Can shooters sell?

[svero]

MOVED FROM REFLEXIVES THREAD....

Not another puzzle inlay clone!!

Aside from that.. the game looks to have outstanding production values, stuff that AAA 2D titles have. So I'm very impressed with the graphics, I bet it plays smooth as well. It will do very well in sales I'm afraid. Although, I must admit, I'm dead sick of puzzle games selling!

So make a *great* shooter then. To my mind there haven't been ANY great shooters since Platypus. And Platypus, btw, sold very well. You might say.. well Phoenicus is great, or Titan attacks is great, or Nexics mutant tank Rat (:-P) game is great, and I might agree and say yeah those are great in their own way, but none of them really go the extra mile and match the level of polish and accessibility that something like Luxor or MCF Huntsville brings to the table. On some levels it's like shooters are only being made by less professional developers who have smaller budgets or something. Where's the real top level professionalism and production for that kind of game? I see a lot of corner cutting and so so production values in the shooters that are released. Show me a shooter that comes close to Luxor's production values and Ill probably show you a shooter that sells pretty good. Certainly Platypus proved the genre itself isn't hopeless. You just need to really bring something great to the table.

[Grey Alien]

Not wishing to dertail the thread too much but Jets'n'Guns has great production values I think. Don't know how well it sells though.

[svero]

Not wishing to dertail the thread too much but Jets'n'Guns has great production values I think. Don't know how well it sells though.

This is the wrong thread so if someone wants to discuss it further then I suggest we move it to another thread. That being said, IMHO I think Jets n Guns is another example of a so so shooter game that doesn't approach the production values and accessability of top casual sellers.

[Leper]

On some levels it's like shooters are only being made by less professional developers who have smaller budgets or something. Where's the real top level professionalism and production for that kind of game? I see a lot of corner cutting and so so production values in the shooters that are released. Show me a shooter that comes close to Luxor's production values and Ill probably show you a shooter that sells pretty good. Certainly Platypus proved the genre itself isn't hopeless. You just need to really bring something great to the table.

I agree mostly, although there are some really good ones on Reflexive but they're *cough* too easy *cough* (they're easier than water bugs, platypus, and puzzle games!) so they dont sell as well as they could.. at any rate. I agree with you.. That's what www.shmup-dev.com is all about (shameless plug!) and hopefully we'll all come together and turn this genre around to something fierce within 18 to 24 months.

[Gilzu]

MOVED FROM REFLEXIVES THREAD....



So make a *great* shooter then. To my mind there haven't been ANY great shooters since Platypus. And Platypus, btw, sold very well. You might say.. well Phoenicus is great, or Titan attacks is great, or Nexics mutant tank Rat (:-P) game is great, and I might agree and say yeah those are great in their own way, but none of them really go the extra mile and match the level of polish and accessibility that something like Luxor or MCF Huntsville brings to the table. On some levels it's like shooters are only being made by less professional developers who have smaller budgets or something. Where's the real top level professionalism and production for that kind of game? I see a lot of corner cutting and so so production values in the shooters that are released. Show me a shooter that comes close to Luxor's production values and Ill probably show you a shooter that sells pretty good. Certainly Platypus proved the genre itself isn't hopeless. You just need to really bring something great to the table.

I'm thinking about the exact same thing. While other games are saturating each genre right now, I can give you 3-4 who stand out in each one. But when it comes to shooters, while there are tons of them out there, none really makes it to that 3-4 genre defining games. I'm talking about games that come out and justify why this genre exist.

Sure. If a decent SHmUP will come out with a great graphics, good mechanics, sound, solid design and gameplay and good publishing - even with a bad uverused "save the world from aliens" - It can be a smashing success.

Heck, I think I've just been convinced of making one.

[princec]

Ultratron sells really well, when it gets any exposure.

Cas

[simonh]

I think one of the reasons Platypus did so well is that it was a shoot-em-up which was colourful and cheerful and just generally shouted "FUN!", unlike most shoot-em-ups which go for the dark sci-fi or space thing and tend to shout "SERIOUS!".

Why isn't there more colourful shoot-em-ups? Like svero I think there is the potential to do very well there.

[Nexic]

Dunno if anyone has seen Alien Stars (by awem), that's pretty good. But yeh I agree svero, there are no shooters which are really doing what they should. And I think you are right, shooters are something that people seem to do as their first project, get cruddy sales, think there is no money to be had and start making match-3s. I think anyone staying on to do just shooters is pretty rare, the only people I know who have is me and Cas.

But to be totally honest, a shooter is *much* more complex to make than ANY match-3. There are so many more factors to tweak and get perfect, which is a big reason why shooters never seem to be as polished as casual puzzle titles. I'm not saying I personally work harder on my games than people who work on puzzlers, but what I am saying is that it takes more work in order to reach that high level of polish and perfection in the shooter genre.

All of these excuses doesn't mean I'm not going to try and make a genre defining shmup, but Luxor esc polish just probably isn't going to happen in any game anytime soon, unless a larger company decides to work on something like this. Which they probably won't, as everyone knows (or rather thinks) there is no money in shooters...

[Mike Boeh]

Bugatron doesn't sell well now, but it certainly used to.

[Leper]

Excerpts from a thread, labeled Molding a shooter into the casual Market

Shareware as a concept and a business model existed long before the portals and Platypus existed. Thats my point over the "best ever" statement. As did shareware shooters. I'm not arguing or denying that Platypus does well for Retro64, but it is a relatively recent downloadable product - maybe in a few years this will be unarguably the case but, as neither of us has anything but second hand opinions to go on, its not a point I'll labour too much as neither of us can prove our argument either way and therefor, a little futile debating it.

I do worry about holding up a product where the author no longer retains the rights to it as an ideal model to work towards a little bit disturbing though. Having said that, if Anthony ever finishes Cletus Clay, from what I've heard - it'll be storming.

-Oddbob

As for why it sold so well - firstly, Mike (it's Mike, not Chris) knows his business really well. Secondly, it was easily adapted to mouse control and only needed one fire button. But it was so much NOT a casual game in so many ways. It was too hard, even on easy. It had no player profiles. The restart points were miles away. You couldn't even save your game and resume it later. But it still did well. I think it was mostly the graphics that did it; simple as that. It's fun to look at. It's accessible. I was sick of serious, techy-looking space shooters. I wanted a game that made me feel happy, like Fantasy Zone made me feel happy. I think this resonated with people.

-Anthony Flack

[Mike Boeh]

Atomaders did well on portal top 10 lists too....

[simonh]

Just out of interest Mike why was Platypus taken off your site? Had it stopped selling?

[Bmc]

Just out of interest Mike why was Platypus taken off your site? Had it stopped selling?

I noticed that too, so I went to squashy software's site and it's not there anymore either, but Flack explains why and I have to say I feel quite bad for him...

[Mike Boeh]

Our agreement with Idigicon has expired for Platypus. It should be back on Retro64.com shortly.

[Nexic]

I think the license has changed hands.

[Nexic]

Atomaders did well on portal top 10 lists too....

And yet it doesn't convert too well now. Do you think Real would accept Atomaders if it had been released in 2006? I doubt it. Just goes to show how much the market has changed since then, and maybe even how much it has changed since Platypus first came out.

Bugatron doesn't sell well now, but it certainly used to.

[Mike Boeh]

Anyway, as the topic says, I certainly wouldn't choose to make a shooter if I was starting a game from scratch. We have a Bugatron sequel on the way, but it does use the existing codebase, so it's a relatively short project.

As for all the "features" Platypus is missing, I have yet to see anything prove to me that user accounts affect sales... Bricks of Atlantis beats the pants off of many breakout games that use accounts, but it doesn't have'em. I think they're very minor in the overall success of a game.

[Bmc]

Do you think Real would accept Atomaders if it had been released in 2006? I doubt it.

Why don't you think they would?

[Nexic]

I'm guessing they wouldn't because it looks dated, has dark unfriendly graphics, has no profiles, is too hard. No I don't know it for an absolute fact, but my best guess based upon games they have published since then, is that they wouldn't.

A lot of those reasons I gave above are the same reasons why RealArcade didn't accept some of my earlier games. Yes they told me that directly.

[svero]

See for my part Im not so sure Atomaders wouldnt do well today. I agree that its darker and less colorful than what Id like to see, but I dont know if the audience has really changed all that much since Atomaders was first released.

I think one quote posted above is telling through. Anthony wrote something to the effect that Mike, when modding and re-releasing platypus, knew the market really well. I think that's a key point that's missing with a lot of shooters. Mike B, kinda knows what's important with the market. He's always thinking about the market in terms of basic principles. It should be mouse driven, the download shouldnt be too large etc...

A lot of shooter makers seem to ignore that stuff and instead use the principal.. it shoudl be exactly as hard dark scary and filled with explosions as every nightmare I had in the 1980's after playing galaxian and operate like I had an xbox controller coming out of my PC. And by that I dont mean that a shooter, to work in today's market, has to be dumbed down or firing at things that look like dweep on a field of stars and rainbows. I don't think that's necessarily the case. But there should probably be a bit more thought going into the designs. So much of the shooter art I see (and Im guilty of this with my own games for sure) is a little gamey or generic. A starfield with a blue nebula and some little typical ships etc... None if it is really going the extra mile. And then to top that off once you do get into the game the interface is some horrible mess where you have to click 30 buttons to get playing after you've equipped you ship and you cant save your game, and there's no sliders for the sound volume, and the text is like pink on a purple background with each letter being 3 pixels high etc... Its awful and not just for more casual players but also for me, who happens to really like playing shooters.

Lastly I'll say this.. One of the reasons I believe bigger companies aren't approaching shooters is that, in fact, they probably don't and never will sell as well as a more generic game like Bejeweled 2. There probably is some limit. So for a bigger company it may not make sense to make a shooter. However for smaller guys I think the potential to make several hundred thousand from a shooter and hit a few top 10 lists is definitely there. Keep in mind too that part of the reason for this limit, aside from more generic things always having the potential to appeal to a bigger audience, is that the audience that frequents the portals is not representative of the gaming population. Portals have, through the games they release and through advertising, skewed their audiences towards players who like certain kinds of games. I believe there is enough overlap for a good shooter to do very well, and certainly well enough for it to be worth the while of a lot of indies, but there is also probably a kind of a built in upper limit to the sales you can achieve given the structure of todays download market.

[Jason Chong]

Shooters do sell I think, but you'll have to benchmark with the Japanese, they're aces in this area, and even till today, it's difficult to beat many shooters from the SNES/Genesis platform.

How many PC versions of Irem/Konami/Capcom/Treasure quality shooters can you find ?

Just want to add, PC developers for shooters have a notorious bad habit of extending levels and providing mediocre gameplay.

Too much focus is in quantity of the levels instead of quality.


Most quality shooters max out at levels 6 or 8.

PC developers try to extend it beyond 20 and each levels are piss poor in terms of quality in my opinion.

What's the point of having 20 levels and average bosses when you can have just 8 levels and 8 quality bosses ?

Trying to play the numbers games to attract buyers in terms of level quantity, makes your game incomparable in quality to the console shooters.

[Anthony Flack]

One of the big problems with making a shooter, from a developer's point of view, is the volume of content. Many people have said Platypus was too short, but it's still about 40 minutes long, and every 30 seconds or so something new happens. And every single event in that 40 minutes of play time is hand-scripted. It takes forever.

You can cut corners with this, but that tends to produce those bland, mediocre levels that Jason complains about. Even though I tried my best with Platypus, it has also been said that the content was over-extended there too.

As for all the "features" Platypus is missing, I have yet to see anything prove to me that user accounts affect sales... Bricks of Atlantis beats the pants off of many breakout games that use accounts, but it doesn't have'em. I think they're very minor in the overall success of a game.

I think that user accounts just facilitate jumping in and out of games easily, picking up where you left off and all that. And it lets you have more fun with collectables and milestones and those little motivational things. You could do it with just a single account, but I like to accommodate people who want to share the game with others who use the same computer.

[Nexic]

One of the big problems with making a shooter, from a developer's point of view, is the volume of content. Many people have said Platypus was too short, but it's still about 40 minutes long, and every 30 seconds or so something new happens. And every single event in that 40 minutes of play time is hand-scripted. It takes forever.

It really is a hard one, Mighty Rodent has a large number of enemies, most of which do insteresting and new things, but so many people say the game is bland because I've streched it out into like 4 hours of gameplay (and yet people are still saying it's too short). I'm starting to lean towards the idea of making something shorter and harder.

Just as an example I bought Gradius V yesterday, I've been playing it for hours on end, and I still haven't gotten past level 4 yet (it has 7 or 8 levels). But I'm not even slightly bored with it yet. Perhaps making you go back to the start each time isn't such a terrible move...

I think I've made the mistake of making shooters which play like puzzle games to please puzzle game players. I'm not disappointed with my work so far, but it does need to be better... much better. Luckily MR sales are good for the moment, which means I have the financial ability to make something a lot more risky next.

[Gilzu]

Just as an example I bought Gradius V yesterday, I've been playing it for hours on end, and I still haven't gotten past level 4 yet (it has 7 or 8 levels). But I'm not even slightly bored with it yet. Perhaps making you go back to the start each time isn't such a terrible move...

Dunno if anyone has seen Alien Stars (by awem), that's pretty good. But yeh I agree svero, there are no shooters which are really doing what they should. And I think you are right, shooters are something that people seem to do as their first project, get cruddy sales, think there is no money to be had and start making match-3s. I think anyone staying on to do just shooters is pretty rare, the only people I know who have is me and Cas.

I've downloaded Alien Stars a week ago. I has a great graphics, solid mechanics - and you can see its well polished.

Thing is that I played the demo start to finish - It was nice, but thats it. It wasn't hard, I didn't mark it as a challange. I played it again, and the same mechanical thing happened. I just passed through the demo not having fun.

So in deparate need of a shooter, I played Raiden II. I flunked the first level 3 times. After 3 hours (and numerus attempts) I made it to level 4. week later I barly made it to level 8. Heck, I still enjoy playing the first level.

And if you'll take a good look at Raiden II - It only has 3 main weapon types (you can also have two types of missiles), each level introoduces about 4 new enemies (yup, I counted). Is it low on content? Heck no. only 3 weapons, but each has its own "magic" (played for hours just to enjoy that purple-arching-weapon), each enemy has its own AI, and not just "this one goes down in a sin wave" and a nice immersive theme.

can you find that in todays shooters? let me know.

[Mike Boeh]

I guess we forget about Mountain King ( www.mking.com ). Scott lives about 15 minutes from me, and he has made a living for many years from his shooters....

[Nexic]

Well I thought Alien Stars was good, but yeh, Raiden II just rips it to shreds. I think Alien Stars was an attempt to remake Raiden II with casual appeal. Hard to know if it worked or not.

I think the only thing I've found that is anything like the hardcore shmups is steel saviour, though it wasn't for me.

I guess we forget about Mountain King ( www.mking.com ). Scott lives about 15 minutes from me, and he has made a living for many years from his shooters....

Yeh I forgot about Mking, I've bought all the Demonstars, and by shareware standards they are really good.

[Jason Chong]

Problem with many shooters, they're always using Spaceships as play character.


Why doesn't anyone look to Gunbird as a reference ?

Little cute witch on a harry potter style broomstick.


Laputa/Nausica style mech/settings.

[Anthony Flack]

Oo, Miyazaki fan. Excellent.

Also see: Cotton (cute witch again), Three Wonders (kind of elfy surrealism), Parodius (cute sillyness), Fantasy Zone (cute psychadelia). Um, what are some others...?

[Leper]

Ok so lets just all conclude that YES shooters can sell!

I think we're on a verge of a major comeback with the genre myself. If you dont believe me then maybe you're in for a big suprise

[svero]

Part of this is building up the market. If a great shooter can make a few hundred grand in todays market and there are enough of them coming out who knows,... maybe in a few years a great shooter can make a mill or two? Great games draw new customers and create new fans. If there was a site releasing games like crimsonland and alien shooter every week the way real releases new bejeweled and solitaires etc.. every week you can bet Id be there spending money. Nowdays I dont even go looking for that stuff. For the most part it doesnt exist.