Have I Made Too Many Video Games?
Maybe.
I posted this article the other day in a Discord server:
My friend Shaun had this response:
There has been an explosion in production, but…Less games = Worse games.
…it means less people learning, less people are being given an opportunity to make a product … less innovating and less [accountability] for those big studios since they have less market competition … huge salute and hat tip to the creators who are making them.
I agree. Developers should get lots of experience making games.
Now, Vogel's article is about trying to make games for a living. As a hobbyist developer, the song is mostly not about me. I’m still contributing to the problem, but I’m not making games instead of having a normal job, contributing to society otherwise, etc. My productivity and inner life may be more compromised by Brotato.
And "released" can mean a few things:
Released to a smaller community e.g. the Discord server referred to above, or even made for one’s family and friends.
Released more widely, but in a hobbyist vein rather than a making-a-living vein. (often games on itch.io, especially in game jams, are released in this manner.)
Released with intent of making a living.
And the above is more of a spectrum than a set of pigeonholes.
Whereas Vogel’s article mainly concerns category (3), categories (1) and (2) still satisfy the requirement of games to “learn from”. I’ve considered hiding a number of my smaller game jam releases and eventually re-releasing them as a compilation. The world of itch.io does not in fact need 20 KKairos mini-games. At risk of self-aggrandizement, here are the KKairos platformers listed on itch.io, and it’s not exhaustive. Are there too many of them?
And in any case, what now? If you came to this post seeking a fully-thought-out solution…I have none.
I'd like to get a game on Steam that makes some money, but even if it really takes off, I'm not quitting my day job. I do think more devs could stand to do jams of games that fall mostly in categories 1 and 2, and build up to their one or two that become very widely intended 3.0 releases. From there, if the people want more, there's always the option of polishing or packaging older things.
Shaun is right to say that developers need a way to get better and fewer games not only won’t necessarily mean better, but could easily mean worse. I also don't mean to devalue the niche or special little things that come from creators. But I'm still inclined to agree with Vogel that some people are chasing dreams unproductively and, as you can probably tell, this is a point of conscience-examination for me.
Those are my thoughts, my piddling ethical vectors. I welcome yours.
NB: I have lots of collaborators, especially, lately, Zephyr and 909crime.
You know I think you do have the answer already ;). (and apologies in advance for the novel)
That original article is so deeply unserious and badly reasoned/researched that I'm tempted to tear it apart, but I see that's already been done in the comments, so I'll resist ;).
More relevant to your post tho, I do think there's a lot of tension between... let's call them publication maximalists and publication minimalists. The former think we should publish ALL THE THINGS and the latter think that publication should be carefully controlled for quality by professionals. And in a society where publication takes a lot of resources (say, typesetting books by hand), it makes sense to limit publication to the most worthy works. But that comes with a lot of downsides! If nothing else it tends to suppress works by BIPOC people, disabled folks, queer folks, and really anything out of the mainstream. It means truly great works sometimes won't be published because they didn't fit the system, or because the authors just didn't think they were good enough to meet the standards - or even just because they applied to the wrong publisher! And so on.
So I think it shouldn't be controversial to say that since digital publishing makes it is cheap and easy to publish everything that somebody wants to publish, we should just... do that. It doesn't take much energy, it helps preservation, it means that people get to experience amazing things which would have otherwise languished. It does cause a bit of a curation problem, but hey, that's what reviewers and youtubers and streamers and such are for. Obviously this is still controversial, and maybe at its most extreme in the book world, where you have one group that thinks everything should be self-published and one that doesn't even acknowledge that self-publishing exists.
But that doesn't actually answer the question in your title, which is have you *made* too many games. There is, I think, an error that a lot of indie devs make which goes something like this:
1. I want to make games which do something unique and different (of course we do!)
2. I need to practice making games to get good at it
3. Therefore I will make a lot of games until I am good at it!
And so they enter a game jam every month and have an itch.io full of tiny games. And this isn't necessarily wrong! If your goal is to make weird little tiny games, hurray, you've done it! It's even possible to make a living doing this if you make a bunch of popular web games and sell ads on them.
But if your goal is to make something bigger or denser or more polished or just *different*, I'm not convinced that doing game jams over and over again or making lots and lots of little games actually helps with that goal. I think it's often a big distraction to think that you need to *finish* a bunch of little games (getting it to that state takes a lot of busywork), when the hard part isn't churning those out, it's growing the scope, organizing a bigger project, finding collaborators, figuring out how to implement that truly unique mechanic, finding your voice, etc. Is it better to release 4 games a year or one game every 2 years? Just depends on your goals!
And that's why if you look at my itch.io you'll see a few game jams done with friends and nothing else. It's not that I haven't made games for practice, it's that I get them to tech demo stage and leave them when I think I've learned everything I can from them. The next game I put on itch.io will be something I intend to sell and also put on steam, and I expect to average maybe 1 game a year or two up to 5-6 games, which I expect will be my total life's work - and the last couple of games will be huge in scope, which I hopefully will be able to spend a decade+ on. I know I just don't have that many good ideas, but I think the good ideas I have are good enough to publish! And I think that's the right approach for me.
But that's absolutely not the only approach! Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I would reach my goals faster if I published more smaller projects! Maybe the people calling for more mid-sized games are correct! Everybody just has to decide for themselves.
So in other words, if you're asking, having made them should you *publish* all those games, I think the answer is clear: publish them if you want to! There's even value in half-finished stuff, maybe not many players will play them, but what if some aspiring developer plays one and gets a great idea! A few megabytes on a server somewhere are not causing the potholes to not be fixed (lol, lmao). The ethical framing in the original essay is just weird. I've spent thousands of hours practicing trumpet; if I recorded a bunch of that and published it on youtube would that be bad somehow? Might be silly, but not *harmful*.
So like:
> I do think more devs could stand to do jams of games that fall mostly in categories 1 and 2, and build up to their one or two that become very widely intended 3.0 releases.
I just... don't think it actually matters if you hit the "public" dropdown on itch.io or not. That's absolutely the least important thing here, and it's entirely a personal decision! And I don't think *intent* really matters either. The important thing is, if you want that 3.0 release, make sure you're doing that instead of making yet another 1.0. Make the games you want to make. It's that simple.