codexian reject
Cipher
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2011
- Messages
- 674
In before another ScamStarter...
Yea and it is so warming to see developers on the verge of suicide because they lost it all on a gamble to make $50k dollars per day like the Flappy Bird creator. So many articles on the web of dreams shattered in becoming wildly successful as it is impossible not to be with over 100 million smart phone/tablet users.Stardock made an observation here in regards to mobile and why they didn't enter it. Turns out that if you're not in the top ten apps, the profits drop hard and fast. People are conditioned not to pay on mobile, and who can blame them given the quality of games... It's a super high risk high reward game.
200k dollars ... for this game.
200k dollars for this ... thing
Yes, yes it is. You're the funniest sad clown I've ever had the pleasure to see/read.You tell me, is this funny?
how the fuck do people like him and those who funded him even manage to breathe?
Wall of text
It's because of right wing propaganda. Because of their lies about hard work making people rich and poor people being poor because they are lazy. People start imagining if they'd become like Bill Gates just because they work hard and get dragged into idiotic business like that without ever looking at what other advantages people who got rich had.I don't doubt there's money to be made in mobile gaming, and I also suspect that older developers who started out on C64 or similar, and who have more of a connection to simple arcade games, would find it more enticing. But.....
...I can't help but notice that many of the people who leap at it seem to just blindly accept that it is universally lucrative, without any thinking any further than 'this is what's hot right now'. No serious industry analysis. No breakdown of how startups compare in that industry compared to elsewhere. No real sense of which market segments are underserved, or what a saturated market would look like.
This guy was better than most - at least he had a target market in mind. Even then, why that market? What are the spending patterns in mobile phone games for teenage girls v other markets? What's the specific market - 'teenage girls' by itself is just an age/gender category (it seems like he's using it as a stand-in for 'casual, fickle/fashion-driven' gamers, in which case he might have realised the downside before wasting his money/time if he had spelt it out)?
Most importantly, there never seems to be any consideration of what's your competitive advantage - what can you do, that your competitors can't, that makes you more attractive to customers? Unless it's purely a hobby and you don't care about remuneration, that should be the first question for any startup - but you just don't ever seem to hear it amongst mobile phone game developers. For the big companies, it might be an easy question to answer - they can produce more products, at lower costs, with better market research and broader distribution, they have less qualms about blatantly copying others, and they have greater funds and legal expertise that enables them to abuse IP laws (Zynga's favourite ploy being to copy a moderately successful game, make it marginally more user-friendly, and then sue the original creator for breaching their IP, stretching the case out until the original creator settles because they can't afford the legal fees). But an indie developer had better have a rock solid idea of what it is that will let him/her compete against companies like that.
The 'competitors can't' aspect is important. Let's say that this guy's game did really well (by indie standards), and had a big start - what would have happened then? Zynga would have rushed out 3-4 clones within a month, as would numerous other big players. Those clones might even have slightly better mechanics, and they'll definitely be more accessible and their distribution will be so superior that very soon anyone looking at the original game will assume that it is the b-grade copy.
If they asked themselves about competitive advantage, it would also lead them to consider whether there is really a market opening for them, as opposed to just assuming that there must be a customer base out there because 'this is the big thing right now'. Firstly, customers rarely know or care whether something is 'hot' within your industry. Secondly, if it's the 'big thing' right now, it's probably inundated with startups doing exactly what you're doing - an indie startup should be searching for the 'unfashionable thing that nobody has heard of, but has merit that outstrips its reputation'. That's where you're going to find untapped markets. Thirdly, just because a platform, or a general industry, is selling well (and even assuming that the high demand isn't being swamped by even higher supply), that doesn't mean that every section of that industry is doing well.
You get the same thing happening with the obsession over Silicon Valley startups. Admittedly, those guys at least will usually have some idea of what they can do that their competitors can't - they aren't slaving away making things that Zynga can cheaply imitate and outmarket. But there's this incredible amount of hype, really talented and intelligent people with valuable qualifications, working insane hours, and despite all the finance going to it, these startup entrepeneurs are typically working for free or for minimal salaries, as they're using all the investment capital to keep their unviable company ticking over for another few months...and they're doing it over and over again....And despite all that, the success rate for Silicon Valley startups is no better than the average for startups across all industries (i.e. terrible, with the overwhelming majority ending in bankruptcy). Again - these are people with talent and expertise of real economic value; for them to be doing no better than your average new small business, the market must be downright terrible.
But they just keep heading on blindly, like moths to a flame (where those moths are flying over a whole bunch of cushy moth holiday resorts that they could be hanging out at instead of burning themselves alive).
Edit: marketing often gets a bad rap, usually because it's conflated with advertising, but I think game developers could actually do with a greater market focus - just a greater emphasis on saying 'who are we selling to, and why would they buy from us'.
Because Flappy Bird was made by a Taiwanese guy in a couple of days, not over one year on 200 thousand dollars.If shit like Flappy Bird can become incredibly popular, why your game would flop?
I'd chalk that achievement on better bosses and subordinates who keep his stupid shit on a leash, maybe a bit of luck on the side. He reminds me of a former teacher of mine who spent most of his time bragging what an innovative businessman and teacher he is and sharing articles on Facebook rather than doing those things properly. A self-described expert.There's a reason that despite slamming hundreds of thousands down the hole of mobile development he still has the money to fund an 8 person team to work on a desktop game.
Yet another powerful testimony from a ex-mobile developer.Did someone edit the thread title?
Yup, dude was just delusional. He didn't make market research or anything like that (probably just looked at success stories). He just assumed iPhone is "next big thing" and he'll earn millions. He probably also assumed that burning more money will make his game more successful/better.In 2010/2011 the world was enamored with iPhone, the mobile game industry was growing by leaps and bounds, no one I knew played a console machine anymore, and I just came off 10 years of business mobile software development. It was obvious what platform I should target: jump on the mobile rocket and ride that sucker to the top of the world. For context, it's just like how “Games as a Service” is all the rage nowadays.
To be fair second app got to be another 200k sink hole because things got out of control / publisher made him target too many platforms.If I had of known I would make $7k, I would have only spent $5-20k making the game.
No, it's not like this. A friend of mine from college did Android games and apps in his spare time. He didn't get Angry Birds money, but we're still talking a dozen hundreds of euro at least. For two or three games he did as a hobby. I've only played one of them, but it certainly was better than that "tickle the monkey" bullshit.
This guy has bad decision making skills and lacks self-awareness and common sense.
If you know that you can't even draw a straight line, then what makes you think you have the artistic sense to select talent that will make your product stand out visually, hmmm? The illustrations for this game look like 1000 other fantasy games. As much as I like to shit on DeviantArt every now and then, I've seen some work on there that is practically visionary compared to the stuff he's got going for his game. Two artists with style are worth more than 6 without; he could have taken the money he saved hiring 2 instead of 6 and rolled it into some business classes.
And he fails at Christianity too, btw . Some people in need could have really used 400k instead of throwing it away on projects that did NOBODY any good. It's not God that separated you and your friend, it's your fucking idiocy that more than likely was the cause. Oh, and you may want to think about whether you're showing proper reverence in thinking your vidya gaem endeavors are worthy of His time and interference.
So how did it do?
Marvellous!! Way beyond my expectations. By day two it hit #1 in the UK and remained there for a week! Also hitting #1 and #2 in many other countries mainly in Europe. Worldwide sales reached about 35 thousand downloads in its first week with a second burst the following month when Apple featured it in the Appstore. Its hard to say where most users came from during its launch as there are unfortunately no traffic analytics in iTunes connect. But its likely it was a result of favourable reviews from many websites which I've documented in our press page.
he's not shooting very far, is it? He's an idea guy dudes, we needed plenty of those in here.I've been struggling for the last week on one aspect of the NPC A.I., what I call "the ripple effect". Every interaction with an NPC "ripples" to other people in the world the NPC has relationships with. In essence I'm trying to replicate what I see in my wife.
Let's say you are mean to my wife on the phone at work. She gets upset and thinks you are a jerk. But then she goes and tells me about it. I think you are a jerk too, but not as strongly as my wife. She then goes and tells her sister, and whichever friend she is around that particular week. The sister cares but probably not as much as I do, and the friend cares but not as much as me or the sister. This I call relationship proximity. The tighter (more important) the relationship the more "impact" shared across the "relationship line".
So in the game, if you are a jerk to a noble, his wife, councilor, and probably the closest guards all think less of you, but to depreciating degrees the further out from the noble you go.
So the reason I'm posting is I think I've figured it out and got it working!
It's because of right wing propaganda. Because of their lies about hard work making people rich and poor people being poor because they are lazy. People start imagining if they'd become like Bill Gates just because they work hard and get dragged into idiotic business like that without ever looking at what other advantages people who got rich had.
I'm not sure what are you trying to say. How does that explain that the developer in question made some extremely shitty games for $400k?Mobile games are shit, and if you enjoy making shit, you may succeed. There's an astronomically low chance of that happening, though. No matter how polished your game about matching 3 gnomes is, it will never unseat Candy Crush Saga. It's the same reason why WoW clones all die, because people would rather just stick to WoW.