When I surveyed the guests on the HTMAG Discord, one of the most consistent feedback items I received was that people are tired of the debate as to whether success in game development comes down to luck or skill. Nobody has ever successfully won this debate and everyone else listening to the debate wants to move on to a new subject.
To prevent that debate from taking over the server again, and making people mad, I am listing out the argument for both sides so that you can look at them and cheer along with the side you like and yell at the side you don’t like.
Please don’t bring this debate to the server. If you see an argument that is not listed here, please email me at chrisz ~AT~ howtomarketagame.com and I will add it to the list.
Game development success is all luck
- There are many good games that are interesting but not all of them take off and go viral. It is clearly luck!
- Sometimes the answer to “why didn’t X game do well” is just “it didn’t get lucky.”
- Game X failed and it is almost exactly like Game Y. See? luck!
- Success isn’t tied directly to game quality. Therefore, luck!
- If you happen to enjoy making one of the popular genres, that’s luck.
- Reddit success is largely luck that depends on who sees it first, if it’s the group that hates indie sunday then they downvote no matter what and then it gets seen by no one.
- Due to some random coincidence, the momentum of initial upvotes can propel it up the algorithm and then it rides the wave of likes and upvotes + algorithm featuring, or the same post tank due to an initial hurdle of haters/downvoters.
- Say your game is good and nobody is playing it, then one day the streamer covers it, you would think that the game got lucky when in fact the game was just good. Luck would be here perhaps that it got into Streamer’s radar, but even that can be countered by just saying that they did marketing.
Game development success is all skill
- Actually, luck is being prepared for opportunities. Because when they come your way and you don’t have the means to use them… They’re gone forever.
- There’s luck to making a game that resonates/appeals more to people, but even then you still have to work to put yourself out there, right, cant go viral if you never post anything
- In card games, that’s often part of the strategy. You “play to your outs” and set up your strategy to be able to capitalize on whatever draw can win you the game. When a high level player “draws exactly what they needed” it’s because they’ve been putting in work to be able to capitalize on that lucky draw in advance and turn it into a win.
- It is actually hard work but it looks like luck from people who haven’t seen all the work that goes into making a successful game.
- Even if someone “randomly” finds your game, you had to do certain things to make them want to check it out, click on it, buy it, install it, etc. Or if you gave them a free key and they just finally decided to play it, you put in that effort to reach out, etc.