Okay, so I’ve just watched an excellent YouTube video from Simon Roth, the chap behind Maia, about how to build a sustainable microstudio (a re-creation of his Develop talk). I’ll include it below because I really recommend giving it a watch:
But one thing stood out to me, very very early on, in the video which is where he’s critical of “useless” advice for indie devs – one of these nuggets of useless advice was, “just make a good game”.
Oh my God. That’s me, I do that all the time, it’s pretty much the only piece of advice I ever give! I’m going to defend it.
Now, I appreciate that it’s fairly useless in the sense that “good” doesn’t really mean anything concrete. Good how? Mechanically robust? Following established conventions of game design? Being in a popular genre? It certainly poses more questions than it answers, and it actually answers very little. But when I give that piece of advice to people, I’m not giving them advice which is a surefire way to success (nobody can do that) – instead I’m recommending a mindset.
As Simon points out (paraphrasing here), “Lots of crap games sell loads, lots of good games fail miserably – so how ‘good’ something is does not necessarily correlate to how well something sells”. This is perfectly true but from my point of view, I would not want to be a developer who writes crap games which sell such that I am now running a “successful” games studio. I want to be a developer of great games. If sales did not follow, then I would be a hobbiest developer of great games – if they did, I would be running a “successful” games studio who makes great games. I’m not interested in the “successful” bit unless that was just something which happened on account of the games I made being well regarded.
The games come first.
If you’re starting out and compiling advice about how to become successful and at no point is the top bullet point of your list of “do’s” a big bold, underlined, “come up with a great game idea, then try to execute it competently” – if success is more important to you than the game – then what the Hell are you doing in the games industry? Frankly, you can piss off 😉
Note in case it isn’t clear: I very much like Simon Roth, his hair, and Maia. This isn’t intended to be critical of him or his talk. I just disagree with that one little nugget of that one slide.