8 ms·

The missing middle in game development

168 points by wrelsien 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jncfhnb 3y ago
The article references a study about games earning a median revenue of 10k. https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic But reading between the lines I think it’s driven by porn and visual novels
- deadbeeves 3y ago
  Arguably that should be even easier to make. Find a good artist who's willing to take a bit of a gamble, program some excuse gameplay, usually some sort of puzzle game, and you're pretty much set. If your audience knows what they're there for, really the game is just a vehicle for the eye candy.
  - jowea 3y ago
    Although I'm not sure it will fulfil the goals of making middle games the post mentions like building team expertise. Unless you're doing a very unusual city builder I guess.
    - deadbeeves 3y ago
      You won't build technical or design expertise, but I can see it being something that's easy enough to do as a side gig or as an experiment to see what it's like to publish a game on Steam or wherever. You can use that to decide if you want to invest more effort into it, while also making a bit of money. Low risk, low difficulty, low reward; perfect for learning. To be honest, "erotic city builder" is such a novel concept that now I want someone to tackle it.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        While I can’t argue against the idea of an erotic city builder I feel like it’s antithetical to the actual doom guy advice
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  And many of those games that aren't porn or straight asset flips are... undesirable. And they will crowd out your middle game. 12,653 games were released on Steam in 2022[1]. I don't even want to know how many are released on Android/iOS. This is not 1992 where you need a assembly wizard to even make a game, and while the author tried to address this, the fact that any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out seems like an unavoidable elephant in the room. 1: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/ https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    > any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out eBay and Amazon sellers have a trick for this: listing zillions of variations or combinations. Not sure if game devs already figured that out. Probably some of them did because 12k looks a lot.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      Looking at the app stores, Android/iOS devs definitely figured it out. I think straight up relisting would be harder on Steam, at least at this point in time. It's not quite to the point where there is so much sludge that Valve staff can't even handle community reports.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- qwery 3y ago
  I'm not sure what's "between the lines". The chart shows the bulk of games released (~12000) being limited to the 4 of their 8 categories which have the lowest median revenue. Those categories being: (Visual Novel, ~4000, $1k), (Sexual Content, ~4000, $2k), (Dating Sim, ~2000, $3k), (Management, ~2000, $4k). The other 4 categories have a tenth of the releases and higher revenue. So there's a huge amount of "porn and visual novels" that are driving the median revenue down.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    I think it’s mixed. Their blog has a little data tool. Note that their chart doesn’t seem to show most game types.I presume this is because they do much worse. If I do a quick check for games since 2022, games with sexual content made a median of $1.6k whereas non sex games made $296. If we use their advice to only check games that cost at least $10: sex games make $17k and non sex games make $11k. So maybe not so bad. Most of these games are selling about a thousand copies it seems. Of the games released since 2022 that made at least 10k (4260 games) only A third were sex and dating sim games
  - tomcam 3y ago
    Thanks for this. What is the management category?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  nothing wrong with porn. Some adult games have great gameplay.
jowea 3y ago
This focuses a lot on the production/offer side, but is there really all that much demand for the size of game advocated for? Aren't those publishers asking for bigger games because that's what the market is looking for?
- qwery 3y ago
  Other than the explanation in the article (big businesses work with big sums, for one thing) -- game publishers (particularly at the big end of town) are notorious for being dead wrong about what customers want and have consistently demonstrated that they decide what the market wants and then try to make that the case. See: single-player games are dead, the only type of game in the future will be live services, Sonic, etc.
  - jowea 3y ago
    Yeah but I don't think a indie studio has the marketing budget to convince consumers that this is what they want.
    - qwery 3y ago
      No, I was responding to your questions, specifically: > is there really all that much demand for the size of game advocated for? Yes, people do buy and play small games. > Aren't those publishers asking for bigger games because that's what the market is looking for? Obviously, there is demand for big games because big games sell. But the publishers focusing on big games doesn't mean that there is only demand for big games. There are multiple reasons why publishers would not be interested in small games or small studios.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Sonic? Sonic is barely relevant IP any more.
    - xcv123 3y ago
      The new Sonic films grossed $700M and they are selling millions of copies of new Sonic games. It's still popular and printing money for Sega.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
The point about making modest games as a educational experience/alternative to paid classes is pretty good. What some successful devs seems to do is make a "mid game" Early Access prototype, learn as they go, and if it seems to work, grow it into a bigger game. I really like this approach, as its like having your cake and eating it. The dev gets an "excuse" for barebones features in a release and free alpha testing. Escape bridges are not burnt. The game builds up a following and a small revenue stream. And then it gets a free 2nd launch, with all the algo/pr benefits of a full launch, at any arbitrary date, which is impossible for non-EA games.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Except it seems like most EA games these days never actually get built much beyond the EA launch, and then after 6-18 months of radio silence, some random version gets tagged as “1.0” and the dev then disappears. Early access is, at least for me, starting to a signal of poor quality. Certainly when the EA release is barely beyond a tech demo.
ehnto 3y ago
I generally agree but I think he misses a glaring societal driver in inflation. $40k in 1986 was probably pretty rad. In 2023 300k revenue split across a small team is not going to pay the bills, even before the marketplaces and taxes take their cut. On 300k something nearer 120k will actually land in their post-tax/post-fee pockets to pay for their food and electricity that year. Split across even just three people, that's not yet a sustainable business.
- cableshaft 3y ago
  > $40k in 1986 was probably pretty rad. According to this inflation calculator[1], $40k in 1986 is equivalent to $112k today. [1]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Inflation calculators aren't the whole story for specific comparisons. $40K was probably a pretty good salary for an engineer /software developer with the (mostly) necessary credentials and some level of experience in 1986. (That's about what I earned as a product manager for a computer company with prior work experience and two grad degrees at that time.) Software developer salaries in the US, especially on the West Coast, have largely outpaced other engineering salaries as well as professional compensation more broadly.
derobert 3y ago
The article describes middle games as "'middle game' should only take 1 to 9 months to create and can be profitable (or at least not a money sink) because it is expected to earn in the range of $10,000 to $40,000." Am I understanding that right? A reasonably competent developer could make at least twice that in salary, with far less risk. So that's not really profitable, once you remember opportunity cost (and especially if you risk-adjust it). The ones that take a few days can be a weekend project. The longer projects you'd be hoping become huge, and very profitable.
- helloplanets 3y ago
  As mentioned in the article though, a middle game would be a stepping stone that provides hands on experience of creating and selling such a game. You'd most likely be working on a small portion of a bigger game at a salaried job, without really being able to accumulate the needed skillset to jump into a larger game developed on your own terms.
- qwery 3y ago
  Yes, building and releasing a game that turns a profit is, in reality, a success. As a programmer, you can absolutely make more money more reliably by getting a job or working freelance. The problem the article is addressing (I think) is that this reality does not seem to inform the popularly held beliefs and expectations of (inexperienced?) indie game developers, and the effects of that.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >The problem the article is addressing (I think) is that this reality does not seem to inform the popularly held beliefs and expectations of (inexperienced?) indie game developers, and the effects of that. Reality doesn't inform a lot of creative endeavors. Writing some tech book (or really books more broadly) is almost certainly some way below minimum wage task from a financial perspective unless it makes your company notice you more, it brings you clients, etc.
- whstl 3y ago
  True for some cases, but not everyone embarking in those Gamedev journeys are competent developers able to land those jobs. If you see testimonials, they're often people coming from different walks of life, doing a micro-game (often following a tutorial) and then deciding to stop everything for a few months or even years. Doing those mid-level games is arguably equivalent to taking a low-paid internship.
qwery 3y ago
I totally agree with the message but I want to raise a few points: Cost of living. The market is saturated. The market being saturated pushes it to be (even more) hit-oriented. 'Saturated' as in a sponge held at the bottom of a full bathtub. You can keep releasing more games but the people you want to buy them (let alone play them) aren't going to quit their second job to find the time to buy and try your weird little games. This is not the middle. The author is talking about small games. It may be the middle of indie game development, but across the whole landscape, the "missing middle" would seem to refer to the "single-/double-A" studios/publishers/games that died out between the launch of the PS2 and the release of GTA IV. id Software is an exception and makes a poor example to follow. Studying wild success stories is not without merit, but is -- if you are interested in how to do the thing successfully -- ultimately a trap. id was (among other things) in the right place at the right time. There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way. You cannot make a game as radical and captivating as DOOM was. You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz. You might say there was very little opportunity for any individual to do so back then as well, but then we are back at exceptions being bad examples.
- chii 3y ago
  > push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way. Which is why game mechanic and gameplay is where the boundaries are, not computational efficiency or photorealism (or even, artistic direction or production value). I imagine that prior to Jonathan Blow's indie hit "Braid", people were also imagining that the technological ceiling has been hit and an individual (or small team) cannot compete with the AAA studios.
  - qwery 3y ago
    Sure, but most explanations of id's success (including in this article) hinge on (John Carmack's) technological prowess (and DOOM melting your face off). I'm not entirely sure what your point about Braid is. An individual or a small team could not compete with triple-A studios in 2008. Anyone thinking that then was right.
- 3y ago
phendrenad2 3y ago
I'd love to see a histogram of all game budgets for every game on Steam. I think the missing middle would be immediately apparent. We'd see the AAA games in the $250-500 million range, a few scattered games below that, and then an absolutely huge mass in the <$10,000 range. I don't know why people don't make more games in the $100,000-$1,000,000 range. I suspect that it's hard to find investors for small projects like that.
- bagels 3y ago
  Because it's exceedingly difficult/unlikely to see a return.
- bsder 3y ago
  $1 megabuck per year is roughly 4-5 developers and nobody else. Yes, you can argue that some developers would work for less than that, but any programmers capable of generating a good game can then go get jobs somewhere else. And you need art assets. And music assets. And sound effects. And ... This is why there is no "middle". Earning $5 million on a game (not $5 million per year--$5 million total) is absurdly successful on Steam.
  - messe 3y ago
    > $1 megabuck per year is roughly 4-5 developers and nobody else. In the US.
    - whstl 3y ago
      This is also assuming that those developers would be otherwise able to land 200k-250k jobs in traditional software development. Which is a bit rare today, as the bulk of people working in small games today isn't made of ex-developers, but of newcomers learning from tutorials with limited/niche experience. And maybe that's the reason it's hard to get an 1M investment, and the reason the market is a bit saturated.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    What developers? There is Unreal engine. If there are any developers, they work on web site, internal tools etc.
loveparade 3y ago
Mobile didn't exist in 1990s. Most of these games have moved to mobile, which is much easier to monetize.
lordwiz 3y ago
I generally feel like we can encourage building up more game development platforms, to solve such financial issues. One such platform was roblox, which i previously worked on, the ease in which they onboarded us to develop a game is pretty good. And due to no upfront cost, developers can quite make some money from scratch and the distribution will be handled by the platforms itself. The downsides i see is the cut they will take from us from the profit as well as bending towards their rules. For advanced development we are still limited by the technological limitations provided by the platform, so it kind of limits our overall ambition too.
- whstl 3y ago
  Don't we already have the analog of a "big platform" distributed among a few huge companies? It's mostly app stores provided by Apple/Google/Microsoft/Steam/Sony, with the needed tooling provided by Unreal/Unity. We also have cuts and we have to bend to their rules.
BigglesB 3y ago
I’m a solo indie developer trying to do almost exactly what this article advocates for and tbh, I’m not sure it’s been the right move. I’m almost 2 months into a project which essentially boils down to an iteration of Asteroids & have a demo up on Steam, but while I’m really pleased with it so far, I’d be surprised if the game even makes $1,000 at this stage, let alone $10,000. I’d be very happy with the latter though as I’m treating this very much as a learning experience, not the least in terms of getting my head around the marketing & community building side of things. I’ve also worked on a game which I’d consider to be a “modest success” that took 2-3 years with a friend & sold enough copies for my share to so far pay (almost) £24k/year, which as others have mentioned isn’t exactly a competitive salary for a software developer generally. In particular, while I can probably build small games in the 2-3 month timeframes suggested (especially if each is an iteration on the last), don’t forget all the “marketing admin” & trailer making & so forth. That’s also definitely not enough time to build enough wishlists to get any Steam visibility etc. Still, definitely timely food for thought for me personally!
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's a similar situation across all of the arts. The tools are now so widely available and there are so many people doing the work - with varying levels of skill - that the real distinguishing factor is marketing. Not quality of output. Not speed of output - as long as that's above a minimum. But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend. DOOM was dropped into an ecosystem of PC magazines and BBSs and almost sold itself - literally with the shareware release. It had almost no obvious competitors. There was some ad spend, but not a huge amount. Today there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of small/medium games available across multiple platforms. Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be. Meanwhile the AAAs have a budget for carpet bomb marketing. Skyrim spent around $15m, which is an insane sum.
  - adnzzzzZ 3y ago
    >But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend. Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games. You can't buy your way to the front page of Steam. Either your game is good and people buy it, play it and share it, or it isn't and then the algorithm will not promote it. There are many things you can and should do to try to nudge the algorithm your way, but by far the best is having a genuinely good game. If the game's quality isn't good you'll mostly be wasting money if you try to approach it with the marketing mindset you have. >Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be. It's actually easier than ever because very few games are exceptional, as has always been the case. The offering of exceptional released games doesn't increase just because the total number of released games does. If there suddenly was an AI tool that let anyone finish a game very easily, you still wouldn't get a significant increase in exceptional released games because there aren't that many exceptionally creative people in the world.
langsoul-com 3y ago
I think the authors strategy is only feasible if you've built out a few middle tier games, have processes and optimised the build loop. Just because you must release at least 2-3 mid games, or more, per year to break even
- qwery 3y ago
  Yes, and the point is that you need to do that if you want to do that. Diving into big projects prevents you from working on small projects, gaining that experience and establishing those processes.
dmonitor 3y ago
This article seems silly to me, considering that plenty of these games already exist. A friend of mine just released their game, Settlemoon after a year of development, while they did other work. According to Steam charts, it's made them around $20k since launch. The issue is clearly discoverability, not that developers just don't release small games.
- codingcodingboy 3y ago
  Apparently the only marketing this game had is a single reddit post and discord, I expect to find something on twitter for this type of games.
  - dmonitor 3y ago
    they have a twitter account, and have been promoting there. they bought some ads on various websites too. they aren’t dissatisfied with the game’s sales. i just think its weird that this article is lamenting about the nonexistence of a kind of game that very much exists.
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      The article is arguing that these types of games DO exist.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I think the article is more of a call to action to focus more on these types of games, especially as a first foray. don't build your dream as your first game or get 2+ years in the weeds and all that.
Ekaros 3y ago
I don't actually believe this sort of middle is missing in market. There is plenty enough of them. And these day they qualify as small games. Middle games are step or two above these. But they suffer from needing both budget and good marketing. But cannot afford either unless they accidentally become hits... AAAs can push both as marketing will bring the sales to fund itself and development.
rspoerri 3y ago
Who wants to buy a middle class game, when you have more daily deals on high quality games then you can ever finish in your free time? It seems to ignore that the distribution channels, the long term availability, the international access, dont have an influence on how to release and monetize a game. The few examples shown are some of the extremely few, very lucky projects that probably made money.
- zem 3y ago
  i do! i got a steam deck recently, and picked up a bunch of big name games on sale, but i've been spending all my time playing "brotato" and "dust: an elysian tale" because they are the distilled essence of fun gameplay in a way the bigger and ostensibly higher quality games are not.
  - rspoerri 3y ago
    I do to. But we are a minority among the player base.
- archagon 3y ago
  Why see an indie film when you can watch a blockbuster Marvel movie?
sandworm101 3y ago
30-hour is qn "epic" game? If a game provides lese than 100 hours of fun then it should be called junk imho. Aim for that "middle" if you want, but i wont buy your game. A developer that cranks out a dozen little games will inevitably rely on trickery and deceptive marketing in order to convince consumers thier games are worth anything. Most of the games i play are from a developer dedicated to the continued improvement of a single title across many years. Factorio, subnautica, prison architect ... such games take focus. Entire careers can be dedictated to improving a single game (minecraft). The modern indi market demands long term commitment, not fly-by-night studios attempting is get in and out in months Among Trees burned many bridges with indi gamers willing to buy into games early. Or you can develop mobile games powered by addiction and microtransactions. I guess that is a "market" too.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  From a player perspective, you're wrong. Go play something like Outer Wilds, you'll finish it in a few hours, and the game will never be the same after you finish, but it will leave an impression as strong or stronger than 10,000 hours in Factorio. From a game publisher perspective, you're right, you want to create "lifestyle games" that players can put 1,000 hours or more into. These games are more likely to sell because YouTubers and streamers will find a niche publishing content for these endlessly repayable games, and that will attract a lot of eyeballs and drive a lot of sales. If your game is "just" an incredible story and experience, then a lot of people will experience it by watching their favorite streamer play the game, and then they will never play it themselves. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIqz5xmQKnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIqz5xmQKnc
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    Outer wilds is not a 30-hour game. Ive replayed it many times. It is full of interesting, replayable, content.
    - BreakfastB0b 3y ago
      You’re confusing Outer Worlds with Outer Wilds, both confusingly released around the same time. Outer Wilds is an indie game where exploration and knowledge is the entire point of the game. It unfortunately has zero reply value as once you’ve pieced together the mystery and how to end the game it’s over. I say unfortunately because it’s honestly the best game I’ve ever played and I sometimes wish I could receive just enough blunt force trauma so I could experience it for the first time all over again.
mkl95 3y ago
> Yet, despite all the limitations of the 1990s, the guys at id Software could make 13 games in 1 year. > In today’s post I want to explore why new indie game developers plunge themselves into much longer game development cycles. The industry has essentially stretched us to cut out one of the most important stepping stones between tiny games and multi-year projects. This has caused developers to have incorrect assumptions, wasted resources, and burnout. If anything, productivity is much higher today. There are small shops out there shipping dozens of simple games a year, mostly in the mobile industry. On the other hand, making and shipping a high level cross platform game is a gargantuan task. A small company can easily spend 5+ years building a game and still disappoint their fans. If you want to know what making AAA games at an understaffed shop is like since the mid 2000s, look up Bethesda's documentary
freddie_mercury 3y ago
As someone who lives outside of America, I find the article's implicit assumption that every videogame developer is American makes many of his arguments less convincing. Like, I understand that $120,000 isn't a lot for a team of 3 Americans. But that's a pretty good amount of money in Poland, Brazil, or Vietnam. So why don't we see these "missing middle" games coming from those places? Sure, American publishers aren't interested in writing small checks... But what about Chinese or Indian publishers?
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  What’s interesting is that with national markets there’s a bit of product market fit. A good example is Japan; there are a lot of Japanese games developed that have good domestic product fit but zero appeal internationally. Poland actually had CD Projekt Red, but Cyberpunk 2077 from that studio was perhaps one of the greatest dumpster fire releases of the current decade. Don’t know about India, but a lot of Chinese development is gacha-based with limited western appeal. (It also does not help that the CCP censors are not particularly fond of video games.)
  - skynode 3y ago
    It's quite disingenious to talk about the failure of Cyberpunk 2077 while discounting the massive success of The Witcher from the same studio
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      It’s the most recent release and the Witcher 4 is projected for 2026.
  - bb611 3y ago
    > Cyberpunk 2077 from that studio was perhaps one of the greatest dumpster fire releases of the current decade That may have been its critical reception but the game was wildly profitable for CDPR: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/04/17/cyberpunk-2077-broke-cdprs-profit-record-triple-the-witcher-3s-launch-year/?sh=14fa5d3059d0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/04/17/cyberpunk-...
mattlondon 3y ago
Tl;Dr: because everyone wants to get obscenely rich from doing it. Fair enough. I guess the whole start-up billionaire phenomenon thing has changed people's outlook (Google, Facebook, Minecraft etc). Understandably everyone wants to do something once, make a huge pile of money from it, and then never have to work again. Personally I'd be quite happy to work on a game for a month as a vacation-project/side-project and "only" make 15k from it.
quadcore 3y ago
What is a middle game? The biggest misconception game developers generaly have about games is they think they are content like movies/series amd music. That is that the average player plays hundreds of games, one after the other. Games are successful or failed killer apps. Like any other software mind you. The average player spend 88% of his time / money playing a very few hits like Minecraft. Which solves your middle-games paradox: those just don't sell anymore. In other words, if you'd make a Commander Keen today, you'd sell 3 copies to your grand-ma (yes grannies play games now). There is always those who come to tell: I have hundreds of games in my Steam library. "Yes me too". Yes you do and on average you guys still spent 88% of your time / money on a handful of them. They are exceptions of course. There is a line that's somewhere but nowhere near "games are content"
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >The average player spend 88% of his time / money playing a very few hits like Minecraft. if you're making a console/PC game, 12% is a lot of time to capture, and it's still a huge market. the "middle game" as described in this article is still a very small scope, even if it's not necessarily more profitable than alternatives. $10k is selling 2000 copies (+ more to cover Steam's cut, so 2700-ish) of a $5 game. Those aren't crazy numbers and is pretty much a failure to any game with more than 2 people on staff.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
At the time Doom was literally the only [FPS] game in town, not the case now. If I'm gonna spend my time on a game, I get to choose very carefully among the very best offers. Cost doesn't really come into equation, $69.99 vs 90 hours of my life isn't even comparable.

168 points by wrelsien 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

The article references a study about games earning a median revenue of 10k. https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic But reading between the lines I think it’s driven by porn and visual novels

deadbeeves 3y ago
Arguably that should be even easier to make. Find a good artist who's willing to take a bit of a gamble, program some excuse gameplay, usually some sort of puzzle game, and you're pretty much set. If your audience knows what they're there for, really the game is just a vehicle for the eye candy.
- jowea 3y ago
  Although I'm not sure it will fulfil the goals of making middle games the post mentions like building team expertise. Unless you're doing a very unusual city builder I guess.
  - deadbeeves 3y ago
    You won't build technical or design expertise, but I can see it being something that's easy enough to do as a side gig or as an experiment to see what it's like to publish a game on Steam or wherever. You can use that to decide if you want to invest more effort into it, while also making a bit of money. Low risk, low difficulty, low reward; perfect for learning. To be honest, "erotic city builder" is such a novel concept that now I want someone to tackle it.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      While I can’t argue against the idea of an erotic city builder I feel like it’s antithetical to the actual doom guy advice
brucethemoose2 3y ago
And many of those games that aren't porn or straight asset flips are... undesirable. And they will crowd out your middle game. 12,653 games were released on Steam in 2022[1]. I don't even want to know how many are released on Android/iOS. This is not 1992 where you need a assembly wizard to even make a game, and while the author tried to address this, the fact that any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out seems like an unavoidable elephant in the room. 1: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/ https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
- two_in_one 3y ago
  > any middle game will almost certainly be crowded out eBay and Amazon sellers have a trick for this: listing zillions of variations or combinations. Not sure if game devs already figured that out. Probably some of them did because 12k looks a lot.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Looking at the app stores, Android/iOS devs definitely figured it out. I think straight up relisting would be harder on Steam, at least at this point in time. It's not quite to the point where there is so much sludge that Valve staff can't even handle community reports.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
qwery 3y ago
I'm not sure what's "between the lines". The chart shows the bulk of games released (~12000) being limited to the 4 of their 8 categories which have the lowest median revenue. Those categories being: (Visual Novel, ~4000, $1k), (Sexual Content, ~4000, $2k), (Dating Sim, ~2000, $3k), (Management, ~2000, $4k). The other 4 categories have a tenth of the releases and higher revenue. So there's a huge amount of "porn and visual novels" that are driving the median revenue down.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I think it’s mixed. Their blog has a little data tool. Note that their chart doesn’t seem to show most game types.I presume this is because they do much worse. If I do a quick check for games since 2022, games with sexual content made a median of $1.6k whereas non sex games made $296. If we use their advice to only check games that cost at least $10: sex games make $17k and non sex games make $11k. So maybe not so bad. Most of these games are selling about a thousand copies it seems. Of the games released since 2022 that made at least 10k (4260 games) only A third were sex and dating sim games
- tomcam 3y ago
  Thanks for this. What is the management category?
johnnyanmac 3y ago
nothing wrong with porn. Some adult games have great gameplay.

jowea 3y ago

This focuses a lot on the production/offer side, but is there really all that much demand for the size of game advocated for? Aren't those publishers asking for bigger games because that's what the market is looking for?

qwery 3y ago
Other than the explanation in the article (big businesses work with big sums, for one thing) -- game publishers (particularly at the big end of town) are notorious for being dead wrong about what customers want and have consistently demonstrated that they decide what the market wants and then try to make that the case. See: single-player games are dead, the only type of game in the future will be live services, Sonic, etc.
- jowea 3y ago
  Yeah but I don't think a indie studio has the marketing budget to convince consumers that this is what they want.
  - qwery 3y ago
    No, I was responding to your questions, specifically: > is there really all that much demand for the size of game advocated for? Yes, people do buy and play small games. > Aren't those publishers asking for bigger games because that's what the market is looking for? Obviously, there is demand for big games because big games sell. But the publishers focusing on big games doesn't mean that there is only demand for big games. There are multiple reasons why publishers would not be interested in small games or small studios.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Sonic? Sonic is barely relevant IP any more.
  - xcv123 3y ago
    The new Sonic films grossed $700M and they are selling millions of copies of new Sonic games. It's still popular and printing money for Sega.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

The point about making modest games as a educational experience/alternative to paid classes is pretty good. What some successful devs seems to do is make a "mid game" Early Access prototype, learn as they go, and if it seems to work, grow it into a bigger game. I really like this approach, as its like having your cake and eating it. The dev gets an "excuse" for barebones features in a release and free alpha testing. Escape bridges are not burnt. The game builds up a following and a small revenue stream. And then it gets a free 2nd launch, with all the algo/pr benefits of a full launch, at any arbitrary date, which is impossible for non-EA games.

TylerE 3y ago
Except it seems like most EA games these days never actually get built much beyond the EA launch, and then after 6-18 months of radio silence, some random version gets tagged as “1.0” and the dev then disappears. Early access is, at least for me, starting to a signal of poor quality. Certainly when the EA release is barely beyond a tech demo.

ehnto 3y ago

I generally agree but I think he misses a glaring societal driver in inflation. $40k in 1986 was probably pretty rad. In 2023 300k revenue split across a small team is not going to pay the bills, even before the marketplaces and taxes take their cut. On 300k something nearer 120k will actually land in their post-tax/post-fee pockets to pay for their food and electricity that year. Split across even just three people, that's not yet a sustainable business.

cableshaft 3y ago
> $40k in 1986 was probably pretty rad. According to this inflation calculator[1], $40k in 1986 is equivalent to $112k today. [1]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
- ghaff 3y ago
  Inflation calculators aren't the whole story for specific comparisons. $40K was probably a pretty good salary for an engineer /software developer with the (mostly) necessary credentials and some level of experience in 1986. (That's about what I earned as a product manager for a computer company with prior work experience and two grad degrees at that time.) Software developer salaries in the US, especially on the West Coast, have largely outpaced other engineering salaries as well as professional compensation more broadly.

derobert 3y ago

The article describes middle games as "'middle game' should only take 1 to 9 months to create and can be profitable (or at least not a money sink) because it is expected to earn in the range of $10,000 to $40,000." Am I understanding that right? A reasonably competent developer could make at least twice that in salary, with far less risk. So that's not really profitable, once you remember opportunity cost (and especially if you risk-adjust it). The ones that take a few days can be a weekend project. The longer projects you'd be hoping become huge, and very profitable.

helloplanets 3y ago
As mentioned in the article though, a middle game would be a stepping stone that provides hands on experience of creating and selling such a game. You'd most likely be working on a small portion of a bigger game at a salaried job, without really being able to accumulate the needed skillset to jump into a larger game developed on your own terms.
qwery 3y ago
Yes, building and releasing a game that turns a profit is, in reality, a success. As a programmer, you can absolutely make more money more reliably by getting a job or working freelance. The problem the article is addressing (I think) is that this reality does not seem to inform the popularly held beliefs and expectations of (inexperienced?) indie game developers, and the effects of that.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >The problem the article is addressing (I think) is that this reality does not seem to inform the popularly held beliefs and expectations of (inexperienced?) indie game developers, and the effects of that. Reality doesn't inform a lot of creative endeavors. Writing some tech book (or really books more broadly) is almost certainly some way below minimum wage task from a financial perspective unless it makes your company notice you more, it brings you clients, etc.
whstl 3y ago
True for some cases, but not everyone embarking in those Gamedev journeys are competent developers able to land those jobs. If you see testimonials, they're often people coming from different walks of life, doing a micro-game (often following a tutorial) and then deciding to stop everything for a few months or even years. Doing those mid-level games is arguably equivalent to taking a low-paid internship.

qwery 3y ago

I totally agree with the message but I want to raise a few points: Cost of living. The market is saturated. The market being saturated pushes it to be (even more) hit-oriented. 'Saturated' as in a sponge held at the bottom of a full bathtub. You can keep releasing more games but the people you want to buy them (let alone play them) aren't going to quit their second job to find the time to buy and try your weird little games. This is not the middle. The author is talking about small games. It may be the middle of indie game development, but across the whole landscape, the "missing middle" would seem to refer to the "single-/double-A" studios/publishers/games that died out between the launch of the PS2 and the release of GTA IV. id Software is an exception and makes a poor example to follow. Studying wild success stories is not without merit, but is -- if you are interested in how to do the thing successfully -- ultimately a trap. id was (among other things) in the right place at the right time. There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way. You cannot make a game as radical and captivating as DOOM was. You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz. You might say there was very little opportunity for any individual to do so back then as well, but then we are back at exceptions being bad examples.

chii 3y ago
> push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way. Which is why game mechanic and gameplay is where the boundaries are, not computational efficiency or photorealism (or even, artistic direction or production value). I imagine that prior to Jonathan Blow's indie hit "Braid", people were also imagining that the technological ceiling has been hit and an individual (or small team) cannot compete with the AAA studios.
- qwery 3y ago
  Sure, but most explanations of id's success (including in this article) hinge on (John Carmack's) technological prowess (and DOOM melting your face off). I'm not entirely sure what your point about Braid is. An individual or a small team could not compete with triple-A studios in 2008. Anyone thinking that then was right.
3y ago

phendrenad2 3y ago

I'd love to see a histogram of all game budgets for every game on Steam. I think the missing middle would be immediately apparent. We'd see the AAA games in the $250-500 million range, a few scattered games below that, and then an absolutely huge mass in the <$10,000 range. I don't know why people don't make more games in the $100,000-$1,000,000 range. I suspect that it's hard to find investors for small projects like that.

bagels 3y ago
Because it's exceedingly difficult/unlikely to see a return.
bsder 3y ago
$1 megabuck per year is roughly 4-5 developers and nobody else. Yes, you can argue that some developers would work for less than that, but any programmers capable of generating a good game can then go get jobs somewhere else. And you need art assets. And music assets. And sound effects. And ... This is why there is no "middle". Earning $5 million on a game (not $5 million per year--$5 million total) is absurdly successful on Steam.
- messe 3y ago
  > $1 megabuck per year is roughly 4-5 developers and nobody else. In the US.
  - whstl 3y ago
    This is also assuming that those developers would be otherwise able to land 200k-250k jobs in traditional software development. Which is a bit rare today, as the bulk of people working in small games today isn't made of ex-developers, but of newcomers learning from tutorials with limited/niche experience. And maybe that's the reason it's hard to get an 1M investment, and the reason the market is a bit saturated.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  What developers? There is Unreal engine. If there are any developers, they work on web site, internal tools etc.

loveparade 3y ago

Mobile didn't exist in 1990s. Most of these games have moved to mobile, which is much easier to monetize.

lordwiz 3y ago

I generally feel like we can encourage building up more game development platforms, to solve such financial issues. One such platform was roblox, which i previously worked on, the ease in which they onboarded us to develop a game is pretty good. And due to no upfront cost, developers can quite make some money from scratch and the distribution will be handled by the platforms itself. The downsides i see is the cut they will take from us from the profit as well as bending towards their rules. For advanced development we are still limited by the technological limitations provided by the platform, so it kind of limits our overall ambition too.

whstl 3y ago
Don't we already have the analog of a "big platform" distributed among a few huge companies? It's mostly app stores provided by Apple/Google/Microsoft/Steam/Sony, with the needed tooling provided by Unreal/Unity. We also have cuts and we have to bend to their rules.

BigglesB 3y ago

I’m a solo indie developer trying to do almost exactly what this article advocates for and tbh, I’m not sure it’s been the right move. I’m almost 2 months into a project which essentially boils down to an iteration of Asteroids & have a demo up on Steam, but while I’m really pleased with it so far, I’d be surprised if the game even makes $1,000 at this stage, let alone $10,000. I’d be very happy with the latter though as I’m treating this very much as a learning experience, not the least in terms of getting my head around the marketing & community building side of things. I’ve also worked on a game which I’d consider to be a “modest success” that took 2-3 years with a friend & sold enough copies for my share to so far pay (almost) £24k/year, which as others have mentioned isn’t exactly a competitive salary for a software developer generally. In particular, while I can probably build small games in the 2-3 month timeframes suggested (especially if each is an iteration on the last), don’t forget all the “marketing admin” & trailer making & so forth. That’s also definitely not enough time to build enough wishlists to get any Steam visibility etc. Still, definitely timely food for thought for me personally!

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
It's a similar situation across all of the arts. The tools are now so widely available and there are so many people doing the work - with varying levels of skill - that the real distinguishing factor is marketing. Not quality of output. Not speed of output - as long as that's above a minimum. But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend. DOOM was dropped into an ecosystem of PC magazines and BBSs and almost sold itself - literally with the shareware release. It had almost no obvious competitors. There was some ad spend, but not a huge amount. Today there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of small/medium games available across multiple platforms. Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be. Meanwhile the AAAs have a budget for carpet bomb marketing. Skyrim spent around $15m, which is an insane sum.
- adnzzzzZ 3y ago
  >But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend. Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games. You can't buy your way to the front page of Steam. Either your game is good and people buy it, play it and share it, or it isn't and then the algorithm will not promote it. There are many things you can and should do to try to nudge the algorithm your way, but by far the best is having a genuinely good game. If the game's quality isn't good you'll mostly be wasting money if you try to approach it with the marketing mindset you have. >Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be. It's actually easier than ever because very few games are exceptional, as has always been the case. The offering of exceptional released games doesn't increase just because the total number of released games does. If there suddenly was an AI tool that let anyone finish a game very easily, you still wouldn't get a significant increase in exceptional released games because there aren't that many exceptionally creative people in the world.

langsoul-com 3y ago

I think the authors strategy is only feasible if you've built out a few middle tier games, have processes and optimised the build loop. Just because you must release at least 2-3 mid games, or more, per year to break even

qwery 3y ago
Yes, and the point is that you need to do that if you want to do that. Diving into big projects prevents you from working on small projects, gaining that experience and establishing those processes.

dmonitor 3y ago

This article seems silly to me, considering that plenty of these games already exist. A friend of mine just released their game, Settlemoon after a year of development, while they did other work. According to Steam charts, it's made them around $20k since launch. The issue is clearly discoverability, not that developers just don't release small games.

codingcodingboy 3y ago
Apparently the only marketing this game had is a single reddit post and discord, I expect to find something on twitter for this type of games.
- dmonitor 3y ago
  they have a twitter account, and have been promoting there. they bought some ads on various websites too. they aren’t dissatisfied with the game’s sales. i just think its weird that this article is lamenting about the nonexistence of a kind of game that very much exists.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    The article is arguing that these types of games DO exist.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I think the article is more of a call to action to focus more on these types of games, especially as a first foray. don't build your dream as your first game or get 2+ years in the weeds and all that.

Ekaros 3y ago

I don't actually believe this sort of middle is missing in market. There is plenty enough of them. And these day they qualify as small games. Middle games are step or two above these. But they suffer from needing both budget and good marketing. But cannot afford either unless they accidentally become hits... AAAs can push both as marketing will bring the sales to fund itself and development.

rspoerri 3y ago

Who wants to buy a middle class game, when you have more daily deals on high quality games then you can ever finish in your free time? It seems to ignore that the distribution channels, the long term availability, the international access, dont have an influence on how to release and monetize a game. The few examples shown are some of the extremely few, very lucky projects that probably made money.

zem 3y ago
i do! i got a steam deck recently, and picked up a bunch of big name games on sale, but i've been spending all my time playing "brotato" and "dust: an elysian tale" because they are the distilled essence of fun gameplay in a way the bigger and ostensibly higher quality games are not.
- rspoerri 3y ago
  I do to. But we are a minority among the player base.
archagon 3y ago
Why see an indie film when you can watch a blockbuster Marvel movie?

sandworm101 3y ago

30-hour is qn "epic" game? If a game provides lese than 100 hours of fun then it should be called junk imho. Aim for that "middle" if you want, but i wont buy your game. A developer that cranks out a dozen little games will inevitably rely on trickery and deceptive marketing in order to convince consumers thier games are worth anything. Most of the games i play are from a developer dedicated to the continued improvement of a single title across many years. Factorio, subnautica, prison architect ... such games take focus. Entire careers can be dedictated to improving a single game (minecraft). The modern indi market demands long term commitment, not fly-by-night studios attempting is get in and out in months Among Trees burned many bridges with indi gamers willing to buy into games early. Or you can develop mobile games powered by addiction and microtransactions. I guess that is a "market" too.

Buttons840 3y ago
From a player perspective, you're wrong. Go play something like Outer Wilds, you'll finish it in a few hours, and the game will never be the same after you finish, but it will leave an impression as strong or stronger than 10,000 hours in Factorio. From a game publisher perspective, you're right, you want to create "lifestyle games" that players can put 1,000 hours or more into. These games are more likely to sell because YouTubers and streamers will find a niche publishing content for these endlessly repayable games, and that will attract a lot of eyeballs and drive a lot of sales. If your game is "just" an incredible story and experience, then a lot of people will experience it by watching their favorite streamer play the game, and then they will never play it themselves. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIqz5xmQKnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIqz5xmQKnc
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Outer wilds is not a 30-hour game. Ive replayed it many times. It is full of interesting, replayable, content.
  - BreakfastB0b 3y ago
    You’re confusing Outer Worlds with Outer Wilds, both confusingly released around the same time. Outer Wilds is an indie game where exploration and knowledge is the entire point of the game. It unfortunately has zero reply value as once you’ve pieced together the mystery and how to end the game it’s over. I say unfortunately because it’s honestly the best game I’ve ever played and I sometimes wish I could receive just enough blunt force trauma so I could experience it for the first time all over again.

mkl95 3y ago

> Yet, despite all the limitations of the 1990s, the guys at id Software could make 13 games in 1 year. > In today’s post I want to explore why new indie game developers plunge themselves into much longer game development cycles. The industry has essentially stretched us to cut out one of the most important stepping stones between tiny games and multi-year projects. This has caused developers to have incorrect assumptions, wasted resources, and burnout. If anything, productivity is much higher today. There are small shops out there shipping dozens of simple games a year, mostly in the mobile industry. On the other hand, making and shipping a high level cross platform game is a gargantuan task. A small company can easily spend 5+ years building a game and still disappoint their fans. If you want to know what making AAA games at an understaffed shop is like since the mid 2000s, look up Bethesda's documentary

freddie_mercury 3y ago

As someone who lives outside of America, I find the article's implicit assumption that every videogame developer is American makes many of his arguments less convincing. Like, I understand that $120,000 isn't a lot for a team of 3 Americans. But that's a pretty good amount of money in Poland, Brazil, or Vietnam. So why don't we see these "missing middle" games coming from those places? Sure, American publishers aren't interested in writing small checks... But what about Chinese or Indian publishers?

bobthepanda 3y ago
What’s interesting is that with national markets there’s a bit of product market fit. A good example is Japan; there are a lot of Japanese games developed that have good domestic product fit but zero appeal internationally. Poland actually had CD Projekt Red, but Cyberpunk 2077 from that studio was perhaps one of the greatest dumpster fire releases of the current decade. Don’t know about India, but a lot of Chinese development is gacha-based with limited western appeal. (It also does not help that the CCP censors are not particularly fond of video games.)
- skynode 3y ago
  It's quite disingenious to talk about the failure of Cyberpunk 2077 while discounting the massive success of The Witcher from the same studio
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    It’s the most recent release and the Witcher 4 is projected for 2026.
- bb611 3y ago
  > Cyberpunk 2077 from that studio was perhaps one of the greatest dumpster fire releases of the current decade That may have been its critical reception but the game was wildly profitable for CDPR: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/04/17/cyberpunk-2077-broke-cdprs-profit-record-triple-the-witcher-3s-launch-year/?sh=14fa5d3059d0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/04/17/cyberpunk-...

mattlondon 3y ago

Tl;Dr: because everyone wants to get obscenely rich from doing it. Fair enough. I guess the whole start-up billionaire phenomenon thing has changed people's outlook (Google, Facebook, Minecraft etc). Understandably everyone wants to do something once, make a huge pile of money from it, and then never have to work again. Personally I'd be quite happy to work on a game for a month as a vacation-project/side-project and "only" make 15k from it.

quadcore 3y ago

What is a middle game? The biggest misconception game developers generaly have about games is they think they are content like movies/series amd music. That is that the average player plays hundreds of games, one after the other. Games are successful or failed killer apps. Like any other software mind you. The average player spend 88% of his time / money playing a very few hits like Minecraft. Which solves your middle-games paradox: those just don't sell anymore. In other words, if you'd make a Commander Keen today, you'd sell 3 copies to your grand-ma (yes grannies play games now). There is always those who come to tell: I have hundreds of games in my Steam library. "Yes me too". Yes you do and on average you guys still spent 88% of your time / money on a handful of them. They are exceptions of course. There is a line that's somewhere but nowhere near "games are content"

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>The average player spend 88% of his time / money playing a very few hits like Minecraft. if you're making a console/PC game, 12% is a lot of time to capture, and it's still a huge market. the "middle game" as described in this article is still a very small scope, even if it's not necessarily more profitable than alternatives. $10k is selling 2000 copies (+ more to cover Steam's cut, so 2700-ish) of a $5 game. Those aren't crazy numbers and is pretty much a failure to any game with more than 2 people on staff.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

At the time Doom was literally the only [FPS] game in town, not the case now. If I'm gonna spend my time on a game, I get to choose very carefully among the very best offers. Cost doesn't really come into equation, $69.99 vs 90 hours of my life isn't even comparable.