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?)
That said:
I would go even further and tell you my personal rule of thumb: if a $10 indie game doesn’t have over 300 reviews, it was probably a financial failure. That is it hasn’t provided the equivalent of what someone could make
in industry in a single year.
This is an incredible statement on many levels. Let me lay them out:
(1) A person who works from home on his passion projects, with complete creative control and complete public credit for the project, should not expect to earn as much as he would when working for a corporation. Otherwise, why would anyone ever work for a corporation...? To the extent he is viewing "be my own boss" as a
professional alternative to "work for a boss who pays me," unless he's being utterly irrational, he is putting a value on control over his work schedule and work environment, fame, creative freedom, etc. that makes up for the shortfall in pay.
That is not necessarily true:
When you have a "core production skill" (directly related to the creating the content the corporation is selling) in a corporation, your work also has to cover all the bureaucratic costs of the structure (management, and all the logistical branches), on top of the income of the shareholders.
In exchange, you benefit from the assets of the corporation, that can range from machines to reputation and contacts, which leverage your productivity.
The thing is, if you are on your own, you need to be good (or be working with someone who is) at every task that is usually handled by other:
marketing, production, project management, on top of the product development itself.
A lot of developers make more as freelances than they made as corporation developers, as long as they have enough contacts to get them going. Game development adds a lot of required skills compared to freelance software development, though, and B2C(Business to Consumer) is riskier than B2B(Business to Business) by nature (cf point 4).
2) A tiny, tiny percentage of people who make failed Steam games are doing it as a full-time profession. So the choice isn't between making Game X and working for Ubisoft, it's between making Game X and going for a hike, posting in another Codex thread, reading a fantasy novel, getting more sleep, etc.
(3) Most of the people who make failed games on Steam couldn't get jobs in the industry. Yeah, yeah, standards are low everywhere. But basically this argument is like, "If instead of writing Warhammer fan fiction on Usenet, you got a job writing shared world novels for Games Workshop, you'd have made so much money!!!!"
That is true, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people who do it full time, and/or had prior experience as game devs with shipped products bite the dust.
I have been developing Zodiac Legion for more than five years. During this time, I have attended a lot of events in the French indie scene, and I met very talented software engineers, and game developers who had a lot of experience whose launches ended in failure, despite their game being very popular at conventions and video game events.
The thing is, it is not the end of the world if your game tanks. It is a hard pill to swallow, but most of the teams I encountered ended up finding contract work for other studios (or outside of the gaming industry).
That said, Dead Cells, Xenonauts 2 and Slay the Spire show that there are still niches where gamers are starved of good games.
(4) If making more money is your goal, making games is a bad idea. So, "If you're only getting 300 reviews, rather than working from home making your dream game project, you should sit in a cubicle writing item descriptions for a F2P micro-transactions idle game" should really be rewritten as, "If you're only getting 300 reviews, maybe you should just get a job in data entry or accounting or pipe fitting."
Going indie is risky, but making games is not that different from any other enterprise project.
I have also met a lot of entrepreneurs who tanked their launch (as I also attend entrepreneurial networking events). The core problem is that B2C (Business to Consumer) requires a ton of people interested in what you are doing to make it work, when B2B only requires some contacts and contracts to get you afloat, as long as you are really solving someone's problem (cf Twitch creator on
Why I love B2B over B2C).
Games are not that different. Gamers are actually easier to reach than your average consumer whose problem you think you are solving. Labor is also typically cheaper for games than for enterprise software development: Games may be a bit riskier than other businesses, but given that game development positions are paid much less than similar non game development positions, going indie is not that bad if you really cannot help making games full time, as long as you have some ways to survive a setback.
At least, when making software, your production costs are much easier to keep in check than when making hardware (as in, you usually don't run the risk of having marginal production costs ending being higher than your revenue per unit), in which failures to assess production cost/shipping costs
can make you go bankrupt,
even when stars seems to align.
So all in all, indie game development might be hard, but not orders of magnitude harder than any other B2C entrepreneurial adventure. You should only do it if you are indifferent to risk (ie, if you don't need to mortgage your own house if your project tanks), and can afford to lose everything you invest in it, like for every other business (so it is easier in countries with low cost of living, or good unemployment benefits/easily obtainable state grants).
Back to the OT, Keith Burgun's YT followers lay not know his latest game was out, given that his latest video is one year old, and doesn't use the same name for what I assume is the same game (the videos refer to push the lane, not escape the Omnochronom). The fact that he talks about a lot of unrelated political issues on his twitter doesn't help either:
He really doesn't make it that easy for his fan to know that he has just published a game. It looks as if he is really trying hard not to leverage his own following. There is also very little information about the game itself, even though turn based MOBA roguelike is a confusing description.
Also, given how inept Steam is at finding near misses when searching for games, the title doesn't make it easy to find or remember the game. The fact that it is listed under a different publisher than Auro doesn't help either.
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