Another question. As the title hints, can Game Developing on BYOND be taken as a form of Business? BYOND will be updated and that will open doors for Serious Game Developers. And thus I wish to know if loads of money can be earned through developing games on BYOND and exporting them to other places. By the huge success of NEStalgia I see it is possible, but that's my standpoint and might not be reality.
Also if people don't mind can you disclose the information related to NEStalgia, Rise of Pirates,
Eternia and few other games that are hit on BYOND?
Thank you.
ID:1597652
 Jun 12 2014, 7:30 am
|
|
I agree with LordAndrew, a lot of developers think that putting your game on Kickstarter or even Steam's greenlight will automatically make the game famous, which is untrue it's how you handle the marketing side of things.
Sure if you just plonk it on a website and let it sit and degrade you may get a few purchases is that worth it? You need to put in twice as much effort to get anywhere near the expectations you have. In the end I suppose you're just a small developer or developers with a 2D game competing against some really well made indie 2D and 3D games that have a team of dedicated people behind them some even with grants. Just remember nothing is out of reach, you just need money and some guts to pull it all off. | |
So what I have learned from your replies is that Marketing the Game is much more important than developing the game. So my first goal if I choose game developing as career, should be to be famous.
Well I was thinking that for a start I can release lots of Freemium Mini Games similar to FART to make name for myself. However yes at the moment I am not sure if I should choose this as career, I am just trying to gain as much information as I can before making this my way of living. | |
I think the way to approach it would be as a hobbyist, and if you release a project that warrants more time due to its success, awesome. Your top priority nonetheless should probably be college (assuming you're around that age) with those spare hours going towards what you enjoy, such as game development.
I just wouldn't go in with the mentality of 'this game needs to make money' or 'this will be my career'. Personally, I don't find that enjoyable and it zaps motivation away for me. As for your question on disclosing information, last month Eternia made a few thousand dollars, which isn't typical income for the project but can paint a picture of the kind of income you can gain if you have something people enjoy. We have a very dedicated userbase, with an estimate of roughly 80% of active players being paying subscribers (http://puu.sh/9rJwi/dad01849be.png). That's partly due to the aspect of creative writing - people are incredibly attached to their works in Eternia because they're essentially short stories, breathing and living with other creations through live role-playing. So with this in mind, and the reported income of other games on BYOND, I think it's reasonable to expect an average of at least $1000 a month if you release a decent ORPG on BYOND that has a respectable amount of content - mind you, it's still very much a guess and hard to say until you have a project out there. It's also difficult to judge other genres due to the focus being ORPGs as far as popular games go. Granted, Eternia isn't so much an RPG as it is a roleplaying engine, and it's certainly good at the latter, but perhaps not your typical BYONDer's kind of game. We've lost a lot of potential players / income due to the genre (http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=890797) and at the same time have the benefit of what I described above, a dedicated userbase that has been gradually growing over the past two years. I hope this helped, if even a little! Feel free to message me with any questions. Good luck on your journey. | |
And such replies makes me want to make MMOs... haha.
Oh well about taking it as a hobby, you are quite right. However, I would say that until and unless a person has interest he can never even take the first step. Well that applies to me at least. Even when freelancing when I am not in mood or not motivated enough, I tend to take a break from the job till I get motivation back. So I guess this attitude might turn into my favour. And, thanks a lot WANO! I really appreciate your response! | |
If your always losing motivation and that makes you not want to work then this really isn't for you in my opinion. No true game developer should think like that. Unless you do do this for a hobby (like myself). But if its a hobby I don't see why'd you care about business aspect of it.
| |
A2J2TIWARI wrote:
So what I have learned from your replies is that Marketing the Game is much more important than developing the game. So my first goal if I choose game developing as career, should be to be famous. I wouldn't go as far to say this, because you should definitely strive to make the best game that you can. But, you could make the best game in the world and it would be a waste of time if you don't market it, because then no one will know your game exists (several BYOND games come to mind)! | |
If you're trying to make money make a MMORPG those seem to be the most profitable. I haven't seen one on this site that even uses the engine's full potential.
Notice WANO said he gets players invested into his game, but I think the best strategy would get people addicted and MMORPG's can do that easily. I would only use BYOND as a stepping stone for collecting enough money to invest in a larger game and so forth. Look at this as your stepping stone. In the future I believe this site could potentially be a gold mine for money but more updates need to happen. Until then if you're trying to make bank MMORPG's are the best way to go. | |
WANO didn't have to do much. His game is roleplay, so the players make their own story and everything just rolls with it. Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game (and a roll-playing game, HA!). All you have to do is give players an environment and an open script and they'll do the work for you. Since role-playing is better in larger groups, they invite their friends, who invite their friends, etc. I personally find role-playing games to be lazy on the part of the developer since all the developer has to do is provide enough tools and a rich environment but it is quite a piece of work.
| |
We're in the "Don't Tell Me What To Do" age. The same way people are now fighting more than ever to not be told who they can and can't marry, or what they can and can't smoke, gamers don't want linear game experiences where they are told "Go here, do that, then do this, because that's how you're supposed to play this game."
People want to open up a game and do whatever they want. That's why Skyrim is so huge. There's no linear game play dictating what type of character you are, or where you need to go next, or what type of abilities you can only have. I logged into WANOs game earlier and I'm actually curious as to why it has a battle system in the first place. From what I saw, people were standing in one spot typing paragraphs explaining what they were doing or what they were about to do. Kinda leads me to believe you don't need a battle system at all in role-play games on BYOND. The players that go into these seem to be playwrights, so just integrating things that would help them keep track of stories and character development would probably suffice. | |
If you want your game to sell, you got to market it. Infact, marketing is the single most important thing when it comes to selling video games (and perhaps anything).
If you need proof of this, look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop See those AAA games that spend more on marketing than on making the actual game? Do you think they do this for no reason at all? I'm willing to bet the vast majority of all AAA games (if not all of them now) spend more on marketing than on developing the game. If you want to sell your game, learn to market, or get someone who knows how to market. | |
EmpirezTeam wrote:
I logged into WANOs game earlier and I'm actually curious as to why it has a battle system in the first place. From what I saw, people were standing in one spot typing paragraphs explaining what they were doing or what they were about to do. this made me giggle for like 5 mins Personally i find that older games are much better than new games.only the highly marketed games get noticed but there usually terrible compared to lower marketed games.IMO | |
Here's the problem with new games. They're being made to make money. It you look at the quality of games as years go by in franchises, it tends to go down.
Assassin's Creed -> a bit of a flip flop. Pokemon -> tends to be okay, but they're totally just making games to squeeze out money. I must say, I'm extremely disappointed in the most recent mystery dungeon game though. I should've went with the mormon game. Anyone that says that the WiiU was released because it was was ready and not because Nintendo wanted to keep up with current gen releases is fooling themselves. Tales Series -> consistently good but I feel like it's going downhill lately. Maybe they lost the good writers. Final Fantasy -> Downhill Legend of Zelda -> Surprisingly consistent. My only beef with this game is that I like the graphics they used on the SNES more but they've managed to chunk out the same game over and over again successfully. Mario -> same as Zelda, but not quite as good. Etryian Odyssey -> Good games, but they don't really change the formula. Grand Theft Auto -> I actually liked a lot of these games. They had decent stories. I haven't played the most recent one but I hear it's good. I guess at the end of the day, it turns into a job where you make okay games and market them really well instead of in the old days where you made excellent games (looking at you Ogre Battle) and market them okay. I guess it's more profitable if people "can't complain" about your game instead of rave about it. | |
Perhaps the economy and cost of living has made people more greedy and focused on whatever makes a profit rather than just making a great game.
It's probably why every time a successful game emerges, ten thousand knock-offs of it emerge 2 weeks later, because people are all like "hurr durr if Notch made a million dollars off of a block game, I can make a million dollars off a block game just like it." | |
The answer is of course yes, you could very well make a business out of developing games with BYOND, but the odds are already stacked against you in a lot of different ways. There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of other developers putting out indie games every day that you have to compete with, so unless you have a very huge marketing push then your game is just going to get lost in the crowd.