Know Your Market: Making Indie Games That Sell
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- Опубліковано 22 сер 2018
- In this 2018 GDC talk, Infinite Monkeys Entertainment's Erik Johnson analyzes trends in the Steam marketplace and explores how his game, 'Life Goes On', failed to match the market.
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This video is 169% more successful than the average puzzle-platformer.
Look at the likes they are 169
Still are
The ratio of likes vs dislikes = 66
432 likes since I liked it 😢. Edit the comment to match the like count. Do this every night. We would appreciate it.
00:50 Introduce himself and his game.
02:08 If you're making games to get rich, you're in the wrong industry.
03:18 Know the context.
04:16 Steam Spy is an absolutely fantastic resource. Boxleiter Method: estimate the number of sales base on reviews count.
05:42 The dominant factor in the game's success is the fallacy of believing that the world is fair.
05:49 Factor: Quality
08:32 Factor: Genre.
10:12 Factor: Visuals really matter.
11:21 Factor: Tone.
14:04 Factor: PlayTime.
16:27 Factor: Streaming
19:05 Takeaways.
19:33 Targeting a Niche.
We are #yolostudiogame - an indie game studio with two members. We are seriously learning about the game industry. So we tweet a GDC video summary every Tuesday.
Happy making game, everyone!
I own a gaming studio too and would love to connect. Are you on Linkedin?
@@Akunspeci hey can I possibly work with you?
@@zeststreams Yes.
@@Akunspeci do you have a linkedin
Steve Job said people don't know what they want, you have to show them. If you ask people what they want they'll give you a shopping list of things they think they want, and then when they get them, they say..."No. Not like that." People do't have a clue what they want. Build a game based on what is emotionally fun and rewarding for people. Build a game that makes people feel excited and you have a winner. Hit them right in the feels! A good team helps too. ;)
No...I've never built a game. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
That's a great point Eric
Ford said if he asked people what they want, they will say a faster horse cart
I agree, but how would we get our target audience?
Steve Jobbs was full of shit
Glad I saw this video... I'm 2 weeks into making a 4 player local platformer game, thinking the market needed that....
If you make games to earn money, then you might as well get a job as a Software Engineer or smth similar. Make games THAT YOU'D ENJOY playing. Always. Don't create the shit the market asks for. That's how the current games will deprecate and people will start playing other games. Yours. Just make a good game. No scratch that. Make a great game!
@@SetYourHandle3 You can make a game you want to make that isn't within an extremely saturated market, unless your taste in games is extremely limited and specific. I don't know about the other user, but I personally won't ignore money. However, money is a consequence. If the game sells well, that means I reached a lot of people. If the game sells poorly, I failed.
@@SetYourHandle3 There are two factors, one is following a trend - and when something is already recognized as a trend (Fortnite), then you failed and your game will be a part of countless clones (does anybody know that Battle Royale Survivor exists? I didnt...). You still can make a competitor (APEX), but it is so hard to beat the king and you usually end remembered as the second.
The second is trying to predict what will be next and trying to be the one, to set the trend. This one is usually being made by smaller indie studios (Riot Games), by studios with good creative reputation (Blizzard, Valve,...) or even modders (Counter Strike was originally a mod). Those usually set the new trend and make the studio a giant.
I dont think that you get what this means. Making good games for people to enjoy is good and you always have to have a target audience. You may make a game just for yourself, but lets be honest why wouldnt you charge money for that?
The thing is, that even for the "games for me" you would probably want some better graphics, original score, or a better programmer than you are! And those people, of course, want money. How do you get money? You could by making games....
And if you go this route, you end up making a game that you enjoy, but is also for the market. You cant just publish a game with no tutorial (or any clever way to teach players about he mechanics), no easy to use menu or no consistency in difficulty, story or locations.
I think that you should make games you enjoy playing, but are also made for other people as well. For the market. And I dont think anybody would give it completely free.
@@SetYourHandle3 EXACTLY! Just because it's something that u think won't sell doesn't mean no one wants to play it.
RadiantSeven yes, but if you make games, you have to know what person is it for, or you end up with a half baked early access mess that tries to be everything.
You have to at least know for who is the game. The game isnt only for you. Its for everybody! (Great, now I sound like a communist.) I personaly like the philosphy of the guy who made Crossy Road: If you make a game, you have to have the target audience.
And that's for:
A) Not making your game Everything you would ever want A.K.A. Does the player want this?
and B) The game has to at least pay its development (its worth making)
The B is the thing you should want, because I, like any other guy would also like to make games that people enjoy playing. But similar to many others I don't have the skill to make it alone for the good of humanity. Then I need some people to help with the game. And they probably wont work for free. The you also need engine and other stuff in the development. And in a blink of an eye you lost hundreds of dolars. And to not bankrupt, you need the game to pay at least its development. This is the reason of many greedy practics by bigger companies, they not only have it as a full time job, but they lose millions in the development. So they need to make games for the most of the market!
If you are still able to make the game of your dreams, then go for it!
You will have low competition and if you do it correctly, you may get everything this niché market is able to give you.
This is a very good talk, appreciated! Speaker is neither monotone n'or fake excited. Makes me focus on the info and his words rather than the powerpoint and him.
90% agree, the west coast way of ending most sentences like a question bugs me somewhat lol. Good talk tho for sure!
heh after watching i was just thinking how chill and relaxed he was for a presentation. impressive and well done sir
He is worse than monotone, he lower his tones as the phrase is ending as If he is out of breath. That is ultra bothersome.
On one hand, I'm surprised to hear his game did that badly, as Steam has recommended it to me on the very top of the store page probably more than 5 times. I thought that would count for something.
On the other hand, I'd figure that game wouldn't do well, because it didn't look one bit appealing to me.
He mentioned the importance of visuals, but I think he understated it.
Also, correlation isn't causation, so take all stats presented with a grain of salt. Just because moddable games do well doesn't mean yours will do better if you slap the feature on top. It might just be that the type of games that lend themselves well to modding do better, regardless of whether they have modding support or not. Various other things could factor in.
Bronkster you didn’t buy it, did you? :)
Fun is a factor that’s difficult to measure and reviewers aren’t always good pickers of what many users will think is fun
Cheap looking visuals really can make you uninterested in a game because it usually screams "These devs didn't really care much about this, why would I think they cared about any other aspect"
I've worked with a ton of indie devs, never made a game myself but the work that goes into some of these games are insane! good to know a lot of this stuff.
I can recognize these are WEKA generated charts, probably also WEKA generated statistics.
Secondly, the statistics fit me quite well. I'm in my 40s. I am no longer interested in most AAA offerings that cost over $50 but only give 10 to 20 hours of gameplay. Instead, I look for "simulation" games that have deep, inter-related mechanics that require lots of play sessions and many hours of puzzling out, coupled with allowing me to be creative in coming up with beautiful and/or functional solutions. Games like Cities Skylines, Prison Architect, Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Empyrion. Hence the hundreds of hours of accumulated play time on these few games even though I only play during weekends.
What do you think about Minecraft and the upcoming Hytale. Is Minecraft going to focus less on storytelling to appeal to builders and redstone engineers?
Building games fit nicely in 2 higher-revenue categories: building and stickiness. So i bet they have a higher shot at success as long as the visuals don’t suck and aren’t hard to figure out what you’re supposed to do
So make a dark goth Zelda clone full of gore and cliff hangers between sections.
Got it!
Really classy that these videos are not monetized.
one of the best talks. nice stats. please invite this guy to do a talk again
Fast forward into the future - and this game of his has 232,000 owners (according to Steam Spy). Not bad for an Indie game.
Really appreciate how thorough Erik was, and alllllllllllll that data. Major kudos.
This is a really good talk, one of the best in a while!
I was there and it was a great talk.
Isnt Steam a PC only platform? I'd think Puzzle platformers are usually played by console/phone users. That would mean the numbers would propably be different if it was released on the platforms with the most players im that genre.
You forgotten Epic Games Store
Great talk, very good observations. Thank you.
Excellent talk! Hits home...
very good and informative. great speaker. to the point with a touch of humor sprinkled in
Excellent presenter, excellent presentation. Informative and helpful. Thank you
This is some really valuable insight.
This is a great video! Actually, when you're developing an indie game in the same high sales category, you may start to feel weird in the indie scenario. I mean, when you're developing a gritty third person shooter and look at your buddies games with colorful, heartwarming and cartoonish games, you feel bad for yourself. There were many times I caught myself thinking "am I doing something wrong? Why I'm doing a game so different from my game dev peers'? The journalists only review funny, cartoon and colorful games?". And I stop the paranoia and go back to my game...
I feel you, bro... I'm currently working on a dark story/police/TPS/crime game and I definitely feel weird when every dev I know is working on lighter themes... My guess is, you're probably going through the same problems I am, which are, highly complex challenges, both technical and artistic and the lack of free/low cost assets that match the standards of your project. I think most people just don't want or feel capable to deal with such challenges being indies and some even being one-man-bands. It definitely feels safer and wiser to invest efforts in something easier to achieve...
I absolutely love this channel. Much appreciated!
We are talking about making indie games that sell, but comparing them to traditional AAA titles that have massive advertising budgets. That skews absolutely everything.
Advertising helps *a lot*, but it is only effective if you've first identified who your target players/buyers are. AAA franchises live-and-breath the "if you liked X, you'll like Y (really X2)" approach, pointedly focusing on people who've already proven that they want what they're selling. Indies have to work harder to find their market, but since it's a smaller crowd, it's actually cheaper to advertise to them.
Short and sweet, I like this guy's style.
I recognize the guy, he is an actor on How I met your mother!
These chart just show how lonely and unsocial we steam players are.
How do I keep up to date with recent trends ? Are there websites that can point it out to me ? Are there any similar data about mobile games ?
Great talk! Very informative
Thank you for an informative presentation!
It is not everyday you find a video you would 100% recommend to people.
Good talk. Greatly enjoyed listening to this. :)
Wonderful talk.
This is amazing 🙌🏾 👏 great talk ❤
This is great information thanks for doing it.
Very helpful (for my next game)!
Talk about dropping some quality knowledge. Thanks for this!
Also, am I the only one who can hear his heartbeat???
I think you have some hidden talent right there. You should contact Marvel.
@@yosuanicolaus Call me "Pulse, The Human Heart Monitor". I should consider a career change 😅
good info, thanks.
Do I read the stats right, is around 4h gameplay the best play time for a game?
Does the steam prophet website still exist?
good talk
9:25 hmm So, I suppose to sell well the best bet would be to make a first person roleplaying city builder..... shooter? 🤔🤔🤔
do you mean minecraft ? :)
Arkadiusz Durakiewicz **mind blows**
Do you mean Fallout?
YOU FORGOT ZOMBIES!
@@Cerbyo sure, minecraft has zombies
so make a dark fantasy moddable online coop action rpg with long play time?
so dark souls with mods?
or maybe dark souls itsefs shows that we need more games like that.
@@arkadiuszdurakiewicz8673 or Dark Fantasy become popular because of Dark Souls games ))
Dark souls 1 is being modded substantially. Look for mods like the scorched contract or daughters of ash.
It sounds fantastic! How can I showcase my project here?
great video
On the other hand: Fortnite is colorful, League of legends too. Many games that did well are colorful (look at blizzards art style). I dont know... Maybe its more of if a game is good and looks aesthetically good too and people learn about it, it will sell.
FPS and action RPGs take much more work and resources to develop than casual puzzlers. You would need to divide the income generated by hours of work invested to have a better understanding of profitability.
Great talk, but I have no idea where are the games I mostly play; none of the categories seemed to apply. I.e. survival and building games, like Factorio, Space Engineers, Subnautica, Starbound, Terraria, Oxygen not Included, plus things like Elite Dangerous.
I hated statistics during Uni...Now I love it.
Chicken and egg story.
What did come first: Succes then charts?
Or charts and then succes....
this makes me want to make my game even more.
Go for it man, good luck! 👍👍
What game are you working on ??
Hiring a graphic designer for the Steam splash art alone could have doubled sales
It is interesting to compare this to the talk from the dream daddy woman.
Basically if your game is either Dark Souls or GTA then you'll do fine
More the opposite. If you are unkown in the market and you make a game in one of these genres, you better have a large marketing budget at hand AND a good game in order to stand out or else you get drown in the 1000s of competitors. Better you make a decent game in a niche and continue to serve that niche.
"Should you make a puzzle platformer in 2018, the answer is no." Then Celeste came out and did gang busters. I think the real issue with Life Goes on is more the aesthetic, the game play looked fine but visually, I just had no interest in it.
the visual looks truly weird, but there are also other games which use the dead bodies as a mechanic, arent there?
@@lugyd1xdone195 Yeah, I know there were some flash ones back in the day on kongregate but I don't remember what they were called.
Imho, Celeste is more of an action-platformer, it's not puzzle based.
Their target audiences are pretty different: puzzle solvers vs hardcore-ish platformers.
It's more like Trine vs Super Meat Boy comparison.
yet its true. visuals was not really great in term of style... i think speakers games world or setting could be really close to shovel knight... and something that could feel as shovel knight im sure could rise his sales at least in some X times
@Mea Ansel well, in general, there's been plenty of successful games with just good gameplay. Heck, a recent example is benett fodding game, that looks weird in general.
The issues are that getting them into the door without visuals is pretty difficult.
Dang, a few months too late. Both SteamSpy and TotalBiscuit are dead.
But their legacy still remains!
This is such a morbid thing to say xD
Too soon bro too soon
I guess I'm not a very emotional mourner and I didn't really know TotalBiscuit at all. I only heard about him after he passed.
How did steamspy die?
having a multi player game or something people need to get to be able to be part of the conversation with their friends, you obviously are going to get some lower scores, and higher scales. advertising clearly helps. :)
although the data here is interesting; anyone who sees this, and conclude lets make a crime game because family friendly doesn't work needs a course in how stats actually work.
Makes me pretty sad to see that some of my favourite types of games have become the least popular. Little but demotivating. But oh well.. I don’t think I’d had the will to put as much time and work as I do if I tried making a game that’s one of the most popular.
So basically family friendly puzzle platformer vs colorful crime game? that's like Tetris vs Gta, I wonder which is more popular right now?
Not trying to bash the talk but it's 90% just charts and stats that don't lead to many conclusions
These charts and graphs are not particularly helpful as we don't know what are being used to make them. Is it just every game on steam?
If that is the case, then of course the action and more mature games are going to look like they are doing way better because that is what most AAA studios are putting 100s of millions of dollars in to. And the medium of the colorful and family friendly games will be extremely low due to the fact that it is mostly indies and a lot of them are lower quality games (visually, mechanically or both) with little to no marketing. And a lot of first games.
If you took out every game with an estimated budget of x and over. And any game that made and estimated y or lower. I wounder how it would change the graphs. Now I am not saying to look at these games too. You should look to see what made a game do well or poorly. But for something like this, I think it would be much more helpful and relevant without those games.
I do recognize the effort that went in to this talk. And thank you for it.
This! I would like to see these charts adjusted for some estimate of budget, and with the top sellers removed.
He did go out of his way to specify “median” throughout the talk. The numbers he came up with weren’t the average amount of money made, more the money made by the average developer. In other words, these graphs seem pretty reliable.
@@-zack8960 The median is not a good metric (at least not always). Not because AAA games, but on the contrary because of the high number of low budget games made by unexperimented devs. Just look at platformers, a lot of them looks like game jam entries (and not good ones). So it is exeptected that the median gross for this genre is close to 0 just because more than half of the games are not marketable. So the median gross for this genre is a worthless information. The median revenue can be usefull for genres with less crappy games, though (city builders, multiplayers, RPG etc.).
Here I am starting to make a local multiplayer game...
Think I gotta make it online
It's like twice the amount of work...
Did you finish it?
@@DOSRetroGamer didn't even finish the local game fully. Just a small demo.
Did do another course for multiplayer, but hated every part of it lol
Unless I had a million-dollar ideas and a solid team I think I wouldn't even consider doing any realtime online PVP as you either won't get enough players or if you do, there is so much crap you have to deal with and people will get upset at (lag, cheaters, matchmaking, weird network setups, balance issues... It's a nightmare)
@@DOSRetroGamer depends on the game. If it's using lobbies it can be fine if you play with friends etc.
But yeah, it takes a lot more work to gwt right
I wonder what these numbers look like for 2020
I get the feeling that the low playtimes for those earlier games comes from people buying lots of games but never playing them, thus contributing a zero to the average. Perhaps median (with zero excluded) would be a better indicator than mean. I dont see people just binging on buying lots of cheap steam games like you saw (and I certainly engaged in) 6-7 years ago, but never getting time to play them, isn't as common anymore. Usually if I buy a game now, I actually install and play the thing,
That comment at the end about how puzzle platforms only take an hour is not true- all games can be made with time and passion.
4 player local are really hard to sell on steam? GEEE I WONDER WHY?
need that fella in me team
I mean anyone can tell you a single player puzzle game with cartoony graphics and just "jump in and play mentality who cares if you win or not" won't sell well.
It is not that easy. Selling people what they want is dificult since they probably already have it.
Marketing works by convincing consumers that they want the product you are selling.
It is also possible to sell people more of what they want, if the market is still very undersaturated. I'm working on a Strategy/Tactics RPG - while that is definitely a niche genre, the waiting times between major releases from the market-leaders are long enough to leave the market mostly underserved.
@@mandisaw Good luck.
Apple: Invent problems, Sell solutions.
Modded: Inventing appealing needs, Sell products.
13:19 Proof that humanity is freaking scary and twisted sometimes
Perhaps the curse of Puzzle Platform games is the low barrier of entry, meaning anyone can create such a game overnight, which generates a flood of bad games of the genre on steam. Genres with a higher entry barrier can have a more selective success, so they have fewer bad games in the store and earn more.
Anyway, I think that Research would be more useful if it took several genres and analyzed one by one, comparing what the games that earned a lot were different from those that earned little.
RIP Total Buscuit
Stardew Valley and Limbo are not comparable, it Will clearly consume more time being a "Farming" Game. There are many more data to consider and compare, but yea at the end is pretty good
I'm watching it in 2024 and it seems the developers PalWorld were watching it too 😂
"game designer's really like to make 4player local games but it seems they're hard to sell on steam"
??? there aren't even that many
All do kids only buy that top 2017 list, or simpler people...
Those are also again the group that comes and goes within a day.
Like Like Like !!!
„go do something else“ but what? i have no idea what i can do with my skillet
14:02
Quality of a game doesn't always translate to sales numbers, Just look at Madden.
8:50
at times, Fez and Limbo
Now at 2020 everything is different now
Is that his heart beat that we hear?
microphone feedback
I appreciate the talk, but the title says indie games that sell, but it mostly talks about success of AAA and downfall of indies with "zero" business sense.
You compete against those anyway. The other parts of the ecuation are being efficient to reducing your time to market and cost, and achieving the best quality possible.
It's hard :p
Video title should be: indie developer gets job with salary of $100,000 as a top statistician. Lol
TIL I am not your average consumer (just kidding, I've always known, this is just proving my point :D)
Bjon Ironside
good talk. work on the uptalk. Indie development is depressing af.
haha, well fuck. I have a puzzle platformer and a 4 player local on steam xD
Even if your game is successful, you would have earned more money with normal software or at least training simulations which offer real value to the customer. I learned it the hard way.
It is so sad to see developers living in poverty while making games while they could earn six figures with their skills in conventional software development.
I’m not a marketing expert, but I feel like only looking at indie games on Steam is too small of a lens. Wouldn’t you want to look at all games on all platforms regardless of being “indie”? It just seems like a niche market you’re trying to study that is too variable to have any meaningful long running statistics on.
The audio is too high in this recording the feedback is really annoying they need a damn sound engineer
Step up your audio game, GDC.
This talk doesn't hit as particularly useful to me. Yes there are some genres that are on average more successful than others. At the end of the day however its up to the developer to capitalize on marketability. Not every game can be marketed the same, and there's a lot of tricks to switch things up. While a genre may seem unpopular or overcrowded you shouldn't restrict your idea if you can convince yourself and others that it would be fun to play. The spirit of this talk felt more like "don't innovate, follow others", which I disagree with.
Hes talking about on average, not hard set rules for every game. He makes that point a few times
As a musician, I need to know how much soundtrack affects success.. ITS TIME FOR SOME RESEARCH.
Great information here, but your presentation felt very dry. Not much volume fluctuation, hand movements, background music... Very very dry. But good info
Ugh, I guess should probably abandon my 4 years in dev adventure platformer.. 😁
Poor guy sounds utterly beaten, though it should be obvious why.
"We probably will never get our investment back out of it but we've done much better than we expected" wait, I need some explanation... the guy who's explaining how to make games that sell was aiming to get a revenue bellow his investment? O_O wuuuuut!!?