So… I just read an interesting tidbit saying there are over 4 million (yes that is right… MILLION) people using Unity.
I think many people (myself included) think the game market (at least mobile) is flooded. Obviously if there really are over 4 million people (let’s say 2 million) making games with Unity that would account for a lot of the spam… er… games.
Taking GameMaker and other popular game dev systems into account it seems likely there may be 5 to 10 million people making games.
I am curious as to what you think about this? Does it seem sustainable to have so many people making games? If the time comes when there are 1,000 new games released daily what impact will that have on the market? How about if 5,000 or 10,000 new games are released every day? 100,000? Where is the limit of what the market can absorb?
Do you think it is meaningless and will have no impact on the market? Or do you think sales of Indy games may decrease greatly over time and possibly a market crash will occur?
Nah most of them will never get to the finish line, and a smaller amount still will finish a turd, and a smaller amount than that will makes something OK that doesn’t get marketed or sold properly, and a smaller amount will make something good but uninspiring.
Whatever tiny percentage remains will make it. It’s not many.
But that’s actually really OK. Tonnes of people need to dream, and even if they don’t finish, they love doing it.
I think the quality standard will become its own filter for the amount of games that can be absorbed at an economically beneficial rate. Of course, the existing issues will probably be there for a long time to come, but I do not think that the market will see so many new games that it will crumble.
Plus, the vast majority of those ~4M users are just screwing around and not attempting to do anything serious. After all, its very cool free software with some big names attached to it, why not tinker?
Very true about most people dabbling and so forth. But wow the sheer numbers are still phenomenal. Even if 50,000 are making a game they will release within the next year or two is pretty crazy.
In pretty much every age of history this is the sustainable way to make money off of a get rich quick scheme. This is a rather callous way to put it. But if you look at who is making money in this business these days and the app stores and game engines will be near the top of the lists.
Very true and that is what crossed my mind when I read that. I already thought it was a better way to make money than making the actual games was. But now I am thinking if the “making games” thing has become this huge it may be the best market of them all. Focusing on the 99% who have an interest but don’t have the time or drive necessary to put in all of the time and effort needed. Perhaps including map / level editors with games would be a good idea and might capture some of this market. Or making something like a construction set along the lines of Pinball Construction Set or Adventure Construction Set. I suppose the popularity of Little Big Planet and Minecraft made this huge desire for an easy way to build their own game worlds quite apparent too.
No offense, but I prefer to rely on my games and apps being good rather than the competition being bad. A lot of them may be bad but I’ve only downloaded 4 new games in the past 5 years. Certainly the games and apps seem to be really bad in the Windows Store - I don’t even have to download them: the curators are doing such a bad job.
In essence, you are dismissing other lottery player’s chances as not valid because they don’t have your numbers.
At any rate, it may be only my hope, but I feel Unity will one day be perceived as an education simulation engine rather than as a game tool. And for that you are talking hundreds of millions of users, maybe even billions, eventually.
I think you’ll be surprised what happens when something becomes mainstream. Just as many people are interested (and prefer) to play a musical instrument or paint instead of using Unity. Doesn’t mean there’s suddenly a billion musicians to worry about.
I’m one of those ones that dorks around from time to time and I would like a nice and complete planetarium simulation software ported to Unity. One that was amenable to be projected on my ceiling.
I am teaching myself music, painting, carving, DIY garden & home repair and they are all nice. It’s natural I think. Think back to the old stereotypes of the English & world couples of olden days doing those things as a matter of survival in comfort then; but now those things can be a matter of civil enjoyment rather than necessity. And for that I’m very thankful for products like Unity, Blender, and so on. And for those that have heard me sing (I hope the neighbors can’t hear me - I sing with headphone on at times and it’s been compared to a dying cat); you can be thankful that not every hobbyist is an aspiring or failed professional, so I’ll spare you. Well maybe for a laugh one day I’ll upload to YouTube. Chumbawumba, I’m not.
This is worth considering in the discussion. It has both good and bad implications. Sure it means that not everybody is going to try and publish a game that competes with yours. But it does mean there are plenty of developers out there who have no need to turn a profit. I can currently afford to give my games away for free. Sure, they definitely are not up to the same level of quality as one might expect from a paid ap. But at the very least they cloud the waters for consumers.
Well, I feel it a hobbyist does make a game that they and their acquaintances enjoy they will be encouraged to publish it but, very much like my singing, if a hobbyist makes a game that they couldn’t enjoy playing (or listen to yourself singing) then they won’t publish. And that’s how the market should work.
I’m not concerned about the noise out their from other indies like myself or even the deluge of advertising from big companies peddling games that are essentially rip-offs of each others games as well. I’ll simply, very hobbyist-like and lego-like, put together a game that I enjoy and publish it and eventually extend it to be something original as interest and time allows.
I’ve already made up my mind with this approach I should only bother with adding Unity Ads eventually as my efforts should be on making a fun game and not on the minutiae of the prettiest, most efficient, most original game, biggest money making game ever. Or with monetize with IAP in the Las Vegas, ego-trip, or guilt-ridden styles we are all familiar with being used in other games and other inappropriate places. It not that more efficient, prettier games and such aren’t worth pursuing, it’s just that Unity are better able to pursue that than I.
Much as human culture has grown and became (percentage-wise at least) more comfortable, more civil, more humane by extending upon the work of own ancestors; I want to take the current state of the art and contributions in the relevant technologies, paid and unpaid, and extend those into something original and enjoyable for me. I do not want to be that caveman pushing the square-wheel because I insisted on doing everything from the beginning, my way.
The rest, is a matter of individual tastes, and at my financial level, I will not kid myself into thinking I have financial clout to market. If I have something in the future worth marketing, I will have to write letters and make phones calls. I cannot afford to buy marketing nor will I market unless I have a game that doesn’t bring anything appreciably new to the table. I currently do not have a game that is worth marketing and although I enjoy it, that is strictly due to the Lego approach I built it with.
And as far as noise caused by me as a hobbyist detracting from real business with government business financing , well my nice-looking, somewhat fun, but non-original game hasn’t received but a total of 6 downloads on GooglePlay, either from myself, a friend, or one these app hoarding and listing services. I don’t think Zynga is worried.
So this concern about 4 million Unity users is unfounded. What those that are concerned about someone like me having free access to Unity is that I am perfectly capable of having and implementing original good game ideals. And by definition, original means they won’t see it coming. And that goes for all the other 4 million Unity users out there too - they can make original and good games now. I have to have the maturity to know the difference between good and shocking. Being notorious is not the equivalent of being good. I’d rather have nothing than be notorious.
You hear all the time that ideals are worthless, but the caveman with the square wheel is wondering why he didn’t think to make the wheel round.
All those games the are copies of each other: they are square wheels - they’ve been done. My current game - it is a square wheel. Legos are square but it is the round pegs that holds them together to make something original. The round wheel is like PI - there is always room for expanding the current precision with original, refined, and good ideals.
Ideals, far from being useless, are our human PI, our comfort, and our dreams. And that’s a long way from worthless when used maturely and rationally. PI is no excuse to be irrational.
^ This is a great point and is what I was originally thinking when I made this thread. Yes most of those 4 million (probably closer to 8 to 10 million if you count all of GameMakerStudio users, UE users and so forth) may not actually make anything. But it certainly seems reasonable we may see 50,000 to 100,000 games released this year (at least for web portals and mobile).
And that is a lot of noise. A lot for players to wade through. In the end I suppose none of it really matters as long as we’re all having fun. So I guess it may not matter much whether 40,000 people are making games or 4 million people are making them. I think we are long past the point where anyone can make a game and simply release it to one of the marketplaces and get a ton of downloads / sales. I am sure it still happens occasionally just the right timing or the right person giving it a mention or whatever. But basically marketing is the key. Even to get free downloads these days. You need to market hard just to give your game away because so many other people are also giving their games away. Personally I am looking forward to the day when I complete my current game which I think should be around 300 hours or so. 300 hours is fine though because I am doing it because I want to. Besides, I only need to sell 200 copies at $100 each for it to make financial sense.
Yes, I spend money on in-game art, not marketing. Otherwise those marketing letters and phone calls I hope to do someday will be wasted and they’ll ignore me the next time.
I was hiring artists. Actually they are still on “stand by” for whenever I decide to contract some more work out. But I am so tired of all of the focus on graphics in games that is a major point for building my current game. I would much prefer to play a game like Warcraft 2 with Atari VCS graphics than some ultra simplistic game with beautiful graphics. Or a Diablo 3 style game with Intellivision graphics than a Flappy Bird game that looks like Pixar made it. I think a lot about what games would be like now if developers had focused more on the gameplay than on the graphics. So I am trying to explore that concept and build the kind of game I have wanted to play for a long time now.
Millions of people sing in the shower, car, or other private place.
Lots of “hobbyists” go to karaoke bars; enough to keep a lot of those bars open.
Yet only a a comparatively smallish number of people get up there on open mic nights at clubs trying to start a career.
A relatively moderate number of people get paid at least some of the time to sing.
A very limited number of people actually make their full living at singing.
Only a handful of people become known stars.
Saying ten million people are making games is like saying ten million people are singers. Very few people fall in the bottom three categories of the list either way.
Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s great that Unity and other game engines are available and being used by so many people. I just think we have to look at the numbers in perspective.
I buy multigame licenses from a particular vendor that makes Poser/DAZ 3D figures. I’m a hobbyist doodling alone and on my income accumulating a library of characters in a cohesive style that I like is taking, for me, a lot of money and a lot of time. I also know that the characters I license won’t be exclusive or my IP should any game become popular. So I’m lucky the expense is high enough that most won’t consider paying that much money and if they do, as my 6 times downloaded game on Google Play shows, it is unlikely that other licensees of the characters have a successful game either.
The important part is that by licensing those I have what I need to try and not sink into this attitude of would of, could of. I look at the expense as reasonable because I have created a couple of characters in Blender and while good or better as many characters I’ve seen used in big commercial games they didn’t have the ‘look’ I was after. And it took me 2 weeks of 8 hour days to make one character in Blender? To make a whole cast and characters and do anything else too by myself? Unreasonable.
That’s not to say I will give up on creating and learning in Blender. It’s another hobby and I can’t hope to be original without trying to be original and the best place to do that is in Blender and with extensions to existing game genre frameworks. But I will save that effort for my ‘mascot’ characters. Am I likely to have Mickey Mouse, Peanuts, or Calvin & Hobbes success? No, but with Blender I can at least but a little bit of a personal original touch of my own into my games.
Yes, singing is too good a stress reliever and enjoyment not to sing because of embarrassment. I just roll up the car windows and ignore the strange looks from people that notice my singing my heart out as they pass by.
Knowing that I’m not a good singer doesn’t mean that I don’t find the possibility of writing original music interesting especially since I’ve woke up in the middle of the night with original music being played in my head, but then that’s the point of an education is to be prepared. Had I not dropped studying violin after 6th grade I could have written down what I heard.
