{"id":1090,"date":"2011-03-15T19:55:13","date_gmt":"2011-03-15T19:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=1090"},"modified":"2011-03-15T19:55:13","modified_gmt":"2011-03-15T19:55:13","slug":"the-viability-of-small-short-games-on-the-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2011\/03\/15\/the-viability-of-small-short-games-on-the-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"The viability of small, short games on the PC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Increasingly, my thinking is that ‘knocking out’ a quick, easier to make, low budget indie game does not make economic sense. That has never been my plan, but I’m getting even more convinced that to do so will not work.<\/p>\n

Obviously there are arguments in favour of a low budget quick, small project (I’m defining that as under 6 months development time for 1 person). I’d guess they are as follows:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Spreading the risk. Multiple games per year, so chances of having a zero-profit year are lower<\/li>\n
  2. Multiple rolls of the dice. You have more chances to hit on a perfect design and implementation<\/li>\n
  3. Lack of burn-out. You finish a game before you get bored with it, everything always feels fresh<\/li>\n
  4. Keeps you in the public eye. Your hardcore fans can buy a game from you every 6 or even 3 months.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I think this is outweighed by the downsides:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Lack of polish. It can take 50 people 6 months to polish a AAA game. If your game is all done in 3 -6 months, there is likely no polish, no testing. You are selling a half-completed game<\/li>\n
    2. Lack of wow-factor. Like it or not, many people ignore a game that isn’t awesome in screenshots and videos, and which doesnt have a huge feature list. You won’t get *less* press coverage, you will likely get *none*.<\/li>\n
    3. Lower price point. If your game looks like it took 3-6 months, good luck charging $20. It *might* work, but you will likely charge less. Lower prices mean many marketing possibilities, like advertising are no longer cost effective.<\/li>\n
    4. Lower mindshare, market-share and virality. If your game is played by 500-1,000 people, it is unlikely to build up momentum in gaming communities. A bigegr game selling 10,000 copies starts to get multiple mentions on forums, people hearing about it from multiple sources. 100,000+ and the effect is much much stronger.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      I know some devs making a living from small, quick-development games. Personally, I think that they would make a better income from bigger, higher budget titles that they spent longer on. Obviously YMMV, and your aims may differ. I know many devs suffer from critical burnout, and love short dev cycles. I think my limit is 2 years, I’m not massively keen to continue tweaking and adding to the GSB code base now. However, I am assuming that the new game (sort of code worded LB) will be of a similar development scale and polish. Hopefully much more :D<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Increasingly, my thinking is that ‘knocking out’ a quick, easier to make, low budget indie game does not make economic sense. That has never been my plan, but I’m getting even more convinced that to do so will not work. Obviously there are arguments in favour of a low budget quick, small project (I’m defining<\/p>\n

      Continue Reading… The viability of small, short games on the PC<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1091,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions\/1091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}