I think some of you are ignorant, steam distributes and markets your game. If the game’s trailer looks good, if people play it and recommends the game then it’ll get higher up on the steam list. More people will play it and if they like it they’ll do the same thing. Soon streamers will play the game and then you’ll have thousands of sold copies. Haidme you said earlier that on a good day your ketchup or krum game sells 5 copies.
Let’s be honest, if you scrolled through games on steam and you saw ketchup game or Krum and you watched the trailer you most likely wouldn’t throw 5 dollars on it when just some pages earlier you could play assasin’s creed and Dark souls, two games of the same genre as Krum. If you wouldn’t want to spend money on a similar game it’s probably not a very good game. Now the idea of running around as a barbarian and fight skeletons, it’s a cool idea but it has to be done right.
If you had made cutscenes in the trailer, with interesting camera movements and maybe hint at some actual storyline and if the graphics would have been more realistic and the animations not so crude I have no doubt that it would become a hit. You can’t blame the poor sales on marketing, a good game sells itself a bad game needs tons of marketing to sell itself. It’s like with that recent mummy movie, would anyone bother watching that shitty movie if we weren’t bombarded with ads, trailers and the poster everywhere for the movie.
No we wouldn’t unless we were into mummies, it’s just another holywood blockbuster shit movie, we’ve all seen special effects and screeching monsters before. Now if it was done right, an actual mummy movie set in egypt, scary, moody and with interesting cinematography and not guns shooting at stuff for no reasons every 5 min it would sell itself by word of mouth. That’s what happened with 2001: A space odyssey, at the beginning it was not very popular but then stoners told people about it and it became a phenomenon. Same with games, if your game had a great trailer, great graphics and hint at something more to the game than hacking away at skeletons more people would buy it. Instead of 5 sold copies a day you would have 300 sold copies a day.
Don’t blame it on bad marketing, make a good game and it’ll be profitable, only if you game is bad would you have to try to convince people to buy it. Go on sites and beg peopl to buy it, look at my game buy it please. Out of the 1000 people who heard you spam maybe 2 buy it, you move on to youtube and to other sites. It’s annoying, personally I hate advertising, most products made in the world are useless. A lot of try hards and few who actually manage to create something of quality. Stop spamming your farmville, feed a cow game or play as an orange that needs to create pumpkin juice or whatever. It’s an insult to the people that you intend to sell the game to, if you wouldn’t buy a similar game don’t expect people to buy it.
But maybe I just have high standards, only own two games myself. Medieval Total War, Civilization 5. Maybe most people aren’t that good at recognizing what makes a product great, what would make a game of any genre great. Anyway if you wanna make your own game I would follow these rules:
•You’re one person, keep it simple, locations that require few props.
•Make the gameplay addictive but very simple and refrain from making it “cool”, nobody needs magic combinations and levels.
•Some type of narrative is going to be needed, don’t have to be complex but a 2 min cutscene at the start of the game I think should be mandatory. Dialouge and interesting character design is also important.
In order of importance:
- Story (Setting, characters, mood, camera movement, “the experience”)
- Graphics (The enviroments, the colors and character designs, refrain from world of warcraft/Blizzard look at all cost)
- Gameplay (Jump on enemies, push blocks around, run through a level and avoid obstacles while being chased by a big monster. It’s not that important what it is as long as it’s something that keeps the mind focused on problem solving.
I would have made such a game a long time ago if I knew how to code, I mean it’s very very easy. To downgrade your AAA models to some crash bandicoot character and then create some simple storyline and some animations for when the characters interact. Very simple props in simple envrioments, 10-20 different levels that the player has to navigate through. Perhaps a cutscene after each level and an ability for the player to backtrack. Gameplay could be anything really as long as it’s not too much work.
We just need those logic nodes that makes programming easy, then capable people will create fun games.:evilgrin:
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