Speaker A
I've talked before on this channel about the kind of my indie game failed videos that pop up constantly on YouTube at the moment and I know from speaking to some of you who've done them before that to some degree these can be a bit cynical
Indie Game Clinic reviews failed indie game post-mortems, critiquing marketing-vs-advertising confusion, genre choice, and whether developers identify the real reasons for poor sales.
Key Takeaways
- Marketing includes every decision about what to make, for whom, and where to sell, not just advertising.
- Failed-game post-mortems often miss the real issue, such as competition or audience fit, instead of blaming visibility.
- Developers should distinguish learning projects from commercial projects and plan accordingly.
- Genre and competitive landscape are critical factors in Steam success.
What the video covers
- The host reviews 'my indie game failed' videos from developers, selecting ones with over 1,000 views to assess their value as game design reflections.
- The first developer made a game as a learning project that unexpectedly became a commercial Steam release after 8 months of development.
- The host argues the developer's reflection about lack of marketing is incomplete, since marketing encompasses all market-facing decisions, not just advertising.
- Marketing and design overlap: choosing a genre, platform, and target audience are themselves marketing decisions.
- Competitive analysis matters: the host suggests the dance game competed with established social platforms like VRChat and Roblox-style experiences.
- Distinguishing a learning project from a commercial project is a valuable reflection, though the developer's conclusions may still miss root causes.
- Other reviewed games are discussed, including a sequel-related question about whether numbered sequels deter players and feedback on combat juiciness.
- Art style and visual polish alone do not guarantee success; the host questions whether gameplay meets genre standards.
- Later segments cover a 3D action RPG inspired by Skylanders-style games and the difficulty of targeting younger audiences on Steam.
- The host encourages developers to critically examine their own post-mortems and avoid blaming external factors for failure.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to indie game failure videos
- 02:00Learning project becomes commercial release
- 04:00Marketing vs advertising explained
- 06:00Competition and audience analysis
- 12:00Reviewing art style and combat feedback
- 22:00Sequels, pixel art, and audience targeting
- 26:00Cordex and the younger audience problem
- 30:00Closing reflections on blaming the market
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
sometimes it's like people get like a little boost of wish lists by doing a sub story but sometimes they are genuine Reflections on what someone has leared uh through a project and it's it's really important doing anything creative
Speaker A
that you do that that you sort of actively think about what you could have done better what I'm going to do today is just pick some of these out watch them with you pause them at Key moments and basically go through the lessons
Speaker A
that the dev has learned and see if there's anything I can add that illuminates the situation too because sometimes I find that people's kind of Reflections on their own learnings miss out some really key things that they should have learned during that project
Speaker A
so let's say we won't go for anything with less than a th000 views cuz if there's a th000 views then this means that this is a perspective that is being shared quite widely that other people are are appearing I want to see if it's
Speaker A
if it's valuable in my mind as as someone who is a game designer someone who's worked commercially as a game designer so let's have a look my first theme game kind of failed but any character you want and make it D you can
Speaker A
even build whole worlds around your character if you want it's a really cool idea inviting creative even players but people just didn't care and honestly that's on me making this game was supposed to be a little coding adventure
Speaker A
for myself until I got super excited about the so there there's a good reflection here from the start is that I didn't set out to launch this I made it for myself I made it to learn something so if I'd have started from the
Speaker A
Viewpoint of trying to make something for other people then maybe what I'd made would resonate more or be kind of more successful but it this happens all the time in the Indie space it's like you're making a hob project uh that
Speaker A
you're just making to learn a game engine or learn to code or learn to animate or whatever it is you're trying to learn and then suddenly it becomes an indie game suddenly becomes like a commercial project that you're trying to
Speaker A
release independently and yeah that leads to problems development and continued adding new features and suchar and eventually it became this 8-month project that ended up being released on Steam I made a Dev vog that summarized the game's entire development in a
Speaker A
couple of minutes and that's it the game was now out on Steam for everyone to buy I don't know maybe you can tell already but uh I I didn't really do a lot of marketing for the game development is
Speaker A
not marketing I made a steam page Shar it a few times on Twitter made a Dev vog and just released it of course nobody was going to Care sorry if you've heard me say this over and over again on this
Speaker A
channel but marketing and advertising are not the same things he's talking about advertising he's talking about there is a product I'm telling people about the product the product already exists marketing includes advertising but it's it's also every decision you
Speaker A
make before that about what to make who is it for where are you going to sell it right so deciding to make a particular genre of game is a marketing decision deciding to sell your game on Steam rather than to make it for a different
Speaker A
platform those are all marketing decisions working out who your game is for and tweaking the design to better serve that group of people that's all marketing there is a massive overlap between designing a game and and marketing because the decisions about
Speaker A
what you make based on who is it for and what they want that's design and it's marketing at the same time so we see so frequently people say marketing and when they mean advertising and part of it is
Speaker A
because as consumers advertising is the part of marketing we can see right we see it on billboards and we see it uh we hear it and we see commercials on the TV but I I beg you if you are in working in
Speaker A
this space if you're an indie game developer start to see marketing as everything you do to do with like how you operate in a market and that can be deciding what to make in the first place right if you have ever said I'm going to
Speaker A
make a game in this genre cuz they're popular right now that is you making a marketing based decision because it kind of just dropped it without anyone knowing anything about it parkour there was Zero hype for the game so it
Speaker A
basically filed before it ever got released there's an interesting cause being presented here where it's like it only failed because of the issue with the lack of marketing or the lack of advertising I think that's maybe a weak
Speaker A
reflection I don't think that really encompasses everything about why this game hasn't done as well as it could have such a waste because a game where you can make stuff like this could 100% sell well if marketed to the Right
Speaker A
audience is the Right audience on Steam in the first place now if you watch uh Chris Sakowski the steam marketing expert had does loads of YouTube videos probably the only person who has a worse camera than me he talks about this loads
Speaker A
he talks about how the genre of game you make can be the make and break decision in terms of whether your game will do well on Steam there are genres that do well on Steam and genres that aren't the
Speaker A
thing about this game is I have seen loads of games on Roblox that are in this kind of genre that do really well where people create a dance or they create an outfit and then they look at what each other have made and they vote
Speaker A
on it the thing about doing this on Steam is you have to understand like what is this competing with is there already something doing this and does it do it better I would say that the competitor for something like this is
Speaker A
probably VR chat and if this is basically VR chat with a much more limited set of things you can do in it then why wouldn't people just play VR chat so trying to locate the entire problem in the advertising and just
Speaker A
saying there wasn't enough hype it's like okay was there an audience on Steam in the first place and if there was what are they already playing that similar and is that thing better than this and what is this doing to like knock that
Speaker A
thing off the top spot for you know funny goofy social dancing games which I never cared to try and find I didn't post enough on Tik Tok or Twitter or even YouTube dance assembly is a game that can be really cool and creative but
Speaker A
it can also be really silly and I was too distracted having fun developing it to properly try and Market it to the Right audience of course it was going to fail but honestly it's kind of like that one meme Mission failed successfully cuz
Speaker A
my goal for dance assembly was never to get a hit game cuz it's simply not the right game for that although I totally wouldn't have minded it I would have been cool with the totally impossible to manage H game I like money but instead
Speaker A
the goal for dance assembly was simply to learn learn how there are some good Reflections here right understanding the difference between like a learning project and a commercial project it's a good reflection this is a fun guy I like
Speaker A
him I wish him all the success in the future and I hope that this video has sort of generated some interest in his game or future games but I do think putting it all down to advertising it's like oh the thing I made was good enough
Speaker A
but it's all about the discoverability and the fact that it was hidden and I didn't advertise it enough I don't think is really getting at the center of the problem which may be just simply that there is another game that does this
Speaker A
thing better that people who are the audience for this already like okay we got another one here five reasons why my game failed it's got a on it a wise man does not blame the world for his own failures for
Speaker A
a wise man knows that he cannot change the world starting off with a fancy quote around the end of the year 2023 I released my new game Sho Legends 2 a game that I've been working on for 5
Speaker A
years my first impression of this game is it looks great I I like this art style it might not be to everyone's taste but it looks good in terms of quality it didn't succeed in fact it flopped and since I had spent 5 years
Speaker A
working on it it made me sad I want to know why you think it failed cuz we've got we've got the evidence that it failed right it didn't sell many copies they made a sequel to a game the
Speaker A
first game sold 100,000 copies more than 90% on uh consoles that's cool so they had high hopes for the second one made quite different game different art style and then they have there kind of five reasons why they
Speaker A
think it failed I personally prefer to blame myself when it comes to my problems instead of blaming the world this in my opinion is healthier because I can change myself but I cannot change the world this is a healthy way of
Speaker A
looking at it for sure I'm going to try not to turn this video into a self-help video about stoicism but in all seriousness if you blame external things for your problems you're going to be less successful because you'll have to
Speaker A
spend your resources fixing external problems right so what he's saying basically is he's got this list of reasons why it failed and the market is the only thing on this list which is an external thing to him that he can't
Speaker A
necessarily control I would debate that because you can control what you decide to put into the market right and uh if I go to a fish market with bananas that a decision I have made to try and sell
Speaker A
bananas in a market that is dedicated to fish with all the lovely smell of fish in the air so we can't control the market but we can know about the market and we can decide what we do based on
Speaker A
what we know about the market I always it always Rings alarm Bells when people show footage of their game and it's just the character walking around it's like games are about doing stuff right so what does the doing stuff look like in
Speaker A
this game basically nothing on the list says that the gaml was the problem so I just want to Let's are these slimes enemies let's see what happens so if this was a game that was sent to me for my review show I would
Speaker A
immediately flag this up because you you've made a game where you've got a character that is a warrior the player is supposed to feel like a cool Warrior even if it's a cute art style right um and hitting those enemies just makes
Speaker A
them flash they don't move around there's nothing exciting about the combat that I can see on that screen my first game and the guy has chosen to include this in the video so to me it shows that there's an issue here that he
Speaker A
is unaware of or doesn't seem to think matters because it's not on that list right art style is on that list nothing on this list about the gameplay window the total number of games on the whole console was also fewer so Post Release
Speaker A
window I still had a lot more Vis consoles it was more like 30 Games per month this was of course much easier to compete with especially on Nintendo switch so we've got a section talking about how many games are released I
Speaker A
always feel like this is a bit of a copout because so much of what goes on to steam is just what we talked about a moment ago people make a game they didn't make it for anyone they just made
Speaker A
it and then they think oh I might as well stick it somewhere blah blah blah so whenever anyone quotes oh it's so hard to release a game on Steam now cuz they're so much competition if your game is actually at the level of quality
Speaker A
where it's fair to ask people to pay for it then you're probably already in the stop top like 10% of games so kind of going to stats for how many thousands of games are getting released always feels like this kind of inflationary maneuver
Speaker A
to make the problem seem bigger than it is if you are really taking your game seriously you're polishing it you're thinking about the right things then 90% of those games are not your competition because they're just hobby projects when
Speaker A
I put the first game on sale in today's market it does pretty well so I don't think the market saturation is to be blamed no but you're putting the game on sale when it's already had the sales before which
Speaker A
means it's probably going to get more of a visibility Boost from from Steam I'm not sure I don't know 100% how it works but I would think that something that has already had visibility is going to continue to have higher visibility so I
Speaker A
don't think you can put it down to this game being inherently more appealing oh the real blame goes [Music] to if you're to compare comp these two games in terms of Futures you will see that the second game is superior to the
Speaker A
first game in almost every way we listing of features and saying it has more stuff right so from a developer point of view this is all adding value because you put work into it so you think it's added value we don't know if
Speaker A
the PC interaction is Well written right and if the first game didn't have much PC interaction and if Johnny aad isn't a very good writer then adding more NPC interaction doesn't increase the like quality of the game if you're a bad
Speaker A
writer and you add more NPC interaction you've made your game worse just adding a list of stuff and saying well this game should be better because I did more stuff it's not really how game design works I spend a large amount of time
Speaker A
working on the quest system leveling up system all the Cosmetic hats and much more but none of it matters if the first appeal is not there it's a very interesting logical leap to say I worked on this more it didn't sell even though I did
Speaker A
all these extra things the main difference people can see is the art style so it must be the art style I'm not totally convinced many has cited that shallow Legends 2 does not have the appealing art style of the first game
Speaker A
and the sad part is that the effort that went into achieving this art style was actually three times higher than this art style I went with this R side because I wanted to explore new heights and I wanted to do 3D but 3D was more
Speaker A
challenging than I thought and I actually really like the style of the second one the 3d1 I think it looks really nice I just think that you know my earlier comment about the combat not having interesting kind of Juicy
Speaker A
interactions in it but to be fair even in the original 2D one I still see that issue of like a fireable hit something and nothing happens there's not much impact there's there's a bunch of stuff with the kind of game feel that I can
Speaker A
see just from watching a video feels a bit lackluster and those things aren't really being called out in in his kind of review of his own [Music] work I love Orcs I think they're pretty awesome and I know many of you love Orcs
Speaker A
too but there is a reason that blizzard added blood elves to World of Warcraft back in burning Crusade for every person who says that they would love to play as an Orc there are five people who would disagree this is definitely one of the
Speaker A
reasons that people chose not to play my game I even have friends I have friends who said this is the reason why they didn't want to play my sequel who have straight up told me that they would not play the sequel because
Speaker A
of this reason the truth is that I kind of knew this would happen and I still went with it I mean that's that's very honest to say that I screwed up here I knew it was going to go wrong but I I'm
Speaker A
not convinced that this is going to be in the top five reasons just the design of the just the design of the protagonist and it being an orc like I think like take I don't know God of War
Speaker A
for example kattos is very very close to being an orc uh it's it's a it feels like a weird reason I don't think that having a hyper masculine character that's green is the problem or something that would bother people that much I
Speaker A
think the execution of that may be the problem right because people who want to play as an Orc are not necessarily the same people who want to play a cute styled 3D Zelda game this kind this kind of animal crossing come Adventure Time
Speaker A
thing going on here and again we we we're getting at all these cosmetic things it's the art style it's the character it's like what about the game is not living up to the standards of what's the best thing in the genre cuz
Speaker A
if I played this and I hit an enemy and it just flashed and died and there was no M that felt good then immediately in my mind I think oh I've wasted my money I I should play Zelda or I should play
Speaker A
the the um the Adventure Time game that is like a top down Zelda game what's it called something Kingdom can't remember if your game from a gameplay perspective before you even think about art style and characters and stuff like this
Speaker A
doesn't feel as good as other games that are available then people are going to play the games that are available are not your game it's very easy to build something like this game and think it's good because you put lots of work into
Speaker A
it and then think that the reason it's failed is because it's just not what people want and maybe the harsher truth is that there is a version of what you made that people might want and you just didn't execute it very well it's the
Speaker A
kind of ideas versus execution thing and then he goes into a thing about it being a numbered sequel when you make a sequel and it has a number in it you're dividing your potential audience into four groups group one played the first
Speaker A
game loved it plays the sequel group two plays the first game hated it doesn't play the sequel or decides to give you another chance group three never heard of your first game plays the sequel and potentially also the first game group four never
Speaker A
heard of your game gets intimidated by the fact that they have to now play multiple games decides not to play your game this has happened to me personally many times and this question shows up a lot when it comes to games with numbered
Speaker A
sequels that's a interesting Insight I think that's quite helpful especially when yeah it's been a big gap since the first game it looks reasonably different right you could make a game in the same world without making it a sequel if
Speaker A
you're really attached to the world and characters you don't have to explicitly make it a numbered sequel I think this is quite a good Insight actually when people see numbered sequels they feel like they have to dedicate too much time
Speaker A
and or money into another franchise and this can be a reasonable barrier of entry for a lot of people I don't know what percentage of players do this specific thing but I believe that one of the reasons that big franchises have
Speaker A
avoided using numbered sequels in recent years might be because of this because the players who have already played your previous games already know that the new game is part of the franchise doing it without numbers doesn't change anything
Speaker A
for them but it is perhaps an easier way to get people who have never heard of your franchise to play the game and I think this is a really good uh Insight I get this with TV if someone keeps
Speaker A
recommending a show and then I go on Netflix I go to watch it and it says Five Seasons I'm like uh ah it's the same thing but in this case it's not something that you've already paid for on a streaming service it's a game that
Speaker A
costs like $10 or more so I think this is yeah quite a helpful quite a helpful insight but I I don't know I think again it's like people always have a blind spot for their own design I see this I see a camera that's
Speaker A
a little bit too far in I see nice roll animation everything about this is appealing and then as soon as I see the combat happening I'm like like nothing about that looks exciting or yeah I don't know from failure
Speaker A
because of how well my first game performed I was under the impression that the sequel would do the same I was [Music] wrong today I'm working on a game that is both 3D and 2D I maybe if shallow
Speaker A
Legends 2 had been done this way it would have been more successful that looks great I I I do like the mix of things um I'm not sure where this you know I'm not sure about the whole art style question I don't think
Speaker A
the 2D that's in the first game is like super high level for this kind of Japanese style pixel art it kind of looks like a midling RPG Maker project it's fine if more people like that and you can prove it then then that's fine
Speaker A
but I think this is given what he says he's learned then this is a good approach right going into the 3D but keeping the 2D for the most important elements for the player base which is like the characters and stuff like that
Speaker A
and maybe the or character would have looked better if it had been done in pixel art I learned a lot from my failure and a lot of that is being reflected into the development of my current project unfortunate that failure
Speaker A
did not come to me first the success of my first game proved to me that success is possible I'm building my upcoming game on the Aesthetics of the first game is the equivalent of following the recipe for success I don't know where my
Speaker A
game development journey is going to take me in the future but this 5 years chapter is definitely going to stay as a reminder of what not to do there are many other lessons I've learned from my mistakes which I've made many videos on
Speaker A
and I will make a couple more videos in the days to come I I don't necessarily agree with every conclusion he's come to but I think that's quite a good video in terms of showing someone who is actually
Speaker A
trying to focus on things they can improve right rather than the attitude we saw in the first video which was you know my game was good and it was just a failure of advertising and I don't agree with every conclusion that Johnny Comes
Speaker A
to in in in the video here but it's a good sort of reflection and then here's what I'm doing next here's what I'm going to do about it and here's what I'm going to take on board and and change
Speaker A
about my practice in future just you know make hitting stuff look cool cuz at the moment like there's bits you've chosen to put in your video that just make the the combat element of the game look so underwhelming like May the enemies spin
Speaker A
around when you hit them or something just give me some juice give me some juice Johnny this one is like 20 minutes long so we're not going to watch all of it but why my indie game failed again let's see if what the dev
Speaker A
thinks was wrong with the game matches up with what I think was wrong with the game you might have different opinion that's fine you're allowed to have a different opinion put it in the comments whatever but I'm always interested to
Speaker A
see what's in this gap of this like kind of self-awareness gap of of of what the perceived issue is versus what you know the issue might have been you know bear in mind if if you're new to this Channel
Speaker A
and you're just tuning in I've been making games professionally for 10 years I've never done an indie game or had an indie game here I've made my own games I've put them on itch but I've been a salaried game designer at Studios so it
Speaker A
kind of kind of gives you a slightly different perspective on things that doesn't mean I'm an expert who you can't argue with but it does mean I have a particular background and and I have a background in adult education as well so
Speaker A
I'm quite good at spotting when people are lying to themselves or when people aren't noticing the the the main issue so let's let's see how we get on with this longer one let's pick out some key bits these guys 25 games a year is that
Speaker A
to produce 25 games within a year for sure many browser games otherwise it wouldn't be possible from the get-go that is a cool way to start off creating things uh roio who made Angry Birds made like 50 games
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before they made Angry Birds and you might not think of that as an indie Studio but I think it was when it started and then got funding later on maybe it had funding at that point but definitely smaller than it is now
Speaker A
working on lots of small games before you take on a bigger project is a much better way to be sure of whether the game that you're working on whether the game you're going to SN all this time into is is worth it okay so we're
Speaker A
getting onto the game that's the actual subject of the video now but we've got their background and they've made lots of things they made up lots of small Indie things cordex is a 3D action adventure RPG and was inspired by the
Speaker A
Zelda Wind Waker Game and should have a similar tune art style for sure the World building process never ended and continued during production one thing I would say in a in a cartoony game like a kind of Zelda thing is that yeah doing
Speaker A
the World building and the fantasy is great but I would try and start from the point of view of like what are the interactions and then build the world around that a bit like if you think of Mario right you have platforms that are
Speaker A
mushrooms you have enemies that are mushrooms and it's the Mushroom Kingdom but but they have ways that you interact with them like you collect certain types of mushrooms you jump on the heads of others others are platforms so the the
Speaker A
the G play and the World building are directly uh like built in parallel to each other which is one of the benefits of making a sort of slightly goofier cartoon Fantastical game Sonic is the same way right the way that Sonic moves
Speaker A
and the environment of Sonic the loop the loops that are in the environment are linked to each other they're not just happen STS so um I'm interested to see how their design of the game play and their design of the world fit
Speaker A
together because this is a cool looking world just from first impressions really like it but is there anything about the gameplay that justifies these elements that they're talking about energy branches grow out of the center connect the single
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fragments and bring energy to them this energy is needed by all living being plants animal and World structures are influenced by this energy only humans are not able to use this energy naturally and need a container and a
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special mechanism to collect and use energy this container are called crystals and have different shapes and areas of application this is cool this is cool World building and I can see how it's linked into gameplay I already think tonally there's um there's a bit
Speaker A
of a danger zone here where this sort of feels like it's aimed at older kids it's kind of like Skylanders you know Spyro or Skylanders or something like that and that's a difficult audience to go for because if you release your game on
Speaker A
Steam you're dealing with an audience who maybe don't have control of their own purchases or their own Steam library and they're sort of dependent on asking for things and they're also kind of you know just buy less games in a given year
Speaker A
and if they like Skylanders and stuff like that then they're probably already kind of focused on the big thing that they play with their PALS like fortnite so I really like this creatively but in terms of who it's for and the audience I
Speaker A
think there might be some dangers there um I mean you can already see a sort of jump uping quality that goes with collaborating and goes with having a larger team although I don't know from what project stage this is but look at the look at
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the Elfie person Mone mute it look at the hands the hand and feet movement doesn't look quite right to me this prototype should already Define and answer artistic style questions and should present the basic gameplay Mechanics for the game this is already worlds away
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from what we saw earlier flight I don't know I just made a game and then it was perfect and the reason it didn't do well is I didn't advertise it this is this is miles away from that this is much much
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closer to how development should look right if you're if you're serious about it if you are planning on releasing something this is what it should look like like prototyping prototyping that is to answer questions right prototyping isn't just making the first bit
Speaker A
prototyping is is the same as it is in other Industries when you prototype something you are testing it you're checking to see if the idea works this diagram is like uh man hours man days or person days of like how much of the week
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each person could work on it so really important part of um project project management just to be able to know when you have people and how long you have them for and and they they didn't have children like I do which makes lives
Speaker A
considerably uh more expensive I don't think think it's necessarily interesting for the purpose of this video but I do really appreciate how much effort that 25 games here have put into uh explaining the the production process uh there because it's it's a helpful
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educational resource for other people whether the game did well or not there's such a disjunct between like the quality of some of the animations like the one you just saw there and then they're just basic walking around moving
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around that doesn't look great me talked about the project and how realistic our goal is at this stage of development after nearly 3 years of development we were far away to publish this game we wasn't able to continue like this
Speaker A
because it was necessary to earn money so that we can survive there wasn't a good reason to continue development it's not the first game in this genre that I've seen a similar story about uh I I see them all the time I see these really
Speaker A
beautiful sort of 3D Platformers that make me think of things like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot and stuff and then I just sort of I don't know who they're for beautiful looking 3D platformer with some puzzles and some combat or whatever
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and I've had a few experiences like this where I've purchased games like this on steam or I've downloaded the demo and I'm excited about it and I want to get back in that head space of when I first
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played Spyro or Mario 64 or whatever game it reminds me of you know Ocarina of Time and then I play it and it's like I realize I'm not 10 anymore I'm not 12 any anymore and my tastes have moved on
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and the game isn't providing like what I as an adult want from a game the initial impulse for me to download it and play it is completely driven by Nostalgia based on what it looks like but then when I get to interact with the game and
Speaker A
this is whether it's like a puzzle game or whether it's an action game it's just not deep enough for my adult brain whenever I see a project like this which is quite common I see you know on Twitter or not on Twitter anymore really
Speaker A
but Blue Sky Reddit people posting games all the time where it's these like beautifully crafted like Adventure platformer games but it's just that thing of the aesthetic tells me that the game isn't going to be very deep and
Speaker A
then because the game isn't very deep it's like that ends up being the reason why it doesn't have an audience I don't know anything about 25 games I hope you're still going or I hope you're all doing productive things cuz I think the
Speaker A
video you've made here is a great Learning Resource and I think you had some great ideas here but the structure of this video even kind of points towards the end problem which is that we've got a great world it's got
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some great thinking behind it in terms of like the fiction you need to power a sort of fantasy world it's got some lovely art design and but even before we get to the little niggles I had about how characters move and
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stuff the the focus is all on the world and the story to make a kind of PC first game where the AUD audience is the steam audience I think the people who want a game that is about story and
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world don't need something this polished they're happy to play things like visual novels and the people who do want to play like a a game where the focus is on the interactivity wants something quite deep and crunchy and this kind of just strikes me
Speaker A
as a game that doesn't really have a a big enough audience in the place where they wanted to sell it it's like it's like with board games right the board games that get backed on Kickstarter are massive huge things that are crazily
Speaker A
crunchy like loads of extra rules cuz the people who are invested in a project enough to back it up front tend to be like the most hardcore fans of that genre so if you're if you're kind of showing me a game on Kickstarter and it
Speaker A
looks like Spyro or Crash Bandicoot it reminds me of one of those games it needs to be like the the grown-up version of that game because you're you're using people's Nostalgia for that but they're not the person they were when they liked that
Speaker A
thing I think there's some interesting stuff to learn from all these projects but we're not always cognizant of our own problems right and that's why I'm doing this format I I don't feel super comfortable doing reaction videos it's
Speaker A
not what I set out to do when I started this channel but hopefully you found something helpful in in me reviewing these videos and talking about how I feel about what I'm seeing and if you want me to do more of them in future
Speaker A
then I will and if you don't then I'll probably try it again at some point anyway because I'm a I'm a stubborn old mule like that [Music]
Topics:indie gamesgame marketinggame designSteampost-mortemgame developmentadvertising vs marketingindie game failuremarket analysis
![Can an Idea be TOO Unique? [I Review Your Games] — Transcript](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M25SZmZEZJQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
