Have you watched The Bridge?
Its an excellent TV series. Its a Danish/Swedish crime series, with some fairly creepy storylines, thats likely either dubbed or subtitled for you. That means that it contains NOBODY you have heard of. Its complex, and not trivially easy to get into. You have to pay attention ALL the time. You have to read all the time. It can be a bit dark. It has a low budget, and doesn’t make any effort to be accessible. It’s fucking amazing. Plus commercially very successful. Almost 2 million people in the UK (note: no Danish or Swedish speaking) watched each episode, despite being hidden on BBC4.
Why? Because if you like serious foreign-language drama series about serial killers with a clearly autistic female protagonist and don’t mind reading subtitles it is THE BEST. Also because… there isn’t a hell of a lot of competition there.
Have you tried Holopoint? It’s an archery training game for the Vive. It uses the proper room-scale setup. You need an $800 vive plus a $1500 PC to play it, plus some space to swing your arms around in. It has apparently, according to steamspy sold 31,000 at $15. Assume only $10 for discounts and thats $300k. I hope the makers won’t mind me guessing that it cost a LOT less to make. It is not Call of Duty, it is not No Mans Sky, it is not <insert name of blockbuster game here>. For the majority of the time your ‘enemies’ are blue cubes. Yup, Blue cubes. Sometimes you get orange cubes. Later you get an animated soldier. Its not exactly Elder Scrolls. BTW the game is AWESOME and you should buy it.
What links these two (and many other examples)?
They are the best X that money can buy, where X is something extremely specific.
I happen to own the IP of the best political strategy game you can buy (there are many election games, but few actual government ones). It is VERY profitable. This means two things:
- I have a very nice car and
- You would be nuts trying to make a political strategy game to compete directly with it.
OK, maybe not *nuts* but you are making things hard for yourself. In short, there is a lot more low hanging fruit out there. In the past, people were annoyed that those ‘Deer Hunter’ games made money despite looking dreadful. The target market didn’t care, they were the only Deer hunting games, they aren’t comparing it to Call Of Duty because COD is not about deer hunting. The same is true of Farming Simulator, or Street-Cleaning Simulator, or <WEIRD FUCKING THING> simulator. Those games can be ‘the best’ in their niche without spending 10 years, the unreal engine and a ton of features/polish/cool stuff.
Developers tend to commodify games in their mind and treat them as substitute goods, but they rarely are, unless they are complete clones. Nobody who has just added Democracy 3 to their shopping basket will remove it for Death Bastard Knife Massacre IX because they notice its cheaper. Nobody is going to swap Holopoint for Prison Architect, or The Bridge for The Waltons. If you make something that serves a specific niche (VR archery game or nordic noir with autistic crime fighting), then there is no competition. You get to sell to them merely by saying ‘Look, a game about this thing’ (which is cheaper than traditional marketing) PLUS you get to charge more for them.
If you want to make a successful game, think about the very specific niche thing you REALLY like, and make a game about that. Trust me, there are 10,000 people out there who WILL be looking for it and WILL buy it. maybe even 100,000. There are currently 35 million active users on steam. If your niche is so fucking obscure only one in 1,000 of them will like your premise, you potentially have a commercially viable game with zero competition. Thats just on steam.
One of the questions about your game that you SHOULD struggle to answer is ‘what is the direct competition?’