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Games don't need venture capitalism

69 点作者 kyriefh超过 1 年前

9 条评论

klik99超过 1 年前
5 years ago I would have agreed, VCs invested in games, rather than studios and most games never get released, let alone be successful if they are released. Rovio is a good example of that time period. But so many games people have exited and formed their own VC studios, or hired people who get games, and the focus has switched to investing in teams which is way better.<p>So while it&#x27;s true that &quot;games don&#x27;t need VC&quot;, yeah there is a huge market for smaller games, and what success means for 1-4 person team is vastly smaller than a big game, there is also a place for large VC funded teams. I think this article is really saying &quot;games shouldn&#x27;t be funded by VC&quot; which I think is just wrong.<p>Just like any VC, you want the VC to understand your industry, which games is hugely misunderstood by people who haven&#x27;t worked in games. The VC has to understand what&#x27;s valuable, which is a team that ships and works well together, not a particular game idea. Alternatively invest in a technology that is being built for the game, which is the Tencent approach and either use buy the tech if it works out or sell it. Either way, don&#x27;t invest in a particular game product. Failures don&#x27;t mean the model doesn&#x27;t work, and successes without it doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not needed. VC is one of many ways to get from point A to point B and if depends on the project - if you have an idea that needs rocket fuel and you&#x27;re willing to take the risk that rocket fuel entails, then it can make a lot of sense. But it&#x27;s def not the only way.
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orbital-decay超过 1 年前
<i>&gt; the all-time concurrent user (CCU) record on Steam was just claimed by Palworld</i><p>Was it? PUBG had &gt; 3.2 millions concurrent players at the peak, and it&#x27;s about 1.3M for Palworld. Sure it&#x27;s growing faster but it&#x27;s still nowhere near that.
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jmyeet超过 1 年前
This is ancient Internet history at this point but does anyone remember Rovio? In the early days of the iPhone&#x2F;iPad they made a large amount of money with the Angry Birds franchise, even licensing the IP to a movie (or was it 2?). In 2011 Rovio took ~$40 million in VC funding and I distinctly remember thinking &quot;well, that&#x27;s over&quot;.<p>Creative ventures don&#x27;t scale. You cannot reduce them to a magic and infinitely-repeatable formula no matter how hard people try. People try and that&#x27;s why we get the exact same summer blockbuster movies every year, 20+ years of superhero movies just rehashing old IP, endless sequelss, annual Call of Duty releases, FIFA&#x2F;Madden annual micro-transaction hell and so on.<p>VC funding works what you&#x27;re doing is repeatable otherwise it doesn&#x27;t.
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hresvelgr超过 1 年前
Games in this day and age ideally need generous government subsidy to be successful.<p>I feel we&#x27;re a long way off universal basic income worldwide so at the very least, something like an artist&#x27;s living wage provided by the government is a necessity to produce good independent video games. Most professional indie developers tend to survive rather than thrive, barely kept afloat by money from publishers who also have their own interests and influence which affect the final result.<p>There would be kinks to iron out in terms of who gets the wage and how it&#x27;s kept and so on, but the funding really needs to come from an entity that is largely divorced from the &quot;success&quot; of the game. Bit of a pipe dream, but it&#x27;s nice to think about.
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meheleventyone超过 1 年前
This article is a bit stating the status quo because games have largely not been funded by VC for most of their lifetime. Although saying that I’ve worked at three venture backed studios in two decades. Although these have all been focused around ‘bigger ideas’ rather than a single game.<p>I would say the days of crowdfunding being a sensible strategy for early stage funding isn’t true anymore. Rather it’s a great way to spend money to help build a community early on. You need a lot of work and good production value to attract attention.<p>Games funding itself feels like it’s in a tricky place. Even “indie” titles are getting up into budgets of $1-2 million and obviously on the other end of the scale there’s non-stop complaining about how AAA costs are out of control versus the money consumers are willing to spend. Then there feels like a scattershot of smaller publishers that are to an extent preying on starry eyed kids making their first game where budgets offered are unsustainably small and promises to help with discovery never happen.<p>From a developer perspective VC seems a lot more attractive as well. Typically less onerous to get, different kind of working relationship, doesn’t eat into revenue and the numbers are higher! But you have to be making something very specifically interesting to the people investing and have a team pedigree they recognise.
kyriefh超过 1 年前
hiya, author here. Palworld is a wild, wild game (think pokemon meets ark:survival evolved, or simply pokemon with guns), and it follows a number of other super-successful indie games that got made with no VC funding. i myself work heavily within the VC ecosystem, so it got me thinking about how games and VC tie together. while the article is written in an opinionated manner, i don&#x27;t mean to present it as fact - more some musings and steelmanning of why VCs aren&#x27;t needed
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zokier超过 1 年前
Isn&#x27;t the traditional publishing model essentially same as VC? Publishers invest in game projects, acknowledging that many will be duds but some will be hits?
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Madmallard超过 1 年前
They need something. I&#x27;ve been trying to crack into this space for a better part of a decade. Ideas that come naturally to me that I spend hundreds of hours on end up being limited by ludicrous amount of art requirements to be considered acceptable in my mind to the public audience. I&#x27;m not interested in releasing an 8-bit (but looks worse somehow) pixel art clone of a popular genre. I want to make something truly interesting. Well, do you have a studio of artists ready to work for the next year or two? No? Well, good luck then.
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spacemarine1超过 1 年前
I think early equity funding has a role to play in video games… a role that’s very similar to YC. So I started EGG:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elbowgreasegames.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elbowgreasegames.com&#x2F;</a>
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