I think the biggest problem is that making fun, engaging games is really, really hard. A lot of people assume that because they can program, and they enjoy playing games, making them should be relatively straight forward.
But it just isn't. It's a creative skill that needs practice just like anything else. It's like making the jump from being a technically competent guitarist to writing music. Nobody writes great music on their first try, nobody writes clean code early in their career, and nobody writes hit games out the gate, except for prodigies so rare it's not worth thinking about.
And I think what happens a lot of the time, is that someone who would otherwise be making $100 an hour writing code decides to make a game for the fun of it, ends up making 1-10 cents an hour on the time invested, and ends up writing a blog post to that effect. So it becomes an entrenched view that making games is a hobby that serious developers need to grow out of.
My first game actually did make under 10 cents per hour of development time. But by my tenth, my best so far, it was up to $300+ (and counting). I still have hits and misses, and perhaps I'd be making more putting my skills to use in another industry, but money isn't everything. And I'm still not great at game design, merely competent - there's a lot of room for improvement there.
Yes, you're right about the bad points of the industry, however, there's one big positive - if you're prepared to stick with it, for years with little reward, it's actually not that hard to reach a point where you're making great money, creating products that people love and that you're passionate about. And sometimes people in real life will notice your shirt and say 'oh, you play that too!'.
Also, if done correctly, the path to making games is actually pretty safe - make them as a hobby, after hours, and release them for free. When 100k+ people download one of them from word of mouth alone, then it's time to consider whether you want to make a career out of it. If you can't make games after hours effectively, you couldn't make them full time, either.
But it's an industry where the winners win big and everyone else struggles, not unlike professional athletics. So when offering advice to outsiders jumping in, the advice should be measured. Among the hard-working success stories of those that made it, the stories of those that didn't get lost.
It sure seems like fun gameplay is the limiting factor. It also seems like that should be a less scary problem to solve, but I'm not a game developer.
Is it considered hard to assess whether your games are fun? Or just hard to make fun games?
I'm working on game #3, still a sub 2.5 star game on Kong. I think I've only made about $5 over the past six months, but I've learned a ton about programming and artwork both!
If you (or anyone else) has any questions, feel free to contact me at [email protected].
Check out the top apps on the Facebook platform. http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/apps Yes, the top games have big budgets (still TINY compared to video games historically). But page 3 or 4 pages in and guess at the budgets of those games (that are merely in the 2M monthly active uniques range). Scroll 9 pages in (600k monthlies). How many consumer businesses EVER touch 600k people, much less in a month?
Gamers are NOT immune to ads. Most of the game builders I know buy installs (i.e. CPA ads) because it makes financial sense to do so.
Virtual goods models allow you to fill up the demand curve. In other words, poor people (who would've stolen games in years past) can play for free. Middle of the road folks can pay a few bucks when they get bored. Rich hardcore players can pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per month.
Virtual goods models make piracy somewhat impractical.
Most of the people I know succeeding in games had never developed games before.
I think your advice is dead on for shrink-wrapped games, traditional shareware, and maybe even fixed price mobile games. I'd throw my weight behind mobile games before I'd throw it behind virtually ANY other consumer effort. All that said, of course, a b2b startup has a much greater chance of survival. The whole consumer-software world is crowded beyond belief.
The game he makes is very unlikely to ever compete with the studios who makes AAA games, this much more of a casual game something that you may play on the subway or the bus during your commute; it's main target is not teens and he doesn't have the expenses usually associated with a game that size.
Minecraft proved that you can make money with non-casual games without competing on the graphics.
But if you restrict your definition of games to games targeted at teens and competes on graphics, then yes you will be left behind.
The mobile market is hugely oversaturated with casual toys. Solution: don't make those. There are entire genres that are empty and waiting to be filled. Jeff Vogel is currently in the process of porting Avadon, his latest RPG, to iPad. I'll bet that he's going to charge at least $20 for it, and that he'll be quite successful. Why? Because there's absolutely nothing remotely like it out there on the iPad, and it's the kind of game I would love to play while relaxing with a tablet device.
An advantage of writing games is that suddenly the pesky and difficult question of 'what problem does this solve for my user' suddenly vanishes.
Still, thanks for the candid summary.
I can only vouch for the major mobile software marketplaces, but the App Store, the Android Marketplace, and Amazon's Appstore are festooned with indie/small shop (or even one-person) developed apps.
There are handfuls of developers whose works fans look out for. Mika Mobile is one. Never heard of them? They made Zombieville USA, a million+ selling app. They followed up with OMG Pirates!, another million seller. They now have Battleheart, which was top 5 in the app store and is still on the top 200 charts, even at $2.99 in the notoriously penny-pinching App store.
Need more? How about taptaptap, who have never made an app that wasn't a huge ($500,000+) seller. Or Backflip, Donut Games, and Nimblebit, who have all had monster sellers consistently.
There is room for not only hobbyist and/or one-hit blockbusters (Tiny Wings, Doodle Jump, Pocket God), but also consistent sellers (the aforementioned, Popcap games, and of course Rovio), along with AAA megacorp houses. Now, being an indie rock star competing against the Billboard and the millions of bar bands hoping to strike it Aerosmith-big, now _that_ is an undertaking. Ditto, filmmaking and acting.
But what if you write a game to learn to code (or code better), or simply to explore some gaming concepts you haven't seen elsewhere?
Personally this is no different than the guy that wants to be a band; if that's his passion, go for it. Just keep in mind a) it's for fun, b) it's a hobby.
If at some point down the road you are lucky enough to be paid for you hobby, all the better. Earning a living is a whole other level beyond that even.
What makes it hard is not the creation, so much as untangling your brain from all the nonsense about what makes a game "legitimate." If you go for legitimacy you'll fail off the bat because it is, as you say, a matter of competing with the big guys. But if you are adhering to lean principles throughout, you can get a game business going. It just may not be a "dream game," necessarily.
It's enough for me to bury my own commercial Android plans. I'll just finish the hobby game I'm working on as best as I can and release it for free. For a few dollars a month I'm not going to pester users with ads either. Who knows, with that experience and changes in the market I'll still have a shot at an Android business later on.
For the braver developers in this thread who already have applications out there, and building on the network promotion mentioned here: Why don't you get together and set up your own system of referrals? That could work much better than just referring to your own other applications (if any) in a closed loop.
What's the _median_ iOS app annual revenue?
[1] http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2010/06/24/so-you-want-to-develop...
How do I love games and hate games businesses, let me count the ways. User expectations are pegged by AAA games, whose budgets you cannot possibly match. Those AAA products set a price point at $DIRT_CHEAP. (Angry Birds costs what?) Your core users are thieves. When you fail at marketing on day one, which you will because everyone does, in any normal business you get progressively better but in games the obsessive fetishization of the new means your game is virtually sunk. It is virtually impossible to iterate based on user feedback because your users are a) transients and b) not wonderful people to deal with. Gamers are virtually immune to ads, don't search for anything gaming-related, don't pay prices sufficient to justify CPc spends, and if by some miracle they hear sbout you via word of mouth they will search for you on PirateBay/etc first and Google second. Meanwhile, in addition to megacorps staffed by people who have been doing this professionally for years, you are also competing with a virtually inexhaustible supply of hobbyists, because perhaps 3 out of every 4 CS majors got into computers to make video games and the fourth one is lying.
Does any of this get better for mobile devs? No, it gets worse, unless you're picked by the platform's kingmakers.