Thinking about where the market is

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This is the first of, hopefully, many patron-only posts I do. Y'all are the only ones that get my long-form posts now, aside from the rare instances where I bother to polish them up enough to post elsewhere as an article. You guys get like... beta blog access, and most of the blogs never get past beta.

(and those of you $3/mo and above get cool/dumb code samples I throw up too, so double huzzah)

Today, I'm going to meander on about where the market is, and what that means to me. This is mostly just navel gazing, please don't take this as hardcore market analysis.

There are a lot of folks expressing nervousness about indie-tier development becoming harder, various 'pocalypse statements, etc. I'm not really convinced, though. The market is just changing. So maybe it's useful to try and noodle out where the market is, and where it's going, and make some relatively concrete statements about what that means? Maybe that'll help some folks?

Game budgets for mid-tier today are noodling somewhere in the multi-million range, these days. Wasteland 2's goal was around a million (and I'd guess the "actual" budget was a bit more than that), Psychonauts 2 was sitting at around $4mil, etc. All of those games technically started a little while ago, so let's go a bit further and just say "generally below $5mil." Sound good? Good. Ok.

That's where game budgets were in the 90's, more or less. AAA budgets in the PS2 era, which began in 2000, averaged on the order of $3-5mil, which is about $4-7mil in today's dollars. It was right after that, the next generation, where AAA budgets spiked radically upward, and have been going up radically ever sense. Before then? It was a bit smoother. It's, thus, pretty reasonable to say that in the 90's, your budgets would have been on average, well below $5mil. That's in TODAY'S dollars, mind - in 90's dollars it would have been quite a bit lower.

So what does this mean? Basically, it tells us what we can expect from the market going forward into next decade, and roughly how we can expect things to play out even in the next few years. There aren't gate keepers like we had in the 90's, so the mouth of the funnel is a heck of a lot wider, BUT, discoverability is a tough nut to crack, meaning a lot of folks are going to get lost in the noise. In practice, that means it's easier (ie. possible at all - publisher-driven games didn't help devs in marginal terms / it was hit or miss all the way) to eke out a marginal existence, but still probably just as hard to actually nail a major or minor hit.

Polish requirements will go up. It probably means that if you can't land a good artist (or at least good coherent art - asset store may be viable), make good systems (so probably a good programmer a/o a really good tech designer with a tool they know really well), AND handle marketing well (either you or bringing on an expert), you're going to struggle. I'm going to guess that pins a minimum recommended budget somewhere in the $50k-$100k range? Which doesn't have to be in "real" dollars, since 3 hard-core friends could still fill those roles unpaid and theoretically knock it out of the park, but it's a far cry from the solo-ist stories that dominated in the past. I'd be really worried if I were still leaning on marginal programmer art, as a for-instance. If I were an artist/programmer that made kickass games but had no idea how to market them, I'd be looking at the "good" publishers really closely. If I were an artist that was ok at marketing making technically very shaky games... actually I think you'll be, at least of the at-risk categories, the least at risk, since visual polish tends to be the deciding factor (though you may start getting raked over the coals over quality).

My gut says that pixel art games are in trouble, too. Not because pixel art is bad, but more because in the past, punters have shown that they're pretty bad at identifying "good" pixel art vs "marginal programmer'y" pixel art. Remember gamer response to stick legs? Gamer response to fake-color thing wherein neighboring pixels of different colors are used in limited palette games? Etc. I feel like it's harder, relatively speaking, to be a remarkably good looking pixel art game. You saw that same basic transition in the 90's, too, if you remember. It went from the likes of Commander Keen and Duke Nukem 2D, to the much higher res PS2-era sprites that were still pixel art, but on that very high illustrative end of things. Duke Nukem tried to bridge the gap, even, but if you look at the last 2D game in the series VS the 2D games that then popped up around the PS2 era, the difference is striking. I think you'll see a similar transition in pixel art games on Steam. Furthermore, I think that'll really contract the market, because holy geeze is "that" tier of pixel art / illustrative game more expensive to make.

With 3D, my suspicion is that programmer-made low-fi is done, basically just mirroring how programmer pixel art will no longer be viable. Artist-made low-fi (Necropolis, STRAFE, etc) is all still viable, as is higher-end art of course, but I'd say the days of Star Fox or Virtua Fighter (or my programmer-art Jones On Fire peoples) era being viable are coming to a close.

Another market perspective is, probably, the DS. Referencing the above article again, DS budgets were $1-2mil in today's dollars, which is dead in the middle of where I'd roughly peg the 90's, and analogous to today's mid-tier. It's ALSO a better example in terms of fewer gate keepers, given how easier it was to get a DS game to market. So if you want a read on what genres work, what levels of art are probably going to be viable (for 2D at least), etc, you could do a lot worse than to poke around in that backlog for inspiration.

Anyways, as stated, this is just me meandering around on the topic. Hopefully it was at least entertaining. Maybe educational, even!