So, I was having a quick chat with @GarBenjamin and he mentioned to me. Wasn’t you doing a top down H&S at one point? My reply to him was yes, but it appears a metric boat load of other people are doing them… So I think it would end up like white noise? Even though it’d be a million times easier than the project I’m pursuing now…
On the other hand, games like Diablo and Torchlight didn’t half sell a bucket load. What do you guys think about it? Would you go large or go home? Or would you think small and ride the white noise rapids?
P.S no, I’m not changing the plan (again) I choose the path, I’m sticking to it …
My current game is a prototype for a “large”. It won’t go past prototype unless it gets serious traction, but I’m ok with that. I’ve got concepts for more prototypes in the magazine, I’ll just keep cycling and firing shots until something hits or I get bored and move on. (I might take a break and make a “small” game from time to time just for fun, because I enjoy that too.)
In the past I mostly worked on “small” games. My rationale behind this was that making games takes ages, and making a large game on the side of a full time job makes actually finishing it very hard. The catch, though, is that everyone is making small games, which I assume is what you’re referring to as the “noise”. And that’s definitely a large part of what influenced my current project. I don’t want it to look anything like the usual indie game. I don’t want it to look out of place when displayed next to big budget titles.
Sounds like you see things from a similar perspective yourself.
Pretty much exactly that, thing is as we discussed over and over cyclically high quality bigger games are in no way a recipe for success. That being said, it seems the only logical path to avoid being lost in “the void” so a catch 22… Either put in the effort and flip a coin or be lost in the crowd, then again a lot of higher quality projects do gain alot of attention.
I’m the exact same, I tend to do a lot of small side projects in Unity where I don’t have to sit there days on end mindlessly stewing over artwork… Besides that, you spend so much time on specifics you forget the amassed amount of knowledge you gained from smaller projects, so it serves as a decent refresher.
If you make a good, solid, fun game, you will get sales. The question is, how many do you need or want?
I have a feeling that you aren’t aiming at 1k sales, so what about 10k units, or do you need 50k, 100k?
What is your budget and what are your thoughts on your price point?
The adventures of van helsing filtered themselves out of steamspy, but they have 4.7k reviews, so I’d imagine they had to have hit 40k-100k sales. If you did the same would that be enough?
My concept with my current game wasn’t about “bigger” so much as it was about being different. There was one thing that did directly result in a change of scope, though, and that was a deliberate move away from the mobile platforms where I’d aimed my last few projects just because of… ease? There were a few reasons behind this:
I’m not personally interested in mobile games. I don’t dislike them, I just never feel like playing them. This both makes it harder to retain motivation in the hard-work part of the project and makes it harder for me to judge whether or not what I’m doing is actually good.
Commercially speaking, that market is flooded. That’s not to say that good games can’t succeed, but I strongly suspect it makes it much harder.
The freemium model drives me nuts. I don’t like the effect it has on consumers (including myself!) because we tend to value free things less, and I don’t like the effect it often has on game designs or customer relationships. (Again, there are cases where it’s done well, but they seem to be the exception rather than the norm.) Even when a game isn’t freemium, it’s valued less on mobile than it is elsewhere (for understandable reasons, but still… I want to maximise the experience).
So when my friend and I decided to start a game one of the very first decisions we made was that we were going to make something substantial, and that it would be for PC and/or console, because those are the things that motivate us.
It was more of a generic question, it’s about time vs. effort… If I could make a Diablo style game as opposed to what I’m doing now, is it the smarter avenue although the market will be saturated due to ease of creation?
Don’t get me wrong, a top down still isn’t by far the easiest game to make. It’s not exactly a “flooded” market like mobile, but it still has a fair amount of competition. I’m expecting to make a loss on the first game, the whole point is to get it in as many hands as possible… Worry about fiscals for the follow up…
But you got to wonder every now an then whether it’s worth the cost to make and /or time invested vs. going for something simpler where competition is stronger? Hell it could work against you as to stand out in said segment you may have to introduce something a little different and spend more time on polish.
Obviously the size / complexity / trying new ideas is going to dictate budgetary needs, how much money goes in to your average A / AA “indie” game?
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. The ID@Xbox-style A-level “indie” titles – which were basically the non-AAA titles in the Xbox 360 Arcade era – are still very professional efforts for the most part. I’m guessing middle six figures when all is said and done.
In other words (in my opinion), not really “indie” at all. Not what it means to me, at least.
I can’t speak for any other efforts. But here’s my thoughts:
My sales target is 1k units, if I break this - I will admittedly be very much in the red (my costs are really just expenses while I’ve learned and worked, but it’s been way longer than I had hoped originally) - but at 1k sales I’ll be satisfied and consider my work a success. Because my target is modest, I feel comfortable choosing a very niche genre. Let’s be honest, “turn based / party based tactical rpg” is not exactly the hottest genre in history, especially if you aren’t going a JRPG aesthetic. But I think that I can hit this goal within this genre, and most importantly: have a game that I can be proud of.
It’s short for “independent”, so to me that’s got nothing to do with budget or skill level and everything to do with whether or not it’s backed by a publisher or other influencing external stakeholder. Independent studios get to make their own creative decisions*, where those backed by publishers largely need to do what the publishers tell them (and pay them) to do.
Oh I understand the origin of the term. To me “indie” also means small… It’s probably a stupid distinction but these days a lot of “indies” are big enough they probably qualify as (or could be) small publishers in their own right.
Yeah, it’s a technicality, and the “small” part is certainly how “indie” often gets presented these days. On at least one occasion a large publisher marketed a bunch of their games as “indie”. (Of course they may have started that way.)
Either way there are compromises being made. If you go with a publisher you might be taking less financial risk yourself but you need to largely do what you’re told. If you go your own way then you can do whatever you want within reason, but need to come up with the money to make it happen on your own. Either way the creative freedom of the studio is limited in some way, it’s more a choice of how it’s limited.
If someone goes indie and gets successful enough that finances aren’t much of a limiting factor then heck, well done to them!
I think it’s a very fine line. On the one hand, you don’t want to do game so niche that it becomes obscure, but on the other hand you don’t want to make game in popular genre that you absolutely hate (one reason I probably never will do a TD or MOBA game). I think you need to pickup a genre that you like, but with ability to sell well. You know, follow your passion, but with a reason. My current game is a 3d platformer about a computer virus. I’m on a horse.
I’m of the mind that you either need to design creatively or perfectly, i.e. you take the genre in a new direction or you codify the genre. Both have their pitfalls, but if you can’t do one of them, then what are you even doing?
There is something cyclical to which is a better option, too. Currently if you try making the “perfect” MOBA, you would just be competing against Lol/DotA and not finding an audience since those audiences are too committed. This is why there is this wave of MOBA-esque games that have a good chunk of the formula, but take the rest of it in a different enough direction so that they feel apart from the rest of the genre.
Yo, point I’m trying to get across is do you go big (defination as in, something you have to actually work at (e.g. not use a framework, do something different, plenty of content) or do you ride in the sea of “indie”? Hoping for the best, thing is what @darkhog says, I’m not particuarily against any “type of games” I enjoy anything from diablo type games all the way to RTS like C&C…
It’s not about doing what I “enjoy” because there’s tons of games I enjoy from all over, as long as it’s good.! Question is where’s “the line”? When does effort become a loss leader? I understand some may say “well you should design the game effeciently” but nobody actually has a clue about what’s going to happen.
Yeah, ultimatley it’s try to do your best / release and see what happens. You have to compete to stay “ahead”, the effort to even just make a “good” game now is a big task… Although to make a game that’s something “different” or special with the redonculous (new word) amount of competition is even more effort.
So again where do you draw the line? @MV10 , my thoughts have always been it doesn’t matter what someone “classes” as Indie, we’re all viewed as game developers to the public. They don’t care what budget you have or how hard it was to make…
I guess that depends on your definition of “the public” but there are definitely people out there who understand indie is not AAA, people who intentionally go after the smaller non-mainstream stuff, even the category I mostly don’t get at all, the so-called “art” games. Of course, those niches probably won’t be money-makers but I don’t agree that all game devs are painted by the same brush.
Of course but when you have “indies” with $5Mil dollar budgets marketing themselves on the strengths of being “indie” then it’s hard for the end user to know what “indie” really is…
How much coverage do you need to be successful (understanding that the criteria for success is variable)?
There’s a big difference between shooting for 1k sales or 100k sales, and a lot of that difference comes down to how much press you need to achieve in order to reach your goals. At the 1k level, you can achieve this with small time youtubers, steam internal exposure, maybe some articles in very small websites, etc.
If your goal is much larger, then it will require stuff like coverage by main stream game sites. Admittedly, this scale is very far beyond my experience or understanding. I imagine this would require being picked up by a reputable mainstream publisher, or at least one who’s games generally get mainstream coverage.
There are a few genres I wouldn’t touch, MOBA is definitely one of them as @RockoDyne mentions above. There really isn’t any point to trying to compete with a LoL or a DotA. These games dominate their genre and offer nearly endless gameplay. For single player titles and the like, or for genres which have a more limited shelf life than e-sports genres, I think there is plenty of opportunity out there.
To a certain extent - ARPGs are also tricky because of PoE. Since development on PoE is ongoing, you would have to ask yourself why a gamer would want to play your ARPG over PoE. But I never saw any coverage for the Van Helsing title, it had to have sold 40k+ copies. The fact that they hid the steamspy stats means that they probably consider this a failure. Would it be a failure for you? Only you can say. But their example clearly means that you can sell 10s of thousands of copies of an ARPG in the current market.
But in general, it’s just kind of a question of how much press coverage do you need to succeed, and why does your title deserve that coverage. Followed by, how much coverage can you personally either guarantee or how much social capital you can leverage.
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