Why aren't you making a video game?

I enjoy video games and have often dreamt of making one myself. There are some things that hold me back, though.

• There is a lot of competition out there already. I read once from an indie developer that making a hit game is very unlikely, and most of your games will have very few players/purchases. It could take 20-30 games before you get lucky, if you ever do.
• Depending on your target, genre, etc, players may wish for expansions, updates, etc which is not necessarily something I'd want to pursue unless I really loved the game.
• A big part of making a successful game is marketing rather than creating the game. Marketing is one of my weaknesses.
• Making a game takes a lot of time - especially solo. It would either cost money for assets, music, possibly game engine plugins, etc, or more time to create these from scratch.
• The audience can be quite vocally critical. In my current (non gamedev) project my audience is other developers. Developers are quite understanding and helpful when it comes to fixing bugs. Although many gamers are nice and understanding, there are many that aren't and will leave unhelpful and nasty feedback.

All that said, I may still make one day... 😀

My friends and I are working on a video game as our first IH venture! https://hexiconapp.com

We are inexperienced in this field, but these are 2 things we have learned that make it difficult to create a successful game:

1. With so many games available, your game really needs to stand out in its genre or be something entirely new for players. Creating something fun can be quite difficult, and the testing and development cycle is just as long as non-game products.

2. You need to have a great marketing and social/community strategy to complement your great game. This is difficult for most game developers, and marketing for games often does not follow a value-oriented pitch like other products (games are about fun, something a bit more intangible).

I do not claim that we are succeeding at either of these - we are going to find out soon though. However, these are 2 things that we do differently that we see as advantages:

1. Our game is multiplayer - this is inherently harder from a technical standpoint, but the social and marketing payoff is high. Word of mouth sharing has been exceptional during our beta without spending more than $10 on test ads.

2. We design with user experience in mind first which many other mobile games don't follow. Gameplay of course is incredibly important, but the app and its minimal UI, UX, ad placements, and ease of use (especially with social features) are where we try to set ourselves apart.

I did make a game: Chat & Slash - an RPG you play in Slack. The original name I came up with (Slack & Slash - before Slack asked me to change it to avoid people assuming it was a Slack-official product) was too good of a pun to not use, so I wrote the game behind it.

I learned a lot about Slack, about Node.js, and about how damn hard it is to promote and retain interest in a videogame. The problem with videogames is that they are vitamins, not aspirin. This makes your promotion twice as hard, since you have to prove first to people that they have a problem ("You're not playing a cool game on Slack right now!") before you can prove to them that you have the solution to said problem.

Also, being on Slack has been its own collection of challenges. Hell is other people's APIs, I've always said, and while Slack has a decent API, when it falls down or changes on you, it means you have to go in and do maintenance anyway.

To that end, I actually am planning on shutting down Chat & Slash in a couple months. Slack is making their granular permissions changes mandatory, and I can't justify going in and spending a dozen hours figuring out what I need to change so that both old and new users are able to continue using the app. Plus, I haven't updated it in over a year (working on my own aspirin) anyway.

I'll probably open-source it when I shut it down, though. Maybe someone else will want to pick up the mantle.

• difficult, gaming code is difficult
• needs cross discipline knowledge. Music, visual design, animation, probably scripting
• very rapidly evolving tech, got to release within 18months or then its constantly playing catch-up with the platforms/apis/trends
• hardly profitable, like most artistic creation, the top 1% grabs 99% of the gains, so the median earnings don't even pay over a dollar per hour spent making the piece

I can't lie, I have dabbled in game development and absolutely love everything about games. But they're just not very profitable a lot of the time. Finding a genre that isn't already overcrowded with other games is difficult, and when you do find one, you need to make sure that you're going to be making a profit back

Making videogames doesn't make sense but we are building one. First, you have to have a team. Doing it solo is almost impossible. You need music, animations, assets, backend, frontend, marketing, etc. Second, it's very expensive. If you don't have a full team you need to buy pieces of the game like assets or music. And lastly, it takes a long time. It's not easy to make it in your spare time. Considering all that we are still making one game. We want to get some skills in the AR sector so we thought it will be a great experience to make a game. There is nothing more difficult than to make a game as a developer so the idea is that If we can make it then we are ready for any other challenge.
I do understand why a lot of people won't do a game. It's just hard to make money out of it but it makes sense when you are doing it for other reasons.

I'm a developer, but I first wanted to build video games as far as I can remember. Like many.

I built some, but then when I began to work professionally I had less time. Now that my workflow is pretty well automated and I have more time to do other stuff (except when I'm stuck in an office "because we need to stay there 8 hours and feel obliged to fake that we work even if we are so tired we create bugs everywhere"), I have more time and I came back to it.

I don't expect any money or whatever from it. The concurrence is too crazy. I still love building them, even if I'm not gaming anymore. I'm trying to explore functional programming with it, because why not.

My boring snake game to learn to use HJKL for Vim: https://matthieucneude.com/snake/
I'm "working" right now on a sokoban game: https://github.com/Phantas0s/sokoban

One does not simply make a game

In all seriousness, I will do one day. When the bills are taken care of :)

Because I hate gaming and internet addiction. So much so that I'm actually making the opposite of a video game---- software to help with internet addiction.

Life is a better video game than any other conceivable video game.

I made one, not very successful title. What I'd say is that it's possible to become good, it's just like anything else, it's an art that if you practice you can become good at if you enjoy the process, definitely needs some time and a few games before creating a business.

The game I built was pretty small, it took me around 4 months and it was pretty much a copy of another existing game. It's a very creative process, I think if you enjoy working on games and have a person you can work with well it's good to give it a shot, I'd recommend doing it on the side first to try out if you like making games and if you could do it for a living.

I worked on one: curvefever.pro in a small startup. Company went bakrupt though, hard to earn enough money unless you get lucky and it's a hit.

The indie game industry is nearly impossible to break into.

Even if you have a great game, which will take at least a year of work, it's very unlikely to become recognized and turn a profit.

Gaming shouldn't be a "business" strategy anyway.

I've made a handful of games, with one being a commercial release on Steam.

• Games are difficult to make, so you're looking at 6 months to a year to release the first version. This makes an MVP for a full experience very difficult to do quickly.
• Gamers are a very tough crowd to please and your entire visibility relies on Steam. The other platforms out there are miniscule and are unlikely to drive much revenue.
• Steam is an amazing platform, however they take a 30% cut of sales. Compared to the expenses of running your own SaaS/business it's crazy.
• Tying into the above, iteration / consistent updates are expected even for small games.
• Competition is stiff. You really have to do something different to have a chance.

I will definitely make more games in the future. However, I've enjoyed working on my first SaaS for a variety of reasons.

The main one being in just under a month, I'm almost done with my MVP.

An entertainment product is tough. It is not like solving a need. Think of movie studios in LA - 50 years in business and still most of their films fail

But I am making video games!

I developed a few games about 6-8 years ago, mainly for android. This was in the days when unity wasn't around or at least it wasn't for mobile at that point.

I used a small engine called AndEngine that had a community of developers. The forum is mostly spam these days and the engine was abandoned by the developer years ago who went on to work for Zynga.

I made a few games and was making about $40-$50 a day at one point due to good timimg of a game I had made and released it right around the holiday season.

I know of a few guys who were making upwards of 1k-4k per day back then and still make a nice monthly income from their games even to this day.

This was before publishers were around and drag-in-drop platforms like BuildBox.

I still think about building a game but it's just so much of an uphill battle that I just don't think it's worth it unless you are REALLY passionate about game making and don't care about the money, or just do it for fun. Otherwise, it's just too much of an uphill battle that I don't want to fight personally. Also, most success these days with games are shortlived for indiedevs due to the dropping attention span of people, especially younger people. Every now and then you have an indie release a hit on steam but those are just exceptions and rare cases.

I thought I wanted to make games, then I took a game dev course in college. It was actually pretty annoying trying to make the levels and tools work, and the bugs can get pretty complex. Games are simply more complex than web apps. However, game design can be pretty useful, Superhuman uses it as the founder was a game designer.

You can make apps playful and fun, while also making them challenging to master, like something with a high skill ceiling that makes people feel rewarded when they are finally able to accomplish it. An example for Superhuman is the keyboard shortcuts. At first there are so many that it might be intimidating. Once you learn them however, you feel the power of using only the keyboard to fly across the app.

Games are also not as profitable. You can sell a 60 dollar game once, possibly with microtransactions, but you need enough players. Contrast that with some prosumer B2B startup, they could charge 60 dollars per user per month.

Honestly, I would love to make a video game! But I also love making apps. And I love making music. And I love drawing… can you see where I’m going with this? 😅

Once I wind down one of my other side projects (or my 9–5!), I’ll find time to make a game. Until then, I’m basically at capacity with my app SongRender and my band babygotbacktalk.

I like putting together some game mechanics, but I am not determined enough to put enough effort in game development to make it worthwhile. I keep it as a hobby when I have nothing to do (and I just bought Stellaris and EU4, so I got plenty to do in my free time) and I prefer putting more effort in projects with higher chance to success, such as Amethyst Platform.

The thing about game development is that you really need to invest a lot of time and resources into getting something playable before getting user feedback and iterating. Which is much riskier than going for something like a web app.

I had developed some web multiplayer games (2D and 3D) couple of years ago, but didn't finish them, except first one - which was buggy and laggy. Interesting enough that I was wondering about this today - maybe I should start creating one.
Really interesting and super-fun stuff to work on.

I have been developing apps into AR / VR and man, I really think I can just dive into developing games. But from what I have read, The indie game dev journey requires a lot of work, patience, trials and errors. It is not that easy as greatly explained by one of the user here. At one point, I would think about it.

Trying to learn and understand physics has mostly put me off. It's something extra that I wish I didn't need to learn when I want to focus on the looks and learning the programming language that comes with it.

I wish i could make games! i just dont have the skillset :(