Hello Everyone,
I occasionally read video game blogs on Gamasutra and came to know about the two games that have been going great. One is a huge success story and the other is doing quite well too. The game made by a 5 member team, yes i am talking about Valheim and SNKRX, that is made by a solo indie. I occasionally browse the unity forums to get an idea of what the indie devs are thinking and saying about the current situation of indie development scenario. What i have seen on the forums is majority of the forum members(Pardon me if i am wrong) seem to have a view that success of a solo indie is almost impossible in the current circumstances. Some time ago , there was some guy who started a thread that he will quit his job to work on a game and most people were advising him to not to take any such step as it involves the risk and i too believe that taking such a risk is not good usually BUT i do wonder when we see and hear success stories every now and then. Maybe its few stories that manage to be successful and thousands or hundreds of thousands of failure stories don’t reach the public, so usually people don’t know about them. Yes , Iron Gate Studio is not a solo indie but it’s a small independent studio that managed to achieve such a magnificent success and similarly SNKRX that is made by a solo indie is going well. So what exactly is it that makes a very few people to be able to cross the Line of Success? Is it hard work, technical skills, determination, motivation, connections with the social media influencers or something else?
i personally feel that determination is the fundamental requirement to finish a game. After finishing the game you must have a strategy to market your game. You would be lucky if you manage to get support of social media influencers. This is one of the reasons of success of SNKRX. But most people fail at completing the game and then a lot of people fail at making a good game and then many fail to market a good game. But yet we see people who manage to do all these things and make a success story. So, we all know the secret of success but all these things are easier said than done and that’s why the huge majority fails. That’s how i see it. What do you guys think and feel about all this? Please share your thoughts.
Yes, this is called Survivorship Bias (or similar). You hear about the successful people because they are successful. There is a large, unknown number of people who don’t get there.
Those are all good. A thorough understanding of the market is also important. And because games take a while to make and things are constantly changing, luck is important, too.
Don’t forget technical expertise - making a good game, as you said. I’m usually telling tech oriented people to remember the business stuff, because that’s the more common bias. Both are important, though. It doesn’t matter how good your business stuff is if your game isn’t competitively good in its area.
Yes @angrypenguin , what you said is right. What is the approx. ratio of successful to failed indie games? Are there people on these forums who have achieved that kind of success or even a medium level success?
There is nothing different about game development compared to anything else that involves a lot of risk and effort.
Most people won’t succeed, because most people are not good at dealing with risk, and most people are not good at consistent effort over long periods of time. The ones who do succeed, for the most part, are those for whom undertaking risk and exerting a lot of effort amount to an act of self expression.
There is very little luck involved. Even risk has virtually nothing to do with luck, but instead is about adaptability and conviction. Many people fail because they cannot accept the truth that would save their enterprise, or because the only way out is over a chasm that they could fall into, because it is not 100% clear they won’t fall into it. They retreat from big decisions, they play defensively, and, after getting backed progressively into a corner, assume that was the only possibility that ever existed.
I suggest that instead of worrying about other people’s opinions, design, build, and market a game and see for yourself if it is not achievable. If you fail, and you really want to know why, you will know. And that means you can maybe try again and at least not make the same mistake.
I feel like this topic comes down to the better mousetrap and “if you build it, they will come” --more specifically, one’s opinion on this. I don’t believe it fully myself. I don’t think quality can stand in for opportunity, and opportunity is another word for luck (or more like “the more I practice the luckier I get”).
I’m working on some music. The guy I’m working with has been consistently impressed by various aspects of the songs I’ve shown him. He used to have a studio in Nashville before returning to his hometown, where he seems pretty well connected in the local scene. I only know about him because there’s another guy I work with (or did ~6 months ago, before he moved on) in my “real job” who has a band and who uses him.
Back in 2018 I applied for two different jobs and got interviews with both. One of them gave me an offer; I had a follow-up interview with the second and when I told them about this, they gave me an offer as well. I distinctly recall going to someone else I know to ask them about this–about which of the two I should take.
Well, it worked out, and various aspects of my life have taken steps forward as a result of that. I haven’t actually released anything yet (the debut single is taking longer than I would like because he’s so busy), but when I do, if it’s successful, some portion of it will be because I knew someone who knew someone. And because I flipped a coin and took a job that was outside of my area of expertise but seemed better in other ways.
I’m not on the other side so I can’t make any definitive statements. But even disregarding the ultimate “luck” of the genetic lottery creating someone who wants to read, who (as a result) learns to write, who learns (who can learn, because that capability itself seems variable) to compose compelling melodies, moments like what I just described will have some integral part in how I came to be.
While there are a ton of different avenues that a single person can view this answer to, for me, it comes down to 2 things at its core.
Discipline: Discipline is doing things when you don’t want to. Its working when work is hard. Its a habitual mindset that I would argue the majority have little of past feeding and watering their mouth holes. If you can’t finish a game, then everything in this post is moot. Its the single most important pre-requisite to success.
Success: Success is in the eye of the beholder. Some people have this idea that to be successful your game must make over a certain amount of money or a threshold of profit to hours poured into the project. That isn’t true. Success is your own personal goal and most people don’t give a blink of an eye as to thinking about what would be a success to them.
For me success is to build games within my reach and publish them. Thats it. If I achieve that goal I am successful. The next goal would be to make it sustainable. Which for me would be 20-30k a year. Thats totally achievable. Not all success stories must be 100k - millions.
Discipline and defining your own success are the things, for me, are the core of crossing that line you ask about. There are a million other facets (business, social media, ect…) but none of those matter if you can’t finish a project.
What if someone came on here and made a really good case with 50 years of data and unequivocally stated, "the ratio is 10,000:1. Or 5:1. Or 175:1.
What is the decision being made?
If you want to make games to make money I think that is not a good idea. Better to go into business. Or only fans. Get rich in a way that doesn’t require actual work, then you can make games for fun.
If you want to make games because its fun, well you can just do that. Pretty much everything you need is free.
Yes consistent effort over a long period of time, adaptability and conviction are essential qualities required to achieve something in this field (or perhaps every discipline of life).
As for the other people’s opinions, it’s just that sometimes you want to know what they think and feel about certain things.
The biggest difficulty that people face with indie development (particularly solo) is that when you start something, your energy, passion and motivation levels are very high but they start to dissipate as time passes on and then there comes a time where you start doubting yourself. You kind of lose faith in yourself and clouds of pessimism surround you. Is there any way or trick to avoid or overcome such a situation?
It’s not a trick, but the best way to deal with this is to have a clear plan and a timeline and always check if you’re making the right level of progress along it.
At the beginning, there are lots of questions, but also a lot of motivation. But as you go along, you lose motivation, but you gain clarity. By the time your initial motivation wears out, you must have answered the biggest questions.
By the time you get really sick of your project, everything needs to be so clear that it’s just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other.
In the end, if you are adding more to your project than what you’re scrapping, you can just keep doing it and eventually it will be done.
You need to work hard, intelligently, and creatively to succeed, but that does not guarantee success. The more opportunities you make, the greater the chance of success. It might happen the first time, the 100th time, or never.
But by opportunities, I don’t necessarily mean more games. It is not a lottery where every game has an equal chance of success. Making better games increases your chances more than more games, but they don’t have to be complex games. Quality is the most important defining factor. Opportunities can mean meeting the right person who introduces you to a new platform / publisher / journalist / ad network / etc. that gives you a chance you didn’t have before. You have to push in multiple directions (including business / development / networking), and the more you do, the greater your chances. It is all going to be very individual, based on the skills you have/gain, and the opportunities you make the most of.
There will also be a lot of decisions where the outcome is not clear, and that is where luck is. But the more you inform yourself, the more obvious some of those decisions will be. That is part of the discipline.
IMHO:
The first secret to success is “don’t quit.”
The second secret to success is “don’t be unsuccessful”.
source: full-time indie dev since 2000. Also… I’ve “retired” several times over the years, only to come crawling back for more a week or so later. Just like I am right now. Because I love it. So that helps, too. But I’m also kind of a sucker for punishment. Which, yeah, get used to that. Oh yeah, and I spent six years in AAA before becoming indie, so maybe do that first.
I believe that is actually pretty good advice. I remember so many of the successful indie devs having prior AAA experience, I’d imagine the approximate success rate is wildly better if you only focus on the subset of indie devs that have years of prior AAA dev experience.
Well, in my experience, tasks usually take more time tha your expectations. When you dive deep into programming and work on algorithms, you come to see unexpected obstacles in the way and some of those hurdles might take months to overcome. You had started a task and in the midway, you realize that you have to add an extra feature so that the task is bug-free. There are so many such things that come your way while scripting and all your timelines become irrelevant and then you have to revisit and redefine the timeline but that may also become irrelevant after sometime. This thing is so annoying.
But one has to deal with it as these are the occupational hazards
Most indies think almost purely like artists: “I make a game I want to play”. That’s a recipe for a failure 99.9% of the time. If you think that being “original” is very important, then you are thinking like an artist.
