This is exactly how Eric Barone felt, despite knowing in his heart that he had made something special to him. This is how he thought Stardew Valley would he received. The general gaming community are such cunts.
The reason is, the people who like to leave reviews are cunts. Source: I hardly ever review anything, because I'm not a cunt. When I do review, it's to a small busines (buzzword alert), and it's always because the service was excellent.
Alien: isolation? Pretty good horror game, imo. SOMA? Subnautica can be pretty scary,. especially for people with thalassophobia or however it’s spelled… Outer wilds? Not horror, but it is quite unsettling. Also an all around amazing game that everyone should experience, imo.
With 20/20 hindsight it was obviously a good idea.
But at the time of making the decision, it was an unbelievably risky plan and the odds were stacked against it. As a matter of fact, for every successful 2D platformer made with care and love that gets released and becomes successful, there are dozens that fail miserably and that you will never hear of.
Yes, believing in yourself and taking risks makes success possible, but remember that it does not guarantee it.
This comment sounds like it’s discouraging these kind of risks. But I feel like you should almost always take them, because otherwise your life is just hollow.
I think you’ve got to work out what your appetite for risk is. It’s important to do take risks sometimes even if they scare you to move your life forward but also sometimes don’t. I’ve seen a bunch of people really fuck their lives up because they just kept rolling the dice.
One of my goals in life is to not become impoverished due to bad financial decisions, and think of how many people quit their jobs to try to make a successful game just for their plan to not work out and them then trying to somehow get their lives back in order so they won’t become homeless.
I’m sorry honey but you have to understand that daddy took a risk otherwise he would feel hollow! Sure we’re broke now because he quit his job to do a thing and it didn’t take off, and your little brother Timmy had to go live with Gramma or else he’d starve, but think of how daddy feels now! Not hollow!
I mean sure, your friends and family won’t let you starve. But you can’t rely on them forever. Government ain’t doing shit either: At least in my country, to get unemployment benefits, you need to be laid off or fired. If you quit your job to develop a game and fail, that’s on you. Yes, there’s also disability benefits, but those are small and require you to be disabled. Food banks exist too, but they don’t help you pay rent, nor do you get a full month’s worth of food every month.
All in all, a family with kids must have at least one working adult or HUGE savings.
So again, where’s the paradise where government will keep your rent or mortgage paid and your family fed if your game dev endeavour doesn’t pan out? I wanna move there.
We have decent worker protections in Belgium, but if you quit your job here to work on games I don’t know if you have the right to unemployment (since you weren’t fired). Even then, it only lasts for a year or so if you have worked at the place for 5 years, with the monthly payment decreasing significantly until the last few months you only get like 500€ per month.
Luck and a good review from a relevant reviewer. The devs of Nightmare Reaper credit Civvie11’s reviews of their game to the multifold increase of sales after they sent him a redeem code. And that’s not the only game that he’s helped out.
My friend quit his job and has been making indie games since 2015. It's been 20 10 years and he's made like $40,000 total in the time with all his games combined. His wife pays all the bills. Every time he releases a new game he tells everyone this is the one that'll make him a million bucks. He points to games like Hollowknight, Stardew Valley, Undertale etc as proof.
What this image does not show is the amount of support this post received, more than 20k upvotes and plenty of endearing messages on reddit only.
u/YoDudeguy Nov 20 '15
Damn, that looks amazing! Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Will buy.
u/Eliza_Douchecanoe Nov 20 '15
I like the dark feel of it, but with light-hearted game play and sound effects. Good shit.
If I sort by votes, I had to scroll a bit to get to that 756 votes message.
It is important to filter and properly process the messages you receive. There are some mean and unnecessary messages on that image (and on the reddit thread), but they do not show the full picture and at that time could easily be ignored.
Yes, there’s less in terms of there being fewer overall discussions going on. Proportionally, though, I’d say Lemmy feels very similar to Reddit in terms of hivemind circlejerking and hateposting.
When game developers noticed the market for GPUs is growing and processing in general are getting more advanced, they started to care less about optimizing their games. That’s literally it. It’s laziness.
There are still devs that do their best to really optimize their games but most studios, especially AAA ones don’t care.
Streamers will not give you good user feedback. They are not playing the game for themselves, they are playing for an audience.
It is very good that you think about validating your expections early in the process. That way you still have time to change the direction of your game if you need to. I think the best way would be to release the demo to a smaller audience, like itch.io.
Cannot wait to buy another Ubislop-like that costs $80, takes 70+ hours to complete the mainstory and plays exactly the same as the last 20 iterations over the past decade
TotK is a great game. And I’ve heard Baldur’s Gate 3 was excellent although can’t play it until I’ve got myself a new computer. I think they’d probably count?
Every single game Larian made would come out on steam in early access, and always with an early access price. When BG3 hit early access with a released game price I was pissed. But then I found out that they were making a game with Wizards of the Coast those greedy fuckers so the price made sense. Still waited almost a year after it was released to buy it, because the released game price was higher than every other fully released Larian game. Fuck WotC and Fuck Hasbro.
I cannot wait for all the AAA developers to whine, cry, and complain about how everyone is saying Silksong is so good and that AAA can’t compete with their own games.
This could very much represent troubles not just in video game development, but project development in an investor-driven market entirely.
Everyone is focused on short-term wins and profits - so they can demonstrate they’re a fantastic manager making incredible things. They hire 1000 people, then show the grandiose things they made with those people in 2 years so they can take more investment. But the way creative work goes, there are far better ways to play that lottery - they just don’t involve as much active management, and are far less showy.
As a publisher, you could just start 50 small studios of only 10 employees each, with occasional external support as needed to each one, and give all of them 5 years to develop. That would equate to the same or much lesser cost as some of these gigantic multi-outsourced projects, but it means investments are left for longer. And of course, few of them would be a “Hollow Knight” or “Minecraft”, but just enough of them would likely succeed to pay for all the others.
You can see similar concerns in R&D and other similar fields across industries, that give randomized and unpredictable benefit when every manager is watching every quarter’s earnings.
And of course, few of them would be a “Hollow Knight” or “Minecraft”, but just enough of them would likely succeed to pay for all the others.
I would contest this. The vast majority of indie games ‘fail,’ and there is some Machiavellian logic to “let’s make a mediocre game we know will sell.”
Basically zero “micro team” indies turn into Rimworld or Hollow Knight or Stardew Valley, statistically, much less Minecraft. That’s a fantasy.
…That being said, I think there is a “sweet spot” dev team size where diminishing returns are quickly hit. Coffee Stain (the Satisfactory dev) is my classic sweet spot example: Big enough to license Unreal Engine and pretty dependably make something “big” and fantastic, without burning cash detailing pores in ass cheeks and making some broken custom engine to fulfill some suit’s “1st party synergy” fantasy.
They have marketers and such, but it’s frugally spent.
And publishers are pursuing this strategy. Paradox seems to be on a spending spree for mid sized studios, and Embracer Group is notorious for it.
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