Safe is Risky Reloaded

My reposting yesterday of Safe is Risky has generated some comment on other blogs.  Although the post was written 2.5 years ago, I think it holds up pretty well.

Phil Steinmeyer had some comments about it:
 

However, I think he’s wrong for the games sub-sector, and that far more first-time game developers fail by being too different from the market leaders rather than too similar...

I think your best bet is to take a successful game, come up with a new theme for it, and add some significant new twists and other incremental improvements. You may not hit a grand slam this way, but if your execution is good and you’ve chosen the right game to imitate, you’re quite likely to hit at least a double.

I think it depends on what you want to do.  If all you are trying to do is get a game on a portal and hope it might get on the Top 10 list for a week or two, then Phil's advice is good.  But that is not going to make you much money, and as portal proliferation continues, it's getting less and less all the time.   The shelf life of portal games is getting shorter and shorter so fast that it's not going to be long before they are like movies doing most of their business on the first weekend of release.

Is a Zuma clone, no matter how good, going to still be selling 10 years from now?  I highly doubt it.  Zuma might still sell in 10 years, but a clone has no hope.   Pretty Good Solitaire, on the other hand, has a good chance of still selling 10 years from now (which would be a full 20 years after initial release).

MakeMacgames.com commented on Phil's post:

Phil Steinmeyer says that Thomas Warfield is wrong and that casual game developers should stick to established genres and styles or risk failure...

Instead of worrying about finding a game that will sell as well as Bejeweled or a game that will define a new genre; a beginning game programmer should worry about finding an idea that will be inspiring enough to keep them motivated to complete the game project.

I didn't say anything about genres in my original post.  The genre doesn't necessary have to be in new genre for a game to be new and different.  To be new and different, a game can take an existing genre and do something significant to it to make something new.  Obviously, Pretty Good Solitaire was in an established genre, even back in 1995.  But it did a lot of things differently from the existing games that helped it stand out. 

These days, it seems like all people do to make a new game is copy some existing game and put a different theme of graphics on it.  Hey, Aloha Solitaire was popular.  Let's make Eskimo Solitaire!   These might get on a portal and sell for a few weeks, but they aren't going to support a long term business.

If you want to make a living off a game for years to come, you need to make something that is going to be popular for years and not just be whatever happens to be the hot trend at the time.

Comments

[David Michael]

Thomas: "These days, it seems like all people do to make a new game is copy some existing game and put a different theme of graphics on it."

I'm doing all I can to confuse this isssue:
http://joeindie.com/blog/?p=153
;-)

I think too much time is spent trying to think up new gameplay mechanics, as if "sliding vs swapping" is either a) a step forward or b) meaningfully different.

Sid Meier described a game as "a series of interesting choices." What makes a choice "interesting"? I contend that it's the context of the game, the miniature world that is being affected by the choices of the player, the description of what the gameplay mechanic is simulating, and the representation of the result.

There are entire *universes* that have yet to be explored for just about any given gameplay mechanic. PGS provides a meaningful example: How many games have been based on the same 52-card deck and the alternating sequence of red-black, counting up (or down)? Hundreds. And somewhere, there's probably someone coming up with another one.

Still, I agree that applying a thin veneer of "new" graphics to an existing game is pretty lame. It could make a decent first project, but its not much of business model.

-David