Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Just saw this very recent interview with the awesome Richard Garriott, Lord British: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m60SbCPdfQI

Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.

The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most..

Can we bring that back somehow?

Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads (and non-game media).

And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.

Now, we have infinitely easier tools, an infinite amount of inspiration, and there is a lot of incredible creativity in the indie game scene, but the discoverability seems worse:

The most popular platforms, iOS, Android, consoles, are notoriously difficult to get a game on and make money from, especially for a kid.

On the other hand there's too much low-effort slop to sift through (which was also a problem during the 1980s)

Seems like what we need most is better discoverability, filtering, and low-friction monetization that isn't ads..

>And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.

I find it unlikely that we will have another once-in-a-century opportunity to be there at the opening of a new frontier like the home computer boom was or the internet revolution that closely followed it.

Maybe it's my pessimism speaking, but the AI boom most definitely doesn't feel the same opportunity wise.

I think this opportunity for AI has come and gone. The era you're talking about for generative AI - the SpaceWar to Pong era - was roughly from AI Dungeon until Cursor. Now we're in the Quake to Half-Life where it's still pretty early but it's clear what direction things are going, hardware capabilities aren't there yet, the market is not satiated and there are still things left to invent. We're not at the GTA6 era yet.

We won't be at the GTA6 era until Rockstar publishes it and LLMs can rip it off.

When is the last time you have opened itch.io and bought a couple of games?

The reason this isnt happening that much anymore is that the standards for games have increased for the average consumer, so development costs have increased to fit those standards. And even then, publishing your game in a monetizable way is hard and often requires starting capital now.

And when it is happening, it is happening on roblox. When is the last time you have opened roblox? It is more or less exactly what you want -- teenagers make either simple games or free copies of more popular games and then fill them with microtransactions to make money.

> When is the last time you have opened itch.io and bought a couple of games?

Guilty (∪ _ ∪) It was months ago.

but.. to be fair, I haven't purchased any music in years either, but I listen to music all the time; everyone just streams it now.

Can something similar be done for games? That's what the "low-friction monetization" was for.

Like some mechanism where you can go to itch.io and just play in the browser, and the creator gets paid for it somehow? Some itch.io PS+-like subscription maybe?

> but.. to be fair, I haven't purchased any music in years either, but I listen to music all the time; everyone just streams it now.

And the margins on streaming for the artists are quite low. I don't think I would want that for developers.

But also, this kinda exists in roblox, where the games are free but have lots of microtransactions, since roblox uses a digital currenct mtx model, it does kinda lower friction for the users of the platform who play multiple games and spend money on them.

But, I may be being unfair, but Roblox imposes a certain aesthetic and feel that if you don't like that aesthetic, you're not gonna like any game on Roblox heh

It needs to be a more open platform like itch.io

I think what youre looking for is what Tim Sweeney describes in the article with UE6 integrating into fortnite as an ecosystem for game development. Look forward to the future for that I guess

That sounds even worse tbh

We should be de-siloing, not more siloing

Discoverability has been the biggest problem for small devs at least before I left the industry in 2018. It’s great Richard Garriot found an audience going up against 5 other games that were released at the time. Nowadays it’s thousands per month plus the ever growing backlog.

People also love to pick the outliers like Balatro to point out how feasible a small indie team is. There were thousands of other games released that made $0 dollars and found 10 players for every Balatro. The p90 outcome is barely a sustainable small business in game dev unless you live in literal poverty

> Can we bring that back somehow?

All the tools are there, and lots of people are doing it already. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from "bringing that back".

This worked because it was new and the big industry hadn't made it into an assembly line yet. The first person to make a car surely got rich, you can't get rich making a new car today because you compete with the professional car makers. What's the next new thing that doesn't have an assembly line?

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