Hi,
Just out of curiosity, what succesfull recent titles can we think of, from non AAA studios?
(let's say from studios or groups of less then 20 people)

How do you define recent?

Depending on your definition of recent, the most obvious examples that comes to mind is minecraft. I am sure others can come up with many more.

Why do you ask?

What does "successful" mean? Towerfall was popular enough on the Ouya to get it ported to PC/PS4 and sell pretty well. The Ouya version was made by one guy.

Just out of curiosity how often it succeeds.
Towerfall and minecraft are good examples I believe

Many will enter, few will win.

Consider that many projects never make it past ideas into a design.

Many designs never begin implementation to a prototype.

Many early prototypes die off, few make it into complete products.

Many complete products never get polished to the point where they can compete in the marketplace.

Many of those that compete in the marketplace die in obscurity (the mobile stores see over 1000 new products every day).

Most of those non-obscure products tend to have a fairly small profit margin.

And the tiny percentage of those remaining titles make a fortune, and are then called "successful".



If you are making games in an attempt to get rich, you are probably better off in Vegas or hoping for a million dollar match in Powerball.

If you are making games in an attempt to get rich, you are probably better off in Vegas or hoping for a million dollar match in Powerball.

I hear this kind of point made pretty often when the discussion of "how to make money making games" or similar topics come up. I dislike it because it implies that there's a large factor of luck involved, or that luck is the determining factor in the success of a game. However I think that only applies to bad games (because they need luck or a really good marketing plan to succeed), and otherwise luck only helps shift the magnitude of success, but it doesn't decide success itself. At least in the vast majority of cases, a few outliers always exist of course.

Instead I think the quality of the game is the single largest factor in the success of the game. Of these 1000 products you mention that come out every day, I'd wager that 999 to 1000 of them are really bad games, with either no distinguishing quality characteristics or bad execution of a good idea. There are tons of indie post mortems around where developers lament their lack of success. And when you read these reports, they always have one thing in common: A bad game that nobody wanted to play. That isn't meant to be an attack on those indie devs of course. Making good games is very hard.

I guess I could also make my point by asking the question: Do you think there's an alternative universe where Minecraft ever completely dies in obscurity? I sure don't. Of course, there are probably a lot of conceivable universes where Notch doesn't end up getting his company bought by two billion dollars, but I think Minecraft would've been at least a moderate success no matter which way luck swings for Notch.

There is an enormous difference between "can I make a regular paycheck" and "can I become rich, buy several mansions, and never work again".

When people like the original poster make comments about "successful" games they are usually talking about the latter, not the former.

Working an an organization that consistently puts out good stuff, where some are runaway success and others are failures but the company balances them out and ensures everybody gets a steady paycheck, that's a common and likely situation.

But that is not what was asked. In fact, the question specifically excluded those. It was for those that are not organizations that happen to create a runaway success. Those are quite rare.

Yeah, there are plenty of people who make a living doing indie games, I wouldn't expect to make Notch level money, that's an anomaly. The guy who does the old school traditional RPGs..uhh spiderweb software? He's been at it since 1994 as a full time career. Zeboyd games is another recent group, they seem to be doing well for themselves, especially considering their humble beginnings as a XBLIG developer.

Success requires:

1) A decent game.

2) Publicity

3) A bit of luck.

Doing something that hasn't been done before, or serving an underserved niche can garner decent success. You'll note that I only said decent, not great game. Flappy bird was insanely popular, and it wasn't exactly the greatest game of all time. But most of the big successes have nice clear controls and UI. I have a hard time thinking of a really successful game that had crappy controls. Though I can think of several with kind of clunky UIs (hello WarThunder and World of Tanks...and well, just about every eastern european game ever)

Instead I think the quality of the game is the single largest factor in the success of the game.

Remember that Minecraft actually started getting popular while it was still buggy and incomplete.

There's loads! Steam is full of non-AAA content, just go look at the front page!!!
Depends how you define success though? Breaking even? Making enough money to continue making games?? Being able to sell your IP for two billion dollars???

The last PC/360/PS3 game that I worked on had a team under 30 staff (not counting executives, publishing and QA), and we just released the PS4/XBone port using probably under 10 staff.

For some perspective -- AAA games these days tend to have budgets in the $50-$100M range.
Independent games tend to be around the $1M to $3M range.
"Indie" games are done on a shoestring.

All the interesting stuff occurs in the ranges in between -- i.e. the shoestring-to-one-million range, and the three-million-to-fifty-million range.

I share an office with a dozen other indie studios (many of the two/three staff variety ), and most of them fall into the making-enough-money-to-continue-making-games category of success. You've probably never heard of any of them though, because they're not Notch

There's also tonnes of "indie" mega-hits that you've probably never heard of. A friend-of-a-friend quit his job and made Antichamber almost solo, and is now a millionaire. A different friend-of-a-friend was part of the two-man team that made Crossy Road and they expect to make 10 million from it... fuckers