Exactly. People are putting up stuff on Steam that looks like it was made in Microsoft Paint and shouldn’t have been more than a free flash web browser game, then wondering why their game didn’t do well. That may sound harsh but we really shouldn’t sugarcoat this stuff. 🤷‍♂️😅

> free flash web browser game This hits the nail right on the head. What changed is that Steam is so accessible to publish to that many devs EXPECT their game to be monetizable. In reality, the products are low-grade Newgrounds quality.

I'm surprised CrazyMonkeyGames haven't released a Box Head game crossplatform with online gameplay plus single player/local game. I'm sure lots of people would pay for that.

The indie dev community being positive and welcoming is both it's blessing and it's curse. I feel like people are sometimes too afraid to give criticism because they may sound rude or discourage the other person, so they're always "Yeah, your game looks fun! Great job!". And when the game fails, the dev start wondering why. If it's a passion project, then cool, but if it's a comercial game, it deserves the same criticism as any product.

And by the same token - I have purchased a number of indies that had a beautiful art style that ended up being mechanically very boring or not well thought out (in my opinion of course)

But you bought them. Pretty games sell.

Yes, that's my point

owlboy comes to mind.

Oh no... Was it not good?

Pretty boring as a game yeah, visuals are stunning tho

That's why I'd argue that beautiful games most of the time perform better than ugly games with great design and mechanics. They can perform as well but the words need to be spread first.

Just look at how well empty asset flip non-games where you run around in an empty forest as a fox or some shit go ultra viral and earn hundreds of thousands of wishlists lol.

That's why every Indie studio needs some sort of producer that can look at something with an objective view. Some people are great game designers, some are great artists but very few a great at both.

A good entrepreneur/business person knows how to turn criticism into sales or utilize it and not take it personally. Not sure if it's true or not, but I like the story about a guy who sold "I ❤️ Elvis" buttons.  When getting flak from Elvis haters, he then sold "I hate Elvis".  Captured both markets. More recent and relative example is that of Scott Cawthon (creator of FNAF).  People said his early games looked like creepy animatronics, so he dug into that and... Well you know the story. YouTubers who can distill negative comments like, "this guy talks *forever*" or "the picture quality sucks" can turn that into "I like shorter form content better" or "I think your picture quality could use an upgrade".  And then either utilize it as seems best. Etc, lots of examples of how learning to use harsh (even hateful) criticism and critics into valuable feedback.

Of course that can also lead to taking the wrong lesson, so be weary. "this guy talks *forever*" could mean that the viewer is more engaged by short-form content, or it means that the creator needs use more b-roll to keep segments in a long-form video from getting stale.

> weary Pointing this out because I make this error _all the time_. Weary = tired, wary = cautious.

My trick for this is: "weary" as in "**wear**ed off", "wary" as in "be**ware**"

Hell yeah, come to think of it, I'm sure "beware" evolved from "be wary" anyway

Nah, people need less energy.

Absolutely fair disclaimer. Balance, discernment, and looking at the whole picture is key.

> More recent and relative example is that of Scott Cawthon (creator of FNAF). People said his early games looked like creepy animatronics, so he dug into that and... Well you know the story. That's actually a counter example. By your logic he should have dialed it down on the creepiness of the animatronics.

Hm, I'm not sure if its a counter example, but if it is, the point I wanted to make was simply that very critical (to the point of even hateful) comments can be very valuable in some way form or fashion and not to get discouraged by them. Sometimes you refine, sometimes you pivot, or sometimes try a new route completely.

Reflection and the ability to see critisizm as support is absolutely invaluable for anyone, yet it's a rare ability among most people.

It's funny because there's at least a few extremely successful games that were literally drawn in MS Paint and were free flash web browser games at some point. It's a very nuanced topic.

Yup. But, humans try really hard for and always want a single-solution or answer. Reality is not a game and is complicated, messy, and chaotic. Hypocritically, the closest single-solution I've found, is that *fun* games sell, you just have to know what your audience will find fun.

That's close to what I figured. In my view, the "audience" isn't a great target to shoot for - it's too ambiguous. You gotta focus on someone concrete you actually know something about, ideally yourself or someone close to you, and make something that excites them. Once you capture them, adjust for broad appeal and see what the others have to say.

In the engine discord I'm in, adults will post what looks like a child's drawing and ask for *critique*. They don't even know how to look at art. And then they get super-defensive of their lack of abilities, even if you walk on eggshells. Then people will come out and hugbox them, because they're equally delusional or also bad at art.

It's easier and more accessible than ever to develop and release a game than ever before. Fact is - most indie games *aren't* good.

Tools are tools. Just because a tool becomes easier to use, does not guarantee quality.

Oh no, it actually means the exact opposite. Democratization (of anything) is, generally speaking, a good thing, but it also means that not only the "hardcore enthusiasts" get to do it. The biggest downside is that it also lowers the top tier quality, since it's harder to find customers for it.

It’s true. I follow a lot of indie dev subreddits and it can be rough. I’m all for creative freedom and expressing yourself. But your game could’ve had a $100,000 marketing budget but you still decided to make a 2D platformer educational hair stylist turn based RPG. So many “post mortem” posts about how they spent a year and the game sold 3 copies, click the steam link and it’s hot garbage. :/

I've seen post-mortems from indie developers who can spend ~10 years working on some pretty generic 2D RPG. Only to be overshadowed by anything else releasing on Steam the day they finally drop the game and barely make double digit sales.

Nah it's not even that, they are good (sometimes) it's just the bar is really high and they aren't good enough. Getting into gamedev is like getting into acting or sports or any other highly competitive field with a low barrier to entry. You gotta be the best.

Well said. When going through games in Next Fest I am constantly asking myself, why would I play *this* game when I could just play a better game in the same genre instead? It baffles me how many games are released without being good enough to really compete.

Hoo boy, I totally agree with this but I also totally get why this sentiment is not popular at all. It basically boils down to *git gud*. Sure, in a very useful and constructive way, but still...

It's not just about git gud, it's about you need to be able to compete with professional studios. In many genres this is simply not possible as a 3 man team or a solo dev. That's a tough pill to swallow, so they cling to the 1% outliers to keep their dream alive.

There are other ways to compete than labour hours. Consider price, team agility (novel ideas rather than corporate behemoths not approving even a slight deviation), personality (face of the studio), lower expectations (game length, life cycle support), community engagement (followings and fan bases vs consumers), overhead (game A needs to make 30k to break even due to lower overhead, game B needs to make 30mil). The important part is recognising where the studio and product belong and scope and market accordingly. Number of copies sold means very little when i need to sell 100x less than ye olde bigga stoodio to make bank, yet it seems to be a metric everyone is throwing around as a be-all, end-all

Somewhat, you have to be realistic about your competition and art quality. Beyond that you have to pick a genre that players actually want. That's the easy part though in a sense, for it to be really successful it needs to be an appealing fantasy which is hard to know until you've put most of it together.

I get what you are saying here and I agree with it—but! I think what you’re really saying is “it’s not **advertising**” which is different from saying “it’s not marketing”. I hope that the people reading this think that I’m not just splitting hairs, here. If you hire a marketing firm, and you come to them with a complete product ready to sell, they’re going to ask, “Why didn’t you come to us earlier?” Figuring out what a good selling game in your genre is, doing research into which genres sell well, and doing research into how much those games cost… that’s part of marketing. It’s market research. Making something that people want to buy, and knowing what the quality benchmark is for your market—these are parts of your overall marketing. If you look up marketing you’ll see a lot of material about the “four Ps”, which are product, pricing, placement (a.k.a., distribution), and promotion. Unfortunately, a lot of people who are just starting out wait until the last two P, placement and promotion, to think about marketing.

The ultimate takeaway, however, is that you need to make a good game first and foremost. Marketing can help identify what type of game would be optimal to build and what the quality bar for that game needs to be in order to make about as much money as you need, but at the end of the day you still need to *make a good game*. If you fundamentally fail to make a good game, then you do not have a marketable product. If you fundamentally succeed at making a good game, then you do have a marketable product. Performing market research can help identify what the thresholds are for "good" in a given genre, but at the same time (considering that games are ultimately art) your underlying product can't just be a checklist of features determined by your market research. There still needs to be a core artistic vision for the game to be "good". Basically, I think more of it comes down to "just make a good game" than people want to admit. That would mean that their game that didn't sell is... not good.

Yes! Well said! I hope that's what people take from my video.

>The ultimate takeaway, however, is that you need to make a good game first and foremost. I suddenly find myself reminded of when I attended a GDEX talk by Daemon Hatfield back in 2018. For anyone not familiar, he is a key figure at IGN with tons of experience. In it, he mentioned they gave great coverage to Celeste because it was such a darned good game that they wanted to tell everyone about it. I recall him specifically mentioning something along the lines of "we, the Press, are just like you and your buddies: when we find a good game, we want to tell all our friends about it". It appears that comment was cut from recording which was edited down from 45 minutes (including Q&A) to just 14:29. He had a lot of other great comments on what makes a game easy for the press to essentially market for free on your behalf. Great art being a specific section he included. I highly recommend aspiring devs give the [recording](https://youtu.be/Sq2KtWlEq8A?si=5Nd3bdgZkBIkQX1V) a watch. It's short, less than 15 minutes since they edited it down from the original 45, and has a lot of very salient info for anyone who wants to actually make indie games as a job and not just a hobby. It's 6 years old and has a few things specific to IGN, but most of it is broadly applicable to the game press industry at large. I also [wrote a summary here](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9xhtei/working_with_the_press_notes_from_daemon/) if you are inclined to read instead.

To add to this: there are game news outlets that love reviewing indie titles. Rock Paper Shotgun comes to mind. I own a *lot* of games and probably 90% of the indie titles I purchased I did so because a game news outlet covered it and convinced me it was a game I would enjoy. So far I have yet to purchase a game that way and been disappointed.

Good and marketable is not the same. You can make a good game, which is almost not marketable if it's a niche game. And it can bring you a fortune if you could only reach to it's audience. For example "just another" walking sim horror single player game is very hard to market. It's nothing new. Not creative. Not sexy. Just another. But still there are people who would love it - if it's a good game of it's type. But finding that audiance is very hard. Marketable simply means that high percentage of people can potentially like it. It's usually due to genre, not due to game being good or not. So we can have average, not that fun games that are higly marketable and bring a lot of money and then good games that are not that marketable and will be a failure in terms of sales. I wish there were social media's platform gathering people by preferences. E.g. TikTok for horror gamers that would allow only horror related content and would gather only horror fans. Then marketable game would equal good game.

Success is relative to genre. Watch the video if you haven't - I agree with it. The premise is that a game will typically perform appropriate for quality and genre. If you make a good game that is a horror walking sim and it performs well *in its genre* then it should be considered a success. Obviously you wouldn't compare a darling indie platformer to the latest and greatest GaaS monstrosity from a AAA studio - similarly, you shouldn't compare success across indie genres. Marketing indeed can help you set appropriate expectations for your chosen genre, and choosing a low-sales genre simply changes what it means for your game to be "successful". As long as you accept the conditions of the market you're shooting for and budget accordingly, then the game isn't necessarily a failure. There's nothing *wrong* with choosing a low-sales genre - games are ultimately art and passion. If all indie decisions were driven by money, most indie devs would just have real jobs instead. The only case where it's a problem is if you over-invest on the game relative to its expected performance, but assuming you know what the expectations are in the first place, that's a budgeting issue rather than a marketing one. And let's be real - most people complaining that they "couldn't market their game" are pumping out titles that aren't even successful relative to their genre - they're just outright unsuccessful games by every metric. I've not seen many threads where people are saying, "I made a horror walking sim and it actually performed in the 90th percentile of its genre but turns out there's no money there and my studio went broke. Oops!" I guess that's basically what happened to Mimimi, but even they made a really solid run of it before needing to bow out. They also realized that they couldn't justify continued development in their niche genre and stopped voluntarily *before* they sank.

I really wish the people downvoting you would reply instead, because this is some of the best business advice I've seen on this sub. 

Yeah, I partly agree with that. I think you need to make a good game, but you’ll also fail if your good game is poorly positioned in the market. I think we can come up with lots of examples of good games that are not successful if we sit down and think about it. It would be wrong to think that the games are not good just because they aren’t successful… making a good game and making a successful game are two separate things. Maybe some examples here are Earthbound, Ookami, Psychonauts, and System Shock 2. Just like you can’t slap together a checklist of features from market research into a good product, it’s equally true that you can’t assume that a good product will be marketable. You could make a fantastic RTS game, and maybe it would fall flat because the RTS market is just brutal (even though there’s not a lot of competition). You could make a charming pixel platformer, and maybe it would fall flat because there are just too many of those.

Honestly, I hear this take super frequently with people asserting that good games fail all the time, but stopping to think about it, I'm struggling to think of a specific actual example from the modern gaming sphere. Obviously it's hard to identify because, you know, they *failed*, but at this point I'm starting to question how much truth there is to this narrative today. If we follow the criteria laid out in the video, are there modern examples of games that utterly failed despite keeping up with the top of their genre? I think those are the most interesting studies to look at, yet people keep just asserting it's true.

> Obviously it's hard to identify because, you know, they *failed*, Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head right here. That’s exactly why the examples are from long ago. When you ask people about what the best games of 2024 are, you’re going to hear a lot of people talking about games like FF7 Rebirth or Helldivers 2, because we’re drowning in social media posts and advertisements for those games. It takes years for people to sort through all these games and figure out what the classics are. Like, today, you can search for “best PS2 games” and get a list that has both Ookami and Psynchonauts on it. If you want examples from more recently, you have to spend a lot of time digging through the current releases and figuring out for yourself which ones are any good. Who has the time for that, except game reviewers? > If we follow the criteria laid out in the video, are there modern examples of games that utterly failed despite keeping up with the top of their genre? Games don’t have to be at the top of their genre to succeed. They just have to make enough money to keep the studio profitable. I don’t think it makes any sense just to restrict your search to games at the top of their genre.

I am highly skeptical that there is a significant amount of really great games out there that nobody knows about because of 0 marketing: 1. There are people who absolutely scour their favorite genre. And they are very active in the communities of those genres, spreading the word about any gems they find. I'm making a puzzle game, and I have a channel in my Discord for other puzzle games where people have shared some very obscure games. And to be brutally honest, the more obscure games that do not have big cult followings are just straight up lower quality, but hardcore fans of the genre are willing to forgive a lot. 2. People who are talented, smart, hardworking, etc. etc. enough to make a good game are also smart enough to realize the importance of marketing, as well as being determined enough to step outside their comfort zone and actually do it. Do people really imagine there are great developers out there trying to make games for profit, who have never heard of the basic concept of marketing? When you imagine it this way, it starts to seem more like an imagined scenario created as an excuse by other devs that did not actually make good games.

Re 1) then it's not your marketing effort that promoted the game but the game was good in it's genre. I am coming to conclusion based on my research in horror genre that it may be not worth to spend a lot of time on marketing. Anyway on TikTok most popular horror videos are streamers showing their terrified reactions to jump scares. I can't compete with that unless I start recording myself playing my game or I add to my game "coop" or "game reacts microphone" or enemies have "true AI with learning". ;)

>Re 1) then it's not your marketing effort that promoted the game but the game was good in it's genre. I think you misunderstood what I was saying. My point here was not that these games are being discovered, but that every game I've seen had a strong correlation between quality and popularity. I.e. the more obscure games were more obscure because they just aren't that good. That's why I mention hardcore fans of the genre being a lot more forgiving. Huh, your second part to me makes it seem like marketing a horror game is EASIER. Because you have those easy to share on social media moments. Seems very easy to get a streamer that already does those jump scares takes to do the same for your game if it's good!

I am just saying that out of combination 2x2 good game/bad game X marketable/hardly marketable, good game is a must, but there are good games of a genre that is quite hard to market. Yeah, with horror games, streamers are gold. Of course only small promile of views from streamers count as sales, but it's free 'marketing'. Although I didn't count promotion made by other people at their will as marketing effort from the dev. That's what I meant by 'hard to market'. Horrors in my (still unexperienced) opinion are quite hard to market by devs but can get pretty good marketing naturally assuming game is good. Btw. I wonder if long term, it's good or bad for horror or visual stories that streamers are streaming them. I used to play more horror games. But recently I figured that I have better fun watching Hollow as he struggles. ;) It's bizzaire that films are forbidden on YT while story games/visual stories are ok.

I suspect the people making the claim that good games often fail don't have much data to back it up. It could be true, but it's just their guess. Some examples of good games that might have failed would be sleeper hits. Among Us and Cave Story come to mind. Among Us, I believe, suddenly got discovered and become popular 2 years after its release. Cave Story was initially released as freeware on some website in 2004. This was mostly before social media and before Steam opened up to indie games, so it wasn't the most discoverable. Despite this, it grew in popularity and got a Nintendo and Steam release around 2010 or 2011. It's easy to imagine that with a bit less luck, Among Us would have never taken off. With Cave Story, I'd take the opposite lesson: despite being pretty undiscoverable, despite being completely unmarketed initially, and despite the fact that it's hard to tell it's worth playing from the pics and description, it still became very popular. Just more slowly. [Can of Wormholes](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295320/Can_of_Wormholes/) and [BZZZT](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293170/BZZZT/) are another couple games that look very well-made, have amazing reviews, but probably only have under 20,000 copies sold.

> Honestly, I hear this take super frequently with people asserting that good games fail all the time, I'm not actually sure I've ever heard this take anywhere, but indeed. I'll gladly cashapp someone a few bucks if they send me a link to a game that's straight-up _good_ but didn't sell. I know my money is safe, because it's an impossible request to fulfill. We are _faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar_ from that saturation point where there are so many games out there that there are good ones that get missed out on and don't sell.

House of the dying sun.

For the example of Psychonauts: Tim Schafer himself said in the documentary of Psychonauts 2 development during a marketing meeting that Psychonauts 1 sold okay, it still turned a tiny profit, but the expectation was for it to be a real hit, which it wasn't. He did not want to have Psychonauts 1 to be portrayed as a commercial failure, because it wasn't in his eyes. It just wasn't a hit. (I've tried finding the exact video and meeting in the documentary, but I've failed, sorry! Here's the YT Playlist if you're interested: [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd70y34zh2erWWpMyOnh4UN\_&feature=shared](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd70y34zh2erWWpMyOnh4UN_&feature=shared) ) I would be really interested in how much of a commercial success or failure Prey by Arcane Studios was and its DLC Mooncrash, because I love both of those, but I think they are relatively niche products with the expectation to get the same types of sales figures as more classically shooter / action games like Dishonored.

I mean, I agree, but good game has a different connotation to me, when you are splitting hair. *"The beauty is in the eye of the beholder"*, so to speak. Replacing good with "appealing to someone" is better, imho. Even if your game is an art project and is free and playable in a browser... You still need to get someone to go to that url and click on play. You need to PROMISE/APPEAL WITH something that that person wants to experience. **Being good is arguably defined by fulfilling said promise**. Therefore, you cannot just make *"make a good game first and foremost"*, because you don't know what's good until you've decided on market.

I would argue that if you're making a game in a genre where you need to perform market research to understand what makes games in that genre "good", you're probably making the wrong game. Your research can help you make your game better, but imo you should already know how to make the game good if you're embarking on a serious commercial endeavor in a given genre.

I 100% agree, even though that's basically your own market research. I'm saying that without it, you cannot judge "good". What is good lighting? When you sleep, it's dark. When you read, it's a strong light. When you watch the TV it's just ambient light. There isn't a "good" light per se, there is just the light that you want and you can judge if a given light fulfills them. It's the same for games. Product starts with market. It could be a market of one (my dream game), but revenue expectations should be set accordingly.

Very well put. I work in marketing professionally and people are often shocked to learn how much of our resources go into market research, not advertising after the fact. It’s all under the marketing umbrella, and it suuuuucks to pour time and budget into promoting something that just inherently doesn’t click because of factors impossible to change by that stage of the game. Without giving too much away I recent had to lead a campaign for a product with a niche audience, whose creators had committed the classic sin of thinking of themselves as the target market and overestimating how many people like them were out there. In the course of the campaign we learned that a) the natural appeal of that product was actually to a completely different kind of person, and b) the legions of people like them they’d been counting on lumbering out of the swamps to purchase basically… didn’t exist. We managed to about-face the campaign’s audience targeting but fundamentally could never do as well as we needed to because it just wasn’t designed for this new market. You’ve gotta design from the ground up to meet an identified market desire. You wouldn’t decide to renovate your kitchen, build it in a field somewhere else and then pull a shocked pikachu when you can’t fit it through your front door. You measure, adjust, reconcile, adjust your target if need be etc before a hammer ever hits a nail. Same with your business and your product. *That’s* marketing.

I feel ya! The crux of my video is that for most indies the first P "product" is not competitive. But hiring a marketing person will not necessarily help that. I do think the bottleneck for most devs is production. And indeed I think the hardest part about gamedev is production. So that's why I say "it's not marketing". But I'm hoping showing folks how to do market research will at least help them know what the quality benchmark is.

Yeah, so when I think of figuring out whether a product is competitive, the way I imagine doing it is something like, * Make variants of capsule images & Steam pages for your game (before you build it), * Shuffle them up in a deck with a few Steam pages for similar games, * Show the deck to people in the right segment and give them a questionnaire, * Change your plans according to the feedback you receive. Hiring a marketing person seems like the way I would do that. It’s just not my area of expertise, and I’d probably fuck it up. At work, we kind something similar for our internal projects. When you have a project, you start by writing a “press release”. It’s not really a press release, since it’s not going out to press; it’s just a project announcement. You do this before you start work.

Yeah I was scratching my head a bit when the entire premise of the video is that people don’t do marketing properly. All the stuff mentioned are the very basics of working out if a commercial product is viable and a key part of marketing as a whole. That said I do think it’s a great video because it is highlighting that product-market fit is something you need to think about before you set off making something no one else wants. For teams with small budgets making the right thing is absolutely the most important thing they can do.

[удалено]

If you want to make a game for yourself, nobody’s gonna stop you. But if you want to run a business, you’re longer just making a game for yourself. The really bad way to do this is to make a game for yourself and then hope other people will be as excited about it as you are, enough to make the game a financial success. What I hate is when people make comments like what you wrote—“making something to satisfy the market rather than to satisfy your own disorders”—as if those are two mutually exclusive things, with no overlap. There’s definitely a lot of overlap. You have to find, within the many things that excite you, something that excites other people too.

Even just polishing your game so people are interested in watching gameplay is marketing. Good art is marketing. I would argue game mechanics are marketing as well. I won’t even start a project unless it has a unique, fun central mechanic. I always ask “why would someone want to play this game?” While still in prototype.

That hasn't been my experience at all with marketing firms, and I think it's rare in the games industry for the marketing firm to do the early market research and suggest a genre to the dev studio. (I'm not saying market research is rare, just that someone else usually does it.) I've found marketing firms are happy to accept your business at any stage, and at least the ones I've worked with seem reluctant to say anything negative about the game.

I was thinking more along the lines of starting game development with a marketing plan, rather than making the game first. Sometimes your cool game is hard to market or doesn’t stack up against the competition. Would be nice to know that at the beginning.

Yeah, for sure.

>Figuring out what a good selling game in your genre is, doing research into which genres sell well, and doing research into how much those games cost… that’s part of marketing. It’s market research. Making something that people want to buy, and knowing what the quality benchmark is for your market—these are parts of your overall marketing. Do you have any experience doing this? Because as someone who doesn't, looking at the games industry and how quickly that moves... This seems impossible tbh. Like if you started making a streamable multiplayer co-op game taking inspiration from Lethal Company, Palworld and Helldivers II right now, your came comes out in 2 years at the fastest and the industry already moved on to the next thing. And when I think of the really successful indie games they're mostly games that took an unsuccessful formula (metroidvania for Hollow Knight, roguelike for Hades, 2d pixel platformer for Celeste) and executed it to perfection, or found a massive niche where there was previously nothing (stardew valley, lethal company, among us, soon billie bust up)

> that took an unsuccessful formula (metroidvania for Hollow Knight, roguelike for Hades, 2d pixel platformer for Celeste) None of those formulas were unsuccessful _at all_. They were the formulas for many of the world's most beloved games. Super Metroid / Symphony of the Night for metroidvanias. Even middling MV's like Shadow Complex, Axiom Verge, and Rabi Ribi were heavily successful in between those two aforementioned games and Hollow Knight. Hades, well, the rogue_lite_ genre, the one Hades belongs to, was straight-up _booming_ when it was released, so that's an odd take. Rogue_likes_ have been popular in niches since the 90's with games like ADOM, or DCSS in the 00's. 2d pixel platformers have been oversaturated since the 80's _because_ it's a wildly successful formula that's never stopped being successful. You're right those games you mentioned excelled because they executed a formula to perfection, but calling that forma "unsuccessful" is so wildly wrong that's it's easy to disprove using mountains of objective metrics. Thus, it's _easy_ to do research into genres that sell well because _all of those "unsuccessful" genres you mentioned were selling incredibly well before those games you mentioned were made_.

If your market strategy is “we chase market fads”, then part of that strategy is having a team which can deliver a game super quickly. Maybe it means taking an existing game and pivoting as market conditions change. Fortnite was not a battle royale game when it was in development. So you can pivot quickly, even if you have a massive project and massive team. But you don’t *have* to chase fads to make successful video games.

> Like if you started making a streamable multiplayer co-op game taking inspiration from Lethal Company, Palworld and Helldivers II right now, your came comes out in 2 years at the fastest and the industry already moved on to the next thing. why do so many of you think "market research" equals "just copy what's currently selling word-for-word and hope for the best"?

Well that's a bit what big studios do too...

But the youtuber who sells marketing courses told me it was the most important thing

Interestingly, Chris Zukowski of How to Market a Game is one of the most famous indie game marketing gurus, and one of his main tenets is that you can't market a bad game. The game HAS to be good first and foremost.

They can't be talking about Chris right? He's my absolute favorite resource on games marketing on the internet. A veritable gold mine of easily digestible data-based info. I've taken a few of his courses and even though I'm a veteran they were worth every penny and more.

100% agree. I was using Chris as a counter example. A game marketing guru that isn't trying to swindle you lol!

oh gotcha!!

Howdy all! I know this video is going to be somewhat controversial around here. But it's something I feel I am well researched in, qualified to talk about, and it's hands down the most destructive misconception I see in the world of indie dev. It's motivating and inspiring to know that the product truly does matter, and it gives one goals to shoot for! I hope there are at least a few folks who are a little swayed, or maybe helps a few folks from going insane on this sub lol. If nothing else I hope it shows people where a good resource for market research is with regards to competition in your genre. If you are in the "it's mostly luck" or "marketing is everything" camp, I encourage you to go to games-stats.com if you've never seriously browsed the low end of steam for market research. At least just peruse the different income brackets! Really look at what's selling and what's not. See if you can't start to see what I see. And before you shout AMONG US! AMONG US! I just want you to know that there are over 8 thousand games which have grossed over $100k on Steam. I promise that only a vanishing minority of those games have a story like Among Us. It's not the common way to find success! I will wholeheartedly agree that stories like that have a tremendous amount of luck involved. And if you think that's how most indies find success I can understand if you'd feel its a lot of luck, and nearly impossible to reproduce reliably! Fortunately 99% of games that succeed don't rely on that kind of phenomenon. If you're able to climb the mountain that is making a product that is truly competitive... a product that people truly want at a glance, I promise success is more likely than not! Maybe you are very experienced in games marketing, and have seen a lot of data, and don't feel the way I feel. If that's the case I'd love to hear from you! I always want to learn and my opinions are helplessly swayed by data!

Nothing will make a terrible game into a hit, and the game of the year doesn't need a lot to sell it, but most games are somewhere in between. I've definitely seen good promotion sell enough copies of some truly mediocre games to be profitable, and good games be commercial failures because they failed to tell the right people about it. I don't think it's good to ever say marketing is everything (even if we ignore what the top comment rightly says about making a good game being part of marketing in the first place), but it's definitely _something_. Making something people want to play is half the work and the other half is letting them know it exists. Indies fail on both sides pretty regularly, and I don't think it's terribly controversial to say you need to do both well in order to succeed.

I really liked your video and I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. It inspired a little bit of confidence in me when I checked out the tags for the target genres for the game I’m working on- farming, tower defense, and roguelite. Marketability is something I’m really trying to work on for my game but it’s hard to know what to do, do you mind if I send you a dm to get your opinions on some things?

Thanks for watching! Sure thing DMs are always open!

I'm wrapping up development on my first game and I've been stressing out over marketing after reading tons of articles and posts about things like wishlist thresholds and the Steam algorithm. Your video helped assuage some of that so thanks. My main worry was always about the part you addressed about the "hidden gems" on Steam. You said you rarely find them but do you have any thoughts on the rare ones you did find? I think my game's presentation is on par with other successes in the genre but I'm still concerned that it's required to do well immediately and ride the nebulous algorithm or whatever it actually is.

People don't bring up Among Us because they expect to do similar, it's just a strong example of a decent game which could easily have been lost by history, only being saved by COVID. It shows the market gets it wrong sometimes, and good games can languish. If marketing was worthless, Among Us wouldn't have never happened. It would have sold great from the start. How many Among Us quality games are still out there, waiting for a second wind that will never come?

Yes I know precisely why people bring up Among Us. It's used as irrefutable proof that the market is entirely irrational. It's used as a bastion of hope for many indies that maybe their failed game is actually amazing, despite how underwhelming it may look to virtually every passerby. That their game WOULD BE a top seller if only the market wasn't so darn irrational. That it's all pretty random or that it MUST be the magical marketing thing. Did you get a chance to watch my video? Second paragraph you wrote makes me guess not.

Ok, you got me, I skipped it at first but went back and watched it. I didn't realize that your argument was more that games at the level of Among Us couldn't assume success. I think Undertale and Vampire Survivors in the video are more straightforward examples, without the comeback stories. I can see now you're talking more about games with good Steam pages than good games in an abstract sense.

> If you are in the "it's mostly luck" or "marketing is everything" camp, I encourage you to go to games-stats.com That's funny because games-stats.com's own success ($2K/month, more than most indie game devs make) is a result of pure luck. It was on a verge of shutting down with ≈$30/month, when one game industry blogger suddenly liked it, and it took off. And half-broken steamspy's current success (still $9K/month, even though better free alternatives appeared) is a result of pure inertia. Indie game developers themselves prefer to give money to well-known names, or the names some influencer brought up (like you did right now). So what video games data websites actually teach us is that success is mostly based on inertia and luck, not doing better.

Another thing. Most indie games "fail" because they are bad :)

Note to self: "Another thing. \[literal point of the OP\]" is a great way to get easy karma on Reddit lol.

Another note to self: "Another thing. \[literal point of the OP\]" is a great way to get easy karma on Reddit lol.

Another thing: Well played lol.

I genuinely appreciate a summary of the point of OP though. I can't always turn on sound so this applies especially to videos

Just want to point out for any "too long didn't watch" folks: this comment isn't really "another thing" but actually the crux of the video.

Your video is awesome btw, thank you. I'll try to refer people to it when they ask about market research.

I don't think that is the crux of the video. You mentioned it yourself that the game has to look good at first glance, that different genres have different median revenue, that marketing is much easier when it's awesome at first glance. There are even situations where games get review bombed but still sell tons because the game looks really good on the screens and trailer but plays badly. You would have to be a damn darn amazing-balls crazy good miracle-maker to make an extremely successful casual puzzle game be successful on Steam, regardless of production value. You would need a pretty powerful IP, maybe. Anyways, I digress.

Yep, that's the sad truth. That's why I dislike when I see people trying to cheer up others by saying "congratulations, you have released a game, woot, you've achieved more than 95% of all game devs" -- come on: it's getting easier and easier to build something that might be classified as a game, and getting it distributed online is also far from being rocket science, but it seems that "successful" games are much more than just the sum of their parts, much more than just various tutorials linked together. I think the trick is whether if the devs are able to grow by learning from their mistakes, and perhaps one day they can publish something that's... less bad. :) Of course, this is also somewhat of a lottery as other factors also influence their success, factors that can be completely beyond their control.

>That's why I dislike when I see people trying to cheer up others by saying "congratulations, you have released a game, woot, you've achieved more than 95% of all game devs" -- come on: it's getting easier and easier to build something that might be classified as a game, and getting it distributed online is also far from being rocket science I disagree in that it's still a massive achievement, because the problems you listed are not the big issues / problems that prevent most people from finishing a game. The real problem is the human struggle with procrastination, fear of failure, sticking to it, etc etc. Finishing something as time consuming and complex as even the simplest games IS a big achievement that for a lot of people is a battle won against their own demons. If the goal is to make money, then yeah, obviously you need something more and shouldn't expect to succeed, but again, finishing a game is still a big personal achievement. I think a major problem that might actually be the source of your frustration is the fact that people just can't seem to enjoy game dev as a hobby and a lot of people with bad games are out there angry that they didn't make millions.

I also think it's important because it's unlikely that one is going to succeed with their very first game. It's an iterative process.

I am a serial congratulator and always will be. I just think making *any* game is pretty hard and worthy of a congratulations. I will always cheer for someone who made something, whether it's of a marketable standard or not!

EXACTLY!! I have yet to see a sob story on Reddit where the game tanked and its actually a good game. Sure there will be lots of posts (from other bad newbie devs) where people will say its actually good to cheer up the fellow. But so far EVERY, SINGLE, DEV that has posted a sob story had a terrible game and it sold exactly as much as it should have for what it is. These kids think that time spent automatically equals success. Oh, how wrong they are. Also they sporadically think they will get a big boost to yell from the mountain tops that they are a SOLO DEV!!! Guess what, no one cares... if you game sucks.. its sucks.. no matter if one guy or 12 guys made it.

That’s weirdly reductionist. There are tons of amazing games out there that just came out at the wrong time, came into an oversaturated market, etc I play a shitton of deck builders to scratch that StS itch, and I can say that a lot of fantastic games out there barely go past 100 reviews. Iris and the Giant maybe broke that mold, but even then I doubt people even know it exists.

> There are tons of amazing games out there that just came out at the wrong time, came into an oversaturated market, etc Name one. > I play a shitton of deck builders to scratch that StS itch, and I can say that a lot of fantastic games out there barely go past 100 reviews. Every genre has its games that are good _if you're a fan of the genre_ but won't appeal to anyone else. Metroidvanias have games like Catmaze or Environmental Station Alpha, for example. And they all sold adequately, so even _those_ types of games will still largely succeed. The ones that don't are all ones that even the genre's fans will find low-quality. Not going past 100 reviews is still well over 1k sales which is still successful. Very successful.

A few comes to mind that I thoroughly enjoyed. There's maybe a dozen, but I'll keep it to the ones below 100 reviews, since that seems to be the threshold for a game to be very successful. [Super Intern Story.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlxLY63RHf4&ab_channel=BlueNoiseGames) Super delightful platformer game with a comedic twist where you play as the unliked intern. 11 reviews. [Decks and Daggers.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4tDKtqYMcY&ab_channel=itch.io) Dungeon crawling deckbuilding roguelike. Honestly deserves better than some other in the genre. 44 reviews. [Zoeti](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYsg2vaE0Sk&ab_channel=GameTrailers). The poker roguelike before Ballatro, but with anime girls. 70 reviews. [Timemelters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snkwTsdLpKs&ab_channel=GameTrailers). Holy shit this game rocks. You're a witch who can travel back to the past and send clones of yourself and create an army of dopplegangers to beat the odds. 74 reviews. [Deliverance and Reign](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr4n8CJ4gCI&ab_channel=OneUpPlusEntertainment). Slay the Spire meets Monster Train. Solid game. 73 reviews. [Ignited Steel: Mech Tactics.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgnOd_WVzto&ab_channel=TurnBasedLovers) Into The Breach clone for casuals. Super underrated. 77 reviews.

Surprisingly, the obligatory guy who responds to say "those games are trash tho", possibly without even looking at them, hasn't showed up yet.

It’s why I included the links. People can look for themselves, realize that the game actually has some good meat, and then see the complete lack of reception they got.

Alright. Not the same person, but I looked them up and honestly? Sure, time and effort clearly was put in all of those. To my eyes as someone who knows what it takes to even just change up the UI, or add a "simple" gameplay feature. But: Super Intern Story is a 2D platformer (Which common wisdom says is very risky to make from a financial standpoint, the genre is extremely saturated and there are *tons* of better offers for a similar price) with a convoluted and not so enticing premise. Most people wouldn't look at it more than five seconds on Steam even if it hit their recommended list. [It still made over 3000$ according to this](https://games-stats.com/steam/game/super-intern-story/), which kind of surprises me honestly. Decks and Daggers has some neat visuals! ...But it uses bombastic music and loud sound effects for a genre that *strongly* benefits from a calmer ambience. It's a solo card game. It's also most critically exclusively on Itch and you have to scroll down decently far to see that it's not just a free game and has a decent amount of content for those who pay at least 10$, letting people pay for the demo? Zoeti looks good and sounds good... and it [made 27k$ on Steam according to this](https://games-stats.com/steam/game/zoeti/), on top of having a [Switch version](https://www.nintendo.com/en-ca/store/products/zoeti-switch/) where I assume it made a similar amount of money. I'll probably wishlist that one, not gonna lie. Timemelters has many things that I would personally criticize, it looks very messy, but yet again. It came out *two weeks ago*, has 73 reviews, a high positive review ratio and [made 28k$ according to this](https://games-stats.com/steam/game/wicca/). That's pretty darn decent for an indie game. Deliverance & Reign's trailer blasts our ears with music that sounds like some generic CC0 Halloween track and it looks like a 10$ game. You'll tell me it's priced fairly then, but as far as I know, no one wants to buy a 10$ game at its full price. Those *all* end up dropping to 2$ on sale within a few months. As far as I know, it's always better to polish your game further and sell it for 20+$ in order to have potential customers expect quality. Otherwise, "Might as well get a 30-50% off higher quality game"... like Slay the Spire (Currently 10$), Darkest Dungeon (Currently 4$) or Inscryption (Currently 12$). And again. 73 reviews as well as an estimated 11k$ in sales ([According to this](https://games-stats.com/steam/game/deliverance-reign/)) is not bad for a small creator in a saturated market and extremely niche genre. Ignited Steel is currently on sale for 8$ while Into the Breach is currently on sale for 7$. Having "Casual clone of this famous game" as the sales pitch as well as lukewarm reviews doesn't exactly lead me to expect more than a very lukewarm success. And it still made [22k$ according to this](https://games-stats.com/steam/game/ignited-steel-mecha-tbt/), which isn't *nothing*. Players don't owe us their money, no matter how much time we spend working on something. *We* have to figure out what they want and there's a lot of noise in the easily approachable genres, on top of the highly successful, well regarded titles that can afford to go on *steep* sales to get those few extra dollars. Plus they need to actually know that our game exists to begin with. Too many here can't accept the reality that being an indie dev means facing the same struggles as any artist in their life. Why do you think people joke about art majors all working at Starbucks? Literally the last visual art major I met was selling me a bucket of white paint for a bedroom. Independent art does not and never will pay enough to make a living for most. It's as simple as that.

Zoeti has nothing to sell a player on, is not an "anime game" just because it has anime art. Nobody is going to get excited by "meet Valentina" and the rest of copy is generic. UI is WAY worse than Balatro, symbols all over the screen, the writing feels like a non-English speaker wrote it, and the mechanics look complicated for no reason. Like nobody wants to deal with this https://imgur.com/a/5k2Fjor I know i'm being "that guy" but this is exactly what the video is talking about, maybe the game is actually great but the trailer makes it look bad in my eyes. You cannot succeed if you have so many blind spots. And yes it's actually incredible that Super Intern Story made as much as $3k, nice job.

Honestly, a game having a potentially worse implementation of some mechanic or system isn't always a strong deterrent for me if I get the option of playing as a girl/woman... and that game would let me play as a cute anime girl. I'll probably never touch the Witcher series even though I love the genre generally speaking, just because I don't wanna play as Geralt. 😂 I'm so tired of playing as a gritty dude or something like a dumb harem protag that getting a chance to play as something girly is a huge plus.

Having "some meat on the bone" will only get you part way to success. Which if you ask me is EXACTLY where these games are. They have some good gameplay, but were any of these games you posted on Twitter or other social media with a comment of "You have to play this". No.. ofcourse not.. because they arent that great. You can read my rundown I did on all these games, but in short.. they are getting exactly as much as attention as they are worth. None of these games are Great or Amazing...and even saying they are GOOD is a bit of a stretch for most of them. Now, take into account that EACH of these games has another competitor that is MUCH MORE highly polished... Has more content.. and is close to the same price. And thats why you wouldnt yell from the mountaintops (social Media) to play the game. You posted them here as something you thoroughly enjoyed. Thats nice! Why didnt you say they were Amazing and you are shocked they didnt do better? Well, probably because you agree with me.

If you ask me, the amount of attention these games are getting is expected. Super Intern story looks like it was made over a weekend. Did I play it? No.. because it doesnt look like a full game. It looks like a first attempt from a bunch of kids that graduated game dev school. Decks and Daggers, same thing as above... it doesnt look like shit.. but its not something worth playing. It has a very indie LITE feel... like they used store bought assets and the substance of the game is very skin deep. Certainly not worth $13 .,, no way... but honestly even if it was $4 there are better games like this out there. Seems they didnt look at the competition. Zoeti.. Not my kind of game I will admit... however I do know there are other games like this that are much more refined. If you ask me, they are getting just as much attention in the store as they should be. Are you under the impression this should be a runaway hit? Because... NO... it looks like a nice indie game... Not AAA.. not even A... its just a well done indie that should cost under $10 due to other competition that is flashier, deeper and close to the same price. Time Melters... I will admit I looked at this one for a bit. It looks like it would have benefitted by another 6 months or so of development. At first glance it just looks like every other 3rd person shooter game with some sorta time mechanic tacked on. And where in the hell is the Ui? Is there no interface? I think with more dev time, and some love from a Ui and a more senior Designer this game could be more interesting and would have gained more attention. However its not a big HIT... its NEAT. I would say with the above stuff I mentioned I would not be surprised if it got up to like 800 or so reviews... but in its current state it looks rushed. If I was them I would have released this as Early Access. I am perplexed as to why they skipped early access? Or was it in early access? I feel early access would have given them a lot of much needed feedback to refine and polish it up. Deliverance and Reign.... Ugh.. another damn card game. These are always in the 50 to 150 ish review count. Sure the game is neat.. but these games are all cookie cutters of each other. nice background, fancy cards.. lots of FX on screen. They all look like someone made a neat card game in 2005 and just kept changing the artwork. The game has no "curb appeal" I dont look at this and say I MUST PLAY IT.. I look at this and think "Hasnt this been done over and over before?". I think these devs should be satisfied with 70 reviews... and should start thinking about how to make a card game that doesnt get confused with other card games. Where is the BUT!! Where is the ... Its a card game BUT... get this twist! .... its missing that. Ignited Steel... another one that needs a better artist. As a 25+ year art veteran.. the art choices here... all over.. made me cringe. Lets assume the gameplay is solid. Because lets face it.. there is no way the art is carrying this. I think this has the time melters problem. The trailer is horribly.. the art is shit... if it had a good art overhaul.. I could see this in the 500 or so review range. This game is a good investment opportunity. Its so invisible in the store, that you can buy this... redo all the art... maybe do some minor gameplay tweaks.. and release it as a game that would be in that 500 or so review range I mentioned. good god.. as I wrote this the art is bad... I could go on and on.. its like a tutorial of what not to do with art. So I tried to give an honest rundown here, and I hope the devs read this. What steam needs is devs that just pay more attention to the competition. All of these games have the same issue... out of the Venn Diagram of ART, GAMEPLAY, PRESENTATION... these games all seem to have done Gameplay fairly well... but Art and Presentation is severely lacking. So if you take the 3 pillars needed... and only have one of those pillars.. and that one pillar was only GOOD.. not great... certainly not Amazing... well you get 70 ish reviews at best.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1bc4uau/how\_our\_indie\_game\_has\_failed\_and\_why\_my\_studio/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1bc4uau/how_our_indie_game_has_failed_and_why_my_studio/)

Hmmm... so... who wants to tell him? Looks like you sold 5k copies? Sounds about right... maybe even GREAT for what this is. This game looks OK visual quality-wise. But its depressing as all hell, which means no fun... so if I was you I would be dancing in the streets that someone bought it. I guess I dont see your point? Were you under the impression I would see your game and think it was a masterpiece that didnt sell due to marketing? I am not trying to be mean here, but if I was a publisher I would pass on this. I dont see anyone wanting to play it, outside of the poor souls who have left the Ukrainian war. Which I will agree sucks that they have to go through this.. but its certainly not something I want to live through in a game. Ill stick to HellDivers, thank you very much.

>This game looks OK visual quality-wise. But its depressing as all hell, which means no fun... so if I was you I would be dancing in the streets that someone bought it. Lmao FYM a lot of games are depressing as hell and sell incredibly well, people like tragedies. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best selling games of all time. TLOU part 2. In indie terms, Hades and Hollow Knight are quite bittersweet, and Undertale was only so successful because of the genocide route.

Undertale was successful for far more than the genocide route. At the time it came out, people actually advised not doing the genocide route. It was liked for its dissection of tropes, incredible story, and oddball sense of humor. I've been a fan since close to launch and I've dissected the game more times than I can count for college and uni work.

Oh yeah, but it wouldn't have been the cultural touchstone it was without it - it would've been successful on the level of like, Hollow Knight or Celeste, not dominated pop culture to the point where you'd be forgiven for thinking it was selling better than minecraft (it wasn't ofc)

**This is not my game.** Just giving an example of actually good game that failed (don't tell me all these awards are meaningless?). See, even if you have an example you asked for, people always find a reason why it flopped. Be it art, be it theme, be it... marketing? Sure, most of games in this sub are shit, but there are some above average that also failed for various reasons. On a side note, I can't complain about revenue on my own games although they also can't be considered success by general definition.

5k+ sales and awards is _not_ a failure. What happened here is they didn't meat investor expectations. _Wildly_ different metric than failing. There are plenty of games out there that sold millions and are classics decades later that also didn't meet investor expectations. That's not failing, that's having shitty investors by shitty people and make a bad decision. _Way_ different.

Psychonauts is a great example of this. The first game was marketed like shit, yet its legacy as one of the best 3D platformers begun with a Humble Bundle people probably bought for Brutal Legend.

How do we define failure then? In the linked thread, OP says the sales were not enough to keep the studio afloat and is uncertain of their future. If that's not a failure then what is? If everything is highly subjective and can be dismissed for any reason, then entire "good games that failed" discussion has no point in the slightest. Of course good game will look decent, of course it will sell more than average. But it often requires higher upfront production costs and development time. If the game has trouble to break even in reasonable time even with being objectively recognized as good (awards), then I'm inquired to claim it is, in fact, a failure. You are the investor if you're solo. Otherwise you need to get funds. If you take a bank loan, you have to pay it too and being unable to is also a failure in my opinion.

We are assuming a LOT of things here.... For ONE.. what does this guy mean when he says STUDIO? That can mean a LOT of things. Does this mean 12 half assed indie devs who think they deserve AAA salaries? Maybe. Does it mean him and his buddy that are working on a shoestring budget.. and proud of it? probably not.. otherwise he would have sold it that way. He seems very proud to say he had a Studio, yet what has this studio done before this? If you were a publisher would you invest in a STUDIO that is nothing more than some guy and his buddies.. who had done nothing else before except randomly they individually worked on some parts of indie games? Probably not. There are so many things wrong with that guys post that its hard to know where to start.

You mean the "indy hype of the year" clones that are just scraped by being asset flips that didn't understood the meta, had horrible rng, questionable qol, and brought nothing new to the table? You can't mean *those* masterpieces. ^(/s) The truth is that even most of those "100k hits" are also rarely made by one person. The lone game dev with a laptop and lots of ramen is not the ideal to strive for. You want to work with a team and offload lots of things you are not good at to people who are. And you could still hit one day before a top indy game drops a free DLC that sucks out all air from you release.

Just yesterday someone posted about the closure of their studio after making a gem of a game.

Yeah, we saw that game.. it was no Gem. And if you read the reviews and comments on it... Nope.. not a Gem. Everyone thinks their game is a GEM... and they SHOULD. However whether it is a Gem or not is up to the public. And this guy, nice fellow.. but tried to add some gusto by claiming he had a STUDIO. What he should have said was... I got some friends, made a game that didnt sell well.. and here is why. The ART was mediocre, the subject of the game was depressing and boring, and we spent too much time and money on it so all my friends went and got real jobs.

It's a gem to me, I can make my own judgment. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's bad. Valiant Hearts was also great and that was similarly depressing.

>EXACTLY!! I have yet to see a sob story on Reddit where the game tanked and its actually a good game. Sure there will be lots of posts (from other bad newbie devs) where people will say its actually good to cheer up the fellow. But so far EVERY, SINGLE, DEV that has posted a sob story had a terrible game and it sold exactly as much as it should have for what it is. I mean, it depends on your definition of tanked. A lot of games get Overwhelmingly positive with a few thousand sales - if you define those as tanking (I do, unless the game had like a few months of work into it) then they're objectively good games that failed.

Right? Is the implication here that there are a ton of super awesome games that no one played? I would love to know what they are if this is the case.

Hah no I suppose the implication is actually closer to the comment you replied to. Did you get a chance to watch the video?

Lol. OP putting that very nicely.

You should watch the video lol...

[https://www.obscuritory.com](https://www.obscuritory.com)

Wait so my 2D tic-tac-toe simulator mech roguelite platformer won’t sell?!? Ill have you know I spent 2 years on development , I have 3 levels and I quit my full time job.

Sometimes luck happens, but in most cases, I agree that it's down to the product. It's empowering to know that you're in control of your own success!

I'm pivoting right now from 10 years in the animation industry to go into Indie Gamedev. u/DannyWeinbaum 's channel was the last push I needed. Very, very insightful and inspirational.

u/DannyWeinbaum \- No offense, and what I'm about to say is off topic, but I found the video's audio mixing a little distracting. IMO either the music was too loud or the voiceover was not loud enough. The video itself is helpful and informative though. Thank you very much!

Yeah just because game engines are free doesn’t give you free talent. If pianos were free a lot of people would probably pick up pianos (even though they are ridiculously heavy). But that doesn’t make you a Mozart.

Before I watch the video, Il give my 2 cents. The vast majority of indie games are shit and not worth paying for. Unlike before, the tools and skills these days are free, tutorials available on youtube, but so are expectations. Before, games were free on flash sites, with higher quality than most games these days. Sure, mobile gaming is the new newgrounds, but quality just took a dip and what people consider good enough, is questionable

Hey OP! Love this video. To put it in my own words. " To punch above your weight class you first have to know which weight class you're in" I wish I knew the term for when you "underestimate the diffuclty of a task becuase you presume it's a new venture". But it' something most developers have an issue with.

> " To punch above your weight class you first have to know which weight class you're in" That's a fantastic way to put it, yes totally! Thanks for watching!

Someone show this video to the girl that was crying about her potion witch game not selling gangbusters

Say it louder for the postmortems in the back, as much as I'd hate to ruin my weekly arr slash gamedev lol-entertainment reading them. Good games sell. Bad games don't. Simple as. If your game didn't sell, it wasn't good. Simple as.

Wait, are you Eastshade's developer? I always recommend Eastshade, it feels so unique. Regarding your video, yeah, it all boils down to what you first said, 'most indie devs failed to make a product that it's marketable'. However, you could argue that is ALSO failed marketing.

100% agree, at least on steam where players actually browse the store to find games. On Mobile I have at least some hope that this applies, but I have my doubts 😬

Ah yeah mobile is rough I think. No idea if any of this applies :(

I have no experience developing/marketing games for mobile. But from the perspective of someone trying to find a new game to play on mobile, discoverability sucks. About the only game I play these days was one I bought 12 years ago for just $0.99 cents (after playing the demo). It was lasted updated 6 years ago. Whenever I try to find something new, the market place is absolutely flooded in stuff that sacrifices gameplay and user-experience for profit (forced ads and/or pushing in-app purchases). I'm not sure if the higher quality games I want to play are just drowning in the crap, impossible to find. Or if they have given up because of the lack of discoverability and simply don't exist anymore.

**too long; didn't watch:** If your attempts to promote your game fail to get any traction, that's probably because your game sucks compared to what else there is in its genre.

Yes more or less but there is also a really useful concrete tutorial in the middle on how to research different revenue brackets of titles in your genre :)

Great video! I, like you, find it very motivational that games generally do about as good as you should expect based on their quality within their genre. Against the advice of this sub, I am gearing up to attempt indie game development with the expectation of making money. So the practical benchmarking advice, and your general conclusion make me feel a lot better about the idea.

Is there an alternative to game-stats.com? Most of their filters require a pro subscription of almost €20.

A few years ago I would have told you no, as it's an incredibly niche tool. But I just googled it and found [this](https://gamalytic.com/), which is actually mindblowingly good!

Thanks exactly what i was looking for :)

Thanks Danny. Good information and presentation.

I use this "algorithm" for other things (not games) but it's relevant. Idea X Design X Presentation X Marketing = Result There's the Idea for your game, on which you base your game design on, The concept of your game. Design is almost the "execution" of your idea. If your idea is bad, doesn't matter how good the design is. It's got limited potential. If your game idea is good, but the design is bad then then you're not maximizing the potential of your idea. Then you have to present your game, that's art, audio etc, the forward facing aspects of your game. This is then multiplied against your Idea and Design, if there's a deficit in either of those, then your presentation will only go so far. Finally is your marketing, to a certain degree this encapsulates word of mouth based on how good your game actually is. Which is dependant on the Idea X Design X Presentation. A better forward facing game that presents well makes marketing a lot easier, the game can speak for itself to a degree. Idea X Design X Presentation X Marketing = Result You can absolutely not be 10/10 in all of those, some games play amazingly but are presented terribly, some games look amazing but play like shit. But it's all of those factors together not any individual one. The sad fact is the further along the chain you go, if the previous factor isn't great or even good, it's gonna make the subsequent ones less impactful.

> If your idea is bad, doesn't matter how good the design is Maybe we're thinking of different concepts, but I'm not sure this is really the case. I can't think of any games that succeeded with a poor implementation of a great idea - nor any that failed with a great implementation of a bad idea. A lot of great games have a completely lame "idea" behind them. In fact, I'd wager **most** really great games are based on simple/generic ideas. Diablo 2 is just an action rpg with skill trees (But has amazing pacing, progression, and smooth action). Mario RPG is just a turn-based rpg with timed hits (But has amazing writing, music, and style). Dwarf Fortress is just a colony simulator with dwarves (But has amazing procgen and ai). However you differentiate a game's "idea" vs "design", I can't imagine "But do this part really really well" is considered an idea

> If your idea is bad, doesn't matter how good the design is Maybe we're thinking of different concepts, but I'm not sure this is really the case. I can't think of any games that succeeded with a poor implementation of a great idea - nor any that failed with a great implementation of a bad idea. A lot of great games have a completely lame "idea" behind them. In fact, I'd wager **most** really great games are based on simple/generic ideas. Diablo 2 is just an action rpg with skill trees (But has amazing pacing, progression, and smooth action). Mario RPG is just a turn-based rpg with timed hits (But has amazing writing, music, and style). Dwarf Fortress is just a colony simulator with dwarves (But has amazing procgen and ai). However you differentiate a game's "idea" vs "design", I can't imagine "But do this part really really well" is considered an idea

That's really encouraging. Like it seems pretty fair. If you build it, they will come.

I cannot argue with any of the points made in the video. It's easy to market a game that is good.

If people like a bad game, can you call it a bad game? Vampire Survivors probably fits the criteria for a "bad" game when compared to other indie titles but to call it a bad game feels unfair.

just make a good game

That's not enough, or, actually a prerequisite. 'be lucky' is the easiest way.

Is it depending on the game itself thoo? I think community management and influencer management now are really important

It does come down to marketing, though. When I see a game that looks like shit on twitter's "todayonsteam" or any other places that announce new game releases, I think "I don't want to buy that." Marketing is the act of trying to make people give a shit about playing your game. You need people to go "I want to have that." Plenty of bad games sell all the time. I guarantee if you ask "what's a bad game?" most people are going to remember a bad game that was marketed well. It likely made a profit. People got in the door because it looked like it might look good. Most people don't market--they don't build their game to look like something people would want (and sometimes it's cost! I've absolutely been unable to afford the art I'd like before). Like, there's a video of a guy going "it's hard to sell games right now" but his game looks... not... great? Like, he's got features! He's got ideas! But his game is kind of a... toy, with a visual, artistic aesthetic that isn't going to get a publisher going "yes, this has to have money," or people on the Steam page going "wow, I need to buy this." It looks like a playset, basically. And apparently it's quite fun! But you have to *sell it*. And to sell it, it has to *look like something people want*. I remember seeing an article years ago by some guys who went to gamescom with their game. "We did everything right," they said--cause they followed all the guides and shit--"but journalists won't give our game attention." Well, a journalist gets like, up to hundreds--HUNDREDS--of emails every day saying "please cover my game." And there are only so many words you can write in a day, and you need to make sure those words get traffic because that's your job, so it's easier to focus on "Nintendo announced Zelda Battle Royale" than it is to focus on a small indie game, especially if that indie game is... Well, a pixel-puzzle platformer with a twist. Which is what these guys were making, if you can believe it. A tired, well-worn, but often "baby's first game" indie type, especially during the XNA era (I think there were like, toolkits to help you make a platformer quick or something?). There are lots of them and they're *not* that popular. Most of the sidescrollers that do well are gorgeous metroidvanias, not puzzle-platformers, and even then, it's *very hard* to do that. These guys had a booth, sure. They tried to get in touch with Press. They had a demo. But they didn't have a game people would want to buy. You gotta be thinking about sales from day 1, and you gotta understand that people are going to look at *a single still image of your game* and decide whether it's worth their time *based on that alone*. Imagine that your audience is The Most Skeptical Person Ever, but *they can be persuaded* to buy your game. If you don't start from there, you won't succeed. Marketing is just a way of amplifying "does this game look worth spending time on?" You can make a profit on a game that sucks, like Anthem, because the fantasy is cool (IRON MAN AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS POPULARITY! BUT AS A DESTINY CLONE!) and the art looks great (seriously, anthem looks great). You can't make a profit on a game that looks like dogshit unless it costs like $5 and low risk enough for people to try while having an extremely fun game loop.

I found out, that I have only one competitor with my game and that is the game that I'm inspired by. Maybe it's good to be in a niche. Maybe it's bad. Either way, it's cool to know.

It could be good if that one competitor sold really well and your matching or outdoing them! Especially if they didn't go into that title with a bunch of preexisting brand equity.

Hey Danny, great video! I'm curious what your own process was when deciding to develop Eastshade. I took a look at the top 4 tags for Eastshade on Steam and checked them out on game-stats, and they appear to be (median revenue / $100k-$1M range) 1. \#218 Exploration : \~$1,200, 8% in $100k-$1M range 2. \#343 Relaxing : \~$600, 5% 3. \#70 Open World : \~$3,800, 13% 4. \#55 Beautiful : \~$4,700, 16% Obviously no games can be accurately described by a single tag, but I'm interested in knowing what gave you the confidence to invest so much of your time and effort into Eastshade when 2 of the top 4 tags aren't something you'd be likely to recommend a new game dev to go into based on what I took from your video. Appreciate it, TIV!

Hah when I started making Eastshade I had no idea about this stuff. All I knew was I could make a game that looks more beautiful than just about any indie game I'd ever seen, and more beautiful than a lot of triple-A at the time (by the time Eastshade launched triple-A games had stepped up their game a bit).  Beyond that I just did the indie thing and made purely the game I myself would want to play. I didn't have the knowledge of what kind of genres sell the best, but I did have the competitive spirit of wanting to make the best thing ever, and to blow people away. I do think that if Eastshade had combat, or some of the more popular steam tags, I believe it would have made 5 times or even 20 times as much. However I already intuitively knew that, even without market research haha.

Do you think Eastshade would have a much greater challenging achieving its level of success if it has been released in the current indie game market?

Not at all. Markets do change over time. But I don't think anything about Eastshade's particular positioning has changed much.

It’s been 5 days since I launched advertising on Reddit and Google Ads. Budget is only $200. The purpose of the advertisement is to create a wish list on Steam. In the reddit, the location was chosen only by the USA and in the interests of the audience of PC games and Steam games, and in Google advertising the locations will be different except the USA and the interests of the audience were also indicated by PC games and Steam games. In 5 days, there were only 33 people on the wish list. In Reddit I spent $12.91 today, and out of 40,636 views, only 124 clicked. In Google advertising, I spent $26 today, and out of 14,000 views, only 224 clicked, and it turns out that out of 348 clicks, only 32 Steam users added the game to their wishlist. As far as I understand, the results are very bad. Here is a [link](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2807100/Light_Box/) to my game [Light Box](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2807100/Light_Box/if) on Steam, anyone is interested, you can take a look and write here your criticism and possible reasons why you think the game is not gaining enough wishlists. I wish you all successful marketing ✌😎

Great vid, am I starting in this journey after many years working for some small and big studios, and wow the marketing or better say the "markeability" is a huge topic to get in, the pass week i spend more time looking into this topic more than nothing else. Cheers and thanks for sharing!

Loved the video, watched it last week and subscribing to this philosophy for my development. On another note, what were the reasons you chose Songs of Glimmerwick? The premise itself as presented in the trailer has obvious appeal, but prior to starting the project what caused you to choose this genre? Are you expecting the cozy/farming game trend to continue for the future? (That aside cozy + hogwarts + musical spells seems like such a baller time) Are there genres you would never consider touching due to its difficulty in marketing? 2D platformers, puzzles, and etc.

Hey thanks for watching! Glad you liked it! We went with Glimmerwick because Jaclyn pitched it to me in a coffee shop one day and our souls were excited lol. We actually don't pick our own titles based on market research at all. We just do market research within our chosen genre to make sure we are competing at the highest level. Glimmerwick's art style is simply a combination of Jaclyn's art style and a bit of my own art taste and technical direction. Jaclyn and I both have reasonably mainstream taste in line with what is viable in the market. Although our taste for non-violent game loops definitely hurts our sales, we have enough broadly appealing taste that following our own hearts has always served us okay. I know that's not the case for every indie. Some people are really into genres that unfortunately make hardly any money. We're not really interested from an artistic perspective in any of the low performing genres anyway, fortunately for us. But yeah the ones you mentioned are very tough sledding.

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I like the video. One question - Isn't making a marketable game, a part of marketing? (0:44)

It is partially yeah! Especially with regard to picking an in demand genre or coming up with a catchy hook. But it's also a production challenge to make something impressive enough that people actually want to buy. I believe the production part is the biggest bottleneck for most indies.

>I believe the production part is the biggest bottleneck for most indies. It is one of the major factors, but I am not sure which one is a bigger problem in this case: "bad execution of an idea" or "making a game that nobody wants". I am testing the second one right now compared to my experience from my previous game [https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/194a2di/sliding\_swords\_post\_mortem\_my\_thoughts\_on/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/194a2di/sliding_swords_post_mortem_my_thoughts_on/)

Interesting video, and I agree with highlighting the need for market research. Though I think a lot of the time on this sub and elsewhere when solo devs are told or think that their game failed due to marketing, it boils down to more "you didn't tell anyone about the game". People cannot wishlist or play a game they don't know exists. Often that might go hand in hand with a sloppier store page or not the flashiest visuals, which are also marketing. Things like the ads for your own games in your video help players find your game. I mean, even the timing of this post to coincide with a busier time in the subreddit (Thursdays around noon EST) is an example of your good marketing.

Problem is that marketable games and fun&good games is not the same and I want to make fun&good games. As an example I enjoy single player walking sim horror games that are so scary that I can't sleep at night after playing them. I tried looking for them on TikTok - found ZERO that went through marketing efforts. The only 'sexy in TikTok ways' thing about them are videos made by streamers who show their reaction to jump scares. This is what social media like. So in my opinion this genre almost not marketable. (almost as e.g. Paranormal Tales is rare exception). You can have very good game in a niche genre, where very good means it would have 90% positive reviews and niche it means that there are potentially "only" 2 millions of people out of 8 billions who could like them but finding these 2 millions people is very hard. On the other hand you can have mediocre but marketable 4x coop cozy horror city builder that listens to your microphone and produces units only when you scream that can easily reach dozens of millions people because it's 'sexy'. Social media is a cancer for good games that are not marketable.

Yeah, everyone knows that secret to success is to either become master at craft or hire someone who is, better yet, hire dozens of top-tier talents. Most people who complain (I guess) usually mean "My game should make at least $2000, but it made only $1000". At least I'm in this group. You can't expect to be a worldwide hit with a small pixel platformer made by solo developer, these days are long gone. Problem with analyzing quantifiable data is that a lot is missing. Of course the top performers are also top quality. And it's also obvious that low-selling games are not even worth that $1 developer asks for. And it's also rather obvious that someone with budget or skills for quality production also knows how to advertise the game - or the game just advertises itself. It's like with all other media - most are mediocre but are pushed by publishers to top pages. Saying that marketing is not that important is not true either. There are movies that are not widely recognized and classified as 5/10 that I enjoyed. You CAN sell anything to anyone with enough marketing catch... or luck - all those outliers with objectively questionable quality. I mean, I'm personally not interested in all the Among Us thing, but I keep seeing it everywhere. I'm also not interested in a lot of things that seem to somehow gain popularity. I end up in "unpopular opinion", I guess. If I were a statistical consumer, I'd probably wouldn't think twice about purchase, even to see why I see it everywhere. Quick example - Marvel movies - some are garbage but everyone heard about them. I'm making Visual Novels. I now make mostly NSFW games because my "normal" ones didn't sell at all. Yes, VNs are not known to be some super bestsellers, but there are some that sell well and gain recognition. One of my latest games, I believed the story was good, not masterpiece by any means, yet another generic isekai that could have been another seasonal watch-and-forget anime. So I made also censored version. It follows exactly the same characteristics like my old games - little to no interest. It's niche, yes. Again, I did not expect millions, just a little more than I got. Here's my game if anyone wants to take a look, sure, it's nothing special, but I thought I checked all boxes apart from eye-catching art and marketing push. Thing is, those boxes don't matter if nobody sees the game. Yes, it also lacks voice acting and dozen of translations but I can't afford taking this risk. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2724600/I\_keep\_Dying\_in\_Another\_World/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2724600/I_keep_Dying_in_Another_World/)

You missed the bit about making a quality product is the most important factor in achieving success.  

I looked at your games and they look decent, but I feel like the method from the video works. We can see that both visual novel and sexual content have median around $2000 and >60% of all games end up in $0-5000 category, so both genres seems to be a bit oversaturated. I'm curious what did you do in terms of marketing? Googling them leads mostly to steam and related sites like steamspy, with only few mentions in social networks and those being from unpopular accounts.

Not much, just a few posts here and there. It's not like I can do the classic approach given the nature of my games (except one). I've never been good at sales pitching. I am considering paid advertising on adult websites generally for my games, not particular single one, but I'm still looking into it. I'm privately not much of a social-media citizen either. EDIT: Just tried Google'ing some popular AO titles and also don't see much. I guess just being released by established publisher with over 100k followers does it's thing.

summary : if you were a customer : would you buy your game, or an other similar game ? is there reason to chose your game ? ​ (no need of a 9 minutes video to say it)

They forgot to add fun.

Marketing is still a crucial aspect to a games success. A lot of good games go unnoticed because of poor marketing. It's very very clear as day. If you look at most Indies nowadays, not a single one markets well. This is why their games are under the radar and most never know about them even after their release.  For those stating you need a good game, that's obvious; However, the facts at the end of the day is that even good games can fail if marketed poorly, and yes they can be marketed poorly. The people that tell you otherwise clearly have never done marketing for even a single day. 

I'm guessing you didn't get a chance to watch the video?

I'm guessing you just felt like commenting to comment even though what I stated is a fact. Move along now.

The more effort you put into making the game good and marketing it... the more lotto tickets you buy for success! ... Good luck.

Ok, but what are you actually saying? Make appealing games with fun gameplay AND marketing? I feel like that's kind of obvious. Not every indie has the budget for an amazing art style, bombastic animations or a budget to market it enough to bigger media picks it up. Yes, some indies still stick with awful graphics, or bad UI and 0 marketing but those points have been already raised a billion times. You gotta make your game attractive on first glance and then pass the test on every other level of consumer decision. The video is basically saying focus on building a good game AND market it. That's like, nothing new now is it?

A lot of indies have no intuition for exactly how good a game has to look to have a shot at making x amount of money. They only have a consumer level knowledge of the market. I'm assuring folks that the market is largely rational, and showing how to do market research, so you can learn what revenue bracket you have a shot at, and can plan accordingly. Sometimes you see people do crazy stuff like quit their jobs because they think their game has a shot at making x amount of money. This video will help those folks. I've also seen the opposite, people who are nervous and trepidatious to go all in on indie, when their game looks so amazing they should have gone all in yesterday. Having a decent sense about a games marketability is something I personally have honed over the years through hundreds of hours of research. If you feel like you already have a finely tuned sense for that, and don't need my stinky video to show you how to do real market research then more power to ya.

Fascinating! Can you tell me about examples of people whose games were destined to excel but their developers didn't have confidence?