4 ms·

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 downloa

by 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.
- saulpw 2mo ago
  I don't think that's true. Games are a product of their time and context; if Tetris didn't exist, do you think it would be a massively popular hit today? I can see it being an interesting entrant in the mobile space like a match-3 game, but not something that literally everyone plays. Like we were ready to be Tetrisized in the 1980s but by the 2010s the vibe was more Angry Birds.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    I don't think Candy Crush is much different in genre to Tetris.
matusp 2mo ago
And when you are an investor, you must predict who is able to make a good game. What is the likelihood that a Myst-like will pay for itself. There is already a lot of Myst-likes on Steam, do players want more?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  The whole "visual novel" genre would say "Yes, we'd like more". They range from all sorts of gameplay though, from Myst-like to RPGs, and a lot in-between. Definitely a market for Myst-like games, the trick is to figure out so production costs don't overrun eventual profits of course, as always.
staplers 2mo ago
i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. By the very nature of it, you wouldn't...
- somenameforme 2mo ago
  But I think this also goes the other way as well. Even the most reclusive dev hermit can get some people to try out their game, and people love a hidden gem, and love talking about it. It makes it quite impractical for a genuinely great game to remain just undiscovered.
  - 3eb7988a1663 2mo ago
    During peak Covid, Vampire Survivors blew up as the hot game. It is a pedestrian dual stick shooter. There are hundreds of examples which do the same thing, possibly better. Getting a hit game requires decent fundamentals and a heap of luck.
    - somenameforme 2mo ago
      No it's not. I'd highly recommend playing it - it's a phenomenal game. It's not a dual stuck shooter, you can literally play it with one hand. The entire schtick of the game is that it auto fires, so all the player takes care of is mobility. It was inspired by the exactly one other game that seems to have created the genre - Magic Survival. But Magic Survival was a mobile game so it was full of ads, spam, microtransactions, and all the other sort of stuff that enshittifies everything on mobile. But the dev nonetheless thought it was a great and underserved idea. So he cleaned up the concept, got rid of the ads and other mobile crap, brought it to PC, and made $millions. His idea was then widely cloned, but games are much closer to art than commodities - so one can't expect clones to do as well as the 'original work' when they're being sold in the exact same gallery. That said, some of the clones also did extremely well when they meaningfully iterated upon the concept instead of just outright mimicking it. For instance Halls of Torment is another great game in the genre.
      - 2mo ago
cubefox 2mo ago
> i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong! That's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I point you to one of these games, you can just say "but it wasn't actually good, otherwise it would have been more successful" or "the fact that you know about it shows that it was at least somewhat successful".
jayd16 2mo ago
I've seen a lot of good games killed by large studios because they feel the opportunity cost is too great, despite being profitable. Mediocre games also happen to blow up all the time. So I'm sure there's a lot of sentiment around not getting that lucky. I also think it's a spectrum. You need a good enough game and to be lucky.
Ekaros 2mo ago
Bar is actually higher than bad. You have to be above mediocre even. As PC player I have decades of games easily accessible. You really need to get to at least top 25% of that if not much higher. People complain that games get rated 7/10. But I think more so 7/10 is often bare minimum of game worth dedicating time for unless you really low the genre or specific thing. So while average game would be 5/10. An average game that is worth buying and sells is actually more so 7/10.
sgt 2mo ago
I actually did build a game (with my 5 year old boy) recently. https://apps.apple.com/no/app/b%C3%A5tspillet/id6791630382 https://apps.apple.com/no/app/b%C3%A5tspillet/id6791630382 We had a lot of fun building it and I used Lua and LÖVE2D to basically build a game engine for a boat game in an isometric world. But to take something like that to something that pays the bills... mindboggling.
inigyou 2mo ago
It's extremely difficult, but there are enough to show that it can be done. Most people just don't want to. The secret seems to be infinite playtesting of infinite variations. Factorio and Minecraft each took over a decade, and scrapped and redesigned core game mechanics many times. Half-Life 2 had a completely different storyline one year before release, and Ocarina of Time had a completely different environment. The Witness spent years testing puzzles and layouts in a blocky programmer world before finalizing it and making it beautiful. Baba Is You obviously also spent ages testing and trying a zillion combinations of puzzle elements. And those are just the ones at the top of my head. You don't need as much to make a slop shooter that's moderately fun and relies on graphics and action gameplay. However, that market is saturated precisely because it is easier.

by volkk 2mo ago

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.
saulpw 2mo ago
I don't think that's true. Games are a product of their time and context; if Tetris didn't exist, do you think it would be a massively popular hit today? I can see it being an interesting entrant in the mobile space like a match-3 game, but not something that literally everyone plays. Like we were ready to be Tetrisized in the 1980s but by the 2010s the vibe was more Angry Birds.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  I don't think Candy Crush is much different in genre to Tetris.

matusp 2mo ago

And when you are an investor, you must predict who is able to make a good game. What is the likelihood that a Myst-like will pay for itself. There is already a lot of Myst-likes on Steam, do players want more?

embedding-shape 2mo ago
The whole "visual novel" genre would say "Yes, we'd like more". They range from all sorts of gameplay though, from Myst-like to RPGs, and a lot in-between. Definitely a market for Myst-like games, the trick is to figure out so production costs don't overrun eventual profits of course, as always.

staplers 2mo ago

i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. By the very nature of it, you wouldn't...

somenameforme 2mo ago
But I think this also goes the other way as well. Even the most reclusive dev hermit can get some people to try out their game, and people love a hidden gem, and love talking about it. It makes it quite impractical for a genuinely great game to remain just undiscovered.
- 3eb7988a1663 2mo ago
  During peak Covid, Vampire Survivors blew up as the hot game. It is a pedestrian dual stick shooter. There are hundreds of examples which do the same thing, possibly better. Getting a hit game requires decent fundamentals and a heap of luck.
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    No it's not. I'd highly recommend playing it - it's a phenomenal game. It's not a dual stuck shooter, you can literally play it with one hand. The entire schtick of the game is that it auto fires, so all the player takes care of is mobility. It was inspired by the exactly one other game that seems to have created the genre - Magic Survival. But Magic Survival was a mobile game so it was full of ads, spam, microtransactions, and all the other sort of stuff that enshittifies everything on mobile. But the dev nonetheless thought it was a great and underserved idea. So he cleaned up the concept, got rid of the ads and other mobile crap, brought it to PC, and made $millions. His idea was then widely cloned, but games are much closer to art than commodities - so one can't expect clones to do as well as the 'original work' when they're being sold in the exact same gallery. That said, some of the clones also did extremely well when they meaningfully iterated upon the concept instead of just outright mimicking it. For instance Halls of Torment is another great game in the genre.
    - 2mo ago

cubefox 2mo ago

> i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong! That's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I point you to one of these games, you can just say "but it wasn't actually good, otherwise it would have been more successful" or "the fact that you know about it shows that it was at least somewhat successful".

jayd16 2mo ago

I've seen a lot of good games killed by large studios because they feel the opportunity cost is too great, despite being profitable. Mediocre games also happen to blow up all the time. So I'm sure there's a lot of sentiment around not getting that lucky. I also think it's a spectrum. You need a good enough game and to be lucky.

Ekaros 2mo ago

Bar is actually higher than bad. You have to be above mediocre even. As PC player I have decades of games easily accessible. You really need to get to at least top 25% of that if not much higher. People complain that games get rated 7/10. But I think more so 7/10 is often bare minimum of game worth dedicating time for unless you really low the genre or specific thing. So while average game would be 5/10. An average game that is worth buying and sells is actually more so 7/10.

sgt 2mo ago

I actually did build a game (with my 5 year old boy) recently. https://apps.apple.com/no/app/b%C3%A5tspillet/id6791630382 https://apps.apple.com/no/app/b%C3%A5tspillet/id6791630382 We had a lot of fun building it and I used Lua and LÖVE2D to basically build a game engine for a boat game in an isometric world. But to take something like that to something that pays the bills... mindboggling.

inigyou 2mo ago

It's extremely difficult, but there are enough to show that it can be done. Most people just don't want to. The secret seems to be infinite playtesting of infinite variations. Factorio and Minecraft each took over a decade, and scrapped and redesigned core game mechanics many times. Half-Life 2 had a completely different storyline one year before release, and Ocarina of Time had a completely different environment. The Witness spent years testing puzzles and layouts in a blocky programmer world before finalizing it and making it beautiful. Baba Is You obviously also spent ages testing and trying a zillion combinations of puzzle elements. And those are just the ones at the top of my head. You don't need as much to make a slop shooter that's moderately fun and relies on graphics and action gameplay. However, that market is saturated precisely because it is easier.