Comments on: What’s the Next (Current) Big Thing? Social Games? Casual? Flash? Facebook? Iphone?

By: Juuso

Juuso — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 07:52:59 +0000

Sargon: perfect answer.

@Israel: ehh..

@Steven, Harvest Moon actually reminds me about board game that has been the most popular game in the board gaming world: Agricola. (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31260/agricola) – you have a farm and need to optimize the harvest… and the description sounded horribly similar to Harvest Moon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_%28series%29

See the similarity?

@Jake: or nokia maemo… tons of things to consider. Good pointers.

By: Steven Egan

Steven Egan — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:32:30 +0000

Personally, I think that the majority of top performing social games do well because they have the intellectual requirements of TV, with interaction. As somebody working on a game for Facebook, I’ve been playing such games, and not caring for it much. Most of the time it’s not about skill so much as effort and number of friends playing the same game, which is torture for a soloist skill gamer.

My guess is that when somebody gets adaptable gameplay down well, they will blow the rest of the market away, simply because it can deal with many demographics of game players. Zynga games bore me so far, and I actually like playing Harvest Moon games.

Besides that, I’m not sure what will happen. PC games will likely continue to exist, and possibly have a resurgence due to what Sargon described. I think Facebook games will do well for a while and decline as people become bored with the innumerable gameplay clones, but will still likely do well as long as most people like to not think much and be praised for exceptionally simple tasks.

By: Israel L. (CerebralGames)

Israel L. (CerebralGames) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:17:35 +0000

everything together is the future ;)

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:39:31 +0000

Also maybe Android? Or maybe another next-gen console with a weird controller? Or project Natal? Or WWIII.

By: Sargon

Sargon — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:05:03 +0000

The short answer, I don’t care! :)
The long answer, I believe most indie developers chose to do this thing because it’s something they enjoy doing. So they probably choose the platform and game they would enjoy making.
Additionaly, “the next big thing” does not mean “the next good thing”. If the iphone will be more popular than PC games, and you develope games for the PC, it’s actually good for you. You have less competition, your game will be more attractive to PC users.
That is the case with mac. A lot of indie games that were ported to the mac enjoy good sales on mac, sometimes even better than the PC version they had. Because there are fewer games on the mac.