This is subject to survivorship bias. Balatro is a great game that deserves its success. But it's easy to imagine a universe where it simply never got any traction, anywhere, and died in obscurity. Conversely, this suggests that in our current universe, many games just as great as Balatro have quietly passed without ever getting their 15 minutes of fame.
At the end of the day, much of success just hinges on luck. There is no law of the universe that says that great art must be appreciated.
The Void Rains Upon Her Heart [1], Fear and Hunger [2] are two examples. You'll look at both of these games and think 'wait, they're actually successful, what's the deal?' and not see the whole story, which is why I linked the charts. Both of these games launched to little to no success, with few (highly positive) reviews. What changed is that deep into their lifespan (~3-4 years after release), a popular youtuber did a video on the game, and as a result it suddenly blew up in popularity and carried that momentum forward. You can in fact see the exact point on the charts where that occurred.
There are a lot of games exactly like that, but haven't had the person with the viewerbase to boost them up. Nor will they ever.
I hope that this doesn't come across as moving the goalposts, but for me it's a given that popular Youtubers can multiply the success of a game, and that this depends to a large extent on luck. For me, the crux of the matter in discussions about game development profitability and survivorship bias is not how much luck influences the maximum possible success of a game.
For me the relevant question is: If you develop a carefully crafted, fun game based on a game concept you have reason to believe will have a decently sized target audience, will you make enough money for a living with some kind of predictability, or does even this depend on luck?
Now when looking at The Void Rains Upon Her Heart, I'd like to know the sales figures before the jump in popularity. You can filter Steam reviews to the period before the game's popularity surged in June 2023. At that time, there were 561 reviews (or 338 reviews for copies sold via Steam). Using the common sales estimation trick of multiplying the number of reviews with 50, we get approximately 28,000 (or 17,000) owners before June 2023. I think the price fluctuated between $9.99 and $6.99. Assuming that after Steam's 30% cut and taxes there are about $3 left on average for each sold copy, then 3 * 25,000 = $75,000. According to the game's credits on MobyGames it was made by a single person. Depending on how long he took, maybe it is reasonable to assume that the game was en route to profitability anyway?
>There are a lot of games exactly like that, but haven't had the person with the viewerbase to boost them up. Nor will they ever.
Such as? Just name one so we can all know. This is your time to help them out no matter how little and there are "a lot" apparently so it shouldn't be hard.
Hex of Steel. Turn based hex wargame, very niche but with a fairly large worldwide community into such games. Only the solo developer is doing plays on youtube and twitch. The game has been seeing a slow upward sales trend as the niche wargame community realizes how good it is. If you've played SSI and Avalon Hill hex games as a kid you should get this.
That is an indie success, almost 400 reviews for that price is good for a solo developer, he can live well on that as long as he continues to create and sell content for.
Failures are games with 50 or less reviews or a bit more if they have much lower price points, there aren't many gems at that level. Note that a large majority of indie game developers don't live in USA, indie gaming isn't dominated by American developers unlike the regular software industry.
Hardcore games are much more likely to convert plays to reviews. Many of the units would have shifted during the 50% sales.
The game is multiplayer which is a whole other layer of complexity.
Based on my experience in this market, I really doubt the author is happy with the outcome as anything other than a stepping stone to something more sustainable.
I think you're an order of magnitude too low setting the bar at 50 for professional developers where this is their full time job - even outside of the US.
Shout out to All Day Dying. 76 reviews. Also both of Colorgrave's games. One way to look for interesting stuff is SteamDB > 50 reviews and over 80%. For example Wild Dogs, Downpurr and Vetrix look cool.
Survivorship bias is the norm in any system with high variance and a low success rate. I would say that arguing against the phenomenon is by far the more out there position.
A analgous statement like, "There are actors with world class talent who never became successful" is one that pretty much everyone would intuitively agree with, outside of maybe an internet agrument. Whether or not I can come up with some talented obscure actors on the fly doesn't disprove the statement.
God exists. I can't show you God. But believe me God definitely exists.
Also low success rate comes from the fact that most of these games are asset flips. But we can conveniently ignore that fact so we can believe in the imaginary.
because you'd also counter with "well that's an exception", or find some other reason it "deserved to fail" while propping up a game jam level game as "deserving to succeed". Yeah, conversation about game metrics without proper metrics and unaligned definitions of "success" is a bit of a fool's errand on social meida.
No disrespect to Balarto, but you just know that if it sold 1k copies, people on Reddit would tear it apart with the usual armchair criticism.
> this looks like a free mobile game
> why are you selling a game about gambling? don't use poker cards
> use a real engine like Unity/Unreal
> rougelites AND card games are oversaturated, pick a better genre
Seen the same things over and over again for years. There's a huge "rule of cool" effect and popularity bias influencing such opinions that suddenly shift when a game is "a success".
>God exists. I can't show you God. But believe me God definitely exists.
I wouldn't call Gabe newell "God", but I guess others would.
But sure, you're free to message him, and he can definitely defy all ethics to show you the sales figures for every game on steam just so you can see how little the average indie game earns. I believe all of that is real. Not feasible, but not outside the realms of reality.
That's sort of the point of survivorship bias. Name one unsuccessful would-be entrepreneur. It's hard because chances are, anyone that's recognizable was successful in some way.
For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.
Then it seems that "survivorship bias" is some kind of unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling belief.
Secondly, these sorts of discussions usually don't define any concrete amount of success that a game is supposed to achieve. What is "no traction" supposed to mean? Aegis Defenders has 1,656 reviews at the moment. There's the assumption floating about that you can roughly multiply this by 50 to get the number of owners, which would turn out to about 80,000. The price point is fluctuating between $19.99 and $4.99. Will it net the developer/publisher less money over its lifetime than its development cost?
In any case, I think that one of the biggest factors is not merely the game's quality, but whether there are a lot of players hungry for a game's specific concept and genre. Making an "excellent game" in an oversaturated genre, or in a genre where games require some network effect to take off (any multiplayer game), is much more risky. Don't just make something good; make something that a lot of people want even when the product is less than perfect.
EDIT: VG Insights estimates $770k gross revenue. That's just for the Steam version. The game was also published on PlayStation 4 and Switch. The developer team seems to have been small.
Based on your reply to the sibling comment, you're just pointing out the "contrast" to the success of Balatro? I honestly don't get the point. I don't think the particular amount of success that break-out hits achieve matters to the discussion. If Balatro had a million reviews, would you expect Aegis Defenders to also have a lot more reviews and sales? I think this isn't relevant to the question whether excellent games will succeed (for me this means: enable the developers to make a good living) with some predictability or whether it's due to luck, and whether there exist a lot of excellent but unknown games.
>Then it seems that "survivorship bias" is some kind of unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling belief.
It's very falsifiable. Just not by us, as we have no acccess to the sales data, nor enough public sales points to make a proper statistical analysis. The best ones out there are either based on estimations (especially reviews to sales ratios) or non-public data you pay the NPD or someone similar thousands to access (and obviously you're not allowed to share that data). So someone truly curious can pay a lot of money to get an answer.
Based on the number of years it took to develop the game, it wouldn't be considered one that achieved "15 minutes of fame". 100 reviews is quite a far cry from your example of Balatro with 33k. I'm not sure where you plan to draw the line on "success", but I think this is a broadly reasonable contrast.
I own this game too, got it probably from a bundle-sale, so I didn't really bought it on purpose for the game itself. It also seems to haven been given away for free some years ago.
At the end of the day, much of success just hinges on luck. There is no law of the universe that says that great art must be appreciated.