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I was going to say: this "moment" on HN might increase the sales more than all of previous efforts did. Today, the market is so saturated that even if you have

I was going to say: this "moment" on HN might increase the sales more than all of previous efforts did. Today, the market is so saturated that even if you have the funds and interest (as a player / fan of genre), there is no way you can discover or keep up with all new releases. Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview, publications have now way of keeping up, streamers only have so much time. The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about. Finally, your game needs to be either hyper-polished or have some sort of novel angle. No disrespect, but looking at the trailer of this particular game, it seems its about 70% of the way their. Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish. The alternative is putting yourself into a niche and marking the hell out of everything, see e.g. the success of Cogmind, whose creator has been really good at Tweeting, posting on reddit, on HN, and so on...

zeroname 8y ago
> The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about. There are no "off days". There is no "solution" for this title, except maybe a total visual makeover, which is probably out of the question. Some titles fail, end of story. > Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish. It doesn't look okay, it looks bad. Few people will tell this to someone's face, and that's part of the problem. Programmers often can't tell. "More polish" is the last thing the game needs. It needs a makeover or be shelved. Just call it "done" and use it as a portfolio piece, it's good enough for that, any more polish is a waste of time.
- byron_fast 8y ago
  Yes. Sadly, this is correct.
- projektir 8y ago
  To be fair, didn't Factorio start out with poor graphics and improved them over time?
  - BigJono 8y ago
    Factorio also has some of the most compelling gameplay that almost perfectly fills a niche I've ever seen. OP's game is a Metroidvania in 2018...
    - projektir 8y ago
      I don't disagree, but I'm responding to the parent, which does not mention gameplay.
      - zeroname 8y ago
        I'm talking about that particular title, which is one Metroidvania amongst many Metroidvanias. It's not a unique concept, that's a given. Even with a unique concept, Factorio started out when there were 20x fewer indie games being released and it took five years to gain traction. Today, such success would be even more unlikely.
rabidrat 8y ago
> Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview I would love to download a list of all games on Steam in .csv (or other simple tabular data) format. Is it possible to write a scraper? I want name, link, genre, price, platforms, and votes/installs if available.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Try https://steamdb.info https://steamdb.info

zeroname 8y ago

> The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about. There are no "off days". There is no "solution" for this title, except maybe a total visual makeover, which is probably out of the question. Some titles fail, end of story. > Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish. It doesn't look okay, it looks bad. Few people will tell this to someone's face, and that's part of the problem. Programmers often can't tell. "More polish" is the last thing the game needs. It needs a makeover or be shelved. Just call it "done" and use it as a portfolio piece, it's good enough for that, any more polish is a waste of time.

byron_fast 8y ago
Yes. Sadly, this is correct.
projektir 8y ago
To be fair, didn't Factorio start out with poor graphics and improved them over time?
- BigJono 8y ago
  Factorio also has some of the most compelling gameplay that almost perfectly fills a niche I've ever seen. OP's game is a Metroidvania in 2018...
  - projektir 8y ago
    I don't disagree, but I'm responding to the parent, which does not mention gameplay.
    - zeroname 8y ago
      I'm talking about that particular title, which is one Metroidvania amongst many Metroidvanias. It's not a unique concept, that's a given. Even with a unique concept, Factorio started out when there were 20x fewer indie games being released and it took five years to gain traction. Today, such success would be even more unlikely.

rabidrat 8y ago

> Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview I would love to download a list of all games on Steam in .csv (or other simple tabular data) format. Is it possible to write a scraper? I want name, link, genre, price, platforms, and votes/installs if available.

scrollaway 8y ago
Try https://steamdb.info https://steamdb.info