[hwbunny]

95 % of games are boring, and unoriginal. Why? Because most of these people, who create these games are entrepreneurs. They only see the possible money from these. These games have no heart whatsoever, why? Because good games need passionate people, not blue collar suits.

There are 1 million subscribers at the gamedev reddit. It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike answers.

[jayd16]

Games are boring and unoriginal because it's incredibly hard to make original, engaging content no matter who you are.

[hwbunny]

I don't think that's the case. Just look at the 90s, early 2000s.

[vohk]

I think that might be survivorship bias talking. We tend to forget all the shovelware and only remember the gems.

I remember playing a ton of awful shareware games as a kid, on floppies and disks packed with a few dozen each. Same thing later on, bringing a game home from the store only to realize I'd chosen poorly.

And it's easy to get a bit jaded after years of experience and look back with a rose tint. I loved the hell out of that junk as a kid, because it was still the best stuff I'd yet seen and I had time to spare. Today I'm a little pickier.

[bnralt]

Being passionate doesn’t guarantee a game being a success, though. Look at a game like Knights of the Chalice 2. It's definitely a labor of love, and many people who play it think it has the best DnD combat of any game out there, and maybe some of the best turn-based combat as well. It has mediocre graphics, though, and a high price point, so it’s had extremely slow discoverability. It also has a somewhat niche audience (people really into complex DnD combat), so it’s not clear how much of an audience is out there even if discoverability wasn’t an issue.

[hwbunny]

People are in their own bubble and believe everything that people say to them on the internet. People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit. That game is built on already outdated foundations. You need to give something to users that will stimulate them.

[bnralt]

> People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit

The places I frequent say that about games all the time. For instance, though the game I mentioned gets highly praised there, almost everyone trashed the author’s previous RTS game. Some places might give every game universal acclaim, but plenty of places have people who will openly call a game garbage.

[hwbunny]

List those places please...

[somenameforme]

That price point is one of the most ridiculous I've seen, and is just lighting money on fire! The game looks great (erm.. so to speak) - clearly extremely heavily influenced by the Gold Box games, but I have no clue at all what the dev was thinking with that price. I am his demographic, and I'm not even considering the game at that price.

[johnnyanmac]

>I am his demographic, and I'm not even considering the game at that price.

That the dev spent tens of thousands of hours on a very niche genre, and that it was better to sell to 10k fans @$45 than to risk selling 25k copies @ $20 (random sales numbers).

It's a common strategy in Japanese game development. Some games are just very niche, so lowering the price doesn't necessarily increase sales proportionately. It just means less money from financially inflexble fans. So keep the price AAA level and target those fans.

[somenameforme]

Haha, when I initially wrote my comment I referenced a little inside 'joke' of sorts I have with some friends in games, referring to stuff as 'Japanese pricing.' I decided to snip that off because I figured it might be too esoteric. But I guess none of us is a snowflake, are we? The thing I'd observe is that Japanese pricing fails, hard - even for Japanese games. It seems a handful of Japanese publishers have realized this. NIS is a great example - they publish a huge amount of stuff, nearly all of it's niche, and it sells crazy well - because it's sold at a reasonable price. SEGA is the equal but opposite example. They still seem to think this is 2001 and they're selling games on a ringfenced console to players starved for content. And so their games are completely flopping.

Compare Etrian Odyssey (SEGA) with Disgaea (NIS). Both games are a fairly comparable genre, with fairly comparable production values, targeting the same demographic, and both were also PC ports/remakes of older classics. Disgaea is less than half the cost and has is pushing an order of magnitude greater sales. Also I think the concept of "niche" is somewhat obsolete.. kind of circling back to the point that none of us a snowflake. The market is so huge and diverse. Even for the most niche titles, there tends to be huge market potential, because "niche" markets now a days are larger than the whole market not that long ago. Games like Mount and Blade are just niche Eurojank embodied, yet has sold millions. Siralim is another great niche game. It sells excellently, especially considering the dev keeps releasing pretty much the same game ever couple of years.

Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers. Region pricing kind of adapts to this, but not really. In terms of exchange rates it's extremely favorable, but what really matters is PPP - how much a unit of currency is "worth" in domestic prices. So for instance the $45 game is sold for about 1000 rupees. I don't live in India but a quick search turns up a rent-by-day place in the cheaper parts of India can go as low as 100 rupee a day. So even though $45 exchanges for like 4000 rupees, it's worth far less (in terms of how far it goes in America) than even the 1000 rupees that the game is sold for India. So when you set the price of your game high in dollar terms, you're setting it to just LOL terms for most of the world.

[johnnyanmac]

>Also I think the concept of "niche" is somewhat obsolete.. kind of circling back to the point that none of us a snowflake. The market is so huge and diverse. Even for the most niche titles, there tends to be huge market potential, because "niche" markets now a days are larger than the whole market not that long ago.

The market is larger, yes. I don't think it's gotten that much easier to target your marketed towards those audiences. the privacy changes on IOS/Android are great, but it has an unfortunate consequence that these more intimate styles of ads are now nearly impossible to channel to the right person. So you have to go to the good ol' fashioned social media blitz. Something everyone else is also trying to do. It's never been harder to get a person's attention.

Essentially, those titles you mention relied heavily on word of mouth (except Mount and Blade, but that was from a different era of gaming). I'm not sure I trust WoM enough to stake my entire livelihood on it. Gamers can be fickle, or timing can just take some cruel turns and ruin all that trajectory built up.

>Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers.

I don't disagree. But the top factors still apply. Very few are going to risk losing the USD to try and get more rupees/yuan. Russia and China in particular are pretty infamous for their piracy rates.

On top of that, getting a good localization can be too much for a smaller indie, and even those who afford it can never assure quality. Localization is a very hard process for games that need more than simply UI text to be done.

[bnralt]

Yeah, the developer is a bit eccentric, which seems to be common when it comes to these passion products. At one point I believe some of the really big fans of the game were pushing him for a price reduction to increase the amount of players (it comes with a NWN style module creator, so a bigger community is important). From what I recall the response was something like, “You know, you’re right, I’ll go ahead and make a 10% discount during the next Steam sale.”

Or you have developers like Iron Tower Studios (Age of Decadence, Colony Ship RPG). The lead developer actually seems to have pretty good business acumen, and is pretty open about the studios finances. But he’s also a perfectionist, and the huge amount of time between games means that the studio requires a lot of sales to stay afloat. The last update from them I saw was that the launch of Colony Ship was good, but it’s still unclear if it’s good enough to support them for several more years while they make another passion project.

[johnnyanmac]

most games are made by entrepreneurs because the best creators are either in industry, too broke to afford to create and took some different job, burned out of the industry for a myriad of reasons, or are one of the few gems out there (which may or may not be hidden).

>It's ridiculous, and when people ask something, they get total balooney, ridiculous botlike answers.

This isn't limited to r/gamedev. Reddit is asking the blind to lead the blind, and maybe once in a blue moon you get an actual expert to help. They often leave once they realize everyone else is blind and questioning their experience, though*.

Sadly, the best place to find the best answers is to find people live. Be it in town, during a conference, or just hoping they accept a cold invite on their social media and choose to respond.

>I don't think that's the case. Just look at the 90s, early 2000s.

yes, you neede to know someone at Nintendo (or later, Sony) just to get your game in there, know how to make your own assets and levels without a high grade commercial engine, and get Nintendo/Sony to approve it. There were a lot of gatekeepers to making an indie game back then, so there were almost none.

Meanwhile, Shareware was hard to profit off of on PC (remember, it was not commonplace to have a digital wallet back then). There may be some great games, but few would be profitable without launching on console, being on store shelves, and overall supporting a propreitary machine.

(*me being an example. Though calling myself an "expert" is an overstatement. 10 years in industry isn't nothing, but also is far from authority level in any technical field).