Or what is a game worth and how do we work out a games price or value, is it based on the amount of work put into it?
It’s not related at all. I’ve become so skeptical of the correlation between dollar value and effort that I’ve almost become convinced that laboring under this delusion is the main reason why the poor stay poor.
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Are you talking about a game that earn total of one dollar in sales? That wouldn’t be very hard to do.
No. Not on the amount.
Be at the right time, at the right place, doing the right thing in the right and smart way and then you’ll have a chance of earning decent amount of cash. Something like that. I think.
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Depends entirely on what work is being done and the exact position of Mercury.
Many people through time have made basically nothing except vaporware. Smoke n mirrors. Yet they built up a large amount of support people eager to spend their money.
Many other people work extremely hard and are very skilled yet only manage a meager existence despite being very skilled and living a life of hard work.
TLDR: Hard work and labor skill (such as development) are not the key to fame & fortune.
I know a guy who has a helicopter and a jet, and all he sells are little metal rods that are used in oil wells. They’re made in China and drop-shipped to the buyers. He never sees them, never meets the buyers, and three or four years ago he lived in a mobile home and had nothing.
I don’t quite believe that it’s all luck but his story sometimes makes me wonder.
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Oh Arowx, you’ve done it again.
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I don’t believe it is always luck. I think sometimes it definitely is luck.
A lot of people buy lottery tickets. A tiny amount win.
You save the life of a random stranger… something that happens daily… yet in this case the person just happened to be a member of an extremely wealthy family who reward you with a large sum of money.
You submit your game to a site where it sits alongside 1,000 others. An employee of a big game website just happens to browse the site at the moment when your game is prominently displayed in New Releases and they write an article on it. A popular YouTuber hears about the article and he makes a video about it. Another magazine not wanting to be the one that dropped the ball also decides to cover it. A viral effect happens.
Things of this nature we can attribute to luck / timing. Things beyond our control. And they generally account for the super success stories that happen.
Then there is created success. And that is a whole different ball game.
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…and the next day you learn that the money they gave you was stolen from yakuza who are now after you.
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Ha ha. Possibly!
This is how it happens 99% of the time, I’m convinced.
“Created success” is when someone learns how to manipulate the above process (maybe they know a prominent Youtuber, or have figured out the best time to have their Greenlight entry go live, etc).
Could be a million hours or 1 hour.
It’s actually very simple. It’s based on how much you think you can get away with, how skilled your public relations teams (especially marketing) are, how desperate your target audience is for the title, etc. Just look at No Man’s Sky. That game is very much indie yet they were able to charge AAA prices for it because they hyped it like crazy and the audience had nothing else similar to play. Some people even bought the Collector’s Edition that still hasn’t shipped.
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This is a very valid question if you are looking at games as a commercial venture. A game studio must pay for three things
- The cost of actual production of the game. Everyone needs a wage. Licenses need to be brought. Marketing needs to be paid for, and so on.
- A profit margin. Noone will invest in games just for fun.
- A generous R&D margin to cover projects that get canned or fail. Game dev is risky, and even the best studios frequently kill projects
That money must come out of the sales revenue of business. Which is dependent on the number of sales and the revenue per sale.
So if you can cover all three items with the revenue, you project is commercially viable. Otherwise its not.
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Yes, and lets all watch how much they can sell their second game for. 
I don´t think there is any hard and fast rule for pricing. But I think two things need to be combined. Something like this
How likely is a person to like the first couple hours x How many hours of reasonable game play is there.
If you can make a game that has like a 75% or above chance to be liked by players, and that game offers 20 or more hours of game play, then charge like $40. If you make a good game that only has a few hours of game time without much quality replay-ability, then just charge $5.
And this is where honest marketing comes into play. The more honestly you market your game and accurately describe the game play, the more likely you are to end up with fairly satisfied players which means you can probably charge slightly more per hour of game play. Imagine two games with 10 hours of game play, one uses false advertising and one uses honest advertising. The second game can probably charge $15 while the first can charge $10 and both would get similar fan reviews.
I am taking the approach of not worry what I can sell my first game for, but instead using that first game to build good-will, so I can increase the price of my second game… kinda an inverted No Man´s Sky.
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I’m not sure if there will be a second game.
They could try the same stunt as elite dangerous: statr making expansion packs.
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So we’ve been making platformers and maze games since the 1980’s, FPS games since the 1990’s and no one has done a time and motion study on making games?
Do we need a Henry Ford (production lines/time and motion studies) for the games industry?
I once worked at a large company that blew vast amounts of money trying to implement Six Sigma for software development. Six Sigma is a manufacturing process meant to be applied to cranking out widgets assembly-line-style, so applying it to custom-built software is painful at best.
It’s several orders of magnitude more comprehensive than time-and-motion studies, but if you really think there are efficiencies to be discovered watching somebody type and move a mouse around, well, somebody probably still sells Dvorak keyboards on Amazon, go build the next Model T of video games.
More relevantly, when I ran a shop of 30 devs building fairly high-volume multimedia training titles (20-30 titles per year), the second best process-improvement step we took was hosting detailed post-mortems (the first, by a long shot, was a massive expansion of QA, both in manpower and scheduling). That company might be the closest I’ve seen software come to industrial-style manufacturing, come to think of it. And it still involved a very large creativity component.
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Just found one from 1987. Used the MIDI port for networking. Up to sixteen players.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze
It’s based off this one from 1974.
But isn’t Unity the equivalent to Fords production line, some things are made on other tools but the assembly line is Unity?
Actually is Unity and Game Engines like it the game development equivalent of the production line?
Now we are into my area of expertise! Henry Ford’s techniques are pretty old school now.
Modern manufacturing is lean/six sigma. Six sigma makes absolutely no sense for production of games. It’s all about reducing defects and improving product quality. Don’t make much sense for an industry that only pushes out a product every few years.
Six sigma thinking and tools do make sense for analytics. Six sigma is very powerful for analysing large amounts of data and figuring out the relationships. So for something like difficulty curves of mobile games, or pricing of IAP to maximise revenue would be perfect for six sigma.
Lean makes more sense for game production. I believe much of agile is based on adapted lean principles for software. Lean is all about reducing waste, from the perspective of the customer. The idea is that you only ever do work that the customer is willing to pay for. It’s a powerful philosophy.
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