Can independent Java game developers make a buck (or two)?

Business and Project Management Discussions
#21

Much discussion on the merits of portals occurs over on the Indiegamer forums… basically we fall into two camps:

  1. Those of us who want to write our own games, build our own self-sustainable business, and therefore remain independent in every sense of the word;

  2. and those of us who want to earn a crust by essentially working for The Man but under considerably worse (and worsening) conditions.

The portal “market” is soon to close for indies anyway. Glad we’ve worked on 1) all this time. That being the point of 1).

And Markus - bloody well done you!! That’s just excellent. And not coincidentally the model that most indies are thinking of pursuing now. It limits the kinds of games you can write (arcade games are sadly not much longer on the Puppygames menu) but at least you get to remain steadfastly independent and financially viable.

Cas :slight_smile:

#22

Yeah, I can never understand most of the attitude around the indiegamer forums - most people seem to have ditched “proper” programming jobs at either a major company or an established game dev studio because they don’t want to work for “the man” and want more independance and control. Yet then they go on and throw that all away by working on generic match-3/bejeweled/flavour-of-the-month clones in a vain attempt to chase whatever the portals want. The constant drive to pay their morgage means that actual innovation is much lower than the actual games industry (despite the constant claims that’s it’s where all the innovation is because they’re “independant”).

I keep looking at going solo but everytime I do I realise I’m much better off at a regular game studio (where my employer takes the risks) and doing side projects at home (where I’m free to do whatever I want, without constantly thinking if it’s “financially viable” and other such bullshit).

#23

I’m personally very excited for Greenhouse Games by Penny Arcade.

http://www.playgreenhouse.com/

Basically because I think the PA guys are passionate about the fact that games that are good are games that should be successful. Therefore if your game is good, they’ll link to it. And if they link to it, you’ll get thousands of hits.

And speaking of Puzzle Pirates and Bang Howdy, I just applied for that company and got denied. Makes me think I should just try things on my own.

#24

I want to add to this post. I really believe you can do it. The gaming market is incredibly big and is getting bigger everyday. Java gets better every release. I am one of those that believe java will take over C++ as the language of choice and game language of choice hehe. As a way of getting it out to the public, right now for java its fairly hard.

1 - Xbox arcade - this is a great way but unfortunately its not java, you have to program i believe in C#. But if your good in java i dont see why this would be hard to pick up.

2 - Steam (Valves Gaming Client) - I have been researching how a game can get on their service to sell. It seems like they are very picky and they do have every right to be since im sure they get alot of crappy games, plus its their service and they want to keep it as good as they can. They also I believe prefer the programmer to use this, https://partner.steamgames.com/documentation/running_on_steam I am not sure though.

3 - Java game portals seems to be a good place but not to make that living.

4 - A kick butt game that gets people addicted but has a in game store to enhance gameplay such as new levels, weapons, basically a subscription or a buy as u play seems to be the best bet besides java game portals.

5 - You could also pick up a ps3 game dev kit for i think less then 500 bucks and learn how to make a psn game. There are millions of gamers that buy the 5 dollar psn game just to have it and same with xbox.

6 - We could join together on javagaming and make our own steam type client that are for indie game makers? that loads the demos and offers the players to buy.

Other then that I hope this somewhat helps or gives an idea, i really do believe though any one with a polished game can make it, its just hard work getting it out there to the public and getting the gamers to talk about it to their friends to buy it also. Its just like publishing a book, no one is going to read your book unless a friend mentions how rad it is, and thats why harry potter became so popular for no reason.

#25

I don’t know if Java will ever become the language of choice. I suspect that C#'s already very large momentum will take it to the #1 position. This is fine for Java developers, though, because the languages are almost identical.

#26

Maybe it doesn’t apply to games, but in general C# is losing ground usage wise:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Thought games wise XNA makes a bit of an impact. Still not seeing much about C# in gamedevelop mag or others. Most still seem to be sticking to C++.

In my opinion, it’s possible to make a “buck or two” being an indie developer with Java. However, it’s not going to make you money comparable to a corporate whoring job (see me) unless the business grow much larger at which point you’re likely to have to sell your soul at least partially.

The main thing to accept if you want to go indie is how much more work it will be than a regular job. Admittedly, work in this case, that is doing something you love.

Kev

#27

Well that list also says that Pascal and Lisp are ahead of Lua, which seems insane to me.

#28

You can read on the page how the statistics are generated. Seems more valid that my own gut feeling.

Kev

#29

prince, it would be interesting to know how the financial crisis in the world has affected sales of indy games, in late 2008.

#30

One word of advice from a 5 year pro: Don’t!

While making a game for a handful of devices might be plausible for one person, if you really want to see revenue, you will have to produce at levels you cannot possibly cope alone.

Mobile game comps survive because they already have the infrastructure and the contacts to portals to get their games sold.

#31

Financial crisis in 2008 doesn’t seem to have affected indie game sales at all. We’re still doing crappily of course. We made about $10k last year in total. We have a couple of half-finished games in the pipeline but once again we return to contracting to make some money to live on.

Cas :slight_smile:

#32

Thank you.

Another question:

From what I’ve seen you release your games as installables. I assume this is some business-model you decided on, but what are your reasons for this? Do you believe there is more demand for download+install games than there are, for example, in-browser games? Why not Applet? Is it because of Javannoyance-dialogs?

#33

Mostly because of the extremely poor applet experience prior to Java 6 Update 10. We are going to start work on applets shortly though.

Cas :slight_smile:

#34

I know it was asked of Cas, but I’ll chime in here as well.

I was having a lengthy discussion with one of my closest friends, who is also a very well known and highly respected person in the games industry globally, about the state of games today. His comment to me about game pricing was, and I am paraphrasing, “More and more, I find it harder to spend $60 on a game when I can knock off a couple of hours playing some cool casual games from Kongregate and other game portals, for free. I mean, even if I have to spend $10 or so, I can get 6 good games that are satisfying. A $60 game has to really offer something special.”

I don’t know about everyone here, but I am kind of in the same camp. The economic downturn has only strengthened this sense. The last full price game I purchased was LittleBigPlanet, because it was worth every penny. Since we got it on release day, my kids and I have played it, literally, almost every single day. Christmas break was brutal because I would have to chase them off the PS3 after 5-7 hours…consistently!

Point is, the mass market has turned “casual”, which is a misnomer. There is nothing casual about a gamer who plays on casual portals for 1-2 hours a day. The ubiquity of web access across a variety of platforms has the same result on games that it had on static content and people are dividing their game time up across more devices than ever before. While the opportunity is there in casual, so is the competition. Apple just stated this interesting bit of info about iPhone games:

The App Store has gone really well. In 100 days, we’ve had over 6,000 apps on the Store: mind-boggling. In the same period we’ve had over 200 million customer downloads. It’s just amazing. And it’s games that turn out to be the biggest category of all, with over 1,500 different games already available. To put that in context, that’s more games than the Nintendo DS and the PSP put together, and this is 100 days in.

Again, a ton of competition, but also an opportunity. Small teams can produce have the chance at a large distribution pipe through Steam, iTunes, portals, etc. You may have to “play ball” with some of them to adhere to their rules but, as with most things in life, sometimes you have to do the things you need to, to do the things you want to. I think that, for the first time in a long time, independent developers have a good shot at being successful.

#35

Encouraging Chris!

#36

Zounds! A fairly ropey-looking Tank Wars style game is currently pulling in $21000 per day on the iPhone.
Fancy learning objective-C cas? You could knock out any old retro clone, apply the puppygames polish, and you’d be beating the competition like red-headed stepchildren in no time.

#37

It’s just so utterly fecking annoying that I can’t just plonk my Java game straight onto iPhone. I think I won’t do it just on principle.

Cas :slight_smile:

#38

Have you looked at Android at all? I’ve wanted to (but putting it off, of course…) look at it. Java, OpenGL-ES, decent looking SDK. Could be a winner.

#39

Be wary of this path. Same thing happened with J2ME and look where it is today.

The hype will pass. If you can cope with it, then go for it!

#40

Well, it’s not the same thing really.

The problem with J2ME was that it was the tech platform as all game developers were just starting to come to grips with what a mobile phone game should be. They made games that were wholly inappropriate for a mobile platform, on a tech foundation that was way to early (when I eventually write my book, I will go into detail about I was yelling for things like multi-keypress and sprite support in MIDP 1.0 but was told by the community that games won’t be important on mobiles when developers could be writing business apps instead…). Coupled with the fact that the manufacturers would change the way J2ME worked on their platform due to hardware differentiation, which is the REAL reason J2ME was claimed to be fractured, and you wound up with the market in it’s current state.

iPhone game development is more like console development. You are guaranteed that you game will work on 100% of the iPhone install base, all the time. Games are being built within the restrictions of the device. It is very different than the J2ME/BREW/Symbian world.