Comment by Pfhreak
6 years ago
Celeste is free this week (or maybe next week) on the Epic Games Store. From the customer's perspective, his point stands -- I can choose to play nothing but award winning, excellent games for between $0 and $10/month. How does a game developer compete when their audience already has a glut of excellent content to consume?
This assumes different games are perfectly interchangeable. Would you make the same argument about books? Why does anyone bother to write a new book at all? My answer is that we're really all different: devs and players both. A game developer can compete the same way an author competes: by offering something only they can make, and only to someone who would buy precisely that sort of game.
To a degree. I don't know the authoring world, but my intuition is that it's a similarly difficult profession to make a living in -- returns are thin, breakout success is unlikely, but you can probably carve out a niche for yourself.
Same with TV/Movies. I watch what Netflix and Prime have, and generally don't buy a series or movie (unless it's something really special.)
Are they perfectly interchangeable? No, of course not. I'm sure there's a musician/author/tv show out there that would be my most favorite of all time and I'll never know it because I won't be exposed to it. I don't get hung up on that, and enjoy that I have a lot of pretty good options at any given time.
But he answers this question. He doesn't compete in the "indie game" space. He competes in the "Jeff Vogel game" space.
That's one way people find success -- get a niche and build a reputation in it. It doesn't change the nature of the playing field though, that we've never had a time when there were so many great games available for free to anyone.
I’ve got lots of AAA games for free on these deals too, does that mean that AAA are basically free and therefore shouldn’t bother with whatever they’re doing?
Those AAA studios sell many, many more copies of their games (like, orders of magnitude more). The demand/sales curves are totally different when you are selling tens or hundreds of thousands of copies of a game.
And yes, it does play into their budgeting/planning calculus as well. There's a reason there are so many franchise games these days...