You see, w hen a game company loves another game company so much...

Apple started out in someone's parents garage.

Yes there are plenty of small team Game makers out there some with great quality as well.

Underrail
SKALD
HROT

these are all done by one person/ or a very small group and outperform others with much larger budgets and produce a more fun product.

Killhouse Game made Doorkickers, DK Action Squad and DK2 (in progress) and came from a small team with a small budget and there is loads of fun in those games.

I'm not really sure what your point is by randomly linking me to your thread from 2013?

I wonder the same in different terms.

What is the business existing reason of the -whole bunch- of those small vgame ,,companies,,?

I mean:
-There are hundreds of them just in Steam
-Some with dozens of the same vgame over and over and over again (slight differences, they are not stupid)
-Many of those vgames, extremelly cheap (or even the opposite: quite expensive for the features offered)
-Most of those vgames have very few reviews (And that makes sense to me: Who in its healthy mind would purchase the same vgame over and over again?)

So: Lots of competition + Low prices + Few sales --> Low profit

And despite that: Why not only -so many vgames- but also -so many ,,companies,,-?

I can get the gist that software is a business that allows a lot of entrepreneurship because it does not demand factories, physical equipment, or lots of investment: Your Co. can be only you, your obsolete PC and your huge talent. Good...

But: Really? Why don't those million Devs realize they are wasting their precious time/talent(?)?

Or expressed from the other side:

Why in the year 2022 should I be enthusiastic of purchasing by 400th time a carbon copy of -Pong- featuring:
One player only (You got it, no local co-op nor LAN multiplayer available)
Without sound
Without color (Yay! Despite the original in B&W this one is on 32bit grayscale with Ray Tracing! But Flat 2D as the original, of course!)
Without menu translations
Without gamepad support
But much worse pixelated than the original (Come on! It is a ,,retro tribute,,!)
But demanding a $400usd GPU in order to play it???
And tied to a Store Client, a 3rd Party License and Denuvo...

Ohhh, and also get excited because they are announcing the release of a VERY similar game in a couple of weeks (or even worse: A DLC for the game your are purchasing right now)
(Yeah, please notice the -no new technical improvements-: 1p, no sound, no color, no translations... as already described. And feel free to apply that template to their entire vgames catalog)

So?
My grumpy Wed, I'm affraid.

i just don't like to repeat myself

Great, still not exactly replying to my post either, never mind you keep a tab on something you posted nearly a decade ago lol

Ok Amok, thanks for the input

I was meaning more cement or linoleum floor and sweep and mop and if you make a mess it isn't in your home.

Does it always have to be a business? Maybe many just want to make games, on their own time, and then release them. Some may choose to sell them for a pittance instead of giving away because they think free games are more often just put away and never touched and they'd rather have at least some people play them, others hope to maybe earn enough for a computer upgrade or even some assets or possibly some months of being spared needing to "earn a living" in some other way, or some other things allowing them to make something closer to a game they actually want to make... As for why a company instead of individual devs, in case it's more than a single person, even if you have something like a coder and an artist, or in some cases even if there is a single person, there are probably reasons, tax-related or otherwise, why they think that it's better to have a firm. And for those with higher aims, at least for the future, it also makes it more likely, or maybe is even a requirement to have a chance, to receive funding through various programs.

Sadly, yes. Taxes and polices are set up in most places that you have to "register a business" to sell things. And the way taxation is set up, there are serious penalties for just being a person doing business. It's a gross perversion of the markets that's sadly pretty much everywhere.

I did say "there are probably reasons, tax-related or otherwise, why they think that it's better to have a firm". By "Does it always have to be a business?" I was referring to tag+'s question, which I took as having a rather different meaning, not just why register a company in itself.

Until you are actually selling a product do you really want to be hounded by a government institution pay taxes for and do the headaches of something that has no return?

Hi Cavalary,

I agree, there is room for enthusiastic vgame makers.
A relevant case that comes to my mind: locomalito.com
A passionate Spanish guy developing vgames as hobby before than looking them as a money/income source.
GameMaker vgames but you can see his enthusiasm reflected on promo art & genres: Schmups, FPS, Scrollers, Platformers...
Total respect to all those Indie/small/limited devs without a doubt!
Talent and will to improve/grow are always welcome. Those are the people really teaching the big rheumatic Corps how things must/can be done.

But to me things start smelling strange when the hobby goes for +20 games, copy/paste efforts...
Judge yourself TigerQiuQiu at Steam: 23 games with 2199 DLCs in 3 years. I don't see much variety nor a reason to deliver so many DLCs; Reviews... are few and I ignore about sales. And Yeah, I admit I have not tried any of those games/DLCs... not even doing a detailed check of their product pages.

Unfortunately I am not skilled pulling backend data from the vgames stores, but I bet would not be so difficult to spot a considerable number of devs/pubs with so many games/DLCs during years and with low sales...

And I also agree with mqstout & rtcvb32: Is too much hassle to setup a Co, have tax responsibilities just for the sake of sharing the product of a hobby...
In such case, places like itch.io sound a better option. But that's me, I admit that too :)

The mistery remains then.

There's some packages with prebuilt games as a base or for you to start with and modify to make something with, with a framework in place. However too many 'asset flip games' have cropped up, where there's 30 something versions of the same voxel survival Mine-craft-like zombie shooter games, likely with few if any changes.

While reusing assets to be copy/paste is acceptable to some degree, as often programmers are not artists, and artists may not be musicians, and musicians are not programmers, and few are good writers... As such you would take asset packs and mix and match and build a game using a framework that's available. RPG Maker and other games which is fine, but then every game looks the same even if they are vastly different.

I'd rather see a few really well made games from someone, which are unique and not slap-together-copy/paste.