I totally agree with the message but I want to raise a few points:
Cost of living.
The market is saturated. The market being saturated pushes it to be (even more) hit-oriented. 'Saturated' as in a sponge held at the bottom of a full bathtub. You can keep releasing more games but the people you want to buy them (let alone play them) aren't going to quit their second job to find the time to buy and try your weird little games.
This is not the middle. The author is talking about small games. It may be the middle of indie game development, but across the whole landscape, the "missing middle" would seem to refer to the "single-/double-A" studios/publishers/games that died out between the launch of the PS2 and the release of GTA IV.
id Software is an exception and makes a poor example to follow. Studying wild success stories is not without merit, but is -- if you are interested in how to do the thing successfully -- ultimately a trap. id was (among other things) in the right place at the right time. There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way. You cannot make a game as radical and captivating as DOOM was. You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz. You might say there was very little opportunity for any individual to do so back then as well, but then we are back at exceptions being bad examples.
>id Software is an exception and makes a poor example to follow. Studying wild success stories is not without merit, but is -- if you are interested in how to do the thing successfully -- ultimately a trap.
The article has plenty of current examples of developers doing this on Steam now that are not at all outliers or an exception. For another concrete example you have something like Chilla's Art https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Chilla%27s%.... Two japanese developers who have been releasing games for 5 years very consistently and have slowly built up their audience while also increasing their skills as developers. They also have a Patreon, which is a model that works nicely, with another more known example of it being Sokpop https://sokpop.co/. And for all their consistent work they're now getting rewarded pretty nicely for it, without having had a single insanely huge hit as far as I can tell. You can find plenty of examples of devs like this, doing it and succeeding on Steam, right now. Calling all of them exceptions sounds like a poor excuse.
>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz.
Yes, you need to be creative in the creative profession and come up with good ideas. That comes with the territory. If you aren't very creative then you should probably consider doing something else.
> push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.
Which is why game mechanic and gameplay is where the boundaries are, not computational efficiency or photorealism (or even, artistic direction or production value).
I imagine that prior to Jonathan Blow's indie hit "Braid", people were also imagining that the technological ceiling has been hit and an individual (or small team) cannot compete with the AAA studios.
> There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.
Checkout the demoscene.
An example of a megahit that started as a tech demo was Teardown [1]. It features a fully destructible world running on a custom game engine created by one guy. It succeeded because of the technical "wow" factor.
> It may be the middle of indie game development, but across the whole landscape, the "missing middle" would seem to refer to the "single-/double-A" studios/publishers/games that died out between the launch of the PS2 and the release of GTA IV.
To be fair, the author specifically listed their definition in the opening:
>These are games that are bigger and more polished than a game jam game but are not huge, 30 hour epic triple-I indie game. A “middle game” should only take 1 to 9 months to create and can be profitable (or at least not a money sink) because it is expected to earn in the range of $10,000 to $40,000.
if you don't agree with the definition, then of course the rest of the arguments run hollow. But this was an article aimed at existing (or soon to be) small indie developers, not consumers nor AAA developers.
>here is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.
Sure there are. But you aren't making a game at that point, nor should try to sell a game on that premise. maybe a tech demo, but that can still be a multi-year venture depedning on the tech. Consumers don't care.
People who do that sell tools to other devs who may make games based off that, and that's probably a more profitable venture than indie devlopment.
> This is not the middle. The author is talking about small games.
Exactly what I thought reading this article. It’s very hard to stand out and it’ll only get harder. Tools are much better than before, and now AI generation is entering the ring. Being an exceptional game is half the problem, the other half is getting noticed. Which takes money, or connections. Usually both.
Two additional points.
1. Good interaction design is still hard. Making something that many people can play and understand quickly is a skill. Releasing lots of content is the best way to learn.
2. Back in the Newgrounds days it was really simple to put something out there and get feedback on it quickly. Ads were (generally) not woven into games directly, the Flash tools were simpler and they limited game scope. Itch.io is ok for this but has a lot of downloadable stuff. I miss the days where browser games were huge but I guess there’s no money in it anymore. Maybe someone with better insight can share.
> So why is it so bad now that games earned $10,000 when 30 years ago it was the norm? Because now there is a slim chance to become super rich because of the indie-utopia.
Which is an utter misdiagnosis of the problem. $10k 30 years ago was a decent chunk of an annual salary which included amenities like living indoors. $10k now is, in the bay area, 1 month's salary if you wish to live indoors.
4s: Saturation + sexy Screenshots sell. If you want to be competitive in a saturated market you goto have AAA graphics for promotion. Thus tons of work.
I’m a solo indie developer trying to do almost exactly what this article advocates for and tbh, I’m not sure it’s been the right move.
I’m almost 2 months into a project which essentially boils down to an iteration of Asteroids & have a demo up on Steam, but while I’m really pleased with it so far, I’d be surprised if the game even makes $1,000 at this stage, let alone $10,000. I’d be very happy with the latter though as I’m treating this very much as a learning experience, not the least in terms of getting my head around the marketing & community building side of things.
I’ve also worked on a game which I’d consider to be a “modest success” that took 2-3 years with a friend & sold enough copies for my share to so far pay (almost) £24k/year, which as others have mentioned isn’t exactly a competitive salary for a software developer generally.
In particular, while I can probably build small games in the 2-3 month timeframes suggested (especially if each is an iteration on the last), don’t forget all the “marketing admin” & trailer making & so forth. That’s also definitely not enough time to build enough wishlists to get any Steam visibility etc.
Still, definitely timely food for thought for me personally!
It's a similar situation across all of the arts. The tools are now so widely available and there are so many people doing the work - with varying levels of skill - that the real distinguishing factor is marketing.
Not quality of output. Not speed of output - as long as that's above a minimum.
But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend.
DOOM was dropped into an ecosystem of PC magazines and BBSs and almost sold itself - literally with the shareware release. It had almost no obvious competitors. There was some ad spend, but not a huge amount.
Today there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of small/medium games available across multiple platforms. Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be.
Meanwhile the AAAs have a budget for carpet bomb marketing. Skyrim spent around $15m, which is an insane sum.
As someone who lives outside of America, I find the article's implicit assumption that every videogame developer is American makes many of his arguments less convincing.
Like, I understand that $120,000 isn't a lot for a team of 3 Americans. But that's a pretty good amount of money in Poland, Brazil, or Vietnam. So why don't we see these "missing middle" games coming from those places?
Sure, American publishers aren't interested in writing small checks... But what about Chinese or Indian publishers?
What’s interesting is that with national markets there’s a bit of product market fit. A good example is Japan; there are a lot of Japanese games developed that have good domestic product fit but zero appeal internationally.
Poland actually had CD Projekt Red, but Cyberpunk 2077 from that studio was perhaps one of the greatest dumpster fire releases of the current decade. Don’t know about India, but a lot of Chinese development is gacha-based with limited western appeal. (It also does not help that the CCP censors are not particularly fond of video games.)
> But that's a pretty good amount of money in Poland, Brazil, or Vietnam.
I've never been to Brazil myself, but someone said that an iPhone is $3000 USD in Brazil, so I wouldn't blindly assume that $120k is super amazing to developers there.
Also, I quickly googled and found something that resembles an family house and it is very expensive at $280k[0]. I could very well be googling incorrectly so HN Brazilians can hopefully add some context.
No matter where you are, you can still embrace adtech and get your work monetised through that route. I personally know of a team in India that spent 2 years working on some mobile game, which was plain garbage after all that time investment. I don't think they even released it. Smaller games churned out every quarter would have been so much better for them. Working for years on the same project with no reward would likely drain most people and turn them away from any profession.
I generally agree but I think he misses a glaring societal driver in inflation. $40k in 1986 was probably pretty rad. In 2023 300k revenue split across a small team is not going to pay the bills, even before the marketplaces and taxes take their cut. On 300k something nearer 120k will actually land in their post-tax/post-fee pockets to pay for their food and electricity that year. Split across even just three people, that's not yet a sustainable business.
The article describes middle games as "'middle game' should only take 1 to 9 months to create and can be profitable (or at least not a money sink) because it is expected to earn in the range of $10,000 to $40,000."
Am I understanding that right?
A reasonably competent developer could make at least twice that in salary, with far less risk. So that's not really profitable, once you remember opportunity cost (and especially if you risk-adjust it).
The ones that take a few days can be a weekend project. The longer projects you'd be hoping become huge, and very profitable.
True for some cases, but not everyone embarking in those Gamedev journeys are competent developers able to land those jobs. If you see testimonials, they're often people coming from different walks of life, doing a micro-game (often following a tutorial) and then deciding to stop everything for a few months or even years.
Doing those mid-level games is arguably equivalent to taking a low-paid internship.
Yes, building and releasing a game that turns a profit is, in reality, a success.
As a programmer, you can absolutely make more money more reliably by getting a job or working freelance.
The problem the article is addressing (I think) is that this reality does not seem to inform the popularly held beliefs and expectations of (inexperienced?) indie game developers, and the effects of that.
As mentioned in the article though, a middle game would be a stepping stone that provides hands on experience of creating and selling such a game.
You'd most likely be working on a small portion of a bigger game at a salaried job, without really being able to accumulate the needed skillset to jump into a larger game developed on your own terms.
In video games it would be very hard to make that kind of money(in vast majority of the world anyway) if you're just starting out. I myself was only paid £18k/pa as a junior programmer at a big studio, programming in C++ with two CS degrees. Industry pays crap to those starting out. So compared to that yeah, if you manage to make some games that make enough money to pay the bills and which give you game Dev experience......completely worth it. Or you could leave the industry, get a normal software job and be paid well - the choice is yours.
The point about making modest games as a educational experience/alternative to paid classes is pretty good.
What some successful devs seems to do is make a "mid game" Early Access prototype, learn as they go, and if it seems to work, grow it into a bigger game.
I really like this approach, as its like having your cake and eating it. The dev gets an "excuse" for barebones features in a release and free alpha testing. Escape bridges are not burnt. The game builds up a following and a small revenue stream. And then it gets a free 2nd launch, with all the algo/pr benefits of a full launch, at any arbitrary date, which is impossible for non-EA games.
Except it seems like most EA games these days never actually get built much beyond the EA launch, and then after 6-18 months of radio silence, some random version gets tagged as “1.0” and the dev then disappears.
Early access is, at least for me, starting to a signal of poor quality. Certainly when the EA release is barely beyond a tech demo.
And many of those games that aren't porn or straight asset flips are... undesirable. And they will crowd out your middle game.
12,653 games were released on Steam in 2022[1]. I don't even want to know how many are released on Android/iOS. This is not 1992 where you need a assembly wizard to even make a game, and while the author tried to address this, the fact that any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out seems like an unavoidable elephant in the room.
I'm not sure what's "between the lines". The chart shows the bulk of games released (~12000) being limited to the 4 of their 8 categories which have the lowest median revenue. Those categories being: (Visual Novel, ~4000, $1k), (Sexual Content, ~4000, $2k), (Dating Sim, ~2000, $3k), (Management, ~2000, $4k). The other 4 categories have a tenth of the releases and higher revenue. So there's a huge amount of "porn and visual novels" that are driving the median revenue down.
Arguably that should be even easier to make. Find a good artist who's willing to take a bit of a gamble, program some excuse gameplay, usually some sort of puzzle game, and you're pretty much set. If your audience knows what they're there for, really the game is just a vehicle for the eye candy.
This focuses a lot on the production/offer side, but is there really all that much demand for the size of game advocated for? Aren't those publishers asking for bigger games because that's what the market is looking for?
The publishing side went big because of the rachet of financial leverage and consolidation.
From their perspective, because a big game is predicted to earn more, and because investment will chase higher returns, they have to say they'll go big to get any investors on board. The publishers that can stay small have to bootstrap, which makes them unattractive as sources of funding. It's not being driven by consumers that assume a production with 4000 people involved is strictly better than one with 3 people, it's the funnelling effect of all the money coming from more speculative sources that have no motive to consider industry health holistically - which is a macro-economic problem.
You can learn about the early days of this from Matt Barton's interview series with Robert Sirotek, particularly the last part[0]. Sir-Tech ran sustainably, by Robert's assessment, and consistently shipped smaller productions, but a shake-out occurred in the 90's. At first it was primarily coming from retailers who wanted things done their way to get a placement, squeezing out lower-cap players and imposing drop-dead ship dates on the developers. But it's reasserted itself a few times in a few different ways, since then, and is now pretty clearly tied to the industry being in a dilemma of either getting no investment, or endless amounts, with a promise of making 100x that, which ultimately reflects the decades-long asset bubble and increasing use of "free money" federal lending. If they don't promise those kinds of returns, someone else takes the funding.
So, the market is actually scrambling to figure out what to do with the investment tap cut off right now. Embracer Group, one of the biggest consolidators of the last cycle, reported troubling finances last quarter and has started closing studios. It's become a "lowering tide, see who swims naked" market.
Other than the explanation in the article (big businesses work with big sums, for one thing) -- game publishers (particularly at the big end of town) are notorious for being dead wrong about what customers want and have consistently demonstrated that they decide what the market wants and then try to make that the case. See: single-player games are dead, the only type of game in the future will be live services, Sonic, etc.
The biggest misconception game developers generaly have about games is they think they are content like movies/series amd music. That is that the average player plays hundreds of games, one after the other.
Games are successful or failed killer apps. Like any other software mind you. The average player spend 88% of his time / money playing a very few hits like Minecraft.
Which solves your middle-games paradox: those just don't sell anymore. In other words, if you'd make a Commander Keen today, you'd sell 3 copies to your grand-ma (yes grannies play games now).
There is always those who come to tell: I have hundreds of games in my Steam library. "Yes me too". Yes you do and on average you guys still spent 88% of your time / money on a handful of them. They are exceptions of course. There is a line that's somewhere but nowhere near "games are content"
>The average player spend 88% of his time / money playing a very few hits like Minecraft.
if you're making a console/PC game, 12% is a lot of time to capture, and it's still a huge market.
the "middle game" as described in this article is still a very small scope, even if it's not necessarily more profitable than alternatives. $10k is selling 2000 copies (+ more to cover Steam's cut, so 2700-ish) of a $5 game. Those aren't crazy numbers and is pretty much a failure to any game with more than 2 people on staff.
This article seems silly to me, considering that plenty of these games already exist. A friend of mine just released their game, Settlemoon after a year of development, while they did other work. According to Steam charts, it's made them around $20k since launch. The issue is clearly discoverability, not that developers just don't release small games.
Who wants to buy a middle class game, when you have more daily deals on high quality games then you can ever finish in your free time?
It seems to ignore that the distribution channels, the long term availability, the international access, dont have an influence on how to release and monetize a game. The few examples shown are some of the extremely few, very lucky projects that probably made money.
i do! i got a steam deck recently, and picked up a bunch of big name games on sale, but i've been spending all my time playing "brotato" and "dust: an elysian tale" because they are the distilled essence of fun gameplay in a way the bigger and ostensibly higher quality games are not.
I don't actually believe this sort of middle is missing in market. There is plenty enough of them. And these day they qualify as small games.
Middle games are step or two above these. But they suffer from needing both budget and good marketing. But cannot afford either unless they accidentally become hits... AAAs can push both as marketing will bring the sales to fund itself and development.
I generally feel like we can encourage building up more game development platforms, to solve such financial issues. One such platform was roblox, which i previously worked on, the ease in which they onboarded us to develop a game is pretty good. And due to no upfront cost, developers can quite make some money from scratch and the distribution will be handled by the platforms itself. The downsides i see is the cut they will take from us from the profit as well as bending towards their rules.
For advanced development we are still limited by the technological limitations provided by the platform, so it kind of limits our overall ambition too.
Don't we already have the analog of a "big platform" distributed among a few huge companies? It's mostly app stores provided by Apple/Google/Microsoft/Steam/Sony, with the needed tooling provided by Unreal/Unity. We also have cuts and we have to bend to their rules.
I'd love to see a histogram of all game budgets for every game on Steam. I think the missing middle would be immediately apparent. We'd see the AAA games in the $250-500 million range, a few scattered games below that, and then an absolutely huge mass in the <$10,000 range. I don't know why people don't make more games in the $100,000-$1,000,000 range. I suspect that it's hard to find investors for small projects like that.
$1 megabuck per year is roughly 4-5 developers and nobody else.
Yes, you can argue that some developers would work for less than that, but any programmers capable of generating a good game can then go get jobs somewhere else.
And you need art assets. And music assets. And sound effects. And ...
This is why there is no "middle". Earning $5 million on a game (not $5 million per year--$5 million total) is absurdly successful on Steam.
> Yet, despite all the limitations of the 1990s, the guys at id Software could make 13 games in 1 year.
> In today’s post I want to explore why new indie game developers plunge themselves into much longer game development cycles. The industry has essentially stretched us to cut out one of the most important stepping stones between tiny games and multi-year projects. This has caused developers to have incorrect assumptions, wasted resources, and burnout.
If anything, productivity is much higher today. There are small shops out there shipping dozens of simple games a year, mostly in the mobile industry.
On the other hand, making and shipping a high level cross platform game is a gargantuan task. A small company can easily spend 5+ years building a game and still disappoint their fans.
If you want to know what making AAA games at an understaffed shop is like since the mid 2000s, look up Bethesda's documentary
Yes, and the point is that you need to do that if you want to do that. Diving into big projects prevents you from working on small projects, gaining that experience and establishing those processes.
Tl;Dr: because everyone wants to get obscenely rich from doing it.
Fair enough.
I guess the whole start-up billionaire phenomenon thing has changed people's outlook (Google, Facebook, Minecraft etc). Understandably everyone wants to do something once, make a huge pile of money from it, and then never have to work again.
Personally I'd be quite happy to work on a game for a month as a vacation-project/side-project and "only" make 15k from it.
30-hour is qn "epic" game? If a game provides lese than 100 hours of fun then it should be called junk imho. Aim for that "middle" if you want, but i wont buy your game.
A developer that cranks out a dozen little games will inevitably rely on trickery and deceptive marketing in order to convince consumers thier games are worth anything. Most of the games i play are from a developer dedicated to the continued improvement of a single title across many years. Factorio, subnautica, prison architect ... such games take focus. Entire careers can be dedictated to improving a single game (minecraft). The modern indi market demands long term commitment, not fly-by-night studios attempting is get in and out in months Among Trees burned many bridges with indi gamers willing to buy into games early.
Or you can develop mobile games powered by addiction and microtransactions. I guess that is a "market" too.
From a player perspective, you're wrong. Go play something like Outer Wilds, you'll finish it in a few hours, and the game will never be the same after you finish, but it will leave an impression as strong or stronger than 10,000 hours in Factorio.
From a game publisher perspective, you're right, you want to create "lifestyle games" that players can put 1,000 hours or more into. These games are more likely to sell because YouTubers and streamers will find a niche publishing content for these endlessly repayable games, and that will attract a lot of eyeballs and drive a lot of sales. If your game is "just" an incredible story and experience, then a lot of people will experience it by watching their favorite streamer play the game, and then they will never play it themselves. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIqz5xmQKnc
qwery|2 years ago
Cost of living.
The market is saturated. The market being saturated pushes it to be (even more) hit-oriented. 'Saturated' as in a sponge held at the bottom of a full bathtub. You can keep releasing more games but the people you want to buy them (let alone play them) aren't going to quit their second job to find the time to buy and try your weird little games.
This is not the middle. The author is talking about small games. It may be the middle of indie game development, but across the whole landscape, the "missing middle" would seem to refer to the "single-/double-A" studios/publishers/games that died out between the launch of the PS2 and the release of GTA IV.
id Software is an exception and makes a poor example to follow. Studying wild success stories is not without merit, but is -- if you are interested in how to do the thing successfully -- ultimately a trap. id was (among other things) in the right place at the right time. There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way. You cannot make a game as radical and captivating as DOOM was. You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz. You might say there was very little opportunity for any individual to do so back then as well, but then we are back at exceptions being bad examples.
adnzzzzZ|2 years ago
The article has plenty of current examples of developers doing this on Steam now that are not at all outliers or an exception. For another concrete example you have something like Chilla's Art https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Chilla%27s%.... Two japanese developers who have been releasing games for 5 years very consistently and have slowly built up their audience while also increasing their skills as developers. They also have a Patreon, which is a model that works nicely, with another more known example of it being Sokpop https://sokpop.co/. And for all their consistent work they're now getting rewarded pretty nicely for it, without having had a single insanely huge hit as far as I can tell. You can find plenty of examples of devs like this, doing it and succeeding on Steam, right now. Calling all of them exceptions sounds like a poor excuse.
>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz.
Yes, you need to be creative in the creative profession and come up with good ideas. That comes with the territory. If you aren't very creative then you should probably consider doing something else.
chii|2 years ago
Which is why game mechanic and gameplay is where the boundaries are, not computational efficiency or photorealism (or even, artistic direction or production value).
I imagine that prior to Jonathan Blow's indie hit "Braid", people were also imagining that the technological ceiling has been hit and an individual (or small team) cannot compete with the AAA studios.
hgs3|2 years ago
Checkout the demoscene.
An example of a megahit that started as a tech demo was Teardown [1]. It features a fully destructible world running on a custom game engine created by one guy. It succeeded because of the technical "wow" factor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teardown_(video_game)
johnnyanmac|2 years ago
To be fair, the author specifically listed their definition in the opening:
>These are games that are bigger and more polished than a game jam game but are not huge, 30 hour epic triple-I indie game. A “middle game” should only take 1 to 9 months to create and can be profitable (or at least not a money sink) because it is expected to earn in the range of $10,000 to $40,000.
if you don't agree with the definition, then of course the rest of the arguments run hollow. But this was an article aimed at existing (or soon to be) small indie developers, not consumers nor AAA developers.
>here is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.
Sure there are. But you aren't making a game at that point, nor should try to sell a game on that premise. maybe a tech demo, but that can still be a multi-year venture depedning on the tech. Consumers don't care.
People who do that sell tools to other devs who may make games based off that, and that's probably a more profitable venture than indie devlopment.
KTallguy|2 years ago
> This is not the middle. The author is talking about small games.
Exactly what I thought reading this article. It’s very hard to stand out and it’ll only get harder. Tools are much better than before, and now AI generation is entering the ring. Being an exceptional game is half the problem, the other half is getting noticed. Which takes money, or connections. Usually both.
Two additional points.
1. Good interaction design is still hard. Making something that many people can play and understand quickly is a skill. Releasing lots of content is the best way to learn.
2. Back in the Newgrounds days it was really simple to put something out there and get feedback on it quickly. Ads were (generally) not woven into games directly, the Flash tools were simpler and they limited game scope. Itch.io is ok for this but has a lot of downloadable stuff. I miss the days where browser games were huge but I guess there’s no money in it anymore. Maybe someone with better insight can share.
rubicon33|2 years ago
x0x0|2 years ago
> So why is it so bad now that games earned $10,000 when 30 years ago it was the norm? Because now there is a slim chance to become super rich because of the indie-utopia.
Which is an utter misdiagnosis of the problem. $10k 30 years ago was a decent chunk of an annual salary which included amenities like living indoors. $10k now is, in the bay area, 1 month's salary if you wish to live indoors.
3seashells|2 years ago
fosk|2 years ago
BigglesB|2 years ago
I’m almost 2 months into a project which essentially boils down to an iteration of Asteroids & have a demo up on Steam, but while I’m really pleased with it so far, I’d be surprised if the game even makes $1,000 at this stage, let alone $10,000. I’d be very happy with the latter though as I’m treating this very much as a learning experience, not the least in terms of getting my head around the marketing & community building side of things.
I’ve also worked on a game which I’d consider to be a “modest success” that took 2-3 years with a friend & sold enough copies for my share to so far pay (almost) £24k/year, which as others have mentioned isn’t exactly a competitive salary for a software developer generally.
In particular, while I can probably build small games in the 2-3 month timeframes suggested (especially if each is an iteration on the last), don’t forget all the “marketing admin” & trailer making & so forth. That’s also definitely not enough time to build enough wishlists to get any Steam visibility etc.
Still, definitely timely food for thought for me personally!
TheOtherHobbes|2 years ago
Not quality of output. Not speed of output - as long as that's above a minimum.
But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend.
DOOM was dropped into an ecosystem of PC magazines and BBSs and almost sold itself - literally with the shareware release. It had almost no obvious competitors. There was some ad spend, but not a huge amount.
Today there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of small/medium games available across multiple platforms. Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be.
Meanwhile the AAAs have a budget for carpet bomb marketing. Skyrim spent around $15m, which is an insane sum.
freddie_mercury|2 years ago
Like, I understand that $120,000 isn't a lot for a team of 3 Americans. But that's a pretty good amount of money in Poland, Brazil, or Vietnam. So why don't we see these "missing middle" games coming from those places?
Sure, American publishers aren't interested in writing small checks... But what about Chinese or Indian publishers?
bobthepanda|2 years ago
Poland actually had CD Projekt Red, but Cyberpunk 2077 from that studio was perhaps one of the greatest dumpster fire releases of the current decade. Don’t know about India, but a lot of Chinese development is gacha-based with limited western appeal. (It also does not help that the CCP censors are not particularly fond of video games.)
sgt|2 years ago
I've never been to Brazil myself, but someone said that an iPhone is $3000 USD in Brazil, so I wouldn't blindly assume that $120k is super amazing to developers there.
Also, I quickly googled and found something that resembles an family house and it is very expensive at $280k[0]. I could very well be googling incorrectly so HN Brazilians can hopefully add some context.
[0] https://www.realtor.com/international/br/alameda-ezequiel-ma...
kaycey2022|2 years ago
ehnto|2 years ago
cableshaft|2 years ago
According to this inflation calculator[1], $40k in 1986 is equivalent to $112k today.
[1]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
derobert|2 years ago
Am I understanding that right?
A reasonably competent developer could make at least twice that in salary, with far less risk. So that's not really profitable, once you remember opportunity cost (and especially if you risk-adjust it).
The ones that take a few days can be a weekend project. The longer projects you'd be hoping become huge, and very profitable.
whstl|2 years ago
Doing those mid-level games is arguably equivalent to taking a low-paid internship.
qwery|2 years ago
The problem the article is addressing (I think) is that this reality does not seem to inform the popularly held beliefs and expectations of (inexperienced?) indie game developers, and the effects of that.
helloplanets|2 years ago
You'd most likely be working on a small portion of a bigger game at a salaried job, without really being able to accumulate the needed skillset to jump into a larger game developed on your own terms.
gambiting|2 years ago
meheleventyone|2 years ago
The hypothetical three year game made by an indie team expecting to make $300,000 is still going to be earning far below a normal software salary.
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
What some successful devs seems to do is make a "mid game" Early Access prototype, learn as they go, and if it seems to work, grow it into a bigger game.
I really like this approach, as its like having your cake and eating it. The dev gets an "excuse" for barebones features in a release and free alpha testing. Escape bridges are not burnt. The game builds up a following and a small revenue stream. And then it gets a free 2nd launch, with all the algo/pr benefits of a full launch, at any arbitrary date, which is impossible for non-EA games.
TylerE|2 years ago
Early access is, at least for me, starting to a signal of poor quality. Certainly when the EA release is barely beyond a tech demo.
jncfhnb|2 years ago
https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic
But reading between the lines I think it’s driven by porn and visual novels
brucethemoose2|2 years ago
12,653 games were released on Steam in 2022[1]. I don't even want to know how many are released on Android/iOS. This is not 1992 where you need a assembly wizard to even make a game, and while the author tried to address this, the fact that any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out seems like an unavoidable elephant in the room.
1: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
qwery|2 years ago
deadbeeves|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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johnnyanmac|2 years ago
jowea|2 years ago
syntheweave|2 years ago
From their perspective, because a big game is predicted to earn more, and because investment will chase higher returns, they have to say they'll go big to get any investors on board. The publishers that can stay small have to bootstrap, which makes them unattractive as sources of funding. It's not being driven by consumers that assume a production with 4000 people involved is strictly better than one with 3 people, it's the funnelling effect of all the money coming from more speculative sources that have no motive to consider industry health holistically - which is a macro-economic problem.
You can learn about the early days of this from Matt Barton's interview series with Robert Sirotek, particularly the last part[0]. Sir-Tech ran sustainably, by Robert's assessment, and consistently shipped smaller productions, but a shake-out occurred in the 90's. At first it was primarily coming from retailers who wanted things done their way to get a placement, squeezing out lower-cap players and imposing drop-dead ship dates on the developers. But it's reasserted itself a few times in a few different ways, since then, and is now pretty clearly tied to the industry being in a dilemma of either getting no investment, or endless amounts, with a promise of making 100x that, which ultimately reflects the decades-long asset bubble and increasing use of "free money" federal lending. If they don't promise those kinds of returns, someone else takes the funding.
So, the market is actually scrambling to figure out what to do with the investment tap cut off right now. Embracer Group, one of the biggest consolidators of the last cycle, reported troubling finances last quarter and has started closing studios. It's become a "lowering tide, see who swims naked" market.
[0] https://mattbarton.net/?tag=robert-sirotek
qwery|2 years ago
quadcore|2 years ago
The biggest misconception game developers generaly have about games is they think they are content like movies/series amd music. That is that the average player plays hundreds of games, one after the other.
Games are successful or failed killer apps. Like any other software mind you. The average player spend 88% of his time / money playing a very few hits like Minecraft.
Which solves your middle-games paradox: those just don't sell anymore. In other words, if you'd make a Commander Keen today, you'd sell 3 copies to your grand-ma (yes grannies play games now).
There is always those who come to tell: I have hundreds of games in my Steam library. "Yes me too". Yes you do and on average you guys still spent 88% of your time / money on a handful of them. They are exceptions of course. There is a line that's somewhere but nowhere near "games are content"
johnnyanmac|2 years ago
if you're making a console/PC game, 12% is a lot of time to capture, and it's still a huge market.
the "middle game" as described in this article is still a very small scope, even if it's not necessarily more profitable than alternatives. $10k is selling 2000 copies (+ more to cover Steam's cut, so 2700-ish) of a $5 game. Those aren't crazy numbers and is pretty much a failure to any game with more than 2 people on staff.
dmonitor|2 years ago
codingcodingboy|2 years ago
rspoerri|2 years ago
It seems to ignore that the distribution channels, the long term availability, the international access, dont have an influence on how to release and monetize a game. The few examples shown are some of the extremely few, very lucky projects that probably made money.
archagon|2 years ago
zem|2 years ago
Ekaros|2 years ago
Middle games are step or two above these. But they suffer from needing both budget and good marketing. But cannot afford either unless they accidentally become hits... AAAs can push both as marketing will bring the sales to fund itself and development.
loveparade|2 years ago
lordwiz|2 years ago
For advanced development we are still limited by the technological limitations provided by the platform, so it kind of limits our overall ambition too.
whstl|2 years ago
phendrenad2|2 years ago
bsder|2 years ago
Yes, you can argue that some developers would work for less than that, but any programmers capable of generating a good game can then go get jobs somewhere else.
And you need art assets. And music assets. And sound effects. And ...
This is why there is no "middle". Earning $5 million on a game (not $5 million per year--$5 million total) is absurdly successful on Steam.
bagels|2 years ago
mkl95|2 years ago
> In today’s post I want to explore why new indie game developers plunge themselves into much longer game development cycles. The industry has essentially stretched us to cut out one of the most important stepping stones between tiny games and multi-year projects. This has caused developers to have incorrect assumptions, wasted resources, and burnout.
If anything, productivity is much higher today. There are small shops out there shipping dozens of simple games a year, mostly in the mobile industry.
On the other hand, making and shipping a high level cross platform game is a gargantuan task. A small company can easily spend 5+ years building a game and still disappoint their fans.
If you want to know what making AAA games at an understaffed shop is like since the mid 2000s, look up Bethesda's documentary
langsoul-com|2 years ago
Just because you must release at least 2-3 mid games, or more, per year to break even
qwery|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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mattlondon|2 years ago
Fair enough.
I guess the whole start-up billionaire phenomenon thing has changed people's outlook (Google, Facebook, Minecraft etc). Understandably everyone wants to do something once, make a huge pile of money from it, and then never have to work again.
Personally I'd be quite happy to work on a game for a month as a vacation-project/side-project and "only" make 15k from it.
sandworm101|2 years ago
A developer that cranks out a dozen little games will inevitably rely on trickery and deceptive marketing in order to convince consumers thier games are worth anything. Most of the games i play are from a developer dedicated to the continued improvement of a single title across many years. Factorio, subnautica, prison architect ... such games take focus. Entire careers can be dedictated to improving a single game (minecraft). The modern indi market demands long term commitment, not fly-by-night studios attempting is get in and out in months Among Trees burned many bridges with indi gamers willing to buy into games early.
Or you can develop mobile games powered by addiction and microtransactions. I guess that is a "market" too.
Buttons840|2 years ago
From a game publisher perspective, you're right, you want to create "lifestyle games" that players can put 1,000 hours or more into. These games are more likely to sell because YouTubers and streamers will find a niche publishing content for these endlessly repayable games, and that will attract a lot of eyeballs and drive a lot of sales. If your game is "just" an incredible story and experience, then a lot of people will experience it by watching their favorite streamer play the game, and then they will never play it themselves. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIqz5xmQKnc
gizmo|2 years ago