Rimworld was released in 2018, two years after the article was written (2016)
I mean, it's strongly 'inspired' by dwarf fortress, so any heterodox design credit mostly belongs there
Basically I'm arguing that there is no black swan. It's not really hard to refute it, if I'm wrong, because all you need to do is point to one. I suppose the inevitable outcome might be we then hem and haw back and forth about whether something is "good", but well - at least it's a reasonable evidence based starting point, yeah?
The game was unknown for ~2 years (Released 2018, picked up ~2020) until it got picked up by streamers and was catapulted into the spotlight.
Why is it so hard to believe there are more games out there like this? These kind of markets are nowhere near efficient.
Keep in mind the way that word of mouth works, it's about the percentages - not the userbase size. Your active userbase growing 30% a month doesn't look impressive when that translates to 3 new people, but so long as that 30% is reflective of organic word of mouth spread, that's going from 10 users to 5500 in a couple of years. Their userbase had increased by orders of magnitude before streamers came, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't not have continued to grow rapidly.
And that's one of the great things about games. People love to talk about them, share what they're playing, and also of course seek out those hidden gems. Players do this for fun, others like publishers do it with a big profit motive. If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it.
Without content creators spotlighting it I highly doubt the game would have gone anywhere. The developers even say "we're really bad at marketing": https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/09/among-us-improbable-rise-t....
The whole article is a goldmine: “We stuck with Among Us a lot longer than we probably should have from a pure business standpoint,” said Willard. “We tried to quit and should have quit several times.”.
It's clear they got lucky here. This kind of organic growth doesn't happen often, even with very good games.
> If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it
The market being inefficient doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to exploit. A publisher is far better positioned than I am to "[make] a killing off of it".
The HN analogy is a SaaS company struggling to become profitable vs struggling to find the first ten or hundred users. Profitability is very hard, finding a big enough niche is very hard, but...ten users?
This is an overly literal exaggeration, but the example remains true even at a more realistic (and still pailtry) 100-200 sales. 1000 users is where it starts to maybe become a side hobby. Before then, You could be mowing lawns and make more revenue (without a 30% platform cut).
At 1000 users on SteamCharts you are making some very serious revenue, especially if you happen to be a solo dev.
I also think he may be being slightly coy there. Most games, especially indie, do spike and tail because they receive a bit of initial interest and new release type promotion, people try it, and move on. But what matters is not most games, but successful games. And there's an increasingly dramatic shift towards long-tail revenue. And there your games does spike, people try it, word of mouth happens, and then your real growth pattern starts. Reach a sufficient threshold and you get a big bump because you end up getting featured on Steam pages, and from there the sky's the limit.
I think there's a blurry line that separates indie games to non-indie games. Sure stardew valley is an indie game and God of War is not. But those are the extremes of the spectrum.
Is Hades an indie game? It is developed and published by Supergiant Games, but at this point is really well known and funded.
But yes, my pedantic side insists that if a large well funded game(or movie or song) uses the same legal entity to fund the game as was used to build it. They are independent and may fairly use the term "indie". Steam is a weird kink in the rules, because they are technically publishing all these games. But I hand wave that away by claiming that they are a market not a publisher(the difference being that a publisher takes on risk by paying you before the work is done).
Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, difficulty settings, runs like butter, and is all in all a super polished game. IMO this was GOTY shit and I don’t know why it didn’t take off.
If I compare Chicory, A Colorful Tale (A) to Stardew Valley B:
A: 97%/1987 B: 98%/483781 on Steam
A: 93.2%=2317 B: 97.33%=562`831 on Steam.db
I don't know where the disparity comes from, but those 4 % are significant. And here's something even more important:
A: 8 in game B: 36`293 in game
8/1987 = 0.4%, whereas 36`293/483781 = 7.5%! Stardew Valley, it seems, has 18.75× more replayability (which absolutely makes sense just based on genre).
Also price:
A: $14 to $20 B: $7.49 to $15
Shouldn't be surprising a game that is considerably cheaper, is more fun and provides that fun for an order of magnitude more time, sells better. It also was released earlier, so it got more sales from the "tail" sales, as well as it provided more value in the form of updates. In fact when I look now at the player count history, it's uneven, perhaps driven by updates, but the tendency is that it grows!
One more thought: maybe Stardew Valley makes for a better streaming content for some reason?
Perhaps Chicory deserves less sales than Stardew Valley, but still considerably more than it got? Maybe its good reviews come from the fact the game reaches the niche very well, it's clear what you do in the game (paint), but maybe this niche is just small?
I can admit I never heard about this game, despite its very high rating.
Now that I’m looking at my steam library I have some other games I think deserve more attention:
- Citizen Sleeper is not unlike Disco Elysium or a visual novel. But its mix of space opera and cyberpunk dystopia is extremely compelling. Excellent OST, and heartfelt characters. You get a real sense of the desperation and humanity of the impoverished, the undocumented, the refugee. The word building is deep and expansive (a sequel is coming, to not enough fanfare imo).
- Umarangi Generation is a photography game where you are playing as a propagandist during an ecologically-vibed apocalypse. You explore scenes of war, poverty, luxury, and terror, taking photographs all the while for the cause. The capacity to tell a deeply layered story with multiple political factions and economic groups merely through environment is stunning. The expansion is absolutely seething with anger.
That branding cost a lot of noteriety in the West.
> Stardew was genre-defining
What is the argument here, that it was very good? That's exactly my point, it was very successful because of how good it was (rather than lucky).
Good indie games are ignored all the time. I tend to seek out indie games explicitly because I don’t have a huge attraction to most “triple a” style games (I dislike fps, sports, 4x, mmo, puzzle, and sex appeal. So I’m mostly limited to not-Witcher open word rpg. Platformers, roguelikes, metroidvanias, horror survival etc. tend to be indie.) So basically I’m usually stuck with “why doesn’t anyone scream about this game more”. Rain World was like that until Downpour came out, finally some fucking attention to it!
One thing you have to keep in mind is that we're all snowflakes to some degree. And so it can feel unfair when a game that really hits our preferences just doesn't receive as much attention as we think it deserves, but that may not necessarily be because people are unaware of the game, but simply because our preferences are not necessarily widely shared.
It's kind of like how in writing a Dan Brown is always going to be vastly more popular than an e.g. Dostoyevsky. It's simply that one author has much more mass appeal than the other. It can feel like a shame for fans of the latter, but it's the way society has always been and probably always will be.
This is offtopic but the forager lead dev is often criticized for claiming to be a solo dev and taking credit for other people who worked on the game.
I.e. "make a fun game that has organic viral growth"
As if developers don't want to do that. You have not provided any information of value here.
Organic viral growth is extremely rare, and "fun" is a useless descriptor for someone trying to replicate "fun" in their own game. Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?
"build it and they will come" is almost always a lie, and the times it's not (I.e. organic viral growth) are not replicable.
If you're making something you have to solve for distribution. Just making the thing isn't enough for it to succeed.
Of course nobody wants to make a game that isn't fun. But I know just how easy it is to get caught up into the "hustle" mentality where all you're focused on is getting the features complete. Once you're in this mindset, it becomes very easy to realize that your own game isn't even fun to you. This simple reminder is huge, should be repeated often, and is great advice.
Make a game that you would enjoy playing for hours on end, and you'll likely gather an audience of people that also enjoy it. It really is amazing at how easy it is to forget this and end up building a game that even you, the creator, don't enjoy playing very much.
Likewise, it's very easy to focus on small slices of gameplay and ignore the cohesiveness of the entire game. If different mechanics are super fun, but aren't fun together, you will have created a game that isn't fun.
Many games aren't fun, but many games are fun enough or are marketed well enough. You won't stand a chance without going above and beyond in one of the two executions.
I mean, why do people want to write buggy software? It's not on purpose, they're just not good enough to deliver quality in a timely fashion.
My experience with most indie games cannot deliver on a core gameplay loop that's satisfying, even when that loop is not the draw of the game in which case I'd expect them to ape something competent.
IMO an example of a studio that doesn't mess this up is Giant Games. I've liked some titles more or less but the core gameplay loop has always been competently designed.
I'm criticizing the shallowness and lack of information in the comment. Everyone knows games should be fun. Saying "[the game] needs to be fun" has literally 0 bits of information and is a lazy explanation for why games don't succeed.
art has to risk failure or it’s not art. perhaps has to even be near certain to fail.
no one should be depending on art to feed their family.
no one should be making art for any reason other than love.
art must be beautiful.
as many have pointed out, blockbuster movies and triple a games are interesting, but they are not art.
So "the game isn't fun" needs a lot more context on who is saying it, and is useless otherwise. Do they like your genre? Are they miscommunicating what sounds like a game design issue when it could be an art/sound issue? Did they just grab your game in a bundle/gamepass and weren't really in the mood to play your game?
It's all speculation. And it's probably better to find better feedback than try to psycho-analyze every comment that way.
Cognitive dissonance and inertia, among other reasons. When asked if the game (which this topic is about) was fun, the author beat around the bush. Even the positive reviews on Steam make it clear people didn't often really want to play the game more than once. The top review on Steam [1] is some guy talking about, "Had a LONG night of playing this yesterday with my mates..." with less than 2 hours played, lifetime.
The developer clearly knew, deep down, that the game wasn't really fun, but he convinced himself it was. And that's really really easy to do. This is one of the few things the mega-studios get right. They're more than happy to cancel big games they've already sunk millions into if they're just not working out right. As an indie developer you either have to have some crazy degree of introspection, or a few friends who understand that absolutely tearing down what you've spent thousands of hours on is the biggest favor they could ever do for you.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/342920/Toto_Temple_Deluxe...
You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales if released today.
There are a dozen rogue-lite survival zombie games released on Steam every week. (Only a slight exaggeration).
For a AAA example, Lawbreakers is probably one of the more recent stories. It was a game made by a director behind the acclaimed Gears of War (Epic's biggest series until Fortnite) thst was like Overwatch, but released a year after. Of course the game wasn't made in a year. But had it released 2 years earlier it might have been able to reach a bigger crowd rather than slowly fade into a niche cult following.
It wouldn't have zero competition in 2015, and I'm not talking about it coming out a decade prior, before Team Fortress 2. two years isn't even half a generation (or a quarter, in gen 8's eyes). I think your metaphor is a bit slanted here.
Also, I'm not saying Overwatch wouldn't have overtaken it anyway; But a year of being around would be enough to establish an audience and keep the game around. For a live service game this is key.
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>Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.
Sure, and pong was successful because it came before brickbreaker. Well, brick breaker is Lawbreakers in this case, the difference between cultural phenomenon and "but you HAVE heard of me" (which is an increasingly harder bar to clear).
And as a tangent, this is also why I'm never a fan of naming games in conversations. I don't think Overwatch is nearly as good a game as people think, it just got all that viral fan art and (previous) goodwill from a company gamers (previously) trusted. But there's some just world fallacy going on mentally in that I am inherently "wrong" when bashing a successful game and also inherently "wrong" when I praise a non-successful game. Because surely if a game fails it must have been bad right?
our perceptions are influence not just by quality, but by the zeitgeist around the games. Especially when we can't truly define why those games are "fun" to begin with.
That seems to me to be true of most (every) industries / areas of human endeavor?
In fact, I'd argue that, having managed to kill the assumption that "newer game == more lifelike graphics" (possibly still valid for AAA, but only there), has dramatically lowered audience expectations in recent years.
At some point the needle to hay ratio becomes untenable and searching the whole haystack is no longer possible for a single person. You can still randomly sample the stack, though, and rely on the opinions of others to find what you personally missed, and good games with mass appeal do tend to rise a little bit from random players stumbling across them; maybe not to blockbuster status or even profitability, but enough that a game with a marketing budget should get more than 21 Steam reviews if it's genuinely appealing. There's really not a lot of cream at the very bottom.
And that isn't just some sort of academic point I'm making. Seemingly the overwhelming majority of indie success stories are achieving long-tail success now a days. Increasing numbers of indie games released like a decade ago are having better play figures today than they did at launch. This includes both the extremely well known titles like Terraria [1], as well as those that are still relatively unknown like Kenshi [2].
Valheim dropped early 2021, just into the 2nd year of real COVID measures including lockdowns and an overall social atmosphere of "stay hunkered down at home and don't go anywhere". It was absolutely perfect timing, and I am 100% convinced it would not have done _nearly_ as well if it released 1 year earlier or 1 year later.
It's hard to make a shitty game successful without a AAA marketing budget sure, but it's also hard to make a good game successful without either a AAA marketing budget, or great luck/timing.
In my opinion now is currently the absolute golden age for indie development of all sorts. But the catch is you actually need to make really good stuff. Just making a functioning game isn't really sufficient. There's even still a huge market for stuff that looks like it came from a 24 hour game-jam codeathon, but it needs to be fun. Check out Forager [3] for instance. As a warning, play that game for an hour - and you'll be playing it for 10 (or 100) because it's really just insanely fun.
And that's really all it is. The "problem" is that it's just become really (relatively) easy to make games. And so just making a functioning complete game is no longer any sort of real achievement. It needs to be fun. Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valheim#Development
[3] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/