4 ms·

This is pretty misleading. He takes the median indie game and shows it doesn't make money. So what? There are a lot of shit indie games on steam. They have a se

This is pretty misleading. He takes the median indie game and shows it doesn't make money. So what? There are a lot of shit indie games on steam. They have a serious problem with people just uploading asset flips and other garbage that isn't intended to be played by anyone. If you eliminate the complete trash from the list, this game might be in the bottom 20% instead of 50%. And the actual median indie developer probably makes quite a bit more than that. In general the world is governed according to power laws. The top 20% of anything gets 80% of the reward. So you should look at the top 20% of indie developers at the very least. Its a lot easier to get into the top 20% than it is to get into the top 1%. The other consequence of power laws, is that it incentives taking more shots. If you only ever produce one game, then statistically it will probably fail. But if you make 5 games, the chance of one of them ending up in the top 20% is much higher. Just like famous directors will get most of the attention they get from one film they made out of dozens, or famous writers get most attention from one book, etc. Even here on HN, most of my upvotes will come from a handful of comments out of all the ones I've ever written.

ThrowawayR2 9y ago
> median indie game No, he takes the median of the _top selling_ indie games. That's a valid measure.
- wmf 9y ago
  Given that the list is 348 pages long, I assume that's actually all indie games sorted by sales. So the middle of the list should be the median game.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  That's Steam's "Indie Games" category, sorted by "top selling". It's not a list of top sellers. The difference is that if you click to the bottom, you get games with 20 reviews all reading "crashes on load, money back". If your game doesn't crash on 50% of startups, you're already not at the same 'median' as this article.
Bartweiss 9y ago
I'm sad that Sturgeon's Law doesn't get talked about much anymore: "ninety percent of everything is crap". The vast majority of all media created is terrible. The only reason that mass media (AAA games, blockbuster movies, etc) are less bad is that they've passed through many layers of quality filters before reaching the public. Those filters are imperfect, which is a real downside. It's all too easy to reject risky ventures in favor of safe ones, or simply misjudge a great work as something bad, or something "the public won't get". It happens all the time, and it's one of the reasons indie works in any domain are so valuable. The lowered barriers to entry bring us brilliant products that would never have seen the light of day in mass media. But they also bring us an enormous amount of crap. That's predictable, and not a problem with the market or the domain. Even after you take out shovelware that the developers know is terrible, the odds of success are still slow. We can talk about making discovery better (and with Steam we absolutely should talk about that), but the low win rate is not inherently bad.

ThrowawayR2 9y ago

> median indie game No, he takes the median of the _top selling_ indie games. That's a valid measure.

wmf 9y ago
Given that the list is 348 pages long, I assume that's actually all indie games sorted by sales. So the middle of the list should be the median game.
Bartweiss 9y ago
That's Steam's "Indie Games" category, sorted by "top selling". It's not a list of top sellers. The difference is that if you click to the bottom, you get games with 20 reviews all reading "crashes on load, money back". If your game doesn't crash on 50% of startups, you're already not at the same 'median' as this article.

Bartweiss 9y ago

I'm sad that Sturgeon's Law doesn't get talked about much anymore: "ninety percent of everything is crap". The vast majority of all media created is terrible. The only reason that mass media (AAA games, blockbuster movies, etc) are less bad is that they've passed through many layers of quality filters before reaching the public. Those filters are imperfect, which is a real downside. It's all too easy to reject risky ventures in favor of safe ones, or simply misjudge a great work as something bad, or something "the public won't get". It happens all the time, and it's one of the reasons indie works in any domain are so valuable. The lowered barriers to entry bring us brilliant products that would never have seen the light of day in mass media. But they also bring us an enormous amount of crap. That's predictable, and not a problem with the market or the domain. Even after you take out shovelware that the developers know is terrible, the odds of success are still slow. We can talk about making discovery better (and with Steam we absolutely should talk about that), but the low win rate is not inherently bad.