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Hidden Gems Don't Exist
Today I got mentioned on this tweet which is talking about my game:
I've been meaning to write about this subject for a while now and this tweet is a good excuse. So in this article I'll expand on why I think that lists like the above are fundamentally flawed and misguided, why a game's quality is not separated from its popularity (if you have a "good" game like mine that is not popular it means the game isn't really that good), why the concept of "hidden gems" is wrong, and why the idea that these hidden gems exist because of poor discoverability on Steam's end is also false.
Good game
The first thing to think about when it comes to this subject is the definition of a hidden gem. In this article, the author says things like:
Every developer I know has a list of obscure indie games they know are great, but just can't get the exposure they deserve.
My twitter friends are constantly trying to personally give visibility for such "hidden gems" and I think that's admirable, and we should keep doing stuff like that.
And I think this is a pretty well agreed upon definition. It's basically a game that is "good" but that isn't popular. So knowing this, we might then move on to the definition of a good game.
This one is a bit more murky but the things I would look at in a game would first be its visual quality. For instance, a game like Owlboy has pretty high visual quality and most people who look at it would be immediately wowed by it, even those who generally dislike pixel art would say things like "damn, this is what pixel art should look like, not that lazy shit other indies are doing".
Another aspect of a game that matters a lot is how it feels to play. Some games might not look super good but they feel amazing to play. The best example of this that I can think of is One Finger Death Punch. OFDP is a game that definitely looks very simple, but the moment you start playing it and pressing buttons it just feels very very good to play. This is the kind of thing that you can convey with words alone, so I definitely recommend buying it and trying it out for yourself.
And then there are games that last a long time. These are games that people can put hundreds or thousands of hours in without getting bored. And finally, there are just games that do those 3 things really well, the best example I can think of right now being Dead Cells. Dead Cells looks super good and the moment you start playing it you immediately notice that pressing a button feels amazing, simply because the animations are super well done and responsive. And then on top of that it's a game that has a lot of replayability and lasts a long time, so it does everything that I care about right.
And these are the things I would look at to define a "good game". But there's one problem with my definition, which is the problem that I don't care about stories in video games. And my 3 main criteria simply don't touch upon story at all. Clearly this is wrong if we're looking at it from a global perspective, because there are tons of games that are story-focused that lots of people love.
This touches upon the bigger issue of defining a good game, which is that it's inherently a subjective pursuit. No one individual or group of individuals can cover the entire spectrum of taste in video games and come up to reasonable conclusions on the quality of all the factors they should care about. It's a fundamentally unsolvable problem if you were to try to solve it in a serious manner.
This is not to say that there's no objectivity when it comes to game quality, quite the contrary. Games that look like Owlboy or Cuphead, for instance, will awe a high percentage of people who look at them. In this sense, those games are objectively good looking. However, when we're talking about hidden gems we're not talking about games that are this obviously good, we're generally talking about games that have very obvious flaws but that despite all those flaws do some things really really well that we think they should have a bigger audience. The problem with this kind of thinking though is that...
The market doesn't owe you anything
The notion that a game can't get the "exposure it deserves" to me is somewhat arrogant. It is essentially a statement that your tastes trump the tastes of other millions of people and their collective decisions to not buy the game that you think deserves more players. Why is your taste more important than the taste of all those millions of people? The answer is that it isn't.
The only possible way to argue that a game deserves more exposure than it got is to assume that the mechanisms through which games are exposed are flawed. And this leads us to an indie developer's favorite scapgegoat: Steam. The argument goes that since Steam "opened the floodgates", tons of games flooded the store and now good games aren't getting the attention they deserve, and so articles and sites like the above get written/made in an attempt to fix the problem.
While it is possible that Steam's algorithms aren't doing the best job possible, people have to understand that Valve has a financial incentive to find good games and surface them to the general population, because if they don't do that they lose money. So it's very likely that Valve checks if their algorithms are working correctly obsessively. In general if you want to understand how Steam works I highly recommend watching the first ten or so minutes of this talk:
With this in mind, it's important to realize that most of the games that "don't get the attention they deserve", more likely than not simply aren't games that convert well among the general population of players, for one reason or another. For instance, tons of Visual Novels fall into the category of hidden gems, so much so that whoever made the site I mentioned at first in the article has a special hidden gem list only for Visual Novels. Which situation is more likely: there are a fixed number of people in the world who like visual novels, and that's why a lot of them are relatively hidden despite their good quality, or Steam's algorithms are wrong? In this situation it's very obviously the former, and I would think that this holds for most other genres as well.
Steam
Lots of indie devs hate on Valve, and I just don't get it. I think that we collectively got very lucky that Valve was the company that ended up "controlling" the PC market, because every action they take is a signal to me that they're interested in the long term health of PC gaming, and by consequence in the long term health of indie gaming (as long as indie developers collectively keep making good games that people want to play).
Valve seems to understand at a fundamental level that their tastes are not better than anyone else's and that the best way they can solve the problem of objectively assessing a game's quality is through the market itself. Through the actions of thousands of people buying or not buying games they are shown, Valve can reliably tell which games are "good" and which games aren't, and then they will show the good games to more people, as you would expect. This is a simple and effective way of running a store and you couldn't really ask for anything different. They've stated time and time again that this is the way they want to run their store, and not through a process of manual/human curation like so many people seem to want:
Knowing all this, I just reject the notion that hidden gems exist at all. Games that are really good but not popular are simply games that fulfill some niche that few people really like, but not something that the general population would want to play. My game, for instance, is such a case. Like the tweet said, it has 99% positive scores (only 1 negative review out of almost 100), but it's also a game that simply has a cap on the number of people interested in playing it. In my Steam page I am very very clear about what the game is and what it isn't:
It's a mix of Path of Exile and Bit Blaster XL, so in theory it has a cap based on the number of people who have played both games, which is certainly less than like 50k people, since they're both very very different games, despite both being popular. And then on top of that, it's a game that stylistically is different from both Bit Blaster XL and Path of Exile, going for a hacker/terminal type of thing. So the audience is capped even more by that. It's just not a game that is going to interest many people, but the people that are indeed interested by it will really like it, probably because I did a good job at what I set out to do.
But none of this means that my game deserves more attention, because it doesn't. It's both a game that has a limit on the number of people who would be interested in it, but it also just doesn't look or play well enough. And the market has responded to this accordingly in my opinion.
Good = popular
With everything I said in mind, it should be more clear as to why I would say at the start of this article that I think that a game's quality is not separated from its popularity. One of the things that follows from the definition of quality that Steam uses, for instance (which is to use the market as the neutral judge of quality), is that game's quality is directly correlated to its popularity. And this is an odd thing to say that doesn't seem right, but once you think about it enough it totally is.
We normally understand a product's quality and popularity as two separate concepts. We can analyze a game's quality by using any of the criteria I mentioned prior in the article, and we can have games that are extremely good at those criteria but that are unpopular. And we can also have games that are extremely bad at those criteria but that are popular. This incongruity can happen for many reasons, but the most obvious one might be marketing. For instance, if the developer of a "bad" game spends tons of money marketing it, the game will likely do better than a game that was objectively better but who's developer was clueless about marketing. And so in this way it's obvious that they are two separate concepts that have little to do with one another.
But if you want to take a neutral approach, then a game's quality is not separated from its marketing efforts, and the game that spent more money on marketing is simply better. This is an idea that indie developers in general don't take into account because it sounds unfair, but it should be obvious. If you design a game that is streamable, for instance, like say a horror game, then you'll have an easier time marketing it to streamers. This horror game, even though it might be worse than many other games on conventional criteria, is way better than all of those on the "streamable" criteria. This is a criteria that most indie developers don't pay attention to, so it's easy to look at that very popular horror game that's played by tons of streamers and say "wow, this is trash but it's so popular, these streamers are fucking stupid, wtf", but that would be an ignorant reaction. And it's ignorant both because the "streamable" criteria is not being taken into account, and because the main idea that dominates the mind of whoever said something like that is that quality and popularity are separated from one another, when they aren't.
I could talk more about this but this article is getting long, but the main notion is that in general, if a game is popular it's good, and if a game isn't popular it's bad. This is a definitional thing where we take it on faith that the market is correct. If you don't agree that the market is correct then you don't have to agree with this, but if you don't agree with the market, in my opinion, you're only setting yourself up for disappointment and unneeded pain. I know that this idea sounds wrong and unfair, but it is what it is. You have to understand that you're a limited human being who doesn't know better than millions of people making choices on what they like or dislike, have some humility. :)
Blaming external factors
This brings me to my last point, which is that in general indie developers have a problem with blaming external factors instead of themselves for their failures. I'm not going to expand much on this because it should be an article on its own, but in general if you hear the words "luck" or "lottery" it should be a red flag that the person you're talking to is infected with the "it's not my fault" disease. It's important to get rid of this mindset and to notice it on yourself, because it a subtle and insidious killer that keeps people from growing as developers and as human beings. Just focus on becoming a better developer and making better games!
tl;dr hidden gems don't exist, the market is truth, Valve is the best company ever, good = popular, don't blame luck for your failures
