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[Peevish]

"But no one on TIGSource would know about that, would they?"

indirectly, they'd know about it through the project having a very small % 'funded', or at least know that the dev wasn't doing a good enough job asking in a lot of places (otherwise it'd be more funded than it is).

Enh. That's an assumption. Maybe the project's just not exciting people, maybe the video and pitch don't impart information well, maybe they don't have that many friends, or not many friends with money anyway... silly to make assumptions.

I am so surprised by how incredibly negative the response to 8BF has been on the forum. Yes, it is possible for 8BF to be a place for lots of half-cocked projects to go begging for money they don't deserve. But it seems the assumption is it can't be anything else.

Any project that is half-cocked and undeserving probably won't get funded. I don't see why anyone should be offended. The system is designed to favor deserving ideas.

8BF has served me in one surprising way: a coder and an artist have seen the page and offered to help with the project by commenting on my blog. If nothing else, 8BF is a short burst of free advertising.

[ithamore]

I think they need to fix their Browsing. The most comprehensive list of games I've been able to find are the most recent games, which is only available after clicking on Browse and then New Projects if you are trying to get through the site's broken navigation.

Maybe they're still trying to correct some html and php discrepancies, but I find it quite disappointing when I click on All Categories and only get 6 projects (1/4 of the current games in the above link).

This unfriendliness toward guests and potential donators isn't helping.

[peanutbuttershoes]

I think they need to fix their Browsing.

Yeah, the site design and navigation is pretty bad.
In my experience, this doesn't lead to much respect.

I also think that maybe they should have been more careful in what projects they approved right off the bat.
If they had more projects that at a first glance appear credible and exciting I think there would have been a much higher feeling of quality or whatever.
Which would lead to developers rethinking whether or not their project is worth posting.
Excellence leads to excellence. No? 

[tametick]

I think it's too early to tell, but it does seem to be growing & I think it's actually on a pretty good path to improvement at the moment.

I was pleasantly surprised the culled the popular and featured lists, which were pretty over-populated with somewhat less than exciting games before.

[valis]

Is there a large market for finished indie games?  

If so, there will be a market for unfinished indie games.  If not, there will not be.

Looks to me like the answer to both questions is "no."  If you're putting your platformer out there with 300,000 other platformers, the bottom line is that it takes an incredible fluke to make yours successful.  Braid and Super Meat Boy are flukes.  These represent the peak on the long tail.  Over to the right side, the "long tail" part of the long tail graph, are the rest of the huge number of hopefuls that come out every year.

The funding beg is a way of frontloading the risk so that you don't spend a lot of money on a title that's not going to earn out.  That's great and all but the money is not magically going to arrive out of nowhere when there is very little market for even finished indie games.

Since there is so little market for finished indie games, there will be an even smaller market for unfinished indie games.

Not only that but the more people who become aware of the funding pool, the less money there will be available in the pool.

There is the guy who got 7 grand for an interactive fiction game.  He was successful.  Good for him.  Others (like Azteka or whatever it's called) have been vastly less than successful.

Another reason this is unlikely to go very far is that a large proportion of those interested in contributing funds are, so far, other indie devs.

And if these funding requests somehow reach the public at large (without spending money on advertising which, again, you don't have) you are now in the larger market that isn't interested enough in indie games to support the large number of indie developers.

The math here should be obvious to most people and frankly I'm astonished that it isn't.

The inevitable conclusion of this effort puts people back to square one: creating assets for themselves or funding it themselves, then selling finished products.

Frankly the whole idea of this, as well as being distasteful from another perspective I won't go into here, just seems so unbelievably naive and unrealistic to me.

[valis]

[from a post he deleted] Why do you feel the need to continue pissing on other people's parade?  We've heard you in the other threads already.

Are dissenting voices permitted here or is this thread just for those who think this is workable?

Have any experience with venture cap?  I do.  What's yours?

[Paul Eres]

i believe there's a market for indie games -- there are several hundred indie games on steam for instance. of the commercial 2d platformers that i know of, most have been profitable: an untitled story, eversion, super meat boy, braid, vvvvvv, cave story wii -- i can't think of many *commercial* 2d platformers that have flopped, actually (just aztaka, offhand). spelunky xbla, la mulana wii, and fez also look like they'll be successful. i don't really see how you believe there is little to no market for indie games -- what is your evidence of this, besides just claiming it? to claim this in the face of the indie game market's most successful year, with minecraft selling over a million copies, seems a bit odd too.

i agree that most indie game projects asking for funding aren't going to get funded, but the percent is probably larger than you think: go to kickstarter and go to the 'games' category, and count the % fully funded. from what you said, you'd expect it to be 1% or less, but it's more like 10%-20% of projects there that get fully funded. which is still a minority, but i'd take 1/10 or 1/5 odds on a bet that involves losing nothing if i lose any day. but even if your math were right and it was less than 1% likely that someone would fund your indie game, there's really nothing to lose in asking for funding, and everything to gain.

(bias note: my own project was successfully funded on kickstarter in 2009: i asked for $195 to pay for the igf fee and the fmod license fee, and got $1500 instead, with which i bought (among other things to help my games) a macbook for the purposes of porting my game to the mac and licensed some sound effects. so my beliefs are colored by positive experiences regarding asking for funding for indie games.)

[moi]

Valis, if you hate indie games so much, why are you posting here?

[tametick]

Have any experience with venture cap?  I do.  What's yours?

Only with my project on 8bitfunding (which isn't really venture capital, but it is this thread's topic), and it's actually going pretty well so far.

8bf is only a week and a bit old and there are already at least 2 games which will get funded for sure (you need to pass 50% to get any of the money), Cardinal Quest & Expedition.

I think we will see that number rise quickly as time goes on and more people become aware of 8bf.

[valis]

I could very well be wrong.

don't really see how you believe there is little to no market for indie games -- what is your evidence of this, besides just claiming it?

According to statistics from the App Store, the average amount made by games is something like $1 per day.  The vast majority of these games are released by small independent developers.  The vast majority of the games that are more successful than that are released by large dev houses-- this means that the non-indie games skew the results, so the prospects for indie games are in fact even smaller than what the raw average would seem to indicate.

i agree that most indie game projects asking for funding aren't going to get funded

Right.  And the more that attempt to use these funding channels, the less money there is going to be in the total pool.

I'd be very interested to see what the number of funded projects in Kickstarter looks like as the number of total projects increases.  If this funding method is not somehow different from other funding methods and gold rushes in the past, there will be rapid and increasing falloff over time of games that are successfully funded.

from what you said, you'd expect it to be 1% or less

Actually I never specified an exact figure.

[valis]

Valis, if you hate indie games so much, why are you posting here?

Moi, where, specifically, did I say anything whatsoever about my opinion of indie games?

Be specific-- I want to see your answer.

[tametick]

i agree that most indie game projects asking for funding aren't going to get funded

Right.  And the more that attempt to use these funding channels, the less money there is going to be in the total pool.

Actually I think the more games are on the site the more publicity and press coverage 8bf itself is going to get.

[valis]

Actually I think the more games are on the site the more publicity and press coverage 8bf itself is going to get.

That's very possible, and the funding source is no longer going to be "in the know" indie devs but the public at large.  And there you're getting into $1/day territory [that is, 1/day for games that are actually finished...]

Don't get me wrong-- it would be wonderful if there was a funding source available for all the unique and original games out there.

I'm just extremely skeptical as to whether that's true.

[Paul Eres]

the app store isn't a very good estimate, as the app store includes both indie and non-indie games, and the quality of games on there is more similar to flash games. you have to consider all indie game markets, not just the least profitable. also consider xblig, xbla, wiiware, psn (ps3's downloadable games), pc downloadable games (including casual games), flash games, social games (facebook games), and so on.

also, to be clear, the average sales of something in a market isn't a good indication of a market. the average published novel sells fewer than 1000 copies. does that mean there is "no market for novels"? not at all. how strong a market is isn't a factor of how well the average person in that market does, it's a factor of how big that market is relative to other markets, and how many people buy things in that market: because there are iphone games that sell millions of copies, even though the average iphone game sells dozens of copies, the market for iphone games is *millions of people*, not dozens of people.

we can at least objectively say that the market for indie games -- e.g. the number of people who bought an indie game in the last year -- is at least one million people (since more than one million people bought minecraft alone). probably much more, i'd be surprised if it weren't more than five million. that's a significant market. of course it's not distributed evenly, there is (as you mentioned) a long tail, where many games only sell a few thousand copies; my last game immortal defense for instance sold only about 2000-3000 copies, despite critical acclaim (though it was a 2007 game when the market was smaller then).

this is a bigger market than for, say, accordians. fewer than 1 million people bought an accordian in the past year. but if you look at the profit of accordian-makers, it's probably higher than the average profit of indie games, because there are fewer people making accordians than people making indie games. so it's a supply and demand thing: the market for indie games is rather large, but so is the supply of indie games, so the outcome is that the average game makes very little (and is of low quality) even if there are a huge number of games that are successful as well.

but if you only expect to do average, that's what you're going to do: you have to aim for higher things than average. if you're not the average indie game developer -- if you have more experience and are willing to put more work into making games than the average indie game developer does (which is often very little work, because as a species we're lazy) -- you can expect to do better than average. many indie devs consistently do far better than average. for instance, the average amount of money in sponsorship a flash game makes seems to be something like $300, but for the people who do it professionally they often get $10k or more for each of their flash game sponsorships, because they know what they are doing.

in other words, sales are stratified but the developers are also stratified, with the more experienced, hard-working, better-connected, and talented developers getting more sales. so if you're experienced, hard-working, well-connected, and talented, you can expect to make more than the average iphone game makes. your competitors are not those games because your games would be so much better than those games.

[valis]

is at least one million people (since more than one million people bought minecraft alone). probably much more, i'd be surprised if it weren't more than five million

As silly as it sounds to say, Minecraft is an extremely high-end and polished product as far as indie games go.

It also happened to hit an extremely lucky and rare sweetspot.

Also, since there's a finite cash reserve, these games (SMB, Minecraft etc) actually drain the pool of money available for smaller projects.

Hey, if this ends up creating some huge cornucopia of money available to provide asset money for independent games, that would be amazingly great.

I would just be absolutely astounded if that were to happen.

I've also experienced quite a bit of hostility here, frankly extreme rudeness.  Turns out that some of the most hostile posts have been from people who actually have products currently seeking funding.  In a more serious setting that would be considered a conflict of interest.  Clue for the immature kids: my opinion here has very little bearing on whether platformer #474846 or roguelike #293746 succeeds or not.

Another inauspicious fact: for a lot of these products, you're getting into a space where you're competing with free software, some of which is produced to a surprisingly high standard of production values.  How they are able to do that I really have no idea but they do.