[HN Gopher] Here ends the story of 10K Riders Publishing
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Here ends the story of 10K Riders Publishing
Author : democracy
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-09-13 11:51 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tumenko.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tumenko.com)
| datavirtue wrote:
| They lost me immediately in section one. No idea what they are
| talking about.
| daitangio wrote:
| Same for me. It is nit clear the problem they tried to solve
| monitron wrote:
| Oh thank goodness it's not just me. These two introductory
| sentences gave me an instant headache:
|
| > In the stone age of gamedev (like 7-8y ago) developers were
| more interested in publishers. Finding new partners was like a
| supermarket trip within devs' events, conferences, communities,
| and checking one own mailbox.
|
| To the writer, if you're reading, please try to imagine your
| audience and remember they don't know what you know. "More
| interested in publishers" than what? Than publishers were
| interested in developers? Than they were interested in self-
| publishing? This is like...half a thought, from my perspective.
|
| And then you introduce an interaction with "partners." I don't
| know what that means...partners for whom? Without context,
| "supermarket trip" carries no meaning as an analogy. At this
| point, I stopped reading because I got this Markov chain/bad
| LLM feeling where my cognitive load is pegged at maximum but no
| meaning is getting through.
|
| Writing is hard. You know your subject 1000x better than your
| readers (that's why they're reading) so you have to work hard
| to apply "theory of mind" to try to understand your output as
| they will. Maybe send a draft to an uninitiated friend or
| colleague to see if it makes sense to them without explanation.
| lambic wrote:
| I got the impression English is not the Author's native
| language.
| lief79 wrote:
| They're clearly Russian, so second language seems likely.
| monitron wrote:
| If that's the case, I applaud the writer's efforts and can
| definitely see how working in a second language could
| hinder the already difficult work of trying to model your
| audience. As a shameful monoglot myself, I'm in no position
| to judge.
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| To be honest, If you read the whole thing it becomes more
| clear. But I get what you mean.
|
| You rarely read a text where someone tries to honestly (I
| feel that the author is) analyse their own failure. If you
| think further it's also interesting where that doesn't
| completely work.
|
| I feel this a hard text to write on more than one level, so
| people should at least read it before criticising too
| harshly.
| monitron wrote:
| You are of course right that it's difficult, laudable and
| unusual to document failures. I wouldn't want to discourage
| anyone from reading or writing something like this. At
| least in my current mental state I simply couldn't power
| through the text, and my intent was to be constructive so
| that similarly valuable works might be more accessible in
| the future.
| mpixel wrote:
| So absurd.
|
| Their target is described as games almost-finished in 4 months at
| most, starting from 0, so they chose mobile tycoons, idle
| clickers, which are indeed finishable in 4 months if you scrub
| the bottom of the barrel.
|
| For that reasons there is lots of them.
|
| Then another case study is copying one of the most successful
| idlers and failing at it, yeah dawg that exists already.
|
| It takes a fuck ton of more work with a 4 months deadline in a
| very small or one person team and actually making something
| meaningful that isn't an exact clone of something. Let alone
| exact clone, 4 months isn't even enough to clone something more
| complex.
|
| This publisher also doesn't seem to have done anything to add
| value in the end anyway.
|
| Had they bought ready-to-publish games that are of this type and
| reskinned it with passable assets and advertised it on tiktok,
| they'd have better chance at turning a profit.
|
| Not to give any ideas though.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Yeah, there's precious little description of their
| planned/actual games here. Just mobile game jargon like
| "match-2", "conversions", "hypercasual", etc. My read is that
| if they were successful they would have been another publisher
| flooding instagram with adverts where you supposedly have to
| save some lady from the the cold by doing puzzles (but the
| _actual_ game a tedious base-building slog with MTX for every
| possible action).
|
| No offense to the author, but we have enough of these. Thanks.
| joshstrange wrote:
| This was incredibly difficult to follow. Granted mobile game dev
| is not my field but it felt like a bunch of nonsense. If you
| can't clearly outline what value you provide in a couple
| paragraphs of rambling then I'm not too surprised you failed.
|
| Then we get to the next section (which I had to skip to after
| rereading the first one a few times and still completely lost)
| and we find they are targeting idle games, aka a scourge on
| gaming. Can idle games be fun and non-predatory? Yes, I'm sure
| they can but I've watched a few indie devs who accomplished this
| then got greedy (Eggs Inc comes to mind). The incentives are all
| to milk your users and find new ways to force/trick/entice them
| into buying 100 gems/coins/bullshit.
|
| I refuse to download games with recurring IAP. Level/campaign
| packs, "remove ads", "full unlock" are all fine but if I see
| gems/coins/power/etc then I'm out. Those games are so predictable
| and only exist to extract money, not to actually be fun.
|
| In the end I'm still unsure why this "publisher" even needed to
| exist (I don't understand the value they were providing) and I'm
| glad they failed if they is the type of trash they were
| fostering.
| wpietri wrote:
| Something about this feels off to me; it has the form of bold
| transparency, but I don't end up with much clarity. I really want
| to hear about this from some of the game developers they worked
| with.
| zoogeny wrote:
| When talking about a developer that terminated their contract
| with 10k, the author says: "There was a moment to reconsider the
| contract and I've failed to explain our value." After reading the
| first chapter and skimming the remaining chapters, I have no idea
| what value they were providing either.
|
| I am cynical, perhaps even bitter and jaded, but it sounds like
| this kind of publisher business is parasitic. They seek out devs
| that are naive, promise them "publisher stuff" and some devs
| don't really know any better and just assume the publisher is
| doing something for them. In some small percentage of cases a
| lucky publisher finds just the right naive dev, signs a contract
| and finds themselves with a cash cow. It literally sounds like
| they would just seek out any dev with a heartbeat, offer them
| "publisher stuff" (like testing? level design? documentation?),
| sign them to a contract and hope they would eventually get a hit.
|
| So my unflattering take of what little I understood of this
| jumbled story was that this parasitic organization (that sounds
| completely dysfunctional) was unable to find a suitable victim.
|
| He talks about his pitch to developers: "You will get months of
| unpaid work under our supervision..." He talks about building his
| team: "part-time entry-lvl intern-like specialists firstly
| designed to fulfill simple scripted tasks"
|
| Everything here just seems terrible to me.
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| I don't know anything about the game dev or publishing
| business. What I do know though it that many tech teams are
| good at tech but often not so good at other tasks that are all
| part of a successful business. That starts with project
| management, goes over organisation or knowledge how to run a
| company and ends in knowing how to make profit.
|
| There is also nothing wrong with this. I have described 3-4
| different departments in a company. Chances are you are not
| good (enough) in all of them, and even if you are you won't
| have time to do all of it good.
|
| There is also value to just know how a industry works. As a new
| starter you can make your own experiences or you pay for
| existing experience, one way or another. This is an important
| business decision that you have to make. Make or buy. You
| simply can't do everything yourself. So what to make and what
| to buy.
|
| I don't know if this is what publisher do (the name suggests
| otherwise) but I guess every dev team that thinks they have a
| hit still have a lot of non game dev related evaluations and
| decisions to make and sometimes you have to pay people with the
| right expertise to help you.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I would not argue against the value of professional services.
| Two that come to mind immediately are lawyers and
| accountants. It is probably a good idea to seek out
| professional advice for those. I think a similar case could
| be made for marketing and sales. One thing to note about
| lawyers and accountants is that you need accreditation to
| offer those services. That helps to keep the worst kind of
| parasitic behavior under control, although it isn't perfect.
|
| But the real defense of my argument is in my own weasel
| words. "this kind of publisher business is parasitic."
|
| Again, lets just consider the words in the article, starting
| with the quote I already cited: "part-time entry-lvl intern-
| like specialists firstly designed to fulfill simple scripted
| tasks". The CEO of this publishing house hired totally
| inexperienced people, gave them a couple of months of
| scripted tasks and then sold them to developers as experts.
|
| Second, another couple of quotes: "That's how within two
| years we have cooperated with almost 150 studios and produced
| 40+ games simultaneously at the peak." and "all in all there
| were 6 ROAS-positive soft launches, none of which didn't
| happen as a hit."
|
| I find these a bit hard to parse, but what I gather is that
| they worked on at least 40+ games of which only 6 had
| positive metrics and none of which was a success. Imagine
| that in a world of professionals like lawyers and
| accountants: having worked with that many businesses and
| never won a case or successfully balanced the books.
|
| The real tragedy, IMO, is that there are likely numerous
| examples of publishers with equal levels of inexperience (or
| incompetence) that probably just happened to luck across the
| right dev at the right moment. Once you sign a contract with
| one of these leeches you are on the hook to pay them even if
| the "expert advice" provided by their 6 month veterans is as
| worthless as you would expect.
| samjohnation111 wrote:
| [dead]
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