You make a lot of good points about expectations driving prices more than any traditional "value" here. Steam has games ranging from pennies to hundreds of dol

You make a lot of good points about expectations driving prices more than any traditional "value" here. Steam has games ranging from pennies to hundreds of dollars if you buy them fully loaded. Clearly there's varied demand. Maybe the indie developers have an image problem where their titles aren't deemed worthy of a >$10 price-point regardless of the effort involved in producing them. That being said, I know people who've succeeded despite their crazy low prices ($0.99 on sale, $3.99 regular) because they make up for it in volume. Steam isn't their only source of income, either, they have a foothold in the PS4, Vita, iOS and XBox space. As an indie you need to port to as many languages, platforms, and regions as you can afford to cast as big a net as possible. Remember, one of the best-selling games of all time is Minecraft which was, for the longest time, put out at the remarkably cheap (in terms of $/hr. of fun) price of $9 during beta. > For reasons I don't comprehend, there is almost no open source standard within indie communities... Ogre3D and a few sound-libraries notwithstanding, you're right. It's terrible. While there are tools like Blender (and Blender Game Engine) there's relatively slim pickings compared to things like the wealth of resources a typical web developer enjoys. It's not about people giving away their hard work, it's about people sharing and through that making it easier for everyone to produce games. The Pixar initiative to share their OpenSubdiv project is a great example of how that could play out: Now you don't have to waste your life writing a sad, non-performant version of subdivision surfaces. You can do more productive things.