200,000 units is a far cry from just a 'minor hit' - congratulations!
During the project, what was the biggest instinct you had that was ultimately validated by its success, but still surprised you? What was a lesson you learned that you didn't expect? How was working with a publisher? What did they do right and what did they do wrong?
Honest answer? Dancing stick figure guy on the title screen. I did it very early in the project, in a fugue state at 3am. It lingered and lingered there, with ppl wondering "Is this real? Is this the actual title screen?" and luckily by the end I think everyone had drank enough psychedelic koolaid to agree - stick figure man stays. The artist made some better art for his hands/feet, and that was that. He's divisive, but everybody at least remembers him :)
Lesson learned that I didn't expect - hmm. Ah, one good one: I spent a LOT of time worrying about stuff being "OP" or degenerately good. Well, turns out, people like OP stuff, or degenerately good stuff, at least in single player score attack games. My biggest lesson learned on the project: people experience your game individually. If they find something broken, in their head, they are the one to have found something broken, and it feels good. You don't have to design for the entire community at once. Don't over-balance your game. Embrace the jank.
> Ah, one good one: I spent a LOT of time worrying about stuff being "OP" or degenerately good. Well, turns out, people like OP stuff, or degenerately good stuff, at least in single player score attack games.
One of the greatest joys in score-attack games like Ballionaire is discovering certain combos that feel brokenly good.
During one of my early playthroughs, I got some combo that would spawn a crazy number of balls on every drop. The game would seriously lag for about half a second while the playing field absolutely exploded with balls. It was incredibly entertaining!
Some developers see this happen and will nerf things into the ground to prevent them, but that's an absolute fun-destroying choice. In a PVP game, yeah, absolutely you should prevent broken builds like that. But a single-player score attack? Nah. Leave that in.
The minute I read “dancing stick figure” I knew exactly what game we’re talking about.
I’m not a stoner and am not really into stoner culture but I’ve watched that figure dance for like 10 mins once, entranced by it. I dunno what exactly it is, but it’s just an absolute home run.
I’m not joking, I’d pay for an app that’s literally just that guy dancing to some music.
Balanced games feel like a chore: you just sit through them, trying to avoid those mistakes that aren't balanced away and there's never any hope for some positive discovery. Decisions do not matter and the pro-balancing crowd even thinks that this is a feature, not a bug.
Yes, discovering the city-per-tile problem in Civ would ruin the game for you (I never did). That clearly is the bad kind of overpowered. But sending that single chariot to the edge of the known universe before it gets constrained by phalanxes? Awesome.
Agree. Over-balancing everything in single player games sucks out the fun.
"Single-player" here is key - minutely perfect balancing is often a necessity in multiplayer games, and I suspect sometimes that mentality is carried over to single-player experiences without stopping to question it.
The trouble with the internet is that it's hard to stop competitive mentality leaking in; the game may be single player, but there are lots of people playing it, and they can watch each other and show off.
(this basically killed puzzle / mystery box games, which survive only in a weird corner for not-very-online people playing on mobile)
Sure they do: stock assets are the most obvious market that AI is taking direct aim at in games development, and the AI tools on the game dev market were largely trained on stock assets. If you need anything from a sound library to a 3D model to an animation to an icon set to background music to network gameplay code… sure you can get it through stock asset marketplaces… but AI tool vendors have ingested many of these stock assets and hope game developers will buy their tools to generate assets rather than buying the stock assets they built their tools with.
Code libraries and your house do not fall in the category of "things that give you game assets without you having to make them" because they do not give you game assets without you having to make them. (Code is not considered a game asset.)
Asset packages are in the category of "things that give you game assets without you having to make them", because they give you game assets without you having to make them. The assets in the package are, by definition, stock assets.
I think that's a great lesson about art: trying to polish things into "objectively good" doesn't work, while human connection and weirdness and jank stay in the memory.
I suppose that when your previous employer has over 3B users (FB alone, not even counting IG and WA and whatever else they have going on), 200k might seem like a small number of people :P
But I agree. OP, 200k is a hugely respectable number for a game or any piece of software for that matter. I’d be happy if 200 people used any of mine, never mind the k :p Congrats! :)
Hey, Meta has something like 67k employees for those 3.35 billion users (for simple stats I could find), and thats. That's 50k users to an employee. I think this dev is doing quite well by those standards. :)
That article is 5 years old. Sadly the article lacks a date, but you can tell because it claims Steam is 15 years old, when it had its 22 anniversary last year.
Next that 7M number is for self-published games. Aka, games where the dev is listed as the publisher. OP has Raw Fury as his publisher. Next Raw Fury posted their contract publically a while ago: it is a pretty harsh contract. 50/50 split, but there is a profit ratio baked into the recoup which is super odd. If OP had held off, did his own marketing for a bit, then negotiated with publishers once he had traction, he might have gotten a better deal.
The challenge for Indie devs with publishers is how the good publishers ask a pretty high take. Meanwhile the good deals come from new publishers with poor or no track record. Personally we signed with Hooded Horse which publically offers better deals and is highly effective. The trade off being Hooded Horse is famously quite selective.
Thus honestly: self publishing is the default-best choice. We did that for our last game and effectively replaced a publisher by just spending a bunch on marketing.
If an article has no visible date, I often just check the source of the document, because most of these blogs use a generic CMS that puts the date in the code anyways.
Yeah I failed to find a date but figured it wouldn't be severely out of date. If anything, that would mean the thresholds would get lower and Steam games more games being submitted. It's a
>Next that 7M number is for self-published games. Aka, games where the dev is listed as the publisher.
That's fair, I can conflate "indie" in the colloquial sense with "indie" in the traditional one. I suppose 1% would be a sttretch if competing with any game with a publisher (indie label or AAA).
>it is a pretty harsh contract. 50/50 split, but there is a profit ratio baked into the recoup which is super odd. If OP had held off, did his own marketing for a bit, then negotiated with publishers once he had traction, he might have gotten a better deal.
Yeah, I figured the article was referring to gross revenue after steam's cut. Itd be nearly impossible to truly guess at all the other cuts taken out from publishers, tools, and labor. Money made =/= money in your pocket.
>Thus honestly: self publishing is the default-best choice. We did that for our last game and effectively replaced a publisher by just spending a bunch on marketing.
It's still a tough choice, and really comes down to the person. There's a lot of technical and artistic people out there that can make a high quality game but can't sell water in a desert. If money is your primary goal, it may still be worth giving up 50,70+% just so people know your game exists to begin with. From there, the momentum should either encourage to self-publish next time or lets you seek a better deal. MArketing also tends to be one of those areas where many people feel they can do it themselves and then completely corner themselves in the end (as a certain YC startup recently learned).
I think the true best choice is self-publish, but partner up with someone who knows how to sell (assuming you're getting great feedback on your game. Can't polish a turd). A singular media marketer shouldn't ask anything close to what a "good" publisher will offer.
During the project, what was the biggest instinct you had that was ultimately validated by its success, but still surprised you? What was a lesson you learned that you didn't expect? How was working with a publisher? What did they do right and what did they do wrong?