(no title)
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.
johnnyanmac|2 years ago
Maybe in 2D, but I still doubt it. Quality animations that stick out are still a hard problem to solve and many tools that tried to solve that problem back in the day (Flash, Spline, etc.) don't suffice these days. If you can emulate the look and feel of a hand drawn animation without requiring 1 year+ from your artists to produce content, there's an entry point.
For 3D is absolutely isn't true. Or at least, it is only true in that 99%+ of indies struggle to even achieve AA scales of graphic in a timely matter, or with a small enough team. There's plenty of room for efficiency here if you want to pursue that (but yes, that efficiency will itself require years of work on not-directly-games).
adnzzzzZ|2 years ago
Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games. You can't buy your way to the front page of Steam. Either your game is good and people buy it, play it and share it, or it isn't and then the algorithm will not promote it. There are many things you can and should do to try to nudge the algorithm your way, but by far the best is having a genuinely good game. If the game's quality isn't good you'll mostly be wasting money if you try to approach it with the marketing mindset you have.
>Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be.
It's actually easier than ever because very few games are exceptional, as has always been the case. The offering of exceptional released games doesn't increase just because the total number of released games does. If there suddenly was an AI tool that let anyone finish a game very easily, you still wouldn't get a significant increase in exceptional released games because there aren't that many exceptionally creative people in the world.
codingcodingboy|2 years ago