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0 pointsfileeditview7y ago0 comments

Well I disagree a lot with what you are saying. Marketing is important sure. But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful. Maybe big gaming companies can do that but even they fail often enough. Luck is an important factor and maybe I would even rate it higher than 5%. I find the number of 90% marketing for an indie game ridiculous.

Stardew Valley is based on existing formula but it is incredibly polished and even people not from this genre play(ed) it. It has something special, similar games don't.

However I think that quality trumps for indie games. There are always exceptions and some "shit" games are hyped because of some Twitch or Youtube coverage. And of course there are some (maybe many?) games that have a high quality and fail. You don't just need quality. But you need it. And you obviously can make a good game in a bad time.

As for the game in the article. I don't want to disparage the author because making a game of this scope is incredible!

However watching a video on his game's site instantly gave me two reasons why the game is not successful.

- The movement of the character looks very stiff and unnatural. - It is missing atmosphere. A lot of repeating textures. No details which makes the whole world uninspiring and uninteresting.

Now these things can be changed and improved still. But in the end the market for this specific type of game really is a hard one. And you compete with game's made by bigger teams and bigger budgets.

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bartread7y ago

I'm inclined to agree. Certainly for games, quality is necessary but not sufficient, and the same goes with marketing. You need them both.

The GP makes a point that pewdiepie picking up this game would result in thousands of sales whereas, although I'm basing this purely on watching the gameplay video, I'd have to say maybe: I don't think pewdiepie, or any other major YouTube reviewer, would pick this up because it's not distinctive enough.

This is especially the case when Infinitroid is going up against games like Dead Cells within the same genre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbfxPptEU6M. Infinitroid is an impressive piece of work but, as a game, I don't think it comes off well in the comparison.

There are markets where quality is of much less importance, such as enterprise software. How else does a company like Deltek survive? Answer: there aren't that many viable competitors and they're all just as crappy. Then it's down to the quality of and investment in the business development and sales process.

Bartweiss7y ago

> But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful.

This doesn't seem to be a disagreement? Quality is necessary for a successful indie game, but that's very different than being sufficient.

I can easily imagine a world where Stardew Valley failed, but I can't imagine a world where Hunt Down The Freeman succeeded. Given the sheer rate at which new games are released, I expect that a majority of polished, fun indie games fail or at least don't see major Terraria-tier success. Heck, half of my Steam library consists of clever, well-executed indie games from Humble Bundles that got near-zero coverage and sold near-zero copies. Orwell, Antichamber, Distance, and a lot of others all had the quality to sell much better than they did.

And beyond that, I think our standards for quality are usually biased by whether a game succeeded. Factorio is absolutely full of grainy, repeated textures, but took off just fine. Dungeons of Dredmor crashes constantly and went through three major expansions without fixing fundamental bugs like "this skill doesn't function", but it's a hugely successful and widely-praised indie title. Subnautica is constantly criticized for just sort of aimlessly ending. It's easy to look at a failed game and say it didn't sell because it was buggy, or looked ugly, or had a weak ending, but all of those things are present in lots of hugely successful indie games. Above some minimal threshold like "no unbearable flaws, one or more excellent elements", it looks to me like luck and marketing are absolutely crucial factors.

fileeditviewOP7y ago

I didn't say that no marketing is needed. I said that you can market all you want if a game is bad it usually won't be successful, with some hype exceptions. I think you are basically making the same point in your second paragraph?!

I don't think to be successful you need to be as successful as Terraria..

As for Factorio.. it's not about graphics. Not every type of game needs great graphics. It's the same as with Dwarf Fortress. Both games offer such a deep complexity that graphics is secondary, especially to the type of player interested in it.

Bartweiss7y ago

> Both games offer such a deep complexity that graphics is secondary, especially to the type of player interested in it.

Separate to my other comment, I should acknowledge that this seems overwhelmingly true. Dwarf Fortress is famous, but I've learned recently that there are also thriving communities for Cataclysm DDA, Dominions, Aurora, every imaginable Nethack derivative, and half a dozen other equally-opaque games.

As long as the genre or mechanics are new, there seems to be a (limited, but) perpetual apatite for ludicrously deep games with minimal player handholding.

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Bartweiss7y ago

I think this might be one of those "forceful agreement" situations, yes. I suppose the way to see is to check all four cases: good and bad indie games with and without marketing.

Presumably we agree that bad indie games with no marketing will certainly fail.

It looks like we agree that bad indie games with strong marketing will usually fail, unlike bad AAA games and with a few debatable exceptions. (Mostly, I think, games that preordered well on hype and reputation but crumbled post-release. Clockwork Empires comes to mind.)

For good indie games with poor marketing, I think they'll usually fail, and it sounds like we might disagree? There are exceptions, but I think lots of them are older than the indie boom (e.g. Dwarf Fortress), or followup titles from successful indie devs. This might just be terminology or statistics though, because I agree that a chance favorable RPS writeup could jumpstart a game with no real marketing plan or budget. I guess the question is how often that happens, versus games doing the convention and reviewer circuit to ensure they get seen and written about.

For good indie games with good marketing, I think there's still a decently high chance of failure these days, which might be another disagreement? This probably requires a better definition of 'failure', people definitely bought e.g. Orwell, but if the standard is "makes enough money to release the next similar game" then even Failbetter Games is on the razor's edge, and they're one of the most acclaimed indie studios I know of.

(On that final point, I think I simply misunderstood you. I was noting that indie games can have any of the failings you mentioned and still succeed, but if your point was just that the specific game in this thread was hampered by those issues then we agree.)

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bodas7y ago

Quality is subjective but marketing is not. Every person has a different taste, I've played some "good" indie games that bored the socks off me. F you have enough people coming through the marketing funnel then only a truly awful game will fail to find admirers.

fileeditviewOP7y ago

There are subjective qualities such as visual quality but there are also objective qualities such as "hours played" or other measurable ones.

Also people will do the marketing for you if your game is good but if it is not you will need to convince them (money most likely). And that is what bigger companies often do (via Twitch streamers e.g.) and what indies cannot (especially solo devs).

ijpoijpoihpiuoh7y ago

Quality is subjective, just like beauty or really anything else. But it turns out a lot of people share the same subjective views of a lot of things. A game that would be subjectively appealing to most gamers will generally do much better than a game that does not. A sufficient amount of marketing might be able to offset some of that effect, but not always, and only at great expense.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

bartread7y ago

I'm inclined to agree. Certainly for games, quality is necessary but not sufficient, and the same goes with marketing. You need them both.

Bartweiss7y ago

> But you cannot market "bad" indie games to be successful.

This doesn't seem to be a disagreement? Quality is necessary for a successful indie game, but that's very different than being sufficient.

fileeditviewOP7y ago

I don't think to be successful you need to be as successful as Terraria..

Bartweiss7y ago

> Both games offer such a deep complexity that graphics is secondary, especially to the type of player interested in it.

As long as the genre or mechanics are new, there seems to be a (limited, but) perpetual apatite for ludicrously deep games with minimal player handholding.

1 more reply

Bartweiss7y ago

I think this might be one of those "forceful agreement" situations, yes. I suppose the way to see is to check all four cases: good and bad indie games with and without marketing.

Presumably we agree that bad indie games with no marketing will certainly fail.

1 more reply

bodas7y ago

fileeditviewOP7y ago

There are subjective qualities such as visual quality but there are also objective qualities such as "hours played" or other measurable ones.

ijpoijpoihpiuoh7y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse