7 ms·

No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

96 points by littlexsparkee 2mo ago

jr3592 2mo ago
pretty interesting, the macro economics of the software space seem shaky
thataccount 2mo ago
Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?
- WJW 2mo ago
  There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.
  - ndiddy 2mo ago
    The problem the article is talking about is that publishers will no longer fund "AA" games with $2-15 million budgets. The game market has bifurcated into low end indie titles (< $1 million budget) and AAA games with budgets in the hundreds of millions. Personally I think this is a huge shame, as "AA" games were a lot of of my favorites during the PS2 and PS3 generations. The article brings up a few reasons for why this has happened, such as the end of ZIRP and the complete lack of curation on platforms like Steam making it hard for titles to stand out. I guess if you're a publisher, you have a better chance of making a return on investment by funding 20 pixel art or friendslop titles and hoping one of them goes viral rather than funding 1 title like the new Myst sequel and hoping it doesn't get buried on Steam and the Nintendo eshop.
  - kg 2mo ago
    The funding climate for indie games is the worst it's been in a long time and it's been bad for over a year. Lots of publishers have stopped signing deals or are only funding small amounts with really bad terms.
  - hnuser123456 2mo ago
    The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned. Indie devs have the time and freedom to pursue any new ideas, and it seems like every couple of months a new indie game goes viral on Steam. But many of them are passion projects that were done in someone's spare time outside of their day job. If devs could give investors more confidence that a game will sell well or go viral if it hits a certain development stage, we could do a better job of directing game dev funding towards indie devs making truly fun games.
    - Filligree 2mo ago
      > The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned. I know a guy who works with one of those publishers. According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.
    - jayd16 2mo ago
      You dump the 100m first and then you get to see if its fun to play. That's a bit hyperbolic but especially for big games, they really don't come together until the end. Now, normally you could use pedigree to make smart bets about who can make a game but there have been so many buy outs and shake ups that a lot of the AAA studios have been gutted. Who is a hit maker now?
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      I don't see why they'd care if the game is fun to play. They care about revenue, and surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.
  - mrweasel 2mo ago
    Might there be so many indie studios competing for the same financing? So they can get financing for smaller games, because investors can just bet on 50 eclectic puzzle games, and if one takes off that will cover their investment, but they can't finance one larger game, because of the risk profile.
- functionmouse 2mo ago
  I think it's that Myst was released in a hungry, undersaturated market, and the competition is a lot tougher now. I truly love what Cyanworlds is doing, but the fact of the matter is, I'd rather be playing TF2 Classic, or Animal Well, or Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, than Obduction. Another problem is, their games were popular at a time when most people didn't even have an internet connection, and therefore had far more patience for offline gaming. Their games require a LOT of patience.
  - paulryanrogers 2mo ago
    Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs. Perhaps as a cheap way to show off CDROM capabilities. Getting games installed and working in that era was often a chore. So when people sat down to play, it was already there for them. Myst's sequels didn't sell as well as the first, despite the power of the brand, either. Likely because of competition.
    - embedding-shape 2mo ago
      > Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs. I think every single shareware/demo disc I had also had some variation/sequel to Myst in one way or another too, somehow.
    - mh- 2mo ago
      It was a ton of people's first exposure to "interactive multimedia", as I recall it being positioned at the time. I remember seeing both Myst and 7th Guest [0] in similar showcases in computer stores. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest
- uxhacker 2mo ago
  What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team. What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    > What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large. Seems no one has written "The Mythical Man Month" for the game industry yet.
    - maccard 2mo ago
      It’s predominantly artists, and art pipelines are usually fairly scalable .
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - maccard 2mo ago
    For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies. The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (players, publishers, executives, developers) go through the roof. It’s very hard to look at those projects and not compare them to projects that are 4/5x that.
    - uxhacker 2mo ago
      But the original game was very playable and fun. There are plenty of modern games that only have a tiny bit more game play.
  - WalterBright 2mo ago
    Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.
y7 2mo ago
https://archive.ph/5RlIw https://archive.ph/5RlIw
spottedmarley 2mo ago
Makes me miss my old Packard Bell PB16 .. or maybe I just miss the 90's in general .. or being young.. sigh
sgt 2mo ago
Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.
- volkk 2mo ago
  i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
  - paulcole 2mo ago
    This is the hard-pill-to-swallow meme truth. If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make. Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well. If you spend $1 million and don’t have a hit on your hands, it’s probably just an OK or bad game. Another $5 million or $105 million would’ve been just more good money after bad.
    - Ekaros 2mo ago
      I am not sure Myst actually is a great game. And I mean that as a game which audiences enjoy or want to play. It is great as in sense it did something special at certain point of when technology was available. I just don't believe there would be many gamers with modern sensibilities who would play it or like it. And the more casual audience have found other things. So you do not need the showcase of multimedia spectacle to justify buying an computer...
      - jcranmer 2mo ago
        It's worth pointing out that Cyan made 6 Myst games (not counting remakes), and people only really talk about the first two. That gives you some idea of the staying power of the franchise... I recently played the remakes, and I have 8 hours in Myst and 12 in Riven. Compare that to 21 hours in Return of the Obra Dinn, 44 hours in Outer Wilds, or 90 hours in Blue Prince, or hell 35 hours in Terraformental (whose GUI is essentially a text adventure game). Compared to modern puzzle games, Myst is just so short; there's surprisingly little of actual substance there. As a modern game, Myst does largely hold up. The puzzles are still quite reasonably by modern standards (indeed, in many ways, Myst did revolutionize the puzzle game genre). As an example of environmental story-telling, it's still one of the premier examples. But the game is extremely thin by modern standards. And the remakes never did a proper redesign to account for how unrestricted 3d motion requires you to change how to guide the player's attention to key objects (in Myst, the key "what am I supposed to do" letter to start the game is surprisingly hard to find, even when you know where it roughly is!). And puzzle games have never been a strong genre--Myst is more notable for its role as a tech demo than for its role as a puzzle game.
bob1029 2mo ago
The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now. I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tools. AI assistance is most dangerous (for your competition) when you mostly need it for the scripting and code, and not for the art or direction. You don't need an AI disclosure on steam if you use AI responsibly.
- galangalalgol 2mo ago
  Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.
  - virtue3 2mo ago
    you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art. Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)
  - tsimionescu 2mo ago
    Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).
    - rdbl27 2mo ago
      The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
jdw64 2mo ago
Games fundamentally require a lot of artistry, depend on user device performance, and involve many factors to consider. from engine licensing costs to labor costs. There's this concept of 'AA games' or 'Myst games' that sit between AAA and indie titles. From what I hear across most of the industry and genres, as people's disposable income shrinks, the market is polarizing into reliable AAA games on one side and small, niche indie games on the other. Small indies can bet on extreme gameplay that big companies would never attempt. In other words, when people start cutting back on hobbies, the first thing they reduce is spending on hobbies. And when they start tightening further, the first games to get dropped from their lists are the mid-tier ones. Whether it's software or any genre market, this middle tier is disappearing because consumer spending itself is becoming extremely polarized. This is a contradiction in cost structure. When developing software, reducing the size to a mid tier level doesn't linearly reduce fixed costs. You still need to build server infrastructure, payment systems, security, basic UI/UX, cross platform support, and more, all of which come with enormous upfront costs. AAA companies can amortize these fixed costs by selling to millions of users, but a AA studio with limited capital ends up spending most of its budget just on infrastructure, leaving few resources to polish the core value of the product, graphics, gameplay fun, and design. Also, when a recession hits, a cognitive tandem effect occurs. Only two things survive: what everyone else is playing, and niche products that match your personal taste. Mid tier products with moderate price and moderate quality require marketing efforts to convince consumers of their ambiguous value, often relying on influencer reviews or other forms of consumer persuasion.
- flohofwoe 2mo ago
  Video game sales usually have been very recession proof. E.g. people still want entertainment and escapism when shit hits the fan.
  - jdw64 2mo ago
    I agree with some points, but I also disagree with others. I agree that the 'overall' video game industry is recession resistant. Over the long term, it will continue to grow. But I don't think the 'polarization' of video games makes the middle tier recession resistant So, because the game industry has an escapist quality to some extent, I can understand why people set aside a budget for hobbies. But apart from that, I think game consumption itself is becoming polarized."
zabzonk 2mo ago
Well, I don't know. Most of the Myst games seem to be background, painted, with a bit of moving art. Comparing this with (say) an isometric RPG (think BG3, Pillars of Eternity) and those look a lot more expensive, but still capable of making money. Or maybe it's just that I never liked Myst - too stupid, I guess.
- layer8 2mo ago
  FWIW, I never got the appeal of Myst as well. Much too limited range of actions.
  - littlexsparkee 2mo ago
    I played the first 4 with my pops so for me: nostalgia, the fantasy environments, the music (must have been what got me into ambient).
Triphibian 2mo ago
Interesting timing on this article considering The Big Walk comes out this week. Obviously the game is not as intricate as a Myst game, but it feels like the perfect mixture of a game where design really matters and reaction to what the market wants. People like playing together and collaborating to make their own fun. It is not hard to imagine a version of Myst like this -- the most fun I have had playing a PC game was sitting next to a friend as we played Riven beginning to end.
- Simulacra 2mo ago
  You might enjoy the new game Solarpunk. A very successful Kickstarter, made by two guys.
flohofwoe 2mo ago
The article reads like it's about 15 years late to reality. Trying to get funding from a publisher as an independent studio was always somewhere between hard and impossible, and especially towards the 2010s. That's why Kickstarter became such an unbelievable success. PS: The one exception was when Epic was on its aggressive rampage to buy as many exclusives for the Epic Game Store as possible. But I guess that money shower has also dried up by now.
the__alchemist 2mo ago
This is surprising to read in a world where we received Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. All top-tier games (When ranked among all games in history), all recent, and all with a moderate budget and studio size, on the size order of Cyan's in its hayday. And Blue Prince has deep puzzle elements that would be at home to a Myst player. This article and headline present a conflicting version of reality to the one I experience.
- ramesh31 2mo ago
  >This is surprising to read in a world where we got Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. Note that none of these were made in the US like Myst was. The cost of living is just too damn high to afford even a small team without massive funding for the amount of time it takes to make games like these. It's why every single notable AA game of the last decade has been made elsewhere now.
  - the__alchemist 2mo ago
    This did not escape my notice. Continental Europe in particular seems to have produced my favorite games of the past decade. And not from any one country: Examples include Poland, Denmark, Croatia, Czech, France. This is an observation; I offer no explanation.
- CuriouslyC 2mo ago
  Blue Prince immediately came to mind for me as relevant modern art. Honestly Myst style puzzle games seem like the easiest type of game for a generative world model to simulate, so I expect if players actually want them we'll see a lot more in the future.
- efromvt 2mo ago
  They actually touch on Blue Prince in the article; it is interesting that Expedition 33 isn't driving investment in similar sized games. But the thesis seems to be that Blue Prince like (smaller budget) is the preferred direction; more attempts at the upside of a runaway hit. Medium budget games give you less shots on goal and no corresponding payout increase.
llm_nerd 2mo ago
Interesting read, but this sort of framing is so common and self-deluding- > At the same time, gaming platforms like Steam—which indie and double-A games once depended on for discovery—have been flooded with low-quality dreck. According to the AI Transparency Index, more than 18,000 games on Steam now feature AI usage disclosures. “User trust in platform stores as a curatorial layer has been all but erased,” says North Cook. “When you feed people enough ads and slop, they just check out.” What a laughable, ridiculous non-sequitur (the casual, slop correlation between AI and the quality problem), and you see this same hilariously broken logic here on HN all the time, where people imagine some pre-AI era of only goodness and greatness. Steam was absolutely swamped with low quality garbage long before AI tools. You could as easily, if not more accurately, blame more accessible game development tools like Unity for broadening the ability of people to get into game development. Steam was more curated in earlier years, as well, and the move to basically letting anyone publish on it flooded the space. It's so astonishingly lazy for so many to use AI as their boogeyman for everything now (ironically...the AI is to blame rhetoric is such low effort slop). The world was filled with low-skill, low-effort, low-value garbage and dreck before AI. And FWIW, in many ways it's an ideal market being flooded for every wild niche or need. If your game is good do a bit of advertising and get word of mouth and you're the next Balatro. But people pushing weak offerings hoped limited choice and a captive audience would be their win.
- picofarad 2mo ago
  If someone makes a machine that produces CO2 in great quantities, I dont think pointing out that people have been exhaling for millennia is a reason to accept the machine.
  - llm_nerd 2mo ago
    A more apt analogy is trying to pin global warming on e-scooters. I mean, look at all the e-scooters. And man, they sure are annoying, and e-scooters also use electricity which is sometimes created by non-renewables, ergo ipso facto sum. Using an AI disclosure count as an indication of anything is already laughably stupid, but just hand waving it as meaningful is basically playing on the stupidity of the audience, and look, it works on some...
rufasterisco 2mo ago
can we pls add /s to to the post title? how can it be that and then inside the article i read > Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email. if you need further proof it really is satire, here we go: our business model relies on Fed rates at 0%. > “Nobody has zero-interest money anymore,” says North Cook. When interest rates were near 0 percent following the Great Recession, and again at the height of the Covid pandemic, video game investors took more risks. But when the Fed rate benchmark surged to more than 5 percent in 2023, venture capital funding for the video game industry collapsed by more than 75 percent, from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to less than $3 billion in both 2023 and 2024. “Money just got too expensive to borrow,” says Eternal. “Publishers looked at their capital and said, ‘This is all the cash we have until the banks change their rates. Let's be conservative and stretch this out.’”
- swiftcoder 2mo ago
  > how can it be that and then inside the article i read > > Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email. Blue Prince is an interesting case, because the developer had a successful SaaS business that funded a significant part of development. Without such a source of "passive" income, I doubt most us have the kind of savings that would allow us to spend ~8 years working full-time on our game
  - rufasterisco 2mo ago
    I don't know if English has a word for when you are half confused and half amused, but that is how I feel. From this same article, here is the co-head of the studio that wanted to produce Myst. > “I don't think people realize the true cost of developing games,” Anderson says, having used Kickstarter to partially fund two of Cyan’s past titles. “A million dollars seems like a ton of money, but it doesn't even come close to covering the full cost of a production like Anglerfish.” Thanks for making me checkout in detail Blue Prince. I don't understand why an article can say that a random dude has built a Myst-like game for what looks like less than a million, and then the very same article is about an indie studio, which says "nah, need more than that". I mean, what I understand is that: you CAN make a Myst-like game for less than 1 million (see Blue Prince), you just cannot be sure that you will make the money back. Also, financing is easier when money is free. In which case sure, I understand it. But please read the title, read the article, come back here and pls join me in a petition to add /s to the title. Because obviously the author is implying "nah Anderson, YOU cannot make that game, check Blue Prince ;) ". Right?
swiftcoder 2mo ago
I wonder how much increasing fidelity requirements are the main culprit here? Myst was made by a team of about 7 people (only 4 of them full-time), in just about 2 years, and cost under a million (adjusted for inflation). Riven had a team twice the size, took twice as long, and cost 10-15x as much. Apart from Exile, which was handed to a more experienced developer who got it done faster and cheaper, the remaining sequels follow a similar trajectory.
- Theodores 2mo ago
  They sold six million copies and made a big profit from Myst, which they presumably invested in the company, to make the next game, with the profits from that (and the diminishing returns from Myst) topping up their coffers. At some stage of the journey they took so much money out of the company that they could not fund development without taking on loans, albeit as advances from publishers. Why does every business have to be based on debt, even if it is a financial success? With automotive, we have car companies that have been going for a century or more, and some of them have 'Open AI/SpaceX' levels of debt in the hundreds of billions, even though they have had a century to work out how to make cars. For example, VW. Sure they have had to buy many other brands, expand in China, pay for diesels that lied and much else, however, is it not possible for a single business to be financed by debt? Even the money printing machine that is Apple has untold billions in debt. They don't even make their own products. There are reasons for this, however, this stock market thing seems all about making debt, not 'money'.
  - s1artibartfast 2mo ago
    Is this a genuine question? I could try to explain more, but debt allows you to have your cake and eat it too. I could save for 40 years for a house, or buy one today with debt today. In the latter case, I get to enjoy it now and save money on rent. Basically the whole world works this way. You could save and then spend, or spend then repay. In a lot of context, you make or save more by spending sooner than the cost of interest.
  - swiftcoder 2mo ago
    I think the answer is always scope creep. You hit it big on a game, your ambition grows, the next game costs an order of magnitude more… eventually you either run out of money, or you build Star Citizen
deleted 2mo ago
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nickisnoble 2mo ago
Big Walk is pretty close to a myst.
readthenotes1 2mo ago
How much did slay the spire cost? I am pretty sure it's not the game that is the cause of the funding trouble?
CamperBob2 2mo ago
What are you talking about? I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend, for practically no money. The audience won't like it because they have beef with the tools I'd choose to use, but that's a them problem, not a me problem. Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art. They'll never know, I guess.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art. I feel like unless you've grokked that art (and most importantly art direction) is also important to communicate the game design to the player, then you clearly aren't god's gift to game design :)
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
  > I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend, for practically no money. I don't believe you can.
  - CamperBob2 2mo ago
    Well, not for free. :-P Still, a weekend-long indy game jam in which the contestants are expected to use AI, rather than being forbidden to use it, would be pretty interesting to see.
    - BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
      > Well, not for free. You said "for practically no money". How much are we talking about here? > weekend-long indy game jam There was apparently one at GDC earlier this year but I couldn't find any details about the winners. I did find https://www.genjam.net https://www.genjam.net, the nicest thing about which I can say is that many of the examples appear to function.
- Ariarule 2mo ago
  Can you name three reasonable-quality games out there like this that were definitely made in such a way? It costs only $100 to publish a game on Steam, recoupable if you meet a fairly low revenue threshold. You can publish elsewhere with no money up front (e.g. Itch). If this were actually true, and even if 90% of players would just pass based on the AI disclosure (doubtful, and also doubtful that _all_ games made this way would actually disclose it), you'd expect there to be lots of Myst quality games out there; hundred to thousands already, at least a handful of which should _already_ be successful. Not entirely a rhetorical question. I've found any images need serious review and touch-up at a minimum and usually multiple rounds of revision. The topology on any generated 3D models is generally atrocious. TTS is not tuned for voice acting to an extent it's absolutely no good for that purpose as far I can tell, and that would be a cornerstone of any serious modern "Myst-class" adventure game. I can't comment on music and SFX in particular and have heard secondhand that current models are "all right", but imagine it's probably the same situation: no care taken, you get uselessly mid results. If it's really that easy and that cheap, I'd like to see it.
cubefox 2mo ago
1. Approximately every software engineer secretly dreams of developing an awesome video game instead of the boring software he actually makes. 2. Consequently, there are way too many people wanting to develop video games relative to the commercial demand for them. 3. Consequently, it is incredibly hard to get funding for a video game project.
- watwut 2mo ago
  Meh, no not true. Plenty of software developers dont even like playing games. And making a game is not all that much more fun anyway. A lot of that work is plain boring. Fun software project and flashy outcome are two different things.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - cubefox 2mo ago
    Which of my statements above do you think is false?
trencedamp 2mo ago
> Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish. This seems like an insane amount of capital to make a game that could be vibe coded in a few weeks
Ariarule 2mo ago
_Dimhaven_, released just a few months ago, looks fairly Myst-like from the videos I've seen. While I haven't played it, Zadbox, the developer, also made the very Myst-like _Quern_; released 2016 and which I have played. I can't help but think the article is a story about _Cyan's_ woes conflated with industry woes. Which isn't to say that the industry doesn't have problems! But Cyan really underperformed with _Firmament_. Look at the Kickstarter comments: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyanworlds/firmament/comments https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyanworlds/firmament/co... They did a rug pull on whether they would ship DVDs with the Firmament collector's boxes _after_ they had complaints about the quality of the equivalent Obduction backer reward. While they did ship a DVD for Obduction, from personal experience the box itself it came in was a bit underwhelming. I didn't care so much about packaging, but I could see how someone would, and the whole situation on this point with Firmament was a very eye-rolling "again?" scenario. The first time with Obduction that they weren't able to ship what they planned in this way was bad luck; the second time was, generously, bad planning about something that was entirely foreseeable on their part. More details here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/754890/discussions/0/3826415752026145042/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/754890/discussions/0/38264157... They made a bad bet on how well VR would take off, with Firmament very obviously created with VR play in mind. So many people were disappointed with Firmament itself. "18,420 backers pledged $1,433,161 to help bring this project to life" but they can't do that again specifically because they burned a huge amount of goodwill with the people most likely to support them that way. Keep in mind that's a 2019 number and CPI adjusting would bring it up to about 1.8 million, at the lower end but solidly within the 1 to 10 million amount Wired said they were trying to raise for Anglerfish from a publisher. And _Obduction_, while beautiful, was a bit short and had its own issues. I would also note with all the discussion of the impact of AI art on games that Cyan was an early _target_ of the anti-AI crowd over their use of AI art in Firmament. IIRC, Steam did not have a dedicated disclosure section at the time Firmament, but they did disclose it responsibly and appropriately in the credits. A more detailed statement from Cyan can still be found at https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in-firmament/ https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in... -- on this, I agree with Cyan's 2023 post, we ought to be able to distinguish "AI Assisted" from AI-generated, although it seems many are allergic to such nuance.
- 2mo ago
TACIXAT 2mo ago
The article said they are looking for $1m to $10m in funding. Given the hype and pedigree, I feel they could crowdfund the low end of that trivially.
- sph 2mo ago
  In this economy, when only old people like me care about Myst (and I’ve been around enough to know not to crowdfund games)? It’s not the 90s any more.
  - kdheiwns 2mo ago
    This is the real issue nobody else wants to address. Tastes have changed and genres have progressed. A few other old time devs have tried reboots of their games (a few point and click adventures, mostly) and they were hyped up beyond belief since they were made by legendary developers and were "bringing back the classics". Then they released and got a few sales from older people wanting to get a taste of youth again, but realizing it's just not the same. Those new games by old devs didn't progress in terms of gameplay, and visually, they were worse because they tried too hard to be "retro" and made things look shoddy and low effort on powerful hardware. When back in the day, artists busted their asses to make things look beautiful on shoddy hardware. Myst has had a bunch of sequels and remakes, but there's a reason people only care about Myst 1. It was lightning in a bottle and trying to desperately pull the "remember Myst?" card several times gets a bit embarrassing after a while.
- teamonkey 2mo ago
  That’s a weird value to get funding for right now. If a publisher wants to fund something cheap and niche, maybe a bit of a gamble, it’s too much. If they want to fund a more fleshed-out title that is likely to succeed with a bit of marketing spend behind it, it’s almost too little. So I think they might be right, they’re in a weird space that publishers don’t want to look at right now.
lightedman 2mo ago
Myst has severely overlooked a platform that has recently made some pretty decent strides - VR. I have a Kat Walk C2 and a game like Myst in VR with that VR rig would be absolutely goddamned insane. Myst ruled because you felt like you were in another world back then. Recreate that with the tech we have to really make you feel like you're in that world.
- GormHouj 2mo ago
  The 2021 remake of Myst has VR support as well as the remake of Riven. I think I own five copies of Myst now. There are at least 4 remakes/remasters. It's kind of insane.
  - lightedman 2mo ago
    No, I want a Myst or Riven game where I'm actually walking around the world. The VR support/remake pales in capability versus what I've seen done with actual VR games, and Myst could easily pull that off if they'd just look at the platform seriously and have some actual VR gamers to bounce ideas off of/beta test.
yoyopa 2mo ago
[dead]
drsalt 2mo ago
aren't all these guys rich? why do they need funding?
- smallmancontrov 2mo ago
  They probably spent the bulk of their myst/riven fortune on Uru (a puzzle solving MMO, a year before World of Warcraft). It was bold and a very cool idea but didn't work out. They kept enough in reserve and have enough residual sales to hang on through the years, but now big projects have to be capitalized with outside money.
languagehacker 2mo ago
Myst was really interesting when it first came out, but games like that are woefully out of date in a world where most games are immersive, and where players are accustomed to onboarding systems like tutorial levels to help prevent frustration and focus on story and enjoyment. I also just really don't think that in this world's collective attention span, nobody wants to play a game where you have to traverse the entire map a bunch of times to solve a puzzle by trial and error. Give me a new Journeyman Project instead!
casey2 2mo ago
Has there not been enough point and click puzzle games? There's been dozens of mystlikes including recent ones and pretty much all of them fail since players generally prefer walking around a 3D world.
inigyou 2mo ago
You can't assume a sequel to something popular last year will do as well as the original - much less something from 30 years ago. Each game has to stand on its own. When you discover a winning formula, there may be appetite for more of it. Or there may not be. Your audience is satiated at some point, and that assumes you even keep the quality up and don't just make slop to coast off the original's brand recognition.
b112 2mo ago
Myst was impressive on multiple fronts, the story line, the graphics, thr music. It was also super easy to port to other platforms. And it was also seen as a new genre, or at least sub-genre. Nothing was quite like it. This was back when playing real sound was taxing

jr3592 2mo ago

pretty interesting, the macro economics of the software space seem shaky

thataccount 2mo ago

Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?

WJW 2mo ago
There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.
- ndiddy 2mo ago
  The problem the article is talking about is that publishers will no longer fund "AA" games with $2-15 million budgets. The game market has bifurcated into low end indie titles (< $1 million budget) and AAA games with budgets in the hundreds of millions. Personally I think this is a huge shame, as "AA" games were a lot of of my favorites during the PS2 and PS3 generations. The article brings up a few reasons for why this has happened, such as the end of ZIRP and the complete lack of curation on platforms like Steam making it hard for titles to stand out. I guess if you're a publisher, you have a better chance of making a return on investment by funding 20 pixel art or friendslop titles and hoping one of them goes viral rather than funding 1 title like the new Myst sequel and hoping it doesn't get buried on Steam and the Nintendo eshop.
- kg 2mo ago
  The funding climate for indie games is the worst it's been in a long time and it's been bad for over a year. Lots of publishers have stopped signing deals or are only funding small amounts with really bad terms.
- hnuser123456 2mo ago
  The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned. Indie devs have the time and freedom to pursue any new ideas, and it seems like every couple of months a new indie game goes viral on Steam. But many of them are passion projects that were done in someone's spare time outside of their day job. If devs could give investors more confidence that a game will sell well or go viral if it hits a certain development stage, we could do a better job of directing game dev funding towards indie devs making truly fun games.
  - Filligree 2mo ago
    > The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned. I know a guy who works with one of those publishers. According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.
  - jayd16 2mo ago
    You dump the 100m first and then you get to see if its fun to play. That's a bit hyperbolic but especially for big games, they really don't come together until the end. Now, normally you could use pedigree to make smart bets about who can make a game but there have been so many buy outs and shake ups that a lot of the AAA studios have been gutted. Who is a hit maker now?
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    I don't see why they'd care if the game is fun to play. They care about revenue, and surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.
- mrweasel 2mo ago
  Might there be so many indie studios competing for the same financing? So they can get financing for smaller games, because investors can just bet on 50 eclectic puzzle games, and if one takes off that will cover their investment, but they can't finance one larger game, because of the risk profile.
functionmouse 2mo ago
I think it's that Myst was released in a hungry, undersaturated market, and the competition is a lot tougher now. I truly love what Cyanworlds is doing, but the fact of the matter is, I'd rather be playing TF2 Classic, or Animal Well, or Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, than Obduction. Another problem is, their games were popular at a time when most people didn't even have an internet connection, and therefore had far more patience for offline gaming. Their games require a LOT of patience.
- paulryanrogers 2mo ago
  Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs. Perhaps as a cheap way to show off CDROM capabilities. Getting games installed and working in that era was often a chore. So when people sat down to play, it was already there for them. Myst's sequels didn't sell as well as the first, despite the power of the brand, either. Likely because of competition.
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    > Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs. I think every single shareware/demo disc I had also had some variation/sequel to Myst in one way or another too, somehow.
  - mh- 2mo ago
    It was a ton of people's first exposure to "interactive multimedia", as I recall it being positioned at the time. I remember seeing both Myst and 7th Guest [0] in similar showcases in computer stores. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest
uxhacker 2mo ago
What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team. What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large. Seems no one has written "The Mythical Man Month" for the game industry yet.
  - maccard 2mo ago
    It’s predominantly artists, and art pipelines are usually fairly scalable .
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- maccard 2mo ago
  For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies. The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (players, publishers, executives, developers) go through the roof. It’s very hard to look at those projects and not compare them to projects that are 4/5x that.
  - uxhacker 2mo ago
    But the original game was very playable and fun. There are plenty of modern games that only have a tiny bit more game play.
- WalterBright 2mo ago
  Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.

y7 2mo ago

https://archive.ph/5RlIw https://archive.ph/5RlIw

spottedmarley 2mo ago

Makes me miss my old Packard Bell PB16 .. or maybe I just miss the 90's in general .. or being young.. sigh

sgt 2mo ago

Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.

volkk 2mo ago
i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
- paulcole 2mo ago
  This is the hard-pill-to-swallow meme truth. If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make. Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well. If you spend $1 million and don’t have a hit on your hands, it’s probably just an OK or bad game. Another $5 million or $105 million would’ve been just more good money after bad.
  - Ekaros 2mo ago
    I am not sure Myst actually is a great game. And I mean that as a game which audiences enjoy or want to play. It is great as in sense it did something special at certain point of when technology was available. I just don't believe there would be many gamers with modern sensibilities who would play it or like it. And the more casual audience have found other things. So you do not need the showcase of multimedia spectacle to justify buying an computer...
    - jcranmer 2mo ago
      It's worth pointing out that Cyan made 6 Myst games (not counting remakes), and people only really talk about the first two. That gives you some idea of the staying power of the franchise... I recently played the remakes, and I have 8 hours in Myst and 12 in Riven. Compare that to 21 hours in Return of the Obra Dinn, 44 hours in Outer Wilds, or 90 hours in Blue Prince, or hell 35 hours in Terraformental (whose GUI is essentially a text adventure game). Compared to modern puzzle games, Myst is just so short; there's surprisingly little of actual substance there. As a modern game, Myst does largely hold up. The puzzles are still quite reasonably by modern standards (indeed, in many ways, Myst did revolutionize the puzzle game genre). As an example of environmental story-telling, it's still one of the premier examples. But the game is extremely thin by modern standards. And the remakes never did a proper redesign to account for how unrestricted 3d motion requires you to change how to guide the player's attention to key objects (in Myst, the key "what am I supposed to do" letter to start the game is surprisingly hard to find, even when you know where it roughly is!). And puzzle games have never been a strong genre--Myst is more notable for its role as a tech demo than for its role as a puzzle game.

bob1029 2mo ago

The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now. I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tools. AI assistance is most dangerous (for your competition) when you mostly need it for the scripting and code, and not for the art or direction. You don't need an AI disclosure on steam if you use AI responsibly.

galangalalgol 2mo ago
Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.
- virtue3 2mo ago
  you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art. Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)
- tsimionescu 2mo ago
  Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).
  - rdbl27 2mo ago
    The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.

jdw64 2mo ago

Games fundamentally require a lot of artistry, depend on user device performance, and involve many factors to consider. from engine licensing costs to labor costs. There's this concept of 'AA games' or 'Myst games' that sit between AAA and indie titles. From what I hear across most of the industry and genres, as people's disposable income shrinks, the market is polarizing into reliable AAA games on one side and small, niche indie games on the other. Small indies can bet on extreme gameplay that big companies would never attempt. In other words, when people start cutting back on hobbies, the first thing they reduce is spending on hobbies. And when they start tightening further, the first games to get dropped from their lists are the mid-tier ones. Whether it's software or any genre market, this middle tier is disappearing because consumer spending itself is becoming extremely polarized. This is a contradiction in cost structure. When developing software, reducing the size to a mid tier level doesn't linearly reduce fixed costs. You still need to build server infrastructure, payment systems, security, basic UI/UX, cross platform support, and more, all of which come with enormous upfront costs. AAA companies can amortize these fixed costs by selling to millions of users, but a AA studio with limited capital ends up spending most of its budget just on infrastructure, leaving few resources to polish the core value of the product, graphics, gameplay fun, and design. Also, when a recession hits, a cognitive tandem effect occurs. Only two things survive: what everyone else is playing, and niche products that match your personal taste. Mid tier products with moderate price and moderate quality require marketing efforts to convince consumers of their ambiguous value, often relying on influencer reviews or other forms of consumer persuasion.

flohofwoe 2mo ago
Video game sales usually have been very recession proof. E.g. people still want entertainment and escapism when shit hits the fan.
- jdw64 2mo ago
  I agree with some points, but I also disagree with others. I agree that the 'overall' video game industry is recession resistant. Over the long term, it will continue to grow. But I don't think the 'polarization' of video games makes the middle tier recession resistant So, because the game industry has an escapist quality to some extent, I can understand why people set aside a budget for hobbies. But apart from that, I think game consumption itself is becoming polarized."

zabzonk 2mo ago

Well, I don't know. Most of the Myst games seem to be background, painted, with a bit of moving art. Comparing this with (say) an isometric RPG (think BG3, Pillars of Eternity) and those look a lot more expensive, but still capable of making money. Or maybe it's just that I never liked Myst - too stupid, I guess.

layer8 2mo ago
FWIW, I never got the appeal of Myst as well. Much too limited range of actions.
- littlexsparkee 2mo ago
  I played the first 4 with my pops so for me: nostalgia, the fantasy environments, the music (must have been what got me into ambient).

Triphibian 2mo ago

Interesting timing on this article considering The Big Walk comes out this week. Obviously the game is not as intricate as a Myst game, but it feels like the perfect mixture of a game where design really matters and reaction to what the market wants. People like playing together and collaborating to make their own fun. It is not hard to imagine a version of Myst like this -- the most fun I have had playing a PC game was sitting next to a friend as we played Riven beginning to end.

Simulacra 2mo ago
You might enjoy the new game Solarpunk. A very successful Kickstarter, made by two guys.

flohofwoe 2mo ago

The article reads like it's about 15 years late to reality. Trying to get funding from a publisher as an independent studio was always somewhere between hard and impossible, and especially towards the 2010s. That's why Kickstarter became such an unbelievable success. PS: The one exception was when Epic was on its aggressive rampage to buy as many exclusives for the Epic Game Store as possible. But I guess that money shower has also dried up by now.

the__alchemist 2mo ago

This is surprising to read in a world where we received Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. All top-tier games (When ranked among all games in history), all recent, and all with a moderate budget and studio size, on the size order of Cyan's in its hayday. And Blue Prince has deep puzzle elements that would be at home to a Myst player. This article and headline present a conflicting version of reality to the one I experience.

ramesh31 2mo ago
>This is surprising to read in a world where we got Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. Note that none of these were made in the US like Myst was. The cost of living is just too damn high to afford even a small team without massive funding for the amount of time it takes to make games like these. It's why every single notable AA game of the last decade has been made elsewhere now.
- the__alchemist 2mo ago
  This did not escape my notice. Continental Europe in particular seems to have produced my favorite games of the past decade. And not from any one country: Examples include Poland, Denmark, Croatia, Czech, France. This is an observation; I offer no explanation.
CuriouslyC 2mo ago
Blue Prince immediately came to mind for me as relevant modern art. Honestly Myst style puzzle games seem like the easiest type of game for a generative world model to simulate, so I expect if players actually want them we'll see a lot more in the future.
efromvt 2mo ago
They actually touch on Blue Prince in the article; it is interesting that Expedition 33 isn't driving investment in similar sized games. But the thesis seems to be that Blue Prince like (smaller budget) is the preferred direction; more attempts at the upside of a runaway hit. Medium budget games give you less shots on goal and no corresponding payout increase.

llm_nerd 2mo ago

Interesting read, but this sort of framing is so common and self-deluding- > At the same time, gaming platforms like Steam—which indie and double-A games once depended on for discovery—have been flooded with low-quality dreck. According to the AI Transparency Index, more than 18,000 games on Steam now feature AI usage disclosures. “User trust in platform stores as a curatorial layer has been all but erased,” says North Cook. “When you feed people enough ads and slop, they just check out.” What a laughable, ridiculous non-sequitur (the casual, slop correlation between AI and the quality problem), and you see this same hilariously broken logic here on HN all the time, where people imagine some pre-AI era of only goodness and greatness. Steam was absolutely swamped with low quality garbage long before AI tools. You could as easily, if not more accurately, blame more accessible game development tools like Unity for broadening the ability of people to get into game development. Steam was more curated in earlier years, as well, and the move to basically letting anyone publish on it flooded the space. It's so astonishingly lazy for so many to use AI as their boogeyman for everything now (ironically...the AI is to blame rhetoric is such low effort slop). The world was filled with low-skill, low-effort, low-value garbage and dreck before AI. And FWIW, in many ways it's an ideal market being flooded for every wild niche or need. If your game is good do a bit of advertising and get word of mouth and you're the next Balatro. But people pushing weak offerings hoped limited choice and a captive audience would be their win.

picofarad 2mo ago
If someone makes a machine that produces CO2 in great quantities, I dont think pointing out that people have been exhaling for millennia is a reason to accept the machine.
- llm_nerd 2mo ago
  A more apt analogy is trying to pin global warming on e-scooters. I mean, look at all the e-scooters. And man, they sure are annoying, and e-scooters also use electricity which is sometimes created by non-renewables, ergo ipso facto sum. Using an AI disclosure count as an indication of anything is already laughably stupid, but just hand waving it as meaningful is basically playing on the stupidity of the audience, and look, it works on some...

rufasterisco 2mo ago

can we pls add /s to to the post title? how can it be that and then inside the article i read > Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email. if you need further proof it really is satire, here we go: our business model relies on Fed rates at 0%. > “Nobody has zero-interest money anymore,” says North Cook. When interest rates were near 0 percent following the Great Recession, and again at the height of the Covid pandemic, video game investors took more risks. But when the Fed rate benchmark surged to more than 5 percent in 2023, venture capital funding for the video game industry collapsed by more than 75 percent, from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to less than $3 billion in both 2023 and 2024. “Money just got too expensive to borrow,” says Eternal. “Publishers looked at their capital and said, ‘This is all the cash we have until the banks change their rates. Let's be conservative and stretch this out.’”

swiftcoder 2mo ago
> how can it be that and then inside the article i read > > Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email. Blue Prince is an interesting case, because the developer had a successful SaaS business that funded a significant part of development. Without such a source of "passive" income, I doubt most us have the kind of savings that would allow us to spend ~8 years working full-time on our game
- rufasterisco 2mo ago
  I don't know if English has a word for when you are half confused and half amused, but that is how I feel. From this same article, here is the co-head of the studio that wanted to produce Myst. > “I don't think people realize the true cost of developing games,” Anderson says, having used Kickstarter to partially fund two of Cyan’s past titles. “A million dollars seems like a ton of money, but it doesn't even come close to covering the full cost of a production like Anglerfish.” Thanks for making me checkout in detail Blue Prince. I don't understand why an article can say that a random dude has built a Myst-like game for what looks like less than a million, and then the very same article is about an indie studio, which says "nah, need more than that". I mean, what I understand is that: you CAN make a Myst-like game for less than 1 million (see Blue Prince), you just cannot be sure that you will make the money back. Also, financing is easier when money is free. In which case sure, I understand it. But please read the title, read the article, come back here and pls join me in a petition to add /s to the title. Because obviously the author is implying "nah Anderson, YOU cannot make that game, check Blue Prince ;) ". Right?

swiftcoder 2mo ago

I wonder how much increasing fidelity requirements are the main culprit here? Myst was made by a team of about 7 people (only 4 of them full-time), in just about 2 years, and cost under a million (adjusted for inflation). Riven had a team twice the size, took twice as long, and cost 10-15x as much. Apart from Exile, which was handed to a more experienced developer who got it done faster and cheaper, the remaining sequels follow a similar trajectory.

Theodores 2mo ago
They sold six million copies and made a big profit from Myst, which they presumably invested in the company, to make the next game, with the profits from that (and the diminishing returns from Myst) topping up their coffers. At some stage of the journey they took so much money out of the company that they could not fund development without taking on loans, albeit as advances from publishers. Why does every business have to be based on debt, even if it is a financial success? With automotive, we have car companies that have been going for a century or more, and some of them have 'Open AI/SpaceX' levels of debt in the hundreds of billions, even though they have had a century to work out how to make cars. For example, VW. Sure they have had to buy many other brands, expand in China, pay for diesels that lied and much else, however, is it not possible for a single business to be financed by debt? Even the money printing machine that is Apple has untold billions in debt. They don't even make their own products. There are reasons for this, however, this stock market thing seems all about making debt, not 'money'.
- s1artibartfast 2mo ago
  Is this a genuine question? I could try to explain more, but debt allows you to have your cake and eat it too. I could save for 40 years for a house, or buy one today with debt today. In the latter case, I get to enjoy it now and save money on rent. Basically the whole world works this way. You could save and then spend, or spend then repay. In a lot of context, you make or save more by spending sooner than the cost of interest.
- swiftcoder 2mo ago
  I think the answer is always scope creep. You hit it big on a game, your ambition grows, the next game costs an order of magnitude more… eventually you either run out of money, or you build Star Citizen

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

nickisnoble 2mo ago

Big Walk is pretty close to a myst.

readthenotes1 2mo ago

How much did slay the spire cost? I am pretty sure it's not the game that is the cause of the funding trouble?

CamperBob2 2mo ago

What are you talking about? I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend, for practically no money. The audience won't like it because they have beef with the tools I'd choose to use, but that's a them problem, not a me problem. Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art. They'll never know, I guess.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art. I feel like unless you've grokked that art (and most importantly art direction) is also important to communicate the game design to the player, then you clearly aren't god's gift to game design :)
BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
> I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend, for practically no money. I don't believe you can.
- CamperBob2 2mo ago
  Well, not for free. :-P Still, a weekend-long indy game jam in which the contestants are expected to use AI, rather than being forbidden to use it, would be pretty interesting to see.
  - BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
    > Well, not for free. You said "for practically no money". How much are we talking about here? > weekend-long indy game jam There was apparently one at GDC earlier this year but I couldn't find any details about the winners. I did find https://www.genjam.net https://www.genjam.net, the nicest thing about which I can say is that many of the examples appear to function.
Ariarule 2mo ago
Can you name three reasonable-quality games out there like this that were definitely made in such a way? It costs only $100 to publish a game on Steam, recoupable if you meet a fairly low revenue threshold. You can publish elsewhere with no money up front (e.g. Itch). If this were actually true, and even if 90% of players would just pass based on the AI disclosure (doubtful, and also doubtful that _all_ games made this way would actually disclose it), you'd expect there to be lots of Myst quality games out there; hundred to thousands already, at least a handful of which should _already_ be successful. Not entirely a rhetorical question. I've found any images need serious review and touch-up at a minimum and usually multiple rounds of revision. The topology on any generated 3D models is generally atrocious. TTS is not tuned for voice acting to an extent it's absolutely no good for that purpose as far I can tell, and that would be a cornerstone of any serious modern "Myst-class" adventure game. I can't comment on music and SFX in particular and have heard secondhand that current models are "all right", but imagine it's probably the same situation: no care taken, you get uselessly mid results. If it's really that easy and that cheap, I'd like to see it.

cubefox 2mo ago

1. Approximately every software engineer secretly dreams of developing an awesome video game instead of the boring software he actually makes. 2. Consequently, there are way too many people wanting to develop video games relative to the commercial demand for them. 3. Consequently, it is incredibly hard to get funding for a video game project.

watwut 2mo ago
Meh, no not true. Plenty of software developers dont even like playing games. And making a game is not all that much more fun anyway. A lot of that work is plain boring. Fun software project and flashy outcome are two different things.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- cubefox 2mo ago
  Which of my statements above do you think is false?

trencedamp 2mo ago

> Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish. This seems like an insane amount of capital to make a game that could be vibe coded in a few weeks

Ariarule 2mo ago

_Dimhaven_, released just a few months ago, looks fairly Myst-like from the videos I've seen. While I haven't played it, Zadbox, the developer, also made the very Myst-like _Quern_; released 2016 and which I have played. I can't help but think the article is a story about _Cyan's_ woes conflated with industry woes. Which isn't to say that the industry doesn't have problems! But Cyan really underperformed with _Firmament_. Look at the Kickstarter comments: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyanworlds/firmament/comments https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyanworlds/firmament/co... They did a rug pull on whether they would ship DVDs with the Firmament collector's boxes _after_ they had complaints about the quality of the equivalent Obduction backer reward. While they did ship a DVD for Obduction, from personal experience the box itself it came in was a bit underwhelming. I didn't care so much about packaging, but I could see how someone would, and the whole situation on this point with Firmament was a very eye-rolling "again?" scenario. The first time with Obduction that they weren't able to ship what they planned in this way was bad luck; the second time was, generously, bad planning about something that was entirely foreseeable on their part. More details here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/754890/discussions/0/3826415752026145042/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/754890/discussions/0/38264157... They made a bad bet on how well VR would take off, with Firmament very obviously created with VR play in mind. So many people were disappointed with Firmament itself. "18,420 backers pledged $1,433,161 to help bring this project to life" but they can't do that again specifically because they burned a huge amount of goodwill with the people most likely to support them that way. Keep in mind that's a 2019 number and CPI adjusting would bring it up to about 1.8 million, at the lower end but solidly within the 1 to 10 million amount Wired said they were trying to raise for Anglerfish from a publisher. And _Obduction_, while beautiful, was a bit short and had its own issues. I would also note with all the discussion of the impact of AI art on games that Cyan was an early _target_ of the anti-AI crowd over their use of AI art in Firmament. IIRC, Steam did not have a dedicated disclosure section at the time Firmament, but they did disclose it responsibly and appropriately in the credits. A more detailed statement from Cyan can still be found at https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in-firmament/ https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in... -- on this, I agree with Cyan's 2023 post, we ought to be able to distinguish "AI Assisted" from AI-generated, although it seems many are allergic to such nuance.

2mo ago

TACIXAT 2mo ago

The article said they are looking for $1m to $10m in funding. Given the hype and pedigree, I feel they could crowdfund the low end of that trivially.

sph 2mo ago
In this economy, when only old people like me care about Myst (and I’ve been around enough to know not to crowdfund games)? It’s not the 90s any more.
- kdheiwns 2mo ago
  This is the real issue nobody else wants to address. Tastes have changed and genres have progressed. A few other old time devs have tried reboots of their games (a few point and click adventures, mostly) and they were hyped up beyond belief since they were made by legendary developers and were "bringing back the classics". Then they released and got a few sales from older people wanting to get a taste of youth again, but realizing it's just not the same. Those new games by old devs didn't progress in terms of gameplay, and visually, they were worse because they tried too hard to be "retro" and made things look shoddy and low effort on powerful hardware. When back in the day, artists busted their asses to make things look beautiful on shoddy hardware. Myst has had a bunch of sequels and remakes, but there's a reason people only care about Myst 1. It was lightning in a bottle and trying to desperately pull the "remember Myst?" card several times gets a bit embarrassing after a while.
teamonkey 2mo ago
That’s a weird value to get funding for right now. If a publisher wants to fund something cheap and niche, maybe a bit of a gamble, it’s too much. If they want to fund a more fleshed-out title that is likely to succeed with a bit of marketing spend behind it, it’s almost too little. So I think they might be right, they’re in a weird space that publishers don’t want to look at right now.

lightedman 2mo ago

Myst has severely overlooked a platform that has recently made some pretty decent strides - VR. I have a Kat Walk C2 and a game like Myst in VR with that VR rig would be absolutely goddamned insane. Myst ruled because you felt like you were in another world back then. Recreate that with the tech we have to really make you feel like you're in that world.

GormHouj 2mo ago
The 2021 remake of Myst has VR support as well as the remake of Riven. I think I own five copies of Myst now. There are at least 4 remakes/remasters. It's kind of insane.
- lightedman 2mo ago
  No, I want a Myst or Riven game where I'm actually walking around the world. The VR support/remake pales in capability versus what I've seen done with actual VR games, and Myst could easily pull that off if they'd just look at the platform seriously and have some actual VR gamers to bounce ideas off of/beta test.

yoyopa 2mo ago

[dead]

drsalt 2mo ago

aren't all these guys rich? why do they need funding?

smallmancontrov 2mo ago
They probably spent the bulk of their myst/riven fortune on Uru (a puzzle solving MMO, a year before World of Warcraft). It was bold and a very cool idea but didn't work out. They kept enough in reserve and have enough residual sales to hang on through the years, but now big projects have to be capitalized with outside money.

languagehacker 2mo ago

Myst was really interesting when it first came out, but games like that are woefully out of date in a world where most games are immersive, and where players are accustomed to onboarding systems like tutorial levels to help prevent frustration and focus on story and enjoyment. I also just really don't think that in this world's collective attention span, nobody wants to play a game where you have to traverse the entire map a bunch of times to solve a puzzle by trial and error. Give me a new Journeyman Project instead!

casey2 2mo ago

Has there not been enough point and click puzzle games? There's been dozens of mystlikes including recent ones and pretty much all of them fail since players generally prefer walking around a 3D world.

inigyou 2mo ago

You can't assume a sequel to something popular last year will do as well as the original - much less something from 30 years ago. Each game has to stand on its own. When you discover a winning formula, there may be appetite for more of it. Or there may not be. Your audience is satiated at some point, and that assumes you even keep the quality up and don't just make slop to coast off the original's brand recognition.

b112 2mo ago

Myst was impressive on multiple fronts, the story line, the graphics, thr music. It was also super easy to port to other platforms. And it was also seen as a new genre, or at least sub-genre. Nothing was quite like it. This was back when playing real sound was taxing