Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

The viability of small, short games on the PC

cliffski

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 that as under 6 months development time for 1 person). I’d guess they are as follows:

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

I think this is outweighed by the downsides:

  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
  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*.
  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.
  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.

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

10 thoughts on The viability of small, short games on the PC

  1. Can’t wait to see what you have cooking for us Cliff :)

    Keep up the good word!

    Regarding the main topic of your post, I partially agree, but I believe this is not true for mobile games though.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts with the world ;p

  2. We think you’re correct there. On XBLIG, or indeed iPhone, it’s the complete opposite – toiling for 8 months on a game is probably 6 months too long to make any kind of commercial sense, in terms of your likely returns. But the PC is a different beast – our view is that you’re best targeting an under-served niche and making something deep and satisfying for them, which takes time. If you’re going broad as an indie on PC, then you need to bear in mind you’re up against incredible indie titles like World of Goo, and you’ll need to polish accordingly!

  3. A couple things:

    1) If you’ve already developed an engine/codebase that handles the more general stuff, that can make quite a difference. For us, AVWW went from nothing to “there’s actually a game here” in about 4 weeks of actual work. Even adding in multiplayer (despite being a different model than we’ve done) only took about a week and a half since we’d already worked out the grunt work of networking. But if we’d been starting from scratch all this would probably have taken at least 3 months. Of course, we have two programmers, and we’re looking at a total development time from start to first official release of no less than 9-10 months, so that’s still different from what you’re talking about.

    2) Even more than that, expansions can nicely fill in the gaps in a development schedule where a short-term-project would be good. Obviously works with DLC-packs, but also with big extensions into new mechanics, modes, etc. Just depends on how extensible the base game is.

  4. If you’re making money for a living from small indie games it’s just too risky to start big project. If you’re making small indie games you are probably working alone or in a very small team that why it’s too hard to do something big. Furthermore, where do you get income if you’re making money for a living from small games because big project will require at lest 6-12 months.

  5. I agree in every point except “Lack of polish”. IMO a 6 month project can/should not have gameplay as deep as a 12+ month project. Therefore polish and tests scale with the game’s complexity.

  6. For a freshly minted indie, actually -shipping- a complete game experience every couple of months is a massive feat.

    I know people who’ve been working on games for ages and may never get them out the door.

    My first two projects had 8-week dev cycles and working to get them out the door was an invaluable experience.

    Caveat: making money is not my interest, building credibility and proving out my ideas is. In regards to an “economically stable” model, absolutely investing more time to make a good idea great is the way to go.

    I’m already seeing how I could take one of these quick concepts and turn them into something larger that might sell.

    I would advocate doing quick, small projects that can easily be launched onto platforms like Kongregate and judging public response. If you get a ton of interest in your little Flash/Unity version that’s almost as good as pre-selling an alpha.

    Then all that’d remain would be to polish that already winning concept/prototype into a “proper” commercial model.

    That’s my theory, anyways.

  7. I couldn’t agree more for the market that you target and I think the new trend is to be able to test if your game is resonating with the audience before release. Selling the game at a steep discount in an alpha state to get feedback is a must if you are doing a longer schedule with no previous audience to avoid a flop. Wolfire is a great example of this as is Minecraft – and they are doing what you describe – going for a very high level of polish before calling the product complete.

    I’m coming at it from a slightly different angle. I want to play with a few game concepts so I am spending a week or so doing small game tutorials with Unity to get the core experience going and then I’m selling the project file for a small fee for people to learn from. I paid $0 for the software and already made money in the first week if you don’t account for salary. It won’t replace a day job but I get to learn and teach and see what people are interested in. Swing by igamemaker.com to see my “VERY low budget” asteroids game.

    I’m tempted to do an actual 6-12 month production and not do everything myself but it is a very tall mountain to climb. My hat is off to you for doing it for years.

  8. Interesting points, although I don’t agree that you need to compete on polish and wow-factor. Sure, without them you lose a large chunk of the market, but you never needed to pitch at the whole market anyway. You rule out massive swathes of the potential audience when you pick a genre but few people worry about that because they accept a choice has to be made. I’d argue the same goes for polish vs. long development times.

    Basically, I believe there are more than enough people out there now who will happily pay $10, maybe even $15 for a rough-looking game to make 4 or 5 months of single-person development profitable, if they’re convinced that the gameplay is good and they know about the game’s existence. I think those are the hard parts!

  9. I think a good way to do it would be a mix of the two. As you mentioned in point 4, more games = more publicity; so one could make some smaller games to start off with, then later spend time on longer, more polished games when one can be assured that people will see them. I mean, theres not much point for a new dev to make a huge ambitious game on their first go, chances are it won’t work.

    Plus, many small games means lot’s of experience with game design, so a larger project will be easier when you’ve already made a bunch of other games.

    However to contradict that I must say that personally I probably wouldn’t purchase a game that lacked polish. I don’t buy many games, and I’d rather buy one good game for $20 dollars then two that are sub-par for $10 each.

  10. Surely the biggest problem for you is marketing. There will always be many more potential customers you haven’t reached.
    If thats true your best strategy would be to take your most popular game and polish and improve it endlessly.

    When i look at the game market, i see many average or poor games. It takes time to find the gems.

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