if there's one piece of gamedev advice i want to beam directly into every indie dev's head, it's that if you made a mildly financially successful indie game, under NO circumstances should you make a direct narrative sequel. you might think you're keeping all your original audience while expanding the quality to entice a new one, but the actual result is that you've shrunk your entire prospective audience to the list of people who've already bought, played, and liked the first game. please trust me on this
Your local Librarianon
- He/Him
Writer, TF Finatic, Recohoster, and Game dev. Wasnt able to post here as much as I liked, but I'll miss it and all of yall. Till we meet again, friends!
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in reply to @hthrflwrs's post:
my personal strategy is to just read a bunch of articles on the blog of https://howtomarketagame.com/blog/
i think a lot about this chart in particular (via https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/01/25/what-are-the-top-selling-indie-games-of-2023/):
woe to the developer who reads this and decides they're going to hit an underserved market by developing a fighting game as their 2nd release
the action roguelike deck builder sexually explicit fighting management simulator will surely pay off
bought, played, liked, AND probably finished. Which, if you have steam achievements related to progress, you'll be able to tell is probably less than half of everyone who played it
I love these posts of yours they are so helpful!
This one's been screencapped and added to my planning document /moodboard
Also even of those completed players how many will be in "played and enjoyed but rolling credits closed the book on the experience and less inclined to go back" headspace? Talking personally and anecdotally but idk why but games are much more of a "finish it and then done" thing for me than books/movies/shows/etc, it's why I so rarely find myself interested even in playing DLC for narrative-centered games, even if I really enjoyed the core game...
your market research strategy of "what the queer speedrunners who post too much will enjoy" does seem to pay off
