GDC Festival of Gaming
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2017–2024
52:12 · 1.2M views · Nov 21, 2016
Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games explains at GDC 2016 how an indie developer survived eleven years without a hit by building a long tail of games and redefining success.
Recommended in indie and solo game development threads as a grounded account of making a living in games.
4 comments from Hacker News
> None of the big (or small) moneymakers in last few years came close to "10 years" of popularity and probably won't. I don't think much of the software out there behaves like this either. It might apply somewhat to game or software franchises, though. For example, LibreOffice has had multiple major releases, but has been around for a bit over 12 years, a bit longer if you include the predecessors. Ubuntu LTS is usually supported for around 5 years, but Ubuntu as a whole has been around for almost 20 years. Similarly, Counter-Strike was released over 20 years ago, even if there's been multiple separate games over the years. It's more or less the same story for Battlefield and Call of Duty. That said, that's setting your own goals unrealistically high, since those are the exceptions when compared to any number of unsuccessful games. If you try to compete against games like that, you'll just burn yourself out. Most startups aren't necessarily built for the longevity either, but rather to have a product hit the market within a reasonable time frame and budget. If you want, make games, fail, iterate, fail some more, iterate some more, maybe eventually succeed. Have a look at some grounded experiences from other folks, for example watch this video titled "How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit": this video
GDC: How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit this video TL;DR: prepare for this to happen, and build a long tail of games/sales. I don't want to sound mean but I don't think anyone should buy the game because they feel sorry and he is begging. I can't condone it. It has become trendy for people to make GoFundMe campaigns or write articles begging people to help. Assume people do buy your game because they are sorry, and you manage to get by. Is that how you intend to create a sustainable business? What about other indie devs who failed, maybe even harder? Should they also write articles with their sad story? What about those who don't make it to the top of Hackernews? Should what is essentially charity support people taking risks? I take this article as a cautionary tale of what could go wrong when you go indie, one of those that we need more of in face of the wild success stories that saturate media.
I see this sentiment a lot on Twitter and Reddit, but it's a an overpressured Copium tank You can see a ton of polished, fun games that weren't successful by just skimming over lists of games on phones, Steam, or Nintendo Switch. I'm not going to bother linking any of them, since you're just going to nitpick and insult the work of random people you don't know, and it won't be a productive path of conversation. That said, you can redefine your idea of "success" a little and make a comfortable living: this video
To be honest, no. It does not look like a game 50k people would buy in early access to me. I would assume it has to be with some streamer playing his game [0]. Regarding your other question, I think that yes, you might have a high conception for what it takes to actually sell some games. Not to disparage on this other dev for example [1] because it sure looks like the games are well polished, but these games definitely look very unappealing to me and I'm pretty sure a lot of people as well. IIRC he talks about how people really have a fondness for specific topics in games and how one can leverage that. [0] [LINK] [1] this video