pouët.net

I don't get this Telethon style pledging for monies to develop a game.
Either you have the code ready to release as alpha or beta or you don't.
Either way you release it or you don't.
Either as demo, free or open-source.
Begging for money to develop a game sometime in the future is basically that. Begging for money.

If I tried this style of "marketing" with my clients they would simply go elsewhere and stop answering my calls.

Fudging for money.
* I used the word "either" a lot didn't I?*

Caveat: I must be really Old-Fashioned.

Gargaj++: I so do not agree.

- You compare the popularity of indipendent games with AAA games by comparing sales of the best indie games with the best AAA games. What you do not factor in is that there are way more indie games released than AAA games. A sensible comparison of the popularity of indie games vs. AAA games would be the total number of indie games sold vs. the total number of AAA games sold per year. Of course this is a very hard comparison to make, as there are so frikkin many indie games out in the market.

- If I was the CEO of a company I wouldn't produce the game that sold the most copies but I'd produce the game that sold the most copies divided by the money that the game costs in making, advertising and selling. I bet meat boy had a way better ROI than GTA 5. That's probably the reason why in the games industry more people are working on small games than on one of those huge AAA blockbusters (that's a fact that I pulled right out of my ass :-)

And about the diversity of games... What planet are you living on? Of course if you only care about AAA games, that may be true. But I bet this year more indie games were released than the total number of games released in the 80s and 90s together. And some of those games are darn innovative or even just plain crazy. My problem with games nowadays is that I simply do not find the time to get an overview of what games are actually out, because there is so many of them, not that there are so few different games that none of them interest me.

Code AND art assets/levels/audio/etc. And creating those takes time which takes money since you need to eat and pay the bills while you're working on it and also pay the team who also need to eat and pay the bills. If you're doing it professionally, that is.



And that's pretty much what all professional game (and software) development is in the end. You don't do it for the kicks, you don't do it for the fun, you don't do it for the glory. You do it for the money and the other things I mentioned are just the sugar coating on top if they come to be. If you don't do it for the money, you either need to be a rich to begin with or then it's not professional development but a hobby.

Crowdfunding is not really different from any other way of financing real games. In the old-fashioned system your studio begs money from a publisher who funds your project and then takes the profits, maybe giving you a cut after the initial investment is recouped. In this case instead of working for a publisher you work for the fans and engage them and ask them what they want. It's better for both and it takes out the middle man.

chock: first off, a dollar is a dollar whether it's spent on an indie game on an AAA-title. a game that makes $10M is more successful than one that makes $1M. and mind you, popularity is very equatable to money.

as far as ROI goes, there's one thing you're disregarding: guarantee. super meat boy probably didn't spend a nickel on marketing and just relied on word of mouth and placement agreements so they just got lucky. with GTA, if your budget is hundreds of millions of dollars invested (since the game is so large scale), you're going to have to spend a considerable section of marketing the game to make sure the game sells. then of course you could argue that everyone should spend smaller budgets on games, but then that market would get so saturated that all of a sudden word of mouth wouldnt cut it anymore and we'd be back to "whoever has the biggest marketing budget wins".

and as for my planet, we were never talking about "the total diversity of all games ever made". we were talking about the diversity of SUCCESSFUL, POPULAR games, and yes that more often than not means AAA. trust me when i say that i'm aware of the variety of games starting from quantum conundrum all the way down to weird shit like antichamber or miegakure or gravity bone (and i do actually make an attempt to play most of them simply because they are for the most part inspiring), but that wasn't even remotely the topic. the topic was why project giana can't seem to get funding even though it's a wonderful-looking game, and my answer to that is that you either need to have a cult following as a developer (see fez) or a massive marketing budget.

I seriously doubt it... Take Two's gross profit for 2008 (when GTA IV was released) was around $500 million dollar (source: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9MzYyNzU5fENoaWxkSUQ9MzU2NjA4fFR5cGU9MQ==&t=1 , page 29)

While previous 4 years (with no GTA) the gross profit of the company was on the 200-400 million dollar line.

So if we meanly extrapolate this data, one could say that GTA IV made between 100 and 300 million dollar profit.

Taking those gross numbers, I doubt Super Meat Boy ROI was even near GTA IV one... and GTA 5 will probably be way more successful (taking there are plenty of more gamers now than in 2008). I understand SMB's expenses were not anywhere near GTA ones, but the pay for a successful AAA title are just worth of it.

The problem is that the operational expenses of Take Two that year (2008), were $430 million... had GTA not been so successful, probably Take Two would have gone down the drain.

@Preacher - I'm alone in what I do so I don't have the overheads. Nor do I develop games.
Thanks for the info - it makes sense.
If it's that cut-throat, then what's the measure of success?

Uhh? Fez has a "cult following"? That guy was dissed into the ground for making a buggy and at least divisive game, not to mention the indie game movie, were he came off as unsympathetic lunatic ("I'M GONNA KILL MA EX BUSINESS PARTNER!!11 FOR REALZ, YO!1"). Since it was only a two man operation, it probably paid off, although from what I hear sales numbers aren't that great. :)

Also, this whole kickstarter thing is not really about funding (as in "we won't even start before we reach amount X"). It's about pre-selling a product. Just "begging for money" doesn't work. Folks want to have something in return, and usually they want a real product, not just a bumper sticker. And that's exactly what they do. They make a decent promo video and SELL their product to an eager (but increasingly jaded) audience.

(The other big misconception about KS is that this is some form of investment. Nope, it's just a donation and it can take months or even years before some indie company will make good on their promises.)

tomaes: okay, maybe "cult following" is the wrong term - what i meant is being the "indie gaming rockstar" the movie so correctly points out. if you're in heavy rotation in the media, that's your marketing: you say phil fish or fez or polytron and a lot of people would raise their heads, even before the film came out. as far as sales go, for a platform exclusive indie title, 100k sales is really respectable, and it did launch really well, before the update of death kinda screeched sales to a halt.

(and fwiw i thought he was sympathetic in the film, but that's not relevant to the discussion)

gargaj: Mhmm, 100+ k sold, revenue shared between 2 (or more in the end) people, and it was how many years in the making? Cost of living? Taxes? Equipment? Microsoft's share? I guess it's more than what 90% of indie devs can hope for, but it was no Braid or Minecraft. :) The bottom line is, that the vast majority of indie devs have little hope for making a good living off their creations.

(that film was also not very good btw, and I could explain at length why not, but that's also not relevant here either)

Are you sure you know what ROI means? :)

Super Meat Boy cost almost _nothing_ to produce and promote. GTA4 out of the gate had to recoup 100 million (production cost only) and probably at least another 50 million for promotion/distribution and overhead expenses. Even if SMB (!) did a measly 10 million in revenue, it was the much more profitable enterprise.

I disagree. A game tham makes $10M and costs $1M in production is less successful than one that makes $1M and costs $0.1M in production. But maybe I'm too much thinking like a business man here.


I'd rather call it risk. Because there is no guarantee. And a big advantage of making many small games over a single big one is that you reduce risk through diversification.


I'm not saying that everyone "should" move to spending smaller budgets on games, I'm rather saying that the game industry "does" move to spending smaller budgets on games. In the long run only those games are made that make money. Big blockbuster games make money, so they are being made (albeit very few of them). Indie games make money (at least I thought so, maybe I'm wrong here?), too, that's why there are so many indie games (albeit no single one of them has the number of sales of the big games).

I have to admit that I have no clue how well indie games actually do sell, but why are there so many if you can not make money with them? Are these all hobby projects?

chock, maybe the ROI percent is better... but the total ROI is just not. Making $300 million profit out of a game is better than making one, whatever your investment was.

(and that's thinking as a businessman)

Jcl: No, it is not. Say I have $100M of money that I can invest. Then I can either use this money to finance 1 AAA game, or 1000 indie games. If the AAA game makes $300M and the indie games make $1M on average (now that number may be a tad bit unrealistic :-), then I'd rather invest in indie games.

jcl: I still don't think you actually know what ROI means. <what you earn> - <what you spent making it> = ROI. "Return On Investment". If your financial investment was close to zero, then any income will produce a good ROI. It doesn't matter if it's $10 or $100.000.000. ROI isn't a fuzzy number used to describe the relative success of a project, it's used to describe what you make from what you put in. If not understanding that is "thinking as a businessman" then I feel sorry for whatever business you're involved in. :)

Oh, and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_return

gloom, <what you earn> - <what you spent making it> / <what you spent making it> = ROI. Is what you meant, right?

Argh, I meant (<what you earn> - <what you spent making it>) / <what you spent making it> = ROI

<what you spent making it> / <what you spent making it> = 1 in most cases ;P

Yeah, there's no such thing as "ROI percent". What he means is total amout of revenue. Spend more money on proven big franchise to make even more money (in total), aka the hollywood blockbuster model of business, which works very well still, btw.

all the ROI discussion is a bit irrelevant either way because project giana is not a 2-person project.

my point still stands, and let's blend in to what preacher said: if you wanna make a $150M contemporary war shooter, all you need is to convince one investor with a bunch of easily accessible data. if you wanna crowdfund a platformer (especially if you're making e.g. braid, which is certainly not a run-off-the-mill game), you not only have to convince 5-10k people, you have to REACH them somehow first.

...okay, that's a bit oversimplifying it, obviously getting $150M isn't as easy as knocking on one well-known door, but once again it's what i've said before: a lot of your success is based on how people know (and perceive) you and your product.