Three fairly recent Indy games that basically demonstrated one fact. Goliaths are irrelevant to making a profit, just produce the quality of goods that can sell.

Huh? I'd say those three are all excellent examples of how one should assiduously avoid the Goliaths, and find a niche audience to play to.

I don't care how great your production values are, an indie team isn't going to be able to go head-to-head with the next Halo...

Huh? I'd say those three are all excellent examples of how one should assiduously avoid the Goliaths, and find a niche audience to play to.

hmm should have emphasised my point with more clarity. Essentially I agree with idea that finding a niche market is the best way to approach commercial success from an indy's point of view. My choice of games and their relative niches combined with the reality that Goliath's are irrelevant due to their absence from them, was where I was going with this. My comment with regard quality was an emphasis on the ideal that the game produced itself shouldn't be shite (as so many indy productions have ended up being), not as a comparison directly to a triple A production.

Huh? I'd say those three are all excellent examples of how one should assiduously avoid the Goliaths, and find a niche audience to play to.

Well if you look at games like Binding of Isaac, you'll notice that while a 'niche audience' was in their crosshairs, and they've estimated a rough 5000 copies to sell, it turned out quite differently.

What you set out to do is make a great games, and that's pretty much it. Start with what you'd want, and go with it, and if people like it too, all the better (case in point: Braids and Super MeatBoy).

As far as going toe-to-toe with the next Halo, you'd be surprised. We look at the big numbers of these franchises, but we forget the big production costs. The actual profits are not that dissimilar, especially in the case of games such as Minecraft.

As far as going toe-to-toe with the next Halo, you'd be surprised. We look at the big numbers of these franchises, but we forget the big production costs. The actual profits are not that dissimilar, especially in the case of games such as Minecraft.

That's not what I mean by "going head-to-head" - Minecraft doesn't really resemble even other commercial world-building games (i.e. SimCity, or Spore).

Building a story-centric first-person shooter, a competitive multiplayer RTS, or a fantasy MMO, puts you squarely in competition with the big guys, right where their massive production budget gives them an edge.

Building a story-centric first-person shooter, a competitive multiplayer RTS, or a fantasy MMO, puts you squarely in competition with the big guys, right where their massive production budget gives them an edge.

Even in those, you can still change the game. First Person Shooter was taken on by Portal, who made great use of an uncommon feature. even with these seemingly vague genre's you can still add entirely new concepts that can change the way the game is played.

for a first person shooter, you could go through a level, blasting your way through. Then, you replay the level as one of the enemies, and your old character will use an AI to try to follow the same path and deviate when needed. and you go back and forth as different characters in the same repeating world, constantly trying to best yourself. And the AI can also learn your repetitive habits, and apply them when it tries to mimic you.

Its a game play mechanic that is very different from most FPS's out there, that don't make sense to apply to the current main stream games without significantly messing up their stories.

Also, Clone Wars has the repeating first person shooter, which also works well, but is significantly different.

But I think your original point was that you shouldn't compete directly, and even those genre's allow indirect competition quite well.

You can approach this from the other direction as well... just think about what it really means to target a mass market like the AAA guys basically need to do. Skyrim is probably the best example of this in recent history. There is just such a wide variety of things to do that it allows players of various persuasions to focus on what they want and enjoy and completely ignore other aspects of the game that they don't like as much. It being a AAA game, Bethesda is forced to (but also has the financial backing to be able to) spend lots and lots of time and effort on aspects of their game that they know from the start will only appeal to some subset of their audience.

But reverse that thinking... a savvy indie-developer can be sitting there playing skyrim and think "Man, I love sneaking around and sniping people with my bow. Wouldn't it be great if there was a game that was focused on just this one thing?". A game like skyrim has a huge audience, but that audience can be subdivided all sorts of ways, and looking at that game and thinking about how to pull out and focus on one part of it. No indie can make anything as expansive and just plain huge as Skyrim, but they can take some particular aspect of it that people like and expand it and focus a game around it...

I have no idea why 1 million people would choose to pay to play Runescape over WoW. It isn't even very much cheaper.

No big mystery there... it had three years head start, it can be played in the browser rather than having to download it or purchase a disk, and you can play for free -- something World of Warcraft didn't initially offer outside of time-limited trials and the game hours included with an initial purchase if I'm not mistaken.

One of the lessons we can learn from this specific example is that a David can effectively compete with a Goliath by offering a more convenient and easily accessible product. If your competitor's product is harder to get and/or more expensive than yours you can establish an advantage. The majority of those one million users who pay to play Runescape wouldn't have just decided to go sign up for a paid subscription -- they're users who were already invested in the game because they were either already playing themselves or had friends who were -- combined with slightly cheaper pricing it's not surprising that some users would choose Runescape rather than WoW.

One of the lessons we can learn from this specific example is that a David can effectively compete with a Goliath by offering a more convenient and easily accessible product. If your competitor's product is harder to get and/or more expensive than yours you can establish an advantage.

That's a really good point +1. I.e. Starcraft isn't available on Android phone, or others. So simply producing a clone with new IP, modified to support/play well on a new system is a great idea. I've always been looking at this from a game feature perspective, that I haven't once stopped to think about availability.

Absolutely. Another good example is Angry Birds; there were actually lots of games (mostly Flash games) built from exactly the same mechanics beforehand, but Angry Birds brought that catapult mechanic to iOS where it was particularly well suited to the touch screen and presented it in a very polished and accessible way. Availability, accessibility and pricing are excellent ways an indie can compete with and often out-do larger studios.

But lets pick a current/popular game like Star Craft,

I would start by listing why StarCraft sux. Then I would make something that is MUCH better (just "competing" makes no sense, beating to the ground is the *only* way to go). If I conclude that StarCraft does not sux (enough) then I would simply not make an RTS.

For instance, Dragon based RTS. How would I market that? Well, Perhaps the dragons are Steam Punk Dragons

Well, I think that's "weirdness" rather than going for a niche. Niche is not the same as "no normal person would play it". In general, I would not touch the theme, because theme is neutral, I would rather go for unique (I hate the word "unique", maybe a better one would be "fitting" or "interesting") mechanics.

Take a look at Minecraft or DwarfFortress, theme is pretty traditional there it's the mechanics that made these popular.