No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now.

I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tools.

AI assistance is most dangerous (for your competition) when you mostly need it for the scripting and code, and not for the art or direction. You don't need an AI disclosure on steam if you use AI responsibly.

The article reads like it's about 15 years late to reality. Trying to get funding from a publisher as an independent studio was always somewhere between hard and impossible, and especially towards the 2010s. That's why Kickstarter became such an unbelievable success.

PS: The one exception was when Epic was on its aggressive rampage to buy as many exclusives for the Epic Game Store as possible. But I guess that money shower has also dried up by now.

I wonder how much increasing fidelity requirements are the main culprit here? Myst was made by a team of about 7 people (only 4 of them full-time), in just about 2 years, and cost under a million (adjusted for inflation).

Riven had a team twice the size, took twice as long, and cost 10-15x as much. Apart from Exile, which was handed to a more experienced developer who got it done faster and cheaper, the remaining sequels follow a similar trajectory.

Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.

Games fundamentally require a lot of artistry, depend on user device performance, and involve many factors to consider. from engine licensing costs to labor costs.

There's this concept of 'AA games' or 'Myst games' that sit between AAA and indie titles. From what I hear across most of the industry and genres, as people's disposable income shrinks, the market is polarizing into reliable AAA games on one side and small, niche indie games on the other. Small indies can bet on extreme gameplay that big companies would never attempt.

In other words, when people start cutting back on hobbies, the first thing they reduce is spending on hobbies. And when they start tightening further, the first games to get dropped from their lists are the mid-tier ones.

Whether it's software or any genre market, this middle tier is disappearing because consumer spending itself is becoming extremely polarized.

This is a contradiction in cost structure.

When developing software, reducing the size to a mid tier level doesn't linearly reduce fixed costs. You still need to build server infrastructure, payment systems, security, basic UI/UX, cross platform support, and more, all of which come with enormous upfront costs. AAA companies can amortize these fixed costs by selling to millions of users, but a AA studio with limited capital ends up spending most of its budget just on infrastructure, leaving few resources to polish the core value of the product, graphics, gameplay fun, and design.

Also, when a recession hits, a cognitive tandem effect occurs. Only two things survive: what everyone else is playing, and niche products that match your personal taste. Mid tier products with moderate price and moderate quality require marketing efforts to convince consumers of their ambiguous value, often relying on influencer reviews or other forms of consumer persuasion.

1. Approximately every software engineer secretly dreams of developing an awesome video game instead of the boring software he actually makes.

2. Consequently, there are way too many people wanting to develop video games relative to the commercial demand for them.

3. Consequently, it is incredibly hard to get funding for a video game project.

Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?

The article said they are looking for $1m to $10m in funding. Given the hype and pedigree, I feel they could crowdfund the low end of that trivially.

Well, I don't know. Most of the Myst games seem to be background, painted, with a bit of moving art. Comparing this with (say) an isometric RPG (think BG3, Pillars of Eternity) and those look a lot more expensive, but still capable of making money. Or maybe it's just that I never liked Myst - too stupid, I guess.

Interesting timing on this article considering The Big Walk comes out this week. Obviously the game is not as intricate as a Myst game, but it feels like the perfect mixture of a game where design really matters and reaction to what the market wants. People like playing together and collaborating to make their own fun. It is not hard to imagine a version of Myst like this -- the most fun I have had playing a PC game was sitting next to a friend as we played Riven beginning to end.

This is surprising to read in a world where we received Blue Prince, Expedition 33, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in the same year. All top-tier games (When ranked among all games in history), all recent, and all with a moderate budget and studio size, on the size order of Cyan's in its hayday. And Blue Prince has deep puzzle elements that would be at home to a Myst player.

This article and headline present a conflicting version of reality to the one I experience.

Myst has severely overlooked a platform that has recently made some pretty decent strides - VR.

I have a Kat Walk C2 and a game like Myst in VR with that VR rig would be absolutely goddamned insane.

Myst ruled because you felt like you were in another world back then. Recreate that with the tech we have to really make you feel like you're in that world.

aren't all these guys rich? why do they need funding?

Has there not been enough point and click puzzle games? There's been dozens of mystlikes including recent ones and pretty much all of them fail since players generally prefer walking around a 3D world.

Myst was really interesting when it first came out, but games like that are woefully out of date in a world where most games are immersive, and where players are accustomed to onboarding systems like tutorial levels to help prevent frustration and focus on story and enjoyment. I also just really don't think that in this world's collective attention span, nobody wants to play a game where you have to traverse the entire map a bunch of times to solve a puzzle by trial and error.

Give me a new Journeyman Project instead!

How much did slay the spire cost?

I am pretty sure it's not the game that is the cause of the funding trouble?

Interesting read, but this sort of framing is so common and self-deluding-

> At the same time, gaming platforms like Steam—which indie and double-A games once depended on for discovery—have been flooded with low-quality dreck. According to the AI Transparency Index, more than 18,000 games on Steam now feature AI usage disclosures. “User trust in platform stores as a curatorial layer has been all but erased,” says North Cook. “When you feed people enough ads and slop, they just check out.”

What a laughable, ridiculous non-sequitur (the casual, slop correlation between AI and the quality problem), and you see this same hilariously broken logic here on HN all the time, where people imagine some pre-AI era of only goodness and greatness.

Steam was absolutely swamped with low quality garbage long before AI tools. You could as easily, if not more accurately, blame more accessible game development tools like Unity for broadening the ability of people to get into game development. Steam was more curated in earlier years, as well, and the move to basically letting anyone publish on it flooded the space.

It's so astonishingly lazy for so many to use AI as their boogeyman for everything now (ironically...the AI is to blame rhetoric is such low effort slop). The world was filled with low-skill, low-effort, low-value garbage and dreck before AI.

And FWIW, in many ways it's an ideal market being flooded for every wild niche or need. If your game is good do a bit of advertising and get word of mouth and you're the next Balatro. But people pushing weak offerings hoped limited choice and a captive audience would be their win.

pretty interesting, the macro economics of the software space seem shaky

Big Walk is pretty close to a myst.

You can't assume a sequel to something popular last year will do as well as the original - much less something from 30 years ago.

Each game has to stand on its own. When you discover a winning formula, there may be appetite for more of it. Or there may not be. Your audience is satiated at some point, and that assumes you even keep the quality up and don't just make slop to coast off the original's brand recognition.

can we pls add /s to to the post title?

how can it be that and then inside the article i read

> Last year’s indie darling, the Myst-inspired Blue Prince, was funded by a solo developer’s personal savings and the ad revenue from his Magic: The Gathering website. “When I finally approached publishers, it was only after I had completed my game, looking for marketing, porting, and release support,” Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros says via email.

if you need further proof it really is satire, here we go: our business model relies on Fed rates at 0%.

> “Nobody has zero-interest money anymore,” says North Cook. When interest rates were near 0 percent following the Great Recession, and again at the height of the Covid pandemic, video game investors took more risks. But when the Fed rate benchmark surged to more than 5 percent in 2023, venture capital funding for the video game industry collapsed by more than 75 percent, from a 2021 peak of $12 billion to less than $3 billion in both 2023 and 2024. “Money just got too expensive to borrow,” says Eternal. “Publishers looked at their capital and said, ‘This is all the cash we have until the banks change their rates. Let's be conservative and stretch this out.’”

What are you talking about? I can make a Myst-class game by next weekend, for practically no money.

The audience won't like it because they have beef with the tools I'd choose to use, but that's a them problem, not a me problem. Maybe I'm God's gift to game design but I just suck at art. They'll never know, I guess.

Makes me miss my old Packard Bell PB16 .. or maybe I just miss the 90's in general .. or being young.. sigh

_Dimhaven_, released just a few months ago, looks fairly Myst-like from the videos I've seen. While I haven't played it, Zadbox, the developer, also made the very Myst-like _Quern_; released 2016 and which I have played.

I can't help but think the article is a story about _Cyan's_ woes conflated with industry woes. Which isn't to say that the industry doesn't have problems! But Cyan really underperformed with _Firmament_. Look at the Kickstarter comments:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyanworlds/firmament/co...

They did a rug pull on whether they would ship DVDs with the Firmament collector's boxes _after_ they had complaints about the quality of the equivalent Obduction backer reward. While they did ship a DVD for Obduction, from personal experience the box itself it came in was a bit underwhelming. I didn't care so much about packaging, but I could see how someone would, and the whole situation on this point with Firmament was a very eye-rolling "again?" scenario. The first time with Obduction that they weren't able to ship what they planned in this way was bad luck; the second time was, generously, bad planning about something that was entirely foreseeable on their part.

More details here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/754890/discussions/0/38264157...

They made a bad bet on how well VR would take off, with Firmament very obviously created with VR play in mind.

So many people were disappointed with Firmament itself. "18,420 backers pledged $1,433,161 to help bring this project to life" but they can't do that again specifically because they burned a huge amount of goodwill with the people most likely to support them that way. Keep in mind that's a 2019 number and CPI adjusting would bring it up to about 1.8 million, at the lower end but solidly within the 1 to 10 million amount Wired said they were trying to raise for Anglerfish from a publisher. And _Obduction_, while beautiful, was a bit short and had its own issues.

I would also note with all the discussion of the impact of AI art on games that Cyan was an early _target_ of the anti-AI crowd over their use of AI art in Firmament. IIRC, Steam did not have a dedicated disclosure section at the time Firmament, but they did disclose it responsibly and appropriately in the credits. A more detailed statement from Cyan can still be found at https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in... -- on this, I agree with Cyan's 2023 post, we ought to be able to distinguish "AI Assisted" from AI-generated, although it seems many are allergic to such nuance.

> Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish.

This seems like an insane amount of capital to make a game that could be vibe coded in a few weeks