GG is under appreciated

#41 "Tetris outsold every fps game out there..."

Well ladee dah. Tetris has been made more times over again than every FPS out there to... No individual Tetris clone that is ever made again will end up making an Indie rich (or likely even put food on the table)... I'll guarantee you that.

"Then you don't have a demanding family, a hectic job and so forth? Because I don't even have time to *appreciate* half life 2, let alone get stuck in and play it... and HL2 is a fairly simple game."

So let me get this straight... you can't even find the six to twelve hours it takes to play through all of Half Life 2? Its not exactly the definition of long you know... and I'd be pretty well pissed if I was going to pay even twenty dollars for a game that I don't intend to play for at least that long...

Half Life 2 isn't exactly the most voluminous game out there you know... about a total of 12 different types of enemy, about 3 or 4 bosses, and while it has a very large and expansive world, you are covering ground really freakin fast... not to mention there is that ever special save feature around anyway for people who like to complain about not having the time to finish it.

And if I'm wrong about the whole volume thing, sales charts of modern games certainly do reflect my opinion as exhibited by the consumers. Might be shallow... but its life.

#42 Casual games are a huge market

#43 I don't suppose you have statistics to back that?

edit:

And more over... if casual gamers are such a huge market, why don't I see more big companies trying to appeal to this huge potential market? (I'm not talking sports games enthusiasts here either...)

#44

Quote:Online games -- This year, 43% of frequent game players said they played online, up from 37% in 2003 and 31% in 2002, according to ESA. While hardcore gamers receive the bulk of media attention, their number pales in comparison to the 83 million "casual gamers," who play games like chess or checkers online.

http://www.trendsetters.com/trendspotting/9001,1,video-games.html

Quote:It seems that multiplayer games need to be casual, or no one will play them.

Quote:In this way, the circle ended where it began: only the most casual of games will sell widely enough to make money; only the lowest common denominator of games, technologically, will sell widely enough to get money (and perhaps even get carried, under the current system).

http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2005/features/20050317/postcard-waugh.htm

Quote:Games that have been traditionally strong with the hardcore gamers (young males), must remain attractive to that group, however increasing the appeal of the game can attract the much larger casual gamers.In these instances, we need the approval of hardcore gamers and rely on them to spread the word of their approval of the game to the market. This increases awareness within the casual market where the bulk of sales resides

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010815/shelley_pfv.htm

Quote:Developing simple games for the casual gamer garnered a surprisingly high level of interest from participants, if a show of hands is an indicator of true intent. Zimmerman stressed the increasing importance of the casual gamer and the reality that established, simple games such as Tetris, Bookworm, etc., far outnumber the mega-budget games being played.

http://www.igda.org/biz/IGDA_2004_BusinessSummit_Proceedings.pdf

#45 Where have you been ? casual games sell more than hardcore games

#46 Moreover

Quote:I don't suppose you have statistics to back that?

shouldn't this be directed at yourself ?

#47

Quote:If the game-buying public doesn't stand up and demand it, why would publishers really have any kind of interest in ushering a new evolutionary step for video games? As it is now, squelching the creativity of the industry and rewarding lack of ambition appears to be quite sufficient, since it appears that all you really need to succeed as a publisher is a healthy (extreme?) sports franchise and the occasional hype-fueled "Halo-killer." The casual gamer demands little more. And the market is casual.

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6084762/p-6.html

#48

Quote:Casual games are now big business. With all the major players from AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft right in the middle of the action, this sector is the hottest new player in the games field. With the expansion of the games industry reaching into all demographic sectors, from kids to hard core gamers and now with women, seniors and teens being drawn further into games, whether through the expansion of PC and broadband, portable players and mobile devices, through interactive TV or simply through the greatness of the new consoles, the casual gaming experience, facilitated by the downloading opportunity on all platforms is driving a formidable marketplace. What will this market look like in the future? How will the games played evolve? What will the growth from simple to sophisticated game and game player look like? We are just at the start of a new phenomenon

http://www.cesweb.org/attendees/conferences/search/session_detail.asp?ID_session=GP10&ID_track=GP05

#49 @Jonathan Rose
A huge selling casual game.

The Sims

#50

Quote:
There have been over 10 million downloads of our Deluxe games on various portals, and on any given day literally hundreds of thousands of people play the free web versions.

from the PopCap Games website

Btw....they sold their company for $34M a couple years ago.

Was playing a Breakout clone the other day called Ricochet that has sold more than 70,000 copies on Reflexive.

The Scorched Earth clone Pocket Tanks gets searched for more than 21,000 times a month on Yahoo.

#51 The popularity of Pogo also shows that EA was somewhat interested in the casual market.

#52 "@Jonathan Rose
A huge selling casual game.

The Sims"

Not really the kind of casual game I'm referring to... I'm really referring to the nostalgic clone types of games, the multitudes of card games out there, simple shareware puzzles, etc. The Sims is an enormously complex game which really... doesn't fit properly into the category.

"Where have you been ? casual games sell more than hardcore games"

A few extremely exceptional examples



"Btw....they sold their company for $34M a couple years ago.

Was playing a Breakout clone the other day called Ricochet that has sold more than 700,000 copies on Reflexive.

The Scorched Earth clone Pocket Tanks gets searched for more than 21,000 times a month on Yahoo."

And these are probably the single most exceptional cases though. Impressive particularly on Ricochet... but when you compare it to the constant stream of massive selling games for PC... such as the over 1.7 million copies of Half Life 2, over 1.5 million of Farcry, over 5 million of Halo, over 4 million of Halo 2, over 8 million of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City selling about a million in its first week of launch, over 5 million of GTA: San Andreas, over 5 million Super Smash Brothers, over 10 million copies of Super Mario 64 included in the over 170 million copies of all the various Mario games sold over the years... and these games don't even make up the majority of the mainstream industry sales for any particular year. The amount of sales on Ricochet was simply astronomical compared with every other game in its class. When it comes down to the entirity of the industry, the typical clone, shareware based game has not come anywhere close to outselling the mainstream... afterall, if it had, EA would have already started creating these kinds of games with their droves of developers to create the better and cheaper clones in such a way that it would squash the competition with relative ease.


And on the topic of soulless games... which seems sooo bloody popular to talk about here how EA (which by the way, I happen to love EA's older games from the Commodore era and their PC titles from back in the 90s) is satan and Grand Theft Auto is shallow, I find it hilarious that clones of Tetris and Breakout are being clung to as some kind of epiphony and that games which at the very least started out as unique (Yes, Grand Theft Auto WAS a very unique game) are crappy games which over volumize and lack true substance. When I look to the Indy scene, I'm looking for interesting concepts which seem unique to me... not some cheap bargain bin Tetris ripoff...

Ah yes... Garage Games... a home of ingenuity and originality. Well, I suppose its out with The Incredible Machine and Lords of Magic and in with Breakout Clone #5983498

#53 @Jonathan Rose
Ah yes, that market is very saturated.
But those games do sell well, nothing i would buy tho
"if you seen one, you seen em all"

#54 [preaching]

Quote:Ah yes... Garage Games... a home of ingenuity and originality.

Easy killer. Please don't make broad generalizations that are basically nothing but flame bait. You are holding a debate about the relative merits and selling power of casual games versus non-casual games--that has nothing to do with the community as a whole, nor ingenuity/originality.

[preaching off]

#55 "Well perhaps if people didn't keep hearing from so many people that Half Life, GTA, etc. are shallow and soulless all the while when someone says that we would still be playing Pong if not for someone pressing the industry, they are asked what is wrong with Pong, then I wouldn't make such generalities, but all I see is constant defense of the old and constant condemnation of the new. I loved Dynamix for original concepts such as TIM, Battle Drome (One of the first mechwarrior style games I ever saw), Tribes, etc. All of which were relatively ground breaking and original concepts with plenty of content and the ability to entertain for a long time. So naturally, I get a little disturbed when all I hear is how great all of the classics were and how the modern industries suck, how no one has any time for a game that isn't tetris, how content has suddenly become an evil, how the 3D new age essential of Turtle BASIC (an old old old program for Commodore 64, essentially a graphics engine which you used to create programs involving a pre-coded sprite engine, very old and relatively unknown for those of you who don't already know it) is competition to the industry standard of C++, and so many other little things out there to irk me."

"I'll tell you what Jonathan Rose, you make your volumnous game, and I'll make my puzzle game and we'll see who sells more?"

I never said that I was going to make a volumnous game, or even a commercial game... but I'm certainly not going to make another clone. I fully acknowledge that I'm not experienced enough to take on a collosal project, so in the meantime, I'm really not caring enough to look for such a challenge. Have fun repatenting the wheel.

#56 There is a breakdown here...casual != clone. casual is a play style, and when people are discussing the benefits of "pong" vs large scale, high committment games, they aren't saying "remake pong", they are saying "make a game that captures the simplicity, ease of use, and low level of commitment" that pong represents...

#57 @Jonathan:

I'm not going to reply again here... there are far too many casual games out there that sell more than the sum of hardcore games, drop an e-mail to some major companies that dabble in both, do some research... anyone can name the biggest of titles, but a handful doesn't make a majority, neither does the big sales of one game vs many common...

"shareware"...

lol... you keep saying untruths and then flip around and say you really mean this. Do you think we would honesty argue that shareware games have the market... we are talking about casual games, shareware games are a part of that... thats like me saying well FPS are all the same thats all I was really talking about, Half Life2 Doom3...
theres a point when you need to admit your wrong... Sims is a casual game among some of the games you even listed...
but thats not the point... when faced with the comment arguing against your statements on the Blitz engine you switched your view "agian" to cover yourself... you di it now.

your argument is completely invalid, GG even said they wont sell clone games... its in the FAQ, we all know this, why would we argue for that, obviously we don't, we're talking the whole casual gaming industry...

but again you won't listen, you'll just switch your words around ;)

I'm not an easy person to annoy but you go far beyond that, go to your message boards where you can debate about debating and see how many times you can save your ass by twisting your own words, I've had enough of it, far too busy making games and helping people make games to listen to this... I think I've actually lost intelligence reading your posts... follow the logical line through them all... the thread is so slim I don't even know if exists

*shrug*

good luck, wake up and face it, you can't always be right... "casual gaming" is a very large market, if you deny that you are more than blind, your ignorant.

btw: on the real topic... GG you are all very under appreciated, there are a lot of us that appreciate you a lot though :)

#58 Oh yes, collect something from a very long time ago and use it against someone. Really awesome. Nice cheap shot buddy. I didn't update my profile for a good number of years... just didn't think to really.

edit: Of course, I guess the bottom line is that you should want me to be ashamed of having taken an interest in Independent Game Development when I was 15, and that every arrogant forum newb should be responsible for every little thing they wrote in a profile when they were still new to the whole concept of communities. Oh, how shameful it is to have been immature at some time...

Oh, but I do thank you for reminding me to update my profile after 2.5 years of leaving it that way... :M

#59 Heres what I have spent so far and this is enough to make games

$100 TGE
$15 Milkshape (I would like 3dsmax but I can't afford that).
$30 Showtool
$30 vc++ (I think theres a free version out)
I think thats all I'm going to buy:
wait I'm going to get these
$50 lighting pack
$25-$56 one or more of tim astes packs
as soon as I think I need these I'll get them (I'll get the lighting pack eventually.

so far I've spent $175

the lighting pack would make it $225

thats really really cheap whoever can't afford that needs to get a day job or something.

#60 @Robert, Jon: Guys, let's take it easy on each other, ok?--when it comes down to it, we're all on the same side, even if our opinions differ!