5 ms·
... in 1977. You're a legend Walter, but there are millions of games available to play now. The days when a title circulated around university PDP-10s are gone
by sago 9y ago
... in 1977.
You're a legend Walter, but there are millions of games available to play now. The days when a title circulated around university PDP-10s are gone. The dynamics of virality are very different.
- TillE 9y agoLook at the vast majority of successful indie games on Steam produced by, say, no more than five people. They're basically all labors of love, the missing niche game that they wanted to make and play. I can't think of a single independent success story that involved someone doing careful market research and engineering a product. There's a reason only big companies take that approach.
- sago 9y agoAs in all such things, you must count the negatives (failures) as well as the positives. It is a common problem to look at what successes do, and ignore what failures don't. See the Watson selection task[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task
- dkersten 9y agoCompetition is very tough nowadays though, while in 1977, not so much. For every successful indie game on Steam, there’s dozens of unsuccessful ones.
- abiox 9y ago> dynamics of virality 'virality' is a very ... particular thing to be clinging to. many things 'go viral' then fall off a cliff.
- krapp 9y ago"virality" is the indie game version of winning the lottery. Everyone wants to be the guy who wrote Flappy Bird in a weekend, and then wound up making so much money so fast that it actually scared him.
- jliptzin 9y agoIt's especially difficult when the game you want to play is probably out there, but impossible to find because it's buried by tons of other crap. So do you build the game only to find that the one you're looking for was there all along, then have everyone call you a copycat?