3 ms·
It's not about lack of understanding. The viral success of a "one-off" type of game like ADR is nearly impossible to reproduce. Sometimes people take a liking t
by jng 9y ago
It's not about lack of understanding. The viral success of a "one-off" type of game like ADR is nearly impossible to reproduce. Sometimes people take a liking to something because you hit exactly the right notes without even knowing what notes they are (not that they do themselves even!), and it is impossible to hit them again. ADR looks like that kind of success. Repeating the success of GTA Vice City is very hard, but probably more tractable than repeating the success of ADR. There are a few reasons: the high resource requirements for the production and marketing create a moat, the type of game is amenable to a near "extension" to repeat the success, etc... notwithstanding that, most game publishers end up finding the way to kill a franchise after a few titles.
- anigbrowl 9y agoSure, but I'd have expected at least some analysis of what happened - where it got reviewed, or what the growth pattern leading up to the sudden spike was like, or anything really.
- wccrawford 9y agoActually, if the original creator of A Dark Room wrote another game that was nearly identical, people would lap it up. Especially the ones that loved it the first time. The problem is that the OP here didn't write it. They ported it to mobile. So they haven't yet actually created a game like this, they've just made some changes to an existing one that was already insanely popular and reaped the rewards for it. Story-based incrementals are still incredibly popular in the incremental games community, and another good one will do quite well. It's very, very hard to charge for them, though, because nobody trusts them to be any good until after they've played it to the end. So you basically have to make a free one and hope it takes off, and then charge for the mobile port of it.