The flipside is that it's a lottery. Steam is overflowing with new indie games every day, and many very good ones die in obscurity. You really have to get lucky and go viral
But yeah, the entry fee for that lottery is at a historic low, which is still great (especially for hobby devs who don't care about the rest!)
When in reality, you have a great deal of control. Marketing IS something you can control.
Sure, some streamer randomly picking up your game is beyond your control. But you can certainly create conditions that would make it easier for your game to be picked up by a streamer (build relationships with journos, streamers; get paid marketing, etc.)
Calling it a lottery is a disservice to the people who actually put in effort to create these games.
Here's what I learned in life that's applicable to many areas, this being one:
Not sucking isn't enough. Even being "Great" isn't enough. And even being "amazing" just isn't good enough to be successful. You need people to notice and care and help you and carry you to success. Mediocrity with a lot of public and positive reinforcement beats quiet greatness. Truly great things die every day from lack of attention and the willingness / motivation of others to help you carry that greatness forward. No greatness succeeds on its own, despite how great it might truly be.
> When in reality, you have a great deal of control. Marketing IS something you can control.
If every creator does marketing, then everyone is in the same position and nobody has control. Also, check out this research paper, published in Science, showing that popularity signals like the number of downloads and ordering by popularity increases the unpredictability of a music market, which is an opposite effect to what you expect. I suspect similar effects happen for game and other cultural markets:
> Calling it a lottery is a disservice to the people who actually put in effort to create these games.
I think that both for simple and complex games there are those that nobody cares about and those that end up really popular. Sometimes it's about good marketing, sometimes it's about making what people actually want to play (instead of what you want to make), sometimes it's about developing it really well, other times it's just about being at the right place at the right time.
Those aren't mutually exclusive qualities, for certain titles you might need lots of one of them, or maybe a mix of all of them. In regards to what you actually need, it can indeed be a lottery and thinking that hard work (or marketing) is all that's necessary in ample amounts (or even is a pre-requisite) might be misleading, because it's not the full story.
For an example of how any mix of those aspects can lead to failure, look at the launch of Brigador, a well made game that was a flop: https://youtu.be/qUsuusNLxik
Then contrast that (years of development) with something like Vampire Survivors. Or maybe 2048, or Flappy Bird, or Wordle for examples of even simpler projects that were also easier to make, that still were immensely popular and much more successful.
Except that creating games and marketing games are two separate things, so calling it a lottery is an insult to marketers, and game developers would do well to recognize that simply building a game and not marketing it should be a conscious decision to shoot themselves in the foot.
Eh, I have a friend who is incredibly talented and when their indie game became iPhone game of the year it couldn’t have been anyone else I knew, the guy was just that stellar. Definitely a combination of ability and persistence and a little luck.
I don't think it's lottery. I think that we don't want to admit that most people are just bad at designing and developing games. I hang about on /r/gamedev and I've seen a lot of posts complaining about low sales and not a single one of those games was compelling
its hard to be critical. ive never seen a great game not do well. even games that might seem pretty not doing well if you look closely enough are often still missing something.
I challenge anyone to provide a link to an actual great indie game that hasnt done well. that flew under radar.
"Great" and "haven't done well" would be subjective, but here's my list of amazing games that are underperforming in sales:
The Hex
Eliza
Suzerain
Know by Heart (and all Ice Pick lodge games for that matter)
Of course it's not just a lottery, it's a lottery weighted (at least to some degree) by a variety of factors like the game itself and the marketing you put into it.
The point I think people usually mean to make is that the odds are low (really, extremely low) so it's not really a prudent financial choice unless you have other ways to support yourself and don't care about potentially throwing away the time/effort if it doesn't work out.
Marketing definitely has an impact, even just social media stuff, but unless you've got a AAA-sized marketing budget there will still be a significant amount of chance involved
Marketing matters more than the game if you're an indie, and I don't say that in a cynical way.
Unfortunately I've seen so many people pour their hearts and souls into a game thinking they can just start marketing it when it's ready: You should be engaging with your future audience well before then.
You don't have to take money from them, you don't have to make empty promises, but in the current landscape you need people to be waiting for your game, not you waiting for players, because odds are they won't come.
For every lucky game that gets the right streamer there's 10 more that are truly great games that just never get traction and die.
Every time I see a new-ish game released for free on the epic games store or indiegala, I think "bummer, I guess it's still mac and cheese in mom's basement for these guys.
> The flipside is that it's a lottery. Steam is overflowing with new indie games every day, and many very good ones die in obscurity.
Sounds to me like an opportunity. There may be a demand for a service that reviews indie games and "discovers" (promotes) little-known-but-great ones. It even has an obvious revenue source: allowing advertising by games (so long as advertisements and promoted works are VERY CLEARLY separated).
You just shifted the problem to a different place. Now it is the reviewer who has to get big, and has to be able to meet the expectations of their audience - over a long period. There are tons of reviewer channels on Youtube and Twitch. I don't think becoming a big enough fish as a reviewer is any easier?
I think it's more than lottery. Skills, contents and marketing are all important aspects of game production. I wonder what is the chance of getting 1,000 sales for the Nth released non-free game. It won't feed the mouth but is a good start (to convince wife). Steam probably has the data.
Easy: Among Us, for the many months that it toiled in nearly complete obscurity to the point of the development team nearly giving up the ghost and quitting, until one specific streamer picked it up and gave it the critical mass attention it needed to go absolutely huge. Had the developers had slightly less resources and shut down the servers before that crucial moment it would have never happened, even though clearly Among Us is a fantastic game in retrospect.
Quality is necessary but not sufficient for success.
Also: a while back, I wanted to empirically test the "any good game will succeed on steam, and if it doesn't succeed, it isn't a good game" hypothesis by setting up a little metagame called "Steam Prophet". We would track upcoming steam games and try to predict which ones would succeed BEFORE they came out. We eventually disbanded the project when we got so reliably good (but not perfect) at predictions that we got bored and quit. Turns out that just a few leading metrics were incredibly predictive of day 1 (and thus day 30, day 60, and day 90, and year 1) success -- chiefly the number of followers the game had on Steam on launch day. It is a rare game indeed that can succeed on Steam without first having banked tons of high quality wishlists (of which followers is a public proxy metric for).
The spirit of Steam Prophet lives on today in the form of Simon Carless' Game Discover Co newsletter, which obsessively follows upcoming and newly released Steam Games:
https://gamediscover.co/
The problem with Among Us is that it's an online game. Meaning you need a certain amount of actual people playing it before it's fun. So it's a chicken or egg problem; it's not fun without players, players won't join if it's not fun.
If you got that good at predictions, doesn't that show that for most games, it's usually not a lottery at all?
Aside from rare cases like Flappy Bird, and aside from the usual vagaries of commercial, technological and artistic projects. And aside from special challenges like the minimum playerbase size required for an online game like Among Us.
During development, developers could set up a Steam page, release one or two trailers as soon as possible (with mocked-up gameplay if necessary), and try to predict the audience's interest by the increase of followers/wishlists (compared to other games). In case of a lukewarm reception, they could decide to drop this game and start developing another one.
Did you write about the leading metrics and your insights somewhere, aside from this article, which seems to be from the beginning of your "Steam Prophet" project?
Most developers have very little understanding of marketing, and are very hesitatnt to pay for good marketing services.
Here's something most people won't tell you: the majority of online marketing is paid, either explicitly (i.e. you pay Google) or covertly (i.e. you "bribe" an editor at Forbes to feature your article).
That's difficult to evaluate since "good" is subjective. So is "selling well", to be honest. I assume you mean a game that is reasonably finished and polished and not simply shovelware, but still not getting the sales to be profitable. There are tons. 30 games drop on Steam everyday. Just sort by new and see all the games that any little indie studio would be proud to release but have few sales.
I've seen many. Wuppo didn't sell well until it was called out by an algorithm as the most underrated game on Steam or something like that. Of course, "good" is very subjective. I personally don't think the most popular games are any good.
It IS subjective.
For a game of its kind it can have sold realy well yet not have sold enough to make up for a poor management and way too big of a debt.
It wouldn't change the reality of "it sold well" but still validate "it didn't sell well enough"
But yeah, the entry fee for that lottery is at a historic low, which is still great (especially for hobby devs who don't care about the rest!)