The article reads like it's about 15 years late to reality. Trying to get funding from a publisher as an independent studio was always somewhere between hard and impossible, and especially towards the 2010s. That's why Kickstarter became such an unbelievable success.
PS: The one exception was when Epic was on its aggressive rampage to buy as many exclusives for the Epic Game Store as possible. But I guess that money shower has also dried up by now.
The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now.
I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tools.
AI assistance is most dangerous (for your competition) when you mostly need it for the scripting and code, and not for the art or direction. You don't need an AI disclosure on steam if you use AI responsibly.
Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.
Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).
The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
Imagine I sell you something and you pay me in cash. The notes look authentic, but I later discover that they are conterfeits. It would be absurd to claim that your successful passing-off deception demonstrates that I don't value money at all.
I can tell you I hate more than anything when I’m lied to. Some AI art could be fantastic (haven’t seen anything yet but I’m sure it’ll happen someday).
I don’t want something you prompted an AI for because genuinely I could just do that myself. The barrier to entry is nil. I’m not interested in the idea an artist has I’m interested in how they execute it.
If they executed it through human effort then I place a much much higher value on that. Same as I would if someone selling a hand forged a knife rather than a mass produced cut out.
Even if the human-made item is lower quality I’d prefer it by a mile if for no other reason than I know someone’s love and effort went into it.
I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated.
The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made.
Point is - the output quality fundamentally doesn’t matter. It’s principle, not the output quality, that guides most people in avoiding AI art.
If you saw two paintings and one was painted with the blood and guts of the artist, and another was a nice oil painting - would you value the former more regardless of aesthetic merit?
> The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all.
Or: the fact that (some) people can't tell between food that is marketed to them as "healthy" and food that actually makes them healthy, is strong evidence that healthy food was not what they value at all.
On the contrary; it seems to me that caring about its authorship even though the product may be outwardly indistinguishable from something a human could have made shows that human authorship is, in fact, precisely what they value.
Are you trying to make an argument that "if they really valued human authorship so highly, they'd devote their every waking moment to learning what every possible method is to tell when a given work was created by an LLM" or something? Because I would think that was fairly obviously bullshit by this point. For one thing, there's plenty of ways to make LLM-generated works (especially smaller, simpler ones) that are 100% indistinguishable from something human-created. (This is especially true in text formats, where the amount of information, and thus the possible failure modes, available in the output is smaller than in images or video.)
That’s how double standards work, there often isn’t a clear reason.
The art and audio is somehow seen as more important and something only humans should de in a game than the code and design, you know the actual game portion of the game.
The most widespread ramification I think is just a continued disintegration of shared trust in the public square.
If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs.
It’s just a matter of principle. Some of the evilest people on earth are the ones who own, operate, and directly benefit from the commercial proliferation of these tools. They commit crimes against us but see no consequence for which national-level politicians they’ve been sure to own. They’re aggressive in how they buy and corrupt local governments against the wishes of their constituents and the burden of responsibility is diffused because it’s not Anthropic buying your city council, it’s some other corp who focuses on building and operating power sinks that ruin entire neighborhoods and drive up their natural resource costs.
The reasons to hate AI (the industry as opposed to the technology) are impossible to ignore unless you keep your head buried firmly in the sand.
If one’s moral compass suggests that building a business on deceit is okay then I suspect they don’t particularly care about all of the externalities anyway.
If the difference between me getting to enjoy some solo developer's vision or not is whether they use the ai, I'll ignore it. Not everyone who can create a great gameplay experience can code, draw, or create music, and the margins can preclude having three different people. The problem you are pointing out is that ai is allowing a repetition of "Engels' pause" where capital accrues all the benefits of automation. Back then the unrest was resolved with workhouses and shipping people to Australia. Also shooting them in the streets. It is hard to predict how that will end up this time.
you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art.
Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)
My guess is from the "cheapness" association.
AI generated images and video are used a lot in scams, really cheap and bad marketing, waste of time clickb8 videos and stories etc.
I can't speak for everyone but my brain associates it with that and when I see AI tells my immediate thought goes: "is this trying to lie/cheat me in some way, did they really put in effort and care in this?".
Code is more opaque, an ugly unmaintainable mess can still create a decently functioning game experience from the player's pov. There's infamous examples of some very shitty code still resulting in games people adore.
Ultimately your point stands, if the product is genuinely good and appeals to people, they will like to buy it and play it no matter how the sausage was actually made. AI generation just ruins the signal though, it's tougher to find the jewels among the sea of slop and that'll affect how consumers judge your product.
I wonder how much increasing fidelity requirements are the main culprit here? Myst was made by a team of about 7 people (only 4 of them full-time), in just about 2 years, and cost under a million (adjusted for inflation).
Riven had a team twice the size, took twice as long, and cost 10-15x as much. Apart from Exile, which was handed to a more experienced developer who got it done faster and cheaper, the remaining sequels follow a similar trajectory.
I took a look at Cyan's games' estimated units sold on steamdb and Im not surprised they couldn't land a multi-million dollar funding deal. Assuming they sold similar units on PS and XBox, net revenue would be around $5 million for Riven (a remaster and their most recent title). Each platform takes 30% of that, and the publisher will take 50% of that plus recoup. Then anther ~~50% is set aside for corp and W2 taxes.
Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.
You have to see games differently from other software. Treat games as consumables, that are meant to be finished. Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was.
However, players will desire more of that similar experience. Ask anybody who just finished a good game and they'll tell you how finishing it left a void, and that they're looking for a similar game to fill that void again. Once you see this, it's easy to understand why there is an ocean of very similar games out there that still manage to sell in good numbers.
> Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was.
I think this has changed a lot since the early 2000s. There are now plenty of "forever games" where players spend hundreds or thousands of hours in, especially MMOs and free-to-play games. And even traditional AAA franchises like CoD or Battlefield are essentially just releasing new episodes of the same 'forever game' with updated graphics but the same gameplay.
i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
And when you are an investor, you must predict who is able to make a good game. What is the likelihood that a Myst-like will pay for itself. There is already a lot of Myst-likes on Steam, do players want more?
If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make.
Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well.
If you spend $1 million and don’t have a hit on your hands, it’s probably just an OK or bad game. Another $5 million or $105 million would’ve been just more good money after bad.
Interesting timing on this article considering The Big Walk comes out this week. Obviously the game is not as intricate as a Myst game, but it feels like the perfect mixture of a game where design really matters and reaction to what the market wants. People like playing together and collaborating to make their own fun. It is not hard to imagine a version of Myst like this -- the most fun I have had playing a PC game was sitting next to a friend as we played Riven beginning to end.
There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.
The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.
Indie devs have the time and freedom to pursue any new ideas, and it seems like every couple of months a new indie game goes viral on Steam. But many of them are passion projects that were done in someone's spare time outside of their day job. If devs could give investors more confidence that a game will sell well or go viral if it hits a certain development stage, we could do a better job of directing game dev funding towards indie devs making truly fun games.
> The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.
I know a guy who works with one of those publishers.
According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.
The problem the article is talking about is that publishers will no longer fund "AA" games with $2-15 million budgets. The game market has bifurcated into low end indie titles (< $1 million budget) and AAA games with budgets in the hundreds of millions. Personally I think this is a huge shame, as "AA" games were a lot of of my favorites during the PS2 and PS3 generations.
The article brings up a few reasons for why this has happened, such as the end of ZIRP and the complete lack of curation on platforms like Steam making it hard for titles to stand out. I guess if you're a publisher, you have a better chance of making a return on investment by funding 20 pixel art or friendslop titles and hoping one of them goes viral rather than funding 1 title like the new Myst sequel and hoping it doesn't get buried on Steam and the Nintendo eshop.
The funding climate for indie games is the worst it's been in a long time and it's been bad for over a year. Lots of publishers have stopped signing deals or are only funding small amounts with really bad terms.
I think it's that Myst was released in a hungry, undersaturated market, and the competition is a lot tougher now. I truly love what Cyanworlds is doing, but the fact of the matter is, I'd rather be playing TF2 Classic, or Animal Well, or Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, than Obduction.
Another problem is, their games were popular at a time when most people didn't even have an internet connection, and therefore had far more patience for offline gaming. Their games require a LOT of patience.
Well, I don't know. Most of the Myst games seem to be background, painted, with a bit of moving art. Comparing this with (say) an isometric RPG (think BG3, Pillars of Eternity) and those look a lot more expensive, but still capable of making money. Or maybe it's just that I never liked Myst - too stupid, I guess.
This is surprising to read in a world where we received Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. All top-tier games (When ranked among all games in history), all recent, and all with a moderate budget and studio size, on the size order of Cyan's in its hayday. And Blue Prince has deep puzzle elements that would be at home to a Myst player.
This article and headline present a conflicting version of reality to the one I experience.
They actually touch on Blue Prince in the article; it is interesting that Expedition 33 isn't driving investment in similar sized games. But the thesis seems to be that Blue Prince like (smaller budget) is the preferred direction; more attempts at the upside of a runaway hit. Medium budget games give you less shots on goal and no corresponding payout increase.
Blue Prince immediately came to mind for me as relevant modern art. Honestly Myst style puzzle games seem like the easiest type of game for a generative world model to simulate, so I expect if players actually want them we'll see a lot more in the future.
>This is surprising to read in a world where we got Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year.
Note that none of these were made in the US like Myst was.
The cost of living is just too damn high to afford even a small team without massive funding for the amount of time it takes to make games like these. It's why every single notable AA game of the last decade has been made elsewhere now.
This did not escape my notice. Continental Europe in particular seems to have produced my favorite games of the past decade. And not from any one country: Examples include Poland, Denmark, Croatia, Czech, France. This is an observation; I offer no explanation.
how can it be that and then inside the article i read
> Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
if you need further proof it really is satire, here we go: our business model relies on Fed rates at 0%.
> “Nobody has zero-interest money anymore,” says North Cook. When interest rates were near 0 percent following the Great Recession, and again at the height of the Covid pandemic, video game investors took more risks. But when the Fed rate benchmark surged to more than 5 percent in 2023, venture capital funding for the video game industry collapsed by more than 75 percent, from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to less than $3 billion in both 2023 and 2024. “Money just got too expensive to borrow,” says Eternal. “Publishers looked at their capital and said, ‘This is all the cash we have until the banks change their rates. Let's be conservative and stretch this out.’”
> how can it be that and then inside the article i read
> > Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
Blue Prince is an interesting case, because the developer had a successful SaaS business that funded a significant part of development.
Without such a source of "passive" income, I doubt most us have the kind of savings that would allow us to spend ~8 years working full-time on our game
Games fundamentally require a lot of artistry, depend on user device performance, and involve many factors to consider. from engine licensing costs to labor costs.
There's this concept of 'AA games' or 'Myst games' that sit between AAA and indie titles. From what I hear across most of the industry and genres, as people's disposable income shrinks, the market is polarizing into reliable AAA games on one side and small, niche indie games on the other. Small indies can bet on extreme gameplay that big companies would never attempt.
In other words, when people start cutting back on hobbies, the first thing they reduce is spending on hobbies. And when they start tightening further, the first games to get dropped from their lists are the mid-tier ones.
Whether it's software or any genre market, this middle tier is disappearing because consumer spending itself is becoming extremely polarized.
This is a contradiction in cost structure.
When developing software, reducing the size to a mid tier level doesn't linearly reduce fixed costs. You still need to build server infrastructure, payment systems, security, basic UI/UX, cross platform support, and more, all of which come with enormous upfront costs. AAA companies can amortize these fixed costs by selling to millions of users, but a AA studio with limited capital ends up spending most of its budget just on infrastructure, leaving few resources to polish the core value of the product, graphics, gameplay fun, and design.
Also, when a recession hits, a cognitive tandem effect occurs. Only two things survive: what everyone else is playing, and niche products that match your personal taste. Mid tier products with moderate price and moderate quality require marketing efforts to convince consumers of their ambiguous value, often relying on influencer reviews or other forms of consumer persuasion.
I agree with some points, but I also disagree with others.
I agree that the 'overall' video game industry is recession resistant. Over the long term, it will continue to grow.
But I don't think the 'polarization' of video games makes the middle tier recession resistant
So, because the game industry has an escapist quality to some extent, I can understand why people set aside a budget for hobbies. But apart from that, I think game consumption itself is becoming polarized."
Interesting read, but this sort of framing is so common and self-deluding-
> At the same time, gaming platforms like Steam—which indie and double-A games once depended on for discovery—have been flooded with low-quality dreck. According to the AI Transparency Index, more than 18,000 games on Steam now feature AI usage disclosures. “User trust in platform stores as a curatorial layer has been all but erased,” says North Cook. “When you feed people enough ads and slop, they just check out.”
What a laughable, ridiculous non-sequitur (the casual, slop correlation between AI and the quality problem), and you see this same hilariously broken logic here on HN all the time, where people imagine some pre-AI era of only goodness and greatness.
Steam was absolutely swamped with low quality garbage long before AI tools. You could as easily, if not more accurately, blame more accessible game development tools like Unity for broadening the ability of people to get into game development. Steam was more curated in earlier years, as well, and the move to basically letting anyone publish on it flooded the space.
It's so astonishingly lazy for so many to use AI as their boogeyman for everything now (ironically...the AI is to blame rhetoric is such low effort slop). The world was filled with low-skill, low-effort, low-value garbage and dreck before AI.
And FWIW, in many ways it's an ideal market being flooded for every wild niche or need. If your game is good do a bit of advertising and get word of mouth and you're the next Balatro. But people pushing weak offerings hoped limited choice and a captive audience would be their win.
If someone makes a machine that produces CO2 in great quantities, I dont think pointing out that people have been exhaling for millennia is a reason to accept the machine.
The article reads like it's about 15 years late to reality. Trying to get funding from a publisher as an independent studio was always somewhere between hard and impossible, and especially towards the 2010s. That's why Kickstarter became such an unbelievable success.
PS: The one exception was when Epic was on its aggressive rampage to buy as many exclusives for the Epic Game Store as possible. But I guess that money shower has also dried up by now.
The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now.
I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tools.
AI assistance is most dangerous (for your competition) when you mostly need it for the scripting and code, and not for the art or direction. You don't need an AI disclosure on steam if you use AI responsibly.
Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.
Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).
The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
Imagine I sell you something and you pay me in cash. The notes look authentic, but I later discover that they are conterfeits. It would be absurd to claim that your successful passing-off deception demonstrates that I don't value money at all.
That doesn't seem to follow.
I can tell you I hate more than anything when I’m lied to. Some AI art could be fantastic (haven’t seen anything yet but I’m sure it’ll happen someday).
I don’t want something you prompted an AI for because genuinely I could just do that myself. The barrier to entry is nil. I’m not interested in the idea an artist has I’m interested in how they execute it.
If they executed it through human effort then I place a much much higher value on that. Same as I would if someone selling a hand forged a knife rather than a mass produced cut out.
Even if the human-made item is lower quality I’d prefer it by a mile if for no other reason than I know someone’s love and effort went into it.
I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated.
The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made.
Point is - the output quality fundamentally doesn’t matter. It’s principle, not the output quality, that guides most people in avoiding AI art.
If you saw two paintings and one was painted with the blood and guts of the artist, and another was a nice oil painting - would you value the former more regardless of aesthetic merit?
> The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all.
Or: the fact that (some) people can't tell between food that is marketed to them as "healthy" and food that actually makes them healthy, is strong evidence that healthy food was not what they value at all.
Neither follows. Both blame the victim of a lie.
Why would you say that?
On the contrary; it seems to me that caring about its authorship even though the product may be outwardly indistinguishable from something a human could have made shows that human authorship is, in fact, precisely what they value.
Are you trying to make an argument that "if they really valued human authorship so highly, they'd devote their every waking moment to learning what every possible method is to tell when a given work was created by an LLM" or something? Because I would think that was fairly obviously bullshit by this point. For one thing, there's plenty of ways to make LLM-generated works (especially smaller, simpler ones) that are 100% indistinguishable from something human-created. (This is especially true in text formats, where the amount of information, and thus the possible failure modes, available in the output is smaller than in images or video.)
That’s how double standards work, there often isn’t a clear reason.
The art and audio is somehow seen as more important and something only humans should de in a game than the code and design, you know the actual game portion of the game.
Because people can tell the difference between AI art and human art. Not true for logic unless you are incompetent.
The most widespread ramification I think is just a continued disintegration of shared trust in the public square.
If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs.
It’s just a matter of principle. Some of the evilest people on earth are the ones who own, operate, and directly benefit from the commercial proliferation of these tools. They commit crimes against us but see no consequence for which national-level politicians they’ve been sure to own. They’re aggressive in how they buy and corrupt local governments against the wishes of their constituents and the burden of responsibility is diffused because it’s not Anthropic buying your city council, it’s some other corp who focuses on building and operating power sinks that ruin entire neighborhoods and drive up their natural resource costs.
The reasons to hate AI (the industry as opposed to the technology) are impossible to ignore unless you keep your head buried firmly in the sand.
If one’s moral compass suggests that building a business on deceit is okay then I suspect they don’t particularly care about all of the externalities anyway.
If the difference between me getting to enjoy some solo developer's vision or not is whether they use the ai, I'll ignore it. Not everyone who can create a great gameplay experience can code, draw, or create music, and the margins can preclude having three different people. The problem you are pointing out is that ai is allowing a repetition of "Engels' pause" where capital accrues all the benefits of automation. Back then the unrest was resolved with workhouses and shipping people to Australia. Also shooting them in the streets. It is hard to predict how that will end up this time.
you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art.
Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)
My guess is from the "cheapness" association. AI generated images and video are used a lot in scams, really cheap and bad marketing, waste of time clickb8 videos and stories etc. I can't speak for everyone but my brain associates it with that and when I see AI tells my immediate thought goes: "is this trying to lie/cheat me in some way, did they really put in effort and care in this?".
Code is more opaque, an ugly unmaintainable mess can still create a decently functioning game experience from the player's pov. There's infamous examples of some very shitty code still resulting in games people adore.
Ultimately your point stands, if the product is genuinely good and appeals to people, they will like to buy it and play it no matter how the sausage was actually made. AI generation just ruins the signal though, it's tougher to find the jewels among the sea of slop and that'll affect how consumers judge your product.
I wonder how much increasing fidelity requirements are the main culprit here? Myst was made by a team of about 7 people (only 4 of them full-time), in just about 2 years, and cost under a million (adjusted for inflation).
Riven had a team twice the size, took twice as long, and cost 10-15x as much. Apart from Exile, which was handed to a more experienced developer who got it done faster and cheaper, the remaining sequels follow a similar trajectory.
I took a look at Cyan's games' estimated units sold on steamdb and Im not surprised they couldn't land a multi-million dollar funding deal. Assuming they sold similar units on PS and XBox, net revenue would be around $5 million for Riven (a remaster and their most recent title). Each platform takes 30% of that, and the publisher will take 50% of that plus recoup. Then anther ~~50% is set aside for corp and W2 taxes.
This article is just emotive journalism.
Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.
You have to see games differently from other software. Treat games as consumables, that are meant to be finished. Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was.
However, players will desire more of that similar experience. Ask anybody who just finished a good game and they'll tell you how finishing it left a void, and that they're looking for a similar game to fill that void again. Once you see this, it's easy to understand why there is an ocean of very similar games out there that still manage to sell in good numbers.
> Once a player finishes a game, the desire to replay it soon after is going to be pretty low, no matter how good the experience was.
I think this has changed a lot since the early 2000s. There are now plenty of "forever games" where players spend hundreds or thousands of hours in, especially MMOs and free-to-play games. And even traditional AAA franchises like CoD or Battlefield are essentially just releasing new episodes of the same 'forever game' with updated graphics but the same gameplay.
Age of Empires 2 for me!
i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!
And when you are an investor, you must predict who is able to make a good game. What is the likelihood that a Myst-like will pay for itself. There is already a lot of Myst-likes on Steam, do players want more?
This is the hard-pill-to-swallow meme truth.
If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make.
Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well.
If you spend $1 million and don’t have a hit on your hands, it’s probably just an OK or bad game. Another $5 million or $105 million would’ve been just more good money after bad.
https://archive.ph/5RlIw
Interesting timing on this article considering The Big Walk comes out this week. Obviously the game is not as intricate as a Myst game, but it feels like the perfect mixture of a game where design really matters and reaction to what the market wants. People like playing together and collaborating to make their own fun. It is not hard to imagine a version of Myst like this -- the most fun I have had playing a PC game was sitting next to a friend as we played Riven beginning to end.
Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?
There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.
The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.
Indie devs have the time and freedom to pursue any new ideas, and it seems like every couple of months a new indie game goes viral on Steam. But many of them are passion projects that were done in someone's spare time outside of their day job. If devs could give investors more confidence that a game will sell well or go viral if it hits a certain development stage, we could do a better job of directing game dev funding towards indie devs making truly fun games.
> The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.
I know a guy who works with one of those publishers.
According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.
The problem the article is talking about is that publishers will no longer fund "AA" games with $2-15 million budgets. The game market has bifurcated into low end indie titles (< $1 million budget) and AAA games with budgets in the hundreds of millions. Personally I think this is a huge shame, as "AA" games were a lot of of my favorites during the PS2 and PS3 generations.
The article brings up a few reasons for why this has happened, such as the end of ZIRP and the complete lack of curation on platforms like Steam making it hard for titles to stand out. I guess if you're a publisher, you have a better chance of making a return on investment by funding 20 pixel art or friendslop titles and hoping one of them goes viral rather than funding 1 title like the new Myst sequel and hoping it doesn't get buried on Steam and the Nintendo eshop.
The funding climate for indie games is the worst it's been in a long time and it's been bad for over a year. Lots of publishers have stopped signing deals or are only funding small amounts with really bad terms.
What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team.
What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.
I think it's that Myst was released in a hungry, undersaturated market, and the competition is a lot tougher now. I truly love what Cyanworlds is doing, but the fact of the matter is, I'd rather be playing TF2 Classic, or Animal Well, or Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, than Obduction.
Another problem is, their games were popular at a time when most people didn't even have an internet connection, and therefore had far more patience for offline gaming. Their games require a LOT of patience.
Myst was also bundled with a lot of PCs. Perhaps as a cheap way to show off CDROM capabilities.
Getting games installed and working in that era was often a chore. So when people sat down to play, it was already there for them.
Myst's sequels didn't sell as well as the first, despite the power of the brand, either. Likely because of competition.
Well, I don't know. Most of the Myst games seem to be background, painted, with a bit of moving art. Comparing this with (say) an isometric RPG (think BG3, Pillars of Eternity) and those look a lot more expensive, but still capable of making money. Or maybe it's just that I never liked Myst - too stupid, I guess.
FWIW, I never got the appeal of Myst as well. Much too limited range of actions.
This is surprising to read in a world where we received Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. All top-tier games (When ranked among all games in history), all recent, and all with a moderate budget and studio size, on the size order of Cyan's in its hayday. And Blue Prince has deep puzzle elements that would be at home to a Myst player.
This article and headline present a conflicting version of reality to the one I experience.
They actually touch on Blue Prince in the article; it is interesting that Expedition 33 isn't driving investment in similar sized games. But the thesis seems to be that Blue Prince like (smaller budget) is the preferred direction; more attempts at the upside of a runaway hit. Medium budget games give you less shots on goal and no corresponding payout increase.
Blue Prince immediately came to mind for me as relevant modern art. Honestly Myst style puzzle games seem like the easiest type of game for a generative world model to simulate, so I expect if players actually want them we'll see a lot more in the future.
>This is surprising to read in a world where we got Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year.
Note that none of these were made in the US like Myst was.
The cost of living is just too damn high to afford even a small team without massive funding for the amount of time it takes to make games like these. It's why every single notable AA game of the last decade has been made elsewhere now.
This did not escape my notice. Continental Europe in particular seems to have produced my favorite games of the past decade. And not from any one country: Examples include Poland, Denmark, Croatia, Czech, France. This is an observation; I offer no explanation.
can we pls add /s to to the post title?
how can it be that and then inside the article i read
> Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
if you need further proof it really is satire, here we go: our business model relies on Fed rates at 0%.
> “Nobody has zero-interest money anymore,” says North Cook. When interest rates were near 0 percent following the Great Recession, and again at the height of the Covid pandemic, video game investors took more risks. But when the Fed rate benchmark surged to more than 5 percent in 2023, venture capital funding for the video game industry collapsed by more than 75 percent, from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to less than $3 billion in both 2023 and 2024. “Money just got too expensive to borrow,” says Eternal. “Publishers looked at their capital and said, ‘This is all the cash we have until the banks change their rates. Let's be conservative and stretch this out.’”
> how can it be that and then inside the article i read
> > Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.
Blue Prince is an interesting case, because the developer had a successful SaaS business that funded a significant part of development.
Without such a source of "passive" income, I doubt most us have the kind of savings that would allow us to spend ~8 years working full-time on our game
Big Walk is pretty close to a myst.
How much did slay the spire cost?
I am pretty sure it's not the game that is the cause of the funding trouble?
Games fundamentally require a lot of artistry, depend on user device performance, and involve many factors to consider. from engine licensing costs to labor costs.
There's this concept of 'AA games' or 'Myst games' that sit between AAA and indie titles. From what I hear across most of the industry and genres, as people's disposable income shrinks, the market is polarizing into reliable AAA games on one side and small, niche indie games on the other. Small indies can bet on extreme gameplay that big companies would never attempt.
In other words, when people start cutting back on hobbies, the first thing they reduce is spending on hobbies. And when they start tightening further, the first games to get dropped from their lists are the mid-tier ones.
Whether it's software or any genre market, this middle tier is disappearing because consumer spending itself is becoming extremely polarized.
This is a contradiction in cost structure.
When developing software, reducing the size to a mid tier level doesn't linearly reduce fixed costs. You still need to build server infrastructure, payment systems, security, basic UI/UX, cross platform support, and more, all of which come with enormous upfront costs. AAA companies can amortize these fixed costs by selling to millions of users, but a AA studio with limited capital ends up spending most of its budget just on infrastructure, leaving few resources to polish the core value of the product, graphics, gameplay fun, and design.
Also, when a recession hits, a cognitive tandem effect occurs. Only two things survive: what everyone else is playing, and niche products that match your personal taste. Mid tier products with moderate price and moderate quality require marketing efforts to convince consumers of their ambiguous value, often relying on influencer reviews or other forms of consumer persuasion.
Video game sales usually have been very recession proof. E.g. people still want entertainment and escapism when shit hits the fan.
I agree with some points, but I also disagree with others.
I agree that the 'overall' video game industry is recession resistant. Over the long term, it will continue to grow.
But I don't think the 'polarization' of video games makes the middle tier recession resistant
So, because the game industry has an escapist quality to some extent, I can understand why people set aside a budget for hobbies. But apart from that, I think game consumption itself is becoming polarized."
pretty interesting, the macro economics of the software space seem shaky
Makes me miss my old Packard Bell PB16 .. or maybe I just miss the 90's in general .. or being young.. sigh
Interesting read, but this sort of framing is so common and self-deluding-
> At the same time, gaming platforms like Steam—which indie and double-A games once depended on for discovery—have been flooded with low-quality dreck. According to the AI Transparency Index, more than 18,000 games on Steam now feature AI usage disclosures. “User trust in platform stores as a curatorial layer has been all but erased,” says North Cook. “When you feed people enough ads and slop, they just check out.”
What a laughable, ridiculous non-sequitur (the casual, slop correlation between AI and the quality problem), and you see this same hilariously broken logic here on HN all the time, where people imagine some pre-AI era of only goodness and greatness.
Steam was absolutely swamped with low quality garbage long before AI tools. You could as easily, if not more accurately, blame more accessible game development tools like Unity for broadening the ability of people to get into game development. Steam was more curated in earlier years, as well, and the move to basically letting anyone publish on it flooded the space.
It's so astonishingly lazy for so many to use AI as their boogeyman for everything now (ironically...the AI is to blame rhetoric is such low effort slop). The world was filled with low-skill, low-effort, low-value garbage and dreck before AI.
And FWIW, in many ways it's an ideal market being flooded for every wild niche or need. If your game is good do a bit of advertising and get word of mouth and you're the next Balatro. But people pushing weak offerings hoped limited choice and a captive audience would be their win.
If someone makes a machine that produces CO2 in great quantities, I dont think pointing out that people have been exhaling for millennia is a reason to accept the machine.