[dkarras]

It is not just about marketing though. There is this belief, especially among fledgling indies that if they make a game that they think is good, and if they are able to market it well, it will be a success, even a hit.

A hit in gamedev is not easier than creating a hit in the music industry really. Even the veteran composers are not able to replicate (or even achieve) creating a hit. Possibility of success depends on many factors which change constantly, and success hinges on your ability to "read the room" which is the sound palette and the persona (for the artist that "performs" the music) millions of people are likely to find interesting at any point in time.

If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke. Same is with gamedev. Your passion project most probably is not the thing most people want at this point in time. No amount of marketing will solve that problem. Your efforts at marketing are doomed to have negative ROI. Maybe you are a year too late? A decade too late? Maybe a couple years too early? Maybe what you think is fun is not really fun in the general sense and will never be?

I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. In the same vein, I'd struggle to find a hit game that succeeded because of marketing. No amount of marketing effort can beat thousands of people finding what you do interesting and sharing their opinion in person, on social media, youtube etc. If you have pockets as deep as Coca Cola, you may influence the culture through your marketing efforts, influence what "should" be popular - but if you are not that, you need to be an expert at reading culture of your target audience and cater to that. When you do that, "marketing" will be a walk in the park. Or else, even if you spend enormous efforts in marketing, it will only generate negative ROI.

[baobabKoodaa]

> If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke.

You're punching too high. Music is a passion for many people. Same as game dev. I would expect >95% of game devs to be perfectly happy if they can make a living creating indie games. Of course it's nice to make a hit that makes you tens of millions of dollars, but most game devs would be happy to make enough to pay themselves a salary to live on.

Now, if we're not looking to make a hit, but we're looking to make a living, there are a lot of composers out there who can consistently achieve that (e.g. beatmaking for rappers advertising on youtube and such).

> I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing.

I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example.

[ApolloFortyNine]

>I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing.

Among Us is a good example. It was out for over a year before it exploded.

It got found by streamers and that slowly spread in that space before even the biggest ones were playing. [1]

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/games/510218

[pjc50]

>> I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing.

> I'll offer Flappy Bird as an example.

Flappy Bird is a bizarre exception: it was a massive viral hit before it was voluntarily withdrawn by the developer feeling guilty over its success. It was then cloned a lot.

[baobabKoodaa]

The reason why I mentioned Flappy Bird is that it originally wasn't a massive viral hit. It was on the app store for like a year with basically no-one playing it. And then it became a viral hit. So it's a good example of how a good game with no marketing doesn't get picked up (until it gets lucky and eventually does get picked up; you can imagine a timeline where that never happens).

[kibbi]

I think that extreme outliers like Flappy Bird (which the developer developed over a couple of days and probably didn't expect any significant return) just muddle these discussions. They're irrelevant if you want to suss out what happens in the usual case.

[johnnyanmac]

I agree, but when talking with these "where the hidden gems" audience, any example I point out will be "an exception". it makes the entire conversation a bit tiring, no matter how much you research the market these kinds of people have their opiions set, with no skin in the game.

[baobabKoodaa]

The usual case of good games which fail commercially because of bad marketing? How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"? The reason I talked about Flappy Bird is that the game's late success proves that its early failure was due to bad marketing. If you only want to talk about games which never succeeded commercially, then I have no way of proving to you that any of those were "good" games.

[somenameforme]

> How would I prove to someone that a failed game is "good"?

Steam reviews are a great way. Lots of folks, including myself, try or tried to seek out these hidden gems on Steam. And Steam provides some great tools to try to find them. [1] It just turns out that there simply aren't many games at all with genuinely high reviews, but very low player numbers.

There's a whole bunch of great games in the ~200 reviews category with high reviews, but I'd generally consider that successful. The average game gets something like 60:1 sales:reviews, so 200 reviews is around 12,000 copies sold. You're not going to be getting rich off those numbers, but that's more than enough to live an extremely comfortable life in the overwhelming majority of the world.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/0

[jarjoura]

Hate to break it to you, but the pop star success formula is actually meticulously detailed and very repeatable. The producers and song writers know exactly how to do it.

It’s not about challenges in finding success, so much as, at least in music, artists don’t want to follow a formula. They want to create songs and melodies that are personal and meaningful to them and their fans.

[recursive]

There are more people that want to make hit songs than there are hit songs. As long as that's true, it will not be easy.

[antifa]

That probably involves more of a corporate marketing vanguard that picks winners more so than it organicly finds them.

[johnnyanmac]

And you think Games are different?

[antifa]

The corporate marketing vanguard that picks winners in the gaming industry is almost entirely dedicated to microtransactions, pay to win, pay walls, subscriptions, and battle passes.

Inorganicly chosen winners is a problem, but in the music industry, the end product itself doesn't exploit the listener beyond just that.

[johnnyanmac]

Sure they are now, that's simply where the money is nowadays. 5 years ago it was battle passes 5 years before that it was an attempt to recoup costs with used game. 5 years prior to that it was experimenting with DLC types and seeing what would stick. And 5 years before that it was trying to have long term subscription attachments to a game.

Games are ultimately tech. And games grew along with the internet. It was inherently going to be run more like a tech company than a media conglomerate for that reason. I see it less as games being exploitative than a double edged sword, like the internet itself. It can be a lot more exploitative. But it also opened up entire mediums of ideas and arguably tore down world borders.

[kjkjadksj]

Artists absolutely want to follow a formula. Read a little bit about songwriting. How common chord structures are across popular music. Music theory in general is literally formulaic. Beethoven or Radiohead both follow formula.

[pjlegato]

While some necessary factors about what makes a pop hit are known, even with that knowledge -- and a huge marketing budget -- the vast majority of songs written even by the very top producers and songwriters flop massively, all the time.

They know this, too. They budget so that their 1% massive hits pay for the 99% that nobody cares about.

[johnnyanmac]

>I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. In the same vein, I'd struggle to find a hit game that succeeded because of marketing.

only if you're looking at the most general audiences. That's the advantadge of targeting a niche. Not everyone will buy furry art, but the ones that do have high demand (and apparently, deep wallets). Indies can't afford to be "for everyone", and even AAA games are struggling.

But if you want an obvious example of the latter: Raid Shadow legends. Literally spends millions upon millions on advertising a year, and I can't imagine many would organically find and talk about such a game themselves. But even after 6 years they seem to have the funding to get every youtuber under the sun to talk about it. You very much can outadvertise a mediocre game as long as you have the right monetization scheme (which spoilers: is not "buy one copy of $10 game).