I mean, being "indie". Are we simply rehashing a business that should most likely give up and go do something "serious" or are we striving towards a utopian future? I see a lot of match3 puzzle dash clones and I look on these forums and everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet for the most part. I just dont know wether people genuinely are doing this for themselves, or because they think that is how business is? If its the latter, then maybe we're all as bad as publishers (who know bugger all about making games). Do you know what I mean?
What filth? I have two choices. I can go work for a big company that spends three or more years making a supposedly AAA game, hoping it won't get cancelled out of the blue 2 years into development or that I won't get fired when it's finished and get nothing from the promised "completion bonuses", and hoping the lead designer is not a complete idiot so I can at least show the game to my friends without shame. OR I can design my own game and create and sell it myself. What's filthy or not serious about that? Rehashing? I don't know. Sure, now and then an article pops up about the indie scene revival or whatever, but that's really just the journalist discovering something that has been here all along. There's no indie revolution, and there's no indie filth. As for people doing it for themselves or going for the money, that varies from person to person.
Fear. I suspect it's all based in the fear of a zero-return on investment. This fear drives developers to the middle of the road to cash in on known-sellers. All the while, the real money-makers are the ones innovating and injecting new ideas into the industry. (Or those following closely behind.) The guys churning out same-old-match-3's consistently fall on their asses or, at best, make just enough to get by. They're certainly not excelling - not like the innovators. Sidenote: Some readers find it rather offensive when you use "indie" and "casual" interchangably. If nothing else, it's inaccurate. So, try to strike that from your lexicon.
None of the above? I guess the volume of traffic here is probably more of the guys who are making casual games... indie games and casual games are subsets with a fairly sizeable intersection. I wish 'em well, but those aren't the games I want to make. I've got a game-development day job that pays the bills, so I can afford to do my own thing. Am I striving for a utopian future? Well, no. Quite frankly, Sturgeon's Law applies to indie games as much as anything out. Whether it's a casual game or some 13-year-old's vision of a World-of-Warcraft-killer, 98% of everything coming from indies is crap, and will always be crap. Big Deal. My only utopian vision of the future is one where nobody feels they aren't allowed to TRY. Where big fat suit-wearing gamekeepers aren't sitting on the gates saying, "You must be at least THIS rich to ride." I don't particularly care for the level of crap that will be exuding from the community ... from lamentable Aquanoid and Bejewelled clones to the half-completed RPGMaker experiments that feel like the developer got bored and quit halfway through development. But I want those to be allowed so that the 2% that has a chance of really shining can get made. And can hopefully have a place to shine and get noticed by customers who will enjoy them. And of course, I hope to be among the 2%. But hey, if I'm gonna dream...
Well, no-one's gonna buy it ? It seriously dismays me why indie games make so little money in general. And also why soccer moms are seen as the only market. Maybe the two are linked. Here's the kicker though: "Indie" is not a replacement/alternative for a real job. You can slag off all those mainstream companies all you want, but the bit the romanticists seem to skip over is that at least in that job you get a decent to very good wage that you can get a good life from. I know about five people off the top of my head who make money doing this, the rest are all skint or working a separate job and killing themselves with their indie stuff on top. A lot of people will tell you this is a great way to "earn a living" but most of them live with their parents and mom buys their computers. If that's you too, then great - give it a whirl. When you want to buy your own home though, don't expect to do so from receipts of indie games unless you're both very lucky and very talented.
I don't know why anyone would say this is a great way to earning a living. That's ridiculous. But it is definitely a great way to live!
I agree with what sonicron says, and i want to add something. I belive there is an absolute lack of knowledge about game design among indie devs, or they dont care to learn, or they have miss-conceptions, or they belive that what they know is enough, or simply are ignorant that it is a huge subject to learn and that its the most important thing that sells games. So i belive there is a fear in learning game design, a fear to try new designs, a fear to create, so they choose copy/clone games, they belive this is the safest, well, the safest is understanding and making concious choices to create new and good things people might buy, but you cant make concious and intelligent choices when you are ignorant about what you are doing, wich is creating games.
Or, "Why I'll Never Be a Mod" I think the forum should have a "No Stairway" rule. It would read something like this: "Absolutely NO Art-vs-Commerce or Risk-vs-Reward threads. You know where you stand, don't worry about everyone else, get the f*** back to work. Thank you, the Mgmt."
What Christian said. Taking a chance with an original design is not a recommended strategy for success. But I do think that on the whole, it's mostly because designing games is difficult and most of us aren't as good at it as we'd like to believe. Writing a mediocre game is not a strategy for success.
Give up the hope of being popular and you'll be a lot happier. Just make your own crap and assume it won't sell. The majority of artists are never successful and even if they are, it is rarely in their lifetimes.
Thanks for not letting this spiral into a thread of woe guys.. I think actually there are some very rational arguments here. I think Applewood is absolutely right. Making a living means actually making a *decent profit*. Not 500 sales, not even 1000. To make a reasonable living AND a profit on top to grow a business (which is what most businesses need) you have to make say 10% profit on top of expenses. Expenses being: 1) Your pay 2) Paying for artwork 3) Paying for business costs like offices, phones etc. So lets do some maths here. Lets assume a medium salary of say £40k (this is in uk, multiply by 1.8 for US dollar values) per person. So we start off small and have 1 guy by himself. Lets assume we start with a small office, you can let those services offices in most micro business places for say £30 a week. So thats rent of around £120 for rent per month. Add on another £80 for various expenses (phone, national insurance etc). Lets assume you spend say $15k on graphics for your game over the year (this is taken from James G saying he spent something like that on feeding frenzy, its probably at the low end). Convert that from USD to GBP = £8350 So we have per year.. £40k salary £200 * 12 months costs = £2400. Artist payments = £8350. So in total, you have to make £50,750, which equates to around $91,350. Thats to simply survive. To actually make a profit... you need 10% more, or another 9,135 gbp or 16,443 dollars. So lets break that down into sales. Lets assume a $20 price tag. Lets assume you get $15 of that. So you take your $91,350 and divide it by $15 and you get 6090 sales. That is DIRECT sales. That is from your own site, direct, no middle man taking a chunk. Lets work out the same thing via portals. Lets say from a $20 sale you get say... oh, $8? I guess thats generous? Anyway, lets go with that.. so for your PROFIT, you need to get over 11,418 sales. So reading Andy Shatz's take on things.. something like 350 direct sales? Something like say 500-800 affiliates? You better hope andy got a LOT more sales via the retail route. My point isnt to be negative. My point is that I think Applewood is trying to inject some common sense into things by pointing out that indies need to sell a lot more. I simply couldnt sustain a business doing that kind of sales. So what sense is there in continuing? Well, for one, I do it because I enjoy making games, I also actually appreciate the indie spirit and I like the indie crowd, naieve though it may be. I also actually think that the multiplication effect comes in. As Andy says, his first title wasnt stellar, but it will sell for ages AND when his next one comes along, it starts cross selling. Then the next etc. Finally, I have a day job, so for me, this isnt life or death. I'd be REALLY scared to do this fulltime without a much clearer plan though. Myself and my business partner both are reasonbly well paid, so we are funding our startup from our own pockets. We both realize the key is to not expect to do all the work ourselves, but to find people to hire who can work for us. The key for us, is to actually work on products that have a wider audience or a more solid sales hook. That is, we need to work on projects that are worth people's interest. Projects that arent just the same as anyone else, but actually give us the opportunity to monetize different streams of revenue. Actually, I think Andy is pretty rational in his approach. Dont expect super sales on your first product. Or even your second, but build up a portfolio that cross sells like hell. All this btw.. has NOTHING to do with Air Ace. Which is another beast entirely (and almost entirely irrational from a business sense). Thanks for the reading though guys.
Brings back happy memories of the infamous "Light for the n00bs" thread. Damn but I wish I could make more money out of my games. I'd love to quit the day job and do it but the money's just not there for some reason. Cas
This may make sense to those of you who had well-paid industry jobs, but imagine the indie market from the perspective of an junior office admin's salary and the figures change....
Good point. Figures look very different for a 21yr old graduate looking at £15k salary with no perks, shit holiday, and probably a crappy commute as well. Cas
Do they ? (Honest question) The impression I get from people around here is that the average game makes about 2 grand in sales if you're lucky. And (generally) a 21yr old office admin isn't gonna make games anything like the speed or complexity you could expect from that 20 year industry veteran either. I'm not arguing, I *want* to be wrong. I'd love to do this, but I just can't afford to.
Well, yeah you're right there, I've never made more than a couple of grand profilt in the entire span of Puppygame's lifetime. But the goal of reaching £15k is a lot more achievable looking than £40k and especially at the tender age of 21 it sounds like a lot of money anyway. And you probably live with mum still I'm still mightily fucked off that I can't make a living out of Titan, which on the right sites sells 50 copies a day (not too bad eh). Trouble is getting that sort of traffic seems bloody hard, even with a few choice affiliates. And then there's the difference between Titan and Ultratron: Titan outsells Ultartron roughly by a factor of 10:1 at the moment but in its heyday it only outsold it by 2:1. Grr. Cas