7 ms·

The Financial Future of Game Developers

111 points by captaincrowbar 12y ago

Negitivefrags 12y ago
http://i1.wp.com/www.raphkoster.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/whatmobilepubs.png http://i1.wp.com/www.raphkoster.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/... This image from the article is so true it actually hurts. The number of times our company has had a conversation like this would boggle the mind. We are not even a mobile game. We are a free to play PC title and we still get this garbage. It's interesting that publishers for Asia don't have this mindset. They are willing to actually put money up front, something that no non-asian publisher has ever offered us.
- Pxl_Buzzard 12y ago
  Your staff page[1] doesn't show anybody in business / marketing roles. How do you handle website production, forums, marketing, legal, etc without dedicated staff? Even with a small group making a game engine[2] we're finding that those issues that pretty much require a full-time person. 1. http://www.grindinggear.com/?page=staff http://www.grindinggear.com/?page=staff 2. https://github.com/Circular-Studios/Dash https://github.com/Circular-Studios/Dash
  - Negitivefrags 12y ago
    That page is a bit out of date. We do have a marketing guy as of fairly recently. The day to day business stuff is handled by our Managing Director (listed as Lead Designer on that page).
- socialist_coder 12y ago
  You get those shitty publisher terms because the publisher has no idea if your game will be good or not. Why would they commit to spending anything before they know what kind of revenue & retention your game will have? If you release your game yourself to a limited market, prove it has good revenue & retention stats, then shop around for a publisher, you get much better terms.
  - Negitivefrags 12y ago
    We did release the game ourselves and generated good revenue and retention. I'm certainly not complaining about our current level of success. The (non-asian) publishers still come out of the woodwork to offer you these kinds of garbage deals. We just don't take them. The fact that we were already successful is why these leeches turn up in the first place. These "publishers" are essentially glorified and very expensive user referral programs.
  - DannoHung 12y ago
    Maybe they should ask to fuckin' play the damn game so they can decide whether it's worth a marketing spend.
  - hnnewguy 12y ago
    >Why would they commit to spending anything before they know what kind of revenue & retention your game will have? Why would you sign a publishing deal if you know that your game has awesome retention and big revenues? The idea is to share the risk.
- existencebox 12y ago
  This may not be the best place to fanboy, but I wanted to say how much I REALLY appreciate your guy's model. It's been a total breath of fresh air in an environment that supports the absolutely worst trends in perverse incentives for free to play games; so just, thank you to you and all of your team. (on top of that, it's a damn solid game too.)
  - mratzloff 12y ago
    Oh, Path of Exile! A coworker was chatting with me about how much he liked the DLC model for that game because it doesn't give anyone a purchased advantage, it's strictly cosmetic. He also said that this was the game that Diablo III should have been.
    - BystanderX 12y ago
      It and DotA2 are the primary titles supporting this model, and it's great for players. It's hard to sell to marketing though, apparently.
dsirijus 12y ago
I think the main issue here is that people don't clearly delineate making games from making money. You wanna make games? No one's stopping you from creating the most whackier experimental game this world has ever seen. You wanna make money off that? You gotta wade through all kinds of shit, as is usual in most businesses. And before someone mentions Minecraft - it is such an outlier that it's not usable as argument in any discussion. I don't subscribe to the self-entitled tone of the article that making games in itself is something virtuous and should be basically subsidized. I love Koster though, Theory of Fun for Game Design is what made me really interested in game development.
- usea 12y ago
  >I think the main issue here is that people don't clearly delineate making games from making money. >You wanna make games? No one's stopping you from creating the most whackier experimental game this world has ever seen. Creators still have to pay rent, buy food, and pay other bills. So unless you're privileged enough to be able to pay your bills without making any money, then yeah you do need money to make games.
  - hagbardgroup 12y ago
    The guy who made Banished contracted his way through the lengthy (something like 4 years) development. Functionally it cost him a lot of money and effort over time, but he did not need the extra overhead of a publisher (unless you consider Steam a sort of pseudo-publisher, which it is). Money is just a thing we use to get other people who don't like us enough to work for us for free to do things for us. There are ways to get resources to make development possible beyond saving up a ton of cash (which carries a lot of risk in and of itself).
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      And how many do succeed in the end? The main reason I ended up in boring IT world instead of gaming, even though I do know a few people in the industry, is a consequence how the whole industry works. More so in Europe where not so many games make a hit. For each Crysis and Killzone there are lots of 1 game closed studios.
zanny 12y ago
How about just not selling your soul to soul sucking distributors like Apple or Valve? The real question is do you want fame and industry class "success" (ie, your game sells millions) or do you want to be creative. Terrible example, yada yada, but Minecraft is still being sold from the Mojang site where the company (and originally Notch) gets 100% of proceeds. If you want to see millions of people play your games, with millions of copies sold, with front page storefront ads, then yeah, you sell your soul to the entrenched interests. But you don't have to play their game - you just need: 1. An Audience who likes your content. 2. A way to eat as a result of that content. Really, the obvious answer is the audience plays patron as the article denoted funder. That, in the long term, is the macroscopic way this is all trending anyway. And I'm not talking kickstarter style get-a-bunch-of-money-at-once-and-blow-it-all. I mean you have an (open) product, put it out there, advertise it however you want (personally or outsourced) and hope that those that experience it think its worth continued funding. Also, metaconsoles is kind of a misnomer - you have a platform spectrum, from open accessible platforms to walled gardens with padlocks. On one side, you have the wild west of self-hosted downloads for free platforms like Android (without the play store, think fdroid) or desktop Linux, and you progress from there through Windows, the Play Store, OSX, and finally the iOS / old console locked down ecosystem where you need a developers license, development tools from the source, etc. Yeah, Steam is barely better than a console - they act as gatekeeper and takes a huge cut - but on the platforms Steam supports, you at least have the option to use other platforms as well, like gog, the humble store, desura, or self hosting. When there is whole stack lock down like on the traditional consoles and iOS, you are literally praying at the alter of the corporate owner that they give you a blessing.
- RKoster 12y ago
  Other storefronts... That would be nice if people could make money on those other distribution channels. Unfortunately, they can't, by and large. Most people don't find the effort worth it to even sign up with Amazon, which has a huge addressable market. I have never even seen a sales report with money from fdroid. For devs who are trying to make a living just from games, anything other than Steam, iOS, and for some people, Google Play, is basically irrelevant. Unless you land in a Humble Bundle. As far as the loyal audience, yes, I agree with you on that, even mentioned it in the article. But that's not a living wage for most, and the latest research says that sort of environment is more susceptible to a hit-driven winner-takes-all market. That leads to an ugly place as regards the income levels for the typical dev.
gedrap 12y ago
While fairly offtopic, this reminded me of Game Dev Tycoon ( http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/ http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/ ) which seems to be written using HTML5 + JS + Chromium. I like this game, and I equally like the way they got traction. They released a restricted version on The Pirate Bay, although the description of the torrent was as if it was a full game. Not very usual, but nothing new either. But a well written blog post about it (http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/ http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...) got them homepage of HN and loads of other press coverage, which helped to take off. Well done.
- mratzloff 12y ago
  It also helps when you base the game on one that's already very popular, Game Dev Story[1]. [1] http://itunes.apple.com/app/id396085661 http://itunes.apple.com/app/id396085661
- tiquorsj 12y ago
  Importantly, the posted version would let you play the game until your software (in the game) was ready to sell and then it would put up a shamer message about how you couldn't make money because everyone was pirating your game.
ausjke 12y ago
I wish they all go broke, 95% of the games whoever produced are mental drugs to the society, especially to young kids. I hope one day that most games are illegal, just like the drugs. If you have kids, you know what I mean.
- angersock 12y ago
  Maybe people should try parenting instead of letting their kids play games? Or giving them cell phones? Computer gaming is a hugely important industry, and the reason that we even have powerful computers and graphics cards today. You need to defend your opinion a bit more if you want it treated as anything other than that, an opinion.
  - ausjke 12y ago
    My kids rarely play games, but I have seen too many kids doing that these days, obsessively. one reason there are less boys in college than girls, guess what, games. I actually read this somewhere. My piano teacher, whose two kids are still at home playing games, at their 20s. You don't just blame drug abusers, you do also blame the drug dealers. In _most_ cases, game designers are doing the same thing as a drug dealer who sells the drug, wearing an IT hat. Parenting can not do this alone when gaming is now becoming a culture/fashion/addictive, due to our genius developers.
    - pknight 12y ago
      Games are a way to play. Life without play is = devoid of joy. You can get play from lots of different things (work/music/improv etc), but it's human nature to want to play. Games are a part of culture, just like music is. Music serves no intrinsic utilitarian purpose. You wouldn't want to cut a person of culture any less you would want a person to never listen to music. Of course, anything in excess tends to be bad. And some games are engineered in diabolical ways and only live to make money. But games in an of itself are a natural and important part of a normal human beings life. And in this generation, computer games are.
      - 12y ago
tdaltonc 12y ago
What is Humble Bundle in his ontology of 'the supply chain of creative work'? it looks like they fill all of the same roles as Apple. I feel like this might not be the right way to divide the industry.
- RKoster 12y ago
  Humble Bundle is basically a publisher with a web storefront. They leverage other distribution channels, and critically, have what's left of the gaming press as a very fruitful marketing channel. They also mostly only publish things that are already hits, so in a lot of ways they are a re-user outlet.
tom_jones 12y ago
One solution. Stay out of the app store. Develop on the web in HTML 5.0. No businesses between you and the players there. Once you are a bit hit, you cut your own deal to go onto other platforms like Facebook and the app stores.

111 points by captaincrowbar 12y ago

http://i1.wp.com/www.raphkoster.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/whatmobilepubs.png http://i1.wp.com/www.raphkoster.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/... This image from the article is so true it actually hurts. The number of times our company has had a conversation like this would boggle the mind. We are not even a mobile game. We are a free to play PC title and we still get this garbage. It's interesting that publishers for Asia don't have this mindset. They are willing to actually put money up front, something that no non-asian publisher has ever offered us.

Pxl_Buzzard 12y ago
Your staff page[1] doesn't show anybody in business / marketing roles. How do you handle website production, forums, marketing, legal, etc without dedicated staff? Even with a small group making a game engine[2] we're finding that those issues that pretty much require a full-time person. 1. http://www.grindinggear.com/?page=staff http://www.grindinggear.com/?page=staff 2. https://github.com/Circular-Studios/Dash https://github.com/Circular-Studios/Dash
- Negitivefrags 12y ago
  That page is a bit out of date. We do have a marketing guy as of fairly recently. The day to day business stuff is handled by our Managing Director (listed as Lead Designer on that page).
socialist_coder 12y ago
You get those shitty publisher terms because the publisher has no idea if your game will be good or not. Why would they commit to spending anything before they know what kind of revenue & retention your game will have? If you release your game yourself to a limited market, prove it has good revenue & retention stats, then shop around for a publisher, you get much better terms.
- Negitivefrags 12y ago
  We did release the game ourselves and generated good revenue and retention. I'm certainly not complaining about our current level of success. The (non-asian) publishers still come out of the woodwork to offer you these kinds of garbage deals. We just don't take them. The fact that we were already successful is why these leeches turn up in the first place. These "publishers" are essentially glorified and very expensive user referral programs.
- DannoHung 12y ago
  Maybe they should ask to fuckin' play the damn game so they can decide whether it's worth a marketing spend.
- hnnewguy 12y ago
  >Why would they commit to spending anything before they know what kind of revenue & retention your game will have? Why would you sign a publishing deal if you know that your game has awesome retention and big revenues? The idea is to share the risk.
existencebox 12y ago
This may not be the best place to fanboy, but I wanted to say how much I REALLY appreciate your guy's model. It's been a total breath of fresh air in an environment that supports the absolutely worst trends in perverse incentives for free to play games; so just, thank you to you and all of your team. (on top of that, it's a damn solid game too.)
- mratzloff 12y ago
  Oh, Path of Exile! A coworker was chatting with me about how much he liked the DLC model for that game because it doesn't give anyone a purchased advantage, it's strictly cosmetic. He also said that this was the game that Diablo III should have been.
  - BystanderX 12y ago
    It and DotA2 are the primary titles supporting this model, and it's great for players. It's hard to sell to marketing though, apparently.

dsirijus 12y ago

I think the main issue here is that people don't clearly delineate making games from making money. You wanna make games? No one's stopping you from creating the most whackier experimental game this world has ever seen. You wanna make money off that? You gotta wade through all kinds of shit, as is usual in most businesses. And before someone mentions Minecraft - it is such an outlier that it's not usable as argument in any discussion. I don't subscribe to the self-entitled tone of the article that making games in itself is something virtuous and should be basically subsidized. I love Koster though, Theory of Fun for Game Design is what made me really interested in game development.

usea 12y ago
>I think the main issue here is that people don't clearly delineate making games from making money. >You wanna make games? No one's stopping you from creating the most whackier experimental game this world has ever seen. Creators still have to pay rent, buy food, and pay other bills. So unless you're privileged enough to be able to pay your bills without making any money, then yeah you do need money to make games.
- hagbardgroup 12y ago
  The guy who made Banished contracted his way through the lengthy (something like 4 years) development. Functionally it cost him a lot of money and effort over time, but he did not need the extra overhead of a publisher (unless you consider Steam a sort of pseudo-publisher, which it is). Money is just a thing we use to get other people who don't like us enough to work for us for free to do things for us. There are ways to get resources to make development possible beyond saving up a ton of cash (which carries a lot of risk in and of itself).
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    And how many do succeed in the end? The main reason I ended up in boring IT world instead of gaming, even though I do know a few people in the industry, is a consequence how the whole industry works. More so in Europe where not so many games make a hit. For each Crysis and Killzone there are lots of 1 game closed studios.

zanny 12y ago

How about just not selling your soul to soul sucking distributors like Apple or Valve? The real question is do you want fame and industry class "success" (ie, your game sells millions) or do you want to be creative. Terrible example, yada yada, but Minecraft is still being sold from the Mojang site where the company (and originally Notch) gets 100% of proceeds. If you want to see millions of people play your games, with millions of copies sold, with front page storefront ads, then yeah, you sell your soul to the entrenched interests. But you don't have to play their game - you just need: 1. An Audience who likes your content. 2. A way to eat as a result of that content. Really, the obvious answer is the audience plays patron as the article denoted funder. That, in the long term, is the macroscopic way this is all trending anyway. And I'm not talking kickstarter style get-a-bunch-of-money-at-once-and-blow-it-all. I mean you have an (open) product, put it out there, advertise it however you want (personally or outsourced) and hope that those that experience it think its worth continued funding. Also, metaconsoles is kind of a misnomer - you have a platform spectrum, from open accessible platforms to walled gardens with padlocks. On one side, you have the wild west of self-hosted downloads for free platforms like Android (without the play store, think fdroid) or desktop Linux, and you progress from there through Windows, the Play Store, OSX, and finally the iOS / old console locked down ecosystem where you need a developers license, development tools from the source, etc. Yeah, Steam is barely better than a console - they act as gatekeeper and takes a huge cut - but on the platforms Steam supports, you at least have the option to use other platforms as well, like gog, the humble store, desura, or self hosting. When there is whole stack lock down like on the traditional consoles and iOS, you are literally praying at the alter of the corporate owner that they give you a blessing.

RKoster 12y ago
Other storefronts... That would be nice if people could make money on those other distribution channels. Unfortunately, they can't, by and large. Most people don't find the effort worth it to even sign up with Amazon, which has a huge addressable market. I have never even seen a sales report with money from fdroid. For devs who are trying to make a living just from games, anything other than Steam, iOS, and for some people, Google Play, is basically irrelevant. Unless you land in a Humble Bundle. As far as the loyal audience, yes, I agree with you on that, even mentioned it in the article. But that's not a living wage for most, and the latest research says that sort of environment is more susceptible to a hit-driven winner-takes-all market. That leads to an ugly place as regards the income levels for the typical dev.

gedrap 12y ago

While fairly offtopic, this reminded me of Game Dev Tycoon ( http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/ http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/ ) which seems to be written using HTML5 + JS + Chromium. I like this game, and I equally like the way they got traction. They released a restricted version on The Pirate Bay, although the description of the torrent was as if it was a full game. Not very usual, but nothing new either. But a well written blog post about it (http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/ http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...) got them homepage of HN and loads of other press coverage, which helped to take off. Well done.

mratzloff 12y ago
It also helps when you base the game on one that's already very popular, Game Dev Story[1]. [1] http://itunes.apple.com/app/id396085661 http://itunes.apple.com/app/id396085661
tiquorsj 12y ago
Importantly, the posted version would let you play the game until your software (in the game) was ready to sell and then it would put up a shamer message about how you couldn't make money because everyone was pirating your game.

ausjke 12y ago

I wish they all go broke, 95% of the games whoever produced are mental drugs to the society, especially to young kids. I hope one day that most games are illegal, just like the drugs. If you have kids, you know what I mean.

angersock 12y ago
Maybe people should try parenting instead of letting their kids play games? Or giving them cell phones? Computer gaming is a hugely important industry, and the reason that we even have powerful computers and graphics cards today. You need to defend your opinion a bit more if you want it treated as anything other than that, an opinion.
- ausjke 12y ago
  My kids rarely play games, but I have seen too many kids doing that these days, obsessively. one reason there are less boys in college than girls, guess what, games. I actually read this somewhere. My piano teacher, whose two kids are still at home playing games, at their 20s. You don't just blame drug abusers, you do also blame the drug dealers. In _most_ cases, game designers are doing the same thing as a drug dealer who sells the drug, wearing an IT hat. Parenting can not do this alone when gaming is now becoming a culture/fashion/addictive, due to our genius developers.
  - pknight 12y ago
    Games are a way to play. Life without play is = devoid of joy. You can get play from lots of different things (work/music/improv etc), but it's human nature to want to play. Games are a part of culture, just like music is. Music serves no intrinsic utilitarian purpose. You wouldn't want to cut a person of culture any less you would want a person to never listen to music. Of course, anything in excess tends to be bad. And some games are engineered in diabolical ways and only live to make money. But games in an of itself are a natural and important part of a normal human beings life. And in this generation, computer games are.
    - 12y ago

tdaltonc 12y ago

What is Humble Bundle in his ontology of 'the supply chain of creative work'? it looks like they fill all of the same roles as Apple. I feel like this might not be the right way to divide the industry.

RKoster 12y ago
Humble Bundle is basically a publisher with a web storefront. They leverage other distribution channels, and critically, have what's left of the gaming press as a very fruitful marketing channel. They also mostly only publish things that are already hits, so in a lot of ways they are a re-user outlet.

tom_jones 12y ago

One solution. Stay out of the app store. Develop on the web in HTML 5.0. No businesses between you and the players there. Once you are a bit hit, you cut your own deal to go onto other platforms like Facebook and the app stores.