How hard have you thought about what you want to get out of game development?
Have you even thought of it at all?
I think I can safely say that everyone who makes games does it from a core place of passion, but it’d be naive to say that passion is the only driving force. We live in a rapidly decaying late-stage capitalist society after all; pure passion is only for fairy tales and billionaires these days.
Doom and gloom aside, lets be real. Game development isn’t a secure 9-5 when you’re trying to make the games of your dreams. But it doesn’t have to be, nor should it be.
Much like auteur filmmakers, game development can exist as an overbearing hobby that might net you some extra change if everything goes well. Invest a couple of hours each week and in a year or two you’ll have a neatly assembled piece of art that speaks to the person you truly are.
Or, you could treat game development as a get rich quick scheme. It might seem soulless, but I can’t fault anyone for thinking with that mindset. Video games are increasingly turning to monetization-first tactics in order to rake in the dough. There shouldn’t be any reason why indie devs can’t engage in the same tactics. Whether it was explicitly made with this purpose or not, Palworld is a notable example. All of the controversy that erupted upon the game’s launch was due to the fact that it was (very blatantly) a Pokemon clone with crafting, base building, and guns.
And it sold millions.
However, not everyone can make a Palworld, nor might you even want to. Maybe you’re just in it for the love of making games. You don’t feel the need to release anything, no need for collecting fame or making money. Game development for you is a pure hobby.
There’s nothing wrong with that either.
All of the attitudes that I mentioned are completely legitimate. There is nothing wrong for wanting acclaim, or money, or to just make the games you really want to make.
What matters is how you work towards your stated outcome. The way you go about engaging with game development determines whether you’ll find yourself burning out or whether you’ll exceed at making the games you love.
Money, Fame, or Passion; Pick One
Again, there isn’t a “right” answer. You just need to be honest with yourself.
If you want to make a living off of making games, you’re best shot is developing the skills and abilities needed to join a studio, indie or established. Being your own boss comes with the downside of needing to figure out how to make the money. Instead, focus on honing your skills and adapting to the needs of a couple select studios you want to work for. Let them do the hard decision making for you and simply make what they request.
Maybe you want to make something that people love. Also valid, but now we’re getting into some murky unknowns. What audience are you making the game for? Do they want a new game? Will they play a new game? You’re likely to be in this area if you’re coming from an established title that’s either deviated from an aspect you enjoy or there hasn’t been a whole lot happening in that particular genre. Either way, you need to know the community you’re developing for, and that is not a simple task.
Finally, the easiest option to pick is also the most vague. Making a game because you really like what you’re making is the best way to ensure that you don’t burn out. However, it’s also the best way to get lost in the sauce. In other words, what gets you really, really excited might end up being extremely bland to the vast majority of others. Passion is a fickle beast, and might end up spurning you if you pour your heart and soul into making a hyper-niche rhythm-based monster-fighting management simulator. Not that I would know anything about making rhythm-based monster-fighting management simulators, of course.
However, you can optimize your development efforts by understanding each of the above situations and focusing your efforts accordingly.
You probably won’t be working on or releasing projects that you absolutely love in order to land a job at a studio. More likely than not, you’ll be recreating what the studio is doing in order to show that you are competent.
Developing for an audience seems straightforward, until you realize that you’ve just subjected yourself to an ambiguous set of standards and goals. You might think you know what the community wants, but half the time even the big AAA developers don’t know what the community wants. And they can employ entire divisions dedicated to figuring it out. Expect to be doing much of the same, and that you will not be getting positive feedback.
The easiest (and most insular) path is developing for your pure enjoyment of the game you make. You aren’t making anything in order to satisfy someone else’s expectations, you’re just making it for you. Just be aware that that also means that no one is obligated to give your game (or you) the time of day. As harsh (and maybe exaggerated) as it sounds, make sure you are prepared for your project to go completely unnoticed.
Once you understand the bleak realities that come from each path, you are better suited to tackle the challenge at hand: making the game.
Optimize Everything for One Purpose
Whether it’s money, fame, or passion, you now have your North Star, your guiding principle. Make sure you stick to it.
Plan to your respective reality appropriately.
Optimizing for Revenue
Making a game for the purpose of making money comes down to two simple ideas:
Keeping costs down.
Selling as much as possible.
The first is done by ensuring you aren’t building something that is prohibitively expensive and outlandish (looking at you, newbs that think you can make the next World of Warcraft). Don’t let your investments balloon past where you’re comfortable with (and beyond what you’ll make back), and make sure the game you want to make is achievable.
The second point is where things can go wrong. Marketing should occupy a good chunk of your time, as you have to both find and optimize your game for a specific group of people. Just like all of the gurus on YouTube tell you, find a niche community and explicitly cater towards them. You aren’t going to find success trying to appeal to absolutely everyone, that is mostly reserved for the big AAA devs who can maximize their games to actually capture that wide target audience.
I’m obviously leaving out a lot, but these are the general attitude you’ll want.
Optimizing for Fame
Sometimes, you just want to make something that gets people talking about you.
The inherent beauty in this approach is that you don’t need to create fully fleshed out games. Most of the time you only need to produce a demo and sometimes you can get away with a video showcasing a vertical slice. You’re making something to get people talking, not to sell units.
Don’t get too attached, make sure you’re learning as you go, and know when something has worn out it’s welcome. Don’t end up developing a game for years on end when everyone stopped looking at it months ago.
Optimizing for Passion
Here is the kicker when talking about passion. It’s unique to everyone.
Before you roll your eyes, hear me out. I can’t tell you what you need to optimize for in order to meet your spiritual needs. You know what you’re interested in, you can decide what you need to do.
What I will tell you, is that this is the most freeing option. You can do literally anything you want to. No restrictions, no curriculum, no gurus, no limits. Make that rhythm-based monster-fighting management simulator, if that’s what you want to do.
But, don’t let it bog you down. Don’t get hyper-fixated on one project to the point where you start losing your passion or burning out. Like I stressed in MipMap #004, do not let your art hinder you.
Satisfaction Guaranteed
When you’re able to identify the reason for making a particular game, you can plan and set expectations accordingly. Those plans should be restricted by one or several outcomes, meaning that your expectations won’t be shattered when things go wrong. Easy enough to say in a newsletter though.
The intent of this edition is to try and get you to separate the emotional state of making games from the realities that often bluntly make themselves known.
Getting immersed in writing your game’s narrative, or making the right models, or creating the perfect mechanics can be an intoxicating experience. It’s the mixture of entering a flow state, engaging in an iterative art form, and coaxing out the creative juices that generates a seemingly unbeatable high. But reality often shatters that experience when things do not turn out as you expected them too.
Which is why we dampen expectations and invest our emotions accordingly. Passion is sacrificed for fame, which is disregarded for money, which almost always is disappointingly disconnected from passion. Such is the artist’s paradox.
Yet, we aren’t confined to one of the three approaches I mentioned. You are not perpetually locked into making games for the sake of passion forever. Maybe you want to challenge yourself to see if you could make something that gets people talking. Maybe that encourages you to then try and make something that you want to sell. Every direction is possible, and you are the sole person who can choose where to go.
The important aspect is that you recognize that you have that control. Only you can determine why you make games and what games you make. When you realize that, it becomes a lot easier to feel comfortable in making them.
It’s too easy to fall back on what everyone else is doing, and think that you have to follow the trends. While it might work out for some endeavors, you ultimately have to want to follow them in order for those projects to work out. You can’t force passion for something that isn’t there, but you might not need it in the first place.
Make your games reflect what you want them to, not what you think others want them to. That is how you reconcile the harsh reality we live in with the art of making “successful” games.
Outro
Some collective thoughts that didn’t make it into the final cut for last weeks issue. Hopefully everything was coherent enough to make sense overall. Next week will be a departure from these bigger picture philosophies as I’ll be entering my first game jam! I’ve already teamed with up with some awesome individuals that I will be collaborating with over the next two weeks to create an awesome little game. I’ll have some thoughts and tips on getting started on team based projects along with creating some key documentation that is required for both jamming and regular game dev. Stay tuned to the Notes section for updates on that, along with some in-progress photos and videos that I’ll hope to share.
Have a great week, and stay focused!
- Adam
As a person who's been a part of both Game Development and Software, I can safely say that I've seen more "get rich quick" schemes in software than in GameDev. But somehow I hear more and more about "cruel and unfair" monetization in games😅