This is a great time to be a game developer! Keep up the work guys 
I like your enthusiasm, but this rings of âfamous last wordsâ to me.
Lol.
After all the work/money I put into my current project, I freaking hope so!
The 90s were a great time to be a professional game developer, 3D had become standard and companies were sprouting up and hiring everywhere. It was all so new and awesome, now itâs aged into something less awesome, more re-hashed and stale. As far as indie goes, well, donât quit your day job.
Well , your already pretty successful .
A maturing android market does present some unique opportunities .
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LOL! A great time to be a game developer? Like what @Khyrid said, games development nowadays is stale and repetitive. Just go on ModDB and look at the 12yr old âindie devsâ that only take the easy way out to make money by copying games that have already been made. SO many horrible survival horror games. oh WAIT lets be original and make ANOTHER zombie game! Ill be honest, I love survival horror games. My favorites were and still are Fallout 3, STALKER series, and the Resident Evil Outbreak games.
I believe the next big thing will be puzzle/ semi educational type games. Ive been sitting around for the past few months researching, building, and trashing experimental puzzle games to see what would work. For the life of me, I can not create a working, fun game that will not be repetitive in any way. It would be nice for someone to help me come up with puzzle game ideas.
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Itâs the worst time in the last 5 years to make money from mobile due to it being infested and flooded with garbage. Desktop and mobile bar is set ever higher each passing month. The golden age for indie is well past, but many of us are still fighting the good fight.
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Uhhh - isnât that the very reason right now is the best time to be indie game dev? Since if most people produce garbage - you only need to make a good game to be rich. Competition is only fierce if everyone is producing AAA game.
And I do agree with you the bar is getting higher, but seeing how the market is today compare to other creative industries - eg. Music, Movie, TV, Literature where they are all matured art form, I would say we are still in our industry is still in its infancy. Sure there are titans from big studios making mobile phone games, but the App Store is still 99% indie and only 1% are from big studios and they are few compare to all other matured industries where âAAAâ (quality/budget/big studios) dominate the market.
Letâs put it this way, would you want to make a movie, or a TV series, or write a novel, or start a band to make music right now? What do you think is your chance of success in these matured industries? I would say its close to zero compare to what current indie game industry (especially in mobile space) is currently offering us. We still have a fairly good odd for success and the playing field is still relatively levelled.
The reason why the playing field is still relatively even for us vs big studio is because of the low price point of the game - big studio cannot afford to throw money at titles like they do at console - eg. $100+ million and expect a return - that would be suicide. They canât even throw $10 million (or maybe even $1 million) to make a mobile phone game and expect a return. The risk is too great for games that only cost $99c each. The low price point for mobile games have a huge impact on how studio can spent on each title, severely restricted their strategy to compete with indie game devs who stand on almost the same equal footing on budget.
Donât be a sad panda, Hippo. At least being an independent game developer can provide a viable livelihood these days, which hasnât been the case since the end of the golden age of shareware two decades ago.
I agree with you that the glass is 90% empty, but at least now there is a glass to speak of.
I donât by any means have a full grasp of the entire indie scene⌠the indie scene is different now than it used to be but I donât know that itâs worse overall, or has less hope. There is for sure a tonne more competition and so many more people involved⌠just as games in general have diversified into much broader audiences/casual games etc so too has game development turned from a specialist art form into a mass-market thing where everyone and their dog wants to make a game, almost. But that doesnât mean everyone and their dog is capable of making a good game, so you can still stand out and be different, and obviously many people ARE successful at this.
Completly agree with that. This is 100% true for desktop development, for mobile there is still huge impact of marketing and exposure that you need despite of product quallity if you really want to become rich to relate on OPs post.
That would be nice. Unfortunately, probably 75% of the great games that have been developed in the last 3 years are games that most of us have never heard of. It takes a lot more than to make a good game. Your voice has to be heard over the roar dung-slinging monkeys thinking theyâre going to be rich because they made another weak knock-off of Angry Birds or âtap to jumpâ game.
Well I playing the game âNun Attackâ and it was pretty good but it was basically a clone of battle-heart. The only difference is instead of 2 guys (like mika-mobile) they threw a 50 man team on it, with at least 10 guys on QA and guess what they still screwed up royally by not only turning it into a massive IAP grind fest (I guess the only way they could make any money on it) but also had a bug that pretty much killed it.
If only this was trueâŚ
Im sure as sht glad this aint the case, otherwise weâd all be fuced!
I donât know, most of these supposedly awesome mobile games which failed because of poor marketing were not very good. I think many people feel bad about their failures and try to justify it with things like âOh nobody got my game because I couldnât afford to promote it more, not because it sucked.â
What ever you do right now, you will always find some else with a better (or similar) idea because the competition is quite fierce, everybody out there is developing mobile games. The only way to stand out is by offering a good quality product and well, thereâs a small marketing part that you must do which is also important.
If they are games you havenât heard of, then how do you know that? Unless youâre claiming youâve played, or at least read the description of every game on the AppStore/Google Play.
I just read this comment from the article about the future of mobile games according to gree.
But then I look at something like bladeslinger where touch arcade gave it 3/5 because of bad controls