So I got to thinking about survivorship bias recently and was trying to apply it to my research on game development. As I’m sure you all know, in game development as in everything else the greatest successes are held up and people start thinking that it’s common, the successes are the rule and not the exception.
Hence the indie gold rush and people trying to make quick cash. Everyone tries to dissect the successes and copy what they did (Minecraft/WoW clones anyone?) and they don’t focus on what caused others to fail.
I know that often success is just the perfect storm of events, that the same game made and released at a different time wouldn’t have the same results, Minecraft/WoW would both likely fall into this.
The purpose of this post though is to ask all of you from the games you’ve created that have failed in one way or another what would you say were the key factors to that failure?
It could be too buggy, rushed release, game was too niche for the time, bad timing on the release in general etc. These are only a few things I can think of and it can be hard to find examples of failed games to learn from. I’ve read a fair few post mortem articles about games but more examples can’t hurt.
Wow and minecraft were pivotal games (as well as others) and were also released at a much different time in the industry. I believe it is difficult to consider them out of their time.
I’ve been fortunate in that I have worked with right people. My last fail was about 5 years ago. It had a lot of great elements, but failed for two main reasons. First was that it was the first game launched on an unproven tech stack. It was a brand new backend that just didn’t scale. 100k+ simultaneously connected users and it tipped over (almost always resulting in loss of a lot of player data). It got good press, which drove traffic and broke it. Bad first impressions are hard to recover from. (As is driving players away by erasing weeks of their progress.)
The other half of the fail was simply poor design. We put so much work into making the experience fun for new players, that we neglected later game play. Once you hit about 20-40 hours, it got boring fast. We tried to fix it by ramping up the difficulty, but then it was hard and boring. Ultimately the design flaws were too systemic to fix after the fact. It never broke even and we eventually shut it down.
While it was a failure in and of itself, it lead to a massive rework of our backend, which we still use today, and now every game we build we very carefully plan for elder game play and lifetime of the game. It also taught us a lesson about cutting our losses at the right time. We were aware of the problems, we were just overly optimistic that we could deal with them or fix them later. But all the work involved in launching a game, meant that ‘later’ never came, we were too busy fixing current problems. We would have saved tons of money if we would have never launched and moved on. We are pretty merciless now about killing games before the death spiral starts. It was a harsh and expensive lesson. Also most of us had a several hits prior to it and were feeling pretty cocky, we all got an ego check, that in fairness, we needed.
I’m gonna go the complete opposite direction of zombiegorilla and talk about my singular release: a free, no-ads, no-IAP turn-based chess-like game for iOS. It’s targeted at a very specific niche group, so I’m not surprised by the low download numbers. But what did surprise me was that of the people who did download and play it, it seems that they’re all dropping out of it very quickly.
I think the problem has a lot to do with the fact that, being turn-based and multiplayer only, once they get in and take their turn, there’s nothing else for them to do until their opponent moves. So naturally, you close the game right down and go do something else. If your opponent doesn’t take his move for a couple days, you have no incentive to come back to the game.
There’s no fix for this… I made a boring game. I’ve already killed three ideas for my next project based off this information, though, so hopefully I don’t make that mistake again.
Mistakes are how you learn!!! Ben Franklin made 2000 mistakes before he invented the lightbulb, and every mistake learned from is another step to success!
@zombiegorilla Just how expensive was that game? How many zeroes? I’m just curious.
Failed lessons - I built an app that did well. Then, I built another that did just as well. Then, I took all that knowledge to build another product, with MUCH better visual production quality. This one did Terribly. And it took me months to realize the problem was the content itself. The first two were topics that people wanted, the last one was a topic that no one cared about. I thought I understood my audience, and I was wrong.
Lesson Learned through failure - BUILD SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE WANT.
Dunno exactly, 2-3mil in staffing alone. Technically very cheap for the time, and because the backend kept failing, we never got a chance to spend anything on marketing. It was mostly art driven, our client side relied heavily on metaplace (our first after buying it). But this was also the height of the social game boom so we were a little reckless back then.
The most important thing and this isn’t specific to games, is the people. I’ve spent most of my career at startups, some in the game industry some not. I’ve been at 2 that failed miserably, several mediocre, and one exceptional one.
The difference between the exceptional one and all the others was the team. Sure some of that was experience, but it was the key people in the team who knew what experience was required and brought it on board. We had depth in the right areas. We had people that were likable, we all had a lot of respect for each other and thus a good amount of trust in each other’s abilities.
That team went from 4 people to 50 in under 4 years, made half a dozen very profitable games, one game of the year, and was acquired.
Yes they were at the right time and place, but that wasn’t an accident. That studio was successful because they had great leadership and brought in the right people. I was lucky enough to get in early and go along for the ride.
Pond Wars was a success, in that it met it’s development objectives. But there was one significant failure worth mentioning.
The main objectives of Pond Wars was for me to carry a game from start to finish. I wanted a project I could explore various marketing and distribution channels with.
Where I went wrong is that after the game was built I got caught up in the money side of things. I became obsessed with only using monetised platforms. I spent weeks figuring out how to put ads in a web player game. I pulled a few jerk moves on indie portals willing to showcase my game, by injecting as code into their websites. I turned down several opportunities to display my game because there was no revenue potential.
For all my efforts the game made 22 cents.
I’m not counting the lack of revenue as a failure. That was never the point of the project. But my obsession with getting revenue was definitely a failure. That’s a ton of time that could have been spent on making the game better.
Building on this, know what people want. Not what you like, or what you are passionate about. Nobody cares about you, your interests or hobbies. It’s not like all indie developers are celebrities. There are celebrities in the indie world, but you don’t just get to be one and have everyone love everything you say and do. That’s not your choice.
Even if you do a great job. Even if you keep trying.
If you’re aware of potential problems in the design, don’t ignore them (or pull the plug instead to avoid losses)
Don’t neglect the late game in order to make the start more fun.
Don’t ramp up the difficulty to artificially increase playtime.
Be realistic about problems in the game, don’t underestimate their impact.
Think about how your game plays, if there are long delays what is the player meant to do?
Choose a target audience and design the game for them. Not just “build it and they will come”.
For teams, encourage a co-operative and close knit workplace.
Don’t focus or obsess about revenue to the detriment of improving the game.
For first game/small indie projects take any opportunity to show your game in as many places as possible, even if it won’t earn money. Obviously for larger indie titles they need to charge to recover costs at the bare minimum.
Some great points here guys, thanks a lot!
On the “build something people want” requirement I read an interview on one of the guys that made crossy road/shooty skies/that pacman remake and he said he picks one person and designs the game for them. By making that game fun for that one person he’s found that it tends to be fun for a lot of others as well.
I’d still take that with a grain of salt though, maybe initially design for one person and then start thinking about the broader market that it fits in.
So if that one person happens to be you - then you are building for one person with hopes it will eventually fit into the broader market.
Personally - since I’m a gamer and a wanna be designer (no release yet) - I’m building the game I want to make. If you don’t build a game in a particular genre you like or with mechanics you enjoy, and you aren’t passionate about what you are creating - it will result in low quality in the final build. So be passionate and build what you like. I’m guessing most of us are gamers - so unless you are detached from reality and don’t like what others usually like, we have some basis in knowing if what we are building is something others will like or not.
My most epic failure was trying to build a lot more than I (or anybody) could handle. Back in the mid 1990s, I spent most of my free time for a couple years building a game engine for a space game I was writing. My game engine was fully 3D (for the environment and the objects) using real time ray tracing. At the time, I figured I could optimize my code base to run well enough to get a playable frame rate on a Pentium with a low resolution, despite the fact that everybody else thought real time ray tracing was impractical in a game engine.
I did a lot of work to try to reduce the amount of work my ray tracing code did per frame. I eventually got my engine to the point where I could get a few frames per second at 400x300 with nearly every cool looking feature culled from my ray tracer. It did not even look like ray tracing by that point, and the frame rate was too low to use for a game. After putting a lot of effort into this project, I eventually had to accept the fact that I was trying to do something that was literally impossible.
The main thing I learned from my failure was that it is important to generate a good honest prediction about the chances of success before putting a bunch of time into it. I was far too optimistic about what I thought I could build. I should have failed faster and then worked on things that were actually possible.
I think the point was more choose someone other than yourself…The example that the interview gave was the guy was once working on a pony game for children. The devs naturally weren’t children, so every time they had a cool idea, adding leveling systems, quests etc they didn’t really have an idea of how it would work in the game. Apparently he stuck a picture of an 8yr old girl on the wall and every time someone had an idea they’d point to the picture and ask if that 8yr old girl would find it fun.
It has the ring of a good design methodology to narrow your target audience down so you can clearly define what should and shouldn’t go into the game.
I’ve heard similar advice from people about product development in general. First up, you need to design your target person realistically. So base them on some research of some kind that suggests such people actually exist, and then make your fictional person based on that. Secondly, they’re used largely as a test filter. Rather than thinking “does this vague group we can’t easily conceptualise like the design decision we just made?” you can instead think “What does Finctional Fred think about this? I do/don’t think Fictional Fred will like this approach, because…”. So I guess it’s a polarising filter.
I’m in the release process for a mini game project at the moment. No idea what sales will be like yet (and by the nature of the project good sales would be a bit of a bonus anyway - I just wanted something simple to make), but there are already a bunch of things I can reflect on.
First up, I spent way too long on the project. The core of it was done in well under a month. Most of the dressing up was done in the two following months. Now, several months after that, it’s finally going up on stores. Practical reflection: I could have dropped a bunch of that busy work, released on just one platform nearly 6 months ago, and made a whole other game in the mean time.
Secondly, it looks super generic. I mean, I think it looks nice enough, and that’s the general feedback I get. It’s a match-3 game with a pretty neat but simple twist to the mechanics. The issue - and maybe this boils down to marketing inexperience - is that it’s super hard to effectively communicate in a screenie or even a short video before people lose interest. I’ve asked a number of people lately “why would someone pick your game to look at if they saw it on a storefront with a bunch of other games?”, and this experience is why. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get someone to pick this game. Practical reflection: For my next project (well underway, and far cooler) I’ve given a lot of thought up front to making the game intrinsically visually interesting. I don’t mean “has good graphics”, I mean that even from a single, potentially arbitrary screenshot I want people to realise this isn’t something they’ve played before.
When you think about it, that’s the part when your brain discovers that maybe your assumptions are false, and so you have to challenge those assumptions and go through the rational arguments again, and look at the facts and the reality… and see if you arrive at a different conclusion.
Companies have spent millions of dollars (not sure the exact weight/mass of the money) and failed. Just another point to keep you in that thought maze, you haven’t found the exit just yet.
