so like, i've been thinking about how a lot of gamedev advice is filtered through the lens of capitalism. plenty of best practices for professional devs involve selling as many copies as possible, which makes sense, gamedev is a job like any other. but a consistent theme that comes up with that is the need to stand out among the pack.
because, look, most games on steam or itch.io have never been bought, let alone played. they are full games just left to rot on a storepage, the hard work of one or multiple people just fucking dashed by the reality of the market. so a lot of advice for how to sell a game, is really advice for how to be not like those games.
this was made most explicit to me in jai kristjan's book, We Deserve Better Villains, a so-called video game design survival guide that talks often about a desire for your game to not end up in the bargain bin like so many games do. but this is a really revealing framing, isn't it? bargain bins are kind of a fixture of stores, nobody's denying that they should exist or will exist. it's just a deep wound to find your own game on there. it's kind of like the way people will often demean someone working a low-paying job, but never deny that someone has to clean the bathrooms. it's a very individualist way of looking at game development, where every other developer is competition that you either beat or lose to.
i don't know. i'm not exactly an activist, i don't know how to approach this. but when i look at just how many tactics rpg's on steam have sold for less than i've paid to make this game happen, i'm given this feeling of "oh fuck, that could very easily happen to me." so the question becomes, is this okay, and if not, how do we change that? i can't really change a capitalist system whose art market centers on an attention economy, if anything i'm contributing to it by releasing a game on these platforms. it's a lot easier to say "rip to them but i'll be different." but it's also hard to see thousands of artists walk face first into their own doom and think "this is how it should be." because something is clearly wrong here, and i don't think it's just thousands of individual failures solely on them. that is a coward's framing for people who want to think they've earned their success.
