>If it isn’t selling on one platform, don’t bother with the others. Maybe you have a fundamental flaw, maybe you aren’t marketing it right.
I think this is a good observation. Porting to a dozen platforms is double the work for, say, double the customer base. If the game catches fire that's money well spent, and if it doesn't you've saved yourself a lot of money by not doing the ports. So wait to see what the reception is before you spend. If you just get a few hundred or a few thousand users, take that money and make another game.
I agree with his conclusion, too. People who play serious games want more graphics power, a keyboard (or at least a game controller), and decent sound. Mobile game users are looking for the 21st century version of solitaire, and they're not willing to pay much for it. Maybe nothing at all.
But that isn't true. There are mobile games today that make huge amounts of money. They have complicated systems and depend on multiplayer gameplay. They aren't Battlefield 3, but they are a long way away from Solitaire.
> I agree with his conclusion, too. People who play serious games want more graphics power, a keyboard (or at least a game controller), and decent sound. Mobile game users are looking for the 21st century version of solitaire, and they're not willing to pay much for it. Maybe nothing at all.
Couldn't disagree more.
I was a serious gamer. These days I only play some Warsow frag fest every now and then. And yet I am willing to pay for outdated graphics, or mobile graphics level, if the game is story-driven with solid characters.
I am thinking of The Dig, Gemini Rue and Super Sword and Sworcery or even Knytt.
I am not thinking of David Cage egomaniac pile of manure that was Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy or the disappointment I felt playing Dreamfall (let just make a short and enjoyable novel of your ideas instead of a painful game to play)[0].
[0] And I'll put Grey matter in the footnote because it's where it belongs.
Maybe most people realize that games are not really that important in general. That's why its so important to get them addicted as opposed to making a great game. People will pay a lot more to feed an addiction than they will to be entertained.
This is one of the most gut-wrenching condemnations of mobile/casual game development I've read, and I think anybody looking to get into that niche should stop here first:
"Yesterday 304 apps were released in the App Store. I didn’t bother counting, but about half of them look to be games. 152 fresh new dreams went on sale. How many of those will hit the top 100? Probably 0. How many of those will be profitable? Probably 0. How many will cover their costs? Probably 0. But here is the real kicker: tomorrow, 152 NEW dreams will go on sale. Today's will be old and discarded, for you only make the new lists the day you launch. Apple boasts about hitting 1 million apps. That is about the worst number a developer could hear. It means 999,999 other people are competing with me for a customer’s attention and wallet."
Author loses friends, money, and time in pursuit of a super-fickle audience, and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.
>Author loses friends, money, and time in pursuit of a super-fickle audience, and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.
More than 152 games are released for the PC per day.
And here's the kicker: they ALSO have to compete with the 150+ new iOS and the 150+ new Android games for the users interest too.
> More than 152 games are released for the PC per day.
Is that true? I'm sure far less than that are launched on Steam or in stores, unless you count every random demo or JS game someone uploads to the internet.
realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.
Of course it remains to be seen whether even that is the way to go. He might enjoy the work more, but that won't matter much if this business turns out to be unsustainable, too.
This is one of the most gut-wrenching condemnations of mobile/casual game development I've read
Eh, is it? The author was sure that mobile was where it was at in 2010, observing that no one was playing consoles (consoles were and are as hot as ever), with nary a mention of PC gaming. They made a, sorry to say, easily replicated game for a niche market, among what already was 100s of thousands of app.
In these sorts of stories it's always a little more complex, and of course someone will be looking out and making broad conclusions about externals, when some of their own decisions were questionable.
I'm not trying to be a critic of the author, but given the number of "see?" type posts, people need to be somewhat more skeptical.
and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.
This is almost too much. Steam greenlight is just overwhelmed with hundreds of entrants, and they're opening the floodgates even wider. And while I'm very likely to try out random little games on mobile (particularly if they're free to play -- not that I like the model when abused smurfberry style, but it is turning into a "try before you buy" tactic that is reasonable), then pay a dollar or so and get an hour or two of entertainment out of it, it's extremely unlikely that I'm going to install anything from a small studio on my PC -- everything is from megastudios where teams of hundreds worked for years, because that's the competition.
On the topic of large teams, the baseline on the PC is incredibly high now. Not only the triple-As, of course, but every amateur has a very high baseline of Unity/Unreal/etc. This seems like a godsend ("Yay I have Unity and all of these cool shaders and techniques and seemingly endless power"), but it means that the artistic and technical demands are enormously high and resource intensive.
I think the key difference that the article points out is that the PC gamer does pay more attention to brands, and even individual developers/designers. People still remember John Romero and John Carmack worked on Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. Chris Roberts' Star Citizen was initially successful almost entirely due to the name Chris Roberts and his reputation. The recent game Transistor was made by the studio that made Bastion, and got more attention than it would otherwise have gotten initially because of that fact. If you establish yourself with one good game, PC gamers are far more likely to try your next game, where in mobile frequently people have no idea who wrote Threes, or Draw Something, they just download an app that their friends or Twitter feed mentioned. You still have to make at least one successful game, but if you get there it's a lot easier to maintain gamers' attention at that point.
>I think the key difference that the article points out is that the PC gamer does pay more attention to brands, and even individual developers/designers. People still remember John Romero and John Carmack worked on Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake.
If that's the case, the guy has not much to hope for in the PC market. What kind of brand name can he build with the kind of games he makes?
> I had a playable alpha of Catch the Monkey in six weeks. It took us another eleven months to complete... In total, across all these platforms, we made around $7k. $200k and 12ish months of our lives for $7k.
> A is for App, on all platforms, was finally complete Fall of 2013. A year from when we first started it, and 9 months after we had a stable playable (store purchase-only) version. Our project cost went from $25k to $200k.
> That weekend I gathered up the family for a family meeting... I estimated $12,000 - $20,000 to get a playable prototype of the game, then we can decide what to do next... I have assembled a distributed team of 9 to help in varying capacities to make Archmage Rises a reality. Each one is being paid, with me as lead designer with full creative control.
"Family meeting! I'm about to make the same mistake for a third time! Who's in?"
Of course he recognises that talking to his family isn't about deciding whether he will hit the financial jackpot with his new gaming idea. It's not a business strategy meeting.
He is meeting his family to tell them that he is about to embark on another "Jackson Pollock" journey in his career where he'll likely lock himself in for days at end, throwing paint on the floor. This, without having anything to show on the proverbial "bacon front".
He is firstly preparing his family for this interpersonal and social change ... but most importantly he is asking them permission to fail. Yep, fail - not succeed.
Full respect for him. And for his family for understanding him. Wish him all the best!
Games are a hard business. There was a gold rush to the App store. There have been smaller gold rushes to Xbox Live Store and Steam. Long before that there was a gold rush to PlayStation development. Before that, there was a boom in PC-CDROM at software stores.
This reads to me like someone who didn't know the business well and failed at mobile. I think he would have failed on PC if he had started there instead. He may succeed at the PC now, but that is partly because he learned a lot. I hope he does well going forward.
The low barrier to entry is making mobile casual games like flash games. Nobody wants to pay, and good games are hard to discover in sea of titles. There is still money to be made in mobile.
Mobile games suck primarily for three interdependent reasons:
1. There are very low barriers to entry to coding a mobile game.
2. Game mechanics on mobile are limited due to the small screen and lack of hardware buttons.
3. Customers have become conditioned to expect prices that are too low to sustain the market.
The three items above have led to an end state where large publishers who can afford the marketing spend hire armies of low-skilled developers to develop hundreds of games in hopes that one or two of them are wildly popular. If the game isn't popular, you can just swap out the pixel art for new assets and release the game as a new product.
Free-to-play is the new hotness in gaming, but a successful F2P game is basically a marketing platform in disguise. It's not something a game developer should try to build without experienced marketing/product people driving the overall strategy. But given #3 above, F2P is the only realistic way to grow revenue per user.
In other words, #1 can be deceptive to people who think development == coding. Programming mobile games is easy, but building a mobile game development company has significant barriers to entry that most US-based developers simply can't overcome. A software developer in the US is easily $100,000 per year -- a guy living in India with the same skillset makes closer to $20,000 per year. Hence why most successful mobile development companies are NOT coming out of the US or western Europe, but rather out of Eastern Europe, South America or South Asia.
I don't think the mechanics on mobile are that limited, as you say in #2. Certainly an iPad can do anything a PlayStation 1 could do, and many things it couldn't. What is limiting is the use case. People play games on phones and tablets to fill time in the cracks in their day. They don't seem to go to an iPhone or an iPad as a destination entertainment device, in the way they do with a console or a PC.
People make a lot of really simple games on mobile, partly because its cheaper, and partly because the assumption is that if you are going to spend more than fifteen minuted uninterupted playing a game, you are going to do it on another device.
Respectfully I have to disagree - the Playstation had hardware controls, the phones being sold today don't, tragically. I really, really, really miss sliding keyboards.
How would a game like Twisted Metal work on a phone? A tablet? Screen controls, for me at least, don't have the responsiveness you want, and the lack of available buttons makes it hard to do anything beyond one to three button layouts. One game that managed this pretty well was Swordigo, but that was with nothing but left, right, jump, attack, and a special weapon. For that matter, how would you make Doom work on a phone halfway decently? Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat? Touch screens are a sad replacement for real buttons, and today's devices are pretty much universal crap for lacking them. The best typing experience I ever had was Android on an HTC Touch Pro 2 because it had a sublimely wonderful keyboard, and that phone ran Windows Mobile 6.5 by default!
IMO the mechanics are limited for the following reasons:
1. The buttons take up screen space. You either have to design your game with a touch interface in mind (touchable objects) or ensure the action all takes place at the center of the screen.
2. In order to hit a button or make a gesture, you have to obscure your view of the screen. This means soft buttons need to be larger than the size of the average finger tip. Which limits the number you can have on screen.
3. The buttons aren't tactile. Again, this limits the number of buttons you can have since it's hard to differentiate between them without moving your finger and seeing where the button is.
Given these restrictions, it's no wonder that certain types of game mechanics have become very popular: parabolic motion games like Flappy Bird or Jetpack Joyride, tower defense/strategy games, swipe gestures (Infinity Blade or Fruit Ninja) or puzzle games like Candy Crush. In fact, the mechanics for these games would likely be very frustrating on a controller or mouse/keyboard.
I've played a number of action games on iPhone as well, and the controls just kind of suck. Secret of Mana is only playable because the console version's hit logic was glitchy to begin with so it works ok on mobile. I probably wouldn't have played more than 5 minutes if it weren't for the nostalgia factor.
I think your third point is the most overlooked one. Mobile gamers are incredibly tight-fisted, and if you want to make money, you have to build that into the app somehow.
I'm often shocked by how awful mobile games are, at least on Android.
Whenever I look for games, all I can find is.
1) The popular casual F2P games, candycrush, angry birds etc
2) Endless clones of 1 (this is at least 50% of the market).
3) Low quality games that were made to cash in on some trend like zombies , military shooters etc.
In contrast , on Steam I could buy almost any of the cheap indie titles and find something original or fun.
So I've basically given up on mobile gaming altogether. I wonder if this is a product of the app store model or something intrinsic about the form factor?
Perhaps there just isn't any demand for good games on mobile because anybody serious about games uses PC or console?
doesn't that make sense tho? you're looking at the top list in the primary marketplace. that'd be like going down to best buy and browsing their ps3 aisle and complaining that all the titles are lame and derivative.
do casual gamers shop on steam? no. people who are "real gamers" do. so, if you're looking for "real" games on mobile, you probably shouldn't browse the top 10 list in itunes.
as to the inevitable question of "how do they make money if you have to special-search for them?", you can take the number of ratings and ballpark some rule-of-thumb average numbers.[0]
downloads = number of ratings * 50
for freemium titles, revenue = number of downloads * .015 (1.5% of people pay on average) * $15 (freemium paying users average out to $15 per month) * 3 (lifetime in months, most folks say 6 month for the lifetime of paying users, but i don't feel that's a very reliable number)
for paid titles, revenue = number of downloads * price.
i'm sure you'll find them not being billionaires, but doing just fine. far better than earning out $7k.
[0] please note these are wild, ballpark numbers based on industry average data from places like swrve industry whitepapers. really only useful for "magnitude-only" calculations.
A few years back there were a fair number of quality RPGs coming out on Android. They typically cost money ($3-$5, sometimes a bit more), had decent gameplay and good graphics.
Eventually to keep up they went F2P and things went down the proverbial drain.
No one was willing to pay for good games, so good games are no longer available.
People expect mobile games to be between 99 cents and free. The same game on PC might sell for $15. Why spend time making a quality game if no one is willing to pay?
They may be just using the wrong business model. If you can pitch a good enough idea, I easily see either a kickstarter one time or ongoing patreon like project to support a games development would work, where the assets are CC licensed and the code GPL, and the community funds its development and anyone can play it for free.
Think 0ad, for mobile. No reason the model couldn't transfer.
In iOS, your game is sharing shelf space with:
* Cribbage games that cost next-to-nothing to develop. ($1.99)
* Hobby projects where the dev isn't looking to make money. ($0.99)
* Free-to-play casual games like Candy Crush. ($0.00)
On PC, all the Candy Crush and whatnot is relegated to Facebook, and your game is theoretically selling on Steam alongside games like:
* AAA titles like CoD:MW3. ($39.99)
* AA titles like Lego [INSERT_FRANCHISE_HERE]. ($19.99)
* Re-releases of classics like Myst. ($5.99)
That's what I feared, it seems the answer is to have either highly curated stores (Steam, traditional gamestores) or sell directly from your own website (Minecraft).
I wonder if iOS had launched without being locked to a single store if things would be better?
I'm not sure that 2nd option is really an option. Minecraft is a total black swan. I'm sure there are plenty of people trying to copy what Notch did, but, I think significantly, I've never heard of any of them.
That thing needs a massive re-working. There are plenty of us who have released apps, games that were great, only to be buried by apps that were terrible.
The cream definitely doesn't rise to the top using the current App Store model.
I'm a bit more pessimistic - I'm not sure if fixing the App Store will fix the mobile gaming industry. IMO the well is thoroughly and completely poisoned at this point.
People are learning to reject IAP-everywhere monetization models, but they've also retained the notion that nothing should cost more than $1.
Even if we eliminate the discoverability problems, the shitty copycats, all that noise, will the economics of mobile game dev still even work out without stooping to EA's Dungeon Keeper-esque shenanigans?
There's a small but growing number of "premium priced" iPad games like Baldur's Gate or XCOM which have apparently been successful enough.
I don't think mobile phone games will ever be a serious thing. The small screen combined with no hardware controls is too limiting. But a tablet can excel in certain areas, particularly anything turn-based.
For example, I'm convinced that a full version of Football Manager for tablets would be massive at $15-20. They've actually done most of the necessary UI work for a touch interface with the "Classic" mode, but apparently mobile CPUs are still a limiting factor.
But Baldur's Gate or xcom aren't ipad games. They're a port, presumably with a complete codebase + assets already made. That must be substantially less expensive than building. So realizing accretive revenue from a port, sure. As a game target, I dunno.
This still leaves the market in a state where the only "premium" games that are viable are ones that have already recouped investments on other platforms.
It doesn't suggest that mobile gaming will ever be able to afford substantial budgets.
Apple's is at least better than Google's Play Store; it is next to impossible to find games that are not those cookie-cutter check-every-five-minutes-to-collect-coins type games.
That's only if you look at the 'Top' lists. It's pretty easy to find interesting games if you look around. I have a lot of game guys on my google+ account which also help.
There are a bunch of categories in the 'games' section of the play store that allow you to discover games that you might like. Also giving reviews of games, the store will then start showing games of like types.
I think the expectation of free or at most $0.99 in mobile just kills any sort of incentive to build the kind of good and rich games you get on PC and console. The false advertising of "Free to Play" games going away, while a good thing, likely won't help the situation too much.
The onus is on the developer to differentiate between "making a game" and "making a game sell". Jumping platforms because you failed is throwing away all the experience and knowledge you now have for an unknown platform. Developers who can't figure this stuff out just don't get to make games for a living.
Startups face the same problem and almost exclusively fail for the same reason. And businesses in general. And authors. Musicians. Actors. Artists. Singers. The list goes on and on. You have to be good at what you do to make it your occupation.
Or in other words, you have huge marketing problem :). App store looks at trends to find the "cream" to surface. However it's YOUR responsibility to kindle the fire. Once fire starts, Apple can provide plenty of oxygen to get it going. This is most challenging part of any business where you have tons alternatives - whether its books or music or games. People who succeed in these kind of spaces are on top of their game to start the fire.
Congratulations: you've discovered what everyone in the music industry knew decades ago! Success in the market is independent of quality!
Seriously, sucess is how well you promote what you do. Being a good programmer will have as much to do with your sucess as being a virtuoso guitar player has to do with the likelihood of making a living as a musician.
While author is probably getting the point of mobile gaming, it should be obvious that it's not about big banner games that you work on for months and hope it to be hit. It's about very quickly churning out dozens of games a year and see what sticks. People I know in this business haven't become millionaires but they don't feel this is a lost cause as business (whether this is also tasteful or not that's another question). They usually weep out a game in a weekend, sometime very silly stuff that is just made out of "template game" replaced by stock graphics. In other words, they write little or no code, design little or no graphics for most of the time. Once in a while they might make a game with some original code and graphics but that's not typical. When they do this, they have offshore people doing much of the grunt work. Sometimes these offshore people are "permanent" employees of their little company but they don't get salaries. Instead they are offered stack in the company. All these keeps net costs down when it comes to cash flow. Most mobile games that have succeeded aren't earth shattering graphics or code. So their hope is that one of their silly things would eventually work out and become a huge hit to pay off year or two worth of weekend work.
It's a special case of a deeper problem with mobile:
It's a feudal platform with a closed app store model and a "nerfed" OS. It was built this way because it's a lazy, thoughtless way to solve the installability, security, and app isolation problems with desktop OSes. A deeper, more well thought out alternative that did not ultimately neuter the computer and disempower the user would have been much more difficult.
Couple of problems here.
You forgot about battery life, which is the primary reason to lock a platform down.
The supposedly empowering aspects of instability and insecurity make the PC a shitty platform, too.
None of those have anything to do with games.
The 'closed app store model' is a million times more open than the preceding models. Ever try getting a game published on a console, or preloaded onto a pre-iPhone mobile? Or even Steam, right now.
Battery life is a special case of priority, throttling, and supervision, which with a proper security model is solvable with quotas and queues.
The PC's security problems are not what makes it empowering. They're an ugly side effect of the PC's relative openness. A good solution would preserve as much of this positive functionality and openness as possible but would fix the messy interaction problems.
This is a solvable problem. It's just harder than feudalizing everything. Instead of solving the problem, mobile OS developers chose to punt on it and neuter the platform instead.
I don't understand what you're getting at by comparing the PC to consoles or console-like ecosystems like Steam. Those are more like the mobile app store ecosystem. In fact, I've long seen mobile devices as effectively consoles.
It's just a console ecosystem with an app store interface and ranking system that creates a race to the bottom in price, which brings us back to the OP...
Android is a much more modular OS than Windows, whose source I can audit, and whom I can make derivatives of like Cyanogenmod.
On the desktop, I can have interpreters and sandboxes. The modern web app is its own desktop app store sandbox. You could even argue the JVM and .net / Mono runtimes are their own sandboxes, if you want them to be.
Meanwhile, Linux distros have had the curated software distribution problem solved for years. You will never find fraudulent or unapproved software in the official Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch repos, yet you can install whatever you want.. if you want to.
And you could make an app platform on top of it, no problem. ChromeOS is freaking Gentoo. It was built with portage and now its app store is the Chrome app store.
But arguing software freedom has been a losing battle for years. Even when consumers can see the consequences - the evolution of fenced off playgrounds with no room to innovate - they just don't care.
I mean, hell, we still don't own our hardware. How many of us are running open source firmware? Even if our mainboards are free, our hard drives run proprietary microcode and our graphics cards run binary blob initialization code. Our cellular data radios are proprietary black boxes by design. The evolution of the app store is obvious in hind sight considering it all.
For the first point, perfect is the enemy of done, and that's (to me) quite evident in the progression of iOS and Android over the years, those platforms having different thresholds for what they think is acceptable for release.
I understand that security problems are not the empowering aspect; that was snark. Still, I don't see how these aspects relate to games.
The comparison between console ecosystems and app-store ecosystems is meant as a counterargument against your feudalist claim. We've never been freer as we are now on iOS and Android, and as you say, it didn't solve anything. And with me not seeing any restrictions on these platforms relevant to /games/, then that leaves a totally unsatisfying argument.
> We've never been freer as we are now on iOS and Android,
That's the part I just can't fathom. You do not control your device. You have to hack it to get "root." There is one app store, and all apps sold within that store must give a percentage (30%?) to the lord of the app store kingdom. The app store can remove any app for almost any reason, and can in some cases even go out and uninstall that app from users' systems. At the very least it can be made uninstallable for new devices and users at any time.
How is that not absolutely feudal? How is that at all free?
We're getting way off into areas not relevant to the OP, but I'm just in a continuous state of amazement at peoples' acceptance of this. It almost seems as if people have been brainwashed into not seeing it... it's like that scene in that old film "They Live" where the guys have the fist fight over putting on the glasses. When I talk about this I feel like that. "Put on the damn glasses!" "No! Mobile is the future!"
Sure, it's not as free as platforms in niche markets. I don't have access to much of the equipment I own, but I don't care about a lot of that. My phone falls into that category.
Anyway, it's all about relative freedom. The 30% tax is not the 5% royalty of yesteryear.
$100 to push to the App Store is not the $30k to licence developer kits of 10 years ago.
A market of hundreds of millions is significantly higher than anything ever seen before.
iOS' ecosystem is experience rapid Glasnost. Android's is tightening up. Both are immensely more free than anything else, historically and presently. This is a question you have to look at over time.
How is this not exciting, and at the same time, completely compatible with the existing and unthreatened harder-core PC market?
I think the OP's problem is we're living in a dark age of gaming, much like the Atari bust in the mid 80s. New ideas will arrive and fix the gaming aspect of this.
"After all the lost money and time I still think Catch the Monkey is a good game. It isn’t very fun at first, but it is very fun and challenging in the later levels. Problem is no one gets there"
If "no one gets there", it's not fun, end of story! This has nothing to do with mobile VS PC.
I spent close to a year creating my first iOS game. I completed the project and then I NEVER shipped. I spent a lot of time working on the game, and it looked nice enough, but it SUCKED. The game was good for a laugh once or twice, and then it was just boring as F. So we didn't ship, mostly because I didn't want that trash on the app store associated with me.
I've released other apps since, no games but am working on another game now, and some have done fairly well but not well enough to quit my job.
So I work a day job and then I go home and work on my apps. If one of them hits it "retirement big" then I'll quit. That's a risky move; time for this guy to put on his big boy pants and get back to work.
Meanwhile, I looked at my Steam library and realized that I've been playing exclusively Kickstarter, Alpha, and Greenlight games. I think the PC gaming revolution is quietly happening.
For me this hype passed very fast. I now never buy alpha, beta, pre-pre-early-alpha-candidates-please-buy-me-I-promise-it-will-be-good, preorders, 0day dlcs, early accesses etc.
I play lots of old games through GoG, I might as well skip all the buggy incomplete "games" and wait until they either fail or live. My backlog is so huge that there is no need now to run for next hyped game.
I'm in the same bucket, Alpha games are worthless. Some have been in alpha so long that you see them in sales. I wish there was a filter on Steam to block them.
Edit: Case in point - I just opened my email and saw: "Project Update #89: Planetary Annihilation Now $29.99". It's drifted all the way down to $30 from $90 in several stages, and still isn't 'finished'.
It is a false alpha. Twenty years ago, the "alpha" of today would be the release of yesteryear. If your game shipped with bugs, well, I guess its buggy. Because its never getting patched or fixed.
The fact you can endlessly patch your game remotely forever automatically is a blessing and a curse. It means many games continue to improve over time, while also meaning many games enter the market in shitty conditions and alpha state with a promise to see them improve over time.
In reality, I think it is more that it isn't a sensible business model to self-finance development, spend the years it takes to make a competitive product in the current market (versus Doom or Wolf3d being made in months) and then pray the sales are enough to not only cover the expenses of that game but fund enough of the next title to last to its release.
Its too unpredictable. Instead, people like continuous income. Alpha early, release perks, gating the community, and your release notes become your advertising. New players are attracted as you improve the game over time. And there are benefits - you can find out early on what mechanical systems don't work, and what features not to pursue because their early releases are rejected by the community. You can do Agile games rather than Waterfall ones.
Well, it's more beta than alpha I agree, but it's still not 'released'. The terminology is wrong, but the end result is the same - I backed Planetary Annihilation on kickstarter, and left it, then tried it a few months ago. It definitely wasn't in a finished state, regardless of final polish.
The problem with the 'alpha' release system is that it's causing a lot of blowback. A lot of users hate it. This system sounds good on paper, but it's not working very well, as far as I can see - it feels like for the most part it merely delays failure of a product that wasn't going to succeed, rather than create a bunch of things that we wouldn't otherwise have had access to. There is a lot of alpha release games out there. Planetary Annihilation in particular is a weird one, because the dev team had heavy experience in dev and also business, and got kickstarted way, way above their asking budget... yet despite being an unfinished game for most of the past two years, it's been showing up in marketing chaff for much of that.
I'm rambling a bit now, I guess, but my take-home point is that for me personally, the advent of alpha-funded games has not improved my experience, and has actively detracted from it. The honeymoon period is over, and it's now being exposed more and more as what it is - nothing like a preorder (yes, yes, no-one ever said it was... but it's still the subliminal marketing message), just an investment with a payoff, and given the number of failures, it's a bad investment. It moves more risk from the business to the consumers, but there are too many finished, worthy games to bother with taking that risk anyway.
The author of this post made some terrible business choices. The constant multi-platform time and money sink is what tanked his company. But who paid the price? The lowly worker, who had little to no say in those choices. How is the author surprised he is upset with him? When you work for a single employer you put all of your eggs in a single basket. You place an enormous amount of trust that your employer will make the right decisions that ultimate decide your future. And by reading this article it appears that those choices were awful.
If he had any honor he would have given him 2 months severance and let him go, only to try an make up for the incompetence he showed running the new company into the ground.
Yea seriously, he was commenting on how it sucked he was paid 2 months and was not working, but it isn't his fault his boss didn't balance the books and went bankrupt, and that he had to seek alternative opportunities.
That was the death of his dream as much as the authors, but it died due to someone elses mistakes, not his own. I think his art assets look great, since I imagine they are to the authors vision and spec in the first place.
no -- none of that is the problem. the issue is that all of the easy, low-hanging fruit is gone and to get workable revenue out of a game, you need to make a quality game.
that's quality without the quotation marks.
and, i'm sorry, but the games in the original post are nothing compared to the likes of papers please, don't starve, or guacamelee! -- much less amazing upcoming indies like no man's sky or ori and the blind forest.
you are kidding yourselves if you think something like "catch the monkey" is going to sell. i was floored to see it actually made $7k in revenue. i would have guessed $1500.
you -- yes, you with your fresh copy of unity and an mvp-fail-fast-idea -- are not going to cut it on the app store. you need to put out a real, honest-to-god, high-quality game.
catch the monkey or a is for app? really?
your game is going to be in the app store next to ori and the blind forest. your game is going to be in the app store next to white night. the player is going to look at both of your games and spend their money on those -- not yours.
the app store is not a disaster -- your game just looks like a disaster sitting next to those titles.
and swapping to pc? have you browsed through the greenlight options? you think your game is going to make it there when you couldn't cut the quality bar on the ios store?
is your game more amazing than anything on that list? better than jotun? better than bounty hounds? probably not.
sure, there are some mediocre games that catch fire and shoot to the top. that's where the lottery is. chances are those 304 apps released on the app store are all crap and don't have a chance in hell of real traction anyway so their only option is catching hold of the lottery tail. if you want to be part of that viral-dependent circus, more power to you, i suppose.
quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now.
however, if your game is legit, you'll do just fine.
that's the key takeaway, make a real, value-for-the-player, interesting game and you'll do just fine. if you can't do that, accept it as a hobby or get a different job.
While that is a noble assessment, if we look at similar industries to gaming we see that quality is rarely enough as well. Music, movies and writing have been under this model for many many years and proven that the reality is that no one really makes any money except a few at the top. They are all tournament economies at heart. VC's have come up with the pseudo intellectual term "Network Effect" but really its just the luck of a hit. Sometimes the Beatles do appear, but mostly its bands that have a couple years of success only to disappear. Part of that is because there is just soooo much competition. The signal to noise ratio is insane. This is because people create music, movies, art and now games and applications for the love of it. So even when sane economic incentives dry up there are still far too many submissions which makes any type of sustainable living still possible but highly unrealistic.
in fact, i kind of cheated and skirted this issue with the flexible definition of "quality". for example, the difference between comparing your (not yours personally, but the royal "your") game with last year hits papers please vs. next year's presumed hit ori. quality in that case is relevant to the competition at the time a game is published.
moving goal posts ftw!
however, i believe this still holds up: make a quality game where quality is present-competition quality, not last-year-competition quality. but that bar just gets higher and higher every year that goes by.
in other words, it's pretty obvious this guy shouldn't be spending $100k making hobby games and then blaming their failure on the terribleness of the app store. that's just silly.
I think if you read TFA, the author would agree with you: the game was not quality because he made a game that he thought other people would want, and it didn't sell. He also spent way too much time going multi-platform and wasted a lot of resources. Much of his article wasn't about how the mobile platform is awful, but about the mistakes he made in his approach to it.
> quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now.
So you mean the entire job of a publisher? It's not so easy to just write a good game and release it: you need a marketing plan, and that's where publishers come in. The reviewer from indiegamemag.com should probably have heard of your game through word of mouth before he even plays it -- but word of mouth advertising is almost never accidental. Even then though, a good writeup on one site might have taken his total revenue from $7k to $70k. He still would have lost money. Marketing is the end-all, be-all of the app store, and he didn't have it. Though in all fairness, most of his strategy was a "me too" attempt to cash-in on mobile gaming, which doesn't work when your competition is paying developers $5-10k/yr in India or China.
Also, there's a recurring theme here: this guy can't manage projects. Two examples:
Catch the Monkey game. Playable alpha 6 weeks; 11 more months to complete. Reasons given:
the publisher wanted so many different versions of the game. It’s a 2D
sprite-based game with thousands of frames of animation. When we were
required to create a Blackberry Playbook version (if you actually remember
what it was!) we didn't have to deal only with a different screen size, it
was a totally different aspect ratio. And Video RAM is handled differently
on the various operating systems. Then there was Kindle Fire, then Nook,
then Android phone with its 14 different kinds of resolutions. Then there
was Android’s new requirement that a game package can’t exceed 50 Mb, and
ours was 70 Mb. Marmalade’s framework didn’t support the Google OBB file
streaming, neither did Nook because they had their own store. So I had to
write my own http file streaming processor that would work on all these
various platforms. The one thing iOS has going for it is a very tightly
controlled OS/Hardware environment. Once you leave that, it’s a total gong
show! But all of the non-iOS builds is where Marmalade really shines, and
so their motivation was to get Catch the Monkey on as many different devices
as they could.
Second debacle: A is for App. First, I think it's a stupid idea. But beyond that, it almost looked like the guy learned: They had a salable stable ios build in 2 months. Great! Ship! Nope, this time, this guy dicks around for 7 months (AGAIN), adding 3rd party iap features on five platforms.
I mean, I don't know what to say. Thomas claims to have run a consulting shop, and I really would have assumed that experience would grind project scoping and bounding into you. But he let the scope of two different projects just wildly explode, from alpha in 1.5 mos -> shipped in 1.05 years, and done in 2 mos -> shipped in 9 mos.
It seems like building 2 projects in 4 months and then either quitting while they were behind or banging out a bunch more tightly scoped projects would be the optimal way to go.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic, but you just have to control project scope. He's going to have the same problem on mac/pc: do you want to be a single person indie? Then you have to figure out how to make a game in 1-2 years, scoped to a single engineer + contract art. Do you want to be mid-tier? Then you have to figure out how to make an awesome game with 3 engineers and maybe an artist in 2 years. And so on. But you must pick which tier you are in then design and scope accordingly.
Indeed, I found this bizarre as well. How did he get into this multi-platform quagmire? The #1 thing that makes you successful in software consulting is limiting and predicting scope. By far. 2 months into that multi-platform hell, at the very very most, the other platforms should have been shelved and the iOS version released. iOS is obviously going to be 50%+ of revenue anyway. At 3 months of burn you need to now figure out if anyone would even play the thing. Even if you just release a "preview" release called "Catch the Monkey: Golden Banana Edition" with 3 levels and enough altered art to make it feel like the next version is the super awesome special 2000 edition.
Honestly, I feel like he had a consulting firm. He managed to keep it above water for a couple years working insane hours, partly because he had this initial lead client which probably gave him a decent lead funnel by referral. Then a larger investor saw his client funnel came in and gave him X for 51% and the position of President, but took over running much of the operation. Finally that funnel started drying up like most enterprise services funnels do without lock-in and the free money for games dried up. Hence why he came back not as President but Programmer.
Some games like Dust have exploded in popularity through word of mouth. For the PC release, I'm sure Totalbiscuit sold thousands of units by himself.
In the PC ecosystem it is actually much easier to get by without advertising because this article does get something right, that if you can get the game in front of the right people they will advertise it for you through the youtube gaming scene at al. Look at Minecraft and how much advertising it had.
It just has to be insanely good and innovative enough to justify people giving a shit to spread it like wildfire, rather than play it as a weekend hobby and forget about it.
> Some games like Dust have exploded in popularity through word of mouth. For the PC release, I'm sure Totalbiscuit sold thousands of units by himself.
That is marketing. Totalbiscuit probably couldn't have found it himself without the creator of Dust getting the word out to him (directly or indirectly).
I agree, it's probably easier and more beneficial on PC, but that doesn't really take away from my point.
yes, i speak from experience. but unfortunately, i'm not at liberty to say much in detail other than the lame "i currently work at the walt disney company and all my opinions are my own".
as to marketing, yes, you will need to do a little bit of emailing and twittering. if your game is great, you'll get some pretty easy traction from places like touch arcade, tigsource, and indie game mag. from there, with no ad spend, i've personally seen much better than moderate, aggregate success.
especially when you consider the users are essentially free as opposed to paying $2-$5 per install from ad channels.
I've decided not to be a native developer, but instead focus only on cross-platform tools. Right now, I've settled on Lua, as I believe its a really powerful, yet simple technology, that has a lot to offer. Of course, I still need to do some native development - extending the Lua host, and so on - but the meat and beef of my applications is only going to be done in the Lua VM .. its finally delivering on the promise of Java (write once, run anywhere) and is just enough of a challenge to keep things interesting. I have to switch between "Host developer" and "App developer" mode, but I'm finding that context switch to get simpler and simpler as time goes on ..
It means the only real native effort that has to be made is just enough to get things working in the Lua side of things, of course - this has its challenges. But, being responsible for the full scope of the framework that supports my app has really made for a more rewarding experience. It has its ups and downs - certainly its not very easy to convince other developers of the merits of this technique - but it definitely results in a sharper, more consistent focus. I feel that the wall-garden effect of other frameworks/environments is no longer an impacting event in my developer chops - I have to understand the native way, but I don't have to use it for the full scope of my implementation.
Plus, there is something very satisfying about deploying on multiple platforms with the same code-base.
I cannot believe that even though his 2nd leason taken from game 1 was 'Making it too good... We added too many features and created too much content.'-that the next game branches in a billion ways and has open content and open world and huge scope. Are you kidding me?!! I think deep down he's hoping on crowdfunding the game dev after doing a proof of concept here- but if you're this much cash down the hole, why not heed your own advice, make a SMALL game, one in a genre you DO enjoy, recoup the initial investment and then do more?
He's setting himself up to get shot in the foot again. Even though he's getting exposure here for the next title, he so far has two failed titles and is working on a huge-scope third(which from what I've seen becomes too time heavy/resource intensive to build to completion for most devs to complete) and still, not an ounce of proof itll work out aside for two people, a friend and musician, saying theyd play the finished version.
To the dev: This is just crazy. Learn from your own mistakes!! Prove that you can actually make money for yourself in making games before of going down this third slippery slope- thus far you have not proven yourself as a good game developer. This is a go big or go home project for sure, and as much as I would like you to succeed after your failures, my bet's still on it hitting a 'go home' result.
Making it too good. Sounds silly, but as a self-funded indie developer there was no one to tell us to stop, or not to add that feature. You get caught in a loop of “if I add this feature it will be more awesome, and more awesome games sell”.
I learned this the hard way. My business partner at the time summed it up as, "Every feature is a support call."
More stuff, even if you think it good, is more stuff that can go wrong, or introduce a subtle bug, or just not work correctly for someone, somewhere,
I think Tsung should have been the co-founder, not the employee. But perhaps it was impossible since the author was bankrolling their mobile experience.
Excellent article, but needs a Call-to-Action. Keep people like me who are casuals but might respond to the ernstwhileness in the loop. Give us a once-a-month update on an email list with the same introspective and honest passion.
IOW, he's learning his lesson about the game itself, but hasn't quite picked up the concept of the marketing around the game. Still, I think his fervor may be leading him slowly and steadily toward success.
I think this is a good observation. Porting to a dozen platforms is double the work for, say, double the customer base. If the game catches fire that's money well spent, and if it doesn't you've saved yourself a lot of money by not doing the ports. So wait to see what the reception is before you spend. If you just get a few hundred or a few thousand users, take that money and make another game.
I agree with his conclusion, too. People who play serious games want more graphics power, a keyboard (or at least a game controller), and decent sound. Mobile game users are looking for the 21st century version of solitaire, and they're not willing to pay much for it. Maybe nothing at all.