Good luck, man. I already did that, and it really paid off. I did it mostly alone, with my brother as musician, with no investment. But it isn’t easy. I gone for ensuring success, which meant making a complicated piece of software that is unique and for which i can be certain there is some market without having to second-guess the audience or compete with anyone.
Going the path well walked, gets you competing with all the 99.9% remakes that are entirely invisible. The most profitable game may be cow clicker, but there’s thousands upon thousands of other cow clickers that are not profitable, and which you don’t see. When you say you look at ‘success rate’ of X, don’t be looking at the % of the successes which are X, that’s your basic application of rationality to this decision right here. The simple toy games are not even exercises in game programming. They are exercises in marketing (and blind luck). If you had 10 000 hours of marketing experience, then you totally should go for them.
That’s a very good strategy. If I wanted to make my own company, and keep it around for a long time, I would probably do something very similar. Start small and grow sustainably.
You’re absolutely right about the cow clicker games. I think their business model has been validated to be used, but the overall game design needs to be refreshed.
Still, with that kind of games, there’s extreme oversupply of all sorts of designs. Here’s this issue: one needs very carefully controlled trials to select the best of the alternatives. Market does not do this. There isn’t a magical mechanism that turns the best of competitors most profitable. Competition among too many products is a lottery. When you make something that everyone else can make—do research before you just conclude nobody’s doing this, you’ll see a lot of people are actually trying to do it. Minecraft made a lot of money, right. Was it original and unique—hell no, a lot of other voxel editors existed before Minecraft.
You can’t outthink others by two steps of second guessing—“okay, everyone can do this, so everyone thinks so, so nobody will do it, so I will do it, and be the only one”. Plenty of people follow that line of reasoning as well. If you want high probability of significant return i would recommend looking for something that other people can not do—find your superpower, use it. If you have people-prediction-superpower, sure, you can make the next minecraft. But rationality is probably not your unique superpower (or not the one that’d help a lot for predicting others). There’s people who don’t for a second have a trouble for e.g. mony hall problem, and whose Bayesian reasoning is almost inborn. They just got lucky this way (edit: and they may actually be fairly bad at predicting other people because they don’t understand other people’s reasoning very well). The ability to program well looks much more like your unique superpower, at one in thousands level or better.
Good luck, man. I already did that, and it really paid off. I did it mostly alone, with my brother as musician, with no investment. But it isn’t easy. I gone for ensuring success, which meant making a complicated piece of software that is unique and for which i can be certain there is some market without having to second-guess the audience or compete with anyone.
Going the path well walked, gets you competing with all the 99.9% remakes that are entirely invisible. The most profitable game may be cow clicker, but there’s thousands upon thousands of other cow clickers that are not profitable, and which you don’t see. When you say you look at ‘success rate’ of X, don’t be looking at the % of the successes which are X, that’s your basic application of rationality to this decision right here. The simple toy games are not even exercises in game programming. They are exercises in marketing (and blind luck). If you had 10 000 hours of marketing experience, then you totally should go for them.
That’s a very good strategy. If I wanted to make my own company, and keep it around for a long time, I would probably do something very similar. Start small and grow sustainably.
You’re absolutely right about the cow clicker games. I think their business model has been validated to be used, but the overall game design needs to be refreshed.
Still, with that kind of games, there’s extreme oversupply of all sorts of designs. Here’s this issue: one needs very carefully controlled trials to select the best of the alternatives. Market does not do this. There isn’t a magical mechanism that turns the best of competitors most profitable. Competition among too many products is a lottery. When you make something that everyone else can make—do research before you just conclude nobody’s doing this, you’ll see a lot of people are actually trying to do it. Minecraft made a lot of money, right. Was it original and unique—hell no, a lot of other voxel editors existed before Minecraft.
You can’t outthink others by two steps of second guessing—“okay, everyone can do this, so everyone thinks so, so nobody will do it, so I will do it, and be the only one”. Plenty of people follow that line of reasoning as well. If you want high probability of significant return i would recommend looking for something that other people can not do—find your superpower, use it. If you have people-prediction-superpower, sure, you can make the next minecraft. But rationality is probably not your unique superpower (or not the one that’d help a lot for predicting others). There’s people who don’t for a second have a trouble for e.g. mony hall problem, and whose Bayesian reasoning is almost inborn. They just got lucky this way (edit: and they may actually be fairly bad at predicting other people because they don’t understand other people’s reasoning very well). The ability to program well looks much more like your unique superpower, at one in thousands level or better.