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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

This is ancient Internet history at this point but does anyone remember Rovio? In the early days of the iPhone/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 "well, that's over".

Creative ventures don't scale. You cannot reduce them to a magic and infinitely-repeatable formula no matter how hard people try. People try and that'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/Madden annual micro-transaction hell and so on.

VC funding works what you're doing is repeatable otherwise it doesn't.

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I think you actually can reduce a lot of it to a formula. Most major games that come out are basically a modern remake of something that already exists and was popular.

Just rehashing the same concepts and improving them is a pretty solid strategy.

This strategy won’t create the Minecrafts and Stardew vallies, but it covers the bulk of game development.

Even Stardew Valley was basically just improving on the existing, popular concepts found in the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory series (among others).

Indeed, if you play Harvest Moon, it's quite interesting just how much Stardew Valley copies.

I don't really like this argument because it reduces down to "all art is derivative". While true, it's not really useful. It leads to things like there being only 37 possible stories [1] and people pointing out how Shakespeare is derivative, which is a true but essentially useless statement.

Even if a story is exactly the same, like going to see a Shakespeare play, we still do it because the performance matters, the interpretation matters and the direction matters. And that's before you get into reskins of the same story (eg Taming of the Shrew -> Ten Things I Hate About You).

So the structural similarity is wroth noting and examining but it really has nothing to do with the execution, with how the movie or story or video game looks, plays or how it makes the user feel..

[1]: https://www.openculture.com/2020/08/37-possible-stories.html

That's not quite what I'm saying. I'm suggesting that there is a formula and predictability to successful games. If you do something pretty much the same as the thing that succeeded several times previously, it's more likely to succeed again than a wildly novel idea.

Far Cry is a perfect example.

They hit upon a working formula in 3 and every game after has basically been the same game in a different environment.

When the original FC came out, if you had told me it would end up being what it is, I wouldn't have believed you.

But FC1, 2, and 3 were all such vastly different games it's obvious in hindsight they were fishing in many ways.

For the record, while I do like the FC formula, I haven't played the latest one because not enough time has passed for me to enjoy it (since it's all basically the same).

imo 2 is the best in the series if you can forgive it's flaws (like soldiers constantly re-spawning). I don't think I've ever experienced a more immersive game.

> You cannot reduce them to a magic and infinitely-repeatable formula

The formula is:

> blockbuster movies every year, 20+ years of superhero movies just rehashing old IP, endless sequelss, annual Call of Duty releases, FIFA/Madden annual micro-transaction hell and so on

These are very successful businesses. You might not like them as a gamer, but I don't know why you said it like they're some failures. They're not OpenAI but clearly are printing money. From an investor's point of view that's what matters.

Games in particular do not have to be that novel. People are still playing chess which hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. There is plenty of money to be made in just remaking the same concept but for the latest hardware with the latest technology.

The counter argument for this is emulators. An extraordinary amount of effort is made by people, largely for free, to play otherwise dead games from dead platforms.

Reskins of games with flashier graphics has some demand but game studios largely don’t do this. New content is created for the annual CoD game rather than simply reskinning the old game, remasters notwithstanding.

The base concept of CoD is the same each time though. If you liked the last one, you'll likely like the next one. It's predictable which means you can pour a lot more money in to it since you know there is a customer base for it.

The fact that they are printing money doesn't make them a success. We aren't earning anything based on this money printing. We're getting a qualitatively worse product for more money, which we accept because in a lot of ways we've been conditioned to believe there isn't any other way.

I feel like you understand they're not a success, because you recognise that "you might not like them as a gamer". This is the target audience.

I’m not sure I agree. Disney and Pixar lives and dies on being able to repeat success. And both have lived for quite a while now.

Rovio was extremely conscious about not building an empire on top of angry birds, as that dad would eventually fade and they needed a new thing. They were aiming to be the next Disney, but of games and smartphones, not cinema and tv.

I’m surprised they took $40 million in VC as that sounds like it must have been Pennie’s to Rovio during angry bird mania.

Pixar is a perfect example. They had a focus on technological prowess, pioneering animation and storytelling under Steve Jobs that became part of their DNA. There was huge cultural inertia.

Since the Disney acquisition it’s mostly been recycling old IP into sequels.

Everything you gave Jobs credit for was actually the work of John Lassetter. Pixar was floundering under Jobs' leadership. Lassetter had the Disney connection that saved the company. Jobs nearly killed the Disney deal many times, and due to his abysmal negotiating skills Disney ended up owning the rights to all of the films and characters made by Pixar (i.e., essentially everything of value).

Just sharing, as I just looked it up: Rovio was bought by Sega last yeae for $776m. They've had over $300m yearly revenue in 2022, though not profitable.

That is wild to me that they could not be profitable. That is so much money stemming from some mobile games. Games from the outside have limited production values vs AAA titles.

Do they spend it all on promotional material to not get out competed by the next mobile venture? Or is it just ever increasing team sizes? M&A gone wrong?

The top 1% are the lucky ones. That is it, game development is as hard as any other artistic form, and or even worse, given how many titles are launched per day.

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