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[peteuplink]

You know what the most disconcerting thing about making games in the 21st century is? The massive wall of silence you meet every time you make any sort of reference to something you've made.

I don't get it. Back when I was making games in the 80's, if you let people see your game they were usually pretty enthusiastic about it (maybe it was because computers were still quite new and people didn't have the anonymity of the internet, you were seeing them in person), but these days you work at something, feel pretty proud of what you've done and decide to post about it, and all you get are the internet equivalent of crickets.

It can be quite off putting because you start wondering "well, when I get around to selling games, how will I do so if nobody is interested?"

Has anyone else found this to be the case? Maybe I've just not adjusted to the modern videogame development environment.

[MrBones]

I think this is largely a result of there being a much more saturated market today then there used to be.
As an example, go and look at the game development boards here (Playtesting, Dev Logs, Finished) and then look at the post/view ratio of each. There's so many threads that it's hard to expect to receive a lot of replies when there's just that many others in the same board. Unless something really seperates it from other projects on a great scale, you'll find yourself with a moderate amount of views and replies. In the Devlog board especially you'll find most people just prefer to lurk on their favored projects whenever there's an update.

In comparison, when I go out in real life when I tell people I'm working on a game I'm usually met with quite the reaction. In fact, not just in real life, but on forums/etc that aren't game-dev centric.

I think it's heavily environment dependent.

[peteuplink]

Yeah, I think you're right. When I first made games back in the 80's the only way we could share our games was person to person. So you'd pack all your gear up and head to the local microfair (with my dads help) with a few demos of your latest game, or maybe even the completed thing if it was ready, and away you'd go. The response was usually very good.

The problem I find with the internet is it's too impersonal. You know people have seen your latest video or devlog, but you've no idea what those people have thought of it, whether they thought it was pants or whether they just glanced in quickly to have a better look later on. At least back in the days of microfairs if someone walked up to your stall, took one look at your game and walked away without saying a word, you could be pretty sure that they weren't impressed.

[Pfotegeist]

If an unknown writes a book, he/she needs to pay someone else to read and make an honest comment about it. A well known author does not pray for a drizzle and still continues to be hit by a deluge of incontinent fans, some of which only liked the earlier work but want to give their opinion about how the new stuff is getting worse.

[VDZ]

It can be quite off putting because you start wondering "well, when I get around to selling games, how will I do so if nobody is interested?"

Forget selling games, how do you even get people to play your games for free? I make games for people to play, but with so many games out there nobody's really interested in playing them.

It's really demotivating for me. I still join game jams, but outside of that, I just wonder what's even the point of making anything anymore. And not even just in the "not gonna succeed" kind of way; I want to make games for people to enjoy, but if those people are already enjoying themselves with the bazillions of other games that are being released, what exactly is the added value of my game?

In comparison, when I go out in real life when I tell people I'm working on a game I'm usually met with quite the reaction. In fact, not just in real life, but on forums/etc that aren't game-dev centric.

I can't say the same, probably due to living in an area where it's not that rare for people to make games. Where I grew up (a tiny village in the middle of nowhere) people aren't interested enough in games to care unless it's the new Call of Duty. In either case the best I usually get is polite feigned interest.

[peteuplink]

I'm starting to think that part of the problem, as well as an over saturated market, is the sterile nature of the internet.

As I said above, back when I started making games everything was face to face. You made a game, printed your own covers, duplicated your own tapes or disks, then carted the lot to your local publisher, shops (when we had them before that it was all mail order), or went to the computer fairs. Then you showed your game to a few people and they'd either say "Yes, that's good! We'll pay you £2000". Or they'd say "it's alright, but if you can do X and Y to it we'll be more interested".  If you were at a micro fair, you'd sell copies for £1.99 each and the following week people would tell you what they thought of it. The profit was pretty good, as tapes were about 35 pence, so you made 100 copies for £35 and if you sold the lot (which wasn't that hard early on) you made £199. The most important thing , though, is that feedback was instant. If people liked your game, you knew. If they didn't, you knew that too!

It was helped by the fact that you had to get out there and meet people and also that games were very new and there weren't many around.

Personally I don't think the environment of actually creating and showing off the games has changed that much (in fact I think it's generally better). Sure, I don't like the online aspect, but if you think about it the shops, and publishers have been replaced by Steam, Desura, Kongregate, IndieDB and others. The micro fairs have been replaced by Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, websites and forums (in fact we still have micro fairs, they're just much bigger and are called things like E3, Comic Con, PAX and so on). You also no longer have to spend money on tapes, disks and a duplicating machine as digital distribution has solved that little problem. It's the whole lack of response that I find a bit off putting.

[internationalfish]

The ease of distribution is a double-edged sword: The net makes it easy for people to download your game. However, it's also easy for them to download almost every other game in existence, too, legally or not, so you might as well be competing with every potentially-available title there is, indie or AAA, for the attention of an increasingly attention-bereft audience that's being coddled with instant gratification and rock-bottom prices, as well as a never-ending avalanche of trash being funneled directly into their pockets via wifi and cellular networks...

Differentiation, it seems to me, has been largely dismissed as a development goal by businesses that specialize in marketing. Without passing judgment, why would you start something new if you could instead just release another FIFA game next year? Why try blazing a new trail when the next Mass Effect game should be as similar as possible to the last one to retain its massive audience? Why stray from the profitability of match 3 if your business depends on Candy Crush to stay afloat? And why not keep pushing these things, harder and harder, if you know that indie devs have access to the same channels you do and that your only real advantage is your marketing budget?

I guess this is just a long-winded way of saying that, in my opinion, the silence we experience is the result of other people yelling louder than we can, and the voices that would otherwise respond to us heeding said siren song. It sucks, but it's something we need to try and understand so we can either redefine the context in which we build and market our games or reconsider our expectations regarding exposure.

[erebusman]

I wrote a little mock-article on reddit in response to someones little article about the state of mobile gaming ; I think it applies just as well to desktop market and sort of mirrors some of your sentiments.. I've created mobile and desktop apps and found them to be equally void of response when published:

===================================================
The State of Mobile by Carl Kidwell of Infernohawke Entertainment

Ever see a TV with that black and white scramble of white noise?

Now imagine that screen is the mobile application marketplace.

Now image you are one of those dots on the screen.

Remember the dots are always moving, every moment a new dot replaces the last dot and you can't focus on anything because the noise is overwhelming.

Welcome to the mobile marketplace of 2015.

But its worse than the picture I've painted so far ( you didn't think that was it did you?).

No no no, its much worse!

You see really big players in the market, with already deep pockets, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to artificially place themselves high on the rating list to ensure their AAA application is placed at the top of the new applications and that they stay there. This system is gamed and rigged to ensure that you application does not appear there because they can outspend you at a rate of 100,000 to 1 to ensure their success.

Furthermore your shiny new independent application may appear on the new application list for as little as one day, or if extremely fortunate in some cases up to a week. The random bits of traffic you get as a member of the white noise crowd literally has the same astronomically low chance as a lottery ticket to pick up enough momentum to be visible to a casual user after it rolls off of the new applications page.

Finally to top it off - even when searching for your application by its very name you might have to scroll through 26 pages of results - that are all higher ranked and share nothing in common with your applications name - before you finally find your application.

In a nutshell the state of the mobile application market is a cross between a gold rush, a rock star dream, and a snowball's chance in hell.

On the upside however you can easily publish your app on the iOS Store for only $99.00 a year and Google Play for $25 one time fee.

Good luck ever making that money back.

[desdemian]

I totally agree with you that person-to-person is completely different. I saw your video and started to think about it...

If you were right next to me right now, and showed me your game (oridium alphanite), i would be pleased to play it (i like ships with those controllers), enjoy it, give you feed back, and listen to your story as a fellow developer, do you have local multiplayer? let's play!. Hell if you asked me for a couple of dollars i would give them to you.

Through the internet: I saw your video. Nice effort. I don't care enough, not even to comment. Let alone take out my wallet.

So yeah, the internet kinda has that impersonal thing, and if i don't care for you beforehand, the only thing that will sell is your "cold and lifeless" product, nothing else. And if you are not getting any comments, is probably that the people watching your post don't care enough for your product.

[peteuplink]

Yeah. It's like I said above, the internet is a very sterile environment for showing off games. Games promotion definitely works better on a person to person basis.

Also, and this is just a general thing I've noticed and not aimed at anyone in particular, because the internet is so impersonal people can be rude (even though they may not mean to be) and purposefully ignore you. It's much harder to do that in person.

I mean, I must be doing something right as I have over 100,000 followers on Tumblr (not sure how that happened), my website has over 5,000 views so far, I've over 1,000 followers on Twitter and my small demo game has been downloaded over 1,000 times on Desura (though oddly only 22 times on IndieDB), so people are following and have played the game. It would be nice if they'd interact a bit more above the usual "like" or "retweet". I appreciate that people are taking time to follow, but sometimes it's like I'm being followed by an army of mutes.

[desdemian]

I mean, I must be doing something right as I have over 100,000 followers on Tumblr (not sure how that happened), my website has over 5,000 views so far, I've over 1,000 followers on Twitter and my small demo game has been downloaded over 1,000 times on Desura (though oddly only 22 times on IndieDB), so people are following and have played the game. It would be nice if they'd interact a bit more above the usual "like" or "retweet". I appreciate that people are taking time to follow, but sometimes it's like I'm being followed by an army of mutes.

Wow, to me those are big numbers, i thought we were talking on a much smaller scale. i would be puzzled too about the silence. But then again at least you are getting likes and retweets... Thats the modern way of aknowledging your work... Without deviating time from watching cats

[Moth]

I have over 100,000 followers on Tumblr (not sure how that happened)

If you had 100k people following on tumblr you would have immense reach and you wouldn't be making this topic. You would definitely get more than 0~10 notes on average (I have 500 followers on my tumblr and my stuff averages pretty decent note counts, my important things can go to the thousands). It would have to be lots of fake accounts following you for some bizarre reason.

What kind of attention do you want from people? Remember you need to give people a reason to care. With so many bad and uninteresting games out there you need to make a great impression and be intriguing.

You know people have seen your latest video or devlog, but you've no idea what those people have thought of it, whether they thought it was pants or whether they just glanced in quickly to have a better look later on. At least back in the days of microfairs if someone walked up to your stall, took one look at your game and walked away without saying a word, you could be pretty sure that they weren't impressed.

I think if people don't respond to an update or video they are basically just walking away unimpressed. Unfortunately the internet is filled with so much free impressive content the bar is set very high. People need to have personal investment to be arsed to give input, so you cater to a niche or just be impressive to appeal to anyone. It's considerably easier for a smaller developer to do the former.

Personally I'm not sure what the difference of showing off something in person can have besides societal pressure to be interested. This topic comes off to me a bit as wanting a handicap when it comes to pr, which I understand... but really, we all have to deal with it.

All I can recommend is, if you feel like you're lacking the ability to market your game because you can't express your personality with it like you can in person, then find a way to integrate your personality into your online marketing. Anything is possible, but through the internet it can be a bit hard to come across with a positively affecting and infectious personality rather than painful hamminess, but if you can do it right people will appreciate it and realize you're a human, not a robot.

Most importantly of all, if personality is an important factor in your game, it needs to be readily apparent in the game itself at a glance- you should see it in abundance in the trailer. The personality should be also be a feature of the product, not a marketing tactic to sell it. Ideally you could let the game's personality do the marketing for you, not let marketing tactics drive a game to success. (That said, an immense amount of marketing work is needed even if your game does have personality. Get writing. Hundreds of personal letters. Prove you're worth the time.)

If you want people to interact with you, you also need to try and give people calls to action to leave their input. Like Bonesy said it also depends a lot on the environment. For example, if your game were on Greenlight, you would probably get a hundred comments minimum and that's just from video and screenshots alone. Greenlight provides the call to action of commenting because that's what the environment is for.

[peteuplink]

If you had 100k people following on tumblr you would have immense reach and you wouldn't be making this topic.

As for the rest of your reply. Maybe I do need to work on my online promotional skills. It was suggested to me recently that I should use questions in my posts to encourage people to reply. Instead of posting a video and going "HEY! Look at this!", post the video and ask people about it "Does the music fit the mood of the game?" or some such.

Things probably aren't helped by the fact that I still have a bit of an "old fashioned" way of approaching games development. Most of my games are the old 3 lives and about 10 minutes of game play in each sitting arcade routine. Those were fine back in 1986, but I'm thinking gamers want something a bit more engaging these days. I'm learning as I go along.

[Moth]

If you had 100k people following on tumblr you would have immense reach and you wouldn't be making this topic.

ahah, I didn't mean to imply you were a liar or anything, thus my note about fake accounts/bots. There are lots of tumblr botters that follow people to try and get people to click to their account with scripts that load malware, for instance.

regarding marketing I wrote up a post here that might be useful to you. it might be stuff you already know, but if you're lost on marketing, it's basically everything I know.

Things probably aren't helped by the fact that I still have a bit of an "old fashioned" way of approaching games development. Most of my games are the old 3 lives and about 10 minutes of game play in each sitting arcade routine. Those were fine back in 1986, but I'm thinking gamers want something a bit more engaging these days. I'm learning as I go along.

there is still very much a market for simple small games, just look at flappy bird and super hexagon. you just need quality, polish and memetic potential. and marketing

[peteuplink]

No, it's OK. I just thought I'd post the image anyway, as it is pretty easy for someone to say "I have X number of followers" when they've really only got 3 and 2 of them are his mum and dad

I'll have a look at your post on marketing. It is kinda new to me because back in the early days we did marketing of a different kind. People were pretty much willing to pull your arm off to get your game if you could develop something that resembled the games they were playing in the arcades.

[Kaustek]

You will never hear from the people who are happy with your product, you only hear from the ones who want to gripe about something.

This is true of all things retail, not just video games.

[Oroboros]

In regards to getting a reaction, doing something different usually garners the most attention. Regardless of the followers, if what you're offering doesn't break the mold it usually doesn't hold people's interest. This applies to music, art and any other entertainment medium.

[tok]

im sure there is a thread here for this here somewhere (heaps probably) but where do you guys go for an audience that isnt dev-centric and isnt shitty about people posting their own work?

[peteuplink]

Not a clue, Tok. I usually post stuff to my blog, which then pops a link onto my Twitter account with the hashtags #gaming #videogames #indiegame and the usual #gamedev #indiedev. Most of my followers on Twitter are other devs, but I'm slowly starting to pick up one or two that are not. And the followers are viewers to my blog are pretty healthy, but I'm not getting much reaction.

[Derek]

Can you link us some posts that you thought would get more attention and didn't?

EDIT: If you're okay potentially getting some critique about the post/game itself, and not just the "marketing" side of things.