Building a video games business from scratch

[srodrigo]

Weekly update 7

11.43 pomodoros average, 7 days. A bit lower than usual, but more days. It was a productive week though, I prototyped some ideas and finally started implementing one.

Tried the remaining tools for making mobile games. (Hopefully) Found an amazing framework: Corona SDK. It looks great because:
- It comes with Built-in Ads, IAP, etc. integration, which are obviously vital for mobile games and I imagine a bit of a pain to integrateon your own (specially Ads and mediation).
- The development workflow is great. Not only "making stuff happen" is fast, but you save a file and the game reloads on the simulator or on a real device. This is massive compared to most tools, specially on mobile because Android takes ages to compile and re-run stuff.
- It got open-sourced recently. This doesn't mean I can modify it (GPL license..), but at least can have a look at the code to figure out workarounds if needed.
- It's code-only (no editor), which suits me better.

I'm going to make Game 2, a mobile game, using this tool. Followed a tutorial for a few hours to have an idea and was quite impressed. If someone has used it in the past and has any concerns, please let me know, but looks great for mobile games so far, and Game 2 should be small enough to mitigate risks. This means that I'm not playing around with Unity anymore for now. I'll go back to it if Corona doesn't work out well.

It's hard to come up with mobile games ideas that satisfy me. The hardcore gamer inside me dislikes most mobile games. But this is obviously irrelevant, as we have to serve player's tastes, not mine

Game 2 is going to be a mobile game about solving mazes. Sounds typical, but seems to be a kind of puzzle that players like (from the downloads/comments of other games), and I want to introduce some stuff I haven't seen in this kind of games. This is cool, although will make the development longer, as I need to customise existing algorithms to accommodate the extras, but I think it's worth it.

I have no idea about how long it's going to take me, but I'd say probably between one and two months, unless I get the maze generation stuff right very quickly. I already have a prototype with he main mechanic after a few days, but there are other things I still need to implement for the game screen itself (apart from the maze generation mentioned earlier, which is the other big chunk).

I didn't do any Pico-8 this week, didn't have the extra bandwidth and would have distracted me, but I want to do more small stuff and consider writing a first book targeted at beginners and kids. This has been attempted already, but wasn't finished and people where asking when would be done, so there is some demand.

I'm going to try to work for as many days in a row as I feel like. Forcing myself to take a day off or two a week is not working great, because some times I can't stop thinking about the work I'll do next day but I'd rather do it right away. Let's see how it goes.

 

[Flybye]

Feel free to post your links to the game in the iOS and android stores. We will be more than happy to test out.

And in regards to your #2 with making a more difficult game after the initial first easy one, always keep in mind to try to have a library of small games. It is tempting to get into a better game, but you want exposure. And one of the ways to get exposure is to keep pumping games out no matter how simplistic. And you never know. One of those simplistic games might become a heaver hitter if it is addictive enough.

 

[srodrigo]

Feel free to post your links to the game in the iOS and android stores. We will be more than happy to test out.

I take your word Probably not on this thread, as it might be considered spam, but cool by PM.

And in regards to your #2 with making a more difficult game after the initial first easy one, always keep in mind to try to have a library of small games. It is tempting to get into a better game, but you want exposure. And one of the ways to get exposure is to keep pumping games out no matter how simplistic. And you never know. One of those simplistic games might become a heaver hitter if it is addictive enough.

Totally agree. It's difficult to postpone those cool games I'd love to make that would take +6 months, but for now I'm focused on smaller things.

Game 2 is totally different from Game 1, even different platform. The second one might take longer (I expect 2 months at most, which is not massive) because it has more complex algorithms and need to integrate all the mobile stuff for the first time in ages, but that was the only mobile game I was happy enough to make without requiring good art or 3D. I want to leave out some cool features until I see whether people play it or not and it's worth the extra effort, because some features would probably require a good amount of effort...

I'm still committed to take as short as possible to ship decent games, specially on mobile, which is better suited for MVPs + fast iterations compared to PC games. And if they get downloads and start generating continuous revenue, no matter how small, then I'll feel freed up to carry on and build on top of that. I try to be quite lean and leave a lot of stuff out to not take too long.

 

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[OverByte]

I would suggest offering rewarded videos when players are in need of the stuff they can earn. For example, they fail to complete a level and lose their last "life". You approach them with a message like "Need more lifes? Watch a video and keep playing" and if they agree, they see the video. Additionally you can offer the IAP first ("Buy more lifes") and offer the rewarded video as an alternative if users decline to pay.

This is exactly what I did when I released my game. I do like this approach as it shouldn’t piss off uses as much as interstitial ads and gives you at least some revenue from users who won’t pay you directly.

 

[srodrigo]

Have you given yourself a loose deadline or still too early for that?

I did, but missed it I'll hopefully get a beta ready next week, and then it's all boring publishing stuff and bugfixing.

When the game is released, I want to go through my logs and try to find what made the game take longer than expected, but apart from 2 weeks porting it to Unity, I suspect I just didn't have a clear idea about what I wanted the game to be, and I wasn't motivated to work the extra mile on this game.

I'm sure you've checked, but don't forget to start with an asset store search pretty much any time you need to do anything. Developers tend to start with the idea that they'll do everything themselves, but many, many of the assets are just amazingly underpriced for what they do, to the point that they might as well be free. Of course, their real cost is in their learning curve and integration time, but still, they can be incredible, incredible values.

I tend to forget, but I've looked for assets for specific things, and couldn't find anything suitable for the game I was making. It's mostly UI + a really non-standard game screen, so the chances of finding specific assets that were useful was low. I need to (re)search more though, there might be good surprises.

I didn't want to go down the path of using more general assets like PlayMaker, I heard of some people getting stuck and regretting, even if they initially made progress faster.

Also, something that I rarely see mentioned is that digging through a well-written asset to understand how it works can be better than any course. You're basically buying source code (in most cases) to high-end for anywhere from free to a few dollars For someone that's new to development, the hand-holding of a course may be better, of course, but if you want to make an inventory system for example, there are about 100 inventory assets there to learn from, even if you still write your own from scratch.

That's a great idea I didn't think of! I'll start with free assets related to specific topics I'd like to learn. Although I tend to be very careful with game programmers' code, the percentage of people who write bad code (I mainly mean unmaintainable here) is pretty high compared to other kinds of programming. But there are definitely still people who are worth reading their code.

 

[srodrigo]

Thanks @MJ DeMarco and @luniac for your kind words I haven't done any work on this recently. I needed a mental break, and that also led to other things taking over:

TD;DR
Decided to look for a job to get stable income. I'm probably moving abroad again. I'll keep working either on this or on something else on the side.

Long version
I spent a month taking a mental rest, and looking for a remote job (which also involved preparing technical interviews, my web dev skills were a bit rusty). I wanted to move out of my current place and probably buy a house soon, so stable income became a priority. Incidentally, I'll probably end up accepting an on-site job in the UK, so I'll be moving there shortly; the salary is going to be really good, which should free my head up to focus on working on my projects on the side even if they fail, while allowing me to look for a house or spend more money on my projects. The down-side is that I'll have far less time, which means projects will take longer, but you can't have everything. I suppose having a well-paid job and working on my stuff on the side would be a good balance at this point. This should help with stopping jumping from idea to idea as well, because it was starting to fall close to money-chasing.

Problems I've noticed so far:

1. Self-doubt just turned me from a hard working (6-7 days a week, all day, just getting things done) guy into a worried procrastinator. Also started looking into other things (SaaS, mobile apps, freelancing - among others), as I stopped believing that what I was doing made any sense at all. I didn't have enough patience to carry on with video-games for long enough until they got some traction, which is something I need to fix anyway because it can bite me regardless of what kind of projects I work on.
2. Felt too comfortable, I kind of lost my Why. I wanted to be closer to my family while working on my stuff. I got that, so I lost the urgency of working my butt off.
3. At the same time, I became too worried about money. That's a good thing in the long-term (you need money from your projects), but it turned into a short/mid-term opportunity cost issue. Leaving a 6 figures salary on the table was difficult to digest for me.
4. Didn't have a solid plan (although they tend to change, but anyway it's good to have it). I came back home to work on a SaaS, then realised the product wasn't a good idea, and got into video-games, but the plan was not great either (games that would take too long - a.k.a. bad idea these days, high risk of not paying off).
5. Marketing.
6. Networking.

Solutions:

1. Get back to the mindset of doing the work and stop worrying. Going back to meditation (to keep me focused and sane) and doing exercise weekly (to have more energy) should help.
2. Moving abroad should destroy my comfort zone and get me on track. I'll be financially comfortable, but I won't be as comfortable in a personal sense, as part of my end goal is not staying in the UK forever, but in Spain close to family.
3. Got a healthy salary, that should solve the opportunity cost issue. I don't hate working as a developer, and still like programming a lot, so it's not a bad situation.
4. Next time I jump into working on my projects full-time, I need to make sure they are already ramen-profitable at least. Thinking "hey, I've got some savings and a roof, I can spend time on this even if I fail" was ok at the beginning, but was the root of some of the problems I had.
5. This doesn't have a simple solution.
   1. If I make another mobile game, I'll try to get a publisher, otherwise you're basically doomed, the game/app gets buried in the pile of +6.000 apps that hit the store daily.
   2. If I make a PC/console game, I'll look at what successful people are doing. I'd probably avoid making PC/console games though if I want to make money anytime soon, as they take waaay too long to make.
6. On one side, I will have the chance to meet other game developers when I move abroad. On the other side, it's probably wise to get a bit more involved in some community to get exposure (this helps with selling games), which implies spending time on game jams, forums, discord, creating content other people may find interesting, etc. (basically sharing content with people, not necessarily final games). The former is not very time consuming; the latter requires a good amount of time. I've seen people turning their community involvement into a business, or leading to contracts opportunities, so that's a posible companion, although given the limited time I'll have from now, it's probably better to just focus 100% on making games and use them as showcase.

I've been thinking more about the entertainment industry. This industry is in trouble There are more choices than ever (e.g. in video-games, great tools that help making games, therefore the number of games out there has exploded) but people have less time and ever to spend on leisure (busy with work, distractions, and again too much entertainment offers), so creators are not only competing with other content, but but users' time (which will never increase, 24h/day max.). This is what made me think that it'd be better to switch to mobile apps (that solve a real problem, not the "I'm bored" problem) or SaaS products. But, anyway, I want to carry on with what I started, I don't want to give up too early. Making good money from a job should give me some margin to spend more time on this before I switch to a different thing.

 

[Jonathan S.Diaz]

Hi there, I decided to create a progress thread, so I'll have to feel ashamed if I don't make good progress

A bit of context: I'm a software developer. I quit my job a few months ago to work on personal projects and move back to my country, after saving enough money to survive for some time (I couldn't stand working on a day job any longer anyway). My original plan was to make a SaaS platform, but I did a better market research and my idea didn't look as good as I thought.

So I decided to go for making video games, which I also like a lot and was postponing it for very long.

The video games industry is huge (more than films + music combined), so there is money there, although at the moment it breaks the commandment of Entry (also Control, if you think about how distribution works, mainly through third-party stores). Professional tools are available for peanuts, and anyone taking a course on Udemy can make and publish sh*t games (many don't even qualify for "game"), so it's also a saturated market. It looks kind-of self-publishing books. A difference (after reading a few threads by authors here) is the amount of time it takes to make a good game in average, compared to a good book. But it's not impossible to succeed, there are independent developers making good money.

The important stuff:

Goals

Even if this is a potential Fastlane business, my first goal is just to make it a viable business. Ideally, it would remain as a one-man shop for a while until it gets traction. From there, I would see how to make it Fastlane, which might involve spending longer (a few years) or good money making something really great; a.k.a. shooting for a "hit". But that will come later. I'm aiming to make at least a minimum wage income within months 6-12, and a mid-class income within months 18-24. Not sure whether this sounds conservative or not, but given how long it takes to make this kind of products, it even sounds optimistic to me.

Current skills

I have no experience in shipping games, although I've made a few half-backed ones. Current skills more in detail:

• Programming: good
• Game Design: ok, and getting better
• Music: have a background, although not in composition, but still better than nothing
• Art/Graphics: this is the fun one. I've been working on it for a few hundreds of hours for a year already, but still far from looking great
• Marketing: have some notions (read books and other stuff) but have only shipped one mobile app before, so still learning

These are the bared minimum skills required to make a video game that makes money. Quite a lot of things, and very different between them. It's been a few months learning the last 3 while working on a game, and felt really overwhelming, because things like art can take years and years to master and I'm quite behind. I can always outsource some stuff once the thing is making some revenue though.

Plan

I started making a game two months ago, and realised that it would take far longer than I was expecting (specially due to being slow making graphics). I'm parking this to start with the plan below, but probably reusing the tech I built, so it wasn't a waste of time.

1) Make a first game for free in less than one month: this should take me through the whole process of releasing a game, not just making it. I'll probably use free stock assets and music. It doesn't need to be a full game, just the bare minimum that you can ship for people to play.

2) Make a second -commercial- game in less than three months: this one should be small, but still a full game that I can charge for. Managing scope will be critical to reach this goal, 3 months is quite a short time to make something decent.

3) Make a third -proper- game in less than 12 months: this should be the one that starts making some money. Ideally, a 6 months project, but might take longer.

I don't want to make longer plans for now, there's a lot of work to do above, but as an idea each game from game 4 should ideally give more traction while trying for find out what can be a hit one at that time (trends change quite fast).

Freelancing (either in the same industry, or any other kind of programming stuff) will be considered if things don't work out as expected, or if I need to get money to pay freelancers.

Difficulties so far

I felt quite uncomfortable with taking long to ship stuff. This is the main reason to step back and do 2 small pieces of work first. This way, I'll get something done and iterate from there.

It can feel overwhelming as hell when you have to learn about so many different things (which I have to do anyway, learning at least a minimum about each is vital). I struggle with art, which means I'll have to either buy it (stock art) or outsource it at some point if I want to go fast, although I'll keep honing my skills here and in other areas.

Anyway, I've started 1) today, I'll post updates.

Hey, glad to see you're experimenting using your existing skills. I'm also a software developer and have been trying to make profitable games for some months now. I even began an execution thread for one here.

I think that you are taking WAY too much at once. Making a game alone is a lot of work, but it is possible. However, it is fundamental for you to understand that you are no longer a software developer. Your only goal when building a game is to give users an amazing experience.

There is no room for specialization in small companies, as an indie developer, you will have to wear many different hats, and many times you will have to resist the temptation to code. Programming is of diminishing return, meaning that at some point, coding will not move the product forward. I am current at this stage with my latest game GearCaster: I have been working on it for some months with a friend and we are at a point where we have to start measuring success by how many players we get, as opposed to how many features we add.

The previous indie game I worked on was a multiplayer RPG called GrandQuest. This project failed because I focused too much on stuff that didn't matter like coding and design. In reality, it will be extremely end-to-end when you are a sole developer: for this game, I was the front-end developer, back-end developer, database administrator, dev-ops specialist, web designer, project manager, graphic designer, etc.

The most important thing is that you get a player base going as soon as possible. And for that, you will require building/perfecting a "fun-loop" as soon as possible. Forget marketing and all that stuff for now, you can deal with that once you have a product. Right now really focus on perfecting a fun-loop, which is the loop that your players go through where they are rewarded for playing.
Example of a fun-loop (GrandQuest): Find a combat match, get to a high level with the equipment they have, get rewarded for getting to a high level, buy better equipment, repeat.

I would also consider out-sourcing stuff like graphics and music if it takes too much time/effort.

In fact, I would consider finding another person to get on the team, though that is difficult... If your game is successful, you probably want to hire a team at some point.

I disagree that building a game break the commandment of Entry. Engineering, designing, deploying, maintaining, and doing all the other shit that comes with building a profitable game is intense. Like, it's probably one of the hardest things you can do. Udemy courses alone will not teach you the skills necessary to build and release a highly profitable game any more.

Programming alone is a difficult task, even with all the platforms available nowadays, which gives you leverage. But that is not enough...

Good luck, and have fun!

 

[EdKirby]

but I cannot make a game in 3 months

I would agree with this except for one thing, Hypercasual games. The hypercasual genre is where an indie can start to bang something out in a few hours and have an MVP in a week and get it released and getting data. Then with that data it's possible to get a publishing deal with Voodoo or Ketchap etc. Not a slam dunk given all the competition but the turnaround time or process/feedback loop is much faster.

I'm not trying to change your mind, just mentioning it because this is where I'm moving towards after my game is released. As a side note, regardless if one of the many ideas I have for a hypercasual game hits, it's a great way to learn various skills fast. Something that I should have realized way before now.

That being said I'm also looking at getting back to my roots and dusting off the skills needed to build SaaSs and iOS apps. I mentioned in another thread that games are candy where as a SaaS or an app can potentially solve a painful problem and therefore have a better chance of making money. People are fickle and it's harder to determine what someone is going to like when it comes to games.

It's great that you've got your game almost there. Is there anything you'd like to share after your (long) journey? I'd really appreciate it, and probably other people too. Would have been worth it even if the game (hope not) doesn't do well?

Thought about doing this and I probably will. I'd like to be able to give back something of value if people think it would be valuable whether or not the game succeeds or fails.

As much as I want my game to succeed in all the usual ways i.e. money, there are other "successes" that mean as much to me. Such as actually finishing and shipping something...Success! All the valuable technical skills I've learned along the way...Success! How to work with artists..huh.. painful Success! lol. My buddy is a professional artist and is part of the project but it's been a grind because we speak different languages. But now I know how to communicate my vision to and can work with artists...Success! You get my point. I see many successes but of course money would be awesome too.

Maybe I'll do a brain dump about all the trials and tribulations in the not too distant future.

 

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[EdKirby]

Glad to see that there's someone else who doesn't believe in hypercasual games.

Whether or not you guys believe in HC games means anything. The fact that people are playing them means there's a market, and for the developers who get the publishing deals with Voodoo et al. are making FU money and funding their sweetheart projects and studios.

Also, It doesn't take 6 months to make one either. One week to one month depending on your skills and the complexity of the game.

For the record, I'm not trying to change your minds but let's be realistic, you can make this a hobby and spend years making your magnum opus that may or (more than likely) not make jack because it was a "passion project" and you didn't listen to the market. Or you can treat it like a business and serve the playing public, or solve a problem (Apps) or what have you and actually make money. I believe in scratching your own itch but only where it has a business need.

I would say that you need to ask yourself, what is important to you ?
1) Make money asap at all costs
2) Create something full-filling that you are proud of and have the opportunity to make money in the future if you stick to it

This is very binary thinking. There are so many other options depending on who you are, what you're capable of etc. and some people have to make money. They have families, mortgages, healthcare etc etc. that can't wait for someday, maybe.

With regards to #2, there's no guarantee of success if you just stick to it. So why would I want to spend years of my life on a possibility? It's also not very Fastlane either.

I would suggest to focus on any non game/art business as there are faster ways to make money than game development and I'm afraid to say that includes app development, its very crowed and competitive the days.

I don't agree. I've been hearing that the gold rush is over, the app store is crowded etc. for years. Well, duh. The days of throwing something up into the app store and selling it with no work is long over. It's crowded but that means it's crowded for a reason. Actually several. People are making money but there's also a lot of crap up there. There's been a whole movement to treat it like the internet marketing of apps/games. Think the old Adsense sites. This has contributed to a whole bunch of crap games up there. My assertion is if you can make quality and out market them, which shouldn't be hard, you can rise above this crap.

So, it's time to start treating it like a business and marketing and selling and do all the things that an artist isn't going to be passionate about. That's the reality. I wouldn't steer away from it just because it's "crowded". Crap, everything is crowded. Wherever the barrier of entry is low you're going to get that.

Look, I was passionate about my game. That's long waned. Passion comes and goes and shouldn't be something you rely on to build a business or even complete a project. You need to commit regardless of passion.

I'm now passionate about (committed to) getting my game into the store, getting downloads, running a business that will hopefully fund other (passion?) projects. Looking for other opportunities in and out of gaming. Making movies with Unity, SaaSs, B&M, who knows but what I do know is you can't do any of that without money and passion doesn't guarantee money. Good planning and good execution gets you much further.

Sorry for the rant but I hear about passion all time online and from some close (artist) friends but most of these people are broke and it drives me crazy when they dig in their heels at the suggestion of learning the business side of things. I once heard "It'll destroy my creativity". Oh brother, then stay poor and stop whining about it. The other one is "I'm not a merchant" and doesn't want to learn. Ok. then stay broke. What do you want me to tell you.

#2 is risky but it can be very rewarding if you stick to it, there's many examples of this route. A very recent examples is a game called Boneworks.

These guys are a success for all the reasons you mentioned and one very important one that you didn't. They picked genres that are hot. Whether it was dumb luck or good judgement I don't know but VR Action shooters are very cool and people like to play them. Hell, I'd love to do one myself. I have all I need to do it with the exception of time.

I loved Arizona Sunshine! I may have to get Boneworks now too.

 

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[peterb0yd]

I might just need a proper break and stop pressuring myself.

I like to give one last push before giving up on a project.

Here's the thing, if you can make this successful, you won't be doing much of the coding at all. Only the strategy and/or marketing.

I recommend setting up a sweet landing page with a sign-up form for the waiting list. Practice marketing the game by explaining the story and building interest.

I'm not an expert in this field, but I'll tell you this from experience. Building a cool game, launching it, spending $10 a month on ads, then praying for it to take off is basically gambling your time away.

I haven't read all of your posts in this thread, but I understand this mindset well because I built a game in this fashion right out of college.

Guess what happened? Nothing. I knew nothing about game-marketing. I ended up removing the paid version, removing the ads, and just giving the game away for free. I thought that might boost conversions.

Wrong!

Building indie games is great, but knowing how to market them is more important.

If you focus on that for a week or two and start seeing people sign up for your waiting list, that might get you back on track to finish the thing.

Just don't stop marketing!

 

[Hai]

Thanks, man. I don't know, I think it sounds like "follow your passion", but I might be missing your point. Putting customers first is a proven way of building a successful business.

I agree with the fact that work needs to be meaningful to you though. The thing is that "meaningful" can have many definitions. For an artist, making their pieces of art is meaningful. For someone else, helping business to grow is meaningful. Etc.

I've seen what you suggest working well in games and art, when people just created something really good because they put their soul and heart into it, and other people love it. I've seen others creating games or art in a more customer-focused way, and they made it big too. I think both approaches work. Which one is better? I don't know. But I think that focusing on the customer might increase the odds of success, at least in non-artistic businesses.

EDIT: Grammar.

Passion = Love what you do without regards to the impact on the world.
Meaning and Purpose = You do it because it´s meaningful(to you AND others) and know it´s going to impact the world.

Pouring soul and heart into it doesn´t mean that it´s good and doesn´t mean anything. But if your purpose is to do something good and impactful it´s going to have value(be it artistic or not). This is a careful distinction to make.
Depending on your personality, this meaning and purpose can channel into more artistic or more business-oriented solutions.
Ever wonder why the app-market is flooded with shit, even when they supposedly started with a "customer-centric" approach(by "researching trends"? They don´t have meaning. And those that successfully execute on trends will make quick bucks and then go back to nothing.
Every GREAT business has a true meaningful reason for being.

In both cases the customer gets value from it, so both approaches work indeed. It´s not about the approach but about the principle.

BUT, the customer doesn´t know shit. You are the one who has the big vision. You´re going to make something big. You can´t rely on the customer to provide the vision for you. But he can help you with feedback. YOU know it´s going to be good, so good they can´t resist. Even if that means you have to adjust. But the big vision stays the same. Just don´t let ego get in the way. Seems offtopic, but it´s part of it.

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.” - Henry Ford

By now it seems like I´m rambling, I like to have this discussion.
If any fastlaners here would like to slap my a$$ for it, feel free to chime in

 

[srodrigo]

What's next for srodrigo? Sounds like you're somewhat enjoying working as a developer. I remember reading your post when you first posted it

Good question. To summarise:

• I still like coding and the challenges it puts in front of me. There's also something magical about creating things out of thin air, with just a computer and your brain.
• I don't like working with idiots though, and there are a lot out there. Specially when they think they are good at what they do but use the same bad practices 90%+ use. Exhausting and tiring.
• While I like coding and building things, I don't find as much enjoyment in learning as I used to. I don't push my technical skills to the limit with books, hard exercises or crazy experiments anymore. I only push them if the project at hand requires me to. Most programming languages and frameworks look pretty much the same anyway, so what's the point in accumulating more marginal knowledge. Even some esoteric tech stacks I wanted to dive into don't look that appealing anymore, I'd rather play video games.
• I've accomplished what I wanted as an employee. I worked for some great companies with great people. I switched areas of programming a couple of times to get out of my comfort zone, sometimes a bit brutally. But there's nothing else that catches my attention. Applying at Google? Meh, maybe 10 years ago, now I'd rather get a fully-remote job that pays the bills and allows me travelling. Also, something about being an employee doesn't feel right. You are a number, and a wage slave, and don't have the choice not to work. You don't have much freedom.
• That's why I became a contractor. Here (UK) it's similar to being an employee, but you've got more flexibility and can work for different clients. This was the last step on my roadmap, the last thing I left undone and wanted to cross out. And this is why I felt quite lost for the last two years, there was no 'next thing', and I didn't particularly enjoy the 'process' either (most clients are a pain in the butt). So now I just leverage the money I make to save up for a house, or fund projects or my lifestyle (mainly travelling).
• The only possible next step from here is building an actual business, specially a digital product. Employee -> Contractor -> Business owner. This is the logical evolution to grow in a couple of areas. This is what some other people in the same situation did and most don't regret. Also fully Fastlane compliant.

If I were financially independent, I think I would still build software of some kind. There are many problems to solve out there, and the process of building a software solution out of nowhere is the closest to being a wizard that you can be in 2022. I've felt burned out and complained recently, but I think it was more about misalignment than about software development itself. I'd probably spend way less time on it though, it's no longer my 10x activity (as @Andy Black would say ) I'd rather play the piano and compose music at least 50% of my time.

 

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[srodrigo]

I started making a new game a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure whether it'll go anywhere, but I needed to get it out of my head. I think the game could be good if I get it right, but it's in a niche-niche, so who knows.

I've been following Robert Greene's work again. It really resonated with my issues. It made me realised how much I've been chasing money, despite dressing the whole thing up as chasing value. I was chasing value on things I didn't care about, which led to nothing because I didn't deliver my best work. I've been skimming this thread today quickly (to lookup some information I couldn't recall), and I came across this:

What work is meaningful to YOU though? If it is meaningful to you it will be meaningful to others.

I´m asking that because anytime I tried to place others first, the business failed. That´s because you can´t commit to something that has no meaning to YOU.

Ever wonder why the app-market is flooded with shit, even when they supposedly started with a "customer-centric" approach(by "researching trends"? They don´t have meaning. And those that successfully execute on trends will make quick bucks and then go back to nothing.

The above is pretty much the problem I've had for around 4 years. I half-built 5 mobile/web apps that I never released (some of them I tried to finish and ship them a couple of times). This is where I disagree with the "build whatever business as long as it makes good money" advice I see often here; maybe it works for some people, but not for all of us. The best way to deliver a subpar product is not being committed to what that product offers to people, even if you try really hard to be customer-oriented.

I have evidence that what's more meaningful to me is meaningful to other people, yet, I talk myself out of it:

• It takes long to make, I could make other things quicker.
• No one will want to pay for this.
• I'm not good enough.
• I should build a more serious business.

Last night, I saw some dude on Twitter. His profile was "building a mobile apps portfolio". Having a scattered brain as I do, it triggered my "that's cool!" switch, and today I was looking into mobile apps again. What a great way of self-sabotaging... At least I've got evidence that I can't ship great mobile apps because I'm not truly committed to this business, so that should help not getting distracted. I do like mobile apps and the idea of having a couple of them and making money and all that. But, at the end of the day, I doesn't mean enough to me to work my butt off and serve customers well enough for them to pay.

I would say that you need to ask yourself, what is important to you ?
1) Make money asap at all costs
2) Create something full-filling that you are proud of and have the opportunity to make money in the future if you stick to it

I saw this question again. Interestingly, I'm still struggling with it.

One one side, I'm still doing contract work. I'm absolutely bored with Web development after more than a decade, and I can't remember the last time I was actually motivated to apply for a new role. Money is the only thing that keeps me doing it. This falls into the danger zone, because you need to stay sharp in this profession, and dreading what you do is not the best way to keep yourself up-to-date. One thing that's making me anxious is the fact that the local contracting market in UK sucks at the moment. It's been like this for a while, and I'm not coping with 2-3 months of downtime. Not because we are starving, but because I could be making money towards our goals instead of eating on savings. I'm using this time to upskill and work on side projects, but I'm still having a hard time. I've started applying for permanent roles, even if I'm not too interested. But I'm still favouring contract roles, and I'll hopefully get something for a few months in a couple of weeks.

On the other side, I can't really afford a career switch and the most likely pay cut. I'm looking into buying a house in about a year because rents eat you alive here anyway (I've paid around £80k in rent in the last 4.5 years, WTF). So I have to grind and stick to what pays the most money, even if I'm overdue for a change. I might try to upskill on some backend tech, or something that at least interests me, but the market is so bad at the moment that finding a client happy to invest a couple of weeks on you catching up with X tech is unlikely. I'm using C# for the game, so maybe that could open some doors for a change.

Answering the question above:

#1 I don't really need that much money ASAP. It'd be ideal to have some extra money ASAP for a deposit when it's time to buy a house, but not critical as long as I'm doing contract work (which allows us to save up quite a bit). Still, I'd like to move on from Web development, so here it comes a nice values conflict:

• I know that I need to look into an alternative. I don't have that many that are viable.
• Even if I commit to one, that means taking time from building products.
• The only thing that kind of aligns with everything is doubling down on game development, which could open some doors to either contracting or getting a job in the industry. But I decided against this long ago, as layoffs are the norm and I can't put my family lifehood in jeopardy.

Which leads to...

#2 I'm trying to dig deep inside and try to figure out what it is. The more I look, the more I know it's game development. I believe this is the only thing I can give my best at, and make something that actually serves people well. I even have evidence as the $20 I made with products in the last 5 years were from video games, lol.

I know there is a doom & gloom vibe among game developers, but if I go to Steam and I randomly search for some games, I find games with 1000+ user reviews that I've never heard before. Even random solo developers just making something cool, like one guy who made this (the) Gnorp Apologue on Steam - I found this because he posted on Reddit how he used Rust (programming language I've been learning for a while) to write the game, and he got tons of sales that he wasn't expecting. I believe he didn't do much marketing, he just uploaded the game and did the bare minimum marketing bits such as sharing on socials. The game looks fun as hell, and the user reviews certify this. So people ARE making money with game development, but most of the time you see a great or at least pretty good game behind. I believe the ones who are moaning about not making money make games that are either average (but the developers don't admit this, as it hurts their ego) or in a niche that doesn't quite sell these days (everyone is tired of metroidvanias). I really struggle to find stories of great games that didn't sell. So just make a great game and market it ASAP. Most businesses fail, and so do games, but in a similar percentage, from my research, not as bad as some picture it.

Now the question is whether I can grind the Web development contract work while I make the games on the side. I don't see any other way to make everything else going on in my life fit (specially the house purchase).

I also feel like I want to give my wife the best life I can, mainly having more time and money to travel. She likes her job and I don't see her quitting even if we were millionaires, so we don't really need that much extra money. But I feel like I've let her down because I've failed so far. I think that at this point she kind of thinks that game development is silly, but the graveyard of other projects I didn't manage to finish isn't much better. I know she's happy with our life as is. But I don't settle for average, so this adds extra pressure that I need to channel correctly to help instead of backfiring.

This "ship quickly" trend that we see nowadays doesn't help much either. No one wants to waste unnecessary time, but most great stuff took time to get done. If you go on Twitter or Reddit, you see a bunch of folks claiming they made and shipped a product over the weekend or two. I'm going to get off this shit, because half of them are bullshitters, and another half are plain scammers (buy my course, I'll teach you how to do this yourself). I'm not sure how some people manage to make a sale when customers see they started 20+ "startups". It doesn't show any commitment to me, more like F*cking around while charging customers.

Anyway, back into the game. I'll try to get a prototype soon and share it with the hungry players in the niche, to see where to go from there. I hope I won't self-doubt myself again in the meantime.

 

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[rpeck90]

Very interesting, the audience for indie games is relatively strong.

I am interested to know the following:

1. What platform are you writing the games for? PC, web or mobile?
2. Why would your games stand out?
3. Do you have your own engine or using one off the shelf?
4. How are you going to market said game? Gaming is a huge market, but has #1 seriously low attention span 2# lots of competition

In terms of the overall plan etc, I think you'd benefit from an accountability partner. With software, it's easy to fall down the rabbit hole of iteration & refactoring... neglecting to realize that - in the end - most people don't care about what went into the system's development. Creating a new Ori isn't something that happens every day.

I would put the following to you:

1. What core "innovation" will your game have? Storyline? Graphics? Gameplay? With every successful game, the cornerstone of the success came from the next "level" the game took the audience.
   
   
2. You need an accountability partner. As do I. Maybe we could talk about this.
   
   
3. Maybe think hypothetically about the gaming thing. I've been working on this for a LONG time (and it still bugs the hell out of me) on integrating much of what make "games" so appealing into functional software.
   
   Things like HEAVY graphical fidelity, object oriented flow, the ability to create/manage objects in a virtual world, story-based context and a number of other things. The market is ripe for this type of thing, but it needs to be done properly.
   
   
4. You need a cause. One of the big things I see from what you've written is you're more in the exploratory phase than having a shippable product idea. This isn't a criticism, but an observation. The best creative guys have a "cause" which they use to empower what they're doing.
   
   
5. I specialize in marketing. It's not difficult if you understand how a market works, where value is derived, and what that means to the end user. I would strongly suggest that the "gaming" market is not going to be a pathway to riches (unless you're super interested in it) - but integrating game-level technology into other products/avenues is.
   
   What is difficult is creating an "offer" which resonates with an audience, portraying that offer in a way which gets them interested in buying said product, and then having the ability to do it again with other offers/products. The SOLE role of marketing is to curate demand. Don't try and sell your stuff with marketing; it's simply there to get footfall through the door.

 

[James Klymus]

I really think the video game industry is RIPE for innovation. Seeing what big publishers are doing to games with some boarderline unethical micro transactions, and deceiving customers, I really see a huge opportunity to innovate and eat the big publishers lunch.

 

[lowtek]

If you want to release something quickly, just to understand the process, check out Phaser.io

It's a 2D (last I checked) javascript based engine with a simple API. I made some basic games before I decided it wasn't for me.

If you're dead set on something like Unity, perhaps try making something for VR. It's a smaller space and might be easier to create a standout product.

Either way, if you're going down this route, I'd highly recommend the following

1) Stick to simple polygon graphics
2) Nail the gameplay
3) find someone to partner up with to do the music for free or cheap

The odds that you personally have the skill sets to nail the art, programming, game design, UI, and music is so low that I'd bet a small fortune against it. There's a reason even small games are built by teams, with the exception of a few individuals who are modern day Da Vincis. The reason is that these are orthogonal skill sets and if you try to master all of them in parallel, the chances of you releasing hot garbage rise exponentially.

Also, and this may be an unpopular opinion, drop the meditation. It's 20 - 30 minutes a day that could be spent with your family or working, and the benefits are pretty nebulous. I don't know if there are any single game devs that waste time with meditation.. but I'm betting not.

 

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[Fastlane Liam]

Make team fortress 3 on source 2 and you can have my kidneys. Just take them its ok

 

[Nikorasu]

I still disagree about not having a minimum knowledge about all areas. Not trying to be stubborn here, well known indies agree with this and has been useful for them. As an example, imagine you buy stock art for your games. You might have a library of assets over the years, and might want to combine them. If you don't have a basic knowledge about what plays well with what, you might make something worse than you think.

If thats what you feel is best for you man go for it. Im still gonna say this is driven by ego haha and theres nothing wrong with that. My intention was just to let you know it will take much longer.
But looking at it from afar, lets say you spent a year focusing on nothing but music. Every day 4 hours a day learning the program for a couple months, learning how to construct a song, and then figuring out what music is best for your game and fine tuning the tracks to near perfection.

Thats a year and tons of mostly wasted hours to make something only decent, when you couldve paid a muscian (someone whose devoted 8+ hours a day for YEARS into their craft) to make you a song 10X better than yours for only $100. maybe a little bit more.
IDK about you, but for me having my name come up in the credits more than once or twice is not worth this effort.

Like I said im a illustrator and as much as I'd like to make all the art for my second game, im not going to. Most i will do is pass a few sketches over to a 3D modeler.

I think this is quite interesting. Take a landing page with some screenshots made in 2 days to show how an app would work. You want to let the user understand what features you are offering, and the user probably doesn't care much about it looking pretty or not, as long as it solves their problem.
If you were to do the same with a video game, I would say that showing functionality (gameplay) is not enough. As a half product/half piece of art, I would miss the art if someone drops their programming assets on their landing page. You'd need at least close to final art (which might change a lot from the original idea to the final look), and for something like crowdfunding, I'd even say you need some gameplay video, with that art as well. You can make the minimum, but still sounds like a good amount of work. Look at crowdfunding pages and make a guess about how much work would be involved, but to me this takes weeks or months, not just a few days. Just notice how most crowdfunding campaigns are run when the game has been months in development.

I would be interested in examples of simpler graphics working well in this case, though, I would love to be wrong about this. But I just see that something a game that you can show to final users (players in this case) needs to be quite polished compared to apps. Not saying that it can't work, it's just that it takes more time.

I think what could work is making a prototype of the main mechanics with plain assets, and show that to people who can provide feedback, these people being someone who is not going to buy it (a.k.a. other developers or people in the industry).

Thanks for your input on this I agree with you when it comes to gameplay being what sells so if anything a gameplay demo should be what is presented first. I think I may just make a short 25 minute demo showing the main functionality of the game if i go the crowdfunding route. finalized art assets and all or atleast very polished.

 

[Comet]

Thanks @srodrigo .

I'll reply on the quit question in a PM.

One point about 3-6 months projects - I think that's reasonable, if you do as MJ implied in TMF : "Commitment is to work on your business 7 days a week whenever time permits".

Think of the game Braid. It took Jonathan Blow just 2 weeks to create a prototype, which was almost the full game (Ref: his talk on effective coding and prototyping). IMO he continued to spend years because he wanted to perfect it (and also fought with the XBOX requirements).

I don't think you need to worry too much on getting the right art, sound effects, etc, either.
A bad game with good art and SFX will not succeed anyways. I would've focused on the design.

Thinking of the tiny details of the future will overwhelm you. Focus on now.
One (prioritised) task at a time.

You also don't need to have it perfect when you let people try it out.
Remember how Minecraft was released to the world? He added a few things every release.
Got some feedback from the market, improved, and so on.

Maybe it can work with your game as well?
(Can be a closed group for getting feedback if you worry about someone copying your prototype)

Looking forward to hearing your progress!

 

[NovaAria]

Interesting thread.
I had this idea in the back of my mind for a while now but I always kept it in the backburner.
I don't think that a one-man team can pull off multi-million wonders unless its a very specific niche. Look at Rimworld, that game came when the market most needed it. Not many games of its kind are out there, and AAA publishers wouldnt dare build a colony simulation.
This is the strength of indie studios, filling a need that big publishers wont play in because the market isnt big enough to warrant multi-million $ investments.

So, honestly, my advice for you is to steer away from metroidvanias or other "uninspired" genres because everyone is working on those (Easier barrier of entry). Look at games like Kenshi or Oxygen Not Included. In Kenshi's case, the guy worked on it for years, but mostly out of stubborness and trying to do everything on his own. The result? He made a unique game like no other and got the praise he deserves for it.

 

[srodrigo]

Indeed, I think there is part of truth, but also part of a general negativity trend for the sake of it. That's why I take there dark forecasts with a grain of salt. I'll be thinking about my plan B in case things get really bad, so I can make money with other things while keeping game dev on the side until the indie market recovers, but I want to see the thing really blowing up before that.

We are competing in game design, not so much in tech anymore, or even graphics. Many games are clones with better graphics. I'm personally taking the opposite approach, trying to at least mix mechanics to make something different to the game I'm inspired to, even if I take long experimenting and end up having less time for looking for great graphics. We'll see how it goes...

One interesting thing about how people make video games is that there are 2 kinds of person:
1) makes the games they want to make and play
2) makes the games they thing people want to play ("business oriented").
You can see success stories with both approaches. I don't know which one is better. The problem with 2), apart from being wrong (which is easier than it seems, as soft-proof is quite time-consuming here), is that, if you take long to make the game, the trends have changed by the time you finish. The problem with 1) is, apart from probably taking a long time to make, better be a masterpiece or it will probably flop.

EDIT: Lost part of the message.

 

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[srodrigo]

Regarding ARPU:
First of all, AppsFlyer (the company that delivered the ARPU study), bases their findings on their own data. They are a tracking provider and gather their data from apps, that have their SDK implemented. That means, publishers need to choose their service willingly, and the data is not a reflection of the entire industry. In this context, it is important to know, that AppsFlyer is a Newcomer. Competitors like TUNE or Adjust are in the market way longer. In the last years, AppsFlyer ran a very aggressive marketing campaign. To gain new customers, they offered their services for free. As a result, their SDK is implemented in about 70% of all apps, but most of them are indie apps or owned by start-ups. Many successful apps (and I know some employees who manage those apps) work with competitors. So AppsFlyer data reflects rather the lower end of the success ladder, and I do not consider their findings an accurate reflection of the market.
Besides that, average data is never a good indicator. ARPU differs massively from country to country. Many apps are simply crap. Many set stupid pricepoints (f.e. there is no point in creating a premium currency package of $0.99, because the majority of buyers would also purchase more expensive packages).
So if you aim to create the next average connect-3 game for India and Pakistan, you will have a hard time making money, for sure. But if you create a quality app with a quality product page, if you target the right markets with proper translations, if your IAPs add value without being pay-to-win, if you show the right ads at the right time, then it will be no problem to outperform the average numbers.
Of course, the number of organic users will be low for the start. But with proper ASO, additional marketing measures (especially social media marketing and PR), you can create a steady stream of downloads.

Regarding ASO:
Creating visibility even for new games on iTunes or Google Play is absolutely possible. It is not easy though, because the algorithms are very complex. But if you invest the time learning about it, you will probably make it better than 90% of your competitors. By the way, I am currently writing a book about this topic. So if someone is interested, I will let you know as soon as it is ready for publishing. Maybe we can figure out a discount or a free chapter ;-)

Regarding Ad Revenues:
Honestly, I do not see much truth in your example. Click conversion is typically calculated based on impressions, and the assumption, that 2 million MAU create only 2 million impressions is... well, let's call it "debatable". So the first assumption already is not realistic.
Ad revenue depends strongly on the price model but also on the ad format. Video (and in particular incentivized video) creates better conversion rates than interstitials and interstitials outperform smaller banners. CPC is rather unusual for mobile apps. Most campaigns I ran, were CPI or in some cases CPM.
Typically, we saw eCPMs around $10 (for industrial countries). And we did so, although we blocked direct competitors from the strategy genre, who tend to be the high spenders in advertising, from running ads in our games.

Regarding Demos for Paid Apps:
I don't know one single example for this approach. For apps, the common way is to publish a free app and offer additional levels as an IAP.

Last but not least, I think the claim that freemium apps target players with addiction problems is over the top. Sure, there might be some people, who do have problems with their spending behavior. But it is only a very small portion. Most people spend money because the purchased goods add value to their experience. Actually, I was surprised that many players of our games had very strict limits (like XX EUR within 4 weeks) and stick to them consequently.
I consider the freemium model to be fairer than paid apps, because players can decide for themselves how much money the game is worth to them.
Besides that, PC and console games also can cause addictive behavior. If you want to be 100% sure to avoid harming someone and focus totally on value, the safe way might be to write a book instead of programming a game ;-)

It's pretty clear that you have experience on the topic. Thanks for the valuable information. I'm basing my opinions on either other people's experience, or data from the wild, which can indeed be inaccurate.

I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing regarding to demos. I meant demos of console games or PC games, and there are plenty there from both big companies and indies. In case you meant mobile apps or games, then I agree that's not a common thing.

I'll keep my door open to mobile games, although I want to carry on for a while with what I started and see whether it gets traction.

 

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[NovaAria]

Thank you, Vaughn, for the insights. This is extremely interesting.

I am studying the market as am planning to work on a gacha game soon. Consider me interested in your coming book.

 

[srodrigo]

An article about what @Vaughn and @splok explained about average mobile games data: A bunch of average app revenue data… and why you should ignore it

Thinking about this, I guess this applies to any market. If you take the average money that e-commerce websites make, Amazon will be an outlier that increases the average, whereas your one-person e-shop will probably miles away from that average, so you need to compare yours with similar ones.

 

[OverByte]

Interested to see how your progress goes. I noticed two things from your original post. 1 - you seemed to imply you are doing everything yourself - programming, graphics, design, marketing... and 2 - that you felt progress is too slow.

I actually built a game a few years ago for mobile and figured I'd give my two cents on lessons learned since I had a similar attitude to the above. The main takeaway was play to your strengths and outsource your weaknesses. There is a ton of competition for the same audience who all have limited attention and some of what is out there is very high quality and free. If you think you can compete with what is already available to customers as a sole developer all I can say is good luck.

If I had stuck to my core competencies - programming - and outsource some of the graphics, animation, modelling instead of learning how to do all of this and then doing it much more poorly than someone from Fiverr. I'm glad that I got some base understanding of how the various tooling worked but it was a real eye opener to me once I started outsourcing some of this.

Take this image which became my play store banner. I spent hours trying to make this and then finally outsourced it on Fiverr and paid $25. Even if I had the same skills to make this it would have taken me hours.

Similarly I implemented my own path finding system instead of spending $99 for the top one on Unity. I felt like the game would only work if I custom built this piece. Completely false, I should have been more resourceful and found a way to use existing libraries to make it work. This would have again saved a ton of time.

Anyway I think you get the point. I've since moved on from games but sincerely hope you do well. If you or anyone else is interested PM me and I'll send you the link to the full retrospective I did after I released the game which contains some other lessons.

 

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[Vaughn]

I have never programmed myself, so I cannot share first-hand experiences. But the devs at the mobile companies I worked for, told me that it is easier to build cross-platform games with Unity than with native technologies. So they were able to adapt games for iOS, Android and Web. Also, the unity asset store offers a great variety of assets incl. IAP-systems, graphic templates for 2D and 3D, etc. Might be worth a look:
Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making

 

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[OverByte]

More technical, but by any chance, does anyone have experience with engines/frameworks to make mobile games? I'm trying to stay away from Unity

What are the dislikes for Unity? This is what I used to develop the game I mentioned and I was pretty impressed with the tool. It's got a lot going on at first but pretty intuitive once you get into it. It also has a ton of assets and the community is very large (I'd guess the largest of any game engine). I think I had one or two minor platform issues that had to be addressed with OS specific code, 99.9% worked flawlessly across platforms (iOS & Android) and you can write code in C# which is a nice language to use IMO.

 

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[luniac]

i use unity for mobile games.

 

[luniac]

Unity is a very powerful tool, I agree with that. However:

• The UI is messy and dated.
• It's littered with bugs. Even using it for 30 minutes is enough to get annoyed.
• Worse, many of those bugs get closed without even a reply to the person who took their time to open it. Some of them have been there for years and years, with users praying for them to be prioritised, but nothing.
• They add features at a very high pace. Too high. And it's only made the 2 points above worse.
• It's a very closed platform. You don't have access to the code. This might be ok for many people, but having the options to read and modify the source code (without paying Unity a fortune) can save your bacon in many ways. Probably not a big concern at the beginning, but making games seems risky enough per se, with quite a lot of lack of control, to make it even worse if you can avoid it. This means you are at their will to fix bugs that are blocking you, for example.
• There's been some problems with their ToS recently. They had to step back and change them to be more flexible, but they have the power of tearing your business apart if there is any concern, not even breaking their ToS. As an example, some devs still making little money complained they got threatening emails saying they had to upgrade their version, apparently by mistake and with a later apologise, but gives an idea.
• They can change their ToS at any time. Now, you can accept the new terms or use a previous version (this happened after a big problem they had with another company), but as soon as you upgrade (and will need to, eventually), you need to swallowed them.
• C# is ok as a language (not great for games, but not terrible either for small ones). But the way Unity is made (it was created by a few kids with very little experience, and it's reflected on how Unity works) embraces bad coding practices. This is tolerable for small projects (although can be annoying), but Unity is well known for being a bad choice for large ones.
• If doing 3D, Unreal Engine seems miles above. It was originally written by professionals, not amateurs.
• Incompatibility between versions of Unity. I believe this is a good thing in software (keeping compatibility with old s*hit leads to worse problems in the long term than breaking changes earlier), but I've seen ridiculous situations (a.k.a horror stories) when combined with bugs where devs had to switch between different versions of Unity to complete a project, because A feature was broken in the latest version but the old one didn't have a new feature they needed. How insane is that?

And this is only the points I can come up in 10 minutes straight out from bed, and having used it briefly compared to other tools. There are probably more I could come up.

There are good points though. To me, the only clear advantage compared to Godot (which is the most similar open source alternative) or frameworks is the easiness to export and integrate third party services (IAP, Ads), specially for mobile. And, given that I want to stick to 2D games, Unreal is not an option, as its 2D is subpar compared to 3D.

TL;DR: Powerful tool, but they are focused on shipping new stuff instead of on making it stable, and has some ToS concerns.

EDIT: Having said that, I don't hate Unity or something like that, I just think it's not for me. Even though, I'm still considering using it for mobile. Definitely not for desktop or consoles, but for mobile seems to have some good selling points. I'd like to see performance though, I've seen many games made with Unity that performed terribly in good mobiles, but this could be the devs' fault.

You're bringing up some outdated points.
Unity is very stable now.
Unity's 3D is as good as Unreal now.
I haven't encountered many bugs but i admittedly make simple games.
The UI is fine to me, that's completely subjective.


What i am really worried about is that Unity plans to go public next year.
Who knows how that will affect pricing.
I've enjoyed the price of FREE until i make money, and Unity has made tons of money off me anyway with their asset store.
I hope they don't change this.

 

[luniac]

That's definitely not been my recent experience, neither for people I read complaining daily about several crashes a day. Maybe those people are using older versions, not the latest ones? I'm glad it's worked well for you though.

Without going into detail, there are more concerns apart from Unity going public. Their new CEO comes from EA, which was on the top of most hated gaming companies for years. I know there are users worried about this, and how that could affect to the product. But time will say. In any case, it's an example of how we lack Control when using this kind of proprietary tools. Not saying that we shouldn't use them, but just something to take into account. Given a very small overhead for using a more open tool, I'm personally inclined to take that road. But this won't always be the case, unfortunately.

dam several crashes a day sucks lol
The EA CEO dude has there for years now, and so far so good.
Things can change at any moment of course.
But if Unity all of a sudden did something really bad, there would be massive backlash.

I've been using Unity since 3.0, so im really used to it now. I really like the relatively simple cross platform building, and the unity component based workflow, and i the C# .NET style programming compared to other things out there.

 

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