100 thousand people are playing Bongo Cat this very second, Gabe

What's a good game I can make? I don't know how to program. Can I get a step by step guide with what software to download. I just need to make like $1000 more each month.

>>737638020
Has anyone ever heard something good about a valve game?
>duhhh half life was.... impressive for its time!!! Look at the setpiece!
>huhhhg... portal is... le puzzle game! Very smart h1b sir!
Valve cant even make good games

>>737638208
newfag shut the fuck up
the hype was insane when portal, hl2 and tf2 were new games

>>737638020
if your game doesnt sell on steam its shit, simply as that. every "hidden gem" people talk about still clear 10 000 sales easily
>>737638208
keep seething timmy boy :D

>>737638208
True but for the wrong reasons. Most "Valve" games are actually games made by an entirely different studio that Valve acquired after the development of that "Valve" game already begun. CS, Dota, TF, L4D, Portal, all of those began outside of Valve and then Valve just sort of payed for them.

>>737638208
they're fun

>>737638119
If your goal is to make money then do not make games, it's that simple. Games are a creation, money is a transaction. Hop on some crypto jew scam and get jewed.

>>737638208
The Portal games completely took over the internet on their release for quite a while. You don't hear anything now because it's been fifteen years without anything new in the series. They're single player games with a set campaign, it's not live service stuff that needs to be in the public consciousness for twenty years to finally turn a profit

>>737638687
They should've tried making the coop in portal 2.... not shit

There's a lot of luck involved too, not just making a good game. Becoming a meme or being played by a popular streamer is what makes games successful today.

>>737639758
It's a lottery where you gotta make a good game to even enter. Like you can't tell me that the coffin of andy and leyley is a masterpiece that deserves 1000x more success than other games just like it. They got lucky and for some reason "DUDE INCEST LMAO" caught on. Lightning in a bottle shit.

>>737638020
Do people really put their games on Steam and think that Valve has entered into a marketing contract with them?

>>737640368
anon, you're hallucinating, nobody said that or anything resembling it

>>737640335
>people wanted incest game
>nobody else made one to the degree of Andy and Leyley
Seems straightforward to me.

>>737638487
>paying developers to make games
Valve really was ahead of its time.

>>737640498
The original post contained an explicit reference to Steam games' developers complaining about "lack of marketing" though.

File: 1777103625204173.jpg (673 KB, 704x1302)

673 KB JPG

>>737638020
bad artists always blame the algorithms o algo

>>737638020
The most important thing is a good gimmick. Peak and palworld got big because it had a good theme/gimmick and serviceable gameplay.

I think peaks devs biggest mistake. Is that i think they should just make extended universe with those type of characters. If they made a multi player little big planet type game with peak characters it'd probably do really well.

>>737640671
But there was no implication that it was Valve's responsibility

>>737640758
I think that is the implication. OP wouldn't be calling these complaints "excuses" if the developers were simply owning up to the fact that they didn't do any marketing themselves.

>>737640501
I bet you there are other incest games on steam with a better story and/or better gameplay. No, I won't find them because I don't have an interest in incest, but I don't think it's a very unusual perception to think that things "catch on." People love being in on the "in" thing online and start making fanart and headcanoning junk about the in thing and building it up bigger and bigger. It's a snowball effect where one needed the fortune to get certain eyeballs on their stuff and then boom.

>>737640916
What? OP is referring to indies not marketing and then getting any attention and blaming it instead of considering that their game isn't good. It's a very, very common thing.

>>737640569
Yeah let's pretend you didn't notice the important part, that all those series started development outside of Valve before the devs were purchased. Out of those, portal devs were the earliest acquisition but they already had the portal mechanic created outside of Valve and that's important bit. And inside Valve all of those series just sort of died and fizzled out, that's what Valve brought to the table

File: 1773542494534446.jpg (32 KB, 661x464)

32 KB JPG

>>737640946
>I bet
At that point you might as well make any argument. Personally I believe that thousands of games exist that not a single person has ever played and that are better than the best games supposedly ever made but "they" don't want you to know about them.

>>737641092
Why didn't John Valve make those games himself with his own two hands.

>>737641121
So people magically find the "good" games and marketing is a fool's errand

>>737641228
marketing exists so marketing people can make marketing money.

>>737638020
You should make a good game, make sure it's full of art that non-gaming internet addicts will find cute and repost for you, and then shill it on 4chan and reddit non-stop under the guise of innocently asking for feedback on your "small team project" staffed by 60 people.

>>737641121
So the natural conclusion is that Pokemon is the best game series ever, people wouldn't flock to the series and buy every game unless they were the highest quality games ever

>>737641354
Name forty games.

File: 1666636593755153.gif (1.07 MB, 249x498)

1.07 MB GIF

>>737641429
That's a strange argument when I specifically said that there's an audience for incest games and that there wasn't really an A&L equivalent (besides just incest and VN games generally). To meet that audience.
That reasoning specifically refutes you now trying to strawman a, quote:
>"Pokemon is the best game series ever"
it would be more accurate to say
>Pokemon fills a niche that other games have not captured
which I think is more agreeable. Mainline Pokemon games are hot garbage but they don't really have actual competition in terms of what they provide. Palworld was so controversal, as >>737640708
noted, because it could attract the people that wanted what Pokemon had and others games did not while having at least serviceable gameplay.

you make a halfway decently written game and get fifty thousand video essays guaranteed

>>737638020
Just start out with some semi-decent free games and let other people do your marketing work for you.
>>737641092
>All those series died and fizzled out
As it turns out, if you have a strong central mechanic and thoroughly explore it in your game, then making a sequel requires an equally strong central mechanic and you can't just make more slop.
It's like going out into the world to find some random arbitrarily sized group of atoms that have just lost half of their initial material to radioactive decay, versus just continuing to hold that group of atoms and screaming at them until half life happens again.
The first scenario can be achieved instantly if you look hard enough, the second scenario may take a few billion years.

>>737641680
>Pokeclones don't exist
Are you sure?
>okay but they're bad!
But so are pokemon games
>b-but
They just didn't have the advantage of catching on. Game quality is not entirely correlated with success.

File: 1629831503689.gif (680 KB, 640x393)

680 KB GIF

>>737646830
Again, unless you're being purposefully obtuse. I already addressed this point by saying
>there wasn't really an A&L equivalent (besides just incest and VN games generally)
and then
>Mainline Pokemon games are hot garbage but they don't really have actual competition in terms of what they provide
>because it could attract the people that wanted what Pokemon had and others games did not while having at least serviceable gameplay.
You're not providing any examples to support your argument, just making very general claims that are already addressed by my posts.

>>737638020
Unfortunately all the good games on Steam have at most 1k reviews.

File: wrinkly-man.jpg (85 KB, 498x498)

85 KB JPG

>>737638487
>buy Turtle Rock Studios
>Make Left 4 Dead into a full on game from just a counter strike mod
>Huge success
>Make Left 4 Dead 2
>Huge success
>Turtle Rock gets signed back their name and leaves
>shits out Back 4 Blood
>Its a failure
Its kind of funny that without Valve L4D would've probably been some really niche CS mod or game. At least with Portal iirc they just bought the guy that came up with the portal mechanic and the rest was made by Valve. Goes to show that at the time Valve can buy something interesting and turn it into gold. Most companies these days just buy up devs without really caring about games and they just end up producing shit. Though Valve did produce Artifact and that was a disaster lol.

>>737638020
Flopmata btfo

>>737638020
True. Can you imagine Hollow Knight not being a success?

Why didn't Gabe use this advice for Dota underlords, artifact, aperture test labs, deadlock

>>737649217
I think this will always be the funniest part when people complain about Valve getting mod developers to make games, we have examples of what they would do without Valve.
I also always find it funny that people always shit on modern developers for making endless sequels but also shit on Valve for not making endless sequels. Granted, they could be making more games full stop, but it's always "muh portal 3" or "muh L4D3".

>>737638208
Half life is still fun

>>737638250
>making up bullshit
Lmao, you are a fanboy living in a bubble. Just like gaylo fans think that their garbage series was a good. There were no hype, only a massive outrage because even physical copies of orange box forced you to install their always online DRM cancer that they kept showing down everyone's throat.
Also
>tf2
Lmao, valvgoyum mentioning a literal f2p gacha scam, where you gamble for real money instead of waiu jpegs. The absolute state of fanboys.

File: Screenshot 2026-04-25 at (...).png (464 KB, 680x726)

464 KB PNG

>>737638020
"Just make a good game" is a really vague comment if you actually take a step back and think about it.

What really makes a "good" game? Is it a certain aspect of it that makes it good? It's sovl? It's heart? What really makes it "good"? Is it because of the writing, and/or gameplay? Why does the gameplay, art direction, or writing feel "good"?

I think in order to make a truly "good" game, you have to do a lot of thinking, a lot of analysis.

>>737653196
On one hand yes, but on the other hand if you look at the greatest of all time lists, there really isn't a pattern to be had.
You got your Zeldas, Marios and the like, but also you Deus Exs, your System Shocks etc. All different genres with all different priorities and why people like them. For every Doom where the appeal is the frantic moment to moment shit without much regard for the story, there is a Fallout where the story does majority of the heavy lifting in why people love it so much. I think more than anything, it should be a "play to the audience that you want to play to" kind of thing, even if that audience is niche, because sometimes that niche audience drums up enough word of mouth that you get sleeper hits.

Okay so why did Okami bomb? What about Valkyria Chronicles? Sleeping Dogs, Vanquish, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Kotor 2, Psychonauts...
I guess none of these are as good as games that sold well like God of Onions and RE4 Remake.

>>737638110
Isn't that an idle game that you play by literally not being in the same room as the computer?

>>737638020
And then he charges you fucking 1100 dollars for a fucking shittier valve index