I don't have any idea on indie game industry. I always think decent games are played. But increasing number of games on steam make this harder everyday. People won't buy this kind of games unless they are bundled or given away for free anymore. So if you don't want to do that you need hype. Youtubers Life stayed in most selling games list for a while which is just an average game. You can be successful in gaming industry and it won't end in near future. So don't be pessimistic about it. As far as there is robotics or computers you will always need the human factor to keep them in check.
Also your concern about future not only in Computer Science. I just gave my tesis on Robotic Systems in Pharmacy recently and I can say i felt the same. But I am more optimistic about it since it's pretty far future for us.
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I agree and then there's resellers on G2A and co. that just make the situation worse and opens up another discussion..
It's sad but you need to create something awesome to be noticed and to be honest, games are art and as an artist you are either poor or rich, think about painters, etsy sellers, photographers, content creators etc.. :/
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+1
However, I do agree that the market is very competitive and it's becoming increasingly challenging for great new games to stand out. I mean, I've seen games that almost no one plays despite having excellent reviews on Steam - all 10 of them..
I don't know enough about marketing to tell you what those devs should've done differently.
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There is a reason Necrodancer, Undertale, Isaac, Stardew Valley and dozens of others are succesfull
Yes, that their devs have been able to put these games on the map. There is an alternate universe in which they didn't and nobody even knows these games exist.
The value of resources, connections and specific knowledge cannot be understated.
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If something is good, the word spreads.
Cult classics and sleeper hits and hidden gems, and hidden gems that stay hidden because nobody noticed?
The view you're proposing is overly simplistic and optimistic, also it has the flaws of ignoring hard facts, that having a good game is not going to get you coverage automatically, while having people in the right places who will listen you when you talk to them, instead of putting your case in a queue, makes a huge difference.
Influencers are a thing. Tube celebrities can make or destroy a game, almost regardless of its quality. Which is subjective to begin with.
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Stardew is one of those classic case of games that simply never existed on a certain platform or disappeared. It also got picked up by Chucklefish, which is nothing to sneeze at.
The whole indie wave was built on retaking empty niches, where competition is literally none (subsequently, very little). This is why a though-as-nails platformer would buy a lot more attention in 2008 than it does in 2016 where that particular segment is overcrowded.
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Notch, when he wasn't investing in real estate yet, or blowing small fortunes on booze and ladies, was interviewed by Forbes and ask to give fellow devs advice.
He said something along the lines of having none, because he happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and you can't explain luck or distill into advice.
I thought that was very considerate of him to say and bought him a lot of admiration from me. Especially because a lot of business strategy is based upon case studies that often omit important factors like the survivor bias or things that cannot be manufactured no matter what, such as, the conditions of 2016 being different from those of 2010.
Today being an indie is astronomically more complicated than before - also because a lot of successful indies today are people who went indie from solid careers in traditional studios.
They have a name to spend, industry connections all over, experience, and so on, a new comer must make up for gap that is huge.
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Selling a game is hard nowadays. Hundreds of users like us who has more than 1k games so they can wait for sales. Top games sold few months after realease in HB monthly or similiar and so on.
Well they can't fire evb and replace with mashines becaues there will be revolution :) and another move similiar to communism and they will lose evth
On the other hand there is more and more popular idea of steady income for evb
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It is worrying, but I enjoyed reading your post, though it steered a bit too sharply from specific game examples to the general economic situation and possible trends.
One of my pet peeves is Mr Draghi ranting about deflation, these guys are so loaded that they don't seem to understand or care that stuff like the price of energy, gas, and food has only gone up, contributing to erosion of purchasing power.
All those things are unaccounted for in core inflation, however for lower income brackets, it's no mystery that they constitute a (much) larger proportion of spending than for rich people, yet economic institutions are seemingly happy pretending this problem does not exist.
For the better part of the last 20 years, I've been arguing the people in charge, worldwide, are mostly busy trying to turn the clock back to a time where population at large is essentially poor, and then they go ranting about their synthetic economic benchmarks not doing what they want them to do.
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In fairness, i thought both games looked particularly uninteresting and have no intentions of playing them.
But I hadn't heard of the promotions till now, and I wonder how much the marketing is to blame, there.
That's certainly the case with scrolls, which Microsoft basically cut all support for until it died from the neglect, after Microsoft purchased Mojang.
Flip side, there are plenty of popular, high-rated games like Murder Miners that can't hold a population no matter how many times they bundle it- of course, there the issue seemed to be that they couldn't get enough players at any point to reach that mandatory minimum for a consistent core population to remain online.
As with me and my friends, we stopped playing when servers died, an each subsequent revival failed to entice us back, either due to being involved in a new game, or due to not hearing about the revival.
In summary:
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"In fairness, i thought both games looked particularly uninteresting and have no intentions of playing them."
This, 100%, for me. I'm not interested in another MMO, and the art for the Death game just looks bad to me.
I'm sorry for them, and I don't mean to sound cruel, but... make better games? I appreciate the struggles the Sirius dev has been going through, but sometimes, you have to do what you have to do in life, not what you want to do. It sucks, but that's reality.
If you have a dream and the fortitude to follow through on it, I wish you every success. BUT... nobody ever said it was going to be easy. :(
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Robots taking our jobs is a scary thing. My math teacher showed my class a machine that picks apples. It does it extremely fast and with insane accuracy. That machine alone will take thousands of jobs. There's also things like fast food restaurants that make the food with robots. That will eventually lose millions of jobs. I think technological advancement is going too far. I think it's starting to hurt us and our economy.
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My experience with startup companies is that there's always two important questions that need to be answered:
1) who is going to build it? (or, who is going to do the actual work)
2) who is going to sell it? (or, who is going to market it)
The most famous partnership of its kind that I can think of is Apple. If Steve Wozniak hadn't hooked up with Steve Jobs, he'd probably still be tinkering in his parents' basement. Wozniak would come up with great ideas/products, and Jobs would sell it.
A lot of people have a "if we build it, they will come" attitude. It doesn't work that way. Selling/marketing takes a lot of time and effort and special skills. There are a handful of exceptions, but, generally, just because you made the greatest game ever, doesn't mean anyone knows that you made the greatest game ever. Think of how many crappy games sell well, because of good marketing, and think of how many great gems never get discovered.
you want to start a small physical business? fine. Who's going to do the advertising? How are you going to make your customers aware that you exist AND THAT YOU"RE THE GREATEST STORE ON THE PLANET?
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Computer science is a solid choice for gaining skills. All this automation will INCREASE the need for programmers and IT people.
If you have been thinking that you would use it to go into game development - well, that's always been a crapshoot. But the career options with a solid set of computer science skills are expanding.
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About game marketing:
Effort alone is not enough. For every Successful Indie Games, mediocrities.
Give these a read if you're interested:
The 5 Myths of the Indiepocalypse
Devs share real talk about surviving the latest 'indiepocalypse'
Bounds, Bottlenecks, and Digital Marketing
About job displacement:
Is it Brazil, op? If it makes you feel better, you're not alone. The rich gets richer, the poor...gets by to live another day.
Honestly, I don't know. What can we do? What can we change? What can we believe? What kind of change can we believe in?
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and it's going to move people out of jobs within the next 10 years
What exactly do you mean there? Automation has been replacing jobs for decades. I highly doubt that within 10 years there won't be much jobs left.
Also, yeah, self driving cars are a thing now, but it's not advanced enough yet to replace any job and it will take a long time before it will really replace taxi or truck drivers.
You seem very pessimistic in this thread. I'm actually surprised that you see that you study computer sience and then continue on with the stuff you said. Especially with that study you'll have plenty of work to look forward to. I'm currently going for a bachelor in Software Engineering and here in the netherlands there are too little people in this area (computer sience as a whole), so plenty of opportunities. Not sure how that is in other parts of the world, but I doubt it will be much different.
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It appears like the indie game market has been saturated...
Nevermind the "indie game market," the market for videogames reached saturation point years ago. Gone are the days when a new game came out once every few months. How many games come out in any given month, now? There is no way you can afford to buy them all, and even if you could, where is the time to play them? I've been passing up even great-looking, highly-reviewed, AAA titles (e.g. Rainbow Six Siege) because there is no way I'm going to find the time to play them. Despite that, people keep entering the game development business in the hopes of "quick and easy money."
Before trying to build a better mousetrap, one should check to see what level of demand there is for the product.
On the flip side, there are opportunities for those who have a skillset and the flexibility to adapt to market demand.
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Recently, the Sirius Online developers decided to remove their game from sale. Originally, i've thought this happened because the game was being ported to UE4(and thus development on Blitz3D would halt temporarily). However, they've just made this announcement.
Apparently, they've only earned 60€ from sales of Sirius Online throughout May, leading them to decide halting sales of this game(as well as deactivating 3rd party seller keys) and focus on making other games to survive as a developer team.
There's also Death by Game Show(disclaimer: i've did playtesting for it). Two weeks ago, they've made This contest, where players who got $1B in score on that game(something that can be done in a matter of hours) would be entered for a chance on a $50 gift card. Despite that, at the time of the post the game only had 2 players hit that score threshold(and i was one of them). 2 weeks later(heading back to the present), The situation is unchanged. The 3rd player on the scoreboard has $578M, 4th one $558M and 5th one(a developer account!) $422M. Literally no one attempted to hit that score altogether since then, and Oointah decided to extend the giveaway to players hoarding 5 Madichins(can be done in less than an hour) or creating a steam workshop asset. Nevertheless, the game was only played 13 times last week, not counting the one time i opened it to check its leaderboard.
Game marketing just looks like a crapshoot nowadays, to a point where it appears to be hit or miss. It appears like the indie game market has been saturated, and finding buyers is increasingly difficult. I don't know whether that's what leads developers to give away so many keys to their games, such as Slashandz and Ember Kaboom, Cyberdogs7 and MAV, or even Digital Homicide's entire game lineup (although i won't discuss their games' quality), but this appears to be indeed the case.
MAV is an interesting case in that the developer has been creating the game for 4 years now, and publishing weekly wednesday updates. I've been following the developer(and bought the game before it was on that giveaway), and until it he's been very protective of it. Since the game went on Steam it went on sale exactly once for the memorial day weekend. Coincidentally, this was also the first time where its developer missed a weekly update.
This is worrying. I've been studying Computer Science in an attempt to get a few more years away from job automation (or at least get a work-in-home career by using it to develop indie games if push comes to shove nevertheless). However since then, machine learning and image processing really took off(much faster than i expected), and it's going to move people out of jobs within the next 10 years. Self-driving cars will eliminate truckers, taxi drivers(even Uber has explicitly said they intend to replace their drivers with self-driving cars), chauffeurs, and many other jobs involving driving vehicles - yet they are just the beginning. Income inequality is now higher than it was during the roaring twenties, and nothing has been done to fix what caused the 2008 financial crisis. Combine both, and you get a global crisis of unprecedented scale. Workers will be laid off, likely not to be hired again(or hired under slave-wages) because robots can now replace them. Wealth gap increases even further due to unemployment, and political lobbying ensures it won't get fixed any time soon.
A country i've been watching for a while is Japan. Not because of
TODOKETEへんたいamine weeb trash, but because it appears other countries will end up on the same route. Japan is a country with an increasingly aging population, a very low value on labor(where sleeping on the job is considered acceptable because it means you've been working yourself to sleep and there's a term for deaths caused by overwork), high suicide rates, a virtually unpayable amount of government debt to local businesses, and a stagnating economy that still suffers from deflation no matter how much money is printed and thrown at it.As it stands, it seems like i won't have either Plan A or B available by the time i finish university. Plan C would be attempting to create a small physical business, but even that is going to be difficult because people would lack disposable income, in addition to microentrepreneurship increases creating a lot of competition as other people also struggle to make ends meet. Perhaps i'm just a pessimist, perhaps i'm doomed to live under... interesting times.
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