Hi, i’ve become an indie developer around 2 weeks ago. I’ve been involved in game industry since 14 years old. I started working as a professional game developer for more than 6 years. I come from a successful game studio focused on Mobile (Google Play/iOS) where i been able to learn enough and gather enough experience to think about making my own games.
Now i made my own path and i’m having my first experiences as a self game developer publishing my first game which i made alone. I’m having a lot of issues reaching bigger audiences. I can’t avoid seeing TONS of projects in different markets, that they die because they reach no users, no matter if they are good or bad games. So its very hard to accomplish a game that makes enough income to live from it.
The purpose of this thread is to share your own experiences as indie developers and how you reached success or which things you did to fail.
Been an independent developer (two person team) since 2000. I’m not even sure if it’s worth it anymore but it’s pretty much the only thing I’m confident enough in to make a living with, so I keep doing it. Still planning my great escape, though. Anyway, welcome to the club. I wish you the best of success.
IMO, making games should be your passion if want to be an indie. Only with passion you have a chance to get anywhere. If making games is your first love, then you will be happy making them even when you make modest money.
My hypothesis is that the best chance of being a successful game developer is if you’re going to do something new and/or that pushes boundaries. There’s far too much cloning and reproduction going on in this business, and I think the evidence of this is that despite the fact that most devs struggle to make a living, it seems players are ready to throw insane amounts of money and become fervent believers in anything that seems like a revolution in game design. It’s not easy though to design anything new, much less deliver.
The other option is that you can set your soul on its merry way and go and learn about rapid reskinning, IAP and how to design Skinner boxes.
Sure there’s a point somewhere in between where you design ‘good’ games and make a decent living, but that requires an unshakeable belief in the non-monetary value of simply being a game developer.
The problem with “pushing boundaries” is that in order to do that you need to reach first “state of the art”. Most indies struggle greatly with delivering ANYTHING worthy of notice. For ex. no indie developer has a chance to “push boundaries” in RPG, FPS or MMO development, since it’s so damn hard to even enter the market for those types of games.
after watching these streams, http://proindiedev.com/
clearly the suggestion was,
if you want to make money, get a real job…(confirmed paycheck every month!)
if you want to have fun, can make games…(if can afford, and/or do it in the side from day job)
I don’t exactly agree. No Mans Sky for example wasn’t even close to state of the art in terms of survival mechanics, and I don’t think they were aiming to be the best at it anyway. But I think they still could easily have delivered something really special that would have satisfied a lot of people.
Pushing boundaries can be simply finding a technique to scale up the size and scope of a game while giving it the sort of indie character that AAA games find hard to monetize. For example I think that a studio which manages to use the kind of procedural tech used in NMS, capture the spirit of Star Citizen and instead of falling into the trap of multiplayer/survival, create an immersive singleplayer experience, will be extremely successful. That’s probably why squadron 42 did not die, in fact.
Another example: it’s not clear that Pokemon Go was out of reach of a small group of indies.
There are a lot of things which can be solved to, in effect, do something new. I think that very sophisticated game AI (not sophisticated at shooting you, but sophisticated in the types and depth and flexibility of interactions it can have with you) is very undervalued. Multiplayer will never replace the desire to have a ‘hero’ experience that involves other characters with realistic, consistent and varied roles and attitudes, which is pretty much impossible in multiplayer. I think there are a lot of gamers who would be very excited to see what the next generation of Knights of the Old Republic sort of games would bring if character AI took a few more leaps.
RPG is an exception, because that can mean a lot of things and is hard to monetize by AAA. But FPS or MMO I pretty much agree with you. Because those are either fairly clearly defined and have been perfected by big studios, or are simply too big targets (not simply in terms of achieving but maintaining in the face of competition) and don’t play to the strengths of indies.
Also, as crazy as it sounds, and despite the fact that I’m aware of how much of a snail VR has been for a while now, I think that if you’re an innovative sort, it’s a far better thing to try to crack it than to do what everyone else has already been doing while expecting a different outcome. I would be far more comfortable working on making the first ‘really good’ VR experience than trying to make some kind of survival rpg or other, even in terms of my expected likelihood of success.
The way I look at it, if you want to make something, just make it. If you get rich, then congratulations. I can’t stand it when people say you can’t do this or can’t do that. Statistically it isn’t great. But at the same time, statistically all it takes is one time and you can be an overnight success raking in millions in no time.
If you want to make your company into a business (pure profit), then treat it as a business, if you want to do it for the love of doing it, treat it as that. if you want a mixture of both worlds, then treat it as that.
So much of this stuff is mental challenges, not really luck, the truth of the matter is, 99% of games never see the light of day simply because developers aren’t mentally ready. There’s never been a single challenge in the world that never had an obstacle in your way. Video games, movies, or anything else, is no harder or easier to sell than anything else. But you’ll never sell anything if you aren’t mentally ready to do so, like any other market or brand in existence.
But keep in mind, success to me, you, or someone else can be entirely different.
Too someone just selling one copy might be success. Others might view 100 dollars a month as success. Others might view 25 million in first month release as success, or just others releasing a game in general is success.
Now there’s a keen difference between Insta MMO button in Editor, and Asset Flips, and a genuine game that is worthy of success. Now granted if you can make an Insta MMO Button in the Editor, you will be rich lol.
You are not serious when you mention No Man’s Sky and Star Citizen. NMS went WAY beyond state of the art in terms of 3D procedural generation. There is a handful of programmers in the world who could make something like that. Consider Mass Effect: Andromeda debacle. They spent 2 years in preproduction. Then they spent 3 years making their “world machine”. They failed and then made everything by hand in the remaining two years. You VASTLY underestimate difficulties of using procedural generation. Mentioning Star Citizen is even more silly. It has budget of 150 MILLION dollars. With this kind of money you can hire a huge team full of world class developers. On top of that they have as their leader one of most acclaimed and experienced designers of all times. Both projects you mentioned are going beyond state of the art. Both projects are elite projects which are completely out of reach for 99% of indie developers.
“Pushing boundaries” directly implies going beyond “state of the art”. When you push boundaries you are moving the frontiers of said state of the art. This is the proper definition of “pushing boundaries”. There is no way around it. The same is true for AI. If you want to push boundaries of AI, then you have to START with the best in the world and then improve upon it.
The reality is than 99% of indie developers can’t even get close to state of the art. That’s why you see on Steam an endless stream of crappy 2D games and only a handful of decent 3D projects. That’s because doing a 2D game requires know-how level from the 90s and that’s where most indies are stuck.
Exactly. My point is not that you don’t need to do something great, but that your game does not have to be in any sense the ‘state of the art’ in its genre. No Mans Sky is not state of the art in the survival genre, not even close.
Maybe I misunderstood your point, but I thought that you said that to be able to push boundaries, your game has to be state-of-the-art in terms of its genre. Like, NMS would have to be a great survival game before it could succeed at being what people expected it to be.
If your point is that to push boundaries, you have to exceed state-of-the-art in terms of the thing that you’re trying to push boundaries in, that’s self-evident.
I wouldn’t say that exactly. Of course it’s very hard, but of course it is or someone would already have done it. I think the main reason no one had done it to that level before was that it’s incredibly difficult to hold up art quality and integrate sufficiently good level design with it, and arguably they failed at the latter too.
There could be any number of reasons for that. In all likelihood the biggest obstacles were in delivering the kind of game that was expected of them as a AAA company, in the format that NMS was created with. It might be relativey easy to get procedural stuff 75% of the way there in quality, but the last 24% is going to be very very hard or even impossible. NMS could take pretty much any shortcut they had to.
You completely missed the point. Star citizen was originally funded at $500,000 in less than a week, for a story-driven completely singleplayer experience (if I’m not mistaken). That’s the kind of thing that people jumped at, and it’s something indies could potentially manage. That’s what I meant by the ‘spirit’ of star citizen, the desire for an epic space tale RPG experience. I still think that indies could compete in this space even now, because Star Citizen has not exactly owned what it originally succeeded at attracting people to.
Agreed. So I must have misunderstood your point as I explained above.
I agree with this completely. And unfortunately there’s no way to change the fact that succeeding is going to be very difficult. But I think there are avenues that indies can take that make their chances of success dependent on the ability to break barriers and push boundaries, rather than the ability to a) attract through nostalgia or b) stay with their heads just above water by barely profiting with decent games.
Well of course building games its a passion… the problem is how do you make a living with that! You can dedicate a lot of time making a project you would like to play or you thought that was going to be a good idea, but if there is no income how can you support doing more projects?
My first biggest barrier is user adquisition. Just uploading a game in a market is not enough! One way i see is spending money to advertise the game and then check further results. I’ve tried little things in social media like forums, facebook, etc but the audience is too small. I’ve seen many horrible games reach millions of users and also beautiful games reach almost no users…
You can also think about investment platforms like Kickstarter, but you get into the same problem. You post a new project idea and its really hard to reach the correct audience that would be interested in investing in the game!
I think you need to have money before becoming an indie dev. I am working on AR startup, last summer we did some really simple demos the business guys went on dragons den - they got 3 out of 5 dragons to agree to invest in them – the insane thing is any indie could have done these demos – but then you wouldnt be an indie.
Um…what does KotOR have to do with revolutionary AI? I love the idea of revolutionary AI (that’s one of my projects), and I love KotOR, but the two have nothing in common. AI is pretty much Bioware’s Achilles Heel.
Highly debatable. A significant part of the SC push was and is extremely high fidelity. Example from the Kickstarter:
"
- 10X the detail of current AAA games
Most current gen “AAA” games have around 10,000 polygons for a character and 30,000 or so for a vehicle. In Star Citizen, the characters are detailed at 100,000 polygons, the fighter at 300,000 and the Space Carrier 7 million! This allows unparalleled detail, making the visuals more immersive than has ever been achieved before."
Again, this isn’t something that developed as the scope grew. This was a fundamental part of the pitch and a huge factor in getting so many whales to donate. And this is only one example. They mention “hundreds of sub-components” on space ships as another, and there are a few others like this.
This really is not in the scope of an indie.
All much ado over nothing.
Are you going to follow your passions, or not?
Yes? Then you will find a way.
Finding the way, that is a different question. It is a specific question. My advice? Get luck on your side. You do that by exposure. Only make friends, never enemies. Help every person you can. Forget about yourself, and focus on doing good work. Eventually, good things come around.
Well, for me it’s been that way. Some people complain that bad things happen to good people, but I’m not sure I trust people who say that. I’ve been in all kinds of dangerous/terrible situations, and I can honestly say that I have been so lucky that I get superstitious if I think about it very long.
Disclaimer – I’m not a successful indie dev. But I do make a comfortable living while working full time on developing 3d art skills. The key is I got life taken care of before chasing pipe dreams. Now I am able to fully invest myself into my pipe dreams.
I think at the moment it’s hard to be positive. $118 billion was made on games in 2017, 50% of that went to the top 25 studios. The industry is growing though, and that means that if you can keep the business side in sight, you should be able to grow with it.
I think the biggest challenge for indie studios is making sure they run as a business with passion, not a project with passion. To win, you will have to focus at least half of your time growing your business - for studios, that means getting attention and getting customers. I think very few studios invest enough in doing that, plus it can be hard to do.
Just base off of things I’ve read, it’s too high of a risk with to little reward to go full time indie. For every winner you get 100 losers. If not more. But that’s just my 2 cents
If that’s what they advertised with, then I have to say it’s one of the dumbest sales pitches I’ve ever heard.
I’m simply trying to tie in my point about what AI could do, with an immersive, character-driven game with a lot of NPC interaction options (at least in dialogue) like KOTOR is fondly remembered as being a benchmark of.
The idea is that when people played KOTOR, just think, what did they imagine to be the ‘future’ of that sort of game? It’s an old game and not incredibly sophisticated in any way, and as you pointed out has probably nothing in the way of proceduralism or advanced AI, but it was something that I think signalled an avenue for games to go which has hardly been explored in much more detail since. It was handcrafted and limited because of that, but imagine what could be done with AI interaction if it was possible to make a move toward proceduralism?
Skyrim for example is not even close to KOTOR in terms of that sort of thing. Superficial, repetitive dialogue without any real attempt to move beyond the most basic interaction seems to be quite the norm. The Left4Dead series seems to have developed the most advanced form of semi-procedural character expression that I know of, but it’s hardly a quantum leap in anything. And it’s not an indie doing it.
Fair point. I still think that a lot of the success was based on the nature of the game though, rather than specifically the level of detail.
I don’t think the relative lack of detail hurt NMS really either, so I still think that using the tech to create a large, immersive, highly interactive world like ‘skyrim in space’ would be a huge success. If NMS and the original Star Citizen pitch had met halfway, I think the result would have been far more successful than either of them would be on their own, and perhaps, as you pointed out, with some changes to make it within the scope of indies, would be a huge success.
Star Citizen is trying now to go in the direction of proceduralism, but it’s a different beast now and I believe that without a much better implementation of sort of ‘singleplayer within multiplayer’ it’s in danger of becoming a slightly boring ‘FPS in space with infinite maps’ which I don’t think has longevity.
Anyway I’ll try to sum up my idea of what I mean exactly by ‘pushing boundaries’. I mean that if you were playing games in the late 90s and early 2000s, what type of experiences did you imagine would be possible in 2018, 20 whole years later?
I think that it’s disappointing, as Quingu pointed out, that indies seem to have sort of become stuck in the past recreating pseudo-nostalgic experiences (that it seems to me they themselves often did not experience originally!), while AAA pursues narrow, lucrative avenues that aren’t revolutionary, and few people are trying to continue the trajectory in the direction that it used to be pointing. Even just taking a really great game from the past and trying to take a single step forward with it, using new techniques and hardware capabilities to add scope, is pretty rare.