Question | Is it still viable to create a commercial 2D platformer today?

People are used to larger-scale games. 2D vs. 3D is not inherently the issue. It's about depth and scope, especially on steam. If the game is too generic, nobody will want to buy it, due to how many 2D platformers already exist. Try doing some market research about people who are disappointed by the genre and try to understand them. That's how you know that a genre still has some unmet demand.

I don't think people want to play a basic game, and especially not pay for it. Your game needs to have a unique gameplay feel to it, and some unique mechanics or something that otherwise hooks the player.

Visibility comes from making a good game, primarily. If the game is appealing, it will market itself almost effortlessly. If it isn't, no marketing in the world will compensate for that. The best marketing is if the game immediately looks fun at first glance, and also is fun, when you play it.

Microtransactions are horrible, because they disrupt the gameplay experience, as suddenly, the player doesn't just play, he also is conscious about his wallet at all times.

I don't think you should be monetising an experimental game like that. Put it on itch.io to get feedback, and when you make it actually good, then go release it on steam for a few bucks.

I recently heard that newer Godot versions are performing really badly on mobile, and are essentially PC-only. Godot is made by volunteers of varying degrees of skill, and doesn't have a clear direction or as good quality control as a big engine. I personally would recommend just learning WebGL, as a 2D game doesn't really need any engine, but you can also use Unity if you think that is a better fit for you. Also, the Godot community is a weird delusional cult, at least from what I was able to gather.

Also, go watch tutorials on game design. The indie game clinic channel on youtube is pretty good as a resource.

RmbRT said:
Visibility comes from making a good game, primarily. If the game is appealing, it will market itself almost effortlessly.

:D

The fact that i found this song only after two google pages about an equally titled, but not nearly as good song from Aerosmith, already tells how wrong your claim actually is.

Imo, you should add a little ‘imo’ to such claims. ; )

Even if you make your game free, here is what you're competing with: https://itch.io/games/free/genre-platformer/tag-2d/tag-no-ai

There are over 10000 games there. Some of these games are quite good, most are crap, but even the crap ones are better than the minimalistic AI slop you are proposing for your initial release.

Yup. “Build it and they will come” works great in movies, not so much in real life.

In the 1980's people were in a marketplace where competitors were 2-3 month projects by an individual. Individuals could turn out great products, the difficulty was distribution and production.

In the early 1990's, competitors were 6-12 month projects by 1-5 people. Individuals could still make great games, but they were less common. It was the heyday of shareware, lots of junk, but also lots of quirky gems.

In the late 1990's, competitors were 12-24 months by 10-30 people. Individuals could still make viable games, but they were becoming rare.

These days, top tier games have a crew of literal thousands. Look at something like Hogwarts Legacy (though not a platformer), MobyGames says 3484 people on the credits, and typically 3-5 year dev times.

Individuals can still make breakthrough successes but they're a lottery ticket, and they cannot be compared to the big commercial products.

For platformers, Astrobot (725 credited people), Sonic: Shadow Generations (1113 credited people). The closest success to a small project was Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom (116 credited people) that was primarily driven by two guys but still had a pretty big team and a bankroll.

As one of the projects over the years, we worked on Duck Game, a fun little platformer. It was a bit of a lottery win for the developer, Landon won big and put an awful lot of his life up to that point into the game, but even that didn't hit critical mass until the pairing with Adult Swim and a bunch of people getting added with testing, marketing, and business development. Even so, it was a quirky game that was a lottery ticket for the developer.

LOL. You're setting up a false framing of the problem. Nobody should expect to compete in the AAA scene as an indie developer. So comparing yourself with AAA budgets and scope is not helpful. “Success” in a financial sense for an indie also looks way different than success for a AAA studio with high salaries for hundreds of people over multiple years.

But even if you buy a trillion facebook ads and youtube ads and paid tweets and all that stuff, a bad game will not sell. Only good games are actually worth buying. And once you got a good game, all it needs is some initial visibility, and then steam will do the rest for you. The initial visibility can be gained by asking some streamer to play it, or dropping a good trailer or something. People will automatically market it for you by word of mouth if it's good. Minecraft was made by a small team initially and it took off by word of mouth, because it was just a great and innovative game.

There are also weird games that are not about being good games, but about producing outrageous moments on streams, but I that's a completely different topic.

Anyone who wants to make a game as an indie has to be realistic about the amount of assets he can afford to produce, so the game design has to leverage that limitation. Either via procedural generation, or modified reruns, or whatever you can come up with. Or maybe the game design can inherently aim to get by even with very few assets. As long as you can make the game good despite its limitations, nobody will care about them. The AAA audience has different expectations, but it also doesn't buy indie games to begin with. But indies also only need like 50,000 sold copies or something to make a profit even for an ambitious project. For smaller projects, you can target fewer sales as your break-even number.

AAA has budget and manpower, but it doesn't have cohesive execution on a vision, and it also doesn't have efficiency or inspiration. It has lots of alignment meetings, bad fits between product and team, communication overhead and misunderstandings, corporate decisions that harm the game's potential, etc. Indie doesn't have budget or manpower, but it has the potential for extremely streamlined development, almost 0-friction execution on creative visions due to the small team size and manageable project scope, etc.

If you are only capable of imagining AAA games, you're not going to make it as an indie developer. Indies fight a completely different battle that plays by entirely different rules and is under completely different constraints from AAA. So anything that AAA does is literally irrelevant to indies who understand how to make indie games.

The audience of indie games has different expectations and usually also different machine specs, a different willingness to spend money, etc. That's why an indie pixelated card game can be hugely successful. AAA could never make an indie-style game, because they can only amortise their costs if they crank out massive projects with massive market reach, and lots of content and high quality art assets. It's not worth it for an AAA studio to rev up its machinery just to end up making a small niche game.

If a game is not inherently marketable, you cannot market it, no matter what kind of marketing genius you are. If your game is good enough to be instantly appealing at a glance, then that makes marketing it trivial, as it only becomes a question of gaining some initial attention. Which no small-time or mid-size streamer will refuse to give to you for free, after all, they make their money off of playing interesting new games all day. But if your game doesn't kick ass, then nobody will want to stream it. The AAA whataboutism is completely besides the point. AAA does not compete in the 2D sidescroller genre. It does not compete in the creative indie scene.

a light breeze said:
There are over 10000 games there. Some of these games are quite good, most are crap, but even the crap ones are better than the minimalistic AI slop you are proposing for your initial release.

Oh wow, I had somehow glanced over the AI part. AI prototypes suck. They're buggy, they have no consistency, they are recognisable as AI, and therefore off-putting. If you need to prototype, make a rapid prototype in some engine if you need, just to sketch out the general game's gameplay and feeling in some vertical slice. And then build it properly from scratch afterwards. You only need a prototype, btw, if you cannot clearly imagine the game in your head. And by that I mean the whole experience, the visuals, the moment-to-moment action, the user controls, the feeling of the user, etc. If you can fully imagine the way the game should behave, and the experience of playing it (actually playing it, not just delusions), then you can skip the prototype phase. Although, the prototype may still be necessary to recruit people for your team, so it depends.

And even if there are 10000 games in that genre: the fact that there are quite a few of them that are good, while most are trash, means that it's not a matter of “oh this has been done already”, but “can I do it really well?”. There are still indie hit titles in the platforming genre every few years, but they are so good because someone had a creative, holistic vision for the game and executed it well. So unless you can do the same, don't bother dreaming of selling it. Just practice your skills instead, build a portfolio, and maybe get hired somewhere with that portfolio.

And my advice for all indies is to only consider making game designs that play into your strengths and budget. Can't model and animate people? Don't put people in the game. Can't make much environmental art? Make it procedural or don't even have an environment. Are you great at atmospheric art? Make the game entirely play into your ability to create an atmosphere.

RmbRT said:
LOL. You're setting up a false framing of the problem. Nobody should expect to compete in the AAA scene as an indie developer. So comparing yourself with AAA budgets and scope is not helpful.

Maybe the numbers he gave do not answer the initial question, but they are at least hard facts and thus always helpful in context.
Also he has contributed to many AAA titles afaik, knowing what he talks about from personal experience.

But it's not helpful if you, who has not yet released any game (afaik) and thus lacks the experience, are telling people ‘just make your game good and it will sell.’ It's not helpful because you present your personal convictions as general truth, eventually confusing newbies. You could easily avoid the confusion by making clear you talk about personal convictions, not about hard facts of game development.

Besides, if you release your game on Steam like you said, you do compete with AAA because they release there too.

JoeJ said:
But it's not helpful if you, who has not yet released any game (afaik) and thus lacks the experience, are telling people ‘just make your game good and it will sell.’ It's not helpful because you present your personal convictions as general truth, eventually confusing newbies. You could easily avoid the confusion by making clear you talk about personal convictions, not about hard facts of game development.

I got this advice from people who have also released both successful games and flops, and they gave good reasonings for it. I don't need to back this up with my own anecdotes, but it also lines up with my intuition and experience as a consumer and an observer.

JoeJ said:
Besides, if you release your game on Steam like you said, you do compete with AAA because they release there too.

I don't make games that target the same audience as AAA games. So they are not competition. Just like an electronics store in a mall does not compete with the clothing store in the same mall. Just because we share the same marketplace does not mean we share the same audience. I know full well that I cannot compete with AAA, so I intentionally only do stuff that aims at people who aren't even looking for AAA games.

Gentle reminder to stay focused on the original post's purpose and five questions, not bicker about who has shipped titles and who hasn't.

Carry on.

RmbRT said:
I got this advice from people who have also released both successful games and flops, and they gave good reasonings for it. I don't need to back this up with my own anecdotes, but it also lines up with my intuition and experience as a consumer and an observer.

That's exactly the kind of context i miss. +1 for that.

Regarding AAA vs. indie, i do not really believe you rule out ‘AAA players’ to buy your game. The competition exists no matter how you look at it. However, i feel like competition in games is generally friendly.

frob said:
Gentle reminder to stay focused on the original post's purpose and five questions

Yeah, but unable to help on these, i can only add what would attract me as a player…

I play Super Mario X daily since a decade. I do so because my wife likes Mario, and we can play together with splitscreen. This market isn't well served.

SMBX is a free community driven game. It comes with an editor, people make episodes and post them on the forum. Quality is good on average, but many are awesome. I guess i have something like 100 such episodes on my HD, so it takes some time until we need to play the same episode once more again.

Regarding 2D vs. 3D, Mario in 3D does not really work imo. My wife rules it out completely and my attempts to show her newer Mario games failed. So imo there is still a need for 2D platformers.
But it seems difficult to make one. I had C64 and Amiga, and the best platform games on those home computers were not nearly as good as Mario. I even was bored about the platform genre back then and stopped playing games for some years.
I do not believe current AI is capable to achieve something like a basic Mario clone, but idk and might be wrong.