Reigns, a mobile game that you pay for before playing it –which is a business model that isn’t supposed to work at all anymore ever again, so they say- has sold over 600,000 units in a month. $2.4M.
RPS was running this story last week: Why A Million People Still Play Multiplayer Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Every Month and it comes down to three, simple things:
– No competitive behavior. People just go around, role-play and race. Racing is competitive but in a very light way compared to being constantly killed by bored, kind of psychotic people.
– It runs on old ass computers just fine. Game developers feel grossed out by old hardware I guess but machines are extremely resilient. I’d argue they are more and more because we underuse them so much (your quad-core CPU has probably been under-employed most of its life).
– Freedom+Bottom-Up design. Players do whatever they want, ask for features to scripters, who in turn make them available to players. Repeat. Not having to deal with marketing, PR, IP holders is a blessing to game development.
At the end of the day you need to craft something that people really want, something that you really believe in. Forget trends and media strategy, trust your feelings have good money on the side if possible, and ship.