Some time ago, some people on this forum said that survival games almost always sell at least a modest number of copies, even the ones that get overwhelmingly negative reviews. Is that still the case? Anyone know?
Nah, not unless you have a hell of a hook. Right now, deception games are the big thing, stuff like Among Us and Unfortunate Spacemen. My guess is that it’s being driven hard by a need to fill a social hole and games like these are pretty low stakes as far as things like time consumed and stuff are concerned. On top of all that, they’re good streamer fodder because they allow the personality people tend to watch for shine through.
I’d say that survival games (notable exception Valheim notwithstanding) have been on the outs for a couple years now
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I think it’s still true, although I wouldn’t count on anything crap getting bought. Good survival games are definitely killing it.
If you can add co-op, it’s probably going to be a good idea.
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Survival games seem fairly saturated on Steam. Based on review count, many are still selling. Unfortunately most of these games never seem to get out of Early Access. Some spend years in that status without ever being finished.
Create a good survival game, I’ll end up buying it because I love the genre, but not until it is out of Early Access.
Farming and shop games are also still popular, which has some overlap with survival games, depending on the style.
Find a good hook. Make it a game that runs well. Most importantly, finish the darn thing.
There is no safe bets, just hard work.
edit: Survival games make me think of DayZ etc, its a very big scope. You probably need open source access to be able to make Unity stream that kind of world
That’s waste of hard work.
No hard bets, work safe!
It’s doable, especially with the new addressables system and improvements to data streaming. While I’m certainly not working at the DayZ scale of map sizes, my development goals remain to have no additional loading screens or notable cheats after initial load-in and it’s been proving an invaluable system for that.
Honestly between that and even just Jobs (not even DOTS), there’s a lot of performance a modestly skilled dev can milk out of Unity. I don’t really believe performance by default will become a reality, but at least it’s performance within reach now as opposed to “performance if you switch to another engine” like it was four years ago especially.
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With no frametime spikes? Thats sounds promising. What streaming tech are you using, custom one built ontop of addressables?
Right now I’m toying with something that uses addressables for generic asset stuff like NPC behaviours and the top level stuff, but underneath I’m also working on a hopefully promising low-cost dynamic LOD system. I wish I could say I invented it, but it’s largely just based on the stuff that was used in the old game Messiah, but with some kinda messy transforms going on to preserve silhouettes better and gives me finer grain control over how data is streamed. It’s almost like a virtual texturing solution on some levels.
It’s finicky now, but most of the hiccups are currently GC based I think since early implementation is a bit sloppy.
That’s for the bigger project, mind, which involves being able to transition from indoors to outdoors to in the air to any arbitrary environment, a game I’m still debating making in Unity or just doing completely in Rust. For my smaller project (indoor to outdoor and back only, extremely low poly and texture data), I just use addressables and a little careful attention to how I’m moving things around.
When I say “extremely low” I should clarify that the most advanced models hover at about 12k poly and the average texture size is 16x16. Still, it has given me a lot of headroom on lower-end hardware, which is a huge part of what I target and why I’m constantly chasing what can appear on the outset to be a little over the top or microoptimization.
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Cool I did a little POC a year or two back since we want to move open world with our VR shooter framework for next project. Tried using world streamer but it spiked way to much for VR.
Edit: stream NPC behavior? Sounds strange, should just take a few bytes of memory 
Yes, but like others have mentioned you can’t make an early access game that is in a barely playable state and expect it to have any success. Too many games have come out in that state only to make little to no progress towards a finished release and people have caught on to that and now shy away from very early releases.
Valheim is the one most people will think of thanks to its recent release and massive sales, but it’s important to understand that Valheim does nothing special. What made Valheim all those sales was that it came out in a very polished and playable state. Its early access done right from day one.
Just don’t expect to spend only a few months and have something in the state of Valheim. I’ve spent the last half hour searching the web and Twitter to determine how far back development started and the game already looked the way it does in 2017 with posts as old as 2015 bearing some resemblence to the game.
https://twitter.com/dvoidis/status/928729901628305409?s=20 - 2017
https://twitter.com/dvoidis/status/909896233942208512?s=20 - 2017
https://twitter.com/dvoidis/status/567805463157547008?s=20 - 2015
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It does, but there’s been situations where I’ve been dealing with lots of complex AI variants, so one thing I’ve been doing is streaming them in using addressables and some other tricks. My ultimate plan is to entirely rework my workflow so that it facilitates performance.
I think I should point out that a lot of my target hardware still encompasses machines that are just leaving the XP era. One of the reasons I’ve got a custom engine on the table is that it’ll let me push XP builds for low power hardware while hopefully keeping my other promise: 30fps on low on integrated, no disabled texture features.
Again, microoptimizations become real important in that context.
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Swedish company, the game released this year but they made some small amount of money last year,
https://www.allabolag.se/5592034820/iron-gate-ab
Too little for side work like consulting, I wonder if they got a bad venture capital deal 