6 ms·

After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say h

After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem. You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. And if you have a good look at them you should realize that they all are extremely polished and coherent. None of them has realistic AAA graphics but they still look good. None of them is just a "copy" of an existing game. They either bring something totally new or bring something known but with a greater overall quality. Then you have successful niche games such as Cogmind or the Zachtronics games. They still have the mentioned properties but also target only a subset of players where there are not many games. I think that makes them guaranteed sales. Now what's wrong with all the stories about failed games? They all are generic. They don't offer something special. And this is what doesn't work in a saturated games market. And I'm not saying the authors didn't work enough. They just don't see what's wrong with their games and continue on their path to demise. I guess what I'm saying is: to make a successful game you don't need to be the greatest coder or greatest artist. But you need to understand what makes a game great and enjoyable. Maybe the days (years) will come where I finally will make a (bigger) game of my own and maybe I will totally fail like many have. Maybe I will revoke everything I said here but today this is my opinion. :)

fiblye 8y ago
>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Very much yes. Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). Papers Please is a truly unique game that was lucky enough to get youtuber coverage. Plenty of equally unique and just as fun games are ignored. I've never heard of Factorio, but looking it up, it's graphically very unappealing. Maybe my opinion would change if I watched a playthrough of it, but it doesn't stand out. Mini Metro might be fun. But so are many of the hundreds of other minimalistic puzzlers released monthly. There are loads of games that just don't sell but become classics decades later. Earthbound sold horribly in America until the main character appeared in a more popular series (Super Smash Bros). Almost nobody played Killer 7. Panzer Dragoon Saga is considered one of the best RPGs of all time. Nobody bought it. Its popularity mostly grew after people discovered it through emulation. The game in this article flopped because there are an abundance of games, it falls into an overcrowded genre, and it doesn't stand out, but most importantly, nobody important played it. If pewdiepie played this, it'd see 10000+ sales in a week and likely appear in a humble bundle. To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.
- Rainymood 8y ago
  >Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). >To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales. I strongly disagree. Stardew valley did well because it is a fun game with good graphics. That's it, it's fun and addictive, graphics are good and it gets the gestalt right. Stardew Valley is just a truly truly fun game in which you say "just one more day" a bit too often. It's just that much fun. The game is FUN and addictive. Did I mention I had a lot of fun playing it? It has nothing to do with marketing it had everything to do with how I played the game and whether I had fun or not. The first time I picked it up I poured in more than 40 hours in a single week! And that's a lot! I just read this article about the creator who spent 4 years making Stardew Valley and it is a really interesting read: https://www.gq.com/story/stardew-valley-eric-barone-profile https://www.gq.com/story/stardew-valley-eric-barone-profile
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    the point is that if the game wasn't well marketed, you wouldn't even know it existed in the first place.
    - bspammer 8y ago
      Definitely not true, I've never seen an advert for Stardew Valley but it's talked about all over the internet because it's a really good game.
      - beaconstudios 8y ago
        > but it's talked about all over the internet Word-of-mouth is marketing too. Perhaps you are thinking that marketing === advertising? Because marketing doesn't have to be advertising. Building a community, attending conferences, getting influencers to play your game - these are all marketing activities. If people are talking about the game, it's surely fueled by a quality experience but marketing has to bootstrap that conversation.
BigJono 8y ago
> You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Interesting. I think you're right about half of those. I can't see any way that SDV or Darkest Dungeon could have failed. SDV is a great all round game with tons of polish, and DD has 99th percentile art direction and atmosphere for an indie game. Mini Metro and Papers Please could absolutely have been dead on arrival. Mini Metro is just an above average puzzle game (of which there are tons), and PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer. It's really one of those "you have to play it" games (aka "sells 0 copies in 99 of 100 alternate universes" games...)
- fileeditview 8y ago
  It's only my opinion and I may well be wrong :) I agree that Mini Metro is the one of the listed games that I would be least certain about. I think however it is very polished (more than other "puzzle" games) and it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses. Papers Please is a very special case. It has a very unique idea and that's what makes it stand out. You are right that you need to play it. However if someone played it he will most certainly recommend it and that's the strength of this game.. the implicit "marketing" it conveys. You obviously always need some marketing be it a only dev log or whatever to at least get the core group interested. For a game like PP that really should suffice to get the ball rolling.
  - petercooper 8y ago
    it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses. And certainly don't underestimate the number of people who are borderline obsessive with transport networks, trains, and anything involving traffic (myself included). Almost any game that adds a good gameplay element to managing or routing trains or traffic is going to do OK. Cities Skylines has done well with this crowd, too, after SimCity decided to start focusing on "Sims" style games and ditch the traffic aspects.
fileeditview 8y ago
Since I cannot edit my post. If you are interested in this topic you can test your skill in predicting a game's success here: https://www.steamprophet.com/ https://www.steamprophet.com/
bighi 8y ago
This part made me thing OP was focusing on the wrong things: > I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic None of that matters to the end result. You might be someone that is not very bright and that never went to college, etc, and still make a very creative and fun game. Saying that he's smart and whatever makes him sound entitled. Like if he deserved to sell well.
- bcyn 8y ago
  I don't think he said that to imply he deserved success. The way I read it: he mentioned it to disqualify those factors (not working hard enough or not having enough discipline) as reasons the game flopped.
- cableshaft 8y ago
  I'm a smart guy too. You know what you hear all the time growing up when you're smart? "Oh, you're smart, you're going to be rich and famous someday." You hear it enough times and you might start to believe it too, that you're so smart you'll make all the right decisions and you can't fail. But then you become an adult and throw yourself into a passion or product and send it out there and realize the harsh truth that the market doesn't give a shit if you're smart or not, or even if what you made is "good", or even "great". And it's impossible for you to know everything about everything, so somewhere along the line you will make a suboptimal choice, or choose the wrong time to release it, or release it on the wrong platform, or the people you hired to do X for you (development, marketing, distribution, qa, whatever) screwed up and leads to you getting terrible press (or no press coverage), or all sorts of crap that you have little control over or can't foresee. I've personally worked for three game studios that made multiple games that flopped hard upon release. It gets depressing and frustrating when the creative products you spend months and months of your time working on didn't even make enough back to pay back your own salary for that time, let alone anyone else who worked on the project, and where you might as well never have spent that time in the first place. The guys in the article only had a couple of failed games, and one monster success that continues to bring in millions of dollars in revenue. My only big success was a free flash game (before in-app purchases even existed) that I released 13 years ago....so yeah, no money there, at least not directly. I've worked on at least 8 failed games professionally, and many other failed or cancelled apps or enterprise software, since then. For example, a year ago I wasted 6 months on a project at work that was supposed to sell to two major Fortune 100 clients and didn't, so it was killed without ever being used once. Even my biggest failed game projects I worked on at least had a few fans. I've easily worked on more failures than even minor successes. It starts to drain on you. My confidence in my ability to make a successful anything in the future is pretty shaken. Anyway, long story short, I was led to believe that my life would be easy and I'd find success after success by many people in my life, parents, teachers, fellow students, etc. And so far pretty much my entire adult life, with a couple of exceptions, has proven that what I was told was total bullshit and I'm just as capable of making bad decisions and getting unlucky as people half as book-smart as I am. So maybe some of the people that do make those assumptions or have heard those same things as they grew up need to be told that it doesn't matter.
ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
Yes. For most gamers these days, time is the bottleneck, not money. In a world where Infinitroid and Hollow Knight exist, one hundred out of one hundred people are going to spend the time on Hollow Knight.
novembermike 8y ago
>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. One thing about all of those is that they pass a smell test. I don't need to play it to be interested, if I just see an ad or see someone playing or hear someone talking about it then I'm interested. This game did not have that, all I've seen is a genre and some bad graphics. The gameplay itself could be great but it hasn't gotten past the smell test.

fiblye 8y ago

>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Very much yes. Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). Papers Please is a truly unique game that was lucky enough to get youtuber coverage. Plenty of equally unique and just as fun games are ignored. I've never heard of Factorio, but looking it up, it's graphically very unappealing. Maybe my opinion would change if I watched a playthrough of it, but it doesn't stand out. Mini Metro might be fun. But so are many of the hundreds of other minimalistic puzzlers released monthly. There are loads of games that just don't sell but become classics decades later. Earthbound sold horribly in America until the main character appeared in a more popular series (Super Smash Bros). Almost nobody played Killer 7. Panzer Dragoon Saga is considered one of the best RPGs of all time. Nobody bought it. Its popularity mostly grew after people discovered it through emulation. The game in this article flopped because there are an abundance of games, it falls into an overcrowded genre, and it doesn't stand out, but most importantly, nobody important played it. If pewdiepie played this, it'd see 10000+ sales in a week and likely appear in a humble bundle. To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.

Rainymood 8y ago
>Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). >To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales. I strongly disagree. Stardew valley did well because it is a fun game with good graphics. That's it, it's fun and addictive, graphics are good and it gets the gestalt right. Stardew Valley is just a truly truly fun game in which you say "just one more day" a bit too often. It's just that much fun. The game is FUN and addictive. Did I mention I had a lot of fun playing it? It has nothing to do with marketing it had everything to do with how I played the game and whether I had fun or not. The first time I picked it up I poured in more than 40 hours in a single week! And that's a lot! I just read this article about the creator who spent 4 years making Stardew Valley and it is a really interesting read: https://www.gq.com/story/stardew-valley-eric-barone-profile https://www.gq.com/story/stardew-valley-eric-barone-profile
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  the point is that if the game wasn't well marketed, you wouldn't even know it existed in the first place.
  - bspammer 8y ago
    Definitely not true, I've never seen an advert for Stardew Valley but it's talked about all over the internet because it's a really good game.
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      > but it's talked about all over the internet Word-of-mouth is marketing too. Perhaps you are thinking that marketing === advertising? Because marketing doesn't have to be advertising. Building a community, attending conferences, getting influencers to play your game - these are all marketing activities. If people are talking about the game, it's surely fueled by a quality experience but marketing has to bootstrap that conversation.

BigJono 8y ago

fileeditview 8y ago
It's only my opinion and I may well be wrong :) I agree that Mini Metro is the one of the listed games that I would be least certain about. I think however it is very polished (more than other "puzzle" games) and it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses. Papers Please is a very special case. It has a very unique idea and that's what makes it stand out. You are right that you need to play it. However if someone played it he will most certainly recommend it and that's the strength of this game.. the implicit "marketing" it conveys. You obviously always need some marketing be it a only dev log or whatever to at least get the core group interested. For a game like PP that really should suffice to get the ball rolling.
- petercooper 8y ago
  it strikes a nerve because the design is very familiar to people using metros or buses. And certainly don't underestimate the number of people who are borderline obsessive with transport networks, trains, and anything involving traffic (myself included). Almost any game that adds a good gameplay element to managing or routing trains or traffic is going to do OK. Cities Skylines has done well with this crowd, too, after SimCity decided to start focusing on "Sims" style games and ditch the traffic aspects.

fileeditview 8y ago

Since I cannot edit my post. If you are interested in this topic you can test your skill in predicting a game's success here: https://www.steamprophet.com/ https://www.steamprophet.com/

bighi 8y ago

This part made me thing OP was focusing on the wrong things: > I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic None of that matters to the end result. You might be someone that is not very bright and that never went to college, etc, and still make a very creative and fun game. Saying that he's smart and whatever makes him sound entitled. Like if he deserved to sell well.

bcyn 8y ago
I don't think he said that to imply he deserved success. The way I read it: he mentioned it to disqualify those factors (not working hard enough or not having enough discipline) as reasons the game flopped.
cableshaft 8y ago
I'm a smart guy too. You know what you hear all the time growing up when you're smart? "Oh, you're smart, you're going to be rich and famous someday." You hear it enough times and you might start to believe it too, that you're so smart you'll make all the right decisions and you can't fail. But then you become an adult and throw yourself into a passion or product and send it out there and realize the harsh truth that the market doesn't give a shit if you're smart or not, or even if what you made is "good", or even "great". And it's impossible for you to know everything about everything, so somewhere along the line you will make a suboptimal choice, or choose the wrong time to release it, or release it on the wrong platform, or the people you hired to do X for you (development, marketing, distribution, qa, whatever) screwed up and leads to you getting terrible press (or no press coverage), or all sorts of crap that you have little control over or can't foresee. I've personally worked for three game studios that made multiple games that flopped hard upon release. It gets depressing and frustrating when the creative products you spend months and months of your time working on didn't even make enough back to pay back your own salary for that time, let alone anyone else who worked on the project, and where you might as well never have spent that time in the first place. The guys in the article only had a couple of failed games, and one monster success that continues to bring in millions of dollars in revenue. My only big success was a free flash game (before in-app purchases even existed) that I released 13 years ago....so yeah, no money there, at least not directly. I've worked on at least 8 failed games professionally, and many other failed or cancelled apps or enterprise software, since then. For example, a year ago I wasted 6 months on a project at work that was supposed to sell to two major Fortune 100 clients and didn't, so it was killed without ever being used once. Even my biggest failed game projects I worked on at least had a few fans. I've easily worked on more failures than even minor successes. It starts to drain on you. My confidence in my ability to make a successful anything in the future is pretty shaken. Anyway, long story short, I was led to believe that my life would be easy and I'd find success after success by many people in my life, parents, teachers, fellow students, etc. And so far pretty much my entire adult life, with a couple of exceptions, has proven that what I was told was total bullshit and I'm just as capable of making bad decisions and getting unlucky as people half as book-smart as I am. So maybe some of the people that do make those assumptions or have heard those same things as they grew up need to be told that it doesn't matter.

ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago

Yes. For most gamers these days, time is the bottleneck, not money. In a world where Infinitroid and Hollow Knight exist, one hundred out of one hundred people are going to spend the time on Hollow Knight.

novembermike 8y ago