I just don’t find in practice the latter to be too much of a problem, but it could be I’m just less concerned with that stuff. I’ve worked on a bunch of indie games with different studios and my primary takeaway is that people have an awful lot of ideas about what is or is not commercially viable while in reality commercial success looks much more random than people think.
I’ve found certain things to be true, like that not having a distinct identity or feel to your work isn’t always the kiss of death but it can make it tough to get noticed, etc., and that can be a big deal.
But mostly what I’ve found is there’s very little pattern to what succeeds and what doesn’t. A lot of it is just the vagaries of public attention, plus access to all the stupid little platforms and organizations that you need now to get eyes on your work. I’ve seen I feel almost every scheme or concept of what makes a “commercially viable work” both succeed and fail at this point. The public is fickle.
I feel like 2008-2012 indie games was kind of always about this back and forth of, you know, how much do you need to compromise your vision? How much do you need to sell out? But sitting here today I feel like my favourite work that’s out there has mostly just side stepped this issue completely. I think this is a problem that can make you crazy, or set you up fighting a lot of big forces and trends that don’t exist or don’t matter.
I think in a lot of ways the best thing for me was to work on a ton of “surefire hits” entirely designed by “market geniuses” with no real ideas or drive to create or personal will—people who felt that making games was itself a game, one about optimization and mimicry and glad-handing and reading all the books called like “Thinkgood: hack your brain for fun and profit, by Dr. Genius Smartington”—and then watching every single one of those titles instantly plummet off a cliff into obscurity. None of them made their money back. Some made literally tens of dollars—like no-name “I just released my hobby game on Steam” amounts of money.
I still got paid, which was good, and usually I managed to get out when the writing was on the wall and not get stuck in the layoff wave.
But it really disabused me of the notion that it’s worth ever thinking that you know what a commercial success looks like, much less that you can engineer one. So when people now talk about commercial compromise I just think… I mean compromise what? For what? And why?
Commercial compromise to me now is like putting on a nice shirt when relatives are coming over. I’m happy to dress up my ideas a little bit if I need to. Fix that motion tween. Maybe get some more sound effects in there if that’ll make them happy. It’s kind of why I tell people to just always try to work on what you actually want to work on as much as you can, because you just don’t know how close to failure you really are. And whenever people are like “no, the new thing is MARKETING FIRST games, that come ready with MEMES and an ACTIVE DISCORD” you can just remind yourself that those people are months from losing their shirt anyway, just like 99% of the behavioural psych hackers and the “I must bare my maudlin suburban soul to the public” young white indie dudes were before them.
The industry is like a really big bear. Sometimes it eats you, but sometimes it eats somebody who’s very full of themselves and that’s funny. Then those people usually go into crypto and make millions while this bear is still gnawing on my leg, so who can say.
Edit: I also think it’s worth pointing out, while on the topic of risk and failure, that it’s not so bad to fail as long as you don’t put yourself in a position where it’s going to kill you. The trick mostly is failing with somebody else’s money. Every AAA game I’ve worked on except for one has flopped, and probably half the indie games I’ve worked on flopped too. Big whoop. As long as you don’t, to bring this one back, sell your house to make your dream game (yikes), you can probably just dust yourself off and do it again.
