Is game releasing supposed to be this bad? ;-;

I’m kind of new here, although I’ve been designing and developing for my 9th year. I had to self learn everything from Music directing, writing, scripting, art and design between working full time some of the most difficult jobs just to earn a living and have a bit of money to spend on making my projects. Living from pay check to pay check and to support my family I didn’t have much of a plan other than to try and learn game developing in my spare time and it became a passion project.

I didn’t use Unity for my first game, the last engine I used was polar opposite, 2D only and the engine itself was 10 years old. I knew it wouldn’t be enough and I needed a new way to make games, and so my 2nd official game I began the difficult task of using Unity. I was so depressed that my head felt like it wanted to explode at times, my first game flopped and barely made any money back considering I spent almost £1000 over 8 years in development, It took a while to accept and move on with the energy to use another engine. In the 2 months learning how to use Unity and studying YouTube and Unity guides I made a second game as a test run at an expense of around £400 give or take Unity wouldn’t refund some items which didn’t work. I was able to open a Kickstarter and working my nads off on it at the moment and it’s looking like it will bomb. I released the demo which is about 2 hours long, it’s as professional as I could take it. Nothing seems to be working out.

I’m not here to promote, you guys seem to have allot of experience. I guess I need to know this is just how it is. I just hope someone with experience can offer some help. It’s like I’m being drowned with no reason behind it. I think I make some good quality games, they just don’t seem to be enough to go anywhere other than the trash bin.

I also understand if this post is deleted. I just needed to reach out and ask for help. Thanks to anyone who replies.

What exactly do you mean by „bad“? How long it takes? How difficult it is to find an audience? How hard it can be to find the strength of cutting features or starting over a feature? How little money you made? How terribly bad and backwards Unity is and that you‘ll be starting over with Unreal, only to find like-minded posts on the Unreal forum saying essentially the same, in reverse?

I suppose all of this is the experience for 99.9% of the devs. Including those that are successful indies - they just made those experiences in the years before. 0.01% are lucky that their hard work paid off. Notch, for instance (though I recall he wasn‘t the happiest despite or because of all the fame and financial success).

But don‘t make it harder on yourself as it need be. I‘d like to have a look at the game you made just so I can see where you are on the road to fame and fortune, I mean, game and fun. :sunglasses:

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Everyone and their dog makes a game nowadays because it has become way easier…
So you do not only have the AAA titles as competition like the previous generation but also lots of other indies.

So yes it is “supposed” to be this bad/hard because that’s the result of the ratio between potential customers and products :frowning:

Are you a marketing talent? Because that is necessary nowadays. Even the successful indies don’t really play the long con. They cause ton of hype and then sell the majority in a couple days.
If you are not a marketing talent, try to find one. Managing a community does take time. Hence why publisher companies demand a large percentage of the revenue or charge upfront.

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Yeah it’s really hard. I’ve found unless you make something people want then it’s very hard to convince them to buy it.

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there are too many games and many of them are fine quality. So, the consumers are extremely spoiled.

If you make something similar to their taste, chances are there is 10 games in their library that are better because they were made by a team. You can’t compete with a team.

If you make something different, good luck getting anybody to spend 5 dollars outside their comfort zone.

Perhaps you can discover an unserved niche. Or maybe you are a rockstar and can do something similar to what’s worked before, but you can do it better (better meaning the same but slightly different enough to feel fresh).

No matter what though, 8 years to make a game isn’t going to work for anybody unless you are like, Rockstar. I think 2 games per year might be a better goal.

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Did you market your game at all? Like, you don’t even have WIP threads here, and running a Kickstarter is not a substitute for marketing. It’s easy to scoff at the idea of it, but ain’t nobody gonna buy a game or give to a Kickstarter they don’t know exists.

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Did you build a community around your game yet? Twitter? Discord? You might be able to get precious feedback so your time wouldn’t be spent badly.

What’s the name of your first and second game? We might be able to know more about it if you post up some name and links. Let us support each other wherever possible, devs together strong!

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Kickstarting a game these days is very hard. You need to have been marketing it for months in advance and even then you either need an established audience that can sing your praises to people that don’t know you or a game that is most of the way to completion.

Are they games people want to play though? Some genres (eg zombie survival) have had so many releases that people have grown tired of them and will only consider games that are high quality or have unique mechanics.

Then there are genres like the space combat and exploration genre where the only games available are both high quality and high budget ones like Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, and Starfield. Indies here need a good hook to lure in players or they have virtually no chance.

Yes, I noticed you have almost no presence here and that’s a bad thing. One of the best ways to learn a subject is to teach it to someone else. Most of my knowledge of Unity came from trying to answer questions on the forums.

That’s just one of the two benefits of these forums though. The second benefit is that your signature is basically a billboard like you would see on a road. The more you post on the forums the more that billboard is placed in front of others to see what you’re advertising in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_by_teaching

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You now have freelance skills. Not everyone can be a rock star but you can play rhythm guitar in a cover band and put bacon on the table.

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Thanks everyone. I just need to work harder, I’ll surely share some work sometime. I have allot more to do.

Probably if you try to get more help from as many people as you can, it will multiply your efforts 1,000x.

Just because you are solo-dev doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of people who can help you.

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I’d say you probably need to work smarter, not harder.

You spent 8 years in one project and still took it to completion. You’ve clearly got the dedication needed. I believe you need to better identify where to put your efforts to have the most effect.

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If your game is just “good”, that’s not good enough. Nobody cares anymore about 7/10 games when they can buy thousands of amazing ones for under $10 each. What talented developers work on for years, players will refer to as “something that might be okay as a high school project”. Maybe a B- at best. Because in their minds it takes like 2 months to make a good game. How else would there be so many great ones?

I know it’s demotivating, but there’s also another aspect. I’m sorry to say this, but making a succesful game is like 40% the game itself and 60% marketing. Maybe even more. If you make a PC game, you absolutely need to get it out to Twitch streamers or be incredibly lucky in some other way. If you make a mobile game, you need to advertise the crap out of it. And if you have a game that is not Twitch material, then there’s a 99% chance nobody will care about it. That’s just the world we live in now.

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If you share your game, maybe people can give you feedback on it. If the game happens to be brilliant, then it’s just a marketing/getting it seen problem.

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Make sure you look after yourself. Working harder is great, up to a point. After that it hurts more than it helps.

So it’s just as important to work smart as it is to work hard. Put your effort where it’s most valuable, use tools to do what a human isn’t needed for, and invest in learning stuff which will increase the value of your future effort.

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You got something here. But it is barely capturing. In fact it is really boring. You need to show more of game play. Something fun, capturing and engaging. Look in the net for various trailers. Learn how they were made. Make trailer for your game.

Mind, showcasing halve of decade to make such game, with what you got so far, will definatelly not win you kickstarter. Not alone.

No one will invest $ on he game, which few features will be added in next halve of decade. And that besides the points other already made.

Checkout kickstarter won and failed projects. Learn what it takes. Investing few hrs will save you days and weeks of preparation and disappointment.

Your best bet is to sell in steam for few $. If you lucky, you may get few sells.

But again, as already pointed out by others, start damm marketing. You can spend 0$, but put some effort and time, to get an audience.

I feel as if ‘like Pokemon’ is kind of fighting a losing battle. There are a lot of Pokemon clones (not saying yours is), and very few stack up to the titanic franchise despite it’s meandering in recent years (though some of the new games are pretty popular I hear).

In 99% of cases when someone wants Pokemon or similar, they’ll go with Pokemon. I say this as a Pokemon enthusiast who’s looked at a lot of clones.

It takes a bit to get yourself out from under the shadow cast by the Pokemon franchise. Digimon does so by aiming itself more towards teens/young adults these days, what with their Cybersleuth games (good games, by the way).

Honestly since ever I played Zanzarah, I was lounging for a pokemon inspired game that is has no turn based mechanics but allows you to properly control your powerful little beast.


Your competing with a constant stream of about 29 new games a day from steam.

Itch.io has had over 265 new games in the last day.

YouTube has 500 hours of new content uploaded every minute.

Or your content has to be the in the top 1% to make an impact on it’s first day 0.1% to last a week, 0.03% to last a month, 0.0027397% to last a year.

Imagine if your business model was to hire the top 0.001% game dev team, game designer, programmer, artists, musicians and make a game what budget would you need?

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You have to make a game that a large amount of people want to play. It has to be in some way better than similar games so that they will want to play yours instead. Then you have to make sure you effectively tell people about your game and why it is better than other similar games. On top of all that you have to (as Arowx pointed out) do those things while tens of thousands of other developers are trying to do the exact same thing.

Yes this requires a lot of time and effort. But no amount of time and effort guarantees you any results. I am sure you know, like we all do, someone who sing/plays music/paints/etc who has been doing it all their life and isn’t successful. It is difficult to be objective about our own work. And there simply is no simple solution to success. Even if there was, everyone would have it and we would be back in the same boat.

The only positive advice I can give you is to make sure you love making games for the sake of making games. That way if something doesn’t work, at least the experience is worth it and fun.

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