In the early 80s, all it took to make a game was a computer, some graph paper, and a lot of determination.
Games were created by brilliant individuals.
Richard Garriott circa 1979
Their designs were often groundbreaking and sometimes deeply artistic.
Their choices defined much of what we see in games today.
Some of these auteur game developers even made a decent living.
Playing their games inspired me to make games of my own.
By the mid-90s I had a degree in computer science, and landed my dream job at Origin Systems.
But the industry had changed. The days of the solitary, brilliant, auteur developer had passed like rain on the mountain.
Now games were made by massive teams with massive schedules and massive budgets.
Big budgets required big revenue, and big revenue required small risks.
My dream job turned out to be a nightmare. I was working harder for less money than my non-game-programming peers in exchange for the privilege of making games.
But I didn’t make games. I made little pieces of games.
So I moved into management. I thought that more leadership would mean more creative control. It didn’t. I still didn’t make games. Now I didn’t even make little pieces of games. I made schedules and budgets and meetings.
So I got out.
Then, just for fun, I started making Flash games.
With Flash you could create art and code in the same space. The games were small and focused. You could make a pretty good game by yourself. And Flash was everywhere, so you could publish your work to the world.
It was a dream come true. I could make whole games—not just pieces. They could be as strange or as fun or as experimental as I wanted. There were no schedules or budgets or meetings to fuss over.
Then the dream got even better. It turned out my little games could make a little money.
Then came the iPhone, and suddenly you could make a lot of money.
It was a renaissance, a second chance. For the first time since the early 80s, an individual programmer or a small group of developers could make a living creating fantastic wonders that made people smile while stretching their view of what games could be.
It was another golden age. For others.
Fez by Phil Fish
Limbo by Playdead
Minecraft by Notch
And for me.
And then, suddenly, it was over.
So many people rushed to make games for the iPhone that supply exploded and prices collapsed. You literally couldn’t give games away.
Soon the only people making money on small games were those who made their games into billboards and markets.
It was the opposite of creativity. The opposite of art. And the type of fun these games delivered was bargain-basement: addictive but empty, like sucking sugar through a straw.
Even small, indie games were no longer innovative, beautiful, or human. They were machines designed to latch onto a human brain and feed it all the right chemicals to keep it entranced.
So I got out.
Now making games is a hobby for me, as for millions of others. Just a hobby.
Small game development isn’t totally dead. Occasionally a game will make a splash and the creators will reap rewards for a few months.
But almost no one makes a steady living. Zynga, Rovio: today’s superstars are tomorrow’s street sweepers.
And if your game does do well, there are always a thousand hungry developers willing to steal and repackage your idea.
Creating small, beautiful games is no longer a living. But it is a grand hobby. A 48-hour game programming competition like Ludum Dare is the highlight of my year.
I get so pumped in those 48 hours, I have a hard time coming down.
When I was in college they told us there would always be a demand for software developers. In general that’s still true.
I always wondered what it would look like when it stopped being true, when the need for developers dwindled, and programming stopped paying the bills.
Now I know.
For the lone game programmer that day has already arrived.
Twice.
49 Comments
Great article. I’m currently a Lone dev too, trying to make games and make a living out of it. I have a daily job that pays the bills, and by night I game dev. Its hard to make games, and be original on mobile platform, mostly due to restrictions on gameplay input, and the amount of cheap copy games.
But I’ve also made a cheap copy game, such as flappy bird, and I sticked to the same, damned gameplay. Ok, I did it for a game jam, put some ads, and put it there. Why? Because If that can give me a little money to allow me to get time to be creative on other games of my own, I’d be happy.
I’m about to release a new, original game, in the coming weeks and although my heart wants thousands of downloads, nowadays, if on launch day I can get 1000, I’ll be happy. It’ll be most likely 100.
Making a game for PC and release through Steam is an option, but with what budget? I’ll continue to make mobile games until I can finance my way to PC.
Nice article tho. And if you’re considering making a team. I can code 😉
This really does depress me. Learning how to make games is pretty much the entire reason I learned how to code. The ability to bring topics around to gaming is how I digested a lot of my complex lessons. And it was all so I could one day I could pay the bills by making games, by doing what I love. Wasn’t that the meat of the lessons that everyone taught you when you were a child?
But if you can’t support yourself on doing that, then… what? What do you do then? I mean, I’m not going to stop making games. The infinite streams of energy that whiz and zip through my head will always be put into game creation and script writing. But now, I fear I can’t devote most of my day programming and testing games without the electricity shutting off. It feels like I’m a part of a dying world that I never had the chance to compete in.
I suppose at this point the best I can hope for is to be the Charles Bukowski of video games. Or, at the very least, the Franz Kafka.
I hate to depress you. The truth is depressing sometimes, and you say it well: “It feels like I’m a part of a dying world that I never had the chance to compete in.” Exactly.
But your path into programming isn’t wasted. There are still many great programming jobs available, including some in games (but maybe not “lone”). And you can still make games—just maybe not for a living, at least not on very small games.
Classic doom and gloom by emo dev who thinks the world owes him a living. It doesn’t.
Build it and something will come. Stop trying to anticipate what people want and make the game you want to play. What reward do you need beyond this if you are the genuine article?
Monetizing and all that garbage is for the frauds and fakirs who jump onto any bandwagon throughout human history with one purpose only in life – to make money. Why would you envy them when that is all they will ever have? A real game designer is rewarded by creating and releasing games.
We get this crap every couple of years during gluts. I can’t believe anyone thinks the world has to pay them to do what they want to do. It doesn’t. Your ancestors fought a war, bitch. Get over it and grow a pair.
I seem to have touched a nerve with you, Biff.
I couldn’t help notice that your URL points to a spanking-brand-new game company website with several games “coming soon.” Your strategy is to “develop games that are marketed largely through word-of-mouth by other gamers…” Why don’t you go and see how that approach works out for you. Then you can come back and trash-talk with some authority.
I’m not here to promote my own blog but I came to a similar conclusion here http://digiterium.com/2014/12/13/how-do-you-make-money-from-making-games-again/ .
The global market and increase of game making tools has created a deluge of low quality games, which has swamped the game markets causing a race to the bottom in prices.
I should say that I do think it’s possible to be a successful lone developer in todays game dev world, but it is very difficult, especially if you want to do it by making interesting, quality games. Vlambeer and others show that it is possible and I think the key is niche. The types of games that are making millions per day are beyond the scope of a lone developer (which I learned the hard way) but cool, quality games from lone devs are still doable, and if talked about enough will find an audience.
That’s a great article and well worth a read for anyone interested in this post.
Thanks for this. It was a great read. I have been getting into game development recently and have been using it to teach my 2 kids (ages 9 and 6) how to turn their ideas into reality and creating something original. Although I agree that it has become increasingly difficult for an independent developer to make money creating games, it’s still a valuable creative outlet. Maybe you won’t be able to sell a million copies of your game but you can still create something fun and original and share it with your friends who may just get some enjoyment out of it. And that’s good enough for me at least.
Part of the problem lies with the centralized nature of app stores and the fact that paid apps share the same space as a huge number of other apps, including those that are free. You wouldn’t see a retail store stock their shelves that way, but when there’s only one place to get apps for a platform that store has to carry all apps, making yours harder to find and sell profitably.
With multiple, independent stores, each store could sell to a particular audience and have its own standards for which apps to include and which to exclude. Developers could offer their games to these stores or sell direct through their websites, allowing them to better distinguish their products from all the crap that’s piled together under the “App Store” or “Play Store” roofs.
Part of the reason it’s so difficult to make money in the app store is definitely that everyone wants free games, but also the market is now dominated by a few giant studios. Studios like Supercell and King.com are paying out the wazoo for advertising that floods the market and drives up the cost of advertising or acquisition for everyone else. I heard that King.com spent several tens of millions of dollars just to push Candy Crush Soda up the charts. That’s probably less money than it cost them to make the entire game in the first place. So now developers are in a position where if they want their game to really be visible on the charts they’d have to pay more to advertise the game than to just make the game, or they have to have a really rare hit, like Monument Valley. It’s frustrating that I can’t easily earn a living making video games. It’s my dream, I went to school for it, I followed my dream and now I’m making a living off of it. But…for how long? I’m not going to move from state to state switching game studios every year or two, it’s simply not worth it. What will likely happen if I don’t strike gold with some game is that I’ll end up programming some non-game software for a living and game development will become a hobby, just like you’ve said in your article. It’s depressing, but maybe inevitable.
“When I was in college they told us there would always be a demand for software developers. In general that’s still true.”
Its pretty much true for most software positions outside of game development.
If you’re looking for quick riches in software development, you’re better off learning a webdev language, or applying your skills to finance. Senior level devs in those fields tend to earn significantly more than game devs of equivalent experience.
Then again, most of us game developers aren’t in it for the money. And personally I find game development rewarding in other ways. But yes, this article speaks to me.
It is because of this article that I bought two of your games for Android. That and I had never heard of them. Bravo on both this article and the games. Thank you!
Is this just a consequence of an industry’s maturation? Look at Fine Art or Film. Many other creative industries have had / are having similar arcs.
It’s a good question. I’d almost argue that film, say, is on the opposite trajectory. Prior to 2000, no decent-quality film was made without a team of specialists and high-end equipment. Now an individual or very small team can make a great film because of advances in hardware and software. So the general trend that is common to all media development (games, film, music, photography, visual arts…) is that technology has made it easier for fewer people to make larger, higher quality products/productions. And the other uniform trend is that “markets” (YouTube, App Store, Steam) have allowed this growing mass of people to reach audiences more easily than before. But the resulting problem is the same, too: millions of talented, brilliant, special people creating beautiful, special artwork that is then thrown onto the scrap heap of overabundant supply. It’s both painful and inevitable; nobody’s fault, yet maddening.
In that sense, I wouldn’t call this an “arc.” This combination of authoring/production ease via software and very large, open markets for media is a destination, a sort of black hole, that is not cyclical, but unique. And although industries have certainly had ups and downs before, this particular pattern of an explosion of supply is also, I would say, historically unique.
If there is a historical analogue, it might be the printing press (?).
I’m going to be contrary here. There are still lone developers cranking out great games and succeeding. Flappy Birds comes to mind and there are others.
The bigger problem is that value has been eroded. The industry rushed to free2play and this makes the odds slim that a niche game can be profitable.
Rodina is a one-man dev team. Maybe the glut of freemium mobile and big-budget console games is giving some breathing room to PC developers?
Great article, really hits home to those in the blast-radius of games-dev meltdown.
It’s a real shame that that the ‘net is so huge and home to thousands of talented, fair minded coders and artists with brilliant ideas, but are all fragmented and dotted around said ‘net world, dispirited and frustrated by ‘collaborative’ forums where it seems only the next ‘Flappy Bird’ or humongous/impossible Online RPG is discussed before being abandoned after 12 lines of code.
Indie music does ok, people learn an instrument, they meet up, chuck out the ones who are no good and they make a band. I’d love to see something similar in indie dev, a site run with the aid of pro developers, bringing together the people who want to write original and new games of a certain quality, aimed at nurturing an appreciative audience who will splash out a little cash for such a game. All run in the opposite manner of the current App Stores, in fact.
I can dream…
I think the biggest problem on mobile is monetisation. we made users get used to free content, it’s almost impossible to monetise your game if you are not targeting a huge audience on mobile. As an indie developer, you develop your game, send to an app store and wait for millions of people to download and by any chance click on the advertisement you stick on top or bottom of an already small screen. If you make it a paid game, don’t even expect big sales without spending as much for marketing. In-app purchases can help a little but again you will need big numbers to make a living out of it. Overall, people pay for food they don’t like, pay for movie they don’t enjoy, monthly cable tv channels they don’t watch but no they don’t pay for a mobile game because a mobile game is not something worth paying for and we developers made it happen.
Actually Apple made it happen. The cheapest price for apps should have been $4.99 NOT 99c, or (the real killer) FREE.
I totally agree. Apple actually tries to help by making it mandatory to have a credit card on registering to iTunes so users are more likely to pay. But on Android, it’s a mess. I don’t know how would that work in real life but if paying for an app was something quite normal and common it would be much easier to make a living as an indie developer.
When there were relatively few games available on the app store the bar was lower. You had to come up with a cool idea for a new game, code it, upload it and watch the $$$ roll in. Now the app store is a very crowded place, but the people who would have bought your game before still exist, to succeed you need to market your game to them. There is a cost associated with doing this and that will reduce profitability but this is a cost most normal businesses have to bear.
This is such a realistic, disheartening tale!
My dream has been to finish up my PhD dissertation in game studies (theory/cultural studies) and transfer over into actually making games independently (development/praxis). The mobile market is in such an awful state right now, but I follow and support tons of small indie studios and developers who nevertheless seem to carry on and make great PC games (with patrons, crowdfunding, part-time, or other strategies). Perhaps I’m too hopeful, but want to at least give it a try 🙂
Great recap, but even by archon, development was teams.
Launching better quality games but getting fewer downloads. Largely in part due to templated unity game projects spaming the market.
The app bubble is bursting.
Hey Jeff,
Great article! Very interesting analysis of the evolution of game development.
Recently I have been getting excited about the potential of multiplayer games on the Chromecast. It is a brand new platform that is relatively untapped. People are just starting to unlock the power. I wish someone would build a win lose or draw where you draw on your cell phone which displays on the tv and others guess on their phone. The potential is exciting!
Really great piece. But there has always been competition to be an entertainer.
My argument is that games are what video was. Companies used to print their advertising. Schools used to use text books. Now online schools use video. I suspect we will be playing little games daily, much like our collective youtube habit.
If you want to make a game that is pure entertainment, you must fight like novelists, cartoonists, painters etc have for centuries. But the opportunity for an individual in game development, in new forms of interactive communication, is very much alive and at it’s infancy.
Archon was made by at least three people, the Free Fall Associates. It was designed by Paul Reiche III (who also created the graphics for the game) and Jon Freeman, and programmed by Anne Westfall.
VR could be the 3rd renaissance. Most mainstream companies are waiting on the sidelines. There is a small window of opportunity for indies to shine.
Would have to be a pretty big “indie” game though. Sprite-based 2D VR is likely to be underwhelming at best. And once you’re into modeling and animating, you’re out of the realm of the “solo” or very-small-team domain.
> Sprite-based 2D VR is likely to be underwhelming at best.
Not necessarily. The real kick I get inside VR environments is the sense of depth (and height as in ‘fear of heights’) and the immersiveness (looking all around me, things creeping up behind me etc). If graphic quality was a dealbreaker for making good games, many of your own games wouldn’t have gotten anywhere 🙂
I don’t know if it will be VR (no one truly knows), but I think it’s safe to say there will be some 3rd renaissance. Eventually people will tire of the same old thing. A new technology will come out, and the indie developers will be the first ones there. But indie developers can only control each new market for so long, until the big companies come in and out-fund them.
Developers have access to the largest markets ever. Worldwide. Almost instantly. There are more players than ever before. More money is being spent by players on games than ever before.
The problem now is that the markets are a mess. Steam seems to care about quality, but not Apple, or Google. We are in a transition. Once the markets get organized around quality, the profession, and professionals, will have another go at it!
This post makes sense, but some of these points aren’t related. How much does a game programmer make? Much less, but that’s not really related to anything else. It has to do with the fact that there are so many people who want to do it. For adventure games, they have always required teams to develop, and lone programmers have always had the chance to make it big (and still do).
The fact that some lone devs can make hits (like Flappy Bird), while the rest of us toil on large game development teams are two separate issues. Even great games made by lone devs might not ‘get lucky’, no matter how good they are. People just miss them, and play something else.
A third totally unrelated issue is making games for fun: that’s what I do, and some apps and games are hits and others are not. It would be nice to get lucky and go viral on one of them, but it’s like winning the lottery. But it doesn’t affect my drive or output of apps and games in any way… it’s just a fun aspect of publishing them on the app store.
Great advert for your games — I just bought two of them. Why not join Richard again at Portalarium and be part of an indie small team building a great game?
You’ve cottoned on to my evil plan (marketing the games). Portalarium has crossed my mind, but I really do enjoy making my very own games, and I suspect that that would be a return to more of a cog-in-the-machine experience. One, two, or three developers working on a game is very different from 20 or even 10. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Not only did he stealthily advertise his games, but the entire post serves to deter new entrants from the market! Smartly done.
There are still indies like Luke Hodorowicz’s Banished and the 2-person DwarfFortress team.
Origin Systems accomplished great things in its day, but EA ate them.
The same thing happened to Maxis and countless other companies from the 90s.
Give it another shot.
You may create something worthwhile.
The iPhone as a market imploded, sure. That doesn’t mean tiny indy games are dead. It just means iPhone games are stupid hard to make a profit at.
Keep on making little hobby games. Post ’em online for free. Develop a personal style and a following for it. And use Patreon to slowly turn that following for your hobby into a living. Or pull together a single-level playable demo, maybe with a tiny team consisting of a couple people to handle whichever parts of art/music/code they’re better at than you, send that demo out to a lot of review sites, buy some advertising now and then, visit conferences (this is part of your ad budget, any sales are gravy), and launch a Kickstarter to turn it into a more ambitious game. (I mean, Monument Valley? That ain’t a single developer. That’s eight people working on it for two years.)
Great read!
Maybe you’ll have to find what is the third renaissance. Maybe games that interact with the real world? I don’t know.
The salaries you showed us seem quite low, is it accurate, old or specific to a location? I know that salaries in the game industry aren’t competitive due to the abondance of applicants, but when you look at full stack or backend engineer in the US, it’s more than 85k, it also higher in city where software engineer salary are normally lower like in Toronto or Montreal (canada).
As far as I’m concerned, this is the cost you pay to follow your dreams. There are people that desperately want to make games but don’t have the intelligence to get a Computer Science degree and will never have the qualifications to get hired by game developers or the innate logic and IQ to develop a game on their own despite their best efforts. The fulfillment you get following your dreams does not guarantee a salary. For those unable to do it, they get neither.
There is a few of us left. We still got some fight left in us, but the field is littered with the dead. It does look grim for most. We’ve retreated to the harder ‘darker’ niches, held onto our dwindling fan base this long. Time will tell if the next version still pleases them and they dare follow us into our niche cave. We leave a sign out front in hopes that the adventurous enter.
This is article is great, well written and sad all at the same time. I see similar things happening in music, graphic arts, and photography. Not exactly parallel, but similar. Everything is being commoditized and mass produced. New tools make the creation of these things open to more people, and makes it easier to enter the market, but it also means that the average level of quality tends to drop, which has a way of dragging expectations down. I was just talking to an ex-portrait photographer who got out of the business because she just can’t make enough money at it anymore. People aren’t willing to pay her as much as they used to because everyone has HD cameras and cool filter apps on their phones, and that’s the look everyone has come to expect. They don’t care about the difference between that and a truly professionally composed, exposed, and touched up photo. Fewer people want to pay for custom music for their projects because of the ubiquity and cheapness of stock music.
To continue your Middle Earth comparison, it’s like the Elves have left, and the time of Men has begun. Stupid Men.
To be fair with the whole photography thing, the software on cameras these days is amazing and just about any one can take great pictures on full auto mode. People didn’t want to pay loads for portrait, wedding photos etc but as long as cameras required some technical knowledge to use, they were necessary. Not any longer.
Interesting point of view. However, having a decent camera is not enough to be able to produce great photos, regardless of how advanced the software is. As the person your replied to said, it’s not that it’s easier to take good photos, it’s more that people are willing to accept what they can get from smartphone cameras or even entry level d/SLR cameras.
Cameras may be easier for the avg person to use, but taking great photos, especially in less than ideal lighting conditions, still requires great skill. People are perhaps just less willing to pay for said skill and are content to accept the “good enough” they can get on their own.
It’s a recurring tale in many places, mediums, and careers. I have family and friends who are still trying to make a living as small scale farmers, when corporate farming has made it nearly impractical. “Organic” farming could be seen as a parallel to the mobile device gaming development phase, but those farms are slowly being absorbed or regulated out of existence, too. I’m not going to label the movement as good or evil; it is what it is.
I am thankful, however, that you didn’t go the path of John McAfee when security software stopped being a one-man development industry.
Very interesting. I would not have made the connection to farming—it makes sense.
As for McAfee: I’ve got my ticket for Belize all lined up.
I have made some comments regarding gaming as being similar to other cycles in other mediums also. Take music for instance. By the end of the 70’s when Punk (like other musical periods) seemed to disassemble the core sounds and beats of music in a veritable garage the same thing happened. Of course these cycles seem to be increasing in frequency and could it be possible there is a singularity at the end of that increasing cyclic repetition ? Jeff, I like your though process and am glad to have found this site. Common reflection seems to be a lost notion in this fast moving age.
So true! You’re speaking from my heart! I also made a living with lone-wolf game programming from 1983 till 1996. What happens now is like a second videogame crash. Same as in the 80s with the Atari 2600 system, now we have it on iPhones. I really wonder where this will lead us …
Wow. Excellent article ! It made me think about the actual video games situation. I really have a bad opinion concerning games like Candy Crush, Flappy Bird or 2048 which just copy existing game concepts to make money out of them. While the real creators usually don’t get recognition.
In the meantime, it made me even more scared of these “game stealers”. As I’m hoping to enter the video games industry in a few years (just after I finish school), I believe there’s going to be even more of them. This is a critical situation.
Anyway, thank you for this article, keep on ! 🙂
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