The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1]
>Abstract
>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.
[1] The Macroeconomics of Superstars, Anton Korinek Johns Hopkins and NBER, Ding Xuan Ng Johns Hopkins, November 2017 https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-for...
[2] The Economics of Superstars The American Economic Review , Vol. 71, No. 5. (Dec., 1981), pp. 845-858. http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981...
My most successful game was an app for iOS which made me a grand total of around $30. The difference is I only spent around 80 hours working on it (40 or so for the game, 20 or so on the level editor, and 20 or so making levels). I had no money for marketing, had done no research beforehand, so I pretty much knew it was going to fail but did it as a fun side project to learn some new stuff and for my CV.
Compare that to the various website side projects I've worked on over the years which have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars (over 10 years). Game dev sounds fun, but if you're looking to make money, I would definitely stay away from it.
The growth of superstars makes me optimistic enough to look at ETF funds like GAMR. The industry overall seems undervalued.
1,016 visits, many of them random and untargeted, is simply not enough to make a statistically significant decision about the viability of this game. Conversion rates for any product tend to vary wildly within specific demographics. Some games perform abysmally with wide audiences, but may have very high conversion rates with specific, well defined groups.
To be sure, there are games that don’t need to look for their niche audience. They become viral sensations because they appeal to mass audiences. They get enormous amounts of “earned media” - viral clicks from people talking about and uploading video of themselves playing - and those are the games we hear about and consider to be “Superstars”. But that in no way means that games that aggressively target some relatively small group of people that the game actually appeals to with paid advertising cannot be very financially successful. Maybe not billion dollar blockbusters, but I’d imagine this author would be happy with a six figure income from his work, which is entirely possible if he finds the right audience and applies the same work ethic he did to developing the game to marketing it.
He needs to figure out who likes the game, what makes them like it, and then use the plethora of online ad platforms and targeting options to find more people like them. His game is not a steaming pile of crap, so he will find a paying audience for it if he looks.
Uber drivers will turn into the economics of superstars. Amazon warehouse workers will turn into the economics of superstars. You'll keep on getting individual ultra-high performers who dominate whatever area it is, and more ordinary performers will just plain fail.
You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't.
And if you have a good look at them you should realize that they all are extremely polished and coherent. None of them has realistic AAA graphics but they still look good. None of them is just a "copy" of an existing game. They either bring something totally new or bring something known but with a greater overall quality.
Then you have successful niche games such as Cogmind or the Zachtronics games. They still have the mentioned properties but also target only a subset of players where there are not many games. I think that makes them guaranteed sales.
Now what's wrong with all the stories about failed games? They all are generic. They don't offer something special. And this is what doesn't work in a saturated games market. And I'm not saying the authors didn't work enough. They just don't see what's wrong with their games and continue on their path to demise.
I guess what I'm saying is: to make a successful game you don't need to be the greatest coder or greatest artist. But you need to understand what makes a game great and enjoyable.
Maybe the days (years) will come where I finally will make a (bigger) game of my own and maybe I will totally fail like many have. Maybe I will revoke everything I said here but today this is my opinion. :)
Very much yes.
Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). Papers Please is a truly unique game that was lucky enough to get youtuber coverage. Plenty of equally unique and just as fun games are ignored. I've never heard of Factorio, but looking it up, it's graphically very unappealing. Maybe my opinion would change if I watched a playthrough of it, but it doesn't stand out. Mini Metro might be fun. But so are many of the hundreds of other minimalistic puzzlers released monthly.
There are loads of games that just don't sell but become classics decades later. Earthbound sold horribly in America until the main character appeared in a more popular series (Super Smash Bros). Almost nobody played Killer 7. Panzer Dragoon Saga is considered one of the best RPGs of all time. Nobody bought it. Its popularity mostly grew after people discovered it through emulation.
The game in this article flopped because there are an abundance of games, it falls into an overcrowded genre, and it doesn't stand out, but most importantly, nobody important played it. If pewdiepie played this, it'd see 10000+ sales in a week and likely appear in a humble bundle.
To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality to sustain those sales.
Interesting. I think you're right about half of those. I can't see any way that SDV or Darkest Dungeon could have failed. SDV is a great all round game with tons of polish, and DD has 99th percentile art direction and atmosphere for an indie game.
Mini Metro and Papers Please could absolutely have been dead on arrival. Mini Metro is just an above average puzzle game (of which there are tons), and PP is a really cool and unique game, but there's tons of games with similar art styles and it's impossible to understand what's good about it from a trailer. It's really one of those "you have to play it" games (aka "sells 0 copies in 99 of 100 alternate universes" games...)
> I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic
None of that matters to the end result. You might be someone that is not very bright and that never went to college, etc, and still make a very creative and fun game.
Saying that he's smart and whatever makes him sound entitled. Like if he deserved to sell well.
One thing about all of those is that they pass a smell test. I don't need to play it to be interested, if I just see an ad or see someone playing or hear someone talking about it then I'm interested. This game did not have that, all I've seen is a genre and some bad graphics. The gameplay itself could be great but it hasn't gotten past the smell test.
There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.
then I watched the youtube video demo in 2017.
A 2D gaming scroller that requires 62,126 lines of code written from scratch? There's tons of libraries out there, game engines you could adopt, etc.
I would argue you could be an awful programmer and use prebuilt tools but have great design aesthetics, vision, music composition, and storytelling, and deliver something far better
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.
Top notch in any field requires optimizing hidden, underlying dependencies to deliver the best output. Optimizing code is not sufficient but it is usually necessary, especially if others have already solved it, setting the standard of performance that players expect.
The way to avoid optimizing core library code is to use someone else's library and build on top of that. But you can only do that so much. This is just an insanely hard industry to get into.
I think gameplay and marketing win here. Consider two gamesL one has great graphics but bad gameplay, the other has bad graphics but great gameplay. The great gameplay game is going to win that match up.
The problem here seems to be that supply is geometricly growing whereas demand is largely fixed. To compete and be noticed you need to make a serious investment in marketing or get extremely lucky.
> you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers.
> Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really.
> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.
> That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
Then I'm not a programmer :) Less optimizing means less work! I like spending my free time in all kinds of ways.
Games these days are a lot about marketing and huge budgets. The indie ones that do well need to be targeted as well as refreshing.
Some hard thoughts just watching the video and reading a bit about the game:
1. I don't really like the graphics as much as I liked the original Metroid. This is probably just a personal preference.
2. It mostly screams low quality "Metroid clone" and not something cool I'd tell my friends about.
3. Procedurally generated levels doesn't sell me. I don't really care.
That said totally not a waste of time. It shows you have the wits to bring something to market and the ability to ship. You coded the whole damn thing which is insanely involved. This is no small feat. However the market is generally the hardest critic and it doesn't matter how many hours you spent or how many lines and bugs you solved.
I understand programmers often like working on their own projects, and sometimes we end up with complete packages like Stardew Valley, but maybe it's better to work in a team where everyone has their own strengths. I see so many games with fantastic code, going to waste because of really underwhelming story, art style or sound.
I would even say that this game manages to hit the 3 points in which I avoid on a Metroidvania:
1. Rogue-like. I really dislike rogue-like, no special reason, just a personal preference
2. Lack of a plot. I appreciate the feeling of exploring a world the feels alive, even if it's a very simple one. Going through levels for the sake of going through them, it's not much of a fun experience to me.
3. Huge resemblance to the original Metroid. If I wanted to play Metroid... I would be playing Metroid.
Also... no Linux version? Really? That excludes me entirely from this game.
The only other thing I'd add for Luke is - do you enjoy playing this game? As in, have you sunk a whooole bunch of hours into playing it, simply because it's the only game available (that you made precisely because there's nothing else) that scratches this very particular itch?
Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generation takes a big dump on any sense of familiarity, which is a big part of the reward for exploration.
In fact, the _only_ games I've played where procedural generation were good for the game are story-building games, such as Rogue-likes and Dwarf Fortress. They reward you for building a story, not for traversing obstacles. In every other game, they are just a weak thematic obscuration of the underlying mechanical goals. The Dryad's name in Terraria doesn't matter. Dig deep enough and you'll find diamonds in Minecraft. Kill a boss enough times in Borderlands, and you'll get a good gun. There's no story about achieving these goals. Procedural generation doesn't participate in making the goals more interesting to achieve, it's a forgettable and incidental fact about something almost wholly unrelated.
Game developers need to stop trying to lean on it as a substitute for content. A game is what people can expect from it each time they play it, and if all it is is a bundle of mechanics and throw-backs, then there's not going to be much appeal.
Also, the design scheme between different 'blocks' which make up the platforms in the game is not uniform, which makes the design feel much more disjointed.
I am the guy who shares this post on Hacker News. First and foremost, I wanna said that I am NOT the original author of the blog. Also, I am NOT advertising for the original author. As a software developer in Hong Kong, I am researching articles about game dev and find this interesting case. Therefore, I just wanna share on HN.
The discussion about this blog is really overwhelming. I hope that everybody can learn a lesson from this article. In my personal opinion, from a business perspective, I think to develop a hyper-casual game will have a higher probability of getting commercial success. However, from a more personal perspective, it is very difficult for a game developer to avoid the temptation of spending years to develop a hardcore game. I just wanna say: Game is the modern art form of the 21st century. So if we consider game developer as an artist, you will understand why he struggles about his artwork.
Anyway, I hope that everybody can earn something from this post. I read through all the comments and learn a lot. Thanks.
You need marketable differentiation.
Also make sure your game appeals to furries. That's where the real money is in indie game dev.
And it is very little to do with luck or numbers or the state of the industry.
Good indie games:
1. are almost never distinguished by programming (the days of Doom are gone and you are not John Carmack). Far too much time is spent coding. Use existing tools. Code only gameplay.
2. are much more about art. The trailer looks like programmer art: no coherent style, no direction, no class. If this is what you produce. You need a collaborator.
3. are even more about feel. Your character movement is janky. Jumping is floaty. Shooting feels flaccid. There is little sense of gravity, inertia or impact. If it isn't fun to move around a single screen, it's not fun.
4. need a hook. There is almost nothing original about this game. You've got about 10 seconds to hook me. (10 seconds into the trailer you cut to a mostly empty UI.) Find the wow. And zealously focus on it.
5. need to be polished. Ambient animation. Consistent sound effects. Screen shake. Lighting. Particles. UI. These are implemented. But none of them particularly well. And they don't tie together into a whole.
6. need to be marketed. Someone needs to be working on that.
7. needs to catch (or create) a zeitgeist. So many features of this game shout '2014' to me.
8. needs a bit of luck. But beware! The converse is very rarely true. If your game isn't successful, it is probably _not_ because you were unlucky. The game probably wasn't very good. Don't spend your time trying to find alternative explanations. Be brutal with yourself. In game terms, git gud.
So this is harsh I know. I'm sorry. But frank. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years. 99.9% of games fail horribly. But 99.9% of them are not very good. This has absolutely always been the case. It's just that the 'fail point' used to be the publisher pitch. Now you don't need a publisher, you get to fail in public.
So yes three years have been ...um... call it learning. I suggest you do more jams. Figure out what it takes to win. Find a game artist. Use tools. Build prototypes. And start to build a community.
In particular, this feels like a game that was created in a weekend or two in Gamemaker. The UI is quite simple, the mechanics (or at least the ones I saw in 10 minutes of poking around) are unoriginal, and the enemies all seem to be variants of "fly/walk towards me".
There's no feeling behind the gun, there's no real feedback when I get hit, I have no idea how much life I have left (yes it's in the UI, but it's not prominent at all).
If I had to guess where the 3 years of effort has gone into, I'd suggest it was the level randomiser. That's a big mistake, and one probably made by a programmer mindset rather than a game design one. The game isn't fun, so it doesn't matter how much replay-ability there is. Whereas if the game were fun but not replayable, I'd probably buy it on the promise of a randomiser coming.
I am a programmer, and I have this PSA for others: Your code is just a necessary evil, not something to be praised and cherished. No customer sees your code, no customer cares about the code.
See: Five Nights at Freddy's and Getting Over It. (You could argue that the hook of Getting Over It is the intentionally annoying controls, but I highly doubt that that much of the market is a bunch of masochists.)
If the game concept doesn't sell itself as an elevator pitch, then it doesn't matter how good the implementation is.
I once met an indie dev who was surprised that their Space Invaders mobile clone didn't sell on Windows Mobile, "despite its amazing particle effects."
1. Having a product idea
2. To get rich
3. Because it sounds like fun
This and other books on launching your own thing stress that you first have to find a market, then fill that market's needs. In the world of indie games I can't even imagine what that would be.
So I hear its a cool rogue-like but unlike the fifty indie rogue-likes I have languishing unplayed in my steam account already, I can play this one in the browser, whoa cool, technically impressive and maybe fun too.
So I go to the web page expecting a slither.io like experience where I'll be playing in 10 seconds.
And there's too many choices. First its a wall of text I can already be playing slither.io before I figure out what to do here in a RPG-adventure-IRL sense. Second there's confusion I should click on "Update Try it now on the play page" or the button "Join early access to play the game" or the tab labeled "Play Game" or down in the text its got a hyperlink to "play online" in the "play online, in-browser" section. Or they're different or the same or cognitive load thats un necessary. Is one link free and one link paid, or they all go to the same place but I better check them all first?
Then the choice confusion continues. I click on one of many widgets to get to the same place, "join early access". No I don't want to join I want to play. And more decision problems crop up, I can pay $7.50 for the free steam key (huh?) or there's a note from Luke that I can skip the payment section and get an account anyway wonder if it comes with a steam key or not what if I change my mind this is all so confusing and I want to make in-game decisions not the second page between me and the game experience. And the page is full of three ways to pay or its also free or the steam key is free or what all is going on here why am I stopping to research this and why am I researching instead of playing. I got a tab open with slither.io to make this stream of consciousness post and its calling to me... What if I don't like it and want my money back what if I make a free acct and later decide to toss some cash in its just all so overly complicated.
There is another interesting impedance bump where there' three federated ways to pay, via amazon, paypal, or stripe CC, which is convenient, I'm not complaining at all. The point is just above that there is no federated login or account generation at all; I have to provide my email for harvesting (come on, I know Luke is a good guy, but I've been on the internet for longer than most kids have been alive; I know better than to provide my email address "for free" it ain't 1990 anymore so say hi to vlm@example.com). Then I need to create yet another username and password to forget because there's no federation. I must have created over a thousand logins in the last couple decades; tired. You integrated three payment processors how about one-click login via google / FB / whatevs.
After all this uphill battle in the user acquisition phase, the tab with slither.io is beckoning to me...
Note that I'm exclusively complaining about the new user acquisition process; everything else is pretty cool! Its just a lot of work and cognitive load to get to play compared to the competition in the market (the fifty unplayed indie roguelikes in my steam account, or .io style instant casual web games)
My constructive suggestion: One page one click login via federated accts and don't forget "click here to play as anonymous coward" then in the UI "click here to sign up or give us piles of cash". The competition can get them playing in one click and 10 seconds...
Interesting marketing mechanic that some might say is evil, whatevs, in game while playing as "anonymous coward" click here to have a federated account (play with your facebook or google acct) and get a minor in-game reward for signing up. Not so ridiculous that people claim its cheaty, but something at least amusing or an in-game joke or something making it a trade in users minds.
Don't give people a chance to think about doing something else while they're trying to decode the onboarding process. Low friction is where its at.
Think of the "S" in SOLID the single responsibility principle, don't make new users ponder if they're paying for something (what, a free steam key?) or joining a club forum or playing a game or whatnot. Give the new user exactly one single responsibility "play the game". Later on, buddy up with "membership" or "gimmie money" but get them into the game first.
Looks like a fun game, once you get into it. Cool!
You can't build it and expect them to come. But you also can't even build it and have someone be your dedicated marketer, because you STILL can't expect them to come. There is no market right now, just people getting lucky.
There is no market.
Let that sink in.
The problem is that the "roguelike" "metrovania" "platformer" genre is oversaturated with so many indie games, so if you're going to grab some money with it it's better gotta be absolutely perfect. From my first impression I don't know if the mechanics are solid, but the art and sound seems too... generic? Maybe if the game had some unique style in it (and some marketing too) it shouldn't have bombed this much...
Some games are so unpolished or uninspired that they were never going to succeed, but always picking apart "why it failed" makes people think that "if I just do x and y and z, my game will succeed!" Which right now honestly just isn't true; there's too much luck and random chance involved (plus of course other concrete factors like marketing effort etc).
The next argument is usually "well, then why don't I see really good games that aren't successful?" A few years ago that was a sort of reasonable argument, but there are plenty of great and unsuccessful games on Steam now. They just don't show up anywhere.
release it
focus on marketing for a while
Treat it as a purely hobby project
Make it into an ethical game experiment
pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety
I feel like there is only one right answer here, and it's just glaringly obvious. Marketing is the thing that needed doing before starting, during the project, and after it's done. Regardless of the trends on Steam, in fact even more so because of the trends on Steam. None of the other options will solve the problem. Releasing it won't help, and making an ethical experiment won't get anywhere without an audience. Pouring more time into graphics will result in greater loss without first gaining an audience.
it's difficult to market what you haven't finished imagining.
[1] https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/967249172804943872
Average number of units sold per game on steam by year (note many games have long tails)
2004 - 11.6m
2005 - 569k
2006 - 581k
2007 - 833k
2008 - 279k
2009 - 322k
2010 - 391k
2011 - 512k
2012 - 535k
2013 - 601k
2014 - 157k
2015 - 111k
2016 - 73k
2017 - 49k2017: 49k, 2016: 36k, 2015: 37k, 2014: 39k
2013: 120k, 2012: 89k, 2011: 73k, 2010: 48k
2009: 35k, 2008: 27k, 2007: 75k, 2006: 48k
2005: 43k, 2004: (this really just means Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike): 820k
With the sales normalized by year, and noting that 2004 did not actually allow third party games on sale, there is not an appreciable drop or trend across the entire time range.. I suspect the crazy spike in 2013 can be attributed entirely to Dota2 and 2012, Counterstrike Global Offensive causing mean skew.
Games industry is like the music industry - if you do it for anything other than the love, you're likely to be disappointed. Your chances of 'making it' are astronomically small.
That what makes stardew valley so crazy, because the %99 outcome of someone who works like him is failure and wasting 3-4 years of your life.
At this point, I would do the 'test if there is demand method' before seriously making a game. You make a MVP of a game, as a hobby, promote it a bit and then commence with marketing it with a kickstarter or patreon. If it gains enough traction, then you commence working on it seriously, otherwise stop or keep it as a pure hobby. Once your done release the full version for free or a nominal price. Add time release tiers for early access and so on to incentivize subscribing and supporting.
This probably means for games you need to do a whole bunch of art first more than programming.
I adopted a different strategy later on. I try to make things that I use myself. So if it turns out no one else uses it, at least my effort doesn't go to waste. My Android App is now sitting at 10+ downloads but I made peace with it fairly easily since I use the App myself twice a day.
If he really wants a commercial success, my guess is that he would be well advised to make a concerted, well-advertised run at the in-browser gaming market, and try to find ways to monetize that (likely by scummy micro-transactions.) His chances still wouldn’t be good, but perhaps better. (Getting on the front page of HN is a pretty good tactic too, though. : ) )
[0] Well, I spent about ten seconds reading the site’s front page, but that’s probably more than most of his hits did.
Now (after about 10 000 hours of work), Photopea is used by one million of people every month, and I have a decent income just from ads, even without working on it.
But whether companies look for this type of employee, I am unsure that is true. The truth is, most companies look for employees without gaps in their resume. They are looking for signals such as having worked Google or Facebook. They care much less about your startup than most people think. If you don't hit those checkboxes, you are going to have a hard time looking for a job.
All that and you still believed hard work directly equates to a big pay out. Welcome to the school of hard knocks. Try some different metrics for defining success.
It's not even possible you've entirely wasted 3 years. There's no way you learned nothing or have only created things that could just be used in this project. It's possible you could simply re-skin this thing and make it big the next day. But don't count on it.
Your website is god awful. Seriously.
The copy doesn't excite anyone to play the game
You make the user jump through hoops to play - if you already are writing it off, make it free to play in-browser without Steam (you want traction at all costs right?)
What did you learn?
Did you have friends or a community playing it as you worked on it? If you didn't, then you really need to look at the Lean Methodology
- call the game finished and walk away now you finished the dev work
- call the game a hobby to excuse the sales now you finished the dev work
- code some arbitrary addition to be ethical just to be coding something cause dev work is probably the only work that exists
- keep iterating cause you can always invent more dev work to do
- get a different project going for another type of dev work
All of these will successfully waste those 3 years and more if you don't focus on converting your nascent product into income.
But when you watch the demo the game itself "seems cool" but in a way that realizes immediately this is Super Mario Bros reinvented.
Also this blog post was from February 2018 and has sat on the Dev Blog "above the fold" for most of this year. It seems like the game has a dark cloud over it.
If something isn't a labor of love, you should end it. But then there's that quote "you cannot excel at something you do not love" ... which seems like the real thing here. It seems excellent in its own ways, just not entirely original or well marketed. So ask why are you doing it and measure by some other metric than sales and usage.
It's been almost a year since then. I kept updating the game, doing quality of life improvements and actively engaged with the people and reviewers playing it. I also kept people up to date with twitter and talked about the game every chance I had.
Hacker News initial exposure helped me sell about 200 copies and by March I passed my 700 copies goal. Enough to stay in business but, by then, I already moved cross-county and got a few consulting gigs happening.
Almost a year later I have over 4700 copies sold on steam with the total amount of copies sold being around 6000. The game was only recently added to a bundle that added ~1000 copies ("retail activations" are still happening). I'm at a point where I am so grateful for the luck I had after the initial HN exposure that now, one year later, I'm releasing the biggest update ever for the game and I finally got a professional artist to help me upgrade the graphics.
What I want the dev to know is that there's still a chance, but in my case, I already managed to secure enough money from my consulting gigs so updating the game and working on it was done on the side and I could afford to do some more marketing and sink time in it. If you are not financially dependent on the game, keep working on it and slowly build up your fanbase and outreach. Take note of people's feedback and if a common theme occurs maybe do something about it.
Hope you'll end up being happy with your project. If it reaches Steam I'll be your first buyer. On your site, I tried purchasing it via paypal and I cannot get pass the re-captcha. I'm trying to click on the "I'm not a robot" checkbox and nothing is happening. Might want to look into that.
> Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in.
Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you keep coming back, trying to level up by grinding boring quests. "You are not done yet, but the end is in sight!".
As a good game dev, in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets.
As a low income indie dev without the academic credentials to get past HR gatekeepers for stable full time work, I can't help but feel studying ML is about as wishful as creating a hit game. I have started studying ML this summer, and although I find the NLP applications really interesting since I have a social science background that exposed me to some literary theory and linguistic ideas that overlap with NLP at times, I think making a living wage doing it is just as much of an unrealistic dream as writing some killer app. The jobs all require PhDs, and the data science competitions have literary thousands of people with PhDs and industry experience competing for five figure prizes. When one is poor with no prospects these kind of pipe dreams feel so good to get caught up in as that sweet haze of hope numbs the critical thinking, but in a clear moment it looks like the ML gold rush is exactly the same as every other tech hype. That's not going to stop me from geeking out on PyTorch and trying to wring sentiment out of blocks of text or whatever, but I won't be able to honestly write a blog post about it in a few years asking if I wasted my time. I already know the answer.
As for the references to „Superstar economics“: as if modern superstars in the music or film industry weren‘t 100% reliant on test audiences... It‘s why we don’t get much original, experimental stuff these days.
Everyone who tackles a project like this should keep this in mind. Its almost certainly not going to make you immediate money, but you'll learn a lot doing it, and that will repay itself down the line.
I've done this twice to myself and it was hard at the time to watch them fail but I now make $500k+/yr at one of the FAANGs and a lot of that salary I attribute to trying build these things, end to end, myself. I just have a much broader context on the industry, on technical stacks, and on software development than if I hadn't.
So, congrats. :)
It's looks like way too much time was spent on an engine when off the shelf would have done better.
Why? With perfectly awesome and free technologies like Unity, you’re setting yourself up for failure by spending hundred hours putting together something that has already been created for you.
It would allow you to focus on making the best game possible, instead of wasting countless hours re-inventing the wheel.
IMHO, that’s the first, and largest, mistake this project made.
Furthermore I agree with others that it simply feels ‘uninspired.’ Maybe less hours spent on the engine and more spent on the content would’ve made the game more notable.
But why did he do that to start? Seems like focusing time on the content instead of the engine would’ve made him feel like he ‘wasted’ less time.
And yes, they haven't been doing their job right, they had too much power, they played it too safe and mistreated the developers.
But instead of supporting game developers who wanted to unionise, instead of supporting social projects (like basic income!) that would reduce the risk an independent takes, we asked people to go indie, and just shoulder that entire risk themselves. Good job, everyone!
The creativity from everyone is great on the building side, but on the marketing and traction side, there can always be bad luck, like this example.
I think a lot of consumers are just fatigued from too many options - think about how much of instagram and facebook is ads vs what it used to be, even back in like 2010.
You are only asking to have people point out possibilities that you didn't.
But in your heart of hearts, you know you did.
That doesn't mean you didn't have fun. I suspect you need to revisit what 'waste' really is for you though.
You need _way_ more visitors to have any clue if your efforts are resonating with your potential market or not.
The nearest "success" example I can think of is Jets-and-Guns [1]. The guys that made the game partnered with an indie 8-bit rock band that wrote the soundtrack specifically for the game. The story is full of parodies on common cliches and silly jokes that made me replay the game several times.
There's a bunch of other successful indie games in other markets and unless it offers a radically new addictive gameplay (say Minecraft), it has to be about the story. Stardew valley, Papers Please, you name it. Unfortunately, this title simply lacks both of them and is hence doomed to fail.
P.S. It shouldn't take 3 years to find out the lack of product/market fit. There's a funny saying that if you are not ashamed of the v1.0 of your product, you have released it too late. This 100% applies here. Release it with just 1 level based on a commodity game engine, gather feedback, decide onward based on it. Anything more than a couple of months is just wrong if you are doing it for the first time as a 1-person project, IMHO.
Furthermore, a simple Google of the game reveals very, very few results. As others have stated, nothing markets itself.
Coding heads down without any marketing or validation (like selling early release steam copies) and hoping it'll see viral growth is a mistake, for both startups and indie games.
Also doesn't have any screen shots, info about the game, etc
It's actually hostile to someone coming across the page trying to check out the game
Edit it's possible the note about "You can skip the payment section below" was literally just added
I wrote a video course on Amazon Machine Learning [0]. I spent about 80 hours researching, writing the outline, putting together the material, recording and re-recording the 105 minute course. I think I've made about $200 from it, directly.
But, I've done several talks on it (which were non paying, but sharpened my presentation skills), wrote half a book on it, and got one consulting opportunity around it. I also got a bit of schwag from AWS because someone noticed my forum contributions, which was cool.
If everything you do is a hit, you aren't taking enough risks. However, I will say that 2600 hours without market validation is far more commitment than I would make.
Well, that seems to be how many multiplayer games are released nowadays anyway. Look at ARMS or Mario Tennis Aces on the Nintendo Switch, or Pokemon GO, or Sea of Thieves* on Xbox. Released in very basic states, then slowly expanded upon via regular updates. You could even possibly say Minecraft went the same way.
That said, this sort of 'Minimum Viable Game' idea may not work as well here as it does for business products or web services. People are practically spoilt for choice when it comes to what games to buy, and a game that leaves an initial 'meh' impression (due to a lack of content/replay value) can often die out before the updates ever come. And the critics will certainly not be kind to it either...
* Admittedly, that one took four years to develop, which may not have been the best setup given the lack of content.
Other ways this is sometimes done are:
1. By releasing demos on a regular basis to test the waters 2. Splitting the game up into episodes and selling them one at a time. Valve did this with Half Life, but it was arguably TellTale Games who ran with it. 3. Or by running a beta test for the game and gauging reactions from that.
Of course, all the above assumes you can build at least a somewhat sizable portion of the game in a reasonable timeframe. If you want to know whether a completely untested idea will be viable... well good luck with that in this industry. You'll always need at least a core gameplay loop setup to know whether the idea is fun, and you'll need much more if you want to know whether anyone will buy it.
For example, let's say you want to make a retro platformer. The assumption is that many people would be interested in a new retro platformer. That's easy to check: browse through Steam's new releases, find the 10 newest retro platformers, and see how much interest they get. Heck, even imagining that exercise could be enough to make you change course.
Stardew Valley primarily gathered early adopters through regular blog updates about dev progress.
- Finish the first 20% and presell the unstarted 80% as a Season Pass
- Launch a basic version with DLC
Personally I played about two rooms and then got bored. It sure is a tribute to Metroid. With weird, floaty jumping (did Metroid have that? I never played that one very much.). And tiny, dark graphics. Plus I was playing it on the keyboard and not fullscreened which never helps.
When I started to find myself with half a dozen of such games, I remembered the year we spent saving money with my brothers to buy a hard copy of Caesar 3. I was just a child. It costed us what would now be 15€. Considering the inflation since then, games were quite expensive.
So, I've decided to stop buying games in those promotions and having games in my library that I will never play. I prefer paying the full price for a game I really want to play, like before. I think it's more honest to the developers. Whether that will mean more money to them in average I don't know. Does someone know if the developers/editors really benefit from the sales on HumbleBundle and the like (the prices really look pretty low)?
It's like asking if the world needs another pop song or pizza joint. There's always room for the next great game and another good place to get a pie.
If you're trying to sell games, your site focuses on all the wrong things.
1) I need a reason to want to play. Some games present themselves as a challenge to overcome (e.g. Volgarr the Viking, Dustforce), while others have some kind of interesting narrative or world to explore (e.g. Metroid/Binding of Isaac.) Some games promise comedy (e.g. Enter the Gungeon.) I can't tell what your hook is. Weapon customization and survival are fine game mechanics, but they're not a reason for me to want to play all by themselves.
2) Artistic theme. Games that age well have a cohesive look-and-feel. My initial impression of your game's theme is "asset store default." Maybe you didn't use an asset store, but that certainly is my first impression
3) When I hear "procedurally generated exploration" I have a negative reaction. It is incredibly difficult to do well, and when done any way other than well, it becomes boring and repetitive almost immediately. On your site, I am given no reason to believe it was done well.
These three things, taken together, mean that I probably wouldn't play your game even if it were offered to me for free with no strings attached.
Metroidvania and roguelike are two of the most crowded markets. And they're full of very good games that can be had for a few bucks. Competing here means you need something that really stands out. This, by contrast, seems very genetic and lacks the production values that can help mask an otherwise generic product. For instance this [1] is a metroidvania roguelike that can be had for about $4 on a sale (and is a great game as an aside). That's what you're competing against.
I think it makes more sense to aim for niche. And there's also the nice outlier that occasionally proves that niche wasn't really niche at all.
Second one was that quote about lack of interest from games media. They do work as gate keepers, and most of them are heavily advertising driven, so the problem here is the same as above, indies suffer because they don't have marketing budgets. When the industry grows so large that it has to start attracting casuals, that always means spending marketing dollars, and indie industry has grown and saturated the core gamer group through, and casual interest just isn't there without marketing.
Here is an interesting article about it: http://cheesetalks.net/proton-linux-gaming-history.php
Great job on the game, the videos look very smooth and I will be sure to give it a play!
The vast majority of them eventually burn out and leave the field or take on a day job to supplant their income. A small number sell their apps to a larger publisher or get hired by a larger company. And very very very few break through that barrier to generate self-sufficient income, much less growing profits.
They have many of the same business challenges of indie game developers too, it seems. Too many alternatives/competitors, distribution challenges, marketing challenges, lack of differentiation, etc.
I suppose the same could be said for indie developers in many other verticals too.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-man...
There needs to be a market for what you're writing, you need to find and reach out to this market, and you need to entice them by providing more value than the spare $X they have in their pocket (plus, you need to communicate this so that they realize this).
You also need to realize that small differences in quality can lead to huge differences in interest, ESPECIALLY given how "copycat" your game seems appears from the homepage. If your game is only 1% worse than the other game I'm interested in, I'll probably give the other game 100% of my free gaming time (others may not be so extreme, but you get the idea).
Marketing/sales folks exist for a reason. You just figured out why.
So you've done good work and gotten not the return you expected... it might take one more game or 10 more games. Or this game might lead you to meeting people that can help you be more successful in the future.
It's ok to "give up" and move on too. You can stay the course and probably eventually become successful, but if you have other interesting things to do and less interest in continuing gamedev, then go try something new.
I understand that it is very hard to make games and 100 times harder to make good games. There must be a sane method for decent compensation waiting to be thought out I hope
You got half decent at a whole bunch of skills, which you can reapply. I'd say it was equal to going to a school for this, but not an exceptional school. It's a start, and it's a toolset.
Me and my brother make games. I do a brainstormy intuitive thing, and he builds stuff brick by brick. He has a tendency to decide things like 'I will build an Asteroids', build the skeleton of such a thing (with all the effort going into code elegance) and not have anywhere to go from there. I have a tendency to have wild exciting-sounding ideas, implement about a quarter of them, and end up with something that's certainly not like anything else, but isn't necessarily FUN or even a game.
I think I have a slightly higher chance of breaking through into the realm of 'making an actual game', but it hasn't really happened yet and may never happen. Even if it did, there wouldn't be money in it. I'm just not that good a designer, though I AM a sort of nascent designer. Plus, I'm too devoted to open source these days and that would likely be a handicap to market adoption; if nobody else can get rich off it either then it ain't gonna be a hit.
To make a hit thing you have to be able to see how exploitative third parties can get rich off you, and then let them do it and hope you get a cut (or some publicity).
I think the future isn't creative (insofar as popular hit products). It's basically focus-grouped artificial blandness and knock-offs consuming the market, and will not go back (occasional fluke successes will doubtless happen)
The future is learning how to manage these creative exploits as communication, perhaps to a very small audience for whom they're specially crafted. You'll be a craft beer or a hand made cheese. You have nothing to do with the market as we know it, it's all about what manner of distribution you can function under at the scale you will forever remain.
So who did you get to know in that three years? Did you form a community, perhaps of other game makers?
I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed, yeah?
But I guess it will be fair to compare also with Movies. As some games have budgets on that scale.
That is around 730 movies per year for USA and Canada. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
> I don't say this to minimize the pain of indie devs that find themselves suddenly deluged with competition... but that's where things are headed, yeah?
Yes. In the 90s there were not so many people with the skills and equipment to create games. Nowadays is a global market where everyone can give it a try. From cheap computers to Unity3D it is easier and cheaper than ever to create games.
I would never ever consider actually becoming involved in the space as a programmer, not in a million years. I advise any potential programmers to stay way the hell away from it too.
There are plenty of types of games I'd still love to see made or have ideas for, but they require 3D, money, great art teams. Indie games generally cannot pull this, so they tend to be limited to rather rigid subgenres, and there are only so many variations of Metroid you can make before people mostly find what they're looking for.
I personally dont think of it like a business at all. I think of it as a vocation. By choosing to make games, I consider myself to have chosen the life of an artist.. My goal right now is to make great games that I want to make, thats it.
I'm living off the savings from my last real job, and being extremely frugal. I moved out to the country, where everything is cheaper (rent massively so). If / when I run out of money I'll do some contracts, worst case scenario is get a fulltime job as an employee again.. But I am extremely happy with my life right now.
If you're making one in 2018, it should either be a hobby project, or you should be prepared for very few sales.
Soo i got lots of text and links but no pictures of game or video whatsoever. All the information i have is what i pieced around in comments, seems like rogue-like metrovania.. this dosent really sell me the game. Sure there is play now but that also lead to page full of text.
Bad marketing
The derivative of an exponential is again an exponential :p
Shameless plug: https://www.dinorush.com
I don't think it was a waste, but maybe the author should be looking for alternative ways to parlay the game into a paycheck instead of ... ... whatever this is.
Most are "rogue-lite" which is a hot genre right now but all have something that make them stand out.
Rogue like games have the potential to become indie hits because they are very good for twitch/youtube audiences, because in general, up until the moment the player loses, they are winning.
This is great for streamers, no long-drawn out sequences where they know they've probably lost, no ability for audiences to get bored watching the player struggle in a losing fight. Instead the player gets to live out their power fantasy up until the moment that fantasy is betrayed and they lose.
And then it's a quick or instant reset and they're back to the pit / whale / plane and off they go again.
But a rogue-lite platformer? Ok that can work, Risk of Rain did an OK job with really poor graphics. But the gameplay was top-notch to compensate, and that was released before the big indie-deluge, that might not do so well if it were released today and had to go up against competetion from the likes of gungeon or dungreed.
With regards to this game, the graphics are too low to look good but haven't masked that by making the choice of going pixel-art, instead it just looks like it's from a PC gamer cover CD circa 1999.
Compare that to Slay the Spire, which has very basic art but has an engine that is well made, so it's limited art is still delivered very nicely. In the case of slay the spire they compensate with a good soundtrack which doesn't get irritating even on repeat playthroughs and some really solid gameplay.
Those are the smash-hits and a hits-based industry follows a power-law, so there's a vast quantity of mediocre games below there. What hope does a game which appears to mostly replicate previous gameplay with weak graphics stand?
That's not to say it was a waste of time, only the author can judge that.
\* Far too many to list, but I'm thinking along the lines of Slay the Spire, Enter the Gungeon, They are Billions. Even Playerunknown's battlegrounds or fortnite in some way fits the 'rogue-lite' formula of facing ever more difficult challenges up until a sudden and final death and complete reset.
Basic is not what I would call this.
But I think we shouldn't confuse graphics fidelity with quality. You can have an ugly pixel art game or a pretty pixel art game.
One area you might reuse your talents and efforts, is gambling industry. It is another toxic environment, I take antidepressants since 2003 since I worked once with a client of this industry, but the payout is at least certain.
This paragraph reads like the guy thinks all of this means he deserves success. I can't say I feel bad for this guy.
Good luck and don't be too disheartened, you've already put in the large amount of work needed, now just spend some time trying to market in order to get some return.
It isn't surprising the internet has been called a gold rush.
That's really how I view things. I just play nice games, find flaws and things to be perfected, and gather up all those things in a game that could be enjoyed.
You will lose money. That's it. There's no magic message here.
Source: an indie dev. I keep my passion for my project because it's something I truly want to do.
This isn't a problem unique to indie games. Every creative field has an overabundance of hopefuls, all chasing a tiny chance of turning it into a success. The problem, as Daniel Clowes observed back in 1991[1] is that everyone thinks that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
[1] https://artinfiction.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/asc-3.jpg
And the fact is many people find making a game so intensely enjoyable that the net cost of making it is zero and they do it even when they're making no money or stand to lose money in expectation. Of course, there's huge variance in both directions, for every ten thousand indie game devs there's one Notch! And in reality I'm guessing being an indie game dev is at least slightly profitable in expectation. But the joy of doing it seems to drive their wages down to basically subsistence level.
1. why would I pay 7 bucks for this, when something like PUBG is ostensibly free? There is no easy "trial" download (Do I even down load this?) Does it work on my phone (a lot of the low end game market went there.
2. Selling things is hard when your up against free. I dont like the freemium model but free stuff with ad's makes money - give it away and monetize on the back end.
3. Every one pays for customers. Marketing matters and especially in a competitive market. Your going to need to spend money to make money in todays age.
Not sure if applying this strategy to a game that has sold only 4 copies in 3 years would really help the situation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9k8wsi/my_games_di...
Jason Rohrer's advice there was essentially:
- Games have to either make an instant emotive connection via their art style or gameplay concept (and be priced well enough for an impulse purchase), or prove that they are deep and long-lasting enough that they'll be worth the investment in time and money.
- Single-player games that don't do the above are especially hard sells, because hit gameplay trends are veering toward multiplayer games: “If your game's initial impression gives people pause, it's already over.”
The Infinitroid developer might learn something from that advice — I checked the trailer at https://infinitroid.com/, and the game looks fun, but I don't feel that instant connection to the art style or gameplay concept in the same way I did with Minit or Monument Valley (both instant impulse purchases), and I don't get the impression that it offers weeks of gameplay like The Witness or Stephen's Sausage Roll do (purchased both later after consideration and persistent appearances in media and social feeds).
It feels like most “my game's a commercial failure” posts I read could have been saved by spending more time on the initial concept and art style, and on testing the market before the three-to-ten year investment in building the full game was made.
Reducing the time to market also seems like a sane strategy. It may have taken five years to build Stardew Valley and 10 years to make Owlboy, but that does not mean every successful game involves holing yourself up for half a decade or more.
Developers also seem to underestimate just how much marketing a successful game needs even when the concept is great. Look at what the Boyfriend Dungeon team did to get traction for their game (5 years of marketing, 10 releases of other mini games on itch.io to build a following, website built 11 months before release, appearance on panels and in game press, months of Kickstarter planning), and check that you're prepared to do the same with your game if commercial success is important to you (it is fine for it not to be):
https://medium.com/@kitfoxgames/years-in-the-making-how-kitf...
Rohrer also mentions that he made 13 games before he had a hit (also happened to be his first multiplayer game), so perseverance and learning from failures seems like a big factor too.
rogue-lite: check. metroidvania(gotta get that retro street cred) : check. Bland uninspired assets: check. post mortem blog post posted to some link aggregator about how you released the same thing that every other copypasta developer on greenlight has crapped out for the past 3 years and it isn't selling well?: check.
yep. 3 years, down the crapper.
The graph of steam sales, as you mentioned, is poisoned with shovel-ware. But it’s also inflated by another kind of game that nobody wants: games that are just remakes of the same old tropes and mechanics — nobody is interested in playing them even though they are implemented with care. It’s a problem that is huge in the programming world: lack of high level thought and consideration. The super meat boy guy who you linked to should have asked himself if anyone really is excited about platformers before sinking all that time into it. There is no indie game problem. It’s a bad ideas problem.
Look at the witness. It did good. It’s because it’s a good game with freshness and insight. Messages are passed from developer to player through every aspect of the game. It is something to sit down and consider for hours. Something to be inspired by. There has to be actual value in the game. This torrent of let’s players and people who use video games and v.g. Culture as some kind of crutch or something to give them identity — endlessly grinding away at meaningless and stupid achievements and 100% completions — all of that is nonsense and it is your own fault for diving into it.
The games that we love from the past exist. And spiritual remakes of those games exist. It's not enough for a game to succeed based largely on nostalgia. I don't mean to discredit the creator's hard work. This is what I understand from a glance at seeing the preview video.
OP is right that there are a million games out there. But I still have a hard time finding games I want to play due to the sheer lack of fun-focused concepts out there.
I don't exactly know how you do this because I haven't done it before, but my naive feeling is that it's a huge risk to sit down for 3-4 years and just write code. You have to find a way to engage your potential future audience while you are developing the game. Many of the most successful indy games have the same development ethos of open source software: release early and release often.
Second, I think it's important to ask for money very early on in the process, if that's your ultimate goal. I think the article is good to point out the economics. Users have played 1000 hours (roughly 1 hour per user) and the dev has made less than $30. That's 3 cents per hour. There are plenty of games that cost $4-$5 that have no demo at all. Even at 1/10th of the engagement, you're still talking about $400-$500 rather than $30.
Finally, as others have said, I think the idea that you are going to strike it rich with your first game out of the gate is naive. Indy game development is about the long tail. Don't throw 2K hours into a game. Throw 200 hours 10 times and try to build up a revenue stream. At the very least, it allows you to pivot a lot earlier if you find that your are getting absolutely no engagement.
But at the end of it (and I haven't played the author's game, so I'm making no judgement here), a game has to be fun. You don't need a finished game to demonstrate the fun. That first proof of concept needs to be distilled down to pure fun. Once you've got that sorted, you can start working on the rest. I think it's temping to build a whole infrastructure of code (or write a game engine ;-) ) and then once you are hundreds or thousands of hours in discover, "Wait a minute... this game is actually kind of boring". Only now you have a legacy code base and it's really slow to start trying to morph it into something that is fun.
I was just looking at Kenta Cho's blog the other day and earlier this year he was doing a 256 byte JS Browser game challenge [1]. What interested me about his blog post is that he concentrated entirely on game mechanics. He tried a couple of game mechanics and then tried to mix and match them to find interesting variations. I think this is the kind of thing you need to do very early on in game development. Then once you have a core game mechanic that is really fun, you can start building a game around it.
[1] - http://aba.hatenablog.com/entry/2018/03/07/174528 (Sorry, Japanese only -- but has some interesting gifs)
If this game had an appealing art style, it might stand a chance in the already saturated market of Metroidvanias.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_a8_zxYLik
They've since sold about 20M copies at $20 (now $30) apiece. I started playing in 2017 with Factorio 0.14, when the graphics were better but still decidedly retro and they'd sold maybe 4M copies.
The difference is that Factorio has a unique gameplay concept that is both extremely addictive and not really found in any other games. People will overlook shitty graphics if the game has a compelling concept that they can't get elsewhere.
(Not a rhetorical question. I'm not a graphic artist. I'm curious if I am missing something that a professional would spot.)
