Aka: The Robert Muldoon theory of genre breakout hits
Raptors never attack the same place twice. They were testing the fences for weaknesses systematically. They remember.
Robert Muldoon
This is one of my favorite parts of one of my favorite movies.
BTW Robert Muldoon never skips leg day. That guy has got gams for miles.
Remember in Jurassic park there was this Paddock and the raptors figured out how and when to break free when the fences failed?
If I could extend this metaphor… there is a similar Indie Obscurity Paddock. Success lays outside the walls, we are stuck inside hidden from the world. Indies want to get out. (Maybe that is why they call it a “breakout hit.”) To get out though, you have to find a weakness and exploit it.
Each one of these weaknesses in the fence is a genre for which we can escape from obscurity and reach success. For instance, there is a hole for Horror (which is big), or City Builder (also big), or pixelart platformers and puzzle games (which are tiny).
The problem is we can’t see those holes. We can only know if they are there by touching the fence. When you release a game you are essentially testing that piece of the fence to see if it is weak enough to let you out so you have have a break out hit.
Now you could just run at a fence at full speed and see if there is actually a hole in there to escape. But this is what will happen:
Sometimes indies (by sure dumb luck) get it right. You typically hear this all the time on r/gamedev or on twitter threads:
I did no market research, no marketing, I just did what was in my heart and created the type of game I wanted to play.
Those indies who post success threads on r/gamedev
They did it and managed to escape! I don’t doubt that they did no research. But essentially, if there are 10,000 indies all throwing themselves at fences all day, every day, by sheer dumb luck one of them is going to find that hole.
That can work! But the carnage and absolute bloodbath of that strategy makes my heart sink. Every single one of those “failed” developers who were electrocuted by the fence were “making the game that was in their heart and trusting their gut.” But we only hear about the successful developers who trusted their gut and managed to escape.
If you are going to spend months (or god help you, years) making a game, why would you want to just blindly throw yourself at a fence hoping for the best?
Clever Girl! Follow the Leader
What if there was an alternative to throwing yourself blindly at the fence. What if we were one of the clever raptors in the paddock? What if we just sat back, waited 10 extra seconds to see which raptor broke through, and which ones crashed into the wall and then just follow right behind the ones who made it!
That seems like an obvious way of doing things right?
I mean at least raptors “remember” and “never attack the same place twice.” I can’t say the same about indie game developers trying to get through the Pixel Platformer hole:
Market Research
There is a name for waiting to see who escaped, it is called doing market research.
So before we run at top speed towards the fence, let’s be clever girls and observe first. See who broke through, see where they went, what they did, and then follow closely behind them.
Sure the first raptor through the fence will probably earns the most money (This is called first mover’s advantage) but being raptor #2 isn’t THAT much worse and it is a hell of a lot better than being a raptor that ran into a fully electrified fence. I call this the “you first” strategy.
Old Dead Raptor from Deviant art
But I want to be the first raptor through the fence!
You really, really want to do something crazy?!? You want to mix genres even though I told you it was very very risky! You want to make a wholesome-first-person-shooter. You want to make a deck-builder-horror-golfing game set on mars. I consider those risky bets. But, I understand you want to be the first one through the fence.
What if, instead of backing up 100 yards and running at that untested piece of fence at 80 miles per hour, you just walk up to the fence, brush your tail lightly across it. If you don’t see sparks it might mean there is a weakness there and THEN you back up and start running at it at 80 miles per hour.
How do you lightly brush your tail against a fence in the world of indie game development? Well first, if you are taking a big bet and mixing two untested genres, don’t spend 3 years and spin up a huge development team to test your theory. Instead, do a small game jam project. Maybe make a mod first and release it for free.
In fact, mods and free games are how MOST novel genres are discovered.
Here, let me prove it to you.
Tower defense
The modern genre conventions of Tower Defense came from the Warcraft III mods Element TD and Gem Tower Defense.
About Desktop Tower Defense
Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBAs)
Wildly popular League of Legends, isn’t original. The genre arguably got its start from Aeon of Strife (AoS) a free custom map for Starcraft.
Battle Royales
The original “last-man-standing” genre came from a 2013 mod of a mod. Let me explain…. Arma 2 was a stand alone game which had a mod called DayZ. Then Brendan Greene created a mod for it called “DayZ: Battle Royale.” Then South Korean game company Krafton hired Greene to make the standalone premium game called PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (it has since gone F2P.)
“The community in Arma was really helpful. I created my own DayZ server for people to play on, messed with loot tables, created more weapons . . . After doing that for about six months, I decided I wanted to make a mod. I basically modded a mod.”
Brendan Greene
Minecraft
Most of the core mechanics for Minecraft came from a free open source project by Zactronics called Infiniminer. When the source code for the game was leaked, fans went crazy and started modding in new modes. That is a good sign! But, Zactronics halted development after the leak and Notch picked up where Infiniminer left off to make Minecraft.
Spelunky
2D Roguelikes are one of Indie Games most popular genre mashups to make and one of the reasons indies think that their primary duty is to cross breed everything.
But if you read Derek Yu’s book about the development of Spelunky you will find that Spelunky actually started as a small experiment released for free. Here is the timeline published in his book:
- September 22, 2008 Spelunky Classic beta release
- December 21, 2008 Spelunky Classic first public release
- December 25, 2009 Spelunky Classic v1.1 released
- July 4, 2012 Spelunky released on XBLA
Notice that it is a quick 3 month development cycle then he released it for free so he could get feedback all before he released the full, paid game on Xbox.
After months of working silently, it was a great relief that the game was well-received, and scrolling through the thread was like reading the banter of actual explorers eager to share their exploits with one another… This positive feedback loop was exactly what I was hoping for, and I rode it hard for the next three months, preparing to unleash the game on the rest of the world.
Derek Yu in Spelunky from Boss Fight Books
Furthermore, the free game marketed it for him:
Those initial beta testers became the first ambassadors for the game, helping to convert new players on TIGForums, and those new converts converted other players, and so on, until the game spread to other forums and blogs. The fact that Spelunky was free made it easy to try it to see what all the fuss was about, and if players didn’t like it, many of them were still inclined to express their opinion, which only increased its appeal.
Derek Yu in Spelunky from Boss Fight Books
Derek proved it was a successful genre mashup by doing quick development, and lowering the bar of entry by releasing it for free. Development on the successful Spelunky HD release on Xbox that most people think of, didn’t start until he had already validated that the new genre was good.
That beta was him brushing his raptor tail on the fence.
Game Jam games
Last year I wrote about the success of Peglin and Dome Keeper. Both of those games started as quick week-long game jam games that were released for free on itch.io. In both cases the developers only decided to go all in on development after fans were begging them for more levels or they could see that the number of downloads dwarfed their other free games.
Life Finds a Way (How to innovate responsibly)
Ok, enough raptor talk, back to reality. Last week I wrote about how it is incredibly risky to create all these wild genre mashups. I estimate that only 11% of the top 400 indie games released in 2022 were true, novel genre mashups.
Steam fans don’t really like 100% original games. They like slight variations on their favorites.
So how are games so diverse? How do we get new genres instead of regurgitating the same old over and over again?
Most new genres emerge from free mods or free cheap games created quickly. With a free game, the barrier is so low that players are willing to take a chance on them. The graphics of these games are usually very low quality or sourced from existing games. They also don’t make a ton of money.
Only after the free, cheap, and quick experiment proves to be something fans are BEGGING for more do the developers commit fully to long development.
Look at Brendan Greene and Krafton during the development of PUBG. Krafton saw his novel mashup of last man standing, open world survival games did well as a free mod. It proved there was a viable market there. Then they leveraged the success of the free mod into a standalone, more polished, game that they could charge money for.
3 ways to a long career innovating and not getting electrocuted
Option 1: (Brushing the fence with your tail)
If you want to be an innovator and create a 100% novel genre or at least novel mashup genre, your best bet is to keep things SUPER lean. You can make cheap mods for a popular existing game which allows you to reuse their assets and code. OR you can make quick week-end-long game jam games with your mashup and release them for free on itch.io.
In this option, development time is super short, cost is low, output is high. Then you watch to see what fans react to. If it turns out nobody is interested in your mashup experiment, move on. That fence is still very strong and there is no weakness here. If there is a LOT of interest (such as people making mods of your mods) or begging you to make more content for your free game, you have something. You can now go off, hire up a big team, go for funding, get a publisher, spend YEARS and millions making your game.
Essentially you brushed your tail against the electric fence, saw it had a weakness, so you backed up and ran full force at that section of the fence and broke through.
Option 2: (Watch someone else go first)
Maybe you want to get right into development and skip the prototype phase and go with a more expensive development with a bigger team and better graphics. With this option, you study the market carefully. You see what genres are hitting. Maybe look to do what Krafton did and hire a designer who made a popular mod and make a full game out of it.
Or you do deep research and study the market. You play all games in the genre. You don’t innovate as much, just make slight 10%-20% changes to the formula of the game that broke through.
Option 3: (Pray and run for it)
Or you do neither small experiments or extensive market research and just run for it and go all in on a very risky idea and pray that you magically find that gap in the defenses
I shared this graph last week:
Basically it shows that the bigger your risk, the quicker and cheaper your should make your game. The worst thing you could do would be to take a big genre risk AND create a huge multi-year game.
Image credits
