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I fear no God. My discord is: ironfire_

I was a trans dungeon master fleeing tumblr.


eniko
@eniko

gamedevs always dispense the wisdom that you shouldn't make a platformer because the field is too crowded. if you ask me, that's wrong. the problem with making a platformer is that the gatekeepers, the people who decide which games to cover in the press and the people who decide which games get shown in events and showcases go "a platformer? meh"

people, in my experience, are actually pretty hungry for good platformers, it's just that the gatekeepers won't let you market one effectively which means your launch will almost certainly be dead in the water


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in reply to @eniko's post:

honestly I think the problem, isn't the market is saturated with platformers- but rather it's saturated with sub par platformers. A mario style platformer is one of the most tutorialised example games, so I'm guessing lots of inexperienced devs put out enough work you need to do something to make people sit up and take notice?

I could be wrong though, that's just my experience as a consumer.

this isn't the problem, but it's something that's easy to believe intuitively. if you're competing with low-effort or low-quality games then your game doesn't have the marketing behind it to propel it to success regardless of the quality

put another way: any game that has enough marketing power to be a commercial success is not competing with games of poor quality, regardless of how many of those poor quality games there are, because they're playing in entirely different leagues

I mean I think I broadly agree?
Developers with a full team, budget and publisher resources are definitely going to be in a different league compared to fresh solo devs. This is true of all genres though, right?

Kinda struggling to articulate what I'm thinking here. It doesn't help that my view of the market is heavily distorted as I lack hardware, time and funds to have played most of anything in the past 5, 10 yrs, but I've seen a few platformers gain traction. Penny's Big Breakaway I've seen get some coverage, for example, and pseudoregalia as well. though the'yre both 3d.

I dunno, I haven't spent much time reading the mags or sites recently but it seems like there's a cycle of styles (soulslikes, DOTAlikes, deckbuilders, survivorlikes) that have kinda booms of activity before settling down to a nominal base level. for your 2d metroidvanias it feels like there was a boom of them released 2010-2015, and excitement about them in the media is dying down .

in short, I think your're probably right? but in say, a few years people will be looking askance at rouguelite deckbuilding dungeoncrawlers in the same way. maybe. ??

Just FYI, many small team or individual indie devs have years, if not decades, of experience. Being 'fresh' isn't the main reason someone doesn't work for a large corporate dev team. (In my experience it was quite the opposite: those huge studios are often churning through entry-level devs at a fast rate.)

yes! many solo devs are well established and experienced. I mean to say simoultaneously fresh AND solo devs, without implying they are the same thing. i.e. the overlap of those two distinct categories.

not really sure there's a huge overlap between fresh and large corporate teams (sometimes amazon or similar will try to make a stab at it and usually make a hash of it, c.f. lumberyard, etc) but I can happily acknowledge that you do get smaller teams who are new to game dev.

apologies for any confusion!

Definitely true in part, but press hasn't been that relevant for a while (to get a million sales sure, but for indies they're just following what's already popular anyways).
I think there's another issue: Nintendo exists. They haven't made the best platformers recently, but in people's eyes it's still mostly all they need? They kinda set the bar so platformers have to do a lot more to stand out, even in their niche. It does mean that the potential audience is huge though.

Still, I'd say the average serious indie platformers do better than their puzzle games counterparts, which isn't as saturated a genre and doesn't have the same Nintendo issue. But it's very much ignored by the press too, so yeah I don't think the advice should be "don't do it, there are too many platformers already"

Oh yeah of course they still have an impact, especially the few times they talk about games that aren't already popular. It's more that the norm is them not talking about games.
That's why I'm always sad when I see journalists say there's no point in talking about some of the games they like or care about because noone reads it. It might not do guides or Ubisoft numbers, but even a mention or a tweet can change some devs' life

Yeah. That's why I call them gatekeepers. Because the only route to mainstream appeal is through them, but to get them to help you your game already has to have mainstream appeal (because an article about an obscure indie title won't get clicks and so won't generate revenue)

It's the worst catch 22