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When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out. The whole indie market thing was hot. But at a certain point, thanks to

by keyle 3y ago

When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out. The whole indie market thing was hot. But at a certain point, thanks to the free availability of game engines and their overal quality, the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games and releasing top quality indie games. It became a game of marketing. And sadly that's where we failed. Steam says that there is no better or worse day of the week or month to plan your release... That should be your first red flag. There are about 30-35 quality titles being put out on steam alone, every day of the week, weekends included. Other markets are a bit of a joke, they hardly fly on the revenues radar, unless you have a special deal with them for increased visibility. You see the title you've worked on for the last 6 months solid just fly off the list quicker than you can say woof. I know for a fact (we talk) that most indies don't make a 10th of their budget back. It's a marketeting's game now. So you probably want a publisher to be in charge of that... and we're back to the old days of non-indies, or essentially small studios. "True" Indie games are dead, by the law of numbers and algorithms. Even people that saw success in the past are now having a hard time pushing signal through noise.

magic_hamster 3y ago
6 months is a very short development cycle. It's also very hard to build an audience in such a short time frame. Obviously if you repeat this cycle you are going to get very frustrated.
dmix 3y ago
> the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games The line between indie game and zero budget side project/potential small business often gets skewed in these sorts of discussions. Anyone in the startup scene eventually learns the distinction between a startup legitimately chasing high growth and a small business caught up in a trend. Sometimes you should just be a small business, not simply because you as a person are not capable of making something high growth, but because your own circumstances, team, effort, and product simply aren't much beyond a niche play. There's nothing wrong with running a small business, plenty of people live fulfilling lives fully supported by one, but if you really want to be something more (like topping console charts absent a lottery viral win) it's going going to take plenty of chutzpah and commitment. Otherwise as a business model it's way more profitable and time saving to be realistic.
onion2k 3y ago
It's a marketeting's game now. I don't think that's true. Not because I think an indie game can succeed without marketing, but the opposite. I think most indie games would still fail even with incredible marketing. They'd just lose more money because they'd have an additional cost. You can't always advertise your way to success in a completely saturated (or over-saturated) market, especially if your competitors are trying to do the same thing. You can either get lucky or fail.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Non-indie games too; think Daikatana, Anthem, Babylon's Fall, Duke Nukem Forever, Shenmue, etc; all high budget, high marketing budget titles but ultimately flops.
  - magic_hamster 3y ago
    To be fair, now that we got a chance to play a leaked (and reconstructed) version of the Unreal DNF build... If this game came out in 2001 it would absolutely be a top tier legendary title. It's tragic that they didn't finish it when they should have. It had nothing to do with marketing. Just plain old fucking up.
raincole 3y ago
I think you romanticized the past. > When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out. > It's a marketeting's game now. So you probably want a publisher to be in charge of that... Fact: Jonathan Blow, one of the devs featured in the movie "Indie Games", signed a contract with Microsoft way before Braid (one of the games featured in the movie) came out. You want a publisher, or just someone else, to be in charge of something, if you're not very good at or interested in something. Big news, I know.
fileeditview 3y ago
I disagree. There are still "true" indie games out there. Just the masses of games produced that call themselves "indie games" are not. Often it seems to be used as an excuse for an unpolished, boring and in the end shitty game. You are right that it became a marketing game. It was a hype and everyone started to call its product an indie game. The solution however is not more marketing. It will automatically solve itself. Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits.
- gareve 3y ago
  > Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits. If there's 5 indie games that fit that description, people can easily enjoy, & more importantly, remember them. What happens when 20, 30, 50 games fit that description? There's no way no good games fall through the cracks. The amount of games developed in a year increases while people's retention remains constant.
  - fileeditview 3y ago
    Of course there might always be exceptions but I doubt that games like Stardew Valley or Papers, Please! could fall through the cracks.. but who knows. I think there is a general saturation problem. I won't have the time to play 20, 30 or even 50 games a year. I don't need more games but better ones (in general.. there are of course great games).
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      That's the neat part of it all. They fall through and you don't know unless you spend a good amount of time digging yourself. Or finding a similarly aligned curator who dig for you. In other words, all games you liked were good. But you haven't played all good games.
      - fileeditview 3y ago
        Well I actually do quite some digging myself. I like certain niches that are not really mainstream (e.g. roguelikes). However I never found a game where I thought this should be a bestseller and it wasn't (compared to the audience). Now I sure still might have missed some.. however I am convinced that games that are truly exceptional will be successful. Because they are (still) rare. Good is not good enough. I stand by the fact that this is not a marketing issue. Of course you need some exposure.. if you never release a gem and never show it to anyone of course it won't find an audience.
lynx23 3y ago
Feels a lot like what happens with electronic music producers. There is a bunch of highly taltented sound designers out there, putting their hard work on BandCamp or whatever platform is friendly enough to make some bucks on. But almost nobody can make a living off selling releases. Almost everyone has to tour and play live gigs to make some money. And I guess the biggest reason why it is so hard to make money with releases is the same as with indie games, too many people trying to get a piece of the same cake... Paying fans are rare.
somenameforme 3y ago
It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.' And of course it did exceptionally well, because it's just a very good game. In my opinion now is currently the absolute golden age for indie development of all sorts. But the catch is you actually need to make really good stuff. Just making a functioning game isn't really sufficient. There's even still a huge market for stuff that looks like it came from a 24 hour game-jam codeathon, but it needs to be fun. Check out Forager [3] for instance. As a warning, play that game for an hour - and you'll be playing it for 10 (or 100) because it's really just insanely fun. And that's really all it is. The "problem" is that it's just become really (relatively) easy to make games. And so just making a functioning complete game is no longer any sort of real achievement. It needs to be fun. Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed. [1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valheim#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valheim#Development [3] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/
- bigger_inside 3y ago
  don't forget Rimworld. One guy making a huge and sprawling game that ignored the studio sensibilities and became hit (and a couple of memes).
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Rimworld (and I'm sure Stardew will also be mentioned) came out years ago though; sure, the indie market was hopping back then too, but it's gotten worse since then.
    - Etherlord87 3y ago
flohofwoe 3y ago
> It's a marketing's game now. Making games break even always was 90% marketing though, maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own, but that definitely wasn't the case for "non-indie" games since at least the late 90's (the way how game marketing is done has changed dramatically though).
- ilyt 3y ago
  > maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own That was never the case. Just that some indie that made "good enough" or "great" game got lucky that they got picked by "right" streamer or youtuber that liked it and it got virally popular off it. Like I doubt Minecraft would explode as it did if Yogscast didn't pick it up and made a popular YT series about it, which also made modders jump on the then-barren game, making it even more interesting.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Or by Valve and Steam itself. They were essentially king makers when they really curated the content. Then came Greenlight and later just opened flood gates. Justly I think. The curation was not optimal model.
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    > Like I doubt Minecraft would explode as it did if Yogscast didn't pick it up and made a popular YT series about it Pretty sure before Yogscast there was already the rollercoaster minecart video released and on Kotaku (and other sites) that made Notch a millionaire overnight. Yogscast may have helped shoot it into the moon, but Notch had already joined the mile high club by then.
  - Etherlord87 3y ago
    Who is convinced by such argumentation I wonder? If there's a hypothesis, and there's multiple examples disproving the hypothesis, and not even a single example proving the hypothesis is provided - how can you be a fan of the hypothesis? It may be a matter of marketing and luck to make money on a "good" game, but a brilliant game is destined to spread like wildfire, because the gaming community is enthusiastic enough to look for such gems and announce the findings.
barrysteve 3y ago
The market is saturated with remakes and games with nothing to say. This is the exact problem Norbet Weiner described in the 1950's book Human Use of Human Beings. Computers are characterized as a Spiritual Filter in that book and the aim is to get a message through the filter. These games aren't selling, cause everyone can tell they've got nothing to say. The know-how that goes into making them is very good, but the content itself is hollow. Steam's most played is plastered with games from 2015-2019 because nothing has knocked them off the throne yet. We all should be wary of making "a game" or "an game" or "a remake" and only make a game when we have something worth saying in a game format. The premise is so underrated lately. We know what happens when the games market is saturated with hollow, empty games. 1983 video game market crash.
- noobermin 3y ago
  This might be harsh, and may be a crash isn't needed, but clearly if there's oversaturation, it is just natural that making "indie" games shouldn't make money. It is depressing perhaps for people who want to make games which clearly is a lot of people, but you're just upset at the economics of reality.
  - barrysteve 3y ago
    Huah? I'm not upset about the economics though. I'm just describing what I see. What upsets me is the drop in meaningful/just games to play. I really like playing and making games, and seeing a valuable thing be created.... It's not happening often any more in the Steam games space. It genuinely hurts to go from GTA V, RimWorld, Stardew, CS and HL (ect) to empty, hollow games. It's okay with me if it crashes. My core ethos is that cream rises to the top. It should be hypothetically possible to make a video game that sells in the great depression or whatever economic nightmare. I wouldn't try to do that, because it's basically insane to try... but if you're going to make a game, don't half-ass it. Have something to say! It has to be worth playing and buying even in hard times.. Just making "AN game" isn't enough. The Hollywood screenwriters would beat a premise to death before green-lighting it. I only say that to point out that the phenomena exists in other industries too.
Aaargh20318 3y ago
For me the main problem with indie games is the amount of value you get for your money. Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game. However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is expected to sell 5M copies is going to have a much larger budget than a game that is expected to sell 10k copies. Add to that the lower price of indie games and there is a huge budget difference. The end result of this is that as a gamer I can choose between a €20 indie game representing maybe €500k of development effort, or an €80 AAA game that represents €200M of development effort. The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.
- ilyt 3y ago
  > The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value. So what non-multiplayer AAA game you played 400 times as long than an 10 hour indie experience ? Or did you had 400x the fun playing it? That's very MBA way to look at it. Game's budget is only vaguely correlated with how good it is as a game. Sure prettier blah blah blah, but we had plenty of big games coming out mediocre and just being bought coz of market inertia of average non-internet-scouring user buying next AAA title from big publisher and not even looking at the smaller ones or indies. Like, if I look at the top amount of spent time in game (the "value" per spend money) it's some small dev management games (Factorio, Banished, Rimworld, X4), the type of game that most AAA developers just refuse to make in the first place. Most of "singleplayer story driven ones" I've played also fall out of AAA space because while 20 years ago industry was busy making games like Baldur's gate or Fallout, now anything similar only happens in sub-AAA space.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    Outright play time isn't the right way to measure the value of a game (or any other piece of art or entertainment) unless your sole purpose is to spend time. I value Half Life 2 hundreds of times higher than skribbl.io even though I probably have more hours in the latter.
  - 3y ago
matwood 3y ago
> It became a game of marketing. Welcome to selling pretty much anything. "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise." - Ted Turner
reddit_refugee3 3y ago
"True" indie games are far from dead, there are just different degrees of quality and success. Yeah, there is a lot of shovelware, but there are also tons of amazing indie games coming out on a regular basis.
mycocola 3y ago
> There are about 30-35 quality titles being put out on steam alone, every day of the week, weekends included. Absolutely not. The vast majority of games released on Steam are not good. You can verify this yourself by looking at new releases. Maybe one or two out the ones released the 19th of June are _potentially_ interesting. Quality, defined as well-produced games in unsaturated niches, is really the only thing that matters, but marketing can be a multiplier of that quality. I've seen many games that blame marketing for their failure, and I have seen many games that fail despite their marketing. Usually those games are not compelling, and reviews will confirm this. It's rare to see games fail despite their high quality.
- burntalmonds 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree. If anything, it's actually surprising how few truly good games are ever released. There is still a massive opportunity for indie games.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    That doesn't mean this is a massive opportunity to sell. I mean if a handful of quality games are buried within tons of shitty games, what do people do? They buy a few random cheap games at first, then realized most of these cheap games are shitty and end up not looking at non AAA games after a number of deceptions. Instead they wait for AAA games to go on sales. That is what at least what I did, instead of finding a gem among indies, I just wait for well reviewed AAA ones to lower in prices because I have other things to do than reading hundreds of reviews to make up my mind and find the gem among a huge pile of poo. Additionally there are so many games entering the market that all of them cannot be reviewed so there is little chance your very nice indie game will be reviewed.
bdw5204 3y ago
Game development has turned into the same kind of nightmare that music is for anybody who wants to go into it. Unless you're really good at marketing/get really lucky, you're never going to make a living doing it because the market is insanely oversaturated and the gaming media focuses most of its attention on a handful of popular high budget games because that's what draws the traffic. Another major problem is how long today's high budget games are. Not only the multiplayer "live service" casinos that are designed to addict their players and keep them playing in perpetuity but the modern single player open world RPGs that seemingly average around 100 hours of playtime. If somebody is playing 300 hours of that extremely bloated Assassin's Creed game about Vikings, they're not playing other games in that time and presumably have less interest in buying them. Likewise, stuff like GamePass and the new tiers of PS+ that offer access to an enormous number of games for a small subscription fee have to be cutting into game sales. And new games are also competing with 50 years worth of old games. I wonder if many of the indie games, especially story driven games, might be better off as movies. Given how everybody carries a camera in their pocket these days, Hollywood movies are formulaic garbage and no actors are stars anymore, there's probably a market for innovative low budget movies shot in the woods on a single phone camera by a few friends and with little to no special effects. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than game development plus you'd get to be outside doing interesting things rather than just sitting at a computer for years working on a game that will most likely be played by a few dozen people.
- karpierz 3y ago
  Analogously: I wonder if many of the low budget films, especially narrative focused films, might be better off as games. Given how everybody has a computer these days, AAA games are formulaic garbage and games aren't centered around a single developer any more, there's probably a market for innovative low budget games made in a basement on a single computer by a few friends and with little to no art assets. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than movie production, plus you'd get to spend time on the internet researching interesting technical problems rather than just sitting in a movie editor for years, working on a movie that will most likely be watched by a few dozen people. tl;dr: I don't think a good movie is any easier to make than a good game.

by keyle 3y ago

magic_hamster 3y ago

6 months is a very short development cycle. It's also very hard to build an audience in such a short time frame. Obviously if you repeat this cycle you are going to get very frustrated.

dmix 3y ago

> the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games The line between indie game and zero budget side project/potential small business often gets skewed in these sorts of discussions. Anyone in the startup scene eventually learns the distinction between a startup legitimately chasing high growth and a small business caught up in a trend. Sometimes you should just be a small business, not simply because you as a person are not capable of making something high growth, but because your own circumstances, team, effort, and product simply aren't much beyond a niche play. There's nothing wrong with running a small business, plenty of people live fulfilling lives fully supported by one, but if you really want to be something more (like topping console charts absent a lottery viral win) it's going going to take plenty of chutzpah and commitment. Otherwise as a business model it's way more profitable and time saving to be realistic.

onion2k 3y ago

It's a marketeting's game now. I don't think that's true. Not because I think an indie game can succeed without marketing, but the opposite. I think most indie games would still fail even with incredible marketing. They'd just lose more money because they'd have an additional cost. You can't always advertise your way to success in a completely saturated (or over-saturated) market, especially if your competitors are trying to do the same thing. You can either get lucky or fail.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Non-indie games too; think Daikatana, Anthem, Babylon's Fall, Duke Nukem Forever, Shenmue, etc; all high budget, high marketing budget titles but ultimately flops.
- magic_hamster 3y ago
  To be fair, now that we got a chance to play a leaked (and reconstructed) version of the Unreal DNF build... If this game came out in 2001 it would absolutely be a top tier legendary title. It's tragic that they didn't finish it when they should have. It had nothing to do with marketing. Just plain old fucking up.

raincole 3y ago

I think you romanticized the past. > When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out. > It's a marketeting's game now. So you probably want a publisher to be in charge of that... Fact: Jonathan Blow, one of the devs featured in the movie "Indie Games", signed a contract with Microsoft way before Braid (one of the games featured in the movie) came out. You want a publisher, or just someone else, to be in charge of something, if you're not very good at or interested in something. Big news, I know.

fileeditview 3y ago

I disagree. There are still "true" indie games out there. Just the masses of games produced that call themselves "indie games" are not. Often it seems to be used as an excuse for an unpolished, boring and in the end shitty game. You are right that it became a marketing game. It was a hype and everyone started to call its product an indie game. The solution however is not more marketing. It will automatically solve itself. Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits.

gareve 3y ago
> Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits. If there's 5 indie games that fit that description, people can easily enjoy, & more importantly, remember them. What happens when 20, 30, 50 games fit that description? There's no way no good games fall through the cracks. The amount of games developed in a year increases while people's retention remains constant.
- fileeditview 3y ago
  Of course there might always be exceptions but I doubt that games like Stardew Valley or Papers, Please! could fall through the cracks.. but who knows. I think there is a general saturation problem. I won't have the time to play 20, 30 or even 50 games a year. I don't need more games but better ones (in general.. there are of course great games).
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    That's the neat part of it all. They fall through and you don't know unless you spend a good amount of time digging yourself. Or finding a similarly aligned curator who dig for you. In other words, all games you liked were good. But you haven't played all good games.
    - fileeditview 3y ago
      Well I actually do quite some digging myself. I like certain niches that are not really mainstream (e.g. roguelikes). However I never found a game where I thought this should be a bestseller and it wasn't (compared to the audience). Now I sure still might have missed some.. however I am convinced that games that are truly exceptional will be successful. Because they are (still) rare. Good is not good enough. I stand by the fact that this is not a marketing issue. Of course you need some exposure.. if you never release a gem and never show it to anyone of course it won't find an audience.

lynx23 3y ago

Feels a lot like what happens with electronic music producers. There is a bunch of highly taltented sound designers out there, putting their hard work on BandCamp or whatever platform is friendly enough to make some bucks on. But almost nobody can make a living off selling releases. Almost everyone has to tour and play live gigs to make some money. And I guess the biggest reason why it is so hard to make money with releases is the same as with indie games, too many people trying to get a piece of the same cake... Paying fans are rare.

somenameforme 3y ago

It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.' And of course it did exceptionally well, because it's just a very good game. In my opinion now is currently the absolute golden age for indie development of all sorts. But the catch is you actually need to make really good stuff. Just making a functioning game isn't really sufficient. There's even still a huge market for stuff that looks like it came from a 24 hour game-jam codeathon, but it needs to be fun. Check out Forager [3] for instance. As a warning, play that game for an hour - and you'll be playing it for 10 (or 100) because it's really just insanely fun. And that's really all it is. The "problem" is that it's just become really (relatively) easy to make games. And so just making a functioning complete game is no longer any sort of real achievement. It needs to be fun. Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed. [1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valheim#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valheim#Development [3] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/

bigger_inside 3y ago
don't forget Rimworld. One guy making a huge and sprawling game that ignored the studio sensibilities and became hit (and a couple of memes).
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Rimworld (and I'm sure Stardew will also be mentioned) came out years ago though; sure, the indie market was hopping back then too, but it's gotten worse since then.
  - Etherlord87 3y ago

flohofwoe 3y ago

> It's a marketing's game now. Making games break even always was 90% marketing though, maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own, but that definitely wasn't the case for "non-indie" games since at least the late 90's (the way how game marketing is done has changed dramatically though).

ilyt 3y ago
> maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own That was never the case. Just that some indie that made "good enough" or "great" game got lucky that they got picked by "right" streamer or youtuber that liked it and it got virally popular off it. Like I doubt Minecraft would explode as it did if Yogscast didn't pick it up and made a popular YT series about it, which also made modders jump on the then-barren game, making it even more interesting.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Or by Valve and Steam itself. They were essentially king makers when they really curated the content. Then came Greenlight and later just opened flood gates. Justly I think. The curation was not optimal model.
- cableshaft 3y ago
  > Like I doubt Minecraft would explode as it did if Yogscast didn't pick it up and made a popular YT series about it Pretty sure before Yogscast there was already the rollercoaster minecart video released and on Kotaku (and other sites) that made Notch a millionaire overnight. Yogscast may have helped shoot it into the moon, but Notch had already joined the mile high club by then.
- Etherlord87 3y ago
  Who is convinced by such argumentation I wonder? If there's a hypothesis, and there's multiple examples disproving the hypothesis, and not even a single example proving the hypothesis is provided - how can you be a fan of the hypothesis? It may be a matter of marketing and luck to make money on a "good" game, but a brilliant game is destined to spread like wildfire, because the gaming community is enthusiastic enough to look for such gems and announce the findings.

barrysteve 3y ago

The market is saturated with remakes and games with nothing to say. This is the exact problem Norbet Weiner described in the 1950's book Human Use of Human Beings. Computers are characterized as a Spiritual Filter in that book and the aim is to get a message through the filter. These games aren't selling, cause everyone can tell they've got nothing to say. The know-how that goes into making them is very good, but the content itself is hollow. Steam's most played is plastered with games from 2015-2019 because nothing has knocked them off the throne yet. We all should be wary of making "a game" or "an game" or "a remake" and only make a game when we have something worth saying in a game format. The premise is so underrated lately. We know what happens when the games market is saturated with hollow, empty games. 1983 video game market crash.

noobermin 3y ago
This might be harsh, and may be a crash isn't needed, but clearly if there's oversaturation, it is just natural that making "indie" games shouldn't make money. It is depressing perhaps for people who want to make games which clearly is a lot of people, but you're just upset at the economics of reality.
- barrysteve 3y ago
  Huah? I'm not upset about the economics though. I'm just describing what I see. What upsets me is the drop in meaningful/just games to play. I really like playing and making games, and seeing a valuable thing be created.... It's not happening often any more in the Steam games space. It genuinely hurts to go from GTA V, RimWorld, Stardew, CS and HL (ect) to empty, hollow games. It's okay with me if it crashes. My core ethos is that cream rises to the top. It should be hypothetically possible to make a video game that sells in the great depression or whatever economic nightmare. I wouldn't try to do that, because it's basically insane to try... but if you're going to make a game, don't half-ass it. Have something to say! It has to be worth playing and buying even in hard times.. Just making "AN game" isn't enough. The Hollywood screenwriters would beat a premise to death before green-lighting it. I only say that to point out that the phenomena exists in other industries too.

Aaargh20318 3y ago

For me the main problem with indie games is the amount of value you get for your money. Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game. However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is expected to sell 5M copies is going to have a much larger budget than a game that is expected to sell 10k copies. Add to that the lower price of indie games and there is a huge budget difference. The end result of this is that as a gamer I can choose between a €20 indie game representing maybe €500k of development effort, or an €80 AAA game that represents €200M of development effort. The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.

ilyt 3y ago
> The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value. So what non-multiplayer AAA game you played 400 times as long than an 10 hour indie experience ? Or did you had 400x the fun playing it? That's very MBA way to look at it. Game's budget is only vaguely correlated with how good it is as a game. Sure prettier blah blah blah, but we had plenty of big games coming out mediocre and just being bought coz of market inertia of average non-internet-scouring user buying next AAA title from big publisher and not even looking at the smaller ones or indies. Like, if I look at the top amount of spent time in game (the "value" per spend money) it's some small dev management games (Factorio, Banished, Rimworld, X4), the type of game that most AAA developers just refuse to make in the first place. Most of "singleplayer story driven ones" I've played also fall out of AAA space because while 20 years ago industry was busy making games like Baldur's gate or Fallout, now anything similar only happens in sub-AAA space.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Outright play time isn't the right way to measure the value of a game (or any other piece of art or entertainment) unless your sole purpose is to spend time. I value Half Life 2 hundreds of times higher than skribbl.io even though I probably have more hours in the latter.
- 3y ago

matwood 3y ago

> It became a game of marketing. Welcome to selling pretty much anything. "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise." - Ted Turner

reddit_refugee3 3y ago

"True" indie games are far from dead, there are just different degrees of quality and success. Yeah, there is a lot of shovelware, but there are also tons of amazing indie games coming out on a regular basis.

mycocola 3y ago

> There are about 30-35 quality titles being put out on steam alone, every day of the week, weekends included. Absolutely not. The vast majority of games released on Steam are not good. You can verify this yourself by looking at new releases. Maybe one or two out the ones released the 19th of June are _potentially_ interesting. Quality, defined as well-produced games in unsaturated niches, is really the only thing that matters, but marketing can be a multiplier of that quality. I've seen many games that blame marketing for their failure, and I have seen many games that fail despite their marketing. Usually those games are not compelling, and reviews will confirm this. It's rare to see games fail despite their high quality.

burntalmonds 3y ago
Yeah, I agree. If anything, it's actually surprising how few truly good games are ever released. There is still a massive opportunity for indie games.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  That doesn't mean this is a massive opportunity to sell. I mean if a handful of quality games are buried within tons of shitty games, what do people do? They buy a few random cheap games at first, then realized most of these cheap games are shitty and end up not looking at non AAA games after a number of deceptions. Instead they wait for AAA games to go on sales. That is what at least what I did, instead of finding a gem among indies, I just wait for well reviewed AAA ones to lower in prices because I have other things to do than reading hundreds of reviews to make up my mind and find the gem among a huge pile of poo. Additionally there are so many games entering the market that all of them cannot be reviewed so there is little chance your very nice indie game will be reviewed.

bdw5204 3y ago

Game development has turned into the same kind of nightmare that music is for anybody who wants to go into it. Unless you're really good at marketing/get really lucky, you're never going to make a living doing it because the market is insanely oversaturated and the gaming media focuses most of its attention on a handful of popular high budget games because that's what draws the traffic. Another major problem is how long today's high budget games are. Not only the multiplayer "live service" casinos that are designed to addict their players and keep them playing in perpetuity but the modern single player open world RPGs that seemingly average around 100 hours of playtime. If somebody is playing 300 hours of that extremely bloated Assassin's Creed game about Vikings, they're not playing other games in that time and presumably have less interest in buying them. Likewise, stuff like GamePass and the new tiers of PS+ that offer access to an enormous number of games for a small subscription fee have to be cutting into game sales. And new games are also competing with 50 years worth of old games. I wonder if many of the indie games, especially story driven games, might be better off as movies. Given how everybody carries a camera in their pocket these days, Hollywood movies are formulaic garbage and no actors are stars anymore, there's probably a market for innovative low budget movies shot in the woods on a single phone camera by a few friends and with little to no special effects. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than game development plus you'd get to be outside doing interesting things rather than just sitting at a computer for years working on a game that will most likely be played by a few dozen people.

karpierz 3y ago
Analogously: I wonder if many of the low budget films, especially narrative focused films, might be better off as games. Given how everybody has a computer these days, AAA games are formulaic garbage and games aren't centered around a single developer any more, there's probably a market for innovative low budget games made in a basement on a single computer by a few friends and with little to no art assets. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than movie production, plus you'd get to spend time on the internet researching interesting technical problems rather than just sitting in a movie editor for years, working on a movie that will most likely be watched by a few dozen people. tl;dr: I don't think a good movie is any easier to make than a good game.