Yes. At this point, recommending that a 9-5 programmer quit their job to work on an indie game is equivalent to suggesting a PR writer quit their job to write the next Great American Novel.
It was always like that though. Game programming had always been the worst field for programmers, and the industry had and is exploiting the fact that some people like games enough to work on them under horrible conditions.
I don’t think it’s the equivalent to writing the great American novel though, because programming is just a minor part of game creating and arguably one of the least important. Design I’d the most important.
The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.
> The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.
Did we read the same article?
Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort went into. A tiny percentage are hits, but most are forgotten in the deluge.
To me that reads as someone that's fully aware that some people are putting a lot of effort in and making good games (Unity or not), but is upset by the realization that quality doesn't seem to be nearly enough. The problem is not (just) that a lot of crap is being released, but that a lot of everything is being released, good and bad. So much so that even the good things can't make good money because supply has so far outstripped demand.
It's sort of like the Netflix queue problem. I'm continuously adding things to my Netflix queue that look interesting, but my time to actually watch them is such that my chance of getting through even a majority of the queue is almost nil.
To me it reads as someone who disregards unity games, while praising well made indie games in general. And in the light of the rest of the article, the author seem to favor people who did good programming, but the truth is that you don’t need to be a good programmer to make good games.
I think supply is an issue, but I also think the author added to the problem by releasing a game that doesn’t have appealing graphics, gameplay or sound. Where as many much of the unity “shovelware” is exactly the opposite.
> Where as many much of the unity “shovelware” is exactly the opposite.
I think the difference of interpretation we're having is that I think you are interpreting "Unity shovelware" to mean "If it's Unity it's crap", which nobody who follows that space could easily defend (a lot of high quality well known games and publishers use Unity). But a lot of shovelware uses Unity, because it's easy to get assets for and publish with.
It's sort of like saying "Java enterprise crap-ware". I wouldn't assume that means all Java programs are crap, or that all enterprise software is crap, but that of the crappy software targeted towards the enterprise, a lot uses Java. That's not an indictment of Java, and might actually be the opposite, given that it has qualities that cover up other poor choices.
Shovelware typically does not have "appealing graphics, gameplay or sound". It is term used for low effort games and imply nothing special in all aspects.
Shovelware can have appealing graphics and sound by way of licensing premade assets, but you can't really buy a game design and paste that into your own title to get appealing gameplay.
I get the shovelware feeling from Netflix too tbh; as with the Unity games mentioned, there's a lot of effort and they're high quality, great writing, visuals, direction, they tick all the boxes and we live in a golden age of TV series and films - but there's just so much of it. Not hearing about any of the shows or movies beforehand from my social circles doesn't help either - the network effect is super important. And that's from a service with a fixed fee per month, so the bar for watching something new is super low.
Re. The shovelware bit: Once upon a time, when men were real men, etc, making a game meant writing it from the ground up, writing your own engine and then writing the game logic on top of that engine to make something unique.
Now that game engines are commonplace, free and work better than what any single developer would be able to come up with after a lifetime of hard work the end result is that games have a very hard time to differentiate themselves from each other. There isn't really an unlimited space of game scenarios out there, even in the days of the 2D arcade games after a couple of years it became much harder to come up with something truly unique.
It was never difficult to "come up with something truly unique".
Your unique thing might be rubbish, but that's not the problem for the millions of shovelware Unity asset flips.
Jim Sterling has covered this at length, even running a competition to show that people can take a horribly over-used cheap asset and do great original stuff - if they try. Asset flips don't even try.
The are tens of thousands of games in which you are an elite soldier running around shooting zombies. There are zero games where you're a pot plant using psychic powers to create sculptures.
Like Hollywood the video game industry chases trends until they're beaten completely to death, and then goes one more round just to make really sure.
I think there has been some windows of opportunity for single-developers teams.
- In the 80's and 90's when PC games where simple enough.
- At the beginning of Steam
- At the beginning of the App Store and the Play Store
At those time, there wasn't that much competition so while it was still hit or miss, you still had a decent chance to be successful as a single-person indie developer.
I remember buying games in the 80ies and 90ies, I’d go to a supermarket and rummage through a mixed box with literal hundreds of different $5 games and pick the one that looked the most exciting.
The biggest treasure I found that way was the original x-com.
I don’t think times have changed that much. The upcoming game I’m most excited by is it lurks below, and that’s being developed by a single developer. Stardew Valley released in 2016, after the explosion. Into the breach, though not single developer did well in 2018.
I mean, it’s not uncommon for solo-small teams to top the steam charts, but you really do need both quality and a little luck. I just don’t think that’s different from how it’s always been, and I think the author of this article in particular lacks quality.
What has changed though is the amount of games people own. In the 90ies you didn’t have a backlog of thousands of games that you picked up from a humble bundle where you only really wanted one game. You also didn’t have MMOs or forthnite competing for your attention.
So I agree with you somewhat, it’s become much harder to sell bad-mediocre games in the past few years, and that’s 99% of indie games. And there is obviously always a market for remakes when a new platform/generation arrives.
Novels are their own problem, but it's a similar one; there's hundreds of thousands of great writers and publishing is trivial nowadays (iirc the longest work of fiction ever made is a Super Smash Bros fanfiction published for free), but getting 'mindshare' (or, just some attention - and that's before making a sale still) is hugely difficult.
Is there really a difference? I know an acquaintance that published a novel they worked on for a few years. They didn't share any numbers with me but they were clear, they made no money. I assume there are thousands of people trying to sell their novels, and a tiny minority succeed in making (big) money.
> and a tiny minority succeed in making (big) money.
Who is making big money JUST off novels? Not speaking, not tv deals, writing.
Meanwhile I know several game developers making a living. Setting out to do it still follows a success distribution, but it’s fundementally achievable in a way unavailable to writers entirely.
They exist. But those writers are making money are doing quantity over quality. I.e. they're releasing like 12 pulp novels a year that they churn out once per month, and build up a fanbase over time with every new release, who then buy up their quickly growing backlog of novels.
Seems like urban supernatural or romance (or urban supernatural romance) seems to be the main genres where this is working. My girlfriend follows several writers who make a living this way, and is wanting to give it a try herself, that's how I'm aware of it.
You can't write The Great American Novel or spend years writing your novel and make money this way though. It pretty much requires the momentum and consistent quick releases for it to work. You're making sugary garbage that's consumed quickly and forgotten just as quickly.
I'd think this is more true for a writer than a programmer. You could probably attempt to program a game by spaghetti coding, copy pasting from stack overflow and tutorials, not using version control or tests, and working solo - at the end you'd have a lot of bad habits and not so much that would be useful at a professional studio.
Some people use mistakes as a launch pad to learn a better way. Not always, and not always immediately, but sometimes it takes dealing with the negative consequences to make the better solution obvious when finally encountered.
Sometimes convincing someone to spend the extra 10-20% of time or effort to do something "the hard way" is nigh impossible until they've spend time doing the alternative and know the extended pain that sometimes results.
It's sort of like seat belts. When they were first required in all vehicles, many people still didn't bother with them. Even before cultural indoctrination took over, a lot of people eventually started too. It took some close calls for people or their friends and family for them to finally make the effort, and such a small effort it was. I saw exactly this play out with my own parents and their siblings.
