What happens when you export the simplest possible "game" from Unity and other game dev environments?

Originally published at: What happens when you export the simplest possible "game" from Unity and other game dev environments? | Boing Boing

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That’s a very interesting little bit of research.

I’ve often wondered how many games clogging up the various mobile and desktop stores are barely altered templates (either included with the development platform or sourced freely/cheaply from tutorials or third party ecosystem sellers) with a few graphical changes and a silly name… and how much income they generate for their (lazy!) developers…

I work in the industry and can answer these for you:

Many many thousands (or possibly tens of thousands). Pumping out shovelware from game engine templates is indeed a very common practice.

None. This is something that every teenager and southeast Asian porting house tries, but the fact is it doesn’t work. You will get no discovery and players will see through your shit screenshots.

There are 2 million apps on iOS and 3 million on Google. The interface for picking one of these millions of apps is a 5” screen with a list that shows 5-10 items. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make games as amazing as possible to get into that tiny list so people will see us. If you export a sample game and post it, you’re just throwing away the developer license you bought to do that.

People assume that “low barrier to entry” means “level playing field”. It does not. If you post a crappy app, odds are nobody will ever even see it, never mind download it or pay for it.

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