Game Dev

The answer to why X game didn't find success

Making games is hard, making indie games is very hard, making successful solo indie games is an extremely challenging feat.

If you've learned a bit about game marketing then the answers in this post will likely seem obvious but it's worth repeating.

"Why did my game fail to find success?" here's a few reasons:

• No marketing: People can't buy your game if they don't know about it. This is one of the main reasons and a tough one to solve. Steam has 400 Million MAUs, if only 0.1% of them knew about your game you would find success, but that task is not as simple as it seems. You need to talk about your game many times in many forms to reach as many people as possible, check out my videos with Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski to learn more.

• Your game isn't SEEN as good: This doesn't mean the game itself isn't good, but it doesn't look good from the outside. Usually this means sub-par visuals, either low quality or just inconsistent. Before a player buys your game they can only judge it based on appearance, so it has to look good. One interesting recent example of this is Supermarket Simulator where the game looks visually very basic and because of that it did not find any success at the start, it only had about 1000 wishlists. But then they published an excellent demo, people loved the gameplay, and then they were able to look past the visuals. But I would NOT advise you to rely on that, make the visuals look as good/consistent as possible.

• Saturation of your genre: There are tons of excellent games on all kinds of genres, why should they play yours? If you make yet-another-platformer then it's really tricky, but if you make a simulator game with a new interesting unique theme then it's easier.

• There is no market for the game: Some ideas are so insanely niche that it may be literally impossible to sell more than a few thousand copies. Are you very passionate about a specific Victorian game that existed in 1850 and want to make a modern version of it? There might only be a handful of people with that same interest. Alternatively are you making a couch co-op offline-only game? That's a tricky genre, regardless of how much you market it.

• It's just not good enough: There are thousands of games, and many of them are excellent, so it can be that your game is just not good enough, which is fine! Everyone starts from nothing so you shouldn't expect your very first game to be a masterpiece. I certainly didn't make a living from my first game (or my 2nd, or 10th, or 30th...)

• Bad luck: The universe is random and luck is always a factor, I made a video on this topic, although personally I love the quote "I believe in luck and the harder I work the luckier I get", meaning yes luck exists (not in your control) and you can minimize its impact by just getting better (which is in your control). Another quote I love is from Star Trek "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose, that is not a weakness, that is life"

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Game Dev

The real cost of playing a video game isn't money, it's time.

Sometimes devs get annoyed at how players seem to massively undervalue games, the same person will gladly spend $8 on a Starbucks coffee but wait for 75% off on a $5 indie game.

As a dev you might find this annoying, but you might understand it better if you realize that the real cost of a game isn't money, it's time.

There is one interesting discussion on Reddit talking about this very fact. There are tons of awesome games your players can play and no time to play them all.

This is also why a good advice for indie devs is to charge more for your games, usually you shouldn't go under $10. If you make your game $5 it won't necessarily sell double the amount of copies since, again, the main limitation for players is Time, not Money.

The other question related to this one is what about excellent but short games? Can you charge $15 for an awesome 2 hour experience? It is tricky since it has to be genuinely excellent but yes you can. Examples are The Stanley Parable, $25, 3 hours; A Short Hike, $8, 1.5 hours; Untitled Goose Game, $20, 3 hours. But all those are excellent!

So make sure you value your players Time more than you value their wallet!

Tech

Get MONEY from the AI bots!

We all know AI bots are everywhere nowadays, and the way they get their knowledge is by constantly scrapping the web. When you or I write some code and put it on GitHub, or write a detailed Blog post about some topic, there will be some AI scrapping that text to use in their training data. This is how companies like OpenAI are worth billions, because they scrape mountains of data to then build very valuable knowledgeable models.

What if YOU could get paid for the data they scrape? Cloudflare is attempting to do just that, they are introducing Pay Per Crawl where AI crawlers will need to pay you to access your content. Publishers can define pricing and when an AI crawler hits the website they are greeted with a HTTP 402 error code and asked to pay the rate to access the data.

This sounds very interesting but I'm not a web dev so I don't know just how viable this is. Is it hard to spoof a crawler to make it seem like it's a genuine user? Either way it's definitely an interesting idea, and considering how Cloudflare is behind about 80% of the entire internet then this could be a pretty significant moment.

Fun

Robots learn to take a dive!

Robotics is an area that continues gradually improving, things are already insanely impressive compared to just a few years ago.

Now China has full fledged Robot football tournaments! The Robots play 3v3 games, they operate autonomously, they can walk around (not really run), they avoid each other, kick the ball and follow all the rules of football.

Naturally they are still a bit awkward and fall down (intentionally?), but when they do they get themselves back up and keep going! The organizers even pull out a stretcher just for fun lol.