7 ms·

like others have said, absolutely, thank you for writing this up. a few observations for my fellow hope-laden game developers. tl;dr: anyone can use today's t

by m3mnoch 12y ago

like others have said, absolutely, thank you for writing this up. a few observations for my fellow hope-laden game developers. tl;dr: anyone can use today's tools to make crappy, me-too games. you need to make good games to succeed. to do that, you're going to need your 10,000 hours of game programming (not the same as web programming), 10,000 hours of game design (not just playing games), and 10,000 hours of all manner of art. 1) the marketplace is a "bloodbath" while, yes, there are tons and tons of other apps out there, to be frank, that's just fine for quality indie developers, because the majority of those games all look like your apps. you cannot with any serious expectation, for example, think to sell like hotcakes something like "wordgrid" or "letters". i mean, the reason "tetra" got any traction at (i would bet as i haven't read the reviews) all was for its multiplayer component. you cannot expect to have sales numbers like incredible-art-having sworcery or the incredible-paradigm-busting papers please with average-looking, average-playing, average-genre games. if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional. just because you can't throw a rock without hitting an amazingly easy toolset does not mean you'll build amazing games. it just means that everyone without the talent to build such games has an equal chance to show off the fact they can't build amazing games. 2) marketing is everything. no. no it's not. i'm part of the zynga/playdom facebook games generation where we instrumented, measured, and then poured on users. we thought virality was king and users were something you bought. push that k-factor through the roof!!! come to find out, retention was king. this is why zynga is ... um ... having issues. come to find out, you need a good game. if you have a good game and that game is easy to share, you'll get users from both channels -- app review sites and word of mouth -- without a lot of dough. you'll grow more slowly, but give people a reason, the method, and the content to share and they will. that's not to say marketing isn't important -- it is. it's just not the most important thing by far. 3) it's a lottery. only for simplistic, easy-to-copy games. take the "threes vs. 2048" conflict as an example: awful 2048 grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start=2014-03-19&end=2014-07-29&device=iphone&view=grossing&lm=f http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/... still substantial threes grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start=2014-02-06&end=2014-07-29&device=iphone&view=grossing&lm=f http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/... if you make something that anyone with a keyboard can make, you'll need to have an extrodinary amount of luck (2048 from ketchapp, flappy bird, etc.) that looks like a lottery. if you make something interesting that people want to play, you'll be just fine. especially these days when everyone is looking to discover the next minecraft or spelunky. so, if you don't have the ability or team to make a good game, yes, you will need the lottery. and every time i hear about "the lottery" that is the app marketplace, all i can think of is nate silver's "the signal and the noise" book. if you think it takes a lottery to succeed on the app store, you have a massive blindspot and that blindspot is: you don't have the ability -- yet -- to make quality games. you only think you do. don't give up. keep going. you'll get there eventually.

exelius 12y ago
> if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional. This, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem with the solo game/app developer. Any concept simple enough for one person to implement has been done to death by hundreds of other people already. So how do you differentiate? Marketing. >> 2) marketing is everything. > no. no it's not. Unfortunately, it is. See, it doesn't matter how novel and awesome (aka differentiated) your product is, you still have to sell it. In order to sell the product, you have to have the right product. This is why traditional marketing includes product development (look up the 5 Ps of marketing). Marketing as a function can tell you where your users are and what they're looking for. Then you design your product based on that, and find the optimal way to sell that product to your target users. The pricing/promotion piece (or what people usually think of as "marketing") comes at the end. Promotion in and of itself is not a differentiation strategy unless you have deep pockets. But promotion is absolutely required to launch a successful product: I don't care how differentiated your product is, if your users don't know about it, it might as well not exist at all. > 3) it's a lottery. It pretty much is a lottery at this point. Any game with a unique concept that is doable by a single person is pretty much immediately copied 10 times over by a Chinese/Indian sweatshop. Why develop your own new game when you can copy someone else's? Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up. App development has become a portfolio game specifically to deal with the randomness. If you view the costs for developing a product as encompassing both SW development costs AND marketing costs, the marketing costs would easily outstrip the development costs. Underperforming apps are unceremoniously killed, and more marketing dollars pumped into the ones that start succeeding. It's hard to play that game as an indie developer, which is why we've seen so many of these posts pop up recently. People were sold on this vision of an egalitarian, meritocratic app economy and it's just not true. In a maturing market like mobile gaming, the one who shouts the loudest commands the most attention. For an indie dev with no capital, that can be really hard to do.
- JonLim 12y ago
  > Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up. Ugh, the dreaded re-skin. In a past life, I helped launch a game, and then push it through two re-skins when the original floundered. Turns out that broken mechanics and poor design doesn't change when you change the art on the outside. The marketing mattered, finding product-market fit mattered, but a poor game still does shit-all for you. Just wanted to throw that in there because it gave me the heebie-jeebies reading about it again.

by m3mnoch 12y ago

exelius 12y ago

> if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional. This, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem with the solo game/app developer. Any concept simple enough for one person to implement has been done to death by hundreds of other people already. So how do you differentiate? Marketing. >> 2) marketing is everything. > no. no it's not. Unfortunately, it is. See, it doesn't matter how novel and awesome (aka differentiated) your product is, you still have to sell it. In order to sell the product, you have to have the right product. This is why traditional marketing includes product development (look up the 5 Ps of marketing). Marketing as a function can tell you where your users are and what they're looking for. Then you design your product based on that, and find the optimal way to sell that product to your target users. The pricing/promotion piece (or what people usually think of as "marketing") comes at the end. Promotion in and of itself is not a differentiation strategy unless you have deep pockets. But promotion is absolutely required to launch a successful product: I don't care how differentiated your product is, if your users don't know about it, it might as well not exist at all. > 3) it's a lottery. It pretty much is a lottery at this point. Any game with a unique concept that is doable by a single person is pretty much immediately copied 10 times over by a Chinese/Indian sweatshop. Why develop your own new game when you can copy someone else's? Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up. App development has become a portfolio game specifically to deal with the randomness. If you view the costs for developing a product as encompassing both SW development costs AND marketing costs, the marketing costs would easily outstrip the development costs. Underperforming apps are unceremoniously killed, and more marketing dollars pumped into the ones that start succeeding. It's hard to play that game as an indie developer, which is why we've seen so many of these posts pop up recently. People were sold on this vision of an egalitarian, meritocratic app economy and it's just not true. In a maturing market like mobile gaming, the one who shouts the loudest commands the most attention. For an indie dev with no capital, that can be really hard to do.

JonLim 12y ago
> Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up. Ugh, the dreaded re-skin. In a past life, I helped launch a game, and then push it through two re-skins when the original floundered. Turns out that broken mechanics and poor design doesn't change when you change the art on the outside. The marketing mattered, finding product-market fit mattered, but a poor game still does shit-all for you. Just wanted to throw that in there because it gave me the heebie-jeebies reading about it again.