Link to Article: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about the differences between hobbyist game development and real game development, and the lack of creativity in modern games. I found this article while browsing the web, and it talks excellently about these topics and more.
So sad and so true. Game dev is just a hobby for me as well. I never wanted to do it for a living.
Feels like that would cause me to hate it, since I would have to work like a horse for something that I can’t even call my own. That’s assuming I was working for a big company.
I love doing it in my own style and on my spare time simply for fun~
I can bulls**t on the entire article, and agree with this commenter;
[quote]As far as I’m concerned, this is the cost you pay to follow your dreams. There are people that desperately want to make games but don’t have the intelligence to get a Computer Science degree and will never have the qualifications to get hired by game developers or the innate logic and IQ to develop a game on their own despite their best efforts. The fulfillment you get following your dreams does not guarantee a salary. For those unable to do it, they get neither.
[/quote]
My Translation: Some people just can’t hack it, and now it’s a lot harder to be mediocre and get away with it than it was back-when.
There are too many one-man projects that debunk this article, like Banished for example. Then, if you consider the tiny-team developers (less than 3 or 4 people) the list grows wildly. Let’s also not forget Farsky and Daedalus, both are 1 man ops, both on Steam and Farsky at least is doing very well. I can’t say anything for Daedalus though, but I assume the same.
… and you know, Retro-Pixel Castles has brought in a good amount of cash, just saying. 
(EDIT: Also, OrangePascal’s Gunslugs 2 is about to be released; http://store.steampowered.com/app/340750/ )
It was never easy to be mediocre. Way back when, when there was less competition in the app stores, there were also less buyers. Those “simple” eighties games had to push the limits of very limited hardware, and everything was built with very primitive or non-existent toolchains.
Yeah I dunno, something about this article just didn’t sit right with me. Maybe it’s the dumbed-down buzzfeed “pictures every other sentence” style.
But more than that, it’s the question: what else did anybody expect? What else would we want?
The “golden days” where “one person” could create a game, by today’s standards… they sucked. Only people who were really dedicated (as in, more dedicated than most of today’s programmers, probably including myself) could make a game. I mean really, if you had to learn how to program by manually copying machine language from a magazine, how many of us would have learned how to program?
Looking back on it, we only see the successes- and many of the successes he lists on his page were NOT done by a single person, but by relatively large teams! And that’s only the 1% of games that were worth remembering anyway. What about the other 99%? Go download an emulator and pick out the rom of a RANDOM (not one you remember) game. I’ll bet you an appreciation that it sucks, or was developed by an entire team of people.
So this “golden age” that’s being trumped up… it never really happened.
I will admit that it’s easier than ever to get into programming. But how can that be a bad thing as a whole?
It’s also easy to become an artist. Or a musician. The “starving artist” stereotype is just a symptom of how many people START pursuing these goals, and how few people sit at the top of the fame and success ladder. But does that mean that nobody should start learning how to play the guitar? Does that mean that nobody should start learning how to paint? Nope.
And it also doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t learn how to program, either.
Whenever this argument comes up, I picture how scribes must have reacted when more people started learning how to read and write. “Ugh, now that the commoners can read and write for themselves, my craft is so diluted with inanity!”
I like the way you look at it. And this is one of the many reasons I enjoy posting, or enjoy when other people post, articles. It gives insight into opinions other than my own and the ones given by the article.
I also think that the author may have a point about the stability of the income provided by these games, but maybe I am misinformed. Some of the “larger” independent games (Fez) were “trendy” and passed, or have begun to decline, like a fad would. Do you, or anyone else, think that these indie games you mentioned will be able to maintain a large enough income to provide for their creators? I am not asking that rhetorically, as I actually have no idea.
I also see a good point in what ags1 said.
Well, the amount of money a one-man developer can make on Steam is enough to support him for a year or more if he plays his cards right, if it’s a hugely popular title like Banished it makes him pretty much a multimillionaire, and set for life unless he just becomes a fool with his money.
Personally, if I made about 250k off RPC I’d consider it a huge success, even if it was just a trendy short-term thing. But I also am one person, so I get to keep 100% of the profits. For a small studio like say PuppyGames, 250k isn’t enough for 4~ people to stay floating for even a single year, and most games take longer than that to develop.
Having said that though, when you start realizing the massive numbers that could be had it doesn’t even matter if your game was a one-hit-wonder trendy title that dies off 3 months after it was born. If you’re a one-man team you still have enough money to sit on while you figure out the second title.
Consider this:
Now consider the mid-level popular game, Towns:
Now ask yourself, how much did the guy who made Banished make?
The reality is being a one man dev is still possible, people just need to have the skills and dedication to get there. Good products DO get noticed. The people who word things like stated in this article usually are the ones who can’t hack it, blaming external factors for their failures instead of facing the fact they’re just not going to hack it. These people will be beaten down by other superior developers.
Yes, there is a small luck factor in this business, but it’s not the main riding factor everyone plays it out to be, many of the people who have a ton of games out but continue to spit out the “luck” rhetoric are usually low quality developers who look at their mediocre products with rose-colored goggles.
[quote=“Elsealabs,post:6,topic:53048”]
Why wouldn’t they?
Even the “article” says that it’s a trade-off: small teams and single-person indie developers can take high risks (read: make experimental games), because they aren’t dealing with multi-million dollar investments. If they fail (and they do fail, all the time), the worst case scenario is that they have to go back to their day job. But with that greater ability to experiment comes the greater potential reward.
We can do crazy experimental things like Minecraft, or spend years on a single game like Fez, or even just get lucky like Flappy Bird. We can put out a dozen little games this year, see which one gets any traction, and spend next year polishing that single game up. Big studios put all their chips on one game, so that one game better be a success. And the best way to guarantee success is by sticking with what they know works.
So our niche is going to be around that ability to take risks, and the upside of that risk is the associated greater potential return.
Sure, only .001% of us will scratch out a living, and even fewer will ever make it big. But that’s not really why we do it, is it?
I’m trying to make it big - whilst at the same time making the sorts of games no-one will make for me to play, and for the hat-trick, attempting to enjoy myself too.
It’s not easy.
The money is pretty poor, even for moderate successes like ourselves. About 50% of my time is not “designing games”, it’s “trying to keep up with technology”, “patching games”, “supporting customers”, “dealing with tedious emails” and “tax returns”.
Cas 
I do so much agree to this part of your sentence
I must say that I also partially agree to the guy from the article. There are way too many people thinking they can make games because they can design a tree, they can program, make an app or have an idea. I’m really missing the dedication of most.
Take FEZ for example, and let aside all statements from the maker(s). That game is very well polished, very beautiful and you can almost smell the dedication and hard work of the devs. And how about Retro Pixel Castles? I really enjoy the fact that Rayvolution puts so much time and dedication into little details, making it not only a playable game, but a very beautiful and enjoyable experience.
It is these things I miss about most modern day games, because suddenly everyone thinks he is a game dev for being able to write three lines of code and make a model.
For me, making games is not about the money, I don’t want fame, I want to learn, I want to do what I enjoy most. I don’t care if I ever finish a game, or if I ever get to make even a dime with a game, as long as I can make them, then that’s ok for me
That wasn’t the only way to learn to program. I learnt to program in the 80s, and while I did get my hands on some magazines with type-in programs I really learnt to program with the manual that came with the computer. Back then, manuals were serious documentation. The manual for my second computer even included circuit diagrams. There were also plenty of books around on programming.
In fact, I don’t agree that it’s easier than ever to get into programming. It’s easier than ever to learn a second language, because of the resources available on the Internet, but a non-programmer has to find advice on which language to learn, sort through the contradictory opinions to arrive at a decision, and install the compiler or interpreter. Computers no longer boot into a shell in which you can start using a REPL for a language stored in the ROM.
Agreed, starting out is as hard as it’s ever been IMHO. But once you’ve learned the ropes stuff like Unity is making the tedious difficult parts of game development “go away” for a lot of use-cases… at the expense of rather a lot of rather samey games coming out and a lot of people putting a lot of polish into a rather mediocre design. But you’ve gotta learn somewhere so you may as well just jump in and use existing engines rather than try and make your own if getting results is what you want (and for most of us trying to earn a living, results is what counts - not the journey).
Cas
I expected to not like the article but found it a bit humorous. Some would say he missed out on the shareware boom that was tucows and download.com a decade or so ago. I believe there were plenty of one man devs there.
Agree with the mediocre statements: Some people say others are lucky but fail to realise the amount of work and dedication that these people put in to get their “luck”.
Do you not count Fez as a modern-day game? :o
I mean, doesn’t that sorta prove my point? Back in the “golden days” you had to trudge through some serious documentation, basically be an engineer. Now you can download a copy of Game Maker and start making a game in about 10 minutes.
And with movements like Code.org trying to (and succeeding at) convincing schools to start teaching programming (in kindergarten!), how is it not easier to get into programming? Couple that with the fact that everybody has a computer in their pocket (not just geeks in a basement trudging away), and I’m not sure how it’s possible that it’s just as hard to get into programming today as it was back then.
I expected pushback on my “the golden days sucked” comment, but I’m pretty surprised that anybody thinks it’s equally difficult to get into programming today as it was 40 years ago.
It is and it isn’t…
The problem is that as computers have gotten immensely more powerful, they’ve become correspondingly immensely more complex. The tools we have merely “expand to fit”. Some aspects of programming have gotten somewhat easier but complexity remains an enormous barrier even now.
My own personal experience this week: upgrading all my game engine code from OpenGL2.0+compatibility layer to pure OpenGL3.3 and no compatibility. It’s practically a complete rewrite - OpenGL has changed so radically that it’s going to take me weeks to get right back to where I started. And it’s all brain-bending, hair-raising, irritatingly difficult fiddly code requiring extensive reading and lots of hassling @theagentd at 2am.
Cas
…and FWIW I spent four hours last night just attempting to render a quad.
Cas
While I’m on the subject… wrt luck:
Having been in the industry now for about 10 years I can safely and disastrously inform you that luck has an enormous bearing on your chances of success, but it is also only a factor alongside all sorts of other factors such as platform reach, game polish, built-in viral design, blah blah etc.
You do need to put in an enormous amount of effort. However you will find people who put in next to bugger-all effort making 100x more money than yourself. You will spend much soul-searching time in the small hours wondering why this is so and why you aren’t lucky. The reasons are complex but essentially what we see as luck is a manifestation of survivorship bias and it works because we are legion.
There are so many games developers releasing games. Most of us don’t have much of an idea what is going to happen when we release a game - whether it will be successful, whether it targets a niche, whether that niche is hungry for your game, whatever. That information is largely unavailable to developers and that’s why you usually see people making the same sorts of games over and over again - because it at least removes a few of the question marks over what does and doesn’t sell. You’ll still get hundreds and hundreds of unique outliers though, and from this pool you will usually find the extraordinary successes so often bandied about when people try and draw some meaningful (but ultimately flawed) conclusion about a game versus its sales figures.
The games that are unexpectedly catapaulted to the success levels they so clearly enjoy had no expectations. Not a one of them was an idea behind which a developer was smugly sitting and thinking to himself, “This is gonna make me a millionaire.” Success is almost always a total surprise. It works because there are so many of us! We hear about quite a few successes because that’s what we want to hear about.
What we don’t hear about is the other 999 games that barely made a bean. The ratio is better or worse in some markets, but the basic principle is the same: we hear all the time about the successes. Try and tell someone about a failure and… well, that’s not so interesting (and thus the cycle of failure continues).
Cas
I was 8 years old. I probably couldn’t have told you what “engineer” means. And actually I didn’t understand a lot of the documentation. For example, the computer came with a version of Logo which could be run with CPM, and there was a fat chapter on Logo in the manual, but I didn’t understand the point of all the list-processing instructions until 10 years later when I learnt functional programming with SML.
Give it 10 years for the teachers to learn the subject, and maybe we’ll have another “Golden Age”.
I still haven’t got round to figuring out all the steps to getting a Hello World running on my smartphone. It’s certainly not a case of turn it on and start typing.
Fair enough. And I’ve heard that argument from other “old school” programmers before: “yeah, I had to walk uphill both ways in the middle of the night just to run my punch-card programs on the single mainframe at school… but nowadays kids are programming for iPhone, and I have no idea how to do that!”
But I dunno, I’m picturing a 10-year-old girl who plays Angry Birds on her iPhone and wants to start programming her own games. She goes through Code.org’s tutorials (which are indeed designed for 10-year-old girls), and within a week she has an Angry Bird clone up and running.
Compare that to how it was in the 70s and 80s: how many 10-year-old girls were learning how to program back then?
And sure, we can get into a debate about “well that’s not actually programming”, but the point is, that little girl now has the foundations and the interest, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. She can take that knowledge and more easily get into the next level, whatever that is. There’s something really cool about that to me.
And that’s why I kinda cringe at the article: sure, a side-effect of programming becoming more open is that it’s harder for us typical programming types (white dudes) to stay at the top. But it’s also easier for non-typical programmers to get into the industry. And how is that a bad thing?
So I guess that’s my point: it’s easier to get into programming. Sure, once you’re at the top, it might be just as difficult… but does everybody need to be on the top just to make a game? I’m not so sure that’s true anymore, especially considering the fact that most indie games are made in Unity!