Let's Be Realistic: A Deep Dive into How Games Are Selling on Steam
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- Опубліковано 1 лип 2018
- In this 2018 GDC session, No More Robots' Mike Rose helps developers get realistic about how well PC games are truly selling by using deep sales data and an understanding of the Steam Marketplace.
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Nice to see someone using the numbers but there's a lot of questionable reasoning here. A correlation alone does not establish cause and effect. For example, the fact that games with a publisher sell better doesn't mean you should take your current game to a publisher - it probably means that games with publishers are already higher quality. The same goes for games with higher prices.
And those game have more marketing or any marketing at all.
Which solo devs completely gloss over thinking they are to small for it or dont wanna invest the money they dont have on a thing it is not for making the game itself.
Yeah that's what was striking me during the talk. Maybe, just maybe, games that are priced higher are better games, which translate to more sells.
The whole talk looked like amateur statistics form someone who never studied statistics...
You are just doing the opposite though. Thinking the effect does not mean the effect
So make a good game lol
"75% off" is where the magic happens. I have many games in my library that I'm quite confident i'll never play, that got purchased due to that.
Pretty much. The amount of games i bought because '75% is much higher than 50' is ridiculous.
@@nemtudom5074 can you tell me what prices they were with 75% off when you brought them?
@@starter_4008 I have over a thousand games, sorry, no. lol
nothing under 90-99% in my library or in a 90-95% discount bundle from other sites, also got a lot free as well from streamers with free ticket or discount codes which are also stackable on the current discount price on steam. Its an online cloud platform with most games being non-free DRM and only playable on steam. Today steam is tomorrow its not so heck yea im not paying more that i should since i can crack it and have it for free on my pc.
I will never understand just buying games for no reason.
I was ready to sell a game for $5-$10.
Yeah, never mind now.
This is described in Paradoxical Warfare as an example. A Jade jeweler couldn't sell her inventory. She discounted and discounted but no one bought. She accidentally posted the wrong price when listing a discount. So instead of $30. She put $300 or something like that. She had a line of customers checking out her stock. They even bought from her.
The lesson being that a higher price indicates a higher product value in the customer's mind. The paradox being that a higher price brought a sale versus a discount.
Before you ask why not charge $200 for a game, the balancer is economics. No one is going to pay more than they think something is worth.
Many people (me included) just add interesting games to their wishlist and wait a year or two for them to hit the 66% - 75% off on a sale and buy them then, so increasing the price might be beneficial when you do the numbers. Tho I think I should point out that I'm in the, rather large but not particularly heavy, minority that has a decade or more worth of backlog in their steam library so I'm always catching up with games a few years after they release.
Not only you get it for half-price at maximum (my own max is 50% sale :)), but also patched up! (Rome 2 TW, I'm looking at you!)
That's why I enjoyed R2:TW for half-price a year later while those who payed full price on release whined for entire year. ;)
This is where it hurts dev like me, when we want to give games for a very few $ but end up not selling at all unless we give huge rebate
Not really. People with this strategy are ready to pay a little or to not pay at all. We are not your target audience, we are just a little bonus to your profit, which comes to life when main sales are off. We may happen or may not. Usually we are those who already have enough games for entire life or/and lost passion to play CG. But sometimes we cannot hold on and buy a new game for dirty cheap price "just in case". We will never pay full price and if the game isn't on sale or isn't dirty cheap we just skip.
I personally have more than 200 games, around 100 of which are installed, around 20 of which I play time to time and around 20 of which I haven't even launched yet. I have no reason to buy new games at all. But sometimes, quite rare, like two-three times per year I may buy a game from my whishlist. Not because I really want to play it, but "just in case". Obviously, I will not pay full price or even on-sale price, if I feel it's too high, for something I don't really need.
Sorry for the text wall, hopefully it will clear a bit this point of view.
I think 10-15% of my shit load are AAA. I actually look more into idie game dev rather than big publishers. My point is I already have more games than I will ever need and for me there is no reason to buy *any* new games, AAA or not. But sale can become such a reason. The other reason is that usually by the sale time games are patched up enough for comfort play. It's very serious reason, because programming quality this days is incredibly low and no one cares about at least basic testing. If I will be convinced somehow to buy a new game I'd rather pay half price year later and get patched playable game than pay full price on release and get unplayable piece of -sh- garbage.
15:05 So I should rethink the turn-based multiplayer robot dating arena I've been working on?
you mind if i steal that idea there
If it is a labor of love then make it. Who cares if it sells if you deeply enjoy it. You will learn things. You will make something. You might make some money, if this is not a priority it will be like icing if it happens.
r/woosh
Actually, some of the best games were made based on silly, arbitrary constraints. Steal away, Lucky.
unfortunately I'm currently working on a small project, so this idea will just go into a list
Come on audience, give the guy a few laughs when he jokes, they weren't that bad.
Maybe you were listening on bad speakers or something. They laughed at pretty much every joke the guy made
@@peteypablo09 it’s cuz there isn’t a mic to pick up the audience which is why they have to go up to a mic to do the Q&A
@@Kevintendo That’s true. You can hear the audience on headphones though or with good speakers.
Nah, he's a bit of an insufferable prick
If we all laugh loud enough he might hear it.
As a customer viewpoint, finding new games on Steam is hard. The start page is bad and includes random staff. The platform is cluttered and it does not help to sort titles anyway. I would like to see a separated part from small and big games at least.
Yeah, sort all the 2d crap from the 3d goods.
A simple rating system for others to point out asset flip games. Would be a great start.
The amount of crap on steam is amazing, and has been for years. I guess I'm just reiterating this talk here. So don't mind me.
@@lionfire3359
Honestly there is probably more 3D shovel ware made than 2D.
@@jakemartinez6894 it's easier to get 3D assets than 2D and Unity&Unreal make 3D easy, so it makes sense
you can use the tag 'indie' ;)
7percent survival , that is litteraly the best odds i have ever had in my life
You literally need to look up literally in the dictionary.
@@davecarsley8773 he is using it figuratively. you can do that you know :)
@@guru_laghima in fact it’s even an official definition in the dictionary
clearly what we need is for devs to make more open world crafting finger family games
On it!
Finger family games? Better turn off your adults only filter for that one. I don't think "finger" was in the word cloud, that's just you.
This is sarcasm right?
pregnant elsa survival and shooter unboxings also come to mind - although I guess the latter is pretty common with loot crates
I think that you left out an important point. Namely, even good games are terrible at release nowadays:
1. Uncertainty about which of the 100s of games is actually good
2. Full of bugs
3. Expensive
4. DLC packs
So, I simply always wait for at least a year because:
1. Good games will still be talked about, have good reviews and UA-cam Let's plays
2. Bugs are patched as much as they will ever be for the game
3. Price is very very low compared to the original price
4. You can get the complete package (game+DLC)
Yep, this is why it's not worth it to be an early adopter anymore. And with large backlogs, it's even less necessary to be an early adopter.
Buy Pathologic 2 to save actually great game devs.
If this was true wouldn't devs see big bumps in their sales a year later?
my biggest issue, is that most games like either genuine fun or are way overpriced for their one shot (looking at you Doom Eternal).
that’s true, and I tend to do this too, but that’s just not how 95% of people buy games! it’s weird, because I agree with you, but the numbers show that most people buy games launch week
For a talk based around numbers, that had some of the wooliest data collection and statistics that I have ever seen.
2020: Devs pay money so that people play their games.
I'm sure many succssful Games buy their first thousand or more downloads.
There is a psychological effect. People tend to klick on the thing that already has the most likes.
@C0MPAQ Context?
the problem with the numbers is that they do not reflect marketing in anyway. if you where to compare marketing of all of the games you will see a VERY clear difference in the amount of money a game makes. publishers will go out of their way to market the game, this is the reason they sell so many more copies. this whole video could be summed up to "market your game and charge more!".
edit: also paying streamers big bucks to play your game helps even more, but no one talks about that.
Hes also forgetting the 30% steam takes
@CommandoDude
nearly all lets plays are all paid for. only time they would do it for free is if they actually like the game, which is rather rare.
most of the big streamers get paid to play for a duration, some keep playing because they enjoy it some will stop and move onto the next paid promotional offering.
yes you don't need a publisher but it can help if they know what they are doing.
still you lose money by working with them, so it's kinda a tossup. it's easier today then it was 10 years ago for sure with twitch/YT.
@CommandoDude yes and no....ill give you an example...my game has been on itchio for about a week and the money Ive made has been solely due to direct contact with players ... If I waited for my game to pick up steam on youtube then I would be waiting a while to make any kind of money.....Also itch relies on your marketing to sell games ...if you just throw up it on itch with no marketing there's like a 90% chance that it will get no purchases. Although steam will get you tons of views I think...more than itchio will for sure....Im convinced that steam will market the games themselves
This was a clickbait talk
Yeah, I think the “race to the bottom” mentality of pricing, when it comes to indie games at least, is more harmful than helpful. If you price it low, it probably won’t make someone more likely to buy it than if you price it higher (within a certain range), and, as an added effect, will mean that you get less overall money for your work.
A part of this mentality, I think, is influenced by how players talk about some sort of ratio between price and the amount of content in a game/the amount playtime you’ll get out of a game, which is kind of a terrible way to think about games, IMO, because of how incredibly subjective it is. It also de-incentivizes Indies from being able to sell games at what they actually need to make in order to continue to make games/keep a studio open/feed yourself/whatever.
Cole w
i dont think anyone making games, like anyone starting out in any sort of media, should rely on sales of that game or other games to keep afloat, always have a back up plan and unless it gets serious dont quit your day job. it should start out as a hobby not a business.
Human psychology is a weird one, put a 2 buck wine into a fancy bottle and they will enjoy it 10x more then normal.
Not really sure how you else you would go about pricing a game if isn’t based on content or playtime though, because you we need some form of objective measurement to sell media I think. Yes, the enjoyment level is on a subjective level, but obviously people should pay more if the quality of the media is higher. I agree with the second point though.
yeah cause that 90 percent of shit on steam has no bearing on the value of the games.
Thanks for the video, good talk. One comment though, publisher stats are a bit problematic to compare to the overall stats. Publishers don't just publish a random selection of games from the general population, they have their own filtering, and it is likely that publisher games are of higher quality than the general population to start with, and it's possible that that is the main cause for the increased numbers, not the publisher itself.
publishers are probably also more experienced or knowledgeable about marketing, which is one of the most important factors in an oversaturated market.
Similar point, but also that smaller, indie type games are less likely to seek out a publisher. So publisher games are going to be from more established studios making games for bigger audiences. All of the speaker's stats were skewed.
His minimum wage stat also made no sense, because it would need to be based on how many hours someone spent making the game, which he can't know. If my game only makes $1k in a month, but I threw it together in an hour, that ain't minimum wage.
@@danspurlock1 He's talking about the first month of sales in most of the talk, so I believe he's comparing it to working 1 month at a minimum wage job, full time.
I think this is why marketing is super important in this instance you don’t want your game to get lost in the sea of forgotten games make sure to put trailers on UA-cam tweet about the game to the community it fits best and then release the game.
I guess I'll quit
I never look at the steam store. I just search titles I’m already interested in lol. If you have no marketing out of steam, I’m not gonna know about it.
@No More Robots - what was the backup plan? I think that's a really important aspect that got skipped over.
I think the reason Survival/Crafting games are so high is the large number of asset kits out there and as it's a popular genre, people think it's a easy road to becoming a millionaire.
He says that 93% of PC Developers don't make enough money to survive, but he also says the average PC game makes $30k in its first year. Even if it took a year to make your game, that would be $30k - 40% that steam keeps, leaving $18k or about $1500/month. I am lucky to make even half of that panhandling. I would love to make $1500/month. Just saying.
Not excluding "the crap", the median was 250 first month, so probably less than 1k lifetime - and includes games made by more than a single person as well as possibly paying other fees (for assets, etc)
Would like to see this updated
The way he speaks makes me curious how his code looks like.
Probably empty cuz he doesn't make games, he just sells them lol
maybe dress code lol
Looks like, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh
Expect to see
#include “uuuhhhmm.h”
In the beginning haha 😆
i really love how one of the main point was "put a higher price to your game"
it's something i really have heard about in the context of art comission, because you are selling time and effort, it's natural that the price you have reflect that
You're not selling time and effort, you're selling a product. The consumer is not buying your time, they are buying your product.
The reason to price higher is because when a consumer looks at your product and sees an unusually low price, they will presume that the low price means that it must be a lesser quality product.
Are there links to his other two talks. Very interested in what he has to say
Is Mike reading these? If so then there's one statistic that I would be very interested in from a marketing standpoint. Wishlists. How many percent of the pre-sale wishlist adds can we usually count as buys on estimating sales numbers?
BenJoe72 hey BenJoe! The very rough number is that around 10% of your pre launch wishlists convert to sales :)
Cool, thanks for the number. :) Wouldn't have guessed it would be so low. I was thinking 25%...guess I'm too optimistic :D
My friends have told me a lot and the consensus seems to be 5 - 10% of wishlists before a game is sold get turned into sales in the first week. Then again... bigger and better games would sell more copies.
Wishlist is made mostly for those who wait for sales, not those who would by for full price on release. This is why persentage is so low.
Awsome report but you forgot one major factor! The 30% steam takes off your sale
It's the new gold rush, with bunch of fools hoping to get rich quick. Steam is one of those who is selling shovels and making it rich.
Maybe because it's not particularly relevant to the point nor unique of Steam, since virtually any other platform/service (that actually moves copies) does the same.
@@maythesciencebewithyou I don't think any dev is in it for the money apart from the shitty shovelware people that pump out 100 games per year
In addition to the published games having higher quality, he is saying average but using the median numbers
Most games on steam fail because they are competing for the share of mediocrity.
I'd love an update of this talk with new numbers!
Yeah really. He stressed how much things changed in just a year. It’s been 3 now. This stuff is ancient history.
Absolutely. Especially with COVID
where can i find his talks that he mention at the end of the video?(how to be in the top 7%...)
He says "being on steam does nothing now" multiple times, but I would argue that NOT having your game on Steam will hurt your sales in the most cases, because people now often use it as a centralised "game folder" or because the purchase is streamlined and so on.
"I would argue" means you're arguing. The point you made isn't contrary to anything he said. You're talking about what not being on Steam can cost you. He's talking about what _being_ on Steam does _not_ guarantee you. These are two wildly different things. He never suggests that not being on Steam is a good idea
Great talk. The resource limit for most people when playing games is time. Not money. So having a higher price point signals that the game is better value (for hours spent) than the competing lower priced games.
Exactly. There's a point where making something inexpensive hurts you because people will, probably correctly, assume that it's cheaply *made.* There's a reason why a BMW costs more than a Toyota. They're simply, objectively better. Everyone knows that a $10,000 car is going to be a piece of crap compared to a $50,000 car. To quote Jeff Foxworthy, if you're getting Lasik surgery, you don't go to the cheapest one you can find.
That absolutely doesn't mean every $60 game is good, because they're not, it just means that it's almost unheard a good $4 game being as good as a good $60 game. You get what you pay for. When people see something inexpensive, the first thing through their mind is "How good can it be if it's only $xxx?"
I bought the shitty Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel game on original Xbox for $4. I knew it was bad. I knew it had terrible reviews, and I knew it had to be bad if it was only $3, but I bought it anyway. And that's the thing, you don't want your customers assuming your product sucks and buying it anyway because it's "only" $4. There's not really any way a $4 game could be good because people who are talented going to work for slave wages that a $3 price tag can support.
On the other hand, if you reduce the price a little bit, that can generate sales, and will gain you very supportive fans and good word-of-mouth if it actually turns out to be good. Good $20 games exist. Good $4 games usually do not. $4 games are like the bargin bin of shitty straight to DVD movies. Nothing in that bin is going to secretly be a brilliant movie.
The market has become oversaturated with spam games because of the ease of development. A decade ago it was seriously challenging to learn C+ from scratch and build a game with it. It took enough effort that it kind of was it's own quality control. Now that people can just put garbage together with the ease of assembling a lego house we kind of have the industry that we deserve. What we really need are playtesters and a quality control standard because right now there is no filter and games are not even criticized at all most of the time before they are uploaded. Steam and other virtual consoles have become as bad as flash game websites. As a creator you just can't see everything by yourself, you have to let people play it, poke around for problems and offer suggestions. This anything goes kind of thing is going to collapse on itself eventually because entities like Steam are actually losing money by supporting it. Microsoft realized this way back when they started the Indie Arcade on the 360. It began strong and then quickly turned into "Pay 1 dollar to see a boob after you solve the puzzle."
Even if you removed all of spam games, it would still be over-saturated. As you said, game development has become much easier. That doesn't necessarily mean all of those easier to make games coming out are spam. The mobile ports, visual novels, and early access unity asset flips are definitely spam though.
We've seen oversaturation of crap games before though. It's part of what caused the Game Crash of 1983, floods of crap Atari games and the like.
What we need are more/better independent raters that sink/swim on their own merits. Then filter them together into meta-raters until people can find the consensus they desire.
Indeed, but hopefully people will learn to sort the wheat from the chaff and not buy the terrible cheap asset flips. And also I'm hoping that the asset flippers all in competition with each other will make no money and quit throwing their trash on to steam. And Steam has kicked a few developers off of Steam recently but that seems more like a token effort to clean the place up.
exactly, the first game industry crash not a single one of the dev's remember that or mention it. I mobile game and for every 5 i download....4 get deleted in minutes. They are there broke and or just crappy.
Wow, I was wondering about selling my game on steam too.
It's a very interesting subject for me. Thank you
I'd love to see this topic revisited now.
thank you, I would have loved to know about new or different places to sell you games.
Good talk though, thank you again .
Is there any similar study about mobile market (App Store and Google Play)?
Maybe.. just maybe there are TOO many games? There are plenty I see and think "that looks ok" but its just "ok" and there are more games than I have hours in my life to give a proper look at.
I don't think it's "Too many games" but rather "Too many Improperly Categorised games" and that's a completely different situation. Because there is indeed a lot of games that I would have played if only I was able to see them when they came out but it still not possible to look for them because Steam is unable to tell what style of games really interest me and instead goes into mass-wildly guess like recommanding me shit tons of cheap erotic games just because I like "Hunie Pop". And that's disastreous.
@@ShinigamiKristak Steams tagging system really is a mess.
Gonna be honest, I don't know how useful this set of data is given that any aspiring devs taking the effort to watch GDC videos presumably already have higher quality standards than > 95% of Steam releases. Will the avalanche of cack out there negatively affect your game's sales? Probably. Will it be the determining factor in whether your game gets buried? Almost certainly not.
Steam really needs quality control. If you don't set standards, everyone suffers in the end. And indie devs need higher standards for their art.
Steam used to have a "standard" which just meant that steam employees removed games they didn't like enough. Some really good stuff was just thrown out the window for no reason.
Tumbolisu Okay, well, you can't replace shit with more shit. We need a different system.
lol
I say allow absolutely everything on steam, just that they should improve the systems for promoting the games that aren't crap
Aipe97 I disagree. There needs to be some quality control. If you go to a publisher and/or a game dev company and try to sell a slightly altered Unity Asset minigame, you get shown the fucking door and told to not come back until you have something with some effort. Steam should do the same.
Thank you! Amazing information
Please upload his other talks too if you can!
Great content, thank you GDC :)
Well, how about per category? Can you predict based on the look of a game or mechanics whether it will sell well? Just gross means over the whole population or even simple snippets won't clarify what you can make.
Could I interest you in my Adventure Anime Survival Crafting Shooter Sim I've been working on?
This was one of the most useful videos I've seen from this channel. Or in general.
Thanks so much!
Can you do one version of that video on todays games?
Where is the "Marketing on a Zero Budget" video.?
I'm a sole Game Dev, and could need some ideas.
So in conclusion...
Don't go into indie game dev for the money.
I think this has been fairly standard knowledge for a long time.
Yeah do it as a side job to your main. You know a couple if hours after work at your leisure.
If the mean and the median are so far apart you probably need a better metric, like categories of games. These numbers are meaningless unless you know what kind of game you're selling I think.
Games done quick looks different this year?
Way more informative though.
Love the new haircut, Yong
It should be mandatory to have demos for first time publishers on steam. So that people can give feedback and reviews atleast on the demo and then maby buy the full game.
maybe I should just focus on virtual reality games instead since no one really makes good vr games yet
this was a really interesting talk. it's something that interests me as a gamer because i'm so picky and selective with games I buy and I often wonder what made a developer or publisher go down a certain route, or choose a certain price.
I have alot of friends and family that are gamers, but since I'm the only female I don't have any way to compare if the way I buy games is somehow different because of that. My dad and brother won't spend money on a new game ever, period, unless someone else they know has gotten quite far in the game and can show what the end-game looks like. I, on the other hand, am the only person I know that will buy games at full price, after only reading/watching a few reviews. I won't usually buy games under $20, since I just assume they must be crappy cheap games to be priced so cheap, and I also won't buy a game that doesn't have footage of gameplay available for me to look at and some kind of reddit or youtube review where I can get a feel for what others think of the game and what the complaints or praises are.
It was interesting to see some of the steam numbers. On that note though, I don't ever buy games from Steam, and in fact don't even have a Steam account lol.
After watching this video I went and did some checking and I have 27 games, most of which are PC games, a small handful are for PS3. On average, the games I own cost $40 when I bought them (ranging from $15 in rare cases, going up to $60 in most cases). I'm also more likely to spend more money a game I already own, like buying DLC's and expansions, than I am to buy new games.
I feel the guys I know that are games are all complete opposite. They tend to only buy games when they're dirt cheap, and as result have 100s of games, and also as a result have loads of games they haven't ever played just lying around collecting dust lol.
I'm also 34 and make decent money while alot of the guy gamers I know are in their 20s, so not sure if that matters. Also, I tend to only play mmorpgs or other mmos, so that, I think, affects the price quite alot. I wouldn't touch a free to play mmo with a 10 foot pole lol. : /
If a new mmorpg came out tomorrow and i had never heard of it before (no alpha or early access, etc) but they were charging $50 for it, I would be immediately interested and try to dig up info on it.
When I click on a genre I like I only find a few games. It's like where are all the games you speak of? From the search results there are only a few games on steam.
250 per month is basically minimal wage where i live. Lmao.
How I buy games:
-The game seems interesting, I see the first part of a firstplay or stream
-The game seems fun, has cool music and ambience
-The game has something different, something that engages me....unless is aprt of a franchise I do like, then I hope is an evolution and not something completely different
-I check every platform it is on, where its cheaper and if where its cheaper (usually pc) it has issues
-I WILL buy almost blindly games that are too good of a deal for their content, I have no issue with 15-20 dollar indies like Shovel knight (first relase), Hollow knight, Celeste, but I do think a lot when a game is 30+ dollars, like a hat in time on switch, I only bought it for the positive reviews and it ended being shit, not even horse shit, the most useless shit, Fish shit.
your gonna laugh but I just removed steam from my dock haha so any advice on where I should sell my games that I put passion into and should I make it free with in app purchases instead
You should learn to use grammar, spelling, and punctuation to properly communicate before you try to sell anything to anyone.
Old news, I remember TB talking about this years ago. I do enjoy all the numbers though
TB definitely didn't talk about this years ago-- he couldn't have. That's obvious. Stop being dumb.
$30 is the sweet spot for full title releases. I've thought this for 20 years, even when I was paying $90 for a new game on NES.
Eh, depends on the game. 18-25 is more reasonable if you’re indie.
I think a lot of games get buried in the pile and lost, just judging a game by its picture or title is all a lot of us have to go on and there has to be a better way to find what is good.
15:06 Interesting that RPGs are not showing up at all in the word cloud. I know RPGs require a lot more effort to build compared to most games, so I wonder if that means that new RPGs will get more attention due to the relative rarity.
In this case, RPGs are included in "adventure"
And I find less than 5 games a month interesting enough to buy.
A lot of the games released are total garbage. Usually low effort unity marketplace soup. No one should be surprised that those don't sell.
wow that's really high. I generally don't find anything interesting in most months.
Really bad talk. The entire point of the talk is the stats but he doesn’t once explain how he arrived at them.
He says that he removed games that never had a chance, and admits this is subjective, but doesn’t even offer his subjective criteria for determining if a game had no chance.
He also states: the average games makes X amount a year and can therefore not sustain someone. He then admits that he doesn’t know if people made their games while concurrently working full time. He also makes no indication that he took development time into consideration. If I release a game each week and make $30k each then I’ll do great!
His numbers might be meaningful, but he hasn’t convinced me.
hasith mayanga I wasn’t trying to give a realistic example, the point is that he’s made a large assumption without properly justifying it
When you're working on a turn based Apocalypse survival game like age of empires but turned based... And Apocalypse ... Kms
He didn't mention this : does early access make a difference ? and when what, etc.
Hey Game Dino -- I actually did cover this! Jump to 11:11
@@NoMoreRobots Thank you ! no clue how I missed it. Wish there was more info though.
I think devs shy away from gore way too much. I understand this means a game is not for everyone, but cmon, no indie game is mainstream. Also, a lot of shit games use gore as their only draw, but it can really increase the experience of a game if used right and with very good animations. Imagine the original Fallout trilogy without those amazing kill animations. Not the same.
Yeah like the game Jim Sterling reviewed recently where you dismember yourself and use the parts to solve puzzles. Looked cool.
Exactly the same thing happened to the music industry. It's so easy and cheap these days to write music that supply outweighs the demand.
As a aspiring to be game dev and someone who has been living all his life with games and the market ecosystem behind him I can tell you that its generally not the wisest thing to put all your efforts at joining a indie and trying to develop the next million dollar hit without any funds whatsoever. Obviously you are bound to fail especially when you start out, what you need is a plan B, the best one by far is becoming adept in programming and getting some experience in software development first. You can always pick up modeling/working with ue4 or any other engine as a hobby but if you tried to become a game dev and failed at making your game a hit you can always learn from the experience and resort to plan B for bread on the table.
You can say what you want but gamers are the best consumers for the type of product you are trying to sell, they actively try to find the right product and generally don't have to much bias for one over the other. If your game is not selling well, its not the platforms or consumerbases's fault, you can either give up and stop or keep going on and learn from the experience while resorting to whatever plan B you have to survive.
deari900 wdym
?? What I just said, don't put all your hopes in a single basket when you aspire to be great in a unstable market. Learn something usefull for other markets so you can always fall back when you need to do so.
Oh so you mean like be a frontend and a game dev? That's what I'm trying to do :D!
Oh nice :p, was actually talking about backend to learn some c++ while also being able to program games, but whatever works really. As long as you're not stuck to being a game dev. Gonna start software development myself in a month, will pick up environmental design/modeling as a hobby in ue4/blender/houdini while i'm at it. Rip most of my social life but oh well, gotta make some sacrifices to do the things you love.
+Deari Good luck and don't forget to spend time with God (if you're religious) and family as well as friends :p!
Not succumb to the race to the bottom in price is something others have tested, I remember an article about App Store where the dev developed a super shitty game with the purpose of ramp the price every time he reached a certain threshold of sales. And worked
Anyone know of any good marketing companies for pc and console games?
oopsy444 Google
Sebastian Haban
I know what Google is. Why do think I'm asking here? You know asking people who may have experience with one? I even tried reddit, stack exchange, and other sites. If you don't have something actually useful don't bother saying anything
Aluminum Chicken never heard of that marketing company what have they published so far
RyanTron coop?
I have so much games in my different libraries that i havent even opened since i bought them a few years back for basically nothing. I think im not going to get any more free games now tho.
The fullstop is not pronounced as "aaaaaa"
I search for the game, I click add to cart, I go to cart, I select purchase and whip out my credit card. That is how we purchase games on Steam.
I cried.
17:38 Is it me or did he unleash the inner Gru
numbers/figures start around 5:41
Those are the crap numbers. The real numbers come in at 9:55
Nice talk! Would like to see some updated figures from 2021/2022 and maybe going some more in depth. Maybe an hour or so...
:)
Those figures about the percentage of game failures is interesting. It fits in perfectly with Sturgeon's Law. I'm of the mind that games are an art form and the art market is extremely fickle. Other art genres tend to be affected much more extremely, but generally speaking a few artists do extremely well, a few more find niche or cult followings, and the vast majority go completely unknown. Some of this is down to quality but a lot is sheer luck. There are also fads which affect sale figures; see for example how "survival crafting" was the biggest genre at the time of the talk. There are generally a few trend-setters that take most of the market and a ton of copycats trying to gobble up what's left.
The huge huge majority of these games are achievement spam made by Russian/Eastern European 1-man and small teams hoping to score a quick buck off of an asset flip really. It's kinda polluting the data.
he did mention that
did you even watch the video?
blame the Slav... smh
klnpd except he's not wrong.
klnpd >> The majority if the 'studios' banned by Steam the past year is out of Eastern Europe, with the absolute biggest slice from Russia.
funny thing is that the 'indiepocalypse' annual is still more money than what the OpenSSL developers/maintainers were getting paid for
i love incredibly objective things
The amount of uh's and uhm's in this video tho........
01000101 01101011 00100000 01100100 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01110011 01111001 00100000 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110100 01101111 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 00100111 01101110 00100000 01101101 01100101 01110100 01100001 01100110 01101111 01101111 01110010 00100000 01110110 01101001 01110010 00100000 01101000 01101111 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101111 01100101 01101001 01101100 01101001 01101011 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101111 01101101 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01101100 01100101 01110100 01101010 01101001 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101111 01100101 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100101 01110010 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110110 01101001 01110010 00100000 01101111 01101110 01110011 00100000 01110100 01111001 01100100 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110100 01100101 01100001 01101101 00100000 01101000 01101111 01101111 01101001 01100010 01100101 01110010 01100111 00101110
@@captainmcpants In normal text: "Ek dink sy vertoning is 'n metafoor vir hoe moeilik dit is om speletjies te vind wat die moeite werd is vir ons tyd in die Steam hooiberg."
That sounds like a great idea for a video thanks.
9:00 Subjective :3
Did he ever say how he got the data? He said he was going to explain it. Maybe I missed it.
He aqcuired it with educated guesses, based on the amount of Players a Game has.
For the second set he took out games, he could not see doing well.
Wild speculation from the dev that did the "11 years without a hit" speech. Yeah 7 match 3s in 11 years and no hits. Go figure.
I wonder what's the numbers nowadays...
Love your weird sense of humor
He says "uhhhh" sooooooo much
great sense of humour
What year is he talking about when he says a year ago
I believe that he is talking about 2017.
@@christianmills1794 thanks for the info
Awesome, numbers and stat's without proofs. 👏
Great content just need to be more confident when delivering it !
x1.25 speed is recommended.
There are plenty of games 3 - 4 years ago with less than 10 reviews. Games that look good and even had money grants to support them, but well utter failures when it came to selling. You have always needed to promote your games.
As for Early Access, just make the game look good and worth money so people will pay money for it. Early Access is a great way to cultivate reviews too before the launch.
As someone that digs through games, I assume the $3 and under games are garbage eager to take your money. My friends have argued with me that any game under $10 is garbage. Plus people buy games on sale anyway.
You get what you pay for after all.
Do you include games that go below $3 during sales when declaring them as garbage? There are a lot of utter masterpieces like Trine, Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy, Gothic, King's Bounty, The Witcher and Portal that are below the $3 mark right now just to name a few.
Also, Super Hexagon is $3 and it's amazing if you are into simple hardcore games.
Also, your friend is missing out on King's Bounty and Hotline Miami. Both are below $10 by default and they are both great.
I didn't know we were talking about "on sale." I assume everything sells when its on sale, so its best to charge higher and know people wait for sales. I don't think my friends would play either King's Bounty or Hotline Miami. They're really into FPS. I'm into a slew of things. You're also right that decade old masterpieces are competing with today's indies.
Terraria is $9.99 and it is usually regarded as a ridiculously awesome game by millions of people. Frequently goes down to $5 or sometimes even less. I myself have put 1,200 hours and people talk about 3k, 5k hours being put into this one game. I mean, 97% of 172,184 people thought it was good enough to recommend. In the last 30 days, 91% of 3,178 people recommended it.
I never cared much for Terraria. It was one of the last games I bought at full price on day 1. Towns was the last game I bought full price on day 1. I was more the Towns target audience than the Terraria target audience.
as a game dev myself its simple if your game is good it sells. I have never found a really good game that didnt sell
Loris Support Guides I’ve seen a few amazing ones that didn’t get the hype that they deserved, and many pre bad ones that got a ton of attention they were unworthy of. At this point it’s more about marketing than the actual product.
yes bad games can sell but there is no way an actual good game wont sell
Marketing it correctly is what make it sells, well in todays market, just look at all those titles that sold because the trailer doesn't even show gameplay but when you play the game is actually broken
a really good game that didnt sell is really hard to find because it didnt sell. i love crosscode, but it didnt sell like what it should have. its trailer didnt even reach 100k views even though its been out since september of last year and very publicly in development. pokeypoke seems to be a good game that got a fraction of the recognition crosscode did. pokeypoke admittedly is a tiny 48 hour game jam game though, i think.
Early access is a serious issue. First off, from a developer point of view, most players will have gotten the game and ditched it before it is done. Then you loose a ton of word of mouth sales, because gamers virtually do not know what early access actually is. They start making videos and reviews on a half finished product and often just tare your alpha apart. I understand the attractiveness of making that money while you are developing your game, but in the end it hurts sales badly.
"early access" has become pretty much standard too. It's supposed to be a way for smaller, inexperienced and/or new studios to get their product out there, get some interest in it from the public, get some more funding and perhaps also be a "proof of concept or viability" to investors. But far too many studios just do it every time as standard practice.
This has also sort of happened to alphas and betas. They have become so ubiquitous that the terms are basically meaningless. Alpha used to mean very rough, systems only half finished, story completely unfinished. A pre-alpha was little more than a mostly-functional engine. Now, betas are basically what they ship, and alphas are what used to be betas. Publishers seem to use "alpha" from concept up to a few weeks before release.
hmmm, I dunno about that. every UA-cam game reviewer I watch (and I watch alot fo them) do early access content quite regularly and will state repeatedly during their play through that the game is in alpha, is not finished, and is basically just being right now for testing and feedback, etc. Also, even comments on these youtube videos will often echo this sentiment and even correct or chastise people who comment that a game in early access "looks like shit"....many people will inevitably remind that person that the game is in early access.
Sounds to me like you're just super salty from a bad experience. Gamers, outside of 10 year olds, have gotten incredibly smart about game development and stages of development.
We aren't idiots.
Also, we tend to like playing games in early access because we feel like our feedback matters, like we're directly helping make the game better, and like we're also helping to support an indie dev that we really like.
: )
@@soshspotgames4380 Nearly every early access game title I have played or seen reviews for is dead by the time of launch. Some might make it a few months after but not many.
You gotta trust the numbers from a guy that looks like the guy from the Iron Bank
This guy is the Taika Waititi of game development.
These numbers don't surprise me. Steam has an (admitted) problem with crap/spam/derivative games being dumped on the platform. Most of the sales on the platform will, by default, be from AAA publishers due to advertising powers and hype/expectations. Then, you have a few shock examples of indy devs making a splash (Undertale, Fez, etc)....and then everything else.
I like this dude