9 minutes ago, francoisdiy said:

That cat copied off of Harvest Moon. Now that's what I call business!

I had heard that it's "heavily influenced" of Harvest Moon. As long as Harvest Moon is Nintendo specific and "a Nintendo game" , it's no problem.

Indies don't need to make amazing inventions all the time, just focusing on rather niche genres have merit imo.

Just now, francoisdiy said:

Now that's confusing. This industry stuff is wack!

Well ... I never played Harvest Moon (checked few times only via youtube) , even if it is based on same idea and similar mechanics, I doubt it is a blatant ripoff.

On my own I prefer indies to go after well made niche games rather than yet another mediocre 3D game or whatever popular at the time. Even revival of "oldies but goldies" is a nice strategy, unless you're Sony backed "No Man's Land" people don't have super high expectations from indies.

When I read the OP, I guess we are talking about mobile games.

My 2 cents: move over to PC or Console, and let the mobile sector alone for now. Mobile Games are dead for devs that cannot compete with the likes of King or the other top 5 or 10 in terms of ads and market research. True, there are the lucky guys like the flappy bird dev, but way to many shovelware and to little moderation by Apple and Google to ever be able to muscle you way to a good position with hard work alone.

While Steam has also become a cesspool of shovelware garbage and bad devs trying to make a quick buck, at least Steam seems to be moving in to do something about it... at the speed of a glacier, mind you. But in contrast to Google and Apple their thing is games front and center, thus if their games market suffers, they suffer.

Same with the Console e-stores really. Sony has left some pretty shady games unto their platform as of lately, but I would guess that at some point they will also have to step in and put some measures in to stop the flood of garbage. Additionally AFAIK it is still not such a no-questions-asked thing to publish a console game like it is on the mobile app stores.

Just let the mobile market run its course, and either be on the right side of the fence when it finally collapses, or swoop back in when it starts to cool down again. I would guess a lot of the shady business does NOT pay out as well as the garbage devs might think, and a small change by the platform holder or the worldwide economy will destroy the loopholes they are currently trying to abuse (like Steam rolling back their trading card system. Now if they also change the rules for achievements (like capping the amount of max achievements per game, or something like that), the bad devs will have to go back to putting ads into their games and try to maximize play time per player).

This ain't the Indieapocalypse if you ask me... its a liberal market running wild, and platform holders being slow in recognizing that they need to regulate it to some extent or risk people loosing interest in said market.

I know I lost a lot of interest in Steam. Besides the flood of garbage its the flood of bad ports, and me not really being interested in all the Steam side functions... but certainly, having to wade through a sea of garbage to find the pearls if I for once not search for a specific game certainly does not make me want to start up a steam store search. Back to my Retro games and the few PS4 diamonds I guess.

EDIT:

Oh, and another thing....

You know how many startup companys will make a profit within 2 years? Almost none. When you build up your own company, you have to be ready to go through multiple years of negative figures while you try to find the winning formula, make connections and find clients.

Maybe you (and many others I guess) went into this with the wrong idea? I know, there will be guys who prove my point wrong because they managed to make a profit within 6 months, but for MOST startups, that ain't the case. Even high profile startups like facebook where in the red for 5+ years while they cranked up their business and muscled their way to the top.

You should have savings in your bank account to pay the bills for multiple years, a steady stream of income either with a day job or occasional side gigs for clients, or just the ability to live dirt cheap to even consider starting up your own company... else you are just hoping for having luck and winning the lottery, which is never a wise decision.

On the flipside that means you need patience... more patience than most people could have, to see your company slowly grow to a profitable entity. 2 years of famine is nothing in the world of self employment... its just a sign that your probably have to re-adjust the way you do business to not eat into your savings another year.

Maybe read "the lean startup"... the core principle of that is to try a lot, fail quickly and pivot in a different direction if you do. If you do mobile development, I guess you can crank out a game within 3-6 months. If you have not found the winning formula for 2 years you either have tried 4 times already and now know a lot about what NOT to do in the current mobile app store ecosystem, or you did something wrong (like spending too long on a title, or trying the same thing over and over again).

IMO of course....

@Khatharr:

While I do agree with many of your statements, that leaves out the fact that there are a F*ckton of games on thes storefront nowadays that are what Valve now classifies as "fake games". Games that never have been made to be real functional games, just simple scams to abuse loopholes. Are these a problem if looked at with your world view? Probably not. They still clog up the store and benefit no-one (besides, jsut maybe, the dev, and then the store owner).

And there IS the fact you leave out one simple thing: someone else has to do the work so you can just use your clever search strategy and get the good games without the effort.  So these guys have no right to complain that the current situation makes their "job" of finding the good games harder? They are not paid by you or Valve or anyone to do their job, and even if they were, they had all the right in the world to complain about a situation which makes finding good games harder than finding gold in the earth, for the guy that does not just want to leech, but add some new finds to the general list of good games.

And then we as a group of mostly hardcore gamers who spend a lot of time informing us about the games that are worth the money often forget that many less hardcore gamers still buy games based on the box art or some other metric we know is stupid (for example based on earlier titles in the series... did this myself back when I bought CoD:MW3).

Sure they should invest more time when making ANY purchase. Sure they get exactly out what they put in in effort. Still, lets not forget about the "casual plebs"

Some people blow the situation out of proportion, yes. The situation is still a problem for many people. I don't think any SANE person would want to go back to walled gardens and publishers having to vouch for devs to get them unto any platform besides PC.

SOME regulation doesn't hurt. As usual, ANY of the extremes is bad. Overregulation just as much as completly open markets. I guess we still need to find the golden middle ground. But letting markets run wild usually is not leading anywhere good, IMO.

EDIT:

watched a totalbiscuit youtube vid yesterday that seems relevant to the topic: 

He makes a ton of good points.

Although people may earn money from games they throw up while making or selling, I think pleasing crowds no longer works because that market especially casual one is quite saturated. I'm not saying make yet another Europe Universalis but not Frappy Bird either.

There is always hope... Given most of the post I see on this and other forum especially in the technical dept that usually goes.." I'm working on this game...but how do I do XYZ " where XYZ are sometimes fundamental concepts that should have been acquired before even going down that road, I'm going to go off on a limb and say there are plenty people out there that have in their head some "get rich quick" indie scheme. Not saying this is your approach as no knowledge of your intent, but if you enter the field with some "get rich quick" scheme in mind, then prepare to be disappointed. Lets say you make a game and its not doing so well sales wise, we all want to recoup our development cost, but at same time, you have to be realistic or set realistic goals. If  you are going to dwell on sale figures vs making the games you love, then to answer your question, all hope is lost. Whenever becomes more about money rather than passion, then all hope is lost...my 2cents..