Do you think AAA studios or publishers pay much attention to big indie successes? Your Hollow Knights, Hadeses, Slay the Spires, Minecrafts (once upon a time), Cities Skylines. I know success is hard to replicate in games, and maybe the amount of sales/success is still a whole order of magnitude off, but are there any lessons to be learned? Any bits to (as a good artist) steal?

boynextdoornews

There's always things to learn from successes and professional game designers usually play a lot of games to continue learning and growing. Good design is always worth studying and dissecting, analyzing, and learning from. This doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to build a whole game in the same line as the indie darling - we can see other competitors, we can see what kind of future such a game might have, we can evaluate what kind of lifespan a similar game could have, and all of these factors go into deciding whether there's any real chance of building a competitor.

Sometimes, if the audience potential is there, the big publishers will greenlight a similar game in the space - see Battle Royale, MOBA, Hero Shooter, etc. But for smaller stuff - Roguelikes, Roguelites, 2D platformers, Metroidvanias, 4X game, city simulator, farming simulator, etc. - there's a pretty well-established cap on the total number of players willing to buy into that kind of game. If we work backward from that number and figure out what our expected revenue would be from building such a game, we can figure out how much we'd have to spend and how much of a profit we could stand to make. If such an endeavor doesn't produce enough to move the needle in a way that investors/board would care, the publishers usually pass on the project.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Добавить комментарий

Ваш адрес email не будет опубликован. Обязательные поля помечены *