Hi there,

I am an indie developer (in my spare time), working hard on my first game (first t I haven't abandoned yet and gone so far with it). I've been recently researching about marketing and how us indie devs should use it for promoting our game. I recon it is very useful and every indie game dev should read and apply marketing techniques to get themselves known to the world, but this post is not about marketing.

All these marketing articles tend to show that you are against a huge competition. You want to publish your game through website X? Tons of games waiting for approval there. You want to get reviewed by magazine Y? Tons over tons of games waiting the same thing. You want to go mobile on iZ platform? Tons of competition there.

While on mobile we have some numbers for this "tons", like 800+ apps registered everyday on iOS App Store and so on, if we choose to put mobile aside, put all web based games aside, put console games aside and remain only with PC and Mac OS (the desktop version) without the AAA games and freeware games, question is:

How big is this competition? What tons over tons of games mean here? If I do a search on Steam (which I'm aware you have to be really special to publish on) and I search for Games and Any OS, I get 1505 items. If I go on GamersGate and hit "Indie" cathegory, I get around 300 games (10 pages x 30 results per page). On Desura, a search for indie games reveals about 400 items. Comparing to  tens of thousands of web games or mobile games, these figures are not that bad. Are these real or I'm really missing something and there are a lot of other games on these platforms?

Thanks for reading and waiting for your opinion!

Hi there,

I am an indie developer (in my spare time), working hard on my first game (first t I haven't abandoned yet and gone so far with it). I've been recently researching about marketing and how us indie devs should use it for promoting our game. I recon it is very useful and every indie game dev should read and apply marketing techniques to get themselves known to the world, but this post is not about marketing.

All these marketing articles tend to show that you are against a huge competition. You want to publish your game through website X? Tons of games waiting for approval there. You want to get reviewed by magazine Y? Tons over tons of games waiting the same thing. You want to go mobile on iZ platform? Tons of competition there.

While on mobile we have some numbers for this "tons", like 800+ apps registered everyday on iOS App Store and so on, if we choose to put mobile aside, put all web based games aside, put console games aside and remain only with PC and Mac OS (the desktop version) without the AAA games and freeware games, question is:

How big is this competition? What tons over tons of games mean here? If I do a search on Steam (which I'm aware you have to be really special to publish on) and I search for Games and Any OS, I get 1505 items. If I go on GamersGate and hit "Indie" cathegory, I get around 300 games (10 pages x 30 results per page). On Desura, a search for indie games reveals about 400 items. Comparing to tens of thousands of web games or mobile games, these figures are not that bad. Are these real or I'm really missing something and there are a lot of other games on these platforms?

Thanks for reading and waiting for your opinion!

There are more indies targeting the mobile and web markets due to the higher viability of small casual games on those, There are also alot of PC games that simply aren't good enough for the big digital distribution channels, (Apple doesn't really check if a game is fun before allowing it on the appstore, they just check that it doesn't violate their rules and that it works)

There are also alot of PC games that simply aren't good enough for the big digital distribution channels

So that means if somehow I manage to get on one or more of these well known channels, I have a quite high chance of being noticed as opposed to apps in the app store or on a portal like Kongregate.

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1331751603' post='4922039']
There are also alot of PC games that simply aren't good enough for the big digital distribution channels

So that means if somehow I manage to get on one or more of these well known channels, I have a quite high chance of being noticed as opposed to apps in the app store or on a portal like Kongregate.
[/quote]

I can't say for sure, but releasing games on the app store is like trying to hit a lottery. There are top-quality mobile games out there but didn't get enough publicity. On the other hand, a game like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja are popular. I never understood the appeal of Angry Birds, why people love it so much, but it does show that good gameplay, quality, and fun (which what we are all about, right?) in games do not equal to profit, especially in mobile games.

it does show that good gameplay, quality, and fun (which what we are all about, right?) in games do not equal to profit, especially in mobile games.

That is what determined me to go for PC and Mac in the first place. Working with Unity3D allows me to publish on mobile platforms too, but I don't really know if I have any chance against that kind of competition. On the other hand, the little research I've done shows me that on "PC & Mac app stores" (to call them that way) there are not so many games to compete against, but on the other hand there aren't so many customers either, comparing to mobile.

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1331751603' post='4922039']
There are also alot of PC games that simply aren't good enough for the big digital distribution channels

So that means if somehow I manage to get on one or more of these well known channels, I have a quite high chance of being noticed as opposed to apps in the app store or on a portal like Kongregate.
[/quote]

I don't know about apple but both android market and kongregate will give you free exposure if you get high ratings early on, so quality games tend to stand out without much advertising (You need to get people to play and rate the game first though so getting the word out there is still important), the first impression is everything on those platforms, a buggy initial release will kill your ratings and cause your game/app to fall off the radar and then it will be very difficult to get them back up.

Its also worth remembering that the successful mobile and flash games are casual, People in general don't want to play a epic RPG on their phone(it doesn't matter how good it is really), they want something they can pick up and play for 2 minutes while waiting for the bus. This is why games like angry birds are successful, cute graphics, simple gameplay and short levels that are fairly easy to beat but hard to get a perfect score on makes for a perfect casual game that anyone from your 6 year old kid to your grandmother can enjoy. If you're going to go big or complex then the PC is a better target platform.

You're right that we shouldn't just look at the demand, but also the competition. You mention IOS - this indeed is a bandwagon platform, that developers and websites have jumped on, e.g., just to produce an "app" for their website, or large numbers of developers hoping to make the next Angry Birds - result is the largest number of mobile applications, despite it being a smaller platform than Android and even Symbian still. Not a good situation for development. At the same time though, I think you're underestimating the competition for Windows. The biggest flaw in your reasoning is:

if we choose to put mobile aside, put all web based games aside, put console games aside and remain only with PC and Mac OS (the desktop version) without the AAA games and freeware games, question is

But you *can't* ignore many of those. I mean sure yes, if you ignore all the competition, there isn't much competition, but...

A Windows indie game is competing against web games (which people can play on Windows), AAA games, and freeware games. When you include all of these, I find it hard to believe that Windows still doesn't come out way on top. It isn't just about raw numbers either - whilst large numbers of those mobile apps might be f*rt apps and website wrappers, every commercial game on Windows is something that's difficult to compete with, not to mention the large numbers of free standalone and web games.

There are also two other advantages mobiles have:

* There's less *established* competition. On Windows, if someone wants to play a particular kind of game, there's plenty to choose from, free or commercial, that are already well known. With so many, why even give time to try something new? There's less of this on mobiles at the moment - even if there were the same number of games competing, you might have a better chance against them in terms of awareness, and able to compete on a more equal footing.

* There's less competition in terms of other things. If you're somewhere bored with your phone, playing a game on the phone is one of a few things to do. If you're somewhere with a desktop or laptop, it's probably somewhere where you have more things to do - doing things on the Internet (either web games or in general) becomes easier; but also other things altogether like watching TV.

So that means if somehow I manage to get on one or more of these well known channels, I have a quite high chance of being noticed as opposed to apps in the app store or on a portal like Kongregate.[/quote]Indeed, getting on Steam will likely give you much better coverage than just yet another app on a website, download site or whatever. but "if" is the keyword here. As you say yourself:

You want to publish your game through website X? Tons of games waiting for approval there. [/quote]

I have no idea what sort of hurdles someone has to face to get onto Steam, but it's probably worth being wary of pinning all your hopes on it.

My own experience of the Nokia app market is that it's much easier than Windows for something completely new to get higher downloads with no advertising - I guess this ties in with the less establish competition as I say above. One of my applications gets 50-100 downloads per day; another one gets around 10,000 per day. On Windows, I get less than 10 a day at most.

It's not that people aren't downloading on Windows. It's interesting looking at the weekly downloads on places like download.com or sourceforge.net - the highest get hundreds of thousands or even millions per week, but I note it very quickly tails off. It seems possible for a relatively small number of apps to mop up the vast majority of downloads, with a much larger number of apps getting rather few downloads. (Having said that though, a similar thing does apply to mobile - we hear about the success stories like Angry Birds, but most won't get anywhere near that - and my 10,000 per day is only for a free application!)

My own experience of the Nokia app market is that it's much easier than Windows for something completely new to get higher downloads with no advertising - I guess this ties in with the less establish competition as I say above. One of my applications gets 50-100 downloads per day; another one gets around 10,000 per day. On Windows, I get less than 10 a day at most.

I'm slightly confused. Are you talking about windows mobile or straight windows? Is there a nokia app market for PC apps? /confused

[quote name='mdwh' timestamp='1331827638' post='4922298']
My own experience of the Nokia app market is that it's much easier than Windows for something completely new to get higher downloads with no advertising - I guess this ties in with the less establish competition as I say above. One of my applications gets 50-100 downloads per day; another one gets around 10,000 per day. On Windows, I get less than 10 a day at most.

I'm slightly confused. Are you talking about windows mobile or straight windows? Is there a nokia app market for PC apps? /confused
[/quote]I mean that I'm comparing Nokia mobile (Symbian in my case) to straightforward Windows Not so much to compare specifically those platforms, but as a general example of mobile versus non-mobile.