One very weird thing I forgot to mention. This Substack is starting to make a noticeable amount of money. I'm more surprised than you are.
Thank you SO MUCH to the people who donate. It really does get me to write more often. I mean, I'll write no matter what. But if a month goes by where people pay me and I don't give anything in return, I will feel very guilty. So it helps me overcome fatigue.
I plan to put out a lot more posts in the near future, in order to get attention to our new game. That will be what REALLY pays the bills.
I have reposted a link to There Are Too Many Video Games about 7 or 8 times last year in reply to something someone says like "why is my indie studio failing?" or "what do I need to do to make games for a living?" or "how many millions of copies will my game sell?" It's a great time-saver for me.
The other thing I could post a link to is my completely new kind of game that I spent 4 years on and earned about a thousand bucks on. Getting attention for a game is so hard.
Money is the spoils of the War of Attention. Step outside from selling games and just try to get a job. Your first great challenge is getting the attention of those who are hiring.
People can have money to burn, but vanishingly little free time. Everyone gets the same 24 hours in a day. As a game developer, your challenge is to convince people to spend some of it on your product. And yeah, your product may be great! ... but there are many great games. I'd be willing to bet that, statistically, most great games never get the attention they deserve. That's not their fault - there is just nowhere near enough attention to go around. How does any given game get noticed out of a throng of 1,200?
Beats me. I suppose if you have a marketing department as skilled and zealous as your dev team, maybe then. Oh, and they need a budget too.
Either way, even if you do have the marketing capacities, or just magically manage to make the next Undertale and are carried into the promised land on a wave of word of mouth, that won't change the fundamental nature of the industry. Back to the War of Attention - can the economy of free time support the industry, indie or otherwise, in its current state...? Pretty sure that answer's been locked on a solid, resounding "NO" for a long, long time now.
I think any plea for less games will ultimately fail (reminds me of CliffyB, although I remember his tone to be rather rude). Many people are doing this as a side hustle. The advent of AI generated content will certainly increase the number of games. Despite Steam trying to prevent that, it will happen.
The overall quality of games seems ... lacking. I don't mean the audiovisual content - that's really good even for smaller studios now. Besides clones (like the Vampire Survivors "genre" - I must have a brain injury, I don't actually find it interesting after a few minutes), games tend to be not very innovative. That's what you wrote I know.
But they even fail to flesh out the game-play of the original. I don't expect a clone to be innovative, but I do expect it to improve on the original game a lot. Cloning an existing game, you already basically have a design document *and* a prototype. Code design gets a lot easier since you don't yet carry the technical debt the original accumulated over the years.
So you should just be able to leave the original in the dust game-play wise. If not, why even bother trying.
BG3 looks amazing... I won't buy it - it would take up so much of my time :D
I still say market for isometric turn-based story-heavy RPGs is underserved. I recently did a review of all upcoming RPGs that might be of interest to me (http://zxstudio.org/blog/2024/02/21/upcoming-turn-based-rpgs-and-tactical-games-from-rpgwatch-list-2024/). Considering that most of them won't even come out this year, the few that will be actually released, and not suck, will not even be enough to fill my year, despite me only having about an hour to play most days.
However, I kind of understand why people don't rush to fill this niche. RPGs is one of the hardest genres to develop, and the most popular engines aren't really a good fit for them - you'll need to write or buy A LOT of additional tools. I think there are money in making a "western" RPGMaker (and asset packs for it) that would make it easier for people with less programming skill to make Fallout (or Geneforge, or Underrail) clones.
Hi Jeff, I was wondering with the Multiverse concept now being a huge thing, have you ever considered writing a game with the set in an alternate timeline in the world of Geneforge, where Huestess' people went to Terrestria instead of the proto-shapers and gone through the same development as they did in the original timeline, if so what will the story be like and what will these people call themselves?
Steam has become like this weird box store with 9 billion products, but 99.9999 percent of them are hidden away in an infinitely expanding, labyrinthine basement (damn, I've just had an idea for a backrooms game!), while the above ground section functions somewhat like a normal store.
So, in other words, does it really matter that so many games exist if nobody ever sees the vast majority of them?
Question on wishlisting. I always purchase through the Spiderweb site, as I assume you get more money that way vs. letting Steam take a cut (side question: is this accurate?). Still, I wishlist on Steam, anyway, because you've said several times that that helps you. I just realized reading this, that I still have Queen's Wish 2 wishlisted on Steam, even though I bought it from the Spiderweb site back when it first came out. Do you know how the Steam algorithm works in cases like that? Is it better to leave it wishlisted perpetually or does having something wishlisted for years without buying it eventually drag down your ranking?
One very weird thing I forgot to mention. This Substack is starting to make a noticeable amount of money. I'm more surprised than you are.
Thank you SO MUCH to the people who donate. It really does get me to write more often. I mean, I'll write no matter what. But if a month goes by where people pay me and I don't give anything in return, I will feel very guilty. So it helps me overcome fatigue.
I plan to put out a lot more posts in the near future, in order to get attention to our new game. That will be what REALLY pays the bills.
I have reposted a link to There Are Too Many Video Games about 7 or 8 times last year in reply to something someone says like "why is my indie studio failing?" or "what do I need to do to make games for a living?" or "how many millions of copies will my game sell?" It's a great time-saver for me.
The other thing I could post a link to is my completely new kind of game that I spent 4 years on and earned about a thousand bucks on. Getting attention for a game is so hard.
Am I bitter? Yes, a little.
Money is the spoils of the War of Attention. Step outside from selling games and just try to get a job. Your first great challenge is getting the attention of those who are hiring.
People can have money to burn, but vanishingly little free time. Everyone gets the same 24 hours in a day. As a game developer, your challenge is to convince people to spend some of it on your product. And yeah, your product may be great! ... but there are many great games. I'd be willing to bet that, statistically, most great games never get the attention they deserve. That's not their fault - there is just nowhere near enough attention to go around. How does any given game get noticed out of a throng of 1,200?
Beats me. I suppose if you have a marketing department as skilled and zealous as your dev team, maybe then. Oh, and they need a budget too.
Either way, even if you do have the marketing capacities, or just magically manage to make the next Undertale and are carried into the promised land on a wave of word of mouth, that won't change the fundamental nature of the industry. Back to the War of Attention - can the economy of free time support the industry, indie or otherwise, in its current state...? Pretty sure that answer's been locked on a solid, resounding "NO" for a long, long time now.
I think any plea for less games will ultimately fail (reminds me of CliffyB, although I remember his tone to be rather rude). Many people are doing this as a side hustle. The advent of AI generated content will certainly increase the number of games. Despite Steam trying to prevent that, it will happen.
The overall quality of games seems ... lacking. I don't mean the audiovisual content - that's really good even for smaller studios now. Besides clones (like the Vampire Survivors "genre" - I must have a brain injury, I don't actually find it interesting after a few minutes), games tend to be not very innovative. That's what you wrote I know.
But they even fail to flesh out the game-play of the original. I don't expect a clone to be innovative, but I do expect it to improve on the original game a lot. Cloning an existing game, you already basically have a design document *and* a prototype. Code design gets a lot easier since you don't yet carry the technical debt the original accumulated over the years.
So you should just be able to leave the original in the dust game-play wise. If not, why even bother trying.
BG3 looks amazing... I won't buy it - it would take up so much of my time :D
(edited some grammar mistakes)
On the subject of VSlikes, one based in the world of Geneforge would be superb.
I still say market for isometric turn-based story-heavy RPGs is underserved. I recently did a review of all upcoming RPGs that might be of interest to me (http://zxstudio.org/blog/2024/02/21/upcoming-turn-based-rpgs-and-tactical-games-from-rpgwatch-list-2024/). Considering that most of them won't even come out this year, the few that will be actually released, and not suck, will not even be enough to fill my year, despite me only having about an hour to play most days.
However, I kind of understand why people don't rush to fill this niche. RPGs is one of the hardest genres to develop, and the most popular engines aren't really a good fit for them - you'll need to write or buy A LOT of additional tools. I think there are money in making a "western" RPGMaker (and asset packs for it) that would make it easier for people with less programming skill to make Fallout (or Geneforge, or Underrail) clones.
Hi Jeff, I was wondering with the Multiverse concept now being a huge thing, have you ever considered writing a game with the set in an alternate timeline in the world of Geneforge, where Huestess' people went to Terrestria instead of the proto-shapers and gone through the same development as they did in the original timeline, if so what will the story be like and what will these people call themselves?
Steam has become like this weird box store with 9 billion products, but 99.9999 percent of them are hidden away in an infinitely expanding, labyrinthine basement (damn, I've just had an idea for a backrooms game!), while the above ground section functions somewhat like a normal store.
So, in other words, does it really matter that so many games exist if nobody ever sees the vast majority of them?
Question on wishlisting. I always purchase through the Spiderweb site, as I assume you get more money that way vs. letting Steam take a cut (side question: is this accurate?). Still, I wishlist on Steam, anyway, because you've said several times that that helps you. I just realized reading this, that I still have Queen's Wish 2 wishlisted on Steam, even though I bought it from the Spiderweb site back when it first came out. Do you know how the Steam algorithm works in cases like that? Is it better to leave it wishlisted perpetually or does having something wishlisted for years without buying it eventually drag down your ranking?