[adnzzzzZ]

>id Software is an exception and makes a poor example to follow. Studying wild success stories is not without merit, but is -- if you are interested in how to do the thing successfully -- ultimately a trap.

The article has plenty of current examples of developers doing this on Steam now that are not at all outliers or an exception. For another concrete example you have something like Chilla's Art https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Chilla%27s%.... Two japanese developers who have been releasing games for 5 years very consistently and have slowly built up their audience while also increasing their skills as developers. They also have a Patreon, which is a model that works nicely, with another more known example of it being Sokpop https://sokpop.co/. And for all their consistent work they're now getting rewarded pretty nicely for it, without having had a single insanely huge hit as far as I can tell. You can find plenty of examples of devs like this, doing it and succeeding on Steam, right now. Calling all of them exceptions sounds like a poor excuse.

>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz.

Yes, you need to be creative in the creative profession and come up with good ideas. That comes with the territory. If you aren't very creative then you should probably consider doing something else.

[qwery]

> The article has plenty of current examples of developers doing this on Steam now that are not at all outliers or an exception.

It also was framed heavily around John Romero and id, which is what I was talking about in that paragraph.

> Calling all of them exceptions sounds like a poor excuse.

I'd probably agree, but I'm not sure who is calling all of them exceptions or what doing so would be an excuse for.

[adnzzzzZ]

>I'd probably agree, but I'm not sure who is calling all of them exceptions or what doing so would be an excuse for.

The excuse is basically most replies in this thread, yours included. They all take the shape of "yea, but this idea is wrong because [the market is saturated/the issue is discoverability/no one wants to buy your little games/you're better off at a normal job] and so on. All of these are defeatist mindsets that people use as an excuse to not try, and they also happen to be wrong, as the examples shown in the article as well as the ones I posted show.

>It also was framed heavily around John Romero and id, which is what I was talking about in that paragraph.

The article clearly uses id as an example of a broader point and ends the post by bridging into the present situation. Talking about what people should do in the present, which you did, while ignoring present evidence and focusing only on the past sounds like poor thinking, doesn't it?

[qwery]

I literally and plainly stated that I agree with the author, didn't make some sort of "gotcha" comeback to the article as you're suggesting and relatively successfully avoided being prescriptive, so I'm not really sure how to respond to you at this point.

[adnzzzzZ]

>There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person)

>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer

>but the people you want to buy them (let alone play them) aren't going [...] to buy and try your weird little games.

>The market is saturated. The market being saturated pushes it to be (even more) hit-oriented.

These are the things you said. I'm simply saying they're all wrong and there's plenty of evidence, in the present, right now, as to why they're wrong, as I mentioned in my previous reply. Consider the last one, "the market is satured and it pushes it to be more hit-oriented". I posted an example of a small indie team consistently releasing games and succeeding without having had any super huge hits. You don't have to reply anymore if you don't want to, it's just that you posted things that are wrong, and I felt the need to correct them.

[thaumasiotes]

> These are the things you said.

...those aren't the things he said. If you published those as quotes, you'd be deservedly fired for intentionally clipping context (the rest of the sentence) that radically changed the meaning of the quote.

You really don't see a difference between "You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer" and "You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60 Hz"?

[adnzzzzZ]

Step by step:

>There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.

This is what he said. The post is about succeeding in the market as an indie developer, so pushing the boundaries of technology is not very relevant, as that's not the only way to succeed with making indie games.

>You cannot make a game as radical and captivating as DOOM was.

OK, maybe true, maybe false, still irrelevant as succeeding in the market today doesn't require DOOM-level success.

>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz.

Again, irrelevant, because the post is about succeeding in the market, and there are multiple ways to succeed in the market, most of which do not involve technological boundary pushing.

Do you now see my point or not? The issue in contention is that he is fixating on the example of id in the past to make factual statements about reality today ("There is very little opportunity today for any team") without looking at the current market and the evidence that exists in it to the contrary. He makes multiple such wrong statements, which I quoted in the post you replied to.

[npinsker]

Don’t want to distract from your point, but I’d say Sokpop’s Stacklands was a huge hit!