuff to fail to begin with. e.g Every game is an RPG, may be theoretically correct, but that doesn't mean people searching the RPG tag are looking for any game
4) Other stuff which i can't remember...

It does tell you why it recommended this to you on the right. Tags like fantasy, story rich etc

 

Yeah it tells me why it recommended it to me, but none of those (or any others visible on the page are "farming" even though the blurb explicitly says it's "inspired by" the three most famous "farming sim" games out there.

 

I don't think it explicitly mines the description to perform auto tagging, recommendation or some such. hahahaha.
Not sure what type of algo is used, but

1) Recommendations would probably be made on what tags you have, rather then what tags you don't have
2) Even if it took into account missing tags, if the game had 5 tags, 1 missing "farming" tag vs 4 which matched other games in your library might still result in it being recommended.

In fact, taking into account missing tags when doing recommendations in order to penalize devs who spam large amounts of tags would be a good thing, but this is not really the case, as they seem to encourage more tags with each game requiring a minimum of 5 tags.

 

The idea that games have to have some kind of actual unique (as in, at least very uncommon) selling point is a myth in my opinion, caused by outliers that get excess attention as Murgilod pointed out. It is also driven by the desire of many devs to produce something original, a darling of their own creativity, rather than something successful.

This seems to produce an obsession with inverting some popular mechanic rather than studying the ones that work well and polishing them. You'll see devs get some genre and add or change something important for the players of that genre, and when it doesn't work all that well they wonder why. All it takes is a single bad mechanic to ruin a game, and almost by definition, new mechanics (since they are usually simply inversions of perfectly good old ones) are very unlikely to work out well.

Like some kind of postmodern art, these games are venerated by a small group of devs who believe they have something really special, when the gamers are saying the exact opposite.

The truth is that most successful games are copies of ones that have already been proven to do well. That's why AAA does the same thing, because they know that a good game is good no matter how many times it has been done before.

I think the idea of emphasizing originality is at best unhelpful for new devs, who should instead prioritize studying how to take perfectly functional mechanics and implement them in a game without messing them up. The finer points of balance in a game, whether it's tuning a mechanic or tuning the AI or tuning the pacing of the game are far more important than doing anything original, and in many ways far more difficult to do.

For example, in the space combat genre, there are many people who are looking for a similar experience to Freelancer. It's almost a meme at this point "is this game the true successor to Freelancer?". What was Freelancer? A very simple game, no crazy or complex mechanics - far simpler than many of its counterparts at the time and easy to pick up and play. Certainly nothing particularly surprising or original. One might call it the Call of Duty of space games. And above all, it's very polished.

Many games have tried to recapture the smooth, enjoyable experience that Freelancer was, but they often mess up or leave out some key mechanic that players associate with all the other mechanics in the game, leaving them unhappy. The closest one is probably Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, but even that made questionable design choices that disinterested a lot of people (including myself).

Even Valheim for instance, which a lot of people are for some reason shocked about, is at its core a very simple and unoriginal game. It's basically a reduced and simplified member of the survival genre, cutting out annoying mechanics and avoiding doing anything stupid. It's a game designed for the player rather than the developer. It shipped in a highly polished state and clearly values the idea of not bamboozling players with anything self-obsessively original or unexpected. In some ways, one might call it the first game to realize what gamers (in general) actually wanted to do in a survival game - and it's mostly very simple and unoriginal things like placing walls where they want to put them, without dying of hunger while doing it.

 

I wasn't implying it was (or ought to be) "mining the description for tags," I wasn't really thinking at all about why it was recommended to me. I was pointing out that a game that is ostensibly about farming does not have a farming-related tag, and if that's the case for this game, it might be the same for others.

 

Ooops, i think i misunderstood your original post, my apologies and thank you for explaining

There is a farming tag, just that its not relevant to you hence its not shown. Under the user-defined tags (below the publisher info) click the + icon to view the full list of tags (not intuitive as most people probably think of "+" to add more tags rather then view tags). There are about 20 tags and there you can see "Farming Sim".

The ordering of the tag is based on voting (click to upvote the tag and move it up the list) and the "Farming Sim" tag's position on the list (check it out) provides an idea of what people feel about or are looking for when they play "this type" of game (how you categorize the game is subjective hence while looking at the same game, "this type" for you may not be the same as "this type" for me).

 

Thanks, I figured there was more than the 4/5 shown there but I didn't think to check that.

That makes me wonder, to what degree is this based on user tags vs. dev-defined tags? If the "Farming Sim" tag is more ubiquitous, are users more inclined to use the tag for other games vs the "Farming" tag?

Also, just took a look at my first page of "Top Sellers" in the "Farming" tag category. Almost all of them include both Farming Sim and Farming as tags, and in that order, indicating that more users tagged them as the former vs. the latter. As such, at best one could conclude that "farming" is a subset of "farming sim." One might further examine this by comparing the frequency (so percentages) of other tags for games tagged "Farming" (or "Farming" + "Farming Sim") vs. games merely tagged "Farming Sim" to examine if there are any significant differences. However, with such a small number of "Farming" tags I'd be hesitant to trust conclusions, given that there are thousands upon thousands of games on Steam.

 

- Big seller "original" game tend to be the one who refine former original games who was either niche, cult or downright broken but had an interesting premise (ie popular with other dev), or basically just blend old stuff in new way.
- Minecraft is an evolution of infiniminer mixed with a way more accessible dumb down dwarf fortress, both are niche obscure, but at the same time appeal to stuff people always wanted in game: destructability, a meaningful open world, infinite possibility of gameplay, customization, etc ... it was accidental but it tape into many deep wish of gamers.

The point is that people don't understand originality in art relative to an audience, yes the audience want new stuff, but not too much, what they want is relatability, if they can relate you are in, that mean to be original, you need to understand teh inner wish, wants and value of the audience, the "cool factor" they are looking for. Originality without the audience's substance is not financially viable. Sales will basically tell you nothing, at best it tells you the market is either saturated, or nothing is filling the void and the next big thing hasn't happen. Randomly tweaking thing won't get you to their next big thing, you have to tap into their dream.

A good example is teh reveal trailer of no man's sky, nobody was clamouring, before, for the next spatial game, only wishing old one to be remade (x wing, freelancer, elite), the genre was niche and stuck into local maximum in term of style and gameplay so it fizzle out, even I was bored of dark military deep black space and I was like, the first spatial game that use something else that a boring black background will get notice, and it happen, while the game didn't deliver, the hype due to tapping into the dream of the next big thing of the dying genre is a testament that values matter, instead of tapping into the usual modern spatial visual, they reinvented 70s space scifi, which people who like the genre also like, it's just nobody fully done it, plus the promise of a full scale universe tap into that deep dream people had. The visual was so influencial that almost everybody switch to color ful space and planet (outer world, the new star wars squadron, one 3d indie game I forget the name, star bound, etc ...) Which mean there is still an opening for the next big thing to happen in that genre, this time in the gameplay.

A bad example is starlink of ubisoft, it's like everything wrong about the wish of the genre, a multiple level, you spend more time hovering on planet than flying, space combat is repetitive, it's kid oriented but without the charisma and energy (which is why teh starfox addition in the switch version had more sales, star fox is much better at capturing that feeling), the mission structure is clever but fail at upholding the fantasy and is shallow in implementation, they picked the main action of no man's sky (scanning flore and fauna, mining, etc ...) but even that they miss why it kept a lot of people in no man's sky drought by trivializing them and turning them in busy pointless task to check a box .... they have all the ingredient but they read the recipe wrong. I mean I'm sure we can stole many originality of that game and put them back to make something that hit the fantasy, but the way they did it was not "relatable". There was no discussion about that game, none, but then that indie game called everspace caught teh attention, ftl worked, both capture the fantasy of space ship and exploration (everspace stole teh progression structure of ftl too)...


IMHO teh best market research is basically pitching the audience and analyzing return on the pitch, by that I mean probing with mock up and vignette prototype, that's basically "loosely" how that goose game got made, they had some stuff shared on social media, and it become viral, so they double down on it. basically the strategy is to create artifact that looks like what teh game would be, which you can probably do within 1h and a day, then share them as broadly as possible and look if that has reaction, who is reacting, to what and how, that's less costly than making a full game, you can tweak, adapt or give up without investing too much, especially emotionally. Also since they are way cheaper you can go pretty wild without committing.

 

neginfinity literally says make some 30 games, one gotta be successful. Right there is the obvious implication of a shotgun strategy of quick iteration of many titles so as to output about 30 of them in any reasonable amount of time (i.e. some few years), in the hopes that one of them makes real money. Otherwise you're going to spend one year per title to make each one at least somehow different, and we might just as well say bye, see you in 15 years or more. Then, if you start thinking about making games original, then you better entirely abandon the idea of large multiplication and swap this for truly measured and well timed quality instead.

Literally spam vs wagyu.

Not that I would recommend the former, but then it also depends what your targeted market and associated platforms are, but the industry has largely proven that the great masses also don't care much about originality for the sake of it. If there's anything to spam out there, it's the same message about how "[My game] is good", ad infinitum.

I can't blame HonoraryBob for reading your post that way because you are actually contradicting your former statement, which was

Sorry but when you say spam some 30 titles and hope to make money there, it's obviously going to be crapware for the most part, there's just no way around it.
I would say that if you are creative enough to make that many truly different games, then you might want use that same intelligence and creativity into even fewer games that will logically outshine the competition instead of trying to spam anything. Spam is popularly associated to a flood of low quality barely differentiated material.
Above all, you are going to consume some significant amount of time on each title no matter what, making it impossible to spam them and managing to turn this activity into a profitable one.

You simply cannot spam sufficient "quality" (big " " here) unless you're a publisher specializing in this type of strategy and counting on gullible poor devs to sell their souls for your own profit and a little of theirs work for you.
The only way to spam a lot of titles at a high rate (because that's the only way you can actually spam anything) put you on the path of Ketchapp (sp?) which, like many publishers of casual or hypercasual games, released a ton of them, managed to make some money on mobile, peaked, then fell.

We may want to believe that it's better to aim for originality, or at least apply high quality in recycling an old recipe (what most 2D platforms have done during the last 10-15 years by focusing on graphics), then either hope on your lucky star (nope) or spend a good amount of time and money in communication, which is very hard. There have been after all several indie successes that feed the hope in us.
On the positive side, Kickstarter has considerably lowered the entry fee here for indies who believe in high quality and originality.

Besides, HB is also right to realize that some types, or genres, are more popular and reach a greater quantity of people. This is the only way I think one could use tags, as indicator of theoretical market size. But then the competition will obviously be fiercer there too.

Not necessarily, you have the profile of a compulsive buyer who mentally projects the "good playing times" ahead but never actualizes them. If his game looked good enough and was getting good reviews without necessarily being better than any of these games you listed, you would probably buy it too. In fact, that you don't play it isn't much of his problem, he may not roll with a long tail DLC strategy at all.

It's most likely word of mouth + curating + forum + youtube, in different proportions, which then translates into a search of the specific title.
That tags might correlate with some successes would have more to do with happenstance. In theory we could observe a strange flood of a specific genre tomorrow, because someone gets lucky with some kind of Flappy Bird of the horror genre (well...) and that would just run the associated tags' worth.
Although Amazon has demonstrated (and all mobile stores do it now for apps) that suggestions are very important, especially if the entry fee is quite low. It pushes content down consumers' throats so they don't have to search for it specifically, and this is where tags have a greater influence (besides the words in the title and description).

 

Wouldn't median revenue be more affected by the quantity of quality and successful titles than average revenue though?

 

At the core of it, many successful 2D games are just pretty reskins. The whole wrapping becomes the selling gimmick so it's important to get it right.

 

I'm not interested in this kind of discussion at the moment.

I believe that's average. Where one highly successful entry pulls the resulting value up.

Here's an example. There are ten data points. 9 data points are 0$. One data point is $1000000. Average : $100000 (sum all data points, divide by total number of datapoints). Median: $0 (sort all datapoints, pick one in the middle).

However....
Let's say that there is a 1000 games in the genre and only 20 are included into median calculation. The data is going to be skewed.

Then there's "correlation does not mean causation".

 

Wow. That is really devious and sneaky. Damn.

 

I have barely if never seen shmup used for anything else but those classical (in style) auto-scrolling (usually) vertical or horizontal 2D shoot'em ups, and even then since the term came up late, it almost became associated with the later 90s-00s shooters. Anything else, from fixed (Space Invaders), pedestrian (Ikari Warriors), free 360 (Asteroid likes) to full 3D (not in rendering but in depth-based axial movement such as Starfox to the more constrained Panzer Dragoon) shoot'em ups were never called shmups.

 

Just FYI that was a spammer. They quoted the OP and put in spam links, and then copy-pasted another post in the thread.

 

FWIW, in Chris Zukowski's test on 16 people (buyers of smaller titles in larger quantities), he found this:



See #5, as part of the "hovering". 5 user tags in it. Later on he even ranks tags in second position just right after "art" and before "short description."
His small sample might not be totally accurate but it's still good to have sticking in your mind.

 

I replied to DubaiQueen.

 

They are the spammmer.


Here's the post they copied:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/marketability-of-shmups.1094566/#post-7053391

 

I guess it depends on what you call "crapware", but I don't think that's "obvious" at all, or that there's "no way around it". Edmund McMillen is a clear counter example. 30 games made between 2001 and 2007, and he continued at that pace for quite some time, and they're not just all variations on the same thing. Many of them are not to my taste, but each to their own. Many of them are of small scope... but that's how you get 'em done.

And by "get 'em done" I don't specifically mean reaching the arbitrary number of 30 releases. I mean that's how you get projects finished, period. Making stuff arbitrarily big is just making life hard for yourself. The larger a project is the less likely you are to complete it. I do make big projects myself, but even then they're as small as they can be while doing what I want them to do.

Even if you do think McMillen's individual games are "crap", that's really not the point. The point is that by visibly completing lots of projects, and releasing the majority of them to the public, he maximised his opportunities to get good at what he does. Both through practice, and through getting repeated feedback on all stages of development. Then when an opportunity arose for a big break* he was well positioned to take it, because he already had loads of experience, a demonstrable track record of completing stuff, and possibly even a bunch of fans.


On a related note, there is nothing wrong with making bad games! Seriously, how do people think other people get good enough to make good games? It doesn't happen by magic. It happens from practice, persistence, giving stuff a go and seeing how to do it better. Making bad games is a step on the path to making good ones. And if you want to make money from this (it's a discussion of "viability", after all) then you're going to have to get good. Look at the amount of practice McMillen got before he became commercially successful. That's an example of your competition.

* I am not in any way suggesting that his specific opportunity is a repeatable occurrence.

 

Fair point, but you might have found someone who's closer to the exception than the rule and I was under the impression that Bob was more of one-man-team rep here. If I look at the wiki, I see that McMillen worked with a talented coder, that already divides the work hours by two. Many small games were iterations of 2D physics mechanics, which again might fall into Bob's early definition of similar games. You also see that by the time more proper games were being aimed at, with a greater lifespan, the development cycle stretched and slowed down. He might have not even been able to work on the creative and artistic part of the games if he didn't already have a stable source of revenue (he had ten years of work in arts, chiefly on comics if I read this correctly). The arguable big and first real hit, SMB, took more than a year a half of work on the basis of an already existing concept, plus extra work from other people involved in Team Meat, and that's around 2010, a nine years gap since 2001. Without solid revenue, that's almost a decade without the ability to build anything close to a real social life and a family. I hope Bob has a stash of cash to rely on.
Our friend above was fairly concerned about a profitable life producing games in a category that has greater potential. This is not the path I would follow either but that was his main concern. I can understand the early worries.

Sure but as we see in the example you picked, they really came close to a "real" game by the time they clearly dedicated a more typical amount of time on such work. The good thing though is the iteration of several concepts they went through until one would work, but then again consider how long it actually took to get there by the time they started making prototypes. With passion you can lift mountains. Bob seemed worried about the money part and money evaporates really quickly without any input.

Gish was a good game, I remember it! Hell if I could see other people play it, it was more of this curiosity that a connoisseur circle of intellectualizing players talked about (release channels were very limited back then). On my point of view, we see tons of quickly made games that will just get nowhere and are not so good today. Earlier on, there was the typical Stem Greenlight spam at some point that became problematic, now you still find a lot of shovelware on itchio too, the ratio of quality to output is quite low and makes for a lot of noise, with little revenue. This generates a new problem because we're not in 2005-2010, there's a lot of competition and if you don't stick out early on, times gonna be tough I'd say.
This is even more true on mobile platforms and this has even begun to slightly afflict desktop production. That's why I'm more on the cautious side of things. We also know that this industry is a cut throat one. Now I don't know what Bob really wants to do either.

That is true, you also need good starting conditions too, like a clever team mate and a reliable money supply so it keeps your faith up despite the relative commercial failures of the quick products you make. One must not forget that McCullin didn't seem to seriously need to be successful at making games to put food in his plate.

OK but I wouldn't be so positive about this. I mean making a bunch of so-so games and improving on this is a good mindset and has potential, but if your output really amounts to tens of truly bad games after several years of work, I honestly think you should quit and look for another job ASAP.
I'll wish Bob the best luck.

 

I see, so I replied to someone else's post actually pasted by the spammer, with little bits of spam in it. You had such a pretty name DubaiQueen. Bye.

 

This is just one example, so treating them as The Truth is folly. Look up other examples and come to your own conclusions (as should Bob).

I picked that example though because it's a somewhat well known one among independent developers who often get it wrong. They point out SMB on the Xbox and how he became an overnight success, completely overlooking the decade that comes before it, and everything else you point out.

And honestly, those things aren't counter to my message, they're part of it. If you want to make games to get income then you have to be a) good and b) lucky, and neither of those things come fast. Which brings me to...

I hope Bob is smart enough not to ditch his day job in pursuit of a dream without appropriate preparation. You pointed out McMillen's connections, prior experience, and existing income? Yeah, you're likely to need something similar.

Putting aside the belittling use of the word "real", that's all a part of my point. All of the smaller games he made helped him when he decided to get into a larger project. This is one example (just one - find others!) of how long it takes to actually get both good and financially successful with games.

I shall once again raise my m guitar example: nobody expects to sell tickets while they're still taking lessons. The same applies here in game development. Going back to my example, McMillen's early stuff was all hosted for free on online Flash portals.

The way those worked it would have made a little income, but that's not the main benefit he would have got from it.

Right. So how are you* going to get yourself in that situation?

You're still thinking about it as an income generating job by default. You know most people who play guitar do it because they enjoy it, right? It's only a very small percentage of players who can derive income from it, and a smaller group among those who can derive a living from it. Everyone else does it as a hobby, or alongside a day job, because they think it's fun.

* This is a hypothetical "you", not you personally.

 

Yeah AKA mobile industry (I'm barely exaggerating here). However Bob goes for Steam (PC) which is more balanced. To talk about the respective usefulness of average vs median in his case, we should use more appropriate examples where there is definitely more "quantity of quality" as I hinted at. 1 out of 10 games being profitable and the others being nothing worth is no quantity at all to speak of. But with the median indicator in a realistic environment of statistics, that's where you see how much 50% of the top or bottom games have made, or how many games reached 50% of the best or total revenue in a given year. I think it would be more useful to Bob for the Shmup category. Admittedly I haven't paid much attention to this segment in the recent years so I could not speak well of it.

 

Obviously we're not entirely in agreement.
If it's an outlier it casts an illusion over reality. Anyone would better try getting closer to "The Truth" tbh.
In Bob's case, say, if he's equally good in making a platformer, a runner, a shmup or a racing game and likes all of these genres, it would make sense for him to go for the safest option first before taking greater risks, so he could afford doing something he's perhaps more passionate about at a later time. Shmups are already super niche so I think there's the passion here already at play, obviously.
Whether he knows the shmup genre's audience is another thing.

I think it needs to be stressed how good these conditions were. From what I read, McCullin had at his disposal a coder living on the other side of the country, who was ready to turn into reality every and all of McCullin's ideas, without any pressure for revenue, and this lasted nearly a decade.
These are not usual conditions. One might even say they're quite exceptionally pleasant. It's necessary to get this right so people reading this don't get a skewed vision of the reality.

Real in the sense of the content, completion and structure of it based on the genre. Expectations are obviously different whether you go for a hypercasual game or one that looks like it wouldn't be out of place against Super Mario but falls short of having even a hundredth of its levels for example. It wasn't related to quality. Some games, even if good, feel more like they're prototypes of would be bigger ones.
However these days it has almost become a thing to make a little game, as if it were part of some kit waiting to be finished. It's more like a nice demo that has you asking where's the rest? Things have changed a lot and competition is even more inane today. You have tons of people who buy games without even playing them which just proves how even harder it has become to make games and get them noticed, bought and then appreciated. After all, how can there be any good word of mouth if your game isn't even played at all? You know, at this point, I don't even know, I'd say take more risks, put more work into less concepts because you really, really, really need to stick out and the last thing you want is to drown. This brings me again back to betas and crowdfunding. If Bob truly thinks he has a killing idea and thinks it's worth the try, and knows how to sell it well to shmup addicts, he might just as well try KS and work hard on the marketing.

I don't know. I mean Bob sounded like he was looking for revenue chances and this implied a sense of expectations within a reasonable timespan, I assume, rather than idling on a free games platform for close to a decade before cash rains. I can totally understand the idea of minimizing risks at first because it would not be the first time some great game does not meet success and gets the dev team all burnt up.

It's not about me. Ask Bob how he feels about this and if his opinion has changed. More importantly, where's Bob?

I'm merely sticking to the context and wanting to make money from games is not a crime. Bob talked about revenue probabilities, that's the context.

So what? Most people suck at it. Bob approached this from a business perspective, not personnal entertainment. Bob might have a wife and kids. He might not have ten years ahead of him before he could afford paying off a loan.

 

Follow the little asterisk.

I never said or implied it's a crime. And I'm also discussing within the context. I see nothing wrong with encouraging people to re-examine their underlying assumptions.

In which case I would encourage Bob to look at a broader range of things from a business perspective before settling.

But, enough back-and-forth. I think my perspective is clear enough.