How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit

What Hacker News said

Recommends angarg12 · 2017-11 · on ““I thought I could ship at least 700 units to stay in business””

GDC: How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit [this video] TL;DR: prepare for this to happen, and build a long tail of games/sales. I don't want to sound mean but I don't think anyone should buy the game because they feel sorry and he is begging. I can't condone it. It has become trendy for people to make GoFundMe campaigns or write articles begging people to help. Assume people do buy your game because they are sorry, and you manage to get by. Is that how you intend to create a sustainable business? What about other indie devs who failed, maybe even harder? Should they also write articles with their sad story? What about those who don't make it to the top of Hackernews? Should wh

Recommends KronisLV · 2023-03 · on “Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?”

> None of the big (or small) moneymakers in last few years came close to "10 years" of popularity and probably won't. I don't think much of the software out there behaves like this either. It might apply somewhat to game or software franchises, though. For example, LibreOffice has had multiple major releases, but has been around for a bit over 12 years, a bit longer if you include the predecessors. Ubuntu LTS is usually supported for around 5 years, but Ubuntu as a whole has been around for almost 20 years. Similarly, Counter-Strike was released over 20 years ago, even if there's been multiple separate games over the years. It's more or less the same story for Battlefield and Call of Duty. T

Recommends Firmwarrior · 2023-06 · on “Making Games”

I see this sentiment a lot on Twitter and Reddit, but it's a an overpressured Copium tank You can see a ton of polished, fun games that weren't successful by just skimming over lists of games on phones, Steam, or Nintendo Switch. I'm not going to bother linking any of them, since you're just going to nitpick and insult the work of random people you don't know, and it won't be a productive path of conversation. That said, you can redefine your idea of "success" a little and make a comfortable living: [this video]

Cites caxco93 · 2024-04 · on “Developer gets Steam game assets stolen by Play Store copycat”

To be honest, no. It does not look like a game 50k people would buy in early access to me. I would assume it has to be with some streamer playing his game [0]. Regarding your other question, I think that yes, you might have a high conception for what it takes to actually sell some games. Not to disparage on this other dev for example [1] because it sure looks like the games are well polished, but these games definitely look very unappealing to me and I'm pretty sure a lot of people as well. IIRC he talks about how people really have a fondness for specific topics in games and how one can leverage that. [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]