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The Indiepocalypse happened - we are now in the Indie Post-Apocalypse

Hobo Elf

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Oh my god you are using Steam reviews a metric for the roguelike community.
No, he's saying that the guy who made Golden Krone Hotel is using them as a metric, and by his own metric, the game bombed. (I think?)
In that case he moved the goalpost. Like a retard.
 

J_C

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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Did you get that data entry job? :P
I know Primordia got much more reviews, but I couldn't let this go. :D

Errr, you know that I have a dayjob, right? As you note, Primordia has ~1750 reviews, and I'd still be silly if I'd made a dayjob out of it. My personal take on Primordia was about $120k. Even if I could knock out one of those a year, that's still only 2/3 what a first-year associate makes in the law, not even considering benefits. (Also, I didn't actually work on UIHY except doing a very little bit of editing work on James's story. It was Primordia's coder (James) and an artist (not Vic) who made it.)

I was responding to the article's stupid point that if you're not making money at indie games, you should take a job in the industry. My point, probably not well made, is that in my opinion

[Indie Passion Project]...................................................[Video Game Industry Job]...[Any Other Job]

If you're making the first leap, you might as well take the second small step and maximize your income. That's especially so because most video game jobs are far worse than their normal corporate counterparts along many metrics. The only ones where video game jobs are predictably better are "are you working on video games" and "are your coworkers nerds." If those two factors are overriding, then a job in vidya isn't a bad idea. But otherwise, I think it's more reasonable to keep your hobby your hobby and earn your living at the most pleasant job you can find.
No problem, I get your point, I was just teasing you. I didn't know you have a dayjob by the way, how could I know it. Opposite to many people on the Codex, I'm not stalking others. :)
 

Jeremiah

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OP here.

The main response to the post is all this is inevitable/cartels are unfair anywyay/it's just like all other creative industries. Sure, I don't disagree. My post was less a deep analysis and just a visceral reaction to seeing someone I thought was guaranteed some modicum of success at this point fail beyond my wildest imagination. I don't think anyone "deserves" to make a living off of their hobby, but I guess in my naivety I thought it was possible to work hard on something for a few years and have more than zero people give a shit. Naive, yes!

This may be so 2016 though, I remember reading an article by an indie dev, that youtube didn't have a great influence on copies sold (might be anecdotal wisdom specific to the game).

Yea I specifically remember reading several articles about this point, but couldn't track any down for the post.

DOTA is a real-time, multiplayer, tactical* game. (* At most.)... I don't come away from this feeling like someone poured his heart and soul into a project and was ground down by capitalism, but like someone tried to moneyball the market and didn't succeed.

Er, what? Mashing up completed unrelated genres has proven mega successful many times (even just among dungeon crawlers: Necrodancer, 10000000). I play a lot of LoL instead of DOTA. But I assume both have a heavy emphasis on both tactics and strategy. As much as I disagree with everything Burgun says, I can't say the guy is chasing dollar signs. He's rather principled in his views on game design and has been trying to reimagine the strategic element in MOBAs into a different form for a couple years now. I totally agree the presentation leaves a lot to be desired. I still didn't expect that to result in radio silence. EA is a perfectly reasonable way to fine tune your game, especially if it's one that has a lot of procedural elements.

Sorry for the confusion about that "zero sales" tweet. My name is not Felip and that was simply a screenshot from steam developer forums. I couldn't have any reviews if I had 0 sales...

Anyway, this blog post was not really about my game. I'm happy with how I've done for a side project (yes I think it's insane to quit your job for indie at this point) and in a niche field with programmer art. You can use the method I outlined to estimate how well the game sold. Nowhere near the 300 review mark, which only applied to full time people. The roguelike subreddit has 30k subscribers for whatever the hell that is worth. I reckon I've sold about a 10th of that. It's a niche. Compare to 18M for the gaming subreddit. Roguelike players as a rule are quite entitled to having massive, perfectly balanced games for free. They're kind of a hard sell.

What this really is about for me is that I've wanted to go into games my whole life. When I actually saw the opportunity to get on Steam in 2015, I was still having the image of games like VVVVVVV or Super Meat Boy doing gangbusters. Those are actually games I think I could make myself. I genuinely believe if they were released today, they wouldn't sell. And also as I said, I'm frustrated with the "poor sales = bad" trope, that the number of sales correlates perfectly to how "good" the game is. So UIHY has 5% the reviews (and presumably sales) as Primordia. Why did the devs decide to make a game 20x as shitty as Primordia? Why did you decide to make a game 500x worse than PUBG? That seems like a really silly line of reasoning to me.

They keep prattling about "roguelikes", but I haven't seen one ASCII symbol in their "graphics". :obviously:

Well, GKH does have an ASCII mode. I find ASCII painful to play with personally.

I was responding to the article's stupid point that if you're not making money at indie games, you should take a job in the industry.

I totally agree. I definitely wouldn't touch the games industry with a 10 foot pole. By "industry" I basically meant "working as a programmer" and I debated between linking to a link about games or a link about software engineers. You can expect to make at least $100k on average, even if you are not a superstar, even if you live in a low cost of living city. That seems to be a fairly reasonable opportunity cost for going full time indie.
 

MRY

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Ha, sorry for the heated rhetoric. The whole reason Infinitron dragged me into this thread is that he knows that I get riled upon on the subject.

Still, I guess I still am more or less here:

(1) The short period where Steam opened up its market to some, but not all, small indie developers strikes me as one of those short periods where if you were in the right place at the right time, you got absurdly lucky. The idea that a so-so indie developer (because that's what we were/are at Wormwood Studios) could release a retro adventure and sell >200k copies is bonkers. Even WEG didn't have much name recognition then. When WEG signed us and Resonance, Dave hadn't grossed $100k on any of his games. Primordia has grossed around $650k. As someone who has missed lots of other boats in life, I'm glad I got on that one. But the overall experience I've had in life is that this era is not an "indiepocalypse" -- that era was an "indiebonanza." This is what has always been normal. In almost every field of endeavor, even very talented people tend to make negative money at their passion projects. For instance, the median passionate violinist probably only ever plays the violin to his or her very small group of friends who play classical music together. The median passionate poet probably has his poems read by no one other than the editor of his local poetry zine. Over the course of decades, my very skilled grandfather turned hundreds of bowls and plates on a lathe, made hundreds of pieces of glazed pottery, whittled dozens of love spoons, and probably sold 10 or 20 of his things, likely at a local Elks fundraiser.

(2) The more of an engagement your creation demands, the fewer people will engage with it. It is much easier to look at a picture on DeviantArt or to read a tweet than it is to buy, download, install, and play a game on Steam. It doesn't matter how cheap, how small, how short. It still is a big investment. Every single game on Steam is tl;dr. Without knowing more about what game "felip" was posting about, I can't really say whether I'm surprised that it got no plays at all. Again, I direct you to legal citations. The average law review article is written by a tenured professor at an elite law school with the assistance of many research assistants of fine pedigrees. It is combed over by editors at the law journal, put on Westlaw where every lawyer can access it, and printed and bound in volumes in dozens of law libraries around the country. The median number of citations for a law review article is zero. I'm not sure why we would expect someone to play Omnochronom. At a glance, it looks bad. Why would anyone go farther than that glance?

(3) "So UIHY has 5% the reviews (and presumably sales) as Primordia. Why did the devs decide to make a game 20x as shitty as Primordia?" I know, it's like this park has really gone to hell since it stopped being a country club! (Though, of course, different devs working in a different genre might have made a difference, too.)

(4) "What this really is about for me is that I've wanted to go into games my whole life." It's too bad you weren't able to release your game in the country club days, but almost no one got a chance to. The reality is that "indiepocalypse" = "almost any idiot who wants to make a game can do so, has a means to distribute it, and likely will get at least some players." Setting aside the very brief indie bonanza, you are in the best moment in all of history for someone with that aspiration. Almost everyone born before you had it worse: hardware was more expensive, game development tools were much more expensive and much more difficult, distribution was nearly impossible, publicity was non-existent. When I made games, even very fun games, back in computer lab in the early 1990s, it was to the delight of all my classmates, but that was it. When I wanted to make a jRPG from ~1992 to ~1998, this required learning a programming language, trying (and failing) to make graphics or to hire artists, etc., etc. I never got anywhere at it. But I knew a guy who did, a Japanese programmer named Takamoto Miura. He actually managed to do the coding, art, writing, everything for a Romancing Saga style RPG. AFAIK, it sold zero copies. Today, anyone can buy RPG Maker in a sale on Steam for $20, can actually distribute the game through Steam, and can get dozens, hundreds, thousands of players.

Imagine two worlds. In world one, there are 100 M&Ms and they were all shared by five people. 20 M&Ms each! What a snack! What a world! In world two, there are 500 M&Ms but they are shared by 100 people. Only 5 M&Ms! What a tragedy! But this is only a tragedy if you thought that you would be one of the five people in world one. Otherwise, you have gone from never even tasting an M&M in world one to at least getting a nibble in world two. I'm fairly sure if the Omnochronom developer had been working in TurboPascal and distributing through binaries on rec.games.* or on MadMonkey.com or something, he wouldn't have gotten more players than today. (He probably never would've finished the game in the first place.)

Take just AGS (Adventure Game Studio). A good number of people made AGS games before Steam. Very, very few people played even the most popular. Do you think it was better to make games then than now? Just go look at the AGS awards from 2006 (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/AGS_Awards_2006) vs 2016 (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/AGS_Awards_2016), the last year that they even permitted successful commercial games to compete -- that's how much better it's gotten. Three of the top five games got commercial releases with some success, and Kathy Rain has been a runaway hit. Which era do you think was better for someone who wanted to make a point and click adventure his whole life?
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
MRY While I agree with you in principle, I'm sympathetic to the idea that selling zero copies - absolute zero - is in a real and relatable sense "not normal".

In a real life store, an item that sold zero units would be removed from shelves. You don't see things that sell zero units. That perhaps is the real abnormality here, that these games instead remain on virtual shelves forever, contributing to the glut that caused the Indiepocalypse in the first place.
 

MRY

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In a real life store, an item that sold zero units would be removed from shelves. You don't see things that sell zero units. That perhaps is the real abnormality here, that these games instead remain on virtual shelves forever, contributing to the glut that caused the Indiepocalypse in the first place.
Yes. In a real life store, Omnochronom would never even be offered for sale. It would not even have the chance of making a sale. The screening would happen at the purchasing agent level rather than at the customer level.

The abnormality is that Steam has opened a market for indie developers who otherwise would never be allowed to even offer their games for sale. Because most of those games are not impressive, they don't sell anything. But they were never going to get an M&M in world one, either. Those are the games that, rather than being incomplete Early Access titles for which people pay money, would have been incomplete games on some guys hard drive that he zipped and sent from time to time to his friends on ICQ.

Again, this is true in every field of endeavor. Most short stories that people write go unread by anyone other than their friends/family/professors because there's no way of mass-distributing them. Once e-text short stories are solidly the norm, it will be bad for the guy who otherwise would've been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction and good for everyone who wouldn't have made it.

Unless you think you would have made a game and managed to get it stocked at Egghead Software, you have no cause to complain about making indie titles in 2018 rather than 1988.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
OK. Maybe I'm being too charitable, but my interpretation of the OP article isn't "These games deserve to sell more, the marketplace is broken!". It's just "This isn't normal".

The writer's desire for normality could, in effect, be a cry for a mercy-killing. (Don't let us on this platform anymore! Take our games down if they flop!)
 

MRY

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We’ve arrived at the worst it can get
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But hey, maybe anti-Pangloss just means "worst it can get" in a "this is unusual, could be good, could be bad" kind of way.
 

Tehdagah

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The indie devs have noone else to blame but themselves.

If they make games for gamers, well, where is my turnbased squadbased inventory management, recruit management, gunporn of a RPG? We've been crying for it since 2007 (the completion of Silent Storm Sentinels and Hammer Sickle were in 2004).

If they make games for the mass, then fuck them, they are no indie.

If they make games for themselse, ie art, then they have no one else to blame but themselves. History show artists (make things for themselves) die poor and unacknowledged.

Whether they are indie or AAA, they make games for gamers. Indie just mean they make games for a selected, probabbly small, audience. Doesnt mean they can escape that assignment.
Us gamers amirite?

Now for real, there are a lot of good games with poor sales, due to lack of audience.
 

laclongquan

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Good huh? We here at Codex has personal definition of good.

For example. "turnbased squadbased inventory management, recruit management, gunporn of a RPG" is quite clear. Yet there's no recent games even attempt to reach that requirement. Note that requirement has nothing to say about graphics or story. Purely gameplay.
 

Kyl Von Kull

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
My uncle used to be a bush pilot, meaning he would crash land planes for a living so that tourists could go hiking in remote areas far from anything resembling an air strip. You might think this job would pay well—high risk, presumably requires a decent amount of skill—but he actually made a lot more money as a crop duster. The problem? Being a bush pilot is fun, at least for crazy adrenaline junkies.

Every time he’d ask for a raise, his boss would just point to the pile of resumes from all of the other pilots who wanted his job.

Can’t imagine the video game business is too different. If your job is at all fun or glamorous, that’s going to be reflected in your salary. People forget, but professional athletes used to be paid pretty poorly, too, before they unionized in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Lot of talented minor league ball players would be thrilled to move up to the majors. I think the same was somewhat true of Hollywood back during the studio system, too.

Generstions X, Y and Z have been ill served by the media we consumed growing up. Too many stories about how everything will work out if you follow your dreams. Not enough “work is a grind, that’s why they pay you.”
 
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Eh, Kyl von Kuck As Cultist Simulator puts it:

"Work: An arrangement to exchange your life for money."

Makes you wonder what being a sjw stealth plant like Infinitron pays. Spending literally every waking moment copy pasting biased propoganda, subverting the codex to make it into a SJW safe space and bringing down upstanding citizens like JarlFrank and sser . For someone who suppsordly has a padsion for games and rpgs he rarely plays them.
 
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Davaris

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I remember a telling comment from Jeff Vogel. He said none of the game companies that were around when he started are still in business. They are all busted and broke. He wasn't talking about Indies, he was talking about AAAs. The only one I can think of that is still around is EA, but they are a too big to fail mega-corp.

I also saw telling comments from AAAish developers over the years, indicating they have a gambler mindset. Comments like "We went all in on this game." Or they felt like every game they made was like betting it all on a roulette wheel, and they were very relieved to have survived long enough to be bought out. Eventually even the successful ones luck runs out. They all know it.
 
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Dayyālu

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All Indie games that survive nowadays ironically enough depend on brand recognition (Illwinter, Trese Brothers, Subset Games, the accursed Vogel). I do think we should point out a difference between "Steam Indies" , meaning some weird pixelated thing that gets put on Steam trying to hit big, and the traditional indie title for a niche.

That still exists and still manages to truck on with the same strategy as before: make a game for a niche, stick in with a niche. Grognard military strategy games are the golden example, but Vogel or the Trese Brothers do games that appeal to a niche, do them well (Vogel arguably less so) and they survive. It's very akin to tabletop RPGs and games though, games for a specific public done by people that aren't making them as a primary job. Can we call them "old indies"?


It would be interesting to know how much Chinese / Eastern European reskins and porn games influence the median.

You know. That's a very interesting question. Was there a boom in porn games? Why bother doing a mediocre metroidvania that will flop when you can made a good metroidvania with porn that will torpedo a shitton of sales but guarantee at least a few?

Let's see if we can summon HentaiWriter . Doubt he will reply (he's here for game promotion) but it would be interesting to know how much money he makes with his craft and how can it compare to "proper indie games".

Also it's only a matter of time before Steam gets into porn, we're alread halfway there.
 
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Davaris

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My uncle used to be a bush pilot, meaning he would crash land planes for a living so that tourists could go hiking in remote areas far from anything resembling an air strip. You might think this job would pay well—high risk, presumably requires a decent amount of skill—but he actually made a lot more money as a crop duster. The problem? Being a bush pilot is fun, at least for crazy adrenaline junkies.

Every time he’d ask for a raise, his boss would just point to the pile of resumes from all of the other pilots who wanted his job.

Can’t imagine the video game business is too different. If your job is at all fun or glamorous, that’s going to be reflected in your salary. People forget, but professional athletes used to be paid pretty poorly, too, before they unionized in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Lot of talented minor league ball players would be thrilled to move up to the majors. I think the same was somewhat true of Hollywood back during the studio system, too.

Generstions X, Y and Z have been ill served by the media we consumed growing up. Too many stories about how everything will work out if you follow your dreams. Not enough “work is a grind, that’s why they pay you.”

The relevent difference between the jobs you mention is not that one is boring and the other is exciting. It is one is needed if people want to live. The other is not needed to live and people can do without it. If you serve a demand that no one else is serving you will make a lot of money. Capitalism rewards service. It does not reward self service.
 

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Davaris

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Even AAA games have problems with popularity on steam now:

F1 2018: all time peak 9,500 players
https://steamcharts.com/app/737800

PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER 2018: 7,000
https://steamcharts.com/app/592580

Strange Brigade flopped even harder: just 1,900 what a joke!
https://steamcharts.com/app/312670


for comparison Pillars of Eternity 2 that is considered to be not so successful has all time peak players 20,000

I remember back in the early 2000s indie devs used to make good money selling casual games to women through their own websites at $20-25 US each. Then the big game portals appeared and the indie devs had to sell though them or not at all. The portals put on never ending deep discount sales to get people addicted to buying, but this also created a hold-out mindset which drove the price for a game down to a dollar and less. Portals always create a race to the bottom. When they show up its time to get out.
 
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Dexter

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We're not in the post-Indiepocalypse era just yet, but it doesn't seem to be far off now. Months at the most, maybe a year.

The problem is that most people don't notice these signs because PC gaming (at least) is riding high on the PUGB/Fortnite wave. When that wave recedes (and if there's not another wave immediately coming after) then we'll at least see some serious damage.
This isn't true, the PC gaming market has only grown aside from PUBG/Fortnite, you just have to have a base sort of appeal and awareness out there e.g. Mid-tier games like Yakuza 0 or similar will make money.

There's also the option to serve an underserved market and make product that people actually want or are desperate for or to gain notoriety through controversy or the likes. Make titty games, piss off SJWs, appeal to Tumblr, make good VR games, make worthwhile Turn-based RPGs - anything where the players are hungry and are looking for you and not where you're looking for players in an oversupplied market segment.

I doubt there are many people out there telling themselves "what I'm looking for right now is another shitty Indie pixely Roguelike game made by some no-name". Stand out, there's still many mid-budget games selling well released not only at the end of 2017, but near the end of 2018. For instance "who knew" that people wanted a return to Theme (Two Point) Hospital or that they really wanted a Jurassic Park management game or that they really wanted an old-school tough Jump&Run in the style of 1930's cartoons like Cuphead, which also profitted immensely from journalists being too retarded to play games or that they wanted a Post-apocalyptic city building game like Frostpunk? Even something like RUINER can be successful if it includes the right elements.

Try something new ffs (the entire MOBA and Tower Defense genres for instance arose from fucking Mod maps for WarCraft III along with various other mildly popular games like Town of Salem, FORCED or Magicka that was likely inspired by SpellCraft, there's various other popular maps from back then that weren't explored further outside of WC3 Mods and would probably make great coop games like the Escape From genre, Uther Party or Run Panda Run, not sure if all the "Footman Frenzy" maps inspired a genre) or return to tried and tested ideas from the past, well made clones or sequels of games like Sim Tower/Ant, Black & White, Lemmings, Populous, Magic Carpet, Creatures or similar would probably sell well today. What do they make instead? FUCKIN' PIXELY ROGUE-LIKES! STAND OUT!

(3) If Game X sells less in 20XX than it would have sold in 20XX-n because a cartel is broken and shelf space is no longer artificially restricted, that is certainly a tragedy for Developer X. But if Game ~X sells any copies in 20XX when it would not have been allowed to be sold in any major portal in 20XX-n, that is hardly a tragedy for Developer ~X. "Things have really gotten worse since we let the riffraff in," thinks every person born at the right time and place in all of history to enjoy special access to a restricted good. I certainly enjoyed the Greenlight country club, but at least I have the self-awareness to acknowledge it for what it was.
What you call "cartel" some people call "curation", it can benefit the platform, developers and customers and this ignores the fact that "letting the riffraff in" and turning your platform into a digital version of modern San Francisco with people injecting themselves and sleeping/shitting on the streets isn't necessarily the best option. I'm really of two minds about this, I like the freedom and everything that comes with it, but I think it's a tragedy that when a platform gets flooded with a river of shit and shovelware it takes the few gems and possible standout hits along with it for the ride and it's now all covered in shit.
I think I would've preferred a two-tiered system like Microsoft did with XBLIG where you "let in the riffraff" and people that want to roll around in shit can indulge in it (even on the same platform, but separate) but the "high society" is still on the main store, has top billing and doesn't have to mix, with the prospect of some of the "riffraff" being upgraded to the bigger platform for either doing exceptionally well or being extremely compelling.

Although we've already had the discussion about this phenomenon and how it pertains to Adventure games last year: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...e-game-renaissance.115818/page-2#post-5305411
 
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Bester

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Every time he’d ask for a raise, his boss would just point to the pile of resumes from all of the other pilots who wanted his job.

Can’t imagine the video game business is too different. If your job is at all fun or glamorous, that’s going to be reflected in your salary.
Lol, no. If you're fresh out of university, sure. A year later, you've burned out working on some dumb soulless shit that you hate with all your being. You like video games, just not this fucking game that's horrible in all regards and your boss thinks your ideas are shit and he's a pure golden genius, forcing you to implement his vision and shut the fuck up.
 

J_C

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MRY While I agree with you in principle, I'm sympathetic to the idea that selling zero copies - absolute zero - is in a real and relatable sense "not normal".
Are we talking about this game?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/682790/Escape_the_Omnochronom/

Checked out the Steam page for that game, and somehow I have a hard time believing that it actually sold 0 copies. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say that it is an impressive game, but I also wouldn't say that it looks and sounds terrible. It also has a decent trailer. With Steams launch visiblity, I can't believe it didn't sell at least a few dozen copies in the first week. The game's discord channel also has a fair number on people on it.
 
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Roguey

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Checked out the Steam page for that game, and somehow I have a hard time believing that it actually sold 0 copies. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say that it is an impressive game, but I also wouldn't say that it looks and sounds terrible. It also has a decent trailer. With Steams launch visiblity, I can't believe it didn't sell at least a few dozen copies in the first week. The game's discord channel also has a fair number on people on it.
https://steamcharts.com/app/682790

Looks like single digit sales, but sure that's more than 0.
 

Viata

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Water Play Catarinense
Find Niche- Understand Niche- Make somewhat unique, good game for that niche- Market it to that niche- Niche buys predictable amount of copies (according to which you should have planned your budget)- Maybe it reaches beyond that niche. People thinking that they do not have to put any effort into selling their product just because its good are dumb.
I'd still think that first you see the game you want to make and then find the niche for that game. If you are going to make games by first searching for a niche, you are going to make some shit game just to get their money.
 

Jeremiah

Literate
Joined
Aug 31, 2018
Messages
11
With Steams launch visiblity, I can't believe it didn't sell at least a few dozen copies in the first week
The dev later told me it sold 24 copies, which is perfectly in line with 0 reviews. It has 1 review now by the way because I reviewed it myself.

I doubt there are many people out there telling themselves "what I'm looking for right now is another shitty Indie pixely Roguelike game made by some no-name".
Except... there are? Dead Cells sold over 700,000 copies, but if it had bombed instead you would say it was justified for the aforementioned reasons.

As far as "no-name", that's a chicken and egg problem. If no one can become a someone until already being a someone, welp.

Frostpunk
Yea in another thread about this post, someone suggested indies should just stop making "ugly games" and do something like Frostpunk. As soon as I get 69 other people to join my studio, I'll give that a try. 70 person studios is indie now I guess.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
Patron
Developer
Joined
Dec 28, 2010
Messages
16,947
Location
Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Checked out the Steam page for that game, and somehow I have a hard time believing that it actually sold 0 copies. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say that it is an impressive game, but I also wouldn't say that it looks and sounds terrible. It also has a decent trailer. With Steams launch visiblity, I can't believe it didn't sell at least a few dozen copies in the first week. The game's discord channel also has a fair number on people on it.
https://steamcharts.com/app/682790

Looks like single digit sales, but sure that's more than 0.
Yeah, this looks pretty desperate indeed. Poor guy, I think even this game deserved more. I don't really get how this is possible, since as I've said, the game doesn't look that bad, and I'm sure there are people out there who like these retro style games. Maybe it was the combination of several factors. Lack of marketing, the mix of genres, which are already oversaturated, the wrong price.
 

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