4 ms·

i keep seeing posts like this: "we made a quality game and it's not selling" "the app store is a disaster" "it's a lottery" no -- none of that is the proble

by m3mnoch 12y ago

i keep seeing posts like this: "we made a quality game and it's not selling" "the app store is a disaster" "it's a lottery" no -- none of that is the problem. the issue is that all of the easy, low-hanging fruit is gone and to get workable revenue out of a game, you need to make a quality game. that's quality without the quotation marks. and, i'm sorry, but the games in the original post are nothing compared to the likes of papers please, don't starve, or guacamelee! -- much less amazing upcoming indies like no man's sky or ori and the blind forest. you are kidding yourselves if you think something like "catch the monkey" is going to sell. i was floored to see it actually made $7k in revenue. i would have guessed $1500. you -- yes, you with your fresh copy of unity and an mvp-fail-fast-idea -- are not going to cut it on the app store. you need to put out a real, honest-to-god, high-quality game. catch the monkey or a is for app? really? your game is going to be in the app store next to ori and the blind forest. your game is going to be in the app store next to white night. the player is going to look at both of your games and spend their money on those -- not yours. the app store is not a disaster -- your game just looks like a disaster sitting next to those titles. and swapping to pc? have you browsed through the greenlight options? you think your game is going to make it there when you couldn't cut the quality bar on the ios store? let me help you with that decision: http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight?appid=765&browsesort=pending&browsefilter=pending&p=1 http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight?appid=765&browsesort=pe... is your game more amazing than anything on that list? better than jotun? better than bounty hounds? probably not. sure, there are some mediocre games that catch fire and shoot to the top. that's where the lottery is. chances are those 304 apps released on the app store are all crap and don't have a chance in hell of real traction anyway so their only option is catching hold of the lottery tail. if you want to be part of that viral-dependent circus, more power to you, i suppose. quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now. however, if your game is legit, you'll do just fine. that's the key takeaway, make a real, value-for-the-player, interesting game and you'll do just fine. if you can't do that, accept it as a hobby or get a different job.

fred_durst 12y ago
While that is a noble assessment, if we look at similar industries to gaming we see that quality is rarely enough as well. Music, movies and writing have been under this model for many many years and proven that the reality is that no one really makes any money except a few at the top. They are all tournament economies at heart. VC's have come up with the pseudo intellectual term "Network Effect" but really its just the luck of a hit. Sometimes the Beatles do appear, but mostly its bands that have a couple years of success only to disappear. Part of that is because there is just soooo much competition. The signal to noise ratio is insane. This is because people create music, movies, art and now games and applications for the love of it. So even when sane economic incentives dry up there are still far too many submissions which makes any type of sustainable living still possible but highly unrealistic.
- m3mnoch 12y ago
  completely agreed. in fact, i kind of cheated and skirted this issue with the flexible definition of "quality". for example, the difference between comparing your (not yours personally, but the royal "your") game with last year hits papers please vs. next year's presumed hit ori. quality in that case is relevant to the competition at the time a game is published. moving goal posts ftw! however, i believe this still holds up: make a quality game where quality is present-competition quality, not last-year-competition quality. but that bar just gets higher and higher every year that goes by. in other words, it's pretty obvious this guy shouldn't be spending $100k making hobby games and then blaming their failure on the terribleness of the app store. that's just silly.
exelius 12y ago
I think if you read TFA, the author would agree with you: the game was not quality because he made a game that he thought other people would want, and it didn't sell. He also spent way too much time going multi-platform and wasted a lot of resources. Much of his article wasn't about how the mobile platform is awful, but about the mistakes he made in his approach to it. > quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now. So you mean the entire job of a publisher? It's not so easy to just write a good game and release it: you need a marketing plan, and that's where publishers come in. The reviewer from indiegamemag.com should probably have heard of your game through word of mouth before he even plays it -- but word of mouth advertising is almost never accidental. Even then though, a good writeup on one site might have taken his total revenue from $7k to $70k. He still would have lost money. Marketing is the end-all, be-all of the app store, and he didn't have it. Though in all fairness, most of his strategy was a "me too" attempt to cash-in on mobile gaming, which doesn't work when your competition is paying developers $5-10k/yr in India or China.

by m3mnoch 12y ago

fred_durst 12y ago

While that is a noble assessment, if we look at similar industries to gaming we see that quality is rarely enough as well. Music, movies and writing have been under this model for many many years and proven that the reality is that no one really makes any money except a few at the top. They are all tournament economies at heart. VC's have come up with the pseudo intellectual term "Network Effect" but really its just the luck of a hit. Sometimes the Beatles do appear, but mostly its bands that have a couple years of success only to disappear. Part of that is because there is just soooo much competition. The signal to noise ratio is insane. This is because people create music, movies, art and now games and applications for the love of it. So even when sane economic incentives dry up there are still far too many submissions which makes any type of sustainable living still possible but highly unrealistic.

m3mnoch 12y ago
completely agreed. in fact, i kind of cheated and skirted this issue with the flexible definition of "quality". for example, the difference between comparing your (not yours personally, but the royal "your") game with last year hits papers please vs. next year's presumed hit ori. quality in that case is relevant to the competition at the time a game is published. moving goal posts ftw! however, i believe this still holds up: make a quality game where quality is present-competition quality, not last-year-competition quality. but that bar just gets higher and higher every year that goes by. in other words, it's pretty obvious this guy shouldn't be spending $100k making hobby games and then blaming their failure on the terribleness of the app store. that's just silly.

exelius 12y ago

I think if you read TFA, the author would agree with you: the game was not quality because he made a game that he thought other people would want, and it didn't sell. He also spent way too much time going multi-platform and wasted a lot of resources. Much of his article wasn't about how the mobile platform is awful, but about the mistakes he made in his approach to it. > quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now. So you mean the entire job of a publisher? It's not so easy to just write a good game and release it: you need a marketing plan, and that's where publishers come in. The reviewer from indiegamemag.com should probably have heard of your game through word of mouth before he even plays it -- but word of mouth advertising is almost never accidental. Even then though, a good writeup on one site might have taken his total revenue from $7k to $70k. He still would have lost money. Marketing is the end-all, be-all of the app store, and he didn't have it. Though in all fairness, most of his strategy was a "me too" attempt to cash-in on mobile gaming, which doesn't work when your competition is paying developers $5-10k/yr in India or China.