On 6/13/2019 at 9:23 AM, DavinCreed said:
No indie dev has any chance at being successful in your eyes.
Not true at all -- and I've already said as much above (and below).
"Context counts" -- and this is waaay out of context of what I've explicitly said here about "longterm success":
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my usage of "longterm" is based on the idea of an "evergreen" company -- i.e. a company that aims to be around longer than five or six years beyond the life of a single product. An evergreen company can't rely on only one product to be "successful".
Again, in the context of an "evergreen company" (which I explicitly specify above), the idea of 'success' is not based on any end-result of "being successful" (because it is not possible) -- Therefore, the idea of overall "success" (in that context) must be based on the idea of having sustainable "success-es" -- as I have already explained -- and therefore, because indie devs are not a huge multinational corporate entity like Nintendo, their context (of being an "evergreen company") does not apply to indies, and therefore indies cannot be evaluated as such.
To be clear -- In my definition of "success", any indie dev accomplishing what he originally set out to do should be considered successful.
Yet, although an indie's goal might be money too, the bar for reaching that goal is getting astronomically-high due to market saturation. I can easily understand if you feel you need validation for what is considered a "successful" indie when "success" is defined only in terms of money or units sold. However, people make games for all sorts of reasons -- And in the end, if money is the only reason you make games, then you have probably lost some of your soul along the way. And until you get your soul back, money is going to become even more elusive for you over time.
Nintendo, too, is trying to reclaim its soul. Its old games were (and still are) "successful", but it still doesn't quite remember or fully understand why.
If you want money, you will have to make a game that hits hard. Games that hit hard are the games that people talk about. And people don't talk about Match 3 clones without A LOT of advertising dollars behind them first. People talk about games that have impact. And in order for a game to "have impact", it generally must have some kind of a soul.
On 6/13/2019 at 9:23 AM, DavinCreed said:
It's easy to misunderstand something that is not clearly put.
On 6/13/2019 at 9:23 AM, DavinCreed said:
But when I see bias, I point it out.
Sure, but you're not taking into account your own bias, which affects your (mis-)understanding of the title of this article.
And for your personal bias, I am not responsible.
On 6/13/2019 at 9:23 AM, DavinCreed said:
There are a lot of things it's not. All I have to go with is what is there. It's easy to misunderstand something that is not clearly put.
"Nintendo's path to failure" -- is quite clearly put.
What I meant to say is there. The only thing that's NOT there is what you (or anyone else) decides to put into it with your own personal interpretations or biases of what I mean (before you read my post). How am I supposed to forsee that? -- Read the posts and then you can decide what I mean. Or don't click on "click bait" looking posts? -- I didn't drag you into this topic. 
On 6/13/2019 at 9:23 AM, DavinCreed said:
I'm not a fanboy of anything. I'm a fan of video games in general.
You came of your own accord to defend Nintendo inside of what you call a "click bait" title that (you felt) assumes Nintendo is currently on a path to failure. Now you continue to defend them, thus the repetitiveness. Try again.
The sad thing is, had you read the topic without your own personal bias (that you fail to see or acknowledge), you would know that there are multiple places where I've said (over and over and over again) that I'm not beating up Nintendo. And just because I say "Nintendo made mistakes" or "Nintendo failed here", how does that mean I'm beating them up? -- Especially when I've explained why I'm saying that?
4 hours ago, deltaKshatriya said:
Your main premise here seems to be that at times Nintendo doesn't/hasn't understand/understood it's audience, or assumes it does and that causes issues. Both myself and @DavinCreed have pointed out a lot of flaws in this line of reasoning.
That is perfectly fine -- and I have addressed them too.
IF there is something I haven't addressed up to this point, feel free to point it out. If I haven't addressed it, then let me know so the original discussion can move forward. I'm bored with all the trolling "arguments" whose only purpose is to drown out my own arguments with something that sounds "smarter". People can be smart in different ways -- and there are plenty of ways to be dumb too. Trolling, imo, is one of those ways. At the moment, all I keep getting from @DavinCreed is that I'm beating up Nintendo and that my advice isn't useful. This is fine too. But I disagree. If he had read my previous post rather than hitting "reply" immediately, he (and you) would have seen that I have shared LOTS of valuable forward-thinking ideas in my last two posts that have nothing at all to do with the "Nintendo doesn't know their audience" portion of this topic.
My goal was to share something useful -- Despite the task of explicitly identifying your audience seeming impossible -- it IS possible. Was it practical or even feasible to go to the moon? No. But when we all decided it was useful -- we wanted to do it -- and people got their heads together and made it happen.
That's kind of my point here -- it IS possible -- but nobody wants to discuss HOW to do it.
I keep getting stuff like:
4 hours ago, deltaKshatriya said:
I want to also reiterate that there is no feasible way to know the 'audience' for any product as well as you seem to be proposing.
This was addressed in my post discussing atmosphere (which you probably missed because of the retort written very shortly afterward by @DavinCreed which completely ignores everything said about it besides the "Anti-Nintendo" stuff that he wants to discuss.)
For example, despite not coming to an easy conclusion, ALL of this addressed your concerns with the feasibility of "knowing your audience" so explicitly:
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This is a great point. -- There's this great mini-series called "The Code" that talks about mathematics in nature, and one part is about how google can predict various epidemics down to almost the _exact_ number of people affected by the flu by just tallying people's searches on particular subjects. That's easily explainable if you're a skeptic (like me) because google is notorious for data tracking and could easily be doing something in the study they didn't disclose. They're not inherently scientists after all.
Instead, a more interesting experiment (in that same movie) is the bit about the Jelly beans. When 400 people were asked about the number of jelly beans in a clear jar, the guesses were wildly off. Nobody was even close. However, when all the (seemingly-random) numbers were added up and then averaged out, the average number of jelly beans people guessed were off by almost exactly 3 jelly beans. Yes, 3. Ultimately, this proves people's issues and mindsets are vastly different, and while their crazy reasons for why they guessed what they guessed was all over the place, in the end, it all averages out. There indeed _is_ an average "atmosphere" that is possible to know and prove objectively -- and with Novelty as the basis, it makes it even easier to hone-in on which areas that people find important in games. And while this seems like magic (after all, we're each just one person), this is actually very much science.
This discussion about novelty leads me to my earlier comments about determining the "atmosphere" around games (and their players) objectively.
In our case, it is actually _because_ our industry is so novelty-driven that we have a decent advantage over other industries. We can easily identify the "average" customer specs for any game because customers and feedback on those games are plentiful, and what's different between games isn't (usually) _that_ different that we can't identify an audience's tastes from that data. The important part is that we know whether it's OUR audience we're identifying tastes for -- or not.
For example, Call of Duty has "RPG" elements in it, but it is definitely not an RPG game just because it has a leveling system. And an "RPG" is definitely not an "FPS" just because you're playing from an FPS perspective and shooting guns (i.e. Fallout 3). There are certain expectations that must be met with each of these monikers, and _those_ expectations change with their audience (and from audience to audience) over time. As a kid, Fallout would never be considered an RPG (in the time of Doom, Quake, etc.) because an "RPG" was actually what we now call a "JRPG" today.
The important part is that we struggle with identifying our audience because our nomenclature and terminology matches our audience's nomenclature and terminology -- which clearly changes over time.
It is hard to hit a target that is always moving -- especially when one lacks the proper terminology to define it.
This isn't an easy task.
In general, style can be used to define games of a certain type -- i.e. one style could consist of cute art and hard-as-nails (but-fair) gameplay, meaning you've got "Megaman 2" or "Ducktales" now. Get rid of that "(but-fair)" part, and you have "Super Meatboy" or even troll games like "I wanna be the guy", where the challenges are heavily weighted against the player and rote memory and fast reflexes are what it takes to survive. Sure, these are all cutesy 2d platformers, but these subtle-but-VERY-different, mindsets attract VERY different audiences.
So how do you strike a balance?
The right nomenclature to identify the game style we're looking to make is important in defining atmosphere objectively (but identifying the specific style of a game is what's _actually_ "hard" about determining our audience -- there are so many "styles" of games, yet there are so few labels, and the labels barely stick as time passes.) For example, is "The Witcher" an RPG, an Action or Adventure game, a Puzzle game, a Stealth game? -- All of the above is the easy answer -- but, really, it is none of the above. We just have easy (extremely subjective) labels to slap on and forget. The real answer is a LOT harder to define with our industry's current terminology.
The label(s) we pick tends to depend on which label we identify with the most or decide will drive us a bigger audience.
There is a downside to talking in game "styles" though.
Talking in "styles" is less precise than talking in "mechanics", but talking in mechanics is tedious and not great for understanding ideas. The variety is overwhelming to us mere humans.
For example -- How do we recognize each other? Starting out, we're groups of atoms defined by quantum rules. But we aren't _just_ atoms -- we're chemicals (certain atoms arranged in certain ways). But we're not quite chemicals either -- we're specific DNA sequences. Yet we're not just DNA sequences either -- we still consist of some floating atoms and some floating chemicals, both unrelated to our specific sequences of DNA. So we call ourselves "human beings" to fill in this gap. But there are just too many human beings. We're Mark or Earl or Jen or Jessica. But there are still too many of those too -- We might call two friends MarkA or MarkB in our minds, but in reality, we know them by their face and personality more than their name. Each Mark we know has a different "style" or "personality" alongside his face in his mind, and it is his personal style which sticks out so prominently to us. This overall unique personal style naturally makes them memorable to us in a sea of atoms in our universe.
It's no wonder Wind Waker bombed a bit, yet is now so unquestionably-memorable. -- It had such a distinct personality, but we didn't get to know it at the time because we just didn't like its face.
After Smash Bros arguably made Toon-Link a celebrity, we're now like "hey, I knew that guy! -- after you get over his cartoonish looks, he's actually really cool!!"
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Games ultimately need better terminology to help them visualize their personal style and scope to their audience -- and verbalize that same unique style and scope so that the atmosphere around their particular games (and players) can be analyzed objectively.
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Adding to the above, customers see companies like EA or Ubisoft way differently than two to five-man team indie developers. Players will accept failures in some places but not others, but depending on who you are, this might be forgiven easily, begrudgingly, completely, temporarily, or not at all. The only way to know this is knowing what customers you're targeting -- and why they're targeting you.
If you want to make a stylized game like WindWaker (because your artists are excellent at that kind of art, or you found a charming style you want to emulate), then look at the atmosphere surrounding stylized games at that point in time. It generally helps to see who the customers are for those types of games (i.e. children, or are adults playing them too?), then check to see how well your particular game adapts to that trend (i.e. WindWaker was kind of a "teen" game, but only young children in the US were playing cartoony games at that point in time). Conker's bad fur day was an exception to this -- and it was great -- but it was sold at the end of the N64's life, so it didn't do great -- the older audience it targeted had pretty much moved on to other consoles by that time. So that's a point too -- it isn't _just_ the audience you should consider, but what _environment_ does that audience exist in should be considered as well.
All in all -- who's "right" depends on a number of factors, including your own capabilities, the general state/mood of the player-base, and the environment in which that player-base exists (any significant change in that environment could greatly alter their perceptions of your product
On 6/13/2019 at 9:23 AM, DavinCreed said:
if your proposed solutions to the mistakes Nintendo has made cannot be applied beyond being able to look back from the future, knowing the audience so well that there is no risk to launching a game, or defining "success" so exclusive that no person or company has yet to achieve it...well, there's nothing very useful there for us game developers trying to make great games and trying to find an audience for them.
See the quote immediately above this one.
I've addressed all of these "issues" already -- and with ideas and advice that is forward-thinking and forward-looking. We've discussed "success" already (see above if you haven't read it -- search "evergreen" if you're just skimming.)
Nobody (except you) has ever implied that (even with my advice) there would be NO RISK in launching a game -- only that this risk could be greatly minimized by identifying your market (with better terminology and identifying atmosphere -- again, see my previous two posts).
There is no silver-bullet for developing a badass game, but making sure said badass game is marketed and delivered to the people who want said game to be badass -- that's where the biggest "risk" in launching a game is. Knowing how to identify those people who specifically want your brand of badass is difficult, bit it's not nearly as "impossible" as you make it out to be. 
@frob -- Thanks for your insights. I can see where you're coming from on this, and I'll try to keep this in mind in my future posts.
Honestly, modern-day Nintendo was a bit of a stretch to talk about to indies, but the ideas I've shared so far were valuable, and really, Nintendo was a "modern-day indie" -- all the way back in the 80's and early 90's. They took a LOT of risks that we take for granted now way back before they even knew they had a market. We at least know what markets we have to work with, and what it takes to be successful financially. They had nothing at all but a hunch and the smarts to back it up with a good marketing message. Most indies, like you said, only have one of these qualities.
Out of all the big companies, I'm "picking on" Nintendo because Nintendo was as close to any indie as any of those super-successful multinational corporations could ever be -- and they are great to learn from (for general "success") because of that. Microsoft and Sony already had loads of cash before they expanded their empires into games and built their Death Stars. But Nintendo was the Jedi that lived in the desert as a poor water farmer who didn't yet know he was a Jedi until he became one.
And yes, when measuring "success" on a bread-and-butter level, modern-day Nintendo is vastly different from an indie, but that's not the discussion I wanted to create here.
My aim was to discuss how and why even a highly innovative rags-to-riches indie company, who eventually earned tons of money, marketing research, and resources, could actually "flop" a big-name game with a big-name IP, when it was the very company who helped gamers and modern-day indies alike define what a "game" actually is?
This definition is worth looking into too.
There is a LOT to be learned from Nintendo -- despite Nintendo's past as an indie who became a multinational corporation, Nintendo's path to failure, in contrast to its resounding successes (from that indie background), can teach us a LOT about marketing, audiences, and what to do before (and what NOT to do after) we finally are financially "successful" with our games.
But we have to understand what exactly brings us there first -- and this is where I feel this argument about "what's feasible" is missing the point of the whole topic.
The "easy answer" is "money" -- but the "hard answer" is there's something deeper than that people glom onto when indies do finally have breakout hits like Undertale that seem to come out of nowhere.
These successes are not random. -- It is no coincidence that Undertale was inspired by a Nintendo game, nor that the entire Metroidvania genre came out of combining TWO Nintendo games.
Surely penny-pinching "indies" have had something in common with Nintendo at some point in its long history? Maybe Nintendo's penchant for innovation always been the thread that binds us. After all, like Nintendo, its modern-day identity as "innovative and novel" is what keeps its audience coming back for more. Indies are saddled with the same expectation --
-- Get stale; die fast.
Except for us -- it is not a matter of years. It is a matter of months or weeks.
Want some useful advice? -- Put your soul into your games. Learn whatever you can from wherever the hell you can. Don't dismiss anything too quickly. And bite down hard. -- Don't let people tell you what you can't do. If it's "impossible" or "impractical", it's only because someone hasn't done it yet.
So -- be the first.
