Explore the fantasy worlds, books, and artwork of R.L. Douglas, including the immersive Globiuz and Stratius series, and its expanding lore.
Game Dev Dreams vs. Game Dev Reality
If you’ve ever fantasized about building the next Stardew Valley from your bedroom, this article is like someone gently (okay, not gently) tapping you on the shoulder and saying: “Hey… you might want to rethink a few things.”
Douglas breaks down the psychology of gamers, the brutal economics of the industry, and the delusions that sink most indie studios before they even ship a demo. It’s not cynical — it’s honest. And that honesty is refreshing.
🌪️ What the article nails
Market delusion — Thinking your game is “special” doesn’t mean the market agrees.
Art vs. product — Treating your game like a masterpiece instead of a product is a fast track to obscurity.
Marketing neglect — The article hammers home the truth: if you’re not marketing, you’re invisible.
The ego trap — Many devs fall in love with the idea of success long before they’ve earned it.
Demand isn’t real — Games don’t have built‑in demand. You have to create it from scratch.
🐷 Favorite metaphor
The “digital product sitting on a shelf” bit? Oof. That one stings. Douglas basically says: your game won’t magically sell itself — and the little “Game Pig” illustration drives the point home with a wink.
👉 Read it here: https://rldouglas.com/why-game-developer-startups-fail
Ubisoft تواجه انهيارًا تاريخيًا في قيمتها السوقية! شركة Ubisoft، التي كانت تُعتبر إحدى أبرز الأسماء في صناعة الألعاب بفضل إصداراتها السنوية الضخمة مثل Assassin's Creed و Far Cry، تواجه أزمة كبيرة مع استمرار انخفاض قيمتها السوقية بشكل حاد. تقارير حديثة كشفت أن القيمة السوقية للشركة بلغت 1.78 مليار دولار مع بداية عام 2025، وهو انخفاض يُقدّر بنسبة 85% مقارنة بقيمتها في عام 2021، التي بلغت آنذاك 12.17 مليار دولار. الأسباب
Despite making over 20 games (there's too many to count, really), I have never released a postmortem. It's time for that to change. I hope you can learn from my experience, and avoid my mistakes. If you’re looking for hard data, it’s at the bottom.
Before we begin, there's one thing it's important you understand. I knew Death Game would not be a financial success. The odds of me, an unknown dev, with little renown, and no usable industry contacts, breaking even on even the smallest game is next to impossible.
But I had some ideas on how to mitigate these problems. First, I was going to become a scavenger, scrounging up sales anyway I could. The big thing, I knew, was game bundles. Without being a success, I was unlikely to get a response from a big reseller like Humble Bundle (Yes, I have emailed them multiple times, and never even received a response. I even know one of the founders, which did not help.). So I intended to target smaller sellers, like IndieGala.
But to resell keys, I needed to be on steam. Steam, at the time, had just begun Steam Direct. Larger developers could release at any time for no price, but for someone like me? I needed a license, costing $100 USD. $100 is a hard number to match in profit for me. Another difficulty to overcome.
Death Game was a game I made from the HON Game Jam (that’s its own story) in two days. I thought it was a good candidate to see if making a commercial game was something that was even possible for someone like me. But it needed a lot more work before I would be happy releasing it.
Death Game took two months for me to make, and released both as a free version and a paid version. But.. to my knowledge, no one ever downloaded the free version, including looking at my analytics. Such is life at the bottom. Death Game (free) received about 30 views over its lifetime. Including the gamejam version, it received 131 views and 51 downloads, meaning I had a conversion rate of 38.93%. This isn’t bad for a free game, but I’ve had other projects that fared much better.
Of that two month development, one month was largely working on steamworks integration. I had never launched a game on steam before, so it took much longer than usual. The game launched on April 19th, 2018. I determined this launch date by obsessing over the “upcoming releases” on Steam, and picking the day which had the least releases, and that had no AAA titles coming out. I can’t compete with AAA, even pretend, so I didn’t try to. This day was inconvenient for me. I ended up staying up all night to click the release button on time, and pretty much immediately took a nap once it was done.
I actually ran a twitter ad for the game, and had pretty decent results from it! I also passively promoted the game by posting it in several discords I was part of, automating twitter posts at peak (and off-peak) times, and posting on other sites I knew had high engagement from prior experiences. The results were overwhelming for me. When I awoke, most of my friends were still talking about the game. Some of them were currently in the process of making levels to share!
...Unfortunately, that experience didn’t last. To this day, I am the only one who has released a custom level for my game. It’s an easy experience, you just need to upload a 5kb or so file that you can create in the game. I got the distinct impression many of my friends didn’t enjoy the game. And that’s okay.
I had given steam keys of the game to some close friends, and they played it and agreed to review it on steam. Of the 10 I sent it to, 3 people reviewed it. One friend, a fellow developer reviewed it on day one, hour one. Another, a friend/fan I’ve known for a long time, warned me that if he were to review it, he’d review it negatively. This was upsetting.. But I told him that I’d rather he review it honestly than to censor his thoughts. He wrote his review on day one as well. The last reviewer, and close friend I’ve known for over 6 years.. reviewed it... 9 months later.
Unfortunately, steam had updated the storefront to essentially ignore reviews from steam keys, essentially meaning I had no reviews. Additionally, the negative review I received was displayed prominently, and was weighed higher than the others, causing my game to have a near permanent negative review percentage. This bombed my analytics, and to this day I have brought more traffic to my steam page than steam has. More on that later.
(Something cute to break up the bad news.)
I had done my research, and knew it was time to check my email next. Anytime you release a game on steam, you will receive a large amount of emails, about any number of things. Business offers, promotions, key scammers, or fans. Obviously, I mostly got business offers and key scammers. Of the business offers, one was promising, and fit my needs. about 80% of the emails I received were people impersonating inactive streamers and trying to get steam keys for the game. I sent steam keys to some of the more reasonable ones, and ignored the rest.
The business offer was from a game bundle company, called GoGoBundle. They did bundles of cheap, disposable games for pennies on the dollar. As an example, you could get 23 games for about € 1.23 for all of them combined. This company did not seem the most... reputable, but I did my research and determined that they’d work.
In total, I did two bundles with them, and the amount I’d get back decreased each time. for the first, I received $113.59 through paypal. The second, $50.87. They contacted me about doing a third bundle, and then stopped returning my emails. This was particularly annoying as we had signed a contract requiring them to return any unused steam keys to me, which they never did. On Steam, I made $90 USD, but with taking Steam’s cut out, it was more like $70 USD. Since Steam requires at least $100 to send out a payment, I still have not received any money from steam.
In total, I made $234.46 USD from death game. This is barely over my costs to put it on steam, and values two months of work, and an additional two weeks later for updates, at $134.46 . If I was actually intending to pay my bills with this game, I would be homeless and starving. Thankfully, I made the obvious decision not to quit my day job. (Well, quit permanently, at least.). If we count my bills, I spend $600 total over the two months to make the game, plus the $100 to put it on steam. Effectively, Death Game cost me 465.54 to make. But hey, at least I can say I have a game on steam now.
Now, on to the data:
Over Death Game+’s lifetime, I had 900, 698 impressions, which basically means an icon for my game popped up in someone’s feed that many times. Of those impressions, I had a clickthrough rate of 6.87%, or just under 62,000 clicks. Of those 62,000, 42,000 came from external websites, meaning not steam. To summarize a lot of data, I, a solo dev with no resources, brought in more traffic to my page than Steam, a multibillion company did. And I paid them $100 to do it.
If you’d like more data, here’s unfiltered screenshots of my analytics.
So, in short, here’s what I learned:
-Whatever reach I have, it isn’t enough.
-If I am going to be able to consistently make games, I would need to make one a month at this level of success to stay alive.
-Steam key reviews are effectively worthless, unless they’re negative.
-That bundle company you worked with? Yeah, they’re going to be defunct by the time you release your next game.
-Outside deals are more reliable than steam sales.
-It’s okay to use outside sources for you assets, like music. If you don’t, you’re just raising the money you need to break even.
Mandatory #goldengatebridge #picture 🖖 now let the games begin! . . #GDC2018 #gamedev #gamebusiness #gamedevelopers #conference #sanfrancisco #workworkwork
First day of #PGHelsinki was filled with awesome talks and meetings, now is time to party (well deserved 😎) #gamedev #mobilegames #conference #gamebusiness (at Virgin Oil Co. Helsinki)
