Nobody buys your game for being unique, they buy what they understand

The biggest mistake people make when talking about a game idea is starting out by hunting for a mechanic. Most of them will not even start the project until they find a mechanic nobody has done, and that mechanic usually never turns up. But the player is not buying to see a new system, they are buying to see themselves inside that game.

Thronefall is one of the best examples of this. Build a castle and defend it, that is all. It is Jonas Tyroller’s game, made by a two person team, and it sold more than a million copies. It has more than 23,000 reviews and a 96% score. The mechanics are good and relatively new, but what sells the game is much less the mechanic than the fantasy it offers you. The person who hears that sentence understands what they will be doing and wants it. He even has a video about this, called “You don’t need a hook”, and I recommend watching it.

VHOLUME, out this month, stands in the same place. A first person parkour game, nothing new mechanically, the genre has been around for years. But it has already collected 170k wishlists. What it sells is not running and jumping, it is wrestling with bureaucracy in a melancholic, brutalist dystopia. They put a world nobody had done on top of the same movement set.

Hooks work, but most people, whatever their industry experience, look for the hook in the mechanic. While chasing the mechanic they forget to manage what the player will feel. A hook is not a mechanic, it is legibility. Thronefall’s hook is not building a castle, it is that you can play the game in your head the second you hear that sentence.

Let me give the counter example too, Balatro. Combining poker with roguelite really was a new idea, and the game came out of one person’s hands and sold more than 5 million. So a new mechanic can sell, I am not denying it. But see this as well: describing Balatro also takes one sentence. Finding a new mechanic does not end your job, you have to be able to describe that mechanic in one sentence, and most of the people hunting for mechanics get stuck exactly where they cannot build that sentence. The more you hunt for a mechanic the more complex it gets, and the more complex it gets the less it can be told in one sentence.

Zukowski does not say anything very different. He warns indies against being too weird and against chasing hooky concepts, because that effort scares off the audience looking for a solid, dependable game in its genre. His example is Valheim, not a particularly hooky game, just genuinely good. The person shopping on Steam is not looking for novelty, they are looking for genre fit.

Because most players are afraid of novelty. The moment they run into a concept they cannot understand instantly, they give up, and turning that around is very hard. Something that is not understood has to be explained before it can attract interest, and every sentence you are forced to explain takes a player away from you. That is the most problematic part of building the game on a mechanic, because what the player is looking for is the continuation of the last game in the genre they love, or that game with a different theme.

The hard part is not the mechanic anyway. A game needs four things to work: being fun, attracting interest, being small enough to finish, and making money. Making money in a premium PC game is a one time pricing decision. On mobile and in F2P it is the thing that shapes the whole game, but not here. Fun you are already chasing in the prototype. That leaves the two that actually kill projects, attracting interest and scope. The mechanic is a subheading under fun, so the thing you have been working on for months is one item inside one of the four legs.

There is nothing new in my own game either. Metal Thunder’s pitch was this: the roguelite of Call of Duty’s Death from Above AC-130 mission. That sentence sells the whole fantasy on its own. So that is Metal Thunder’s hook. Neither the mechanic nor the genre is new. The most correct thing I did in the game was giving the player the power fantasy the AC-130 promises, and giving it well.

But not having a new mechanic is not a strategy on its own. If you are not innovating, you have to bring the appeal from somewhere else, from the game itself or from its presentation.

There are a few ways to find appeal without innovating. You can take a formula proven to work and improve it with a +1 on top. You can find an empty spot in the market, the way I did. You can carry something over from a film, a book or another medium. If you have a technological advantage you can build on that. Or you can start straight from the fantasy you want people to feel and write the mechanic to fit it.

Be careful while looking for an empty spot, most of those spots are empty because nobody wants them. If a genre has never been tried, first look at why it has not been tried. Most of the time it has been tried, and it sank.

Do not take this as clone things. Standing on the same shelf and making the same game are different things. What gets you onto the shelf is genre, what gets you picked off that shelf is theme, tone and presentation. VHOLUME’s mechanic is not new, but nobody had put parkour inside that world. Metal Thunder is the same, the gunship genre already existed, I brought power fantasy x100 to it.

So what do you do? Drop the question of what my game’s hook is and ask this instead: which fantasy is the player buying this to live? If you can answer in one sentence without using the name of a mechanic, your game can be sold. If you cannot, the problem is not a missing mechanic, it is that there is no game yet.

The cheapest way to test this is a trailer. Before you make the game, put out a short video that shows that sentence and measure the interest. If the fantasy does not land, the mechanic will not save it, and if it does land, you will not need to hunt for a mechanic.

Nobody is going to explain the game you cannot explain in one sentence for you.