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.
>Not quality of output. Not speed of output - as long as that's above a minimum.
Maybe in 2D, but I still doubt it. Quality animations that stick out are still a hard problem to solve and many tools that tried to solve that problem back in the day (Flash, Spline, etc.) don't suffice these days. If you can emulate the look and feel of a hand drawn animation without requiring 1 year+ from your artists to produce content, there's an entry point.
For 3D is absolutely isn't true. Or at least, it is only true in that 99%+ of indies struggle to even achieve AA scales of graphic in a timely matter, or with a small enough team. There's plenty of room for efficiency here if you want to pursue that (but yes, that efficiency will itself require years of work on not-directly-games).
> many tools that tried to solve that problem back in the day (Flash, Spline, etc.) don't suffice these days. If you can emulate the look and feel of a hand drawn animation without requiring 1 year+ from your artists to produce content, there's an entry point.
Studios still use Flash (now called Adobe Animate) to create great looking art very quickly. I think Massive Monster used Flash for Cult of the Lamb. Klei still uses this process:
>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.
Having a good game is table stakes for sure but I'd not ignore what the OP is saying about marketing spend relating to marketing effectiveness. You can't buy a frontpage slot on Steam but you can do simple things like adding translations that will get your game shown in more regions. Which is quintessentially a marketing activity.
Then you have the ability to affect things through off-platform marketing. If you make use of that to find success the organic discovery on Steam compounds the result.
A good game is table stakes though and good relates significantly to the market segment your game is in. Understanding that is also part of marketing the game.
> Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games.
I would disagree with this, you can absolutely buy your way to the front page of Steam if you know what you’re doing. On Steam, everyone’s front page is different so it’s perhaps not as obvious as hitting the front page of HN though and it’s in the interests of Steam & most successful indies to paint a narrative of purely organic growth leading to great success.
You don’t necessarily have to have an “exceptional game” but you do need to know your audience, what they like & how to reach them. Even then, once you’ve got that stuff down, you don’t just build it & hope they’ll come via the Steam algorithm. That’ll only really help you once you’re over a certain tipping point & it’s getting to that tipping point where the judicial use of a sensible marketing budget will make all the difference.
Bringing it back to the points raised in the article, it’s very much the believe that “all you need to do is make an exceptional game” that causes indie developers to sink years into a single make-or-break game which almost certainly won’t recoup its development costs.
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.