"This is a WINNER TAKES ALL market. You are either in the top 0.1% of indie game developers, or you are unemployed, with an expensive hobby where you make effec

"This is a WINNER TAKES ALL market. You are either in the top 0.1% of indie game developers, or you are unemployed, with an expensive hobby where you make effectively free games." Game development is a fast moving business, and the goal posts are constantly moving if you are trying to make money in it. Remember when the only games phones had was 2d snake? Remember when the GameBoy was in black and white? Remember when you had to write your own Game Engine to get anything done? If you don't keep up with the change, you get left behind. "This is nobodies ‘fault’. Steam didn’t cause it, Unity didn’t cause it. games got easier to make, and more people got access to PCs, development kits, computer skills and broadband." With the rise of general game engines, game dev truly has never been easier. Thesedays I can pay roughly ~$70 and get a basic FPS game which I can then add to. That is outrageous. But here Cliffski talks as if there is some upper limit to games - but there isn't. If everyone is saving the same amount of time by using more efficient tools, then your only option is to spend that extra time on adding more content to your game than your competitors. "almost NOBODY covered my latest game (in terms of gaming websites). Its extremely, extremely tough right now." Cliffski creates very niche games, and it looks like his latest game is a car-themed Factorio, without any of the enemies and just pure stats. In fact, all of his games seem very political or manufacturing based. One trailer even talked about taxes. This stuff just isn't going appeal to a mass market of gamers who want to escape reality for a few hours. I do agree that if anyone is thinking of becoming an indie dev though, then they need to understand the market they are entering into. For example the VR market at the moment is small, so creating games for that space will result in a bigger splash and potentially more money. The Linux gaming space is also expanding. Steam stats [1] say about roughly 1% of all users are on Linux, doesn't sound like a lot until you see that in the past 48 hours, Steam had about 13 million concurrent active users, which gives you a potential market of 130, 000 linux users. There is also the Switch, another new gaming platform which is open for business to indies. Again you just have to keep up with where the market is going. [1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/