Indie Game Launch FAILS Badly ( My Response / Analysis )

hey what's up guys so we have a bit of a situation unfolding right now and i thought it was important enough that i interrupt my video schedule and make this video so there has been a game developer who has come out on reddit um they've just launched their game they spent thousands of dollars four years making it with a small team and this game has just crashed it has had an abysmal launch and they put out a plea to the community asking for help asking what went wrong they're exasperated they're in a state of shock and i can completely understand that so i wanted to take a look at the situation with you guys for the first time and trying to get to the bottom of what happened so that it can perhaps help us and also help the developer to kind of get a clearer picture of what went wrong so let's look at this guys so let me now read to you the post which appeared on the game dev subreddit hello game devs i come to you saddened and exasperated by my experience i spent the better part of the last four years working on my first game with friends we focused on making a quality game that people would love to play and all our feedback from dozens of testers and streamers and internet friends that played said it was going to be amazing and they loved playing it we spent amongst ourselves nearly ten thousand dollars of our own money on assets music contractors marketing and legal while we are not marketing people we certainly did not neglect marketing we spent nearly 1 000 of our own money in ads facebook and instagram we had all the social media accounts we posted and engaged with the community we had a discord with over 100 people we had 2 300 wish lists at launch yet after being released for a full week we've made 579 gross but only 335 net because of taxes and you know steam fees i can't even describe to you how much of a disappointment it is and i would have ended up with more money buying games and just playing them versus the money spent on making one with how poorly it sold maybe my game is just a flop i don't know i feel like i've wasted the past four years of my life i don't think i was completely irrational in my expectations i didn't expect to be a millionaire but i was confident we'd at least break even here are some of my questions for the community please be honest even if it's harsh i think we were surrounded by too many people pleasers and maybe didn't have an accurate representation of what was happening 40 percent of the copies we sold were requested for a return and refund is this normal while we're a multiplayer title this seems to be high we're released with 2 300 wish lists we read around 10 to 50 of those can convert after a week we've had about two conversions and now 2 400 wish lists is that low of a conversion common the only reviews we have had are negative some are completely off topic despite violating steam's off-topic policy and being reported they're still there others are just from negative people who only post negative reviews for all their games it seems that quality of game does not matter all that matters is marketing and if you're able to go viral with a big streamer of some meme or a publisher who knows how to market who takes tens of thousands or 50 cut help that's been my experience so far 10 000 in 350 dollars out okay a lot to unpack there so first of all i want to say i really feel for these guys i really do you know they spent multiple years working on this and probably compromised a lot of their personal life and their personal hobbies and pleasures so they can they can do this together regardless of how their game sold they should be very proud of what they accomplished not many people actually get to ship their game and by the sounds of it i'm yet to see the game properly but by the sounds of it they put in a lot of time and a lot of effort and took this very seriously it's not one of these um just you know crappy games and people are oh what happened you know because they're in complete delusion these people at least did make a active um effort to tickle as many boxes as they could so anyways i want to take a look at this and try to work out what the hell happened so one of the very alarming things here is that they had 2 300 wish lists and converted two sales two sales of 2 300. let me get my calculator out i've heard of bad sales conversions but 0.04 magnitude is less than one percent um that doesn't seem right first of all something has gone wrong here recently i've seen an acute focus on wish lists where people are talking i wish this was you gotta get your wish list and that is very true because uh wish lists are an important data point uh useful metric that steam provides us pre-launch because we don't have much to work with as game developers like what do we have how do we know if a game is going to do well or not i mean the wish lists are pretty much the main thing we can work with but it's not the only factor and what this shows is that you can have thousands of wishlists and it's it's junk it means nothing if you don't get your other factors aligned so i'm guessing that there were some other factors that influenced this low conversion where people wishlisted the game pre-launch thinking ah this looks good right and then something happened when the game launched when people wish list a game they get an email that gets sent out when the game launches then they go to the page and they look at it and like ah something's gone wrong in that um in that phase so let's have a look i mean where do we go from here maybe we'll have a look at the page itself and get straight to it right but i do want to quickly touch on something before we do that because they mentioned that everyone around them was telling them that their game was amazing the game is going to be great it's going to be very successful and they kind of fell into this echo chamber a bubble if you will and we're all experiencing it i experience it i'm working on a game as you know and you know i have a degree of bias and people who i show my wife my family or friends there's going to be a bias there even even when i tell them be harsh be cruel there's always going to be a bias because the people around you who kind of want to be around you want to be friends with you and want to be on good terms with you don't want to necessarily tell you the hard truth so i think it's important to really find a path or strategy to getting to that um hard truth even if it means paying a consultant who is impartial has no affiliation with you no friendship but they can just look at it and say look your game sucks for x y z um you know and maybe you can fix it through these other reasons so anyway let's get to this page and have a look so the name is dirge so let's start with the um synopsis or blurb if you will durge is an asymmetric up to four versus one survival horror where up to four paranormal investigators in the post-war era to hunt down and defeat dark entities hunting various tortured locations across the world first of all there's some i feel like there's some grammatical issues there where up to four paranormal investigators in the post-war era to hunt down and yeah i mean look there's some issue here like this is the first thing people are gonna read and if you have a typo there then it's going to reflect perhaps poorly on the entire game look if the screenshots are amazing and the trailer is amazing then maybe it's less of an issue because you know look um the world is multicultural people have different languages and from time to time you get maybe games with bad english but in this case it seems based on that post i read they seem to have a good command of english so it looks like they've basically got a typo in their main game description which is probably not an ideal start but anyway hopefully the developer can see this and fix that asap it's also important to understand that while i'm able to evaluate somebody else's work maybe making some critiques or whatever that does not in any way mean that i don't have issues with my own work i absolutely do i'm completely biased you know as we all are in regards to our own work it's a lot easier for us to make evaluations and assessments of stuff that's external to us that we do not have a personal stake in so i just want to make that clear before i continue on making evaluations of this page yeah i mean so i mean i get a i'm getting a fair idea of what this game is um i feel like there are perhaps some issues with the 3d models and maybe like the lighting or something like that this is often a situation you find where when indies or without a high budget attempt to make 3d games which are realistic with realistic looking characters where here they've gone for this character but the face the expression and kind of everything about it almost just the lighting sort of looks uh like an asset pack thing it may not be for all i know this is actually an original model but something about it has the hallmarks of one of these sort of asset flip games and of course i'm not saying that's the case but just to be impartial and look at it as my first reaction there there is something going on here that kind of has that feel that yeah and that's why you have to be careful making realistic 3d games unless you have the budget to see it through in all other aspects of the game and it's why a lot of people go for you know low poly or abstract kind of ideas where they have less chance of tripping the uncanny valley switch and that's what's happened here um even though this is not moving uh there's a bit of uncanny valley here going on so be mindful of that you know sometimes it's um better to go with something that's not so realistic you know i not get it people want to go for the realistic stuff because they want to compete they want to make a double a game they want to make a triple a game but you got to be realistic you know because um unless you can manage that level of standard across the whole project it's it's it's difficult it's difficult all right i'll stop it there i mean look that looks quite good i can see there's a lot of um work has gone into it um a lot of interesting interactions the combat you've got like the environments are very nice but it is very dark i suppose um i probably wouldn't buy this game just based on my personal preferences i'm not big into these dark everything's like dark and you constantly walk around with flashlights and stuff so okay we've got an it's in early access all right so the game is incomplete i mean this is significant in a way because um yeah people buying this are going okay well do i want to buy yet so these 2 300 wishlisters maybe they weren't expecting this to be going into an early access phase and you know a lot of people are reluctant to buy early access games it's not for everyone you know so i feel like if you're going to go into early access maybe you need even larger wishlist pools to give you a more chance at a conversion because it seems that nobody from that wishlist pool had any interest in early access perhaps but um yeah let's move on so oh so this is significant um they've got a price point of 43 aud to usd so 32 american dollars that's you know price is subjective of course but this does seem like it's on the high end based on what i've seen and importantly because it's going into early access right because so you're asking i mean this is a aaa you're in aaa at this point with this price point and there's probably i mean i can think off top of my head so many other games that i could buy for that money this would this could be what it's all about at this point it could be that the very one factor that has brought this all down on the developers is the price point it could be as simple as that i mean it's easy to overanalyze this and think oh maybe it's this maybe it's the graphics maybe it's this and that like all those things yes but the primary factor here i suspect based on my you know my opinion it's the price they've simply gone with too high of a price at launch compared to what they are offering i mean i'd love to know what you guys think about this of course let me know in the comments below what you think is this a price point issue online pvp lan co-op lan i mean this even have a single player mode so this game doesn't look like it has any single player mode or at least that's how it seems based on the store listing that's so you need a few friends to play this game up to four even which means they all have to spend that amount of money to play this game that's a bit of a hard sell i think yeah that's going to be tough that's going to be tough and i'm not sure if it's open like if it's only co-op online co-op land co-op land pvp so it's pretty much co-op maybe there's a lobby or something like that um but even then like there's nobody playing this game for you to be able to find a match be careful making games which are primarily multiplayer you know four guys is you know they had a you better believe they had millions of dollars behind that game so you know fall guys is not this indie game project that a lot of people were trying to make it in social media they were kind of using that as a bit of a trick strategy where they were making people believe it was like just a small team or just like a couple of individuals this is a big game with massive servers with a lot of money backing it and god knows what kind of investors and stuff like that so about this game so this is very dark for me this gif i have a blue light filter that's on my screen at all times and i can barely see this it's all just very dark so we have some information about the game but i'm just going to skip this because most people we're making a choice to buy this kind of game i'm not going to be reading this so i'm just treating this as a potential buyer would so we've got some multiplayer action being showcased and um we're going through a door which is i don't know maybe not the most interesting showcase of multiplayer just going through like a doorway and it almost looks like this guy's getting stuck on the door as he's going through which could um you know make people think that there might be some clunky aspects to the multiplayer perhaps so yeah look so here's a here's a good example of what i meant in terms of the price point phasmaphobia look overwhelmingly positive look at those reviews and you can get that game for 19 aud which is probably like 15 u.s dead by daylight 30 australian dollars which is about you know 22 us dollars so i can pretty much buy both of these games for the price of this current game dirge so let's have a look at the reviews it's got a positive so i think we should look at the negatives i think it's all uh you know this guy got it for free so i think the negative reviews are sometimes a good indicator of things i don't know why any of these people gave this game a positive review this game was the worst thing i've played in months and my day has been ruined i mean is a bit harsh i think that's a bit dramatic but yeah and keep in mind they've only played it for half an hour so and another one only half an hour on record i've only played this for under four hours so far but it has a lot of potential for growth and even with the current content will keep my friends and i entertain for weeks if not months so one thing that did occur to me is that this game reminds me a lot of another game called murdered soul suspects you got to be careful what games you might unknowingly associate yourself with like there might be a game on the market which everyone recognizes because it has some distinct features in this game it's like the detective and the ghosts and the apparitions and the hat uh murdered soul suspects was pretty much exactly that in terms of the the look and feel and it was a aaa game mind you and to compare these side by side the disparity between the 3d model quality starts to become a little bit more apparent so very interesting you know and i think looking at the page we've been given a clear idea of the various factors in play that are likely responsible for this outcome for the developer you know we have the high price point we have the multiplayer only by the looks of it um we have the early access factor and then of course we have the 3d models maybe looking a bit subpar in certain respects so i think it's those different things collectively together which are responsible for this outcome for the developer and again i really feel for them you know they've put obviously put a lot of time into this regardless of how this thing sold regardless of the reviews there is a lot of work here you know they've put a lot of work and passion into this across four years like think about this you know we none of us are immune from this situation this could very well be my situation when it comes time to release my game i hope not i'll do everything i can for this not to be the case and we should all do the same but this is always on the table you cannot run from this unknown factor where we everything is going well up into launch and then we make one blunder one mistake which has catastrophic um repercussions you know which in my in my opinion the main factor here is the price point if they had perhaps released this at um you know half of that with maybe a launch discount of i don't know 30 percent then they may have had a successful game a successful launch at least you know that could have been um that could have been the case in like sort of like a parallel dimension scenario so you know and it's man it's tough it's tough we need to break out of these delusion bubbles um you know i made a video about this which you know it was quite popular or i called it the great game dev delusion because a lot of people come running to this industry seeing some um successful game example some case study and thinking hey you know if they did it i can do it too like sure why not right and yeah why not but there's so many factors involved and you know and often the factors that are truly responsible for some of those successful games are not really talked about and nobody really knows them you know like what's the real reason um valheim was successful is that the art is it this is that or was it some mystery x factor that nobody knows or you know other indie games that have found you know this kind of viral success and that's why you really have to do it for the passion you have to be prepared to not make any money you have to be prepared to spend years not making any money and still be okay with that you have to come to those terms you have to be comfortable with that don't let that stop you because we all have to face these failures at some point in our life nobody has just this kind of glory run from the start till end of life you know you're going to have setbacks some small some big but each one is a learning opportunity it's there's something to find here and i applaud these developers for coming to reddit putting their heart on their sleeve and asking for help and saying you know what went wrong here and i i think that's um that takes a lot of courage you know because they i haven't gone through that post but i can um i can just imagine there's some people going oh this is all that and hopefully they've got some good constructive criticism there as well it's a passion pursuit it really is so with all passion pursuits we have to weigh up the pros and cons and make sure that we are actually happy in this pursuit and not just doing it with the hope of getting some kind of financial return because um you know that may not be the case at all so that's about it guys and i hope that this commentary has um you know hopefully shed some light on what could be the causes of this situation for you guys for myself and for the developer involved and again i wish them all the very best i think they put in an absolutely valiant effort there's been a lot of work that's gone into this and regardless of the outcome i think they've um you know they they have a lot of respect from me and coming forward takes a lot of courage and you know it is what it is at this point but hopefully it's been valuable in the sense that we can take some lessons back to our own projects and hopefully try to have a more favorable and fruitful outcome thank you for watching the video thank you to all my patreon supporters who are supporting this channel and helping me to continue making these videos thanks very much guys and i'll see you in the next video bye thanks for watching guys if you found this video useful and you'd like to see more please do give it a like and subscribe to the channel i'd really appreciate that if you want to support this channel further you can do so through the patreon doing so will give you access to a bunch of different tutorials and resources that i've made alternatively you can consider wishlisting my current gaming development blood and meat i'd really appreciate that guys links for those will be down below see you all and take care

Channel: Lost Relic Games

Views: 70,247

Keywords: game dev, Steam page, learn game dev, indie dev motivation, indie dev, get better, tips for beginner game devs, lost relic games, john stejskal, advice, game dev tips, indie dev advice, game development, how to make games, how to get into game development, game development beginner, game development college, how to make first indie game, how to learn game dev, tips for beginner game dev, tips for starting game dev, starting first indie game, how much money game dev, analysis

Id: lytuRLkfhus

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021