The curse of game development democratization; Was it even worth doing?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

A really good article on the fact that indies find it almost impossible to make money nowadays if you have any sort of dream of going commercial

The comments also give a good insight on the reality of things. Making the game you want will not make money, the only way to have a remotely decent chance, other than getting that rare lightning in a bottle, is to make tons of throwaway games that try to mine wallets with IAP and are filed with ads.

So in a sense, the chance of even succeeding in the commercial space if you’re not a billion-dollar entity is practically non-existent, so goes the idea of just perhaps making games as a hobby, on a shoestring budget, and perhaps try to make a few thousand dollars over its lifetime (as some indies have already done).

There is one thing that might help, and that would be to de-democratize game development by axing the idea of Unity, Unreal and Source for free and instead charge perhaps 1000 USD minimum (to weed out the hobbyists), but even that might not work if upcoming FOSS solutions end up being extremely powerful and once again allows hobbyists to make games). The other thing would be for the stores to enforce a minimum game length and quality (no hacked together simulators for instance and no pre-made assets for core components), but people might end up protesting that decision as fascism.

So, amidst all of the effort to make Blender more suitable for indies, was game development democratization worth it, did it become more of a curse on the entire industry rather than opening a gold mine?

2

yeah, people make money on quality games,

people also don’t make money on crappy games…

sometimes the opposite is true.

roll the dice.

indie singlets evolve into teams that evolve into studios.
or not how much work can you put in?

3

Really, I’ve seen plenty of good games perform poorly on Google Play, the developers end up making less than the ones that make reams of throwaway projects, I hear that it’s the same on Steam as well nowadays.

By your logic, the larger games with better graphics should almost always be making hundreds of thousands of dollars for the creator, many of them don’t even make 10K over a period of several years. Game development does not mint money like it used to, as the article shows, making enough to cover expenses is almost impossible (even on PC where you have to be up there with the absolute best to even have a chance).

4

Yes its worth it, tools alone don’t make a game better or make it sell. However allowing start-up developers access to these tools will eventually vitalize the market.

Making a game in Unity don’t automatically make it a game with “good playability” and making a game in UE don’t automatically make it a “good looking” game. The idea of the game , the design that is formed from the idea and the effort put in to making the design work is what makes a game have “potential to sell”. That potential alone doesn’t make you earn money though. The pricing and marketing plays a big role in this.

A good example is Wasteland 2 ; they had a very big fan base from wasteland 1, fallout , fallout 2 and the “fallout” brand grew even larger with bethesda acquiring and making 2 titles from it. So when wasteland 2 was kickstarted it wasn’t a surprise that they reached their goal But Brian Fargo and DeepSilver decided to suck blood with a $60 tag , and people still went out and bought it. This was all possible of 2 brand names > “Wasteland” & “Fallout”

Another similar examples are games “Monochroma” and “Darklings”. Two small indie companies both released indie games , 1st one NoWhere studios is going bankrupt and second is MildMania is growing slowly and steadily.

NoWhere Studios -> Monochroma basically ripped off “Limbo” and according to one of their devs they took loans and expanded rapid because on the fact that they thought their game sales on steam would at least cover their expenses. Their game had a $24 tag on steam and it wasn’t successful. They had around 15 people working and made a expense around $ 500k (if thats true ?). The same dev was bashing steam about injustice of indie exposure back in 2013.

MildMania -> Darklings had a minimalist look like limbo but was completely different game , they had a smaller group around 4-5 (as far as I remember). They were aided for logistics for 1 year from the Middle East Technical University - Techno Park and choose mobile as target audience for their game (reasonable choices given their resources ). They sold enough to hire new staff , they settled in Techno Park and now they just released their second project (its called “Rope” you can check it out in apple store).

Both studios where start-ups with NW studios having unrealistic expectations while MM was playing it safe.

There are a lot of games which can be thought as clones in the industry with unrealistic price tags . People will always go for the brand/franchise they like but they will also try “cheaper” games which they think are interesting. If you ever get a chance where people “try” your game thats the point where you convince to invest in your product. So drop the price tag and try to convince them…

Development companies should try to create “brands” and create a fan base.

Another example is Taleworlds. They created “Mount & Blade” brand and they said its " Early Access " and managed to sell their bad looking games to bigger audiences since 2005 , they have their own engine and employ 50+ people.

5

Welcome to the Real World ™: whenever there is no scarcity there is no money (so much for the delusional futurist/libertarian’s post-scarcity utopias).

The real reason behind these moves is to allow a lot of young, naive and enthusiastic people to become proficient with these tools, on their on time, with their money (i.e. without any cost for firms). The next step is for big game outfits to hire a few of best (and they can be picky, since there are a lot of candidates), pay them a pity (the more the skill is common, the lower the wage is), suck them dry (psychologically and possibly physically) and then throw them away to be replaced by the next lot of expendables.

For further info, have a look at the works of two german philosophers of the 19th century (Marx and Engels).

6

I usually don’t agree with jpb06, but yeah, they’re definitely just trying to get people crazy enough to deal with game development familiar with their engines. To effect, in game design courses and gamejams, participants have to find free sensible to use game engines. There’s a lot Unreal and Unity benefit from this.

Plus, it’s near impossible to create a AAA game on these engines, not because they aren’t capable of it, but because it takes so much effort and know-how to even do it. It’s partially why Indie Design’s rising around… 2006/2007 was so important: AAA studios cannot be expected to be innovative any more, while Indie designers can.

That said, we would have seen this oversaturation even without all big game engines becoming ‘free’, it would’ve just meant that all indie games would looked exactly alike. We have already seen that with the situation before the big videogame crash. We thankfully have better infrastructure in place for pre-elimination nowadays though.

What needs to be done now is that if you go into indie design, people need to be realistic.

That said, I don’t agree we should read Marx and Engels for more information: They are exactly utopianists themselves, and furthermore, I don’t really recall them talking about using this exact method to get free labour…

7

They wrote about the exploitation of men by other men (which is the real reason behind the current events).

8

Yeah, but Plato wrote about games as well, but that doesn’t mean we should turn to him for modern game design…

9

Post-scarcity are socialist/communism not libertarian, libertarias are very capitalistics

10

Yes, it’s a bad time currently for indies, business wise. When I released Steel Storm in 2011, I think we already passed prime point of indie game dev business. Things were going downhill already in 2011, but at least I didn’t have to put a penny into marketing. Market was not as saturated as it is now, and selling good number of copies was not that hard.

Nowadays we have too many games, too cheap, and we still only have 24 hrs a day and only so many marketing channels.

For an indie game to stand out, it needs to be close to AAA quality with better than AAA gameplay and more polished (bugs wise). Preferably it has to come out on all available platforms and be released when no other big game with massive following is released.

I personally would love to be back in 2008, when commercial engines cost and arm and a leg, when there was no indie Maya and such, and Steam didn’t have Greenlight. Then we could be in a competitive position when using FOSS engine, Blender 2.75 and Krita 3.0 could put us ahead compare to folks who doesn’t use FOSS, not on Steam, etc.

Funny part is even though we are where we are as indies (in general), no one wants to look at the situation realistically and joint forces to either make a platform for in-house game (and then allow other indie games of certain quality to the platform), or simply joint forces on high quality projects. Everyone still wants to make their own game, even if they haven’t even started yet (or thinking that UE4 or Unity 5 somehow will magically put them into winning position).

11

Well its possible that if it did not work with game developing, its time to use game engines to make animations!

12

That approach has very similar to game dev issues - you still need to make a ton of assets and since it’s an animated movie, quality of animation and assets needs to be higher than for the game itself, and plus you still need to attract an audience somehow. Capitalizing on (animated) movies is harder than on games.

I personally have issue with development pace of my game due to the fact I am making it technically alone :confused: So between making assets, animations, effects and scripting gameplay I only have maybe 2 - 3 hours a day (and not even every day) to spare :frowning:

13

+1

Want to make games for as a day job?

Focus like a laser on a specific area of game dev, and join a team,

for the generalist to make 100% of a game, it either needs to be simple,
or be prepared to learn more of your time then to write it.

14

I made the mistake of developing only for android, which was OK in the beginning. I developed 4 apps that were “Top 500 entertainment category best selling” that paid around 500 per month which was equal to but better than a fast food job, but after google purchased admob they suddenly sandbagged the market limiting search results to 250 for each search term. I believe they learned they could make a lot of money through “app discoverability”. Where customers previously found an app through searching the markets unlimited results, now you have to pay to advertise. I tried 50$ and in the blink of an eye my marketing campaign was over with no effect whatsoever. They constantly “fat finger” things. At first I thought it was corporate espionage because it seemed like they were constantly pulling the rug from their market, I remember they suddenly for a week cancelled about 40 orders per day, there was an outcry in the google android forum from many, many other developers in the same situation, some loosing thousands, then a few days later the market was shuffled as developers were still furious and google told developers to stop posting in the Google Android forum :smiley: My sales went instantly from $500 to $50 per month and never recoupetated. Most recently my apps were deleted because my gmail never syncs and I missed a notification that I needed to agree to a new terms of service contract. Now I think they are making sure they are in control of what succeeds, so a new Facebook is prevented from accidentally surfacing, and also working with other corporations just trying to devalue every form of art to Chinese level of compensation, in preparation for epic teams that will need to be cheaply formed to create mindstaggering mega extravaganza future movie and game spectacles. Look at the corporations at the botyom of the webpage at fivers.com! People there do everything and anything for 5 dollars :smiley: I was joking to a friend that it should be called twofitty.com because I bet fivers takes almost half of the ‘five’. Yesterday i heard Microsoft is paying artists to create personalized artwork to people who tweet to microsoft :smiley:

Sorry for the rant but I thought I should give a heads up about android. Last I heard the Apple market was still OK, but I imagine they will suddenly follow suit and change to a “free apps” market theme, allong with sandbagging and limiting search results, payment “glitches”, etc.

15

This ‘everyone can be now be a game developer’ ideology which has led to the market being trampled over, I’m pretty sure would hew close to Marx’s philosophy (as he advocated the idea of everyone having access to everything).

The events we’re seeing can be seen as an example of how capitalism and scarcity in the past has actually worked to keep an industry alive and vibrant. The walls have been broken down to the point where kids are just a few steps away from having their own game development tools, and the outcome is that now you have thousands of kids and young adults all trying to make the next big thing. Another contributor is also from the government itself in their gambit to turn almost everyone in the school system into coders and get them interested in making programs, I don’t think it would be a wise thing to try to make everyone interested in a single industry, let them choose what they are interested in instead (if they want to spend time with more analog hobbies then don’t bother so much with coding lessons).

The scarcity in the past prevented people who didn’t have a strong interest in trying their hand at game creation (and then spamming little projects onto internet storefronts). This also may eventually hurt the commercial engine developers themselves because they now rely on the mass-scale success of the new developers in an ultra-saturated market that is getting worse.

16

I think someone will make a steam, review panel with a team that lets you know if your game is not of high enough quality to sell, and why.

they should keep things above a certain quality, and
not allow clones with no improvments or art.

Also did you hear about Gsl improvment grant for viewport and PBr?

Ton says it will improve the gsl for the game engine :slight_smile:

17

That used to actually be the case with Steam, where reviewers hired by Valve would inspect every game for quality before it got approved,.

However, ever since Greenlight came about, all you have to do now is get enough people to upvote you and you’re in regardless of how good of a quality it is (and with games like Goat Simulator being popular, a lot of indie gamers also don’t care about the presence of bugs because it makes for fun Youtube videos and whatnot).

18

The story often is that a bunch of random people want to make a game (and lot of money). They take no risks, but create a generic game as if there wasn’t enough of them. They possibly don’t know what a good game is, they’re so focused on making money. Sometimes it works, these days more likely it doesn’t work, because the market for those games are oversaturated. Trust me, if you make actually a good game it will be a success. Most (indie) games are crap and it’s a small wonder they sell even that many copies, mainly thanks to ignorant young players.

19

And why should we trust you? :slight_smile:

Young ignorant players actually ruin good games by downvoting them, because it’s not as stupid as they want it to be. I saw some decent games on Steam that have front page full with thumbs down reviews.

20

I would rather release 1 good game in 3 years then 100 little gamelets.

I think the only way to shine in a overstaurated market is by word of mouth,

making a truely unique game is 1/3 effort, 1/3 talent 1/3 time.