Yesterday, a round table “Development and publication of mobile games” was held at FlashGAMM. It was moderated by Yulia Lebedeva from Nevosoft, who, after asking the participants “who are indie developers”, set the tone for the entire discussion.
“Indie developers are those who don’t chase money and trends,” said independent developer Andrey Kovalishin from Hunter Hamster.
To Maxim Donskikh’s remark from Game Insight that money is important for developers, Andrey replied that it is important, but still not in the first place.
Valentin Merzlikin from Prosto Games, clearly relying on his own experience, immediately quipped: “First there was money, and as soon as it ran out, we became indie.”
Gradually, it all came down to the fact that, no matter how indie the developer calls himself, he is always happy to cooperate with Chillingo. However, to begin with, he will need to stock up on food for 6-8 months, “because Chillingo does not immediately respond,” Merzlikin joked.
In general, the discussion of independent development could have continued indefinitely if the hall had not sounded sacramental: “Indie is from the word individual.”
However, the next question – from the audience itself – turned out to be much cooler: what is a game? Because of its obvious philosophic nature, the participants of the round table had to fight back with irony: what goes in the app stores on the appruv.
“What is the most difficult stage in the development of the game,” one of the girls asked Maxim Donskikh. He, without thinking twice, said that this is when it comes to deciding whether the project needs to be released or still needs to be finalized. According to him, this is also one of the most interesting stages of development.
However, it turned out that today, unfortunately, there are no recipes for determining whether your project is a “dead horse” or not. However, according to Donskikh, “globally, everything is simple: the development costs exceed the profit from the game, which are not in a hurry to grow? It’s time to close your project.”
On whom, it is desirable to conduct focus tests? On children, – says Kovalishin. If the children figure it out, adult users will understand everything.
But making games in the hope of creating a trend is not worth it, says Donskikh. Trends do not appear as quickly as it might seem. If now some projects are in the top, then a lot of similar ones will be made and released only a few months later – then this will become a trend. He also believes that “educational games are good if you have a grand from Skolkovo.” Otherwise, it is unclear why to do this. Training projects will not bring money.
As a result, the round table had two main conclusions. Firstly, the main thing is to have fun creating a game. Secondly, “let’s stop the Orthodox game fight”!