Aren't (commercial) movies the same though? The decisions are made by producers, and their main task is to figure out how to make the movie appealing to the largest possible audience, so that investors will get maximum RoI.
I know this is difficult to get but people watch a movie and then watch another one. They dont do that with games (not in an economically significant way). People spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on one game. They spend their life on 2-3 games. Its a product, not content.
This is not true for me. I think I buy more games than I watch movies at this point. Movies of the games are under ten dollars because I pick them up on sale, then I spend a couple hours on them and feel fine with it, because it wasn't very expensive. Based on the front page of Steam, I don't think I'm the only one. I have a couple I keep going back to, but probably on average, I spend about ten hours on each game I purchase, and I would guess I'm not the I only one.
I think you’re probably an outlier here though. I’m the same, I buy and play a game for an evening, but I don’t know anyone else personally that also does that.
I would definitely not expect a game designer to target for this type of audience.
I really don't think so. It might be true for sandboxes which draw players in by letting them create new objectives for themselves, or competitive games with high time investment requirements, but it's definitely not true for linear singleplayer games, and in my experience most games are like that.
What is your source for that?
Games are different, f2p mobile games are an equivalent of slot machines working on pure addiction, for some indie games you pay for a short unique experience, there high budget single player games where they have a campaign you play and that's it.
Disclaimer Ive seen a little bit the game, I dont know the extent of its success.
1) most likely, just look at his success rate in terms of how many of his games did succeed.
2) now the definition of success. if he took 5 years to develop the game, he has to net a very (very) minimum of 20 millions to start becoming successful. Remember, you can't just pay one salary developing software, you have to cover: salaries (top engineers and top artists) + (the most important) investment for the next games + bad years + grow you company (that's the point of a company) + hardware + R&D to stay at the top of your game + retirement money because you cant do this after 38. 20 millions net is a very optimistic number, I wouldn't be happy with that, I would be happy with netting 50.
Did he net 50 millions? If yes, then yes he was starting to become successful. If he did this 3 games in a row, now he wasnt lucky.
Now dont get me wrong, this game is a wondeful piece of art, but it's likely not a succesful company.
> most likely, just look at his success rate in terms of how many of his games did succeed.
I don't think you ca boil it to some formula like success rate. Journey got funding partly from the big critical success of some of those earlier ones.
> grow you company (that's the point of a company)
OMG... No. The point of the company is to provide satisfactory profits to the owners. In case of many smaller companies, the point is not even that, but instead "to provide a place of work for owners where they can work on their own stuff and on their own terms".
Plenty of people don't care about infinite growth. People are not bacteria.
