I don’t think it’s the equivalent to writing the great American novel though, because programming is just a minor part of game creating and arguably one of the least important. Design I’d the most important.
The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.
Did we read the same article?
Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort went into. A tiny percentage are hits, but most are forgotten in the deluge.
To me that reads as someone that's fully aware that some people are putting a lot of effort in and making good games (Unity or not), but is upset by the realization that quality doesn't seem to be nearly enough. The problem is not (just) that a lot of crap is being released, but that a lot of everything is being released, good and bad. So much so that even the good things can't make good money because supply has so far outstripped demand.
It's sort of like the Netflix queue problem. I'm continuously adding things to my Netflix queue that look interesting, but my time to actually watch them is such that my chance of getting through even a majority of the queue is almost nil.
I think supply is an issue, but I also think the author added to the problem by releasing a game that doesn’t have appealing graphics, gameplay or sound. Where as many much of the unity “shovelware” is exactly the opposite.
I think the difference of interpretation we're having is that I think you are interpreting "Unity shovelware" to mean "If it's Unity it's crap", which nobody who follows that space could easily defend (a lot of high quality well known games and publishers use Unity). But a lot of shovelware uses Unity, because it's easy to get assets for and publish with.
It's sort of like saying "Java enterprise crap-ware". I wouldn't assume that means all Java programs are crap, or that all enterprise software is crap, but that of the crappy software targeted towards the enterprise, a lot uses Java. That's not an indictment of Java, and might actually be the opposite, given that it has qualities that cover up other poor choices.
I think you mean the opposite: the bar is super high because the chances of watching something new are low ... it's more difficult.
Now that game engines are commonplace, free and work better than what any single developer would be able to come up with after a lifetime of hard work the end result is that games have a very hard time to differentiate themselves from each other. There isn't really an unlimited space of game scenarios out there, even in the days of the 2D arcade games after a couple of years it became much harder to come up with something truly unique.
It was never difficult to "come up with something truly unique".
Your unique thing might be rubbish, but that's not the problem for the millions of shovelware Unity asset flips.
Jim Sterling has covered this at length, even running a competition to show that people can take a horribly over-used cheap asset and do great original stuff - if they try. Asset flips don't even try.
The are tens of thousands of games in which you are an elite soldier running around shooting zombies. There are zero games where you're a pot plant using psychic powers to create sculptures.
Like Hollywood the video game industry chases trends until they're beaten completely to death, and then goes one more round just to make really sure.
- In the 80's and 90's when PC games where simple enough.
- At the beginning of Steam
- At the beginning of the App Store and the Play Store
At those time, there wasn't that much competition so while it was still hit or miss, you still had a decent chance to be successful as a single-person indie developer.
The biggest treasure I found that way was the original x-com.
I don’t think times have changed that much. The upcoming game I’m most excited by is it lurks below, and that’s being developed by a single developer. Stardew Valley released in 2016, after the explosion. Into the breach, though not single developer did well in 2018.
I mean, it’s not uncommon for solo-small teams to top the steam charts, but you really do need both quality and a little luck. I just don’t think that’s different from how it’s always been, and I think the author of this article in particular lacks quality.
What has changed though is the amount of games people own. In the 90ies you didn’t have a backlog of thousands of games that you picked up from a humble bundle where you only really wanted one game. You also didn’t have MMOs or forthnite competing for your attention.
So I agree with you somewhat, it’s become much harder to sell bad-mediocre games in the past few years, and that’s 99% of indie games. And there is obviously always a market for remakes when a new platform/generation arrives.
Automating (super dull financial industry department) is the industry of superstars
Who is making big money JUST off novels? Not speaking, not tv deals, writing.
Meanwhile I know several game developers making a living. Setting out to do it still follows a success distribution, but it’s fundementally achievable in a way unavailable to writers entirely.
Seems like urban supernatural or romance (or urban supernatural romance) seems to be the main genres where this is working. My girlfriend follows several writers who make a living this way, and is wanting to give it a try herself, that's how I'm aware of it.
You can't write The Great American Novel or spend years writing your novel and make money this way though. It pretty much requires the momentum and consistent quick releases for it to work. You're making sugary garbage that's consumed quickly and forgotten just as quickly.
Sometimes convincing someone to spend the extra 10-20% of time or effort to do something "the hard way" is nigh impossible until they've spend time doing the alternative and know the extended pain that sometimes results.
It's sort of like seat belts. When they were first required in all vehicles, many people still didn't bother with them. Even before cultural indoctrination took over, a lot of people eventually started too. It took some close calls for people or their friends and family for them to finally make the effort, and such a small effort it was. I saw exactly this play out with my own parents and their siblings.
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.
You'd try to be very long-lived, steadily selling for years, say just a few copies a week. All traffic would come from people who have some incredibly niche interest they are searching for, say baptism planners discovering your "baptism planner simulator 2000".
If you continued to make games like these say one per month or two, it might be possible to gradually build up a liveable income from them.
I guarantee that if you drop the "planner" that game would sell like hotcakes as soon as a medium sized YouTuber/Twitch streamer notices it.
There is no way a game about dunking babies doesn't get enough shock value to get a decent return on investment, especially if it has wonky physics, "bad" controls or other emergent gameplay.
For a deeper game, maybe bring back the "planner" aspect to add a simulation layer on top. Make a tycoon game where you manage a church and the baptisms are just one of a few minigames.
Was this orders from clients or did you create some SaaS?
There are a large number of amateur creators who are trying to win the lottery (either from a fame or monetary perspective), and most won't and will see little recognition and remain obscure or very niche.
This is seen in basically every area of media. Music, books, movies, etc and is perfectly normal.
In 2017, 21 games per day were released on Steam and most of them were trash.
You choose one of the many existing game development frameworks and rapidly prototype a concept, if it works you keep iterating on it etc etc. This works in games as well as any other major software endeavour.
The matter of having the talent to produce a new idea that’s actually fun to play and marketing it successfully is arguably the hard bit here, rather than the technical implementation details. I’d make the argument today that the technical barriers to entry for game development are almost _too_ low now, which is why partly why Steam is filled with so much “indie” junk.
You can download Unity, purchase and install for example UFPS that will handle most FPS functionality for you (includes basic gun etc model) and you can use Unity networking for LAN connectivity.
Let's say the twist is a Battle Royale game, you just make a Unity terrain and a basic sphere that becomes smaller.
After that coding the extra bits such as HP, HP loss due to sphere etc isn't a big deal.
That's one way, doing it via a mod also works, but you really need knowledge of the product you're modding (although the same is true of e.g. Unity, if its your first week with it it won't be that easy).
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.
"Superstar industries" follow extreme power law distributions, where, due to the low barrier to entry, high ceilings, and limited consumer base (there are only so many hours people can spend on entertainment), the pie isn't growing and new entrants aren't going to be able to carve out much that hasn't already been claimed.
It's not a new thing, the name comes from the music industry which acts the same way. Anybody can record a song and print it on CDs, but the market is already saturated: you have to either really really really stand out like nobody has in decades (An event so rare I couldn't find any examples), or you have to get the support of one of the big players (game studios or music labels) to lend you their resources and audience.
Nearest example I can think of, mySpace was where she got noticed so that dates her breakthrough to a good decade ago.
Adele was legitimate however others have pretended to have an Adele grade story. Lily Allen also claimed to have been discovered on mySpace but her dad was rock and roll celebrity so her efforts can be dismissed as nepotism. Often these links to rock and roll celebrity are not obvious because performers use stage names that sound like real names. Their children don't use their parents fake surnames.
Being really good and self publishing helps you build your resume in a superstar industry, but it's nearly impossible to actually achieve commercial success without a well-established sponsor. Adele probably wouldn't have gotten far on her own if XL or some other label hadn't picked her up. Her accomplishment before then was a really good resume.
XL Recordings came from the rave scene, the Prodigy were their first big earning group, however, for every Prodigy there were scores of 'Dome Patrol' grade releases that nobody except for DJs ever heard of. XL moved on when the rave scene died to other acts in different genres. They 'pivoted' to use the parlance.
I know Adele worked with a label however it was a genuine thing her getting spotted on mySpace and not some fake back story, as per the Lily Allen example. I don't believe music executives really would listen if I posted my singing efforts to the internets, or if anyone here did likewise. Yet that did happen with Adele.
I don't think this phenomenon is limited to one form of media. "The Martian" by Andy Weir was originally published on his website one chapter at a time. The internet has, in general, lowered the bar to publishing any kind of work significantly - be it games on Steam, songs on YouTube, or ebooks on Amazon. There are now new avenues into the wider industry, but the big players are still the big players.
In this case... "metroidvania" is a very oversaturated market, and a lot of games do it better.
1) high demand (not just high demand in general -- high demand for new/better content by a new entrant);
2) low supply;
3) well paying customers.
I'm sure despite the flood those will still exist, as long as there's still a good amount of differentiation between people's preferences. A niche is a small subset of in the space of products that a small subset of customers have strong preference to. This needs preference differentiation.
This preference difference could be toward many features: cultural setting, story style, gameplay style, aesthetic style, etc.
There's perhaps a combinatorial advantage here: if sensitivity varies significantly across many of those parameters, just choose any unexplored subset, optimizing for 1/2/3 -- there are exponentially many in the number of distinguishing features (if you browse Steam tags you see this is potentially a very large number!).
Maybe that used to be metroidvania, but that's long over. Visual novels have been on the rise for a while, so are rougelikes and card games, but those are saturated now. You want to get in before the big streamers and reddit frontpage and ride the wave.
Who knew a Harvest Moon clone would be the biggest indie success of its year? Maybe we can systematically analyze old games to identify overlooked gems and valuable revivals.
I don't think it's bad advice, though. If you treat genre and its elements as only means to an end, you wind up with exactly the trends that oversaturate the indie market now, because everyone is trying to "find a niche and hit it hard." Games are entertainment.
I think you should at least learn to want to play the game you're making. At the very least, you should know why the customer would want to play it. Ticking off boxes hoping to find combinatorial success isn't enough... that "battle royale farming simulator" still needs to be entertaining, or at least capture interest.
I'd say you need both: you need to want to do a game you'd want to play, because you'd have an easier time recognizing if you're doing something that would appeal to at least one person. And if it's in a niche, you'll have a better chance to get coverage and buyers. But if you just try to hit a niche hard without knowing what makes the games in that niche good, you'll have a hard time making something that'll interest players.
I think using your own taste is a crutch. If you get good at it, you should be able to know it's good regardless of your own feelings.
We see this when game developers are shuffled around and work on ones that are completely different from their passion projects. The good ones still excell.
Let's agree to disagree then.
Your market is the whole world too.
The reason is monetary policy. The Fed constantly 'prints' new money out of thin air and injects it into the economy via a combination of 1. loans to the government and 2. open market operations. Guess who gets the first dips into these two huge pots of newly created money?
In the case of government money (loaned by the Fed), big corporations get a huge chunk of that money pot because they get all the lucrative government contracts. In the case of open market operations; big finance firms like Goldman Sachs and big traders with insider information are the first to get their hands into that pot.
Basically that money which is meant to 'trickle down' isn't actually doing that; instead it appears to be trickling back up to government officials who are enacting policies that benefit corporations and increased centralization of wealth.
The Fed mostly buys government bonds, the markets for which are very liquid and efficient.
(The government however does benefit from the Feds buying their bonds, instead of injecting money into the system some other way.)
There is a significant delay before the newly created money affects wages. Shareholders benefit from the new money instantly (since the market reacts to it quickly and it drives up the value of their stocks) but wage earners won't benefit from the new money until they get their annual 2% salary raise at the end of the year. That delay is significant because it allows shareholders to compound their ROIs several times before wages catch up.
On the one hand, no one has yet figured out how eliminate inefficiences out of large organizations. They're all like that, usually the bigger the more inefficient (the government, because of its size, being obviously the worst offender).
However, it seems that it just takes dozens (if not hundreds) of thousands of employees to run say a top tier car or microprocessor company. You just can't do it with less, so the inefficiencies are the cost of producing such advanced stuff as say BMWs or Intel processors.
The relatively stable exchange rates can be explained by entirely orthodox inflation targeting together with purchasing-power-parity pretty well.
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.
[1]https://www.remic.ca/real-estate-sales-person-vs-mortgage-ag...
For real-estate, some numbers that I saw had 51% of licensed real-estate agents making one or zero transaction in the past year.
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...