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.
>I'd probably agree, but I'm not sure who is calling all of them exceptions or what doing so would be an excuse for.
The excuse is basically most replies in this thread, yours included. They all take the shape of "yea, but this idea is wrong because [the market is saturated/the issue is discoverability/no one wants to buy your little games/you're better off at a normal job] and so on. All of these are defeatist mindsets that people use as an excuse to not try, and they also happen to be wrong, as the examples shown in the article as well as the ones I posted show.
>It also was framed heavily around John Romero and id, which is what I was talking about in that paragraph.
The article clearly uses id as an example of a broader point and ends the post by bridging into the present situation. Talking about what people should do in the present, which you did, while ignoring present evidence and focusing only on the past sounds like poor thinking, doesn't it?
I literally and plainly stated that I agree with the author, didn't make some sort of "gotcha" comeback to the article as you're suggesting and relatively successfully avoided being prescriptive, so I'm not really sure how to respond to you at this point.
>There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person)
>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer
>but the people you want to buy them (let alone play them) aren't going [...] to buy and try your weird little games.
>The market is saturated. The market being saturated pushes it to be (even more) hit-oriented.
These are the things you said. I'm simply saying they're all wrong and there's plenty of evidence, in the present, right now, as to why they're wrong, as I mentioned in my previous reply. Consider the last one, "the market is satured and it pushes it to be more hit-oriented". I posted an example of a small indie team consistently releasing games and succeeding without having had any super huge hits. You don't have to reply anymore if you don't want to, it's just that you posted things that are wrong, and I felt the need to correct them.
...those aren't the things he said. If you published those as quotes, you'd be deservedly fired for intentionally clipping context (the rest of the sentence) that radically changed the meaning of the quote.
You really don't see a difference between "You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer" and "You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60 Hz"?
>There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.
This is what he said. The post is about succeeding in the market as an indie developer, so pushing the boundaries of technology is not very relevant, as that's not the only way to succeed with making indie games.
>You cannot make a game as radical and captivating as DOOM was.
OK, maybe true, maybe false, still irrelevant as succeeding in the market today doesn't require DOOM-level success.
>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz.
Again, irrelevant, because the post is about succeeding in the market, and there are multiple ways to succeed in the market, most of which do not involve technological boundary pushing.
Do you now see my point or not? The issue in contention is that he is fixating on the example of id in the past to make factual statements about reality today ("There is very little opportunity today for any team") without looking at the current market and the evidence that exists in it to the contrary. He makes multiple such wrong statements, which I quoted in the post you replied to.
> 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.
Sure, but most explanations of id's success (including in this article) hinge on (John Carmack's) technological prowess (and DOOM melting your face off).
I'm not entirely sure what your point about Braid is. An individual or a small team could not compete with triple-A studios in 2008. Anyone thinking that then was right.
> 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.
> 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.
$53k/year isn't a great salary, but $120k/year is common outside of big tech and especially in games.
It's also a lot better than working unpaid for 4 years on a game that fails to capture any attention (or sales).
The point is releasing games as a stepping stone from new studio to large projects. How much would a founder earn at a self-funded startup in the first year anyway? $0?
However, very true that it would be foolish to live in the Bay area when not earning a Bay salary.
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.
Interesting. For mobile games, it has become a very annoying trend to see heavily-produced, 100% fake, videos of the game in ads. Since advertisement is not as regulated as AppStore/Steam screenshots, I pretty much assume now that all ads are fake. I'm pretty sure some AAAs were accused of doing that in the past too.
I wonder how much this will last. On the other hand, maybe the point is not selling the game to people who see the ad, but merely to use them to prop up download numbers.
I get your point but I take more issue with fake gameplay videos than with obvious 90s cover illustrations or max-settings screenshots.
Mainly because, at least for mobile game ads, the quality of the fake gameplay video is technically achievable by my device. But the major problem is that the ads often show a much more fun and interesting game, mechanics and graphics…
If you want to compete with AAA games then you may need AAA graphics, but the market is larger than that. Look at Re-Logic (Terraria), Supergiant (Hades), Megacrit (Slay the Spire), Klei (Don't Starve), Evil Empire (Dead Cells), Team Cherry (Hollow Knight). Many smaller studios make games at an entirely different level of production. And there even smaller levels of success below that.
The point of the article is to find success at smaller levels before aiming higher.
However, you're right that good-looking screenshots sell, but that's just good art and not exclusively AAA art.
Not OP but: AFAIK, in the 80s the "Atari crash" was mostly due to lots of buggy games flooding the market, a perception of video games as being a fad that was over, since home computers were starting to show up. The excess of money from VCs created teams churning low quality games and helped fuel that perception.
Today, bugs and QA issues are sort of "fixable" by online patches. And as for the perception of it being a fad, I think Nintendo showed the market a few years later in 1985 that there was still room for consoles.
EDIT: I remember a few years ago we were talking about the "indiepocalypse", but that didn't really seem to have nowhere near the same impact.
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.