4 ms·

I believe the Deltarune release this year also crashed a bunch of storefronts. Kind of interesting to compare the sales from these tiny indie developers vs, say

I believe the Deltarune release this year also crashed a bunch of storefronts. Kind of interesting to compare the sales from these tiny indie developers vs, say, anything that Microsoft's mega game studios have touched in the last few years.

jsheard 1y ago
I think that's mainly down to those mega-huge games usually having preorders, and small indie game usually not, for whatever reason. Neither Deltarune or Silksong could be preordered so everyone was zerg rushing the stores at the same time.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  Especially with the ballooning size of installs, pre-ordering and pre-loading a 100GB+ game could be the difference between playing same day vs the next.
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    Note how Silksong is a decently small 7-8 Go.
altairprime 1y ago
There’s a natural break-even point between the cost of maintaining peak server capacity and the lost revenue of server outages, especially if that peak demand is primarily fixed-quantity for a unique product with a very low chance of giving up. Ticketmaster figured this out decades ago and clearly the major game platforms have learned it as well. Note to clouders, they could spend on pre-warmed autoscaler pools, but a corporation that spends a single dollar of revenue more than necessary to make the sale is violating its duty to shareholders, and total gross launch revenue will be the same whether they do or not, so they won’t, even though they could. Note to game developers, for this exact reason you should be demanding launch month bonus targets rather than day or week; any less and you’re being knowingly ripped off by business execs.
shadowgovt 1y ago
Games, as an industry, have a lot of overlap with film. One of those overlaps is that it's still an industry where one person, with the right idea and (depending on the idea) the willingness to invest the ungodly amount of time to see it through, can put something out there that competes with the big teams and big budgets. Sometimes, the idea hits so hard that you don't even need the time investment. Notch got Minecraft from version alpha to version 1 in 2 years. That one was lightning in a bottle; unlikely to be reproducible consistently.
- dmonitor 1y ago
  Is that still true for film? The distribution channels for that industry are so tightly controlled that indie film producers don't see nearly the same levels of success as video games. There's a good handful of new indie game millionaires every year, and I don't think that the same can be said for TV or film.

jsheard 1y ago

I think that's mainly down to those mega-huge games usually having preorders, and small indie game usually not, for whatever reason. Neither Deltarune or Silksong could be preordered so everyone was zerg rushing the stores at the same time.

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
Especially with the ballooning size of installs, pre-ordering and pre-loading a 100GB+ game could be the difference between playing same day vs the next.
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Note how Silksong is a decently small 7-8 Go.

altairprime 1y ago

There’s a natural break-even point between the cost of maintaining peak server capacity and the lost revenue of server outages, especially if that peak demand is primarily fixed-quantity for a unique product with a very low chance of giving up. Ticketmaster figured this out decades ago and clearly the major game platforms have learned it as well. Note to clouders, they could spend on pre-warmed autoscaler pools, but a corporation that spends a single dollar of revenue more than necessary to make the sale is violating its duty to shareholders, and total gross launch revenue will be the same whether they do or not, so they won’t, even though they could. Note to game developers, for this exact reason you should be demanding launch month bonus targets rather than day or week; any less and you’re being knowingly ripped off by business execs.

shadowgovt 1y ago

Games, as an industry, have a lot of overlap with film. One of those overlaps is that it's still an industry where one person, with the right idea and (depending on the idea) the willingness to invest the ungodly amount of time to see it through, can put something out there that competes with the big teams and big budgets. Sometimes, the idea hits so hard that you don't even need the time investment. Notch got Minecraft from version alpha to version 1 in 2 years. That one was lightning in a bottle; unlikely to be reproducible consistently.

dmonitor 1y ago
Is that still true for film? The distribution channels for that industry are so tightly controlled that indie film producers don't see nearly the same levels of success as video games. There's a good handful of new indie game millionaires every year, and I don't think that the same can be said for TV or film.