> “But look at that AI… look at those colors… look at that particle explosion!”
Unfortunately, while I admire all of these things, there's not good selling points for most consumers anymore. Because of AAA titles, people come to expect things like good AI and good explosions, and are only disappointed when their expectation aren't met.
To truly break out in the indie gaming market, you've got have very unique gameplay and a good bit of luck with marketing. Two indie games that have done a really good job of this lately:
Can't recommend FTL enough. My wife and I like to play it together, making decisions together throughout the game.
It's like the video game analogue of Space Alert, a board game with a somewhat similar premise. Funny enough in this case the board game is real time and the video game has a (much needed) pause option.
Is it possible that the market is now so saturated with games of all kinds that it's simply hard to find enough customers to care about each separate product? Between smartphone app stores, Facebook games, a half dozen different consoles, an endless supply of entertainment through Steam, Kickstarter and (basically free) Bundles of all sorts, it must be really difficult to stand out without a truly unique product and phenomenal marketing.
As some of you folks pointed out, it's turning into a race to the bottom similar to the music industry, where people won't even play your product for free, even when it's really high quality. Think of all the games you accumulated through Steam sales and never even touched. It's a brutal war over the spare time of the average gamer, and it's highly contested space.
I don't know about games but in indie music the market used to be saturated by free mediocre music, and now it's starting to become saturated by free good music. But not because the musicians want to generously give all their music away for free, it's because they're all chasing the same goal of "if I give some away for free, the marketing boost will make up for it". And as more people enter the market, that belief gets less and less valid. I think there might be a lot of parallels with game-making. A popular thing to produce but the "game theory" behind it is tough as everyone races to destruction. I keep hoping that something like repeated-prisoners-dilemma will happen, where producers collectively decide to act in a way that is in everyone's best interest.
The market is saturated by mediocre-to-average games. There's plenty of room for truly great stuff.
Just today we heard about Banished, a beautiful city builder game in development by one guy which has hardcore PC gamers (jaded creatures indeed) very excited:
It used to be that there was only a very narrow market for games, but now there is casual, hard core, mobile, tablet and console, desktop, MMO's, indy, web. But to offset that the market is also much bigger and more inclusive. There are people that now pay for video games that would never have bought a Nintendo or an Xbox. If you want to make money in video games you have to find a niche and give that audience quality versions of what they want.
So few Mac games make it down the transom that I do take note when they show up on Steam's list. Ultratron was one of them, though I didn't buy it because it didn't seem like something I'd be into. Whether or not the game deserves to be a blockbuster, it indeed stinks when hard-working developers don't have much of a net or runway to finally craft the next big indie hit.
That said, there still seems to be opportunities to break out for developers of all sizes. Recent success stories that come to mind:
* Faster than Light, a space sim just made for Star Trek fans...it reached $200K on Kickstarter -- 2000% of what they had initially asked for -- and it still seems to be selling well. I just bought it last week and it has ruined my free time (http://www.ftlgame.com/)
* Block Fortress - a ingenious mishmash of MineCraft, first person shooters, and tower defense. These developers (apparently, four brothers) also made the great Heroes and Castles, a first person tower defense game. And both of these games are dirt cheap with totally reasonable/optional IAP: http://foursakenmedia.com/
* Ridiculous Fishing - a casual iOS game made by some all-stars of iOS development, including Vlambeer and the guy (Zach Gage) who did the awesome SpellTower, one of the iOS games I've played the longest: http://www.ridiculousfishing.com/
One of my favorite dev reads from last year was "Starcraft: Orcs in Space go does down in flames" (http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-d...), in which the Starcraft dev talks about how a completely faked game, Dominion Storm, forced Blizzard to reboot Starcraft (for the better)...the game was faked at E3, where companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars just to secure floor space and throw big BS publicity stunts, because that was the only way to get press attention.
At least today, as a developer, you have options of getting yourself known and your work seen without having to jostle for floor space with the big boys.
I bought Ridiculous Fishing out of curiosity for the water-themed game mechanics, but it's a very poor game, specially with the coins/store crap. It was sitting at the top of featured games, makes me think it's success has more to do with the names behind it than the game itself.
I think you've made a very big insufficiently justified leap to "very poor game". I also don't understand the remark about the "coins/store crap". Unlike many other iOS games, it has no in app purchases.
If you read interviews with the creators, you'd see that they wanted a very tight reward loop for the game. They also wanted to be certain that no matter how you played, you'd always feel like you could make more progress.
As for "the names behind it"; it's a group of Dutch indie developers. It's hardly selling because of their names.
I'd like to see a more objective, reasoned post from you about why it's a "poor game".
One of the most important things I learned in life was how to more objectively evaluate something by asking if it was well made, used techniques properly, etc. You may not personally enjoy the game, but that does not make it a "poor game".
I think you should have said, "it appears to be a well-made game that clearly the creators spent years polishing, but the gameplay itself is not something I enjoy".
The parent called them "all-stars of iOS development". This is clearly only my opinion, maybe I was too blunt - in-game currency is a real turn-off for me.
After a whole 15 seconds of gameplay I was greeted by a popup "please buy a longer line in the store", that's probably what blew my experience from the start. Now I can only think of it as an endless loop of [coins -> better gear -> more coins -> gear], and have no interest in playing at all. Just trying to break a depth/points record, like pre-farmville games, would be enough incentive for me to keep playing.
You do realize that it's just a basic computer RPG equipment upgrade system on top of an arcade game, right? At no point do they ask you for real money. The coins are basically XP you can use to upgrade stuff.
I do. In most RPGs there are much more complex relations at work, not a simple single-path progression of coins/equipment. I don't think it adds anything to this genre.
On the strength of this article I downloaded the demo, and it was a long way away from "a visual lollipop of swirling color that leaves your eyes sparkling and pixelated for hours". In fact, it was deathly dull. I gave it five minutes and encountered nothing remotely resembling challenge or interest. The graphics aren't bad, but from the article I was expecting to be blown away; I saw nothing that hasn't been done five years ago.
Maybe their sales stink for a reason. Back to Touhou for me.
I played Ultratron too and it is a decent game but not very interesting. Revenge of the Titans on the other hand is an excellent, exciting game and I'm surprised it's not more successful.
It is worth adding more upgrades, mods and marketing to milk that cow.
I feel like I remember playing this game five years ago ... Maybe even eight years ago. In fact, yeah, I think this is a game from 2005 (maybe it was just recently released on Steam or something). It definitely felt like something new or at least very well done when I first played it.
A decade ago when I first released my shareware app for users of eBay, I actively participated in a video game forum. Why a game forum? I wanted my software to feel fun and exciting to use, and in 2003, nearly all software I could think of had a crappy user interface and user experience.
Cas complained in many forum threads about about how hard and unprofitable it was to finish a game. I remember writing a particularly long post about how he should just work on his game and everything will work out. Also, I repeated advice many gave that he should use existing game libraries and engines, and focus on finishing the game. Also, that he should create casual games rather than retro arcade games.
Knowing nothing about him, except how much he stood out trying to do things his way, it's amazing how determined he's been.
I realized only recently that Minecraft was created using the lwjgl (http://www.lwjgl.org/), the lightweight Java Game Library that Cas created as a result of writing his own games in Java (how crazy!) instead of using existing open-source and closed-source game frameworks.
Not many people have the drive to create exactly the kind of games they want to play, as well as their own developer tools, for over ten years.
There was nobody there to tell him that he needs to quit his day job and join a startup accelerator, as well as find a co-founder first.
The idea that you will eventually realize some financial gains if you keep releasing quality games or apps is common wisdom. But to actually realize, ten years later, just how rare it is for a developer to continue to make and polish stuff for themselves, regardless of what other people think? Or to have created something that enabled a massively popular video game to be created?
Indeed, if it weren't for people like us, there wouldn't be most of the games that people love playing today. There'd be no Minecraft, no FTL, no Terraria, no Binding of Isaac.
I worked in the game industry between 2000 and 2006, mostly on MMO titles.
This is a simple supply and demand problem.
There is a HUGE supply of young males who want to work in the gaming industry, and the customer demand for games of the quality which they can supply is insufficient.
This is why you have so many gaming schools that can't actually take all the potential students who want to join, but very few of the graduates can actually get jobs.
In the last few years, there have been so many great games that I can't possibly play them all. This has been lamented by many in recent times. There are just so many people working on games that there are a ton of great games out there, and some of the really good games get ignored because of the pile-on effect that a few of the great games get.
I should note that Puppy Games titles are awesome and work on Linux.
Not related: Lately I've been playing FTL a lot. It's awesome too.
"so many great games that I can't possibly play them all"
Are there? Outside of the shooters.
For example, I'm a fan of turn based strategies but I don't see much of those in the recent years.
And not much other kind of strategies either.
Blizzard does it cool and CIV still survives, but this isn't "a lot" compared to the times that were.
I remember Cas (the game's author) from waaaay back in the day on Java game programming forums. Always seemed like quite a character, but as far as I know he's been plugging away at indie game development for at least a decade. His company has a really slick asthetic. The games they make aren't really my cup of tea (genre-wise) but they look fantastic.
> But the customers have stopped listening by now and are giggling along with a game that makes farting noises when you mash a red gradient rectangle with your nose.
People just want to have fun with games, they don't care about how advanced the AI is, or the physics of explosions and stuff like that. Sure, some people do care about this things...
Did the company make any research to see if there was demand for this kind of game? Doesn't matter how technically advanced the game is if no one want's to play it.
We knew there was no huge demand for Ultratron. Although, Binding of Isaac.
Our original blog post was about how much it costs to make such a game, and how much money such a game earns typically, not about whether it's a failure or success.
I don't know about anybody else but I'm starting to experience indie game fatigue about now.
Every time I open up Steam there is some other "8 bit" sidescroller or zelda clone on offer for £2.99.
OTOH there are plenty of interesting RTS games I remember from the old DOS era that could make a comeback that would require art assets beyond pixelated sprites but still less technical than a modern AAA.
By selling a lot of copies AND putting barely anything into it. Super Hexagon is bereft of actual content and actually has very little actual game in it. It is a perfect example of how to make money from not much work.
That's not cricket, old chap, to knock the competition.
Super Hexagon has highly polished gameplay and a stellar soundtrack, not to mention being very, very fun. IMO Terry Cavanagh knew exactly what to leave out.
I've met Terry personally, and I didn't knock Super Hexagon. I've just said it how it is: Super Hexagon (and VVVVVV for that matter) are examples of how to make games on the cheap.
We don't do that, though. We put AAA polish and content into every title.
* Making games is like making music, movies, books, etc. in that the odds of you having a hit are very small. Thousands of people try, few are successful.
* I've seen a several articles about games here on HN that have been about "me to" games. Clones of clones of clones. The authors want us to pat them on the back for making a ripoff? Sorry. Make something original.
Personal opinion but Ultratron does not look even as good as the game it's supposedly cloning, Robotron 2084, which has way more "visual lollipop of swirling color that leaves your eyes sparkling and pixelated for hours". Compare
This being said, the version of Ultratron released on Steam has had some significant graphical and gameplay updates. It's the third major revision of the game.
Ah my mistake, I was referring to the 360 release of Geometry Wars (I've never actually played it, mostly coz I've never owned a console!)
The original was 10 years ago now. Think about that for a moment! Some of the people who are actually old enough to buy a game with their own credit card now were only 8 years old when Geometry Wars first appeared. Crazy.
Why would the author expect big sales from a polished version of a 30 year old genre? Look at his competition: Here is another $4.99 game in the action/indie category http://store.steampowered.com/app/211400/
The recent big indie hits are genre defining or at least have very unique gameplay. (minecraft, ftl, etc)
When we were making Ultratron for Steam we knew that it wasn't ever going to actually sell much, but that was not the point of the article. The point of the blog post I wrote was simply to say, it takes this long and this much money to make a game like this, and it earns about this much money, so we're not going to do them any more. I think it's a shame because it scratches an itch that just isn't scratched anywhere else. And that's what Jeff was getting at, indirectly; it's a shame that these kinds of games aren't really all that viable to make. I don't want to play endless zombie games and man-shooters. I want to play games like Ultratron, and almost nobody is making them any more, which is why we've made it.
Ah. Thanks for clarifying. For very small markets, like classics or nostalgic, maybe you could up the price because your potential buyers are price elastic?
If you are selling to 10,000 older, rich guys who crave old school arcade action, why not sell at a $40 price point?
That's the only solution I can think of that other niche markets do to stay alive (collectibles, etc).
I'm sure the author already knows the facts of life, and was merely sharing his lament of those facts. But for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know, especially kids:
This is not a viable way to get paid.
1. Do something you enjoy
2. Collect payment
This is a viable way to get paid.
1. Select a person or group that has money
2. Figure out what they are willing to pay for
3. Do that thing
4. If you haven't received payment, return to step 1
I'm sorry that Ultron and Droid Assault haven't done well, but they're both twin-stick shooters that aren't playable using a gamepad. That's an initial turn off for many hardcore fans of the genre.
I can't speak for Ultron because the demo (not available on Steam) won't run on Windows 8, but last time I tried Droid Assault, it took a while to pick up in difficulty. I didn't encounter much challenge until near the end of the (rather long) demo.
Droid Assault was also pretty easy to exploit; the first few boss enemies won't chase you off screen, so it was possible to pop in and out of hiding, firing off a few shots at a time. This makes for boring gameplay, but the game didn't discourage it.
The games don't seem to be aimed at hardcore gamers, and they're not popular with casual gamers. Who is Puppygames target audience?
Ultratron works fine with a controller. Droid Assault is most definitely not a twin-stick shooter.
We deliberately make our games easy because they sell more. The easier they are, the more they sell. Simple formula.
The target audience is me. I am a child of the 70s, grew up in the arcades and playing on C64s. The games of that era are shit. They weren't shit then, but they are now. What I do is take old game ideas and make them not shit, and I think I do pretty well at that. One of the biggest components of not-shitness is making sure that most players can see most of the game before it gets too hard for them.
FWIW I've never completed any of my own games, I'm that rubbish.
The comparison to music is apt. I have a friend who went through the 90's in a grunge band and had a small modicum of success (they released three albums) and said he's glad he's not in the music industry now. He described the music industry these days in one word: saturation. Actually, an over saturation of shitty music.
These days, it really takes an effort to find good music. It's the same thing with the gaming industry. There's so many games, it's hard for people to sift through the shit to get to a decent game. When you have an entire generation of kids with an attention span of a goldfish, unless you have millions in marketing, it's a long, long road till you make some money.
I'm reminded of the immortal words of AC/DC when they sang: "It's a LONG way to the top if you wanna rock n' roll."
Right now is the best time to be a musician ever. Recording tools are cheap, distribution is virtually free.
Being a fan of music has never been as awesome as now. Access to new music is virtually free and instant.
It takes much less effort to find good music now than ever before. I can just hit up TasteKid and listen to new music on Youtube, where I get further recommendations, which I can instantly listen to, too.
There was a short period in the history of recorded music where you could make a lot of money from it because making copies and distributing them was hard. This is not the case anymore, and as a musician and a fan of music I can't be thankful enough for that.
I think the phrase is a little overworn and misappropriated but I think it's a little bit applicable here:
"The customer is always right."
Recently I've seen this phrase thrown around more as a customer service mantra, and in those cases I don't think the customer is actually always right, though it may be the best course of action to act like they are.
In the case of a customer liking or disliking your game/app/widget. They ARE right. Or at least they're not wrong. I think the greatest point of this article is that the author (and hopefully the subject) enjoys developing the games they do. That's a good enough reason right there to keep doing it.
I know they mostly don't make money, but his games are not the kind of games people play on desktop/console. Which tend to be sit down and play for a couple hours over voice with a bunch of friends.
Cas's games are more the grab an iPad and play for 20 minutes while waiting on the bus.
He would most likely have a better chance at breaking even in such an environment.
Clarification: the article author isn't Cas. So the author writes iOS games, whereas Cas writes Java games. (Though they are Java games which cleverly bundle their own JRE, avoiding a lot of the horror that can come with it.)
There are a few detractors from Ultratron in here - and that's fine, I know it's absolutely not everyone's cup of tea - but often the reason given for not "liking" (for want of a better word) the game are specious.
I can summarise some of the perplexity that arise with five words: Explain the Binding of Isaac.
Binding of Isaac starts off with some elements of classic Rogue Like gameplay that also has a dual stick shooter battle mechanics and is finally topped off with an action adventure dungeon exploration and upgrade system.
It is made from three classic successful genres all seamlessly blended together.
Content in the game is given to the player at just the right rate of flow. Dozens of initial play-throughs each reveal new items, and on subsequent plays the player begins to understand how to start combining items together.
Then there is the masterfully done difficulty curve. Facing the game straight on results in death, it is only through understanding of items and upgrades that the player has a hope of surviving, with each new discovery extending the player's life span by just a little bit more.
Then finally there was controversy around the game that got it great press coverage, press coverage which was excellently taken advantage of through very well managed sales and deals.
Binding of Isaac isn't a surprise at all. It isn't just a well made game, it is a well made game that gradually unfolds before the player at just the right pace.
So far from what I have seen in this thread, the primary complaint about Ultratron is the pace at which it ramps up. It sounds like people are saying the demo never really ramped up, which is fairly disappointing for a dual stick shooter. Dual Stick Shooters should create a sense of outright fear at times, and pretty early on in the process. Sure have the first level be a "here is how you shoot!" and that level should be over as soon as the player learns how to shoot.
The next lesson? "Here is how you run away. You'll be doing a lot of it."
There's nothing to indicate the author doesn't understand that point. He's simply being sympathetic to someone who has made a good game and wishing it had more success.
IndieStatik's really nice - lots of in-depth stuff as opposed to rewritten press releases. (OK, they gave my game a positive review, so maybe I'm biased.)
And that publisher is... Steam. The trouble is even with the might of all those well-targeted customers there's still only a few thousand sales to be made - and thanks to the sudden change in the pricing of games in the last 5 years or so, you can now only make 1/10th of the money from a sale that you could before.
In my original posting I wasn't really trying to complain about the situation; just showing the facts and figures, and the ultimate conclusion of course, which is that we're not making any more of them. Probably. It is quite fun.
Clearly there's way more sales to made than thousands, it's just that it's going to be a power law distribution. There's only going to be one Minecraft (10s of millions), a handful of Super Meat Boys (million copies) or Legends of Grimrock (half a million), etc.
It seems like the more interesting question is what a developer can do to increase their likelihood of winning the indie game lottery. Besides making a good game. FTL did it by getting lots of publicity from being an early game development kickstarter success story. Legend of Grimrock had excellent graphics for a 4 man indie game, resurrected a genre that had been dead for a couple of decades, and got good launch-time reviews in a lot of big PC game publications. (I expect that the nostalgia effect was a factor both in getting the reviews in the first place, as well as in them being so positive).
I'm running Linux exclusively these days. I think Eugene Jarvis' Robotron 2084 is one of the best video games ever made. I read the very positive RockPaperShotgun writeup. I noticed that it was cheap on the Steam sale, and I'm perfectly happy to fire money towards games that I feel might be worth it. I also played and enjoyed one of Puppygames earlier offerings, some tower defence game that made it to a Humble Bundle.
So I downloaded and fired up the Ultratron demo. I figure this might be right up my street.
But I passed on it.
To begin with, it didn't play, or sound, anywhere near as compelling as Robotron. Robotron is a visceral, intense experience. When it starts up, it starts up LOUD, your gun fires a rapid, punchy pow-pow-pow noise, amidst various other electronic squawks, you are placed slap-bang in the middle of a higgledy-piggledy gang of hostile robots all heading in your vague direction, and you've got about a quarter of a second to work out which is the right way to move and which way is the right way to shoot to Macguyver your way out of this wave and live for a few seconds more. It's fast, intense, and if you're doing it right, at some point zen kicks in, and conscious thought gets out of the way - you're running on instinct and adrenaline; the game has shortcircuited most of your brain and you're just a vessel for connecting the Robotron machine directly to your lizard backbrain, via a set of fingers. Somewhere in that zone, high-scores get made.
When the Ultratron demo starts up, you're in the middle of the screen, a few slow, passive bad guys are placed somewhere out of the way in the corner, and you have plenty of time to shoot them all (by pointing and clicking) before anything dangerous happens. And then you do it again. And again, with some slightly-varying bad guys. There's nothing intense, or rewarding or difficult about getting past a wave. I figure the game might get better or harder later on, but there was nothing to indicate it would get harder in a satisfying way. It's just chewing-gum for your thumbs.
Ultratron (or at least the demo) doesn't bring any new or compelling game ideas or mechanics to the table either. There's things to pickup including Pacman-style fruit. There's things to shoot at, including Centipede-style spiders. There's boss monsters. There's powerups you buy with coins you pickup. The demo didn't show me anything I hadn't seen a thousand times before in a thousand other games.
The name and the advertising played up Ultratron's Robotron roots, but it didn't once hit my Robotron G-spot, and I didn't see anything new to engage my interest either. Nothing about the game (as opposed to the front end) struck me as bad, but nothing struck me as particularly good either.
We're spoilt for indie games these days - even us Linux-users. I'm currently divvying my gaming time between Super Hexagon (a hypnotic arcade-style one-more-go two-button frustration-fest that DOES tickle that lizard-backbrain), Kerbal Space Program (don't let the muppets fool you, there's a pretty hardcore sandbox space sim going on) and Crusader Kings 2 (medieval grand strategy, where incestuous Royal Marriages and tactical infanticide are as essential as warfare for achieving your territorial ambitions. Think of it as a blend of history book, wargame, soap opera and crack cocaine).
I'm being introduced to new, clever, and interesting games all the time now. It's a buyer's market for gamers these days, and Ultratron just isn't cutting it as far as my free time is concerned.
Oh, one more thing - if you're reading this Puppygames, having a 5-second nag screen advertising the full version after the player has played your demo and is trying to quit is a big turnoff. I tried your demo, I quit it, and I want to do something else. Making the player wait 5 seconds to watch your nag-screen BEFORE playing the game is acceptable - these days, the person playing the demo realises it's the cost of playing the demo without buying the game. Holding the player's operating system to ransom while you throw advertising at him or her is simply not cool at all.
Very strange, because what I see has obviously been done deliberately.
From the main menu, after playing the game and dying and clicking the 'x' in the top left to quit, the game goes to the nag screen. It's the same screen that appears when you start the game, with with an icon in the bottom left to click if you want to buy the game and one in the bottom right to continue to the menu - only the bottom right icon is missing. After about 5 or 6 seconds the button that lets you end the game appears - the button says something like 'Fight evil another day' - and the game finally lets you click it and leave.
When I get home, I might fire up a screen capturer and upload a video to demonstrate the behavior for you.
>both buttons exit the game immediately. See the one on the left? The one that's always there?
And that button is clearly labelled 'Buy Now!'. I don't know which school of user interface design you went to, but when I see a link labelled 'Buy Now!', I figure that if I've no intention of buying the product, then I've no business clicking that link. I don't think I'm an atypical user in this regard.
Plus, since clicking that link does bring up your online store in a web browser (which, I'll reiterate, I've no intention of using), no matter which way you cut it, it still counts as an obnoxious nag and a user interface peeve.
What's more, it's not immediately obvious, in these days of in-app purchases and whatnot, that a link marked 'buy' will exit the game. For instance, suppose this demo was downloaded from a Steam account with some actual cash attached (I don't know if your demo is on Steam, this is a hypothetical), there's no way that I, as an ignorant user, can tell whether you've made some arrangement with Valve or if there's some call in the Steam API where clicking the app can extract the money from my account to automatically buy this game. Similar things are already in place in mobile app stores.
Asking users to go clicking on your 'Buy my product' links willy-nilly is definitely much worse than the behaviour I was originally grumbling about!
(And despite this now interminable forum conversation, it's certainly very far from being the worst crime against gaming out there. Grumbling about it has already eaten up more than it's fair share of time and effort on my part!)
Unfortunately, while I admire all of these things, there's not good selling points for most consumers anymore. Because of AAA titles, people come to expect things like good AI and good explosions, and are only disappointed when their expectation aren't met.
To truly break out in the indie gaming market, you've got have very unique gameplay and a good bit of luck with marketing. Two indie games that have done a really good job of this lately:
FTL: Faster than Light http://www.ftlgame.com/
Prison Architect http://www.introversion.co.uk/prisonarchitect/
As far as mobile games go, most people aren't looking for depth. It's all about quick fun -- e.g. Angry Birds