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

[HentaiWriter]

What might happen in the industry is that instead of gigantic studios with people for every single specialist job possible (ex. someone whose sole job is just to design the logos for magazines in the game world), we might trend towards a market where smaller studios with less amounts of people that are doing a wider range of skills ends up being the norm.

Think about it salary-wise; if you have 100 people getting paid within a given range, but most of them are extreme specialists, and you cut that down to 10 people who are now each doing 10 of those specialist jobs each, you've just saved 90% of your income in one shot (and even if you pay them somewhat more, you'll end up still saving lots).

With how powerful a lot of software tools are becoming, it's automating and speeding up a lot of tasks that originally took excessive amounts of time, which is what's making stuff like that possible. All three of the games we're working on, for instance, have teams of only 3-4 people each, with all audio paid flat rates as we commission it (for music, SFX, and voice acting). Each member of the team has their specialty, sure (on a 3 person team, that's programming, art, and writing respectively) but each of us also contributes in extra jobs, too.

For instance, I'm doing a lot of small jobs; I do all the hiring, money handling/payouts, marketing, emails for Patreon rewards, networking/PR/social media, game design documents (for art, music, writing, gameplay, characters, the game world etc.), continuity/keeping all of that stuff together, managing everyone/mediating compromises, storyline/writing/dialogue, hiring voice actors/music/SFX/etc., voice direction, cutscene "programming", level design/creation, etc.

Triangulate (our artist for Future Fragments) is doing literally 99% of the art himself (the remaining 1% is effects I'll make in other programs just to save him time), so he's playing the role of background artist, tile artist, sprite artist, CG artist, animator, special effects, lighting, environment artist, etc. as well as adding some visual flair with prop placement to the maps I design.

And Frouge of course is doing 100% of the programming, so he's made the in-house level/cutscene creator, has to do lighting, physics, bug fixing, collision, AI, pathfinding, and all the other things that go into coding a game.

That's something like 20-30 jobs, all condensed into three people. If we actually hired a separate person for each one of these jobs, we'd be paying out ten times what we do now, which is something we obviously couldn't afford.

So I think you're going to see a lot more layoffs like this as studios condense and combine job roles, and people will get paid a bit more, but the studio as a whole will save huge amounts of money which will let them be able to afford to bid lower and lower to companies/licenses when it comes to applying for doing games for them, as well as a lot less confusion and clutter over communicating things to different people on a team.

 

[Viata]

https://infinitroid.com/blog/posts/did_i_just_waste_3_years

Did I just waste 3 years?

I had trouble sleeping on Monday night.

My mind was circling around some staggering recent game industry stats, and some foreboding writings from prominent indie developers. And around the fact that, for the 3 years I’ve invested on this project, only 4 copies have sold so far.

Those four sales were from generous folks who already had free access to the game, but wanted to support its development (thank you guys). New sales, from new visitors to the site (1,016 since I put the game on sale in November) are currently at zero.

Zero. Yikes.

As bleak as that is, with previous unpaid players the game has had its fans. 368 people had created free accounts before it went on sale. Based on analytics, people have played about 1,080 hours, and many still play daily or weekly. The game has gotten positive feedback when shared on forums, reddit, etc.

1,016 is not a huge number of visitors in internet terms, and perhaps I just need to drive in more traffic. But 0% is not the most encouraging conversion rate!

Industry mayhem and the indie tidal wave
This has been covered elsewhere, but while I had my head down working, the game industry experienced a gigantic thermonuclear explosion. Sometimes referred to as the indie tsunami / indiepocalypse, it detonated in 2014 or so, right before I started on Infinitroid.

Below is the number of annual Steam releases, year-by-year, thru 2017:

(sources: Steam Spy and Grid Sage Games)

Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort went into. A tiny percentage are hits, but most are forgotten in the deluge.

Some prominent developers have been surprised by the relative lack of success of their recent releases—Mark Morris and Chris Delay from Introversion Games, after a string of successes, found their innnovative latest game Scanner Sombre to be a total flop (discussed in their video here). Edmund McMillen’s The End Is Nigh sold quite modestly despite his past blockbusters like Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac, and his prominence in the indie world. Cliff Harris of Positech Games warns on his blog:

You are reading the thoughts of a guy who was coding since age 11, has 36 years coding experience, has shipped over a dozen games, several of which made millions of dollars, got into indie dev VERY early, knows a lot of industry people, and has a relatively high public profile. And still almost NOBODY covered my latest game (in terms of gaming websites). Its extremely, extremely tough right now.

Like most gamers, I have a backlog of dozens of purchased-but-never-played Steam games picked up at ridiculously low prices from Humble Bundles, Steam sales, etc. Does the world need any more games at this point?

So, I’m pretty discouraged. I seem to have arrived very late to the party, and there are broken bottles and passed-out revelers everywhere. It’s not inconceivable that Infinitroid might still have a shot (I think it does many things well, some of them quite unique) but the prospects are looking more bleak by the day.

Financial matters
As it stands, I’ve put in 2,600+ hours and written 62,176 lines of code (mostly C++). The game’s made $27.92 in income, which nets out at about $0.01 per hour. Had I spent the time washing dishes at $7.25 / hour (a 725x more lucrative job) I’d have made a cool $19k!

I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic, and I love what I do. I’m a lifelong learner, always evaluating my work and experimenting with new approaches. Should I be failing this badly?

Of course money isn’t everything, and I’ve had a lot of fun building and sharing the game. But I did have some hope of creating something that a lot of people would check out and enjoy, and making some return on my time investment, perhaps enough to keep doing this as an independent career.

What’s next
I don’t like to spend too much time feeling sorry for myself or dwelling on the past, at least more than needed to learn from it—and it’s perhaps too early to declare complete failure—so I plan to keep experimenting with marketing and finish the game in some form. But it doesn’t look good right now, and I’m really questioning how much more of my time I want to keep pouring into this when there are other fun, potentially profitable things I could be doing with my remaining creative years that could make a positive difference in the world.

Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in. I’m kinda floundering right now and not really sure what to do, but a few random thoughts I’ve had over the past few days:

• Do the minimal work to wrap it up satisfactorily, release it, and be able to call it finished.
• Put development on hold, and just focus on marketing for a while; try price drops, promotions, pay-what-you-want, free trials etc.; decide what’s next based on the results of that.
• Treat it as a purely hobby project: work on it when I feel like it, and only on the parts that are fun for me. It may take years to finish but perhaps it’ll turn out something cool and unique in the end.
• Make it into an ethical game experiment: reduce addictive qualities of the game, e.g. allow players to set the amount of time they want to spend on it and get a friendly reminder to stop at the end; try to make it benefit people’s lives beyond just consuming their time (this has been on my mind a lot lately, something I had hoped I could foster in the game’s story but haven’t fully realized—more on this in a future post).
• Continue as I have been, pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety, and release a finished product I’m proud of, even if it’s a total commercial flop (not sure I have the energy for it right now but it’s still an option).

For the moment, I have an urge to put my creativity elsewhere, perhaps do some one-week or even one-day projects for a change, so we’ll see. But, if anyone has any feedback, I’d appreciate it—on marketing, potential blind spots in my thinking here, how the game is presented, perspective on the industry right now, comforting words, tough love, etc.!

Thanks for listening.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[KazikluBey]

While SAT scores are not as g-loaded as they were in the past, they're still certainly an IQ-indicator.

 

[fantadomat]

Meh another stupid pixel art platformer not selling. What a surprise,who would have thought??? It is the same shit as telltale,over saturation is kill the market.

 

[J_C]

https://infinitroid.com/blog/posts/did_i_just_waste_3_years

Spoiler

Did I just waste 3 years?

I had trouble sleeping on Monday night.

My mind was circling around some staggering recent game industry stats, and some foreboding writings from prominent indie developers. And around the fact that, for the 3 years I’ve invested on this project, only 4 copies have sold so far.

Those four sales were from generous folks who already had free access to the game, but wanted to support its development (thank you guys). New sales, from new visitors to the site (1,016 since I put the game on sale in November) are currently at zero.

Zero. Yikes.

As bleak as that is, with previous unpaid players the game has had its fans. 368 people had created free accounts before it went on sale. Based on analytics, people have played about 1,080 hours, and many still play daily or weekly. The game has gotten positive feedback when shared on forums, reddit, etc.

1,016 is not a huge number of visitors in internet terms, and perhaps I just need to drive in more traffic. But 0% is not the most encouraging conversion rate!

Industry mayhem and the indie tidal wave
This has been covered elsewhere, but while I had my head down working, the game industry experienced a gigantic thermonuclear explosion. Sometimes referred to as the indie tsunami / indiepocalypse, it detonated in 2014 or so, right before I started on Infinitroid.

Below is the number of annual Steam releases, year-by-year, thru 2017:

(sources: Steam Spy and Grid Sage Games)

Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort went into. A tiny percentage are hits, but most are forgotten in the deluge.

Some prominent developers have been surprised by the relative lack of success of their recent releases—Mark Morris and Chris Delay from Introversion Games, after a string of successes, found their innnovative latest game Scanner Sombre to be a total flop (discussed in their video here). Edmund McMillen’s The End Is Nigh sold quite modestly despite his past blockbusters like Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac, and his prominence in the indie world. Cliff Harris of Positech Games warns on his blog:

You are reading the thoughts of a guy who was coding since age 11, has 36 years coding experience, has shipped over a dozen games, several of which made millions of dollars, got into indie dev VERY early, knows a lot of industry people, and has a relatively high public profile. And still almost NOBODY covered my latest game (in terms of gaming websites). Its extremely, extremely tough right now.

Like most gamers, I have a backlog of dozens of purchased-but-never-played Steam games picked up at ridiculously low prices from Humble Bundles, Steam sales, etc. Does the world need any more games at this point?

So, I’m pretty discouraged. I seem to have arrived very late to the party, and there are broken bottles and passed-out revelers everywhere. It’s not inconceivable that Infinitroid might still have a shot (I think it does many things well, some of them quite unique) but the prospects are looking more bleak by the day.

Financial matters
As it stands, I’ve put in 2,600+ hours and written 62,176 lines of code (mostly C++). The game’s made $27.92 in income, which nets out at about $0.01 per hour. Had I spent the time washing dishes at $7.25 / hour (a 725x more lucrative job) I’d have made a cool $19k!

I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic, and I love what I do. I’m a lifelong learner, always evaluating my work and experimenting with new approaches. Should I be failing this badly?

Of course money isn’t everything, and I’ve had a lot of fun building and sharing the game. But I did have some hope of creating something that a lot of people would check out and enjoy, and making some return on my time investment, perhaps enough to keep doing this as an independent career.

What’s next
I don’t like to spend too much time feeling sorry for myself or dwelling on the past, at least more than needed to learn from it—and it’s perhaps too early to declare complete failure—so I plan to keep experimenting with marketing and finish the game in some form. But it doesn’t look good right now, and I’m really questioning how much more of my time I want to keep pouring into this when there are other fun, potentially profitable things I could be doing with my remaining creative years that could make a positive difference in the world.

Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in. I’m kinda floundering right now and not really sure what to do, but a few random thoughts I’ve had over the past few days:

• Do the minimal work to wrap it up satisfactorily, release it, and be able to call it finished.
• Put development on hold, and just focus on marketing for a while; try price drops, promotions, pay-what-you-want, free trials etc.; decide what’s next based on the results of that.
• Treat it as a purely hobby project: work on it when I feel like it, and only on the parts that are fun for me. It may take years to finish but perhaps it’ll turn out something cool and unique in the end.
• Make it into an ethical game experiment: reduce addictive qualities of the game, e.g. allow players to set the amount of time they want to spend on it and get a friendly reminder to stop at the end; try to make it benefit people’s lives beyond just consuming their time (this has been on my mind a lot lately, something I had hoped I could foster in the game’s story but haven’t fully realized—more on this in a future post).
• Continue as I have been, pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety, and release a finished product I’m proud of, even if it’s a total commercial flop (not sure I have the energy for it right now but it’s still an option).

For the moment, I have an urge to put my creativity elsewhere, perhaps do some one-week or even one-day projects for a change, so we’ll see. But, if anyone has any feedback, I’d appreciate it—on marketing, potential blind spots in my thinking here, how the game is presented, perspective on the industry right now, comforting words, tough love, etc.!

Thanks for listening.

If the guy really sold only 4 keys, it sucks, buuuuut:
- it's a browser game, with a promise of a Steam release somewhere in the future. Nobody pays 7 dollars for an early access browser game, unless it looks really friggin good.
- according to the website, the guy built a custom engine from scratch. Really? This game could have been made in either Unity, Unreal, or even Gamemaker Studio, and I bet it would have taken far less time for him.
- although the game doesn't look particularly appealing to me, but I'm pretty sure if the guy released the game on Steam, it would had a modest sale at least. So please, don't release a browser game and complain that it only sold 4 copies.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

tfw you make a custom engine for bland as fuck platformer and nobody cares

 

[Destroid]

What might happen in the industry is that instead of gigantic studios with people for every single specialist job possible (ex. someone whose sole job is just to design the logos for magazines in the game world), we might trend towards a market where smaller studios with less amounts of people that are doing a wider range of skills ends up being the norm.

Think about it salary-wise; if you have 100 people getting paid within a given range, but most of them are extreme specialists, and you cut that down to 10 people who are now each doing 10 of those specialist jobs each, you've just saved 90% of your income in one shot (and even if you pay them somewhat more, you'll end up still saving lots).

With how powerful a lot of software tools are becoming, it's automating and speeding up a lot of tasks that originally took excessive amounts of time, which is what's making stuff like that possible. All three of the games we're working on, for instance, have teams of only 3-4 people each, with all audio paid flat rates as we commission it (for music, SFX, and voice acting). Each member of the team has their specialty, sure (on a 3 person team, that's programming, art, and writing respectively) but each of us also contributes in extra jobs, too.

For instance, I'm doing a lot of small jobs; I do all the hiring, money handling/payouts, marketing, emails for Patreon rewards, networking/PR/social media, game design documents (for art, music, writing, gameplay, characters, the game world etc.), continuity/keeping all of that stuff together, managing everyone/mediating compromises, storyline/writing/dialogue, hiring voice actors/music/SFX/etc., voice direction, cutscene "programming", level design/creation, etc.

Triangulate (our artist for Future Fragments) is doing literally 99% of the art himself (the remaining 1% is effects I'll make in other programs just to save him time), so he's playing the role of background artist, tile artist, sprite artist, CG artist, animator, special effects, lighting, environment artist, etc. as well as adding some visual flair with prop placement to the maps I design.

And Frouge of course is doing 100% of the programming, so he's made the in-house level/cutscene creator, has to do lighting, physics, bug fixing, collision, AI, pathfinding, and all the other things that go into coding a game.

That's something like 20-30 jobs, all condensed into three people. If we actually hired a separate person for each one of these jobs, we'd be paying out ten times what we do now, which is something we obviously couldn't afford.

So I think you're going to see a lot more layoffs like this as studios condense and combine job roles, and people will get paid a bit more, but the studio as a whole will save huge amounts of money which will let them be able to afford to bid lower and lower to companies/licenses when it comes to applying for doing games for them, as well as a lot less confusion and clutter over communicating things to different people on a team.

That's how videogames started but if you want to make a big game you need to spend a lot of man hours. Doesn't matter if they come from a few people or a lot.

 

[Dexter]

https://infinitroid.com/blog/posts/did_i_just_waste_3_years

Spoiler

Did I just waste 3 years?

I had trouble sleeping on Monday night.

My mind was circling around some staggering recent game industry stats, and some foreboding writings from prominent indie developers. And around the fact that, for the 3 years I’ve invested on this project, only 4 copies have sold so far.

Those four sales were from generous folks who already had free access to the game, but wanted to support its development (thank you guys). New sales, from new visitors to the site (1,016 since I put the game on sale in November) are currently at zero.

Zero. Yikes.

As bleak as that is, with previous unpaid players the game has had its fans. 368 people had created free accounts before it went on sale. Based on analytics, people have played about 1,080 hours, and many still play daily or weekly. The game has gotten positive feedback when shared on forums, reddit, etc.

1,016 is not a huge number of visitors in internet terms, and perhaps I just need to drive in more traffic. But 0% is not the most encouraging conversion rate!

Industry mayhem and the indie tidal wave
This has been covered elsewhere, but while I had my head down working, the game industry experienced a gigantic thermonuclear explosion. Sometimes referred to as the indie tsunami / indiepocalypse, it detonated in 2014 or so, right before I started on Infinitroid.

Below is the number of annual Steam releases, year-by-year, thru 2017:

(sources: Steam Spy and Grid Sage Games)

Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort went into. A tiny percentage are hits, but most are forgotten in the deluge.

Some prominent developers have been surprised by the relative lack of success of their recent releases—Mark Morris and Chris Delay from Introversion Games, after a string of successes, found their innnovative latest game Scanner Sombre to be a total flop (discussed in their video here). Edmund McMillen’s The End Is Nigh sold quite modestly despite his past blockbusters like Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac, and his prominence in the indie world. Cliff Harris of Positech Games warns on his blog:

You are reading the thoughts of a guy who was coding since age 11, has 36 years coding experience, has shipped over a dozen games, several of which made millions of dollars, got into indie dev VERY early, knows a lot of industry people, and has a relatively high public profile. And still almost NOBODY covered my latest game (in terms of gaming websites). Its extremely, extremely tough right now.

Like most gamers, I have a backlog of dozens of purchased-but-never-played Steam games picked up at ridiculously low prices from Humble Bundles, Steam sales, etc. Does the world need any more games at this point?

So, I’m pretty discouraged. I seem to have arrived very late to the party, and there are broken bottles and passed-out revelers everywhere. It’s not inconceivable that Infinitroid might still have a shot (I think it does many things well, some of them quite unique) but the prospects are looking more bleak by the day.

Financial matters
As it stands, I’ve put in 2,600+ hours and written 62,176 lines of code (mostly C++). The game’s made $27.92 in income, which nets out at about $0.01 per hour. Had I spent the time washing dishes at $7.25 / hour (a 725x more lucrative job) I’d have made a cool $19k!

I’m not a dumb guy—I got good SAT scores. I’m disciplined, I have a good work ethic, and I love what I do. I’m a lifelong learner, always evaluating my work and experimenting with new approaches. Should I be failing this badly?

Of course money isn’t everything, and I’ve had a lot of fun building and sharing the game. But I did have some hope of creating something that a lot of people would check out and enjoy, and making some return on my time investment, perhaps enough to keep doing this as an independent career.

What’s next
I don’t like to spend too much time feeling sorry for myself or dwelling on the past, at least more than needed to learn from it—and it’s perhaps too early to declare complete failure—so I plan to keep experimenting with marketing and finish the game in some form. But it doesn’t look good right now, and I’m really questioning how much more of my time I want to keep pouring into this when there are other fun, potentially profitable things I could be doing with my remaining creative years that could make a positive difference in the world.

Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in. I’m kinda floundering right now and not really sure what to do, but a few random thoughts I’ve had over the past few days:

• Do the minimal work to wrap it up satisfactorily, release it, and be able to call it finished.
• Put development on hold, and just focus on marketing for a while; try price drops, promotions, pay-what-you-want, free trials etc.; decide what’s next based on the results of that.
• Treat it as a purely hobby project: work on it when I feel like it, and only on the parts that are fun for me. It may take years to finish but perhaps it’ll turn out something cool and unique in the end.
• Make it into an ethical game experiment: reduce addictive qualities of the game, e.g. allow players to set the amount of time they want to spend on it and get a friendly reminder to stop at the end; try to make it benefit people’s lives beyond just consuming their time (this has been on my mind a lot lately, something I had hoped I could foster in the game’s story but haven’t fully realized—more on this in a future post).
• Continue as I have been, pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety, and release a finished product I’m proud of, even if it’s a total commercial flop (not sure I have the energy for it right now but it’s still an option).

For the moment, I have an urge to put my creativity elsewhere, perhaps do some one-week or even one-day projects for a change, so we’ll see. But, if anyone has any feedback, I’d appreciate it—on marketing, potential blind spots in my thinking here, how the game is presented, perspective on the industry right now, comforting words, tough love, etc.!

Thanks for listening.

If the guy really sold only 4 keys, it sucks, buuuuut:
- it's a browser game, with a promise of a Steam release somewhere in the future. Nobody pays 7 dollars for an early access browser game, unless it looks really friggin good.
- according to the website, the guy built a custom engine from scratch. Really? This game could have been made in either Unity, Unreal, or even Gamemaker Studio, and I bet it would have taken far less time for him.
- although the game doesn't look particularly appealing to me, but I'm pretty sure if the guy released the game on Steam, it would had a modest sale at least. So please, don't release a browser game and complain that it only sold 4 copies.

 

[dmonin]

Just want to share some cool story. My friend released his game in a Steam. The work took about 4 years. After 8-9 months of sales Steam banned him and banned his game too. The ban was for fake reviews.

As I understand right now Steam tries to clean shitty games like 'Putin 20!8', 'Hentai' and games with fake reviews. How Steam detects fake reviews I don't know.

You can find Far Out game here: https://steam.madjoki.com/apps/banned

 

[Gerrard]

Meanwhile, over in the land of good indie games

 

[J_C]

How Steam detects fake reviews I don't know.

I'm just guessing, but if the dev is really stupid, he/she can post reviews fromt he same computer, same IP, using several Steam accounts. I guess Valve can check the IP of the accounts used. Or some bots can also give fake reviews, which can be spot if the bots give similarly worded reviews with little to no gametime.

 

[Haba]

So if you wanted to, say nuke some point and click adventure game on Steam, all you'd have to do is to buy some botted reviews for it?



Really makes one think...

 

[J_C]

So if you wanted to, say nuke some point and click adventure game on Steam, all you'd have to do is to buy some botted reviews for it?



Really makes one think...

 

[Freddie]

What might happen in the industry is that instead of gigantic studios with people for every single specialist job possible (ex. someone whose sole job is just to design the logos for magazines in the game world), we might trend towards a market where smaller studios with less amounts of people that are doing a wider range of skills ends up being the norm.

Think about it salary-wise; if you have 100 people getting paid within a given range, but most of them are extreme specialists, and you cut that down to 10 people who are now each doing 10 of those specialist jobs each, you've just saved 90% of your income in one shot (and even if you pay them somewhat more, you'll end up still saving lots).

With how powerful a lot of software tools are becoming, it's automating and speeding up a lot of tasks that originally took excessive amounts of time, which is what's making stuff like that possible. All three of the games we're working on, for instance, have teams of only 3-4 people each, with all audio paid flat rates as we commission it (for music, SFX, and voice acting). Each member of the team has their specialty, sure (on a 3 person team, that's programming, art, and writing respectively) but each of us also contributes in extra jobs, too.

For instance, I'm doing a lot of small jobs; I do all the hiring, money handling/payouts, marketing, emails for Patreon rewards, networking/PR/social media, game design documents (for art, music, writing, gameplay, characters, the game world etc.), continuity/keeping all of that stuff together, managing everyone/mediating compromises, storyline/writing/dialogue, hiring voice actors/music/SFX/etc., voice direction, cutscene "programming", level design/creation, etc.

Triangulate (our artist for Future Fragments) is doing literally 99% of the art himself (the remaining 1% is effects I'll make in other programs just to save him time), so he's playing the role of background artist, tile artist, sprite artist, CG artist, animator, special effects, lighting, environment artist, etc. as well as adding some visual flair with prop placement to the maps I design.

And Frouge of course is doing 100% of the programming, so he's made the in-house level/cutscene creator, has to do lighting, physics, bug fixing, collision, AI, pathfinding, and all the other things that go into coding a game.

That's something like 20-30 jobs, all condensed into three people. If we actually hired a separate person for each one of these jobs, we'd be paying out ten times what we do now, which is something we obviously couldn't afford.

So I think you're going to see a lot more layoffs like this as studios condense and combine job roles, and people will get paid a bit more, but the studio as a whole will save huge amounts of money which will let them be able to afford to bid lower and lower to companies/licenses when it comes to applying for doing games for them, as well as a lot less confusion and clutter over communicating things to different people on a team.

I don't have background in gaming or adult industry. I have done other things though and while outside of gaming and your niche, your post made me think of some experiences of my own.

I do not have any reason not to believe that your model doesn't work for you, but I do wonder how much of a factor it is that you work in adult game niche and has succeeded to build yourself recognisable and trustworthy brand image within this said niche much earlier. Or you got a head start and were able to capitalise on that, to summarise.

Small studio model you described can work very well and it can be fun and what was very important for me back in the day, it offered environment where applying theory to practice was a must. I also got to work with people who were very good in their profession and learn about how they solved problems, team work skills etc. Experience of doing and developing my skills my core skills actually helped a lot also in developing my core skills further. Obviously it also worked. In general we wouldn't get new ideas and products but from perhaps 3 companies in the world, if new comers couldn't build leverage somehow. I also agree that there are limits and outsourcing things, like in your case you mentioned on audio side of things is a good move.

However, I also observed that global market can be very tough, it does I think matter if innovation is really reinventing something or refining, and further you go with synergy model, more dependant you come from this internal synergy. Things happen in people lives and when there's need to replace one, personnel who are actually able to take over don't come cheap any more.

There's also that after few years there may come a point where this team synergy model may become straining. That depends a lot of what you are working with, strategy and goals though. In some scenarios it may happen that when you grow, there is more and more need for certain core understanding of different things, a lot of bureaucracy can be outsourced, but if your deal with, say accounting firm or lawyer goes sour, things may become very bad, very fast. More so if team doesn't have core knowledge about what to even ask if that happens. That core knowledge comes with the price of internal bureaucracy (it makes creating a product possible, but contribute towards project anything other than that). I can't recall name of this one Kickstarter game I was following, but the dev run with the money after trying to negotiate licence deal for certain assets copyrighted by some film studio and the mess he ended in as result. If he were bothered to even consult someone in the know before, he could have gotten away by just altering said assets, people would have the game and he would still be in business. But that's not how it went.

In the end I guess I'm trying to say, that while I have no doubt that your current model is working to you just fine, it don't think it's universally superb model. There are lot of good in it, but for beginning studio Return of Investment is one thing and while product is The Thing, it may very well be that acquired skills that become within process and networking may be where the real long term value for team is. Again depends of strategy among other things, but IMO building skills which equals for exit strategy for even outside entertainment industry from the beginning, instead of multitasking in many roles for who knows how many years, might be worth consideration too.

 

[some funny shit]

The state of indie dev and why it will not get easier
October 03, 2018 | Filed under: business
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I recently showed off my latest game production Line at a big UK games show (EGX), and not long after than, I took a trip (my first ever) to Boston to meet up with some Boston devs and talk to some nice people from valve. I also had a look around the local Boston indie games festival event while I was there, and talked to a bunch of indies about various stuff. In-between this I visited the Boston tea party museum, which you kind of have to do if you are very English and in Boston right?

Now I am finally recovered from jet lag, and back working on cool new stuff for Production Line, I have time to reflect on the indie scene as I see it now in September 2018.

I think this is a good time to do this, as a number of people are talking about this articleabout the reality of indie game dev, and there has also been debate about this article, about the experience of some fellow indies (who also happened to be next to us last year at EGX). Its probably also worth mentioning that Limit theory’s developer seems to have quit the project.

Anyway…

yeah its not getting any easier, and I don’t see any immediate reason to believe it will. In theory, eventually enough indie developers go bankrupt in a saturated market so that the self-correcting methods of capitalism kick-in, people realize that its no different to writing a novel (in terms of success chances), and the people who are currently ‘chasing the indie dream’ get jobs in banking or business app development. In practice it seems that indie development is still seen as attractive enough that there is another decade or so of new entrants coming in to replace every developer who drops out when their finances run dry. I really cannot see the ‘number of games released on steam this week’ metric dropping a lot in the medium term.

Another potential solution or equilibrium would be a more even and less hit-driven distribution of revenue from stores could make indie devs more sustainable at the margins. Every RimWorld or Prison Architect, of for that matter every PubG is making so many bazillions of dollars of pure profit, that if it could be distributed over 100x as many games, there would be a lot more solvent developers and maybe a handful fewer multi-multi-millionaires on steam. Arguably that would be a good thing, but not something I think you can really force.

Ultimately there a few forces that are naturally causing the current state of affairs to persist, and I dont think any of them are evil, or corrupt, or bad per-se, they are just the reality.

Force #1: people want this lifestyle so much they are prepared to take unnecessary risks. That means the price is driven down. Its simple supply and demand, and because many people are as happy to live on noodles as a game developer than they would be to apply the same skills to biz-app development at a $90,000 salary… then the average developer is going to see their wage driven down. Thats simple supply/demand economics and that is not going to change.

Force #2: Barriers to entry have dropped hugely. We can argue the pros and cons of the $100 steam fee, but the simple fact is unity and similar engines & asset stores mean its easier to make a game than ever before. That vastly increases the pool of people able to compete in the market.

Force #3: There is a massive skill disparity in the range of ‘indie’ game developers. This is the one that requires more explanation:

A really AWESOME bricklayer may be able to lay bricks at double the rate of a bricklayer who learned the trade last week. Maybe even three times as fast. Thats awesome. But a really AWESOME programmer is likely 40-50 or even 100x as productive as a newcomer to programming. It sounds like bullshit but its true, and the sad thing is, you really need to HAVE that much experience before you truly appreciate this reality. The same is likely true for artists.

If you are a newcomer to programming, think of all the time you spend debugging, the time you spend googling the answer to something, the time you spend refactoring, the time you spend on skype or discord asking people for help, and then remove ALL of it, and thats how it is when you have coded *that kind of thing* 10 or 20 times already. Once you know what you are doing at a certain level, programming is just typing. I can create new user interface code for Production Line pretty much at the speed I can type this blog post, and to be frank, using whole tomatoes improved intellisense, its actually quicker for me than typing English.

In many ways I am the *WORST CASE* scenario as a competing indie developer. I have 37 years coding experience, and 20 years indie dev experience. I learned to type before home computers even existed, and used to get a book and type out the text from the book on a manual typewriter *for fun* as a child. I’m married, and have no kids so I’m not constantly socializing or dating, and have zero distractions. I work from home in the countryside in a 100% distraction-free environment. I can afford the most comfortable chair imaginable, the fastest PC imaginable, I am healthy, I love my job, I have no boss, and no financial worries. Add to this… I have no major hobbies, I hate most TV, the majority of books I read for fun are about programming or business or marketing.

If you imagine designing a robot to take human form and churn out as much productivity as possible as an indie dev… its not *that* much better than me. The only things working against me are the fact that I guess I’m older than average so theoretically less energised? (I made a a developer blog video on Boxing day, so I cant see the lack of energy myself…)

Anyway my point is… I am your competition as an indie dev. You may not like to think like that, and I certainly like to be helpful to other indies, and encourage people, but the fact is, I exist and I’m making games 60 hours a week and I love it. I am not the only one. You are also trying out-code Chris Delay from introversion, Jonathan Blow, Jamie Cheng, Ryan Clark, and a bunch of other indies who have WAY more experience and WAY more technical ability than you (probably), simply because of age and time.

(This sounds horribly arrogant, but I’m not claiming to be any ‘better’ a person and certainly not innately any cleverer than anybody else. I’ve just done it a LONG time, and I am unusually single minded and focused. Essentially I’m tough competition due to time, age, and genes.)

..so what am i getting at here?

The excellent Lake Ridden post mortem includes this:

“35h work week. We measured the SCRUM points completed and was able to get the same amount of things done in 35h instead of the usual 40h. All while the stress number was staying the same or dropping. Everybody was actively encouraged to use this extra free time to see family or do exercise.”

Which sounds GREAT and I wish the whole world was like that, but unfortunately it is not. They are indie devs, and competing in the free market with the rest of us. I’m not working 35 or even 40 hours, and never will ( I am too obsessed with my games), and by mere fact of being much older and more experienced than that team, I have a huge advantage. You cannot legislate that advantage away, nobody can make a solo indie dev who owns the company work less hard. The playing field is NOT level, and its not going to be.

So whats my answer to this problem?

I absolutely accept that I do not have one. It is, simply put, really fucking hard right now, and probably always will be. Music, Writing, Acting, game-dev, they all suffer from this problem. Too many people want to do it for everyone to end up with a great lifestyle, working conditions and standard of living. I absolutely understand why people would like indie game dev to pay (on average) like a normal 9-5 job with normal 9-5 hours, but this is not about to happen, sorry. If you expect gamers to ‘pay more’ to subsidize better working conditions for indie game devs, ask yourself when you demanded the option to pay an extra amount to spotify to support indie musicians.

HUGE disclaimer: If you work for someone else in a big company like EA/Ubisoft/Whoever else, then absolutely you should NOT be working > 40 hour weeks. I ROUTINELY went home dead on 6PM from my jobs in AAA and never got fired for it. Similarly, if you are a super-experienced developer in those same companies then you should FIGHT LIKE HELL to get the pay you deserve. Absolutely some coders should earn 10x what other coders earn, and if they wont pay you that, leave.

TL;DR: Indie dev is really hard. The experienced devs have an advantage. This sucks if you are new. This will not change.

The bolded part made me LOL then I went to cry in my corner.

 

[Haba]

If you expect gamers to ‘pay more’ to subsidize better working conditions for indie game devs, ask yourself when you demanded the option to pay an extra amount to spotify to support indie musicians.

ICE BURN.

 

[Dexter]

In many ways I am the *WORST CASE* scenario as a competing indie developer. I have 37 years coding experience, and 20 years indie dev experience. I learned to type before home computers even existed, and used to get a book and type out the text from the book on a manual typewriter *for fun* as a child. I’m married, and have no kids so I’m not constantly socializing or dating, and have zero distractions. I work from home in the countryside in a 100% distraction-free environment. I can afford the most comfortable chair imaginable, the fastest PC imaginable, I am healthy, I love my job, I have no boss, and no financial worries. Add to this… I have no major hobbies, I hate most TV, the majority of books I read for fun are about programming or business or marketing.

That bit sounded like a Cleveian rant about Crackerjack programmers, but honestly I don't think it ultimately matters as much as he thinks it does. Some of his games are okay, but I don't remember any breakout hits to believe that many people would even absolutely want to "measure up" to him: https://www.positech.co.uk/

I think some "newbie team" with a really appealing idea or good artists/art direction that don't have "his experience" but instead make something that really appeals can very much steal his market and sell multiples of what his games do.

 

[Dayyālu]

That bit sounded like a Cleveian rant about Crackerjack programmers, but honestly I don't think it ultimately matters as much as he thinks it does. Some of his games are okay, but I don't remember any breakout hits to believe that many people would even absolutely want to "measure up" to him: https://www.positech.co.uk/

I think some "newbie team" with a really appealing idea or good artists/art direction that don't have "his experience" but instead make something that really appeals can very much steal his market and sell multiples of what his games do.

Wait, are you saying that a man that lives in the middle of nowhere and has no passions bar programming and business lacks the creativity and grit to truly put out a product that can reach a wide success?

The dude (bar being an arrogant twat from his writing style) is pretty much the polar opposite of the wide-eyed "BUT I LOVE GAMES" indie with no technical skills. I've just played Gratuitous Space Battles and Gratuitous tank Battles, and they are.... well, games that literally play by themselves with rather iffy balance. I am not joking, his games are pretty much the tactical model of a good 4x and nothing else. They are, sadly, boring.

Being a monster Neanderthal programmer doesn't help when all you program is stale boredom with derivative mechanics. Who would have guessed.

 

[Blackstaff]

Project Warlock decided to go GOG timed exclusive to strengthen their visibility :

https://af.gog.com/forum/general/coming_soon_project_warlock_abcc4/post17?as=1649904300

Too bad the store page is now so shit , nobody will ever find them.

 

[fantadomat]

Too bad the store page is now so shit , nobody will ever find them.

Yeah,what is with the nu front page? It is totally shit and confusing. Is there a way to roll back?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Was this what they meant by the Indiepocalypse?

 

[fantadomat]

At least it was spend on something worthy!

 

[Dexter]

Frogboy wrote this: https://littletinyfrogs.com/article/492794/game-developer-economics-of-2019

Game Developer Economics of 2019
Published on Friday, December 28, 2018 By Brad Wardell In Game Development Journals

If you're a game developer, 2019 is the year you adapt or die.

The market has changed. This Steam release chart makes it obvious:

2018's numbers aren't available yet but given that the flood gates are now open, you can imagine what that looks like. Like every other industry that has reduced the barrier to entry, the game industry is filling up with titles. This is (mostly) good for gamers but presents new challenges for game developers.

The Pareto Principle

There are certain mathematical models that become relevant once you are dealing with numbers this high. The most obvious being the Pareto principle.

In games, it works basically like this: The square root of the total competition will earn 80% of the income of a given competitive field.

Let's assume that by end of 2018 there are around 30,000 titles on Steam.

Roughly speaking, that means that in 2018 the top 180 or so will make 80% of the revenue and the remaining 29,800 will share in the remainder of the 20%. As others have noted, Steam's revenue has not been increasing at anywhere near that rate.

In 2017, Steam generated around $4.3 billion versus $3.5 billion in 2016. Or put another way: In 2016 there were 10,000 titles on Steam and in 2017 there were around 18,000 titles on Steam.

This works out to the bottom 9,900 titles on Steam in 2016 sharing $700 million. Or $70,000 for the average for 2016.

But for 2017, while revenue went up to $4.3 billion, the number of titles went up to around 18,000. Which, using the Pareto principle means that that while the 17,800 shared 20% of that amount . Or $48,314 for the average of 2017.

For 2018, let's say the revenue increased by the same rate as it did previously. I don't think this will be the case because of the trend of a few major titles of last year coming out on their own custom platforms. Indeed, if you look at the Steam top sellers for 2018, only three of them were released in 2018.

So for the sake of argument, let's say that total revenue increased to $5 billion last year. That's an impressive increase in total revenue right?

However, while the top 180 or so games will make 80% of that revenue, the bottom 28,800 or so will share in on the remaining $1 billion. Or $34,722 for the average of 2018.

The Pareto principle is a pretty universal axiom used in many industries. It is, what it is. It is a trend that has already occurred in the music and video industries. As the technology and logistics to produce content allow more competition, not only do prices come down but the per product revenue comes down as well regardless of the price. That means developers can't solve this problem by lowering their price. The top 100 or so will always generate around half the total revenue with the top 200 generate around 80% and the rest just will get largely lost in the shuffle.

Discoverability is not the main problem

No matter how perfect Amazon, Steam, GOG, Humble or anyone else makes their discoverability algorithm, it won't change the axiom that that the very top games will generate nearly all the revenue. Discoverability helps to be sure. But it helps at a linear rate of return rather than the exponential rate of the Pareto distribution.

It's easy for a game developer to blame the platform holder. But it's no more Steam's fault that lots of new titles are being submitted than it is Amazon's fault that lots of new digital books are being released. It's not like there were 10,000 games being made per year in 2012 that were being censored. It's just that the rise of inexpensive high end computers for development combined with the amazing tools available to developers has resulted in an explosion of new titles.

So what do you, the developer, do?

There are a number of well tested paths to address this. One of the reasons capitalism works is that it organically generates lots of competitive segments so that the Pareto principle gets split into lots of mini-competitions. For example, Paradox has done well with the "grand strategy game" segment. Being the leader in your niche can translate into a better chance of getting a much, much bigger piece of the pie.

Ultimately, however, it means that we will see a major stratification of game development this year. If you're a major publisher, there is no point in investing in a title that won't be in that top 100.

For Stardock, which has historically worked in the mid-market segment, it means reviewing our own strategy. As a company, we have enough engineers to make a single AAA game but have operated with multiple teams going at once to make mid-market games (Galactic Civilizations, Star Control, Ashes of the Singularity). But as you can imagine, we have seen each game's revenue affected as you would expect.

What is Stardock doing?

Stardock, being an independent developer, has always been able to work on whatever it wants to since it self-funds. This, however, is also a doubled edged sword because it also has meant it errs a bit on the side of caution and thus has not tried to be the "leader" of a given niche but rather the leader of a niche within that niche. I.e. better to spend $3 million to make $15 million in a niche (but also be able to recover if the game fails) than to risk $9 million.

The most obvious example of Stardock's traditional strategy is Galactic Civilizations III. For $3 million invested in generated around $15 million in revenue. But that's nothing compared to Stellaris. Despite being released in 2016 it was the 14th top seller on Steam last year and owns the space strategy genre right now.

When Galactic Civilizations III was being designed in 2012, there were only 1,500 titles on Steam. The risk of making our budget back was very low.

But as we enter 2019, it's a very different world. Spending $3 million knowing you won't be in the top 200 is now a very risky strategy for an independent developer. As other developers have noted, your options are to spend trivial amounts to play the slot machine of indie success or go for the top 200 which means a much bigger risk for an independent studio since one failure could bring down the whole company.

So there are a few things we're thinking of:

1. Helping Indies. Like I said, discoverability won't cause the third best fantasy strategy game to suddenly become the top seller, but it can make it can double or triple the game's revenue easily over what it might have done. So this is one area we are looking at is helping promising indies succeed.
2. Promising Niches. Stardock is the main user of Oxide's Nitrous engine which allows for emergent game designs. Since it's core-neutral (i.e. the more CPU cores you throw at it, the more it can do) we can make either new types of games or we can do niche games with a fidelity or gameplay that wasn't previously possible. The challenge here is that as we saw with Ashes of the Singularity, a game with a $2 million budget (but has sold almost 800,000 copies) is that many people didn't have 4 CPU cores in 2016. And for Nitrous to really show its advantages, you really need 8 to 16 CPU cores which the market just isn't ready for yet so we still have to design around 4 CPU cores which limits our advantage.
3. Embrace our existing niches. With Star Control: Origins, we attempted to go wider. And while the game has done fairly well on PC, its budget was predicated on porting it to consoles which is underway. But rather than going wide with future games, another path is target future games at tighter segments. So for instance, a Star Control II might be a more hard-core RPG. Sins of a Solar Empire has been so successful because it dared to be a multi-hour long RTS. An Ashes of the Singularity II might focus on that kind of depth (i.e. multi-hour games) based on a much richer economic and diplomatic system rather than being a kind of simplified Total Annihilation game.

Regardless of what Stardock does, the game industry as a whole will have to adapt to this model and developers who don't will disappear.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

When Steam releases its 2018 numbers, there will be shat a lot of bricks.

I think it will be around then, or in the following weeks, that the Indiepocalypse will truly be upon us.