I dabbled in shareware games for roughly 20 years. I had high hopes for making a revolutionary game and my ship coming in like Notch, but what I found was that making a game was never the difficult part. It was always about funding - making rent each month, affording food, etc. It was also about telling people no, because the closest people around me were often the most demanding of my time and energy, even going as far as telling me what I should be working on. I failed utterly on both fronts.
I found (and still find) most games deeply underwhelming, especially when they get high praise for their creative gameplay or plot, because those are the easy parts. Very few games also have solid engineering like Minecraft. That solid engineering is so elusive, so expensive, that it’s effectively out of reach on an indie budget. The only thing left is cookie cutter games like Angry Birds, which I categorize as the first thing that would come out of any medium. So if all you have is eggs you make an omelet, if all you have is leaves you rake them, if all you have is a physics engine you throw things. It’s no wonder that the profit for something anyone can make either rapidly approaches zero or goes into the stratosphere on its own fame like Paris Hilton, creating the illusion of value for an industry that would otherwise have none.
Then I watched a talk by (as I recall) Jason Fried of 37 Signals, who made the rather astounding point that the way to earn a profit is to make something people want and sell it for money. This was after the dot bomb when people were still chasing eyeballs, I wish I could find the video. It was one of the prime motivators that got me to quit my soul-sucking job and flip broken computers for a year, and then get into contracting. It finally hit me that people make money doing all kinds of things because people want them, and I didn’t have to suffer the grind in my life any longer, because to work so hard at something people aren’t willing to pay for is the very definition of futile.
Sooo.. I may make another game. I may sell it at the exorbitant price of $5, $10 even $20. I may not even give away a free demo. All of the other free, ad-based, casual, social games of the world can keep playing house, and bless them for doing so. But people will always want the real games, and I know that because I would be willing to pay for one, should one come along. I’m thinking that in this case, if Apple and other companies have really created a race to the bottom economy for games and other apps, then nature will “find a way” and create more of an egalitarian way for developers to earn an income, perhaps from crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, but more likely from guilds, co-ops and to be quite frank a collective approach that takes the enormous wealth produced by the industry and uses it for something more productive than the hypervaluation of startups. As far as I can tell, we’re on the verge of total blah just like in 2000 and if everyone doesn’t wake up, history is about to repeat itself. If we glorify success and ignore wasted potential, the next thing we sell that people are willing to pay for could very well be a side of fries.
I'm currently working on a mobile game all by myself. So this article should worry me. But I share your sentiment. You should create the games you'd want to play yourself. There are many games that were developed with the wrong intentions and so I'm actually glad they fail because it makes the audience seem smarter than they are often depicted.
Every now and then I browse through the app stores for games that didn't get attention and I've never seen a great game among them. I'd like to be proven wrong on this but it hasn't happened yet.
I've also read a couple of postmortems of failed games and I haven't seen a single game that failed despite delivering quality. Most of the times I asked myself how they even thought they'll have success with such a low quality product. One of the best post mortems I've read was this one which emphasizes my point http://gamasutra.com/blogs/DomDrysdale/20150107/233677/Lesso...
>... we were inspired by the success of games like Ski Safari and Jetpack Joyride. These are not good reasons to make a particular type of game
>... I don't think we ever really had the passion for this genre of games to make something truly great.
See, I disagree with your "budget".. all it takes is a computer and a dream to build whatever you want. It doesn't take budgets.. Can you do it in the same time a team with 30 million in funding? Hell no, but with the right group of people and a lot of persistance you can make anything happen.. see SWG Emu http://www.swgemu.com/forums/index.php
it's taken years, and years, but with determination and $0 budget they've pretty much reverse engineered an entire game. It doesn't have to be done today. Start it, don't stop, keep going, and while doing that for fun(because that's why I started and still write code today.. for me its fun as hell.) find something that pays the bills like a day job.
I'm working on a project, all by myself right now.. I put in my day job, and then if I'm up to it, put in a couple hours on my side project. When its done, its done.. or it may never be done, but i make a little progress any chance I get.
Ya what you say is true, it's definitely possible to make a game as a side project while working a day job. The only problem is that it’s difficult to know if/when to throw in the towel. My old partner and I ended up spending 11 years on a game that way. That was before Kickstarter, although I'm not sure anyone would fund the style of game we were making because it was just a 2D platformer sequel.
It’s also true that there are few or no expenses in programming other than labor, but even living a subsistence lifestyle adds up. I think we each averaged over 500 hours per year, call it 10,000 total to be conservative. So we could have made the game over about 2 years if we could have raised $70,000 and paid ourselves minimum wage (which just barely makes ends meet for a single person where we live in Idaho). Instead we worked a bunch of dead end jobs, I ended up moving furniture for 3 years and my partner got sucked into computer repair rather than programming. We would work seasonally and then be on call at home during slow parts of the year and spend what money we’d saved on rent and food while we hacked on the game for days on end. Struggling with burnout and destitution for so many years set our careers and personal lives back so far that we still haven’t started families and we’re pushing 40.
What I learned from all of this is that if you want to raise money, you need to earn an order of magnitude more, somewhere between 2 and 10 times as much as you think, because of life’s expenses (mainly debts in this era). It works just like time where even tripling your estimate is sometimes not enough. As far as I can tell, there is nothing like an artist guild for indie programmers, no support structure to lend any dignity to the lifestyle through grants, commissioned work or the attention of benefactors. There’s just the starving artist mentality, which grows more unpalatable with age. I don’t view this as anything close to sustainable, so it’s no wonder that the overall quality of indie games has fallen to amateur levels (and eventually apps as their prices race to the bottom). It’s going to follow the same trend as books. I’m hopeful though that maybe something like a basic income might come along and rescue art from slow decline. Art is synonymous with culture so I guess that’s why I get so worked up about all of this, because I feel it’s intimately tied to whatever technological future we would like to see for ourselves and future generations.
I found (and still find) most games deeply underwhelming, especially when they get high praise for their creative gameplay or plot, because those are the easy parts. Very few games also have solid engineering like Minecraft. That solid engineering is so elusive, so expensive, that it’s effectively out of reach on an indie budget. The only thing left is cookie cutter games like Angry Birds, which I categorize as the first thing that would come out of any medium. So if all you have is eggs you make an omelet, if all you have is leaves you rake them, if all you have is a physics engine you throw things. It’s no wonder that the profit for something anyone can make either rapidly approaches zero or goes into the stratosphere on its own fame like Paris Hilton, creating the illusion of value for an industry that would otherwise have none.
Then I watched a talk by (as I recall) Jason Fried of 37 Signals, who made the rather astounding point that the way to earn a profit is to make something people want and sell it for money. This was after the dot bomb when people were still chasing eyeballs, I wish I could find the video. It was one of the prime motivators that got me to quit my soul-sucking job and flip broken computers for a year, and then get into contracting. It finally hit me that people make money doing all kinds of things because people want them, and I didn’t have to suffer the grind in my life any longer, because to work so hard at something people aren’t willing to pay for is the very definition of futile.
Sooo.. I may make another game. I may sell it at the exorbitant price of $5, $10 even $20. I may not even give away a free demo. All of the other free, ad-based, casual, social games of the world can keep playing house, and bless them for doing so. But people will always want the real games, and I know that because I would be willing to pay for one, should one come along. I’m thinking that in this case, if Apple and other companies have really created a race to the bottom economy for games and other apps, then nature will “find a way” and create more of an egalitarian way for developers to earn an income, perhaps from crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, but more likely from guilds, co-ops and to be quite frank a collective approach that takes the enormous wealth produced by the industry and uses it for something more productive than the hypervaluation of startups. As far as I can tell, we’re on the verge of total blah just like in 2000 and if everyone doesn’t wake up, history is about to repeat itself. If we glorify success and ignore wasted potential, the next thing we sell that people are willing to pay for could very well be a side of fries.