8 ms·

The Indie Bubble Is Popping

125 points by cjauvin 12y ago

suprjami 12y ago
I have been playing Jeff Vogel's games since Exile 1 in 1995, and I'm still playing them today with the Avadon series. He's a fantastic author and fantasy world architect, however I strongly disagree with his opinions on the game industry. This is a guy who was selling a 20+ yearold game as a downloadable installer from his ancient website for $30 while new indie authors were pumping out new games on sale for $10, $5, or less. Who was making more sales, and ultimately more profit from this? Evidence it wasn't him: http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-half http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-hal... I think Jeff is a dinosaur, stuck in the 90s shareware era, and bitter that people can make more money by selling games for $3 than he can by selling games for $30.
- zyxley 12y ago
  Seconded. This is a guy whose total sales of games were low enough under his original model that one of them sold about 4,000 copies total since its release (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-games-i-sell.html http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...). Later, when he actually dropped the prices to something that average people might feel like actually paying for games built on such retro foundations, he sold 33,000 bundles in one week (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vogel-on-bundles-graphics-and-pessimism/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vo...)... while misunderstanding the effects of lower pricing on his target audience enough that he thought he'd sell "less than a third of that".
- duskwuff 12y ago
  In Jeff's case, I suspect that the low audio/visual quality of the games that he's been releasing since 2000 has been a significant factor in the weak reception he's seen them receive. Reviewers have been consistently dinging his games since Geneforge in 2001, and he's still using the same game engine (and a lot of the same graphical assets!) in his current releases. Plainly put, his games look and feel dated. Is graphical polish a make-or-break factor for games? Of course not. But that isn't a license to ignore it, either. "Lo-fi" graphics can be attractive as an intentional design choice, but that isn't what he's got, and I suspect it's turning off a lot of potential players.
archagon 12y ago
Frankly, I've yet to see a truly stunning game pass me by, either in the indie space or on the App Store (where this problem has existed for a little while now). Market saturation causes mediocre games to become buried. The obvious solution is to not make mediocre games. I'm still convinced the cream will rise to the top.
- TillE 12y ago
  Absolutely. Dwarf Fortress is a fun example of what's possible when you make a genuinely great, innovative game while putting zero effort into marketing or accessibility. There will always be a market for exceptional games like that. There'd be a much bigger one if he could get a proper GUI together, but Tarn Adams seems perfectly content with his modest income. If you're a business person, games are probably a poor investment. If you're an independent creator, it's still one of the most self-sustainable forms of art.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Exactly. Games need to be approached as art because they are art. And most of the common rules of success in art apply there.
- glhaynes 12y ago
  I don't mean this snarkily: how would you know if a truly stunning game had passed you by? If it'd been out for a long time before you heard about it? That wouldn't seem to account for the possibility of really great stuff passing everybody by and never achieving critical mass.
  - lelandbatey 12y ago
    I agree, in part at least. Additionally, one of the things I've noticed is that good stuff is often made great by being successful, which can be a bit of a paradox. Also, a lot of games that people really like are not (or weren't when they first came out) "really stunning".
  - ama729 12y ago
shmerl 12y ago
I disagree with the general sentiment. > The problem is too many games. That's not the problem. It's like saying that music industry is in crisis because there are tons of junk records around. Good music is always a minority and one has to sift through noise to get to it. Gaming isn't any different. Good games are a form of art, and they are always a minority, whether we are talking about indie and low budget or big budget / publisher funded games. That's why Steam may be a bad example, because filtering games there isn't easy. Services like GOG concentrate on good games. That's of course subjective (according to the distributor), but they do a lot of pre-filtering for you. > It's not sustainable. It is, like any other art. Make something unique, make something good and you'll find your audience. Crowdfunding also helps to increase visibility.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  There is absolutely no guarantee that you'll find your audience, and indeed the odds against doing so are increasing. For example: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/10/16/the-most-important-thing-you-will-read-all-day/ http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/10/16/t... Services like GOG concentrate on good games. That's of course subjective (according to the distributor), but they do a lot of pre-filtering for you. Which Steam did, a role which they have since abandoned. Why do you assume GOG will be any different? The day GOG's accountant proves irrefutably that it's more profitable to offer 20,000 shitty games than 200 good ones is the day they'll start doing that. That might not be for a while; as long as GOG's sales growth depends on differentiating it from other brands like Steam by being more selective. But eventually that growth will hit a plateau, and economics change. It is, like any other art. Make something unique, make something good and you'll find your audience. You might, but there's no guarantee that you won't get lost in the shuffle. As Vogel points out, the problem is not so much for micro-producers with very low overhead, for whom even small sales are profitable, as for mid-sized ventures that have to invest $1 million+ to meet audience expectations and who will go broke if they can't recoup their production budget. I really find your advice a bit facile. What branch of the arts do you work in?
  - shmerl 12y ago
    > There is absolutely no guarantee that you'll find your audience, Well, of course, there is always risk. What I meant is that if the game is not unique and not standing out, then the chances of success are way lower. > Which Steam did, a role which they have since abandoned. Why do you assume GOG will be any different? Because GOG insists they will be. So far they were honest: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-15-gog-on-early-access-definitely-not-every-game-should-be-permitted http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-15-gog-on-early-ac... > I really find your advice a bit facile. My advice is based on viewing art as art, and not something that has to be specifically commercialized really. Indie developers are actually in the better situation here, because they can resort to crowdfunding which allows them making artistic choices based on interests, rather than on demands from the publisher. And it makes it easier because they don't have huge agreements to spend millions on marketing which they need to recover.
ps4fanboy 12y ago
Steam is currently being flooded with "Casual" mobile app ports it remains to be seen if they actually sell, I have yet to see one on the top sellers list after release. I would hardly call that a bubble. Good indie games will continue to make money.
james33 12y ago
The good news is that these things always go in cycles. The ones that can weather the downturn will be the big winners on the other side.
mindstab 12y ago
One of the assumed axioms of this argument is the the game industry is a zero-sum game, which it isn't at all in anyway. Now maybe it's not the flexibilist market and the low hanging fruit and easy stuff is much more saturated then it was a few years ago so it's certainly harder, but a bit the argument has some more give in it than it might be admitting.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Discoverability is a huge problem. I would at any time want more turn based strategies in the triangle HoMM-Disciples-MoM, but it seems there aren't any? Even if there are, I can't discover them! Only thing that still can do is word of mouth. I've scraped Play store for wargames and the best I got was a crappy game I did not run for the second time. I believe I paid for that. Word of mouth is very irregular and app stores' charts are always full with "safe choices", i.e. either you know about this title already or it is a knockoff crap. I would like to spend more on good games but I don't see much supply.
- shmerl 12y ago
  Somehow I don't have problems finding good games through the word of a mouth or by looking at some crowdfunding campaigns. And one can have some expectations. For example I'm waiting for Wasteland 2, Torment Tides of Numenera, Divinity Original Sin, Armikrog and some others. Out of recent which just came out and which are good is for example Tex Murphy - Tesla Effect.
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    That reequires me to keep a good eye on campaigns. But I am in fact not a gaming enthusiast any more. I want to play some good games from time to time but I'm not going to be an early adopter. Different priorities.
    - shmerl 12y ago
      Then your best bet would be to find someone who is a gaming enthusiast and ask for advice what to pick and what's new and worthwhile around :)
      - guard-of-terra 12y ago
        I don't have anyone. Some people only play poker, some play TES, most reverted to casual games.
benologist 12y ago
The indie bubble isn't popping. It's an amazing time to be an indie developer, with massive audiences sitting around just itching to create millionaires. The developers who are suffering are the ones who can't figure out how to get on top of markets, and especially the ones armed with obsolete "strategies" like being the only new game on Steam this month.
incision 12y ago
Odd article. It feels to me like the author is trying hard not to offend his community and ending up a ways off the point. There can't be 'too many' games any more than there can be 'too many' websites or whatever else. Too many is only relevant here because the indie segment has effectively been propped up on the good will of the community, not the quality of those games - with obvious exceptions. This is a charity pie being sliced thin, not one made of value. High-value products will always have a place in any market. Second rate games have been skating by with issues or omissions that would see any major label release crucified simply because they were sporting the indie armband of immunity. Expecting to turn a profit, much less get rich with anything less than "an utterly flawless, ground-breaking title and utterly blow everyone’s minds." is the problem. Forget the indie label and there's absolutely nothing new to see here.
- SoftwareMaven 12y ago
  I disagree, on multiple levels: First, you can have too many. It's just like going to the grocery store to get tooth paste: the frustration of trying to decide the right one with 5000 choices is real, and it increases the likelihood of buyers remorse. That reduces real dollars spent. Second, indie developers have not been charity cases. Over the past 30 years, there have been a lot of amazing indie games. There have also been a lot of crap games. Good games have made money because they were discoverable. It is likely that amazing games will continue to thrive. The ones that will face difficulties are the good-to-really-good games. Those won't have the inertia to break out above the fog of the developer masses. In other words, indie games are going exactly the same place App Store games did.
  - pachydermic 12y ago
    And we all know how bad the tooth paste bubble was! So only the best games will rise to the top now... I fail to see how that is a burst bubble.
    - kevingadd 12y ago
      More supply does not automatically mean the best games rise to the top. The way storefronts like iOS and Steam work is there's really weak categorization and 'top seller' lists and maybe tagging and... that's it. There are no mechanisms in place to find the 'best games' and make them rise to the top; no heavy user rating rankings, no time played rankings, no rankings based on which games your friends play, etc. This is part of why he points out the huge increase in Steam launches. Back when Steam was curated, the front page changed infrequently and you could count on at least half the games up there being worth a glance (even if they weren't worth buying). Now there's basically no filter and half the games that go up are early access or perpetual betas or games from 2001. The best games aren't rising to the top. The games that rise to the top are rising to the top. Sometimes the best games are ALSO coincidentally the ones that rise to the top, but not always. If you want a tired example, look at Flappy Bird. It wasn't a terrible game, but it wasn't an amazing one either. It was just an adequate game, and it managed to get high enough in the charts that it stayed there, because the visibility ensured its success. Like it or not, but life is that way for many indies right now. (For reference, I've shipped titles on Steam and in the boxed AAA game market.)
mcherm 12y ago
Much of what Jeff has to say in this article is true. Especially the part about how the cold, hard-hearted hand of Adam Smith will ensure that when X dollars are divided among Y game developers and Y increases, that the developer income will decrease. That is why the only real hope of the developers is to change X. And that is possible. There are hundreds of thousands of 12-year-olds who are obsessed with Minecraft. (Seriously: last week when my son visited a new school wearing a Minecraft shirt, something like 60% of the male middleschoolers go out of their way to say something about it to him, and several teachers mentioned how obsessed they were.) That market didn't exist before Minecraft. In a similar vein, I spend a certain number of hours per week watching shows on Netflix, and I am certain that I could be persuaded to spend a big chunk of that time playing a game (for which I would gladly pay money). But it isn't one of my habits -- someone would need to find the sort of game I would enjoy and manage to let me know about it. Here are some hints: since I am not your normal market I don't own the latest console nor do I own a fancy controller (but I CAN run Steam). I am not that excited about first-person-shoot-em-ups (if I were then I would already have gotten involved), but I might be interested in something more strategic. I am not willing to pay much up-front (since I don't know for sure if I'll really be into doing this) but I would be willing to spend money once I know that I like it, so long as I don't feel like I am being cheated (mandatory in-game payments or play-to-win often leaves me feeling that way). And most important of all, I do not read the indy gaming press or attend indy gaming conferences (since I am a NOT the existing demographic), so you need to reach me some other way -- probably through my friends, using some form of viral marketing. The market for independent video games is small, but the market for entertainment is astonishingly large. (Plus, maybe your game can be something ELSE... educational perhaps?) The route to profit is to find a new (bigger) niche.
- astrodust 12y ago
  "The market for independent video games is small..." Says who? You? When I look at how many bands are out there slaving away to write new music, then touring, and/or making albums it doesn't seem nearly as out of proportion. How many bands with finished albums have you never heard of? Compare with how many finished, polished games you've never even seen on Steam. There might be a lot of games on Steam now compared to historical norms, but it's a tiny fraction of what you'd see with new books, new albums, or even new independent films. The market for game-type entertainment is huge, and if people have an astonishing level of choice when it comes to how to spend their time, so much the better. We don't need indie games to hit the $100MM mark to be considered successful. Many developers would be happy if their game pulled down $10K. We're used to games where you'd have to invest $50 and want dozens of hours of gameplay for it to be worthwhile. Now things are to the point where a $1 game only has to amuse you for a few hours and it's paid for itself. The biggest problem in the indie game space is not the number of developers, but discoverability. The structure of stores, the methods used to promote them, they're all relics of when there was a handful of games that would get released any given month. These need to change to support a broader, more rich environment where you might have hundreds of them.
pachydermic 12y ago
tl;dr the indie space is more competitive than it was a few years ago and it's hard to get noticed Well maybe that's not fair, but that's the impression I got from this. That is very different from a "bubble" popping. The problem of discoverability will be solved by someone - there's just too much money on the table for that to not happen. Whether it's Valve or not no-one knows (obviously they're the front runners now), but someone will get it done. Sure. It's probably a lot harder for the indie devs out there in a lot of ways (in terms of trying to stand out - or only getting a smaller and smaller slice of the market). On the other hand, there are tools like Kickstarter, Unity and now Unreal which make it much, much easier to make games - often for a wider array of platforms. Harder to stand out, but lower barrier to entry - that makes sense and does not mean that any bubble is about to burst. In fact, it probably means that games will just continue to get better!
- KVFinn 12y ago
  Yeah, the article isn't wrong on many points, but the characterization as a 'bubble' isn't right. The race to the button pricing is a concern. I worry about the day where every title has to be free-to-play to get made... Ugh.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  I'd like to agree with you that 'the problem of discoverability will be solved', but history doesn't bear that out. Discoverability has been utter horseshit for PC games, iOS games and Android games... forever. And it's not improved at all, and no new players are improving it, because Steam, the iOS App Store, and Play Store all have customers 99% locked in. You can't force those big players to innovate unless they find a good reason to do it, because there's no way you're ever going to steal those customers away from them just by offering a better search tool. They want the convenience and safety and integration they get from the big player's storefront app. The low barrier to entry for game development is actually not a new thing. The barrier has been low since the introduction of XBox Live Indie Games, perhaps even a couple years before then - that was just the visible point where a bunch of new developers started building and shipping games on a small budget. The huge glut of samey titles releasing and squeezing each other out of the market is a relatively new occurrence. The stats he provided for Steam releases are a very new trend and concerning to anyone who wants to find good games to play, or build good games to sell. I can say for a fact that the clickthrough rates and conversion rates for Steam front page placement are much worse than they have ever been, even for high-scoring, well-reviewed titles with PR buzz.
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pkamb 12y ago
> How many times last year did we see the article, "Another 100 Greenlight games OK'ed for publishing!"? Why are console games still being "OK'ed for publishing"? Why haven't any of the big names (Steam/Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo/Apple) released a true "app store" where anyone can get a game into the store for maybe $100 and after going through a light content review process?
- smacktoward 12y ago
  Microsoft did: the XBox Live Indie marketplace. A quick browse through its catalog (http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames) will reveal the problem with this approach, namely that it quickly turns into a giant swamp of Minecraft ripoffs and other such disposable crap.
  - pkamb 12y ago
    Disposable crap is fine, so long as it's hidden by the good games that rise to the top. See: the iOS App Store. This XBLIG thing seems like a real second-class citizen on the Xbox. I've never even heard of it, after years of owning the system and Xbox Live. If all "good" indie games are released through a completely different platform/marketplace it's no surprise that Microsoft ignored XBLIG.
    - kevingadd 12y ago
      If you think that's how the iOS app store works you don't seem to know much about the iOS app store. For reference, XBLIG did work that way, and just like iOS, the top sellers were the ones that rose to the top and remained top sellers. IIRC, the #1 all time selling XBLIG game is some sort of 'minecraft with zombies' deal that hit the top of the chart by being a) cheap and b) checking the boxes. Some of the most successful XBLIG devs literally churn out a game every week or two, all with low production values, and make their money off the $1 impulse buys from people who are browsing the lists. 'Good stuff will rise to the top' is broken reasoning for storefronts like this. Purchasers have terribly flawed information and don't have the ability to actually evaluate quality; the only things that 'rise to the top' are things that have an upward force applied to them, like marketing, word-of-mouth, or pure luck (for the last one, see Flappy Bird, that ended up catching all its traction as a fluke when it rose enough on the charts to get noticed.)
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- reedlaw 12y ago
  781 million registered games sounds like this is the total number of purchased games.
jjjeffrey 12y ago
I've been thinking recently about what makes a good video game experience for me, and it's slightly relevant. I can place the games I've highly enjoyed into two basic categories: -Short and sweet, having one or more of 1. interesting play mechanics 2. great story/theme 3. interesting art direction. -Solid all around, with addictive elements (e.g. leveling, collecting things) that make repetitive tasks seem fun and extend the time I play the game to beyond a few evenings. Many indie games I've played fit into the former category, and most non-indie games fit into the latter. I've been realizing that these "short and sweet" games that I've been getting more and more of a chance to play have provided more lasting and fulfilling experiences than longer games. The feeling I get from sinking an evening into a short and sweet game is kind of similar to reading a good book or playing a good chess match. Likewise, the feeling I get from sinking an evening into a longer game is some artificial feeling of making progress. I'm overgeneralizing a little, but the point is I've started skipping AAA titles in favor of trying out lots of indie games. Most aren't great, but the cost of a few dollars or less and a half hour to find out isn't bad. For me, it's worth it to find the gems. And not having several-week-long addictions to games with low quality:time ratios is great too. I really hope there's no indie bubble.
- KVFinn 12y ago
  There's a third category that I would put most of the games I enjoy into: -Long and Deep: Games you can play for huge amounts of time but don't depend on an artificial sense of progress to do it. Strategy games, roguelikes, competitive games, etc. Games where you level up yourself by getting better, instead of the character in the game.
  - jjjeffrey 12y ago
    That's a great point. I play Nethack now and then, and I like how I can play it for an evening and then walk away, satisfied that I'll never beat it.
- Groxx 12y ago
  I pretty much exactly agree on this. I've been buying far more games (both quantity and $ spent) since I got into the indie-er crowd, and have been enjoying them more. Also, I don't buy "X dollars / Y devs" and "X is fixed". If anything, the massive rise in casual (and mobile) gaming disproves it solidly. New markets exist, and you can eat from external markets too (I find more and more people watching (and wanting!) less TV - dropping cable gives you quite a large gaming budget).
hyperion2010 12y ago
I think others have mentioned this already, but this is a problem that faces almost every industry these days. How do you get your product noticed? Why is advertising the fuel of the web? Competition. There are 10 versions of exactly the thing the buyer is looking for and 10,000 other things that are almost what they are looking for. Those 10,010 different sellers are all trying to capture that sale. There are many different information channels that companies can try to use to get the word out. Without having done an actual study myself (though I'm sure someone has) I would guess that if you can trigger a word of mouth or viral campaign they end up being extremely effective. Furthermore if I had to guess if you can get the attention of one of the 'hubs' (a respected member of a community) in a social network to endorse or mention you, there is also a huge payoff. Search and algorithms is one way to approach the problem, probably 'the new way.' Maybe some day we will have AI agents that know us so well that they can search through the morass of content and products and find things that will actually enrich our lives, but for now we're still monkeys that respond strongly to social cues and our algorithms suck and are easily gamed (star ratings) or are extremely time consuming (reading tons of reviews). So we go find an expert or someone we trust.
BoppreH 12y ago
I think the model of X dollars / Y developers is wrong. When I see a good game being sold by a good price I buy it. I only stop myself if I've spent a large amount recently, which so far only happened during some Steam sales. This means my "gaming money pool" is not a pool at all because I may spend no money for months at a time, or spend a significant fraction of my salary in a week. If my behavior is as common as I believe it is, this completely invalidates the model of X dollars / Y developers and paints a much less bleaker picture of the future.
jaunkst 12y ago
The state of gaming blows. Today's platforms pigeonhole the consumer and developer to being unhappy. Casual gaming is flooded, but there is always money for core gamers to spend on a quality product especially original and innovative indie games.
drewcrawford 12y ago
I was doing some background research for another essay and this is as good a time as any to produce an actual journal article on point. There's a common talking point I've seen both in this comment thread and elsewhere that the number of entrants isn't the problem at all and the real problem is game developers aren't innovating, and if they just innovated more things would be fine. Kevin Boudreau [1] is one of the earliest researches on this scene, who concludes that "incremental increases in the number of application producers in this context led to a decrease in innovation incentives, on average, as measured by the rate at which new versions of existing titles were generated" and further that "the strength of descriptive patterns alone suggests that marginal entrants curtailed overall innovation". Kevin's research, while it has many limitations, suggests that innovation decline is actually a symptom of an overcrowded market, not an independent factor in its own right. If true, this could mean that the practical way to address an innovation crisis is to first solve the problem of the overcrowded market. The idea that market crowding depresses the innovation of individual independent developers is sort of a surprising result, but once accepted there are many possible feedback mechanisms that may explain the effect. For example, market crowding may drive innovators to go innovate somewhere else. Crowding may also limit available funding which may be disproportionately required by innovative titles rather than non-innovative titles which can be more cheaply manufactured. [1] preprint: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=%201826702 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=%20182670... jstor: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Diphone%2Bsoftware%2Bengineering%26amp%3Bprq%3Diphone%26amp%3Bhp%3D25%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bso%3Drel%26amp%3Bracc%3Doff&resultItemClick=true http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2F...
mxfh 12y ago
But still there are more new indie games than AAA titles out there I care about, it's not a tragedy if there only 2 to 6 outstanding games per year that reach me through the noise, mostly by direct recommendation. The best thing about Greenlight is that pre-2005 games get some new exposure and even patches, like in the case of Jets'n'Guns. So if you want to stretch the music industry analogy as others did, you currently not only competing with the ever increasing amount of new releases but also with back catalogs on the same platform. Another problem with an awful lot of indie games (especially those 40% unplayed fillers games from bundles, which are not even always strictly speaking Indie) is that you can see that there was little to no user testing, so they are just not fun or even impossible to play on specific not too exotic configurations. Just to name a few (each of these happened in at least two games): - no way to remap keys - no way to remap mouse buttons or game ignores windows swapped buttons - fixed resolutions - optimized for small resolution, resulting in insane mouse travel on today's native screen resolutions (just drop that retro stick if you just cant effort a proper artist please.) - no way to run a game windowed - touch optimized ports from Android don't even register windows touch events. - Content is cropped off screen with wider aspect radios with no way to change resolution.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  All those quality issues are a big deal. Sadly, the industry (and customers) as a whole reject quality checks and validation. Valve does less QA of steam releases than they used to (because this was a part of the reviled 'curation'), Microsoft and Sony have been forced to incrementally phase out certification checks (because developers complained constantly about the cost of those checks), etc. The end result is utterly broken games go up on Steam and have to get pulled, and patches roll out on consoles that corrupt saves and do other nasty stuff like that. It's a mess. On the bright side, this does increase access to storefronts, so the one or two marvelous games by people who can't afford cert or get the attention of Valve's curators are able to sell to their customers now. (Assuming they actually reach them, which hasn't actually gotten any better... that's gotten worse.)
  - mxfh 12y ago
    Thanks again, if you did that Escape Goat port for Steam, is a stellar example of a properly tested release. Had much fun with it and works like a charm with the Xbox 360 Controller.
damian2000 12y ago
Totally unrelated, but how does this post rank so low on the HN front page? 84 points in 2 hours is huge ... but its at number 22 right now. Has something happened to the HN rank algorithm?
overgard 12y ago
You know, what really got me into indie games was that most of them had something unique and interesting to offer. They weren't all auteur works (although a lot of them were), but they generally felt like they weren't just made "to make a game", they were made because they had a reason to exist. There were definitely a lot of rough edges, but they were interesting. There wasn't the hegemony you'd see in AAA titles. But... you don't see that so much in the indie scene now. Many of those games feel like they just exist because someone thought "I should make a game". There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's somewhat counter to the spirit that made the scene interesting in the first place. I feel like a lot of indie games now capture the form but not the function. They look indie, but they don't really feel indie. I don't think there's an indie "bubble", I feel like the scene that had those values has moved somewhere else. Or if it hasn't, it will. We've always had a glut of mediocre games that didn't really make anyone much money (see: flash games in the mid oughts.) Same thing, its just the platform has expanded and the branding has changed.
- jamie_ca 12y ago
  Yeah. And as a guy with tastes that run awry from the "mainstream FPS" genres, I've been getting a lot of my gaming enjoyment from indies over the past few years. And the games with sticking power have always been the ones that are pushing the boundaries or trying something different. Braid: Platformer where you can (and must) rewind time. FTL: A roguelike where you command a ship instead of an RPG hero. Monaco: A heist movie, as a top-down game. Fez: Side-scrolling 2d platformer... in 3D! (where perspective changes are actually part of the platforming) On the other hand, the ones I've enjoyed the least have wound up being less innovation, and more derivation. At least, according to my Steam library.
xsmasher 12y ago
> X dollars, Y developers. That's all that matters. That assumes the indie market is a only feeding on its existing audience. Minecraft's money didn't come at the expense of indie developers; it came from EA and Sony and the other big publishers. I don't dispute the rest of his thesis, but that "X" is big enough for all "Y" of the indies to pay their rents for a long time if divided evenly. I think the quality problem, the discovery problem, and "alpha fatigue" from games that are never finished are bigger issues.
Taek 12y ago
Video games are joining the same ranks as books and music. The barrier to entry for creating a video game is dropping. Libraries are getting better and programming is getting more ubiquitous. Video games are on track to be as difficult to publish successfully as books and music (and perhaps movies). If you aren't a big budget, it's very rare that you'll enter mainstream. The expectation is going to stop being that video games are a vehicle for profit (just like being an author is not typically considered a vehicle for profit).
kevingadd 12y ago
This comment thread is filled to the brim with arguments that either demonstrate a lack of familiarity with video games (excusable, but...) or regular old weak thinking. A few variations on this core theme: "The cream will rise to the top" "Good games will find an audience" "Create something truly special and you will be successful" These lines of thinking are all COMPLETE AND UTTER NONSENSE. I would love to live in a world where those statements were true, but they are not. They have never been true in video games, even if they are perhaps true in other industries. Anyone with any experience observing games development, sales and marketing knows that these statements are false. The vast majority of successful game titles are successful as a result of a finely-tuned marketing and sales pipeline. The big studios have their own pipeline for this: Paying staff to contact the news outlets and YouTubers, paying to run television advertisements or put up billboards, doing co-promotional deals (like bundling the Battlefield 4 beta in with another game, etc), advertising their new games via popups in older games, buying installs to climb the app store rankings, etc. Smaller developers can't use the big studios' bag of tricks, so they use their own: Forming industry connections, so that developers and other people with big audiences promote the game to their audiences. Building name recognition and dedicated fanbases by shipping lots of games (Jeff Vogel is a textbook example of this - decades of releases!). Building dozens of cheap games and releasing them to try and find something that fans like. Cashing in on the latest trends and buzzwords in order to get good returns. Slaving away for no pay for months or years, killing yourself to make a 'masterpiece'. Note that many of the above tricks are not guaranteed to work. Some of the highest-profile 'indie successes' in the past few years have actually had poor sales or poor revenues, when you examine their budget. In some cases this is due to actively being undermined by the storefront. Microsoft has a track record of undermining big releases on XBLA by scheduling them at poor times, dropping them from the front page, and otherwise leaving them to die. Some of the other big publishers do this too - Electronic Arts sank a ton of money into Starbreeze's new Syndicate reboot, then spent nearly nothing marketing it and it languished in a pit along with all the other FPSes - even though it's actually a quite solid game from a studio with a great pedigree (reviewers agree). Here's the reality of building and selling video games: Building video games is expensive. It probably costs more time & money than you realistically have. Selling video games is difficult... and expensive. You often have to sink as much time/money into selling your game as you do in building it - lots of contract reviews/negotiation, along with lawyers' fees, time spent prepping builds for each storefront and building storefront/platform-exclusive content (steam workshop, achievements, etc). Making it possible for players to find your video game is difficult... and expensive. You sink tons of time/money (often over the whole duration of development) reaching out to journalists, youtubers, genre fans, previous customers, and random strangers. You spend money on booths at conventions like PAX, buy banner ads on game-focused websites, build a mailing list, etc. Even after all this, factors entirely outside your control will fuck you. Your game will get pirated, Steam's checkout flow will break during your launch week, a crippling bug found on launch day will undermine your sales, or market forces will simply shift and leave your game stranded in a market players aren't interested in anymore. Sometimes another developer literally swoops in under you, clones your game outright (based on all that marketing and outreach you've been doing), and steals a huge chunk of your market. This has happened to Vlambeer multiple times and has happened to other big-name indies (Spry Fox, for example). People interested in dropping some lazy truisms like 'just work hard and build something awesome' are doing themselves a disservice and lowering the level of discourse. There are hard problems here, and many of them are not actively being solved. Some of the problems are within the industry, and mean developers need to make better choices. Some of them are the industry's machinery, with storefronts providing inadequate discovery and unreliable sales pipelines. Some of them are playerbase issues, where players tend to chase after novelty and hot trends (I want a minecraft clone! I want a zombie game!) and don't have discerning tastes. Many of these problems aren't any one person's fault, they're just problems we have to fix. But nobody is going to fix anything if we keep plugging our ears and yelling "EVERYTHING IS FINE!"
islon 12y ago
I don’t think the problem is money vs games (the X and Y) the problem is time vs games. I have enough money to buy all the games I want and don’t want to play, most of them are very cheap in bundles and promotions, I just don’t have time to play all of them (I’m talking more about pc/console games, not mobile ones). There’s only so much games you can buy and not play before you start thinking about not buying anymore and focus on the ones you really want to play.

125 points by cjauvin 12y ago

I have been playing Jeff Vogel's games since Exile 1 in 1995, and I'm still playing them today with the Avadon series. He's a fantastic author and fantasy world architect, however I strongly disagree with his opinions on the game industry. This is a guy who was selling a 20+ yearold game as a downloadable installer from his ancient website for $30 while new indie authors were pumping out new games on sale for $10, $5, or less. Who was making more sales, and ultimately more profit from this? Evidence it wasn't him: http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-half http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-hal... I think Jeff is a dinosaur, stuck in the 90s shareware era, and bitter that people can make more money by selling games for $3 than he can by selling games for $30.

zyxley 12y ago
Seconded. This is a guy whose total sales of games were low enough under his original model that one of them sold about 4,000 copies total since its release (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-games-i-sell.html http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...). Later, when he actually dropped the prices to something that average people might feel like actually paying for games built on such retro foundations, he sold 33,000 bundles in one week (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vogel-on-bundles-graphics-and-pessimism/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vo...)... while misunderstanding the effects of lower pricing on his target audience enough that he thought he'd sell "less than a third of that".
duskwuff 12y ago
In Jeff's case, I suspect that the low audio/visual quality of the games that he's been releasing since 2000 has been a significant factor in the weak reception he's seen them receive. Reviewers have been consistently dinging his games since Geneforge in 2001, and he's still using the same game engine (and a lot of the same graphical assets!) in his current releases. Plainly put, his games look and feel dated. Is graphical polish a make-or-break factor for games? Of course not. But that isn't a license to ignore it, either. "Lo-fi" graphics can be attractive as an intentional design choice, but that isn't what he's got, and I suspect it's turning off a lot of potential players.

archagon 12y ago

Frankly, I've yet to see a truly stunning game pass me by, either in the indie space or on the App Store (where this problem has existed for a little while now). Market saturation causes mediocre games to become buried. The obvious solution is to not make mediocre games. I'm still convinced the cream will rise to the top.

TillE 12y ago
Absolutely. Dwarf Fortress is a fun example of what's possible when you make a genuinely great, innovative game while putting zero effort into marketing or accessibility. There will always be a market for exceptional games like that. There'd be a much bigger one if he could get a proper GUI together, but Tarn Adams seems perfectly content with his modest income. If you're a business person, games are probably a poor investment. If you're an independent creator, it's still one of the most self-sustainable forms of art.
- shmerl 12y ago
  Exactly. Games need to be approached as art because they are art. And most of the common rules of success in art apply there.
glhaynes 12y ago
I don't mean this snarkily: how would you know if a truly stunning game had passed you by? If it'd been out for a long time before you heard about it? That wouldn't seem to account for the possibility of really great stuff passing everybody by and never achieving critical mass.
- lelandbatey 12y ago
  I agree, in part at least. Additionally, one of the things I've noticed is that good stuff is often made great by being successful, which can be a bit of a paradox. Also, a lot of games that people really like are not (or weren't when they first came out) "really stunning".
- ama729 12y ago

shmerl 12y ago

I disagree with the general sentiment. > The problem is too many games. That's not the problem. It's like saying that music industry is in crisis because there are tons of junk records around. Good music is always a minority and one has to sift through noise to get to it. Gaming isn't any different. Good games are a form of art, and they are always a minority, whether we are talking about indie and low budget or big budget / publisher funded games. That's why Steam may be a bad example, because filtering games there isn't easy. Services like GOG concentrate on good games. That's of course subjective (according to the distributor), but they do a lot of pre-filtering for you. > It's not sustainable. It is, like any other art. Make something unique, make something good and you'll find your audience. Crowdfunding also helps to increase visibility.

anigbrowl 12y ago
There is absolutely no guarantee that you'll find your audience, and indeed the odds against doing so are increasing. For example: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/10/16/the-most-important-thing-you-will-read-all-day/ http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/10/16/t... Services like GOG concentrate on good games. That's of course subjective (according to the distributor), but they do a lot of pre-filtering for you. Which Steam did, a role which they have since abandoned. Why do you assume GOG will be any different? The day GOG's accountant proves irrefutably that it's more profitable to offer 20,000 shitty games than 200 good ones is the day they'll start doing that. That might not be for a while; as long as GOG's sales growth depends on differentiating it from other brands like Steam by being more selective. But eventually that growth will hit a plateau, and economics change. It is, like any other art. Make something unique, make something good and you'll find your audience. You might, but there's no guarantee that you won't get lost in the shuffle. As Vogel points out, the problem is not so much for micro-producers with very low overhead, for whom even small sales are profitable, as for mid-sized ventures that have to invest $1 million+ to meet audience expectations and who will go broke if they can't recoup their production budget. I really find your advice a bit facile. What branch of the arts do you work in?
- shmerl 12y ago
  > There is absolutely no guarantee that you'll find your audience, Well, of course, there is always risk. What I meant is that if the game is not unique and not standing out, then the chances of success are way lower. > Which Steam did, a role which they have since abandoned. Why do you assume GOG will be any different? Because GOG insists they will be. So far they were honest: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-15-gog-on-early-access-definitely-not-every-game-should-be-permitted http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-15-gog-on-early-ac... > I really find your advice a bit facile. My advice is based on viewing art as art, and not something that has to be specifically commercialized really. Indie developers are actually in the better situation here, because they can resort to crowdfunding which allows them making artistic choices based on interests, rather than on demands from the publisher. And it makes it easier because they don't have huge agreements to spend millions on marketing which they need to recover.

ps4fanboy 12y ago

Steam is currently being flooded with "Casual" mobile app ports it remains to be seen if they actually sell, I have yet to see one on the top sellers list after release. I would hardly call that a bubble. Good indie games will continue to make money.

james33 12y ago

The good news is that these things always go in cycles. The ones that can weather the downturn will be the big winners on the other side.

mindstab 12y ago

One of the assumed axioms of this argument is the the game industry is a zero-sum game, which it isn't at all in anyway. Now maybe it's not the flexibilist market and the low hanging fruit and easy stuff is much more saturated then it was a few years ago so it's certainly harder, but a bit the argument has some more give in it than it might be admitting.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

Discoverability is a huge problem. I would at any time want more turn based strategies in the triangle HoMM-Disciples-MoM, but it seems there aren't any? Even if there are, I can't discover them! Only thing that still can do is word of mouth. I've scraped Play store for wargames and the best I got was a crappy game I did not run for the second time. I believe I paid for that. Word of mouth is very irregular and app stores' charts are always full with "safe choices", i.e. either you know about this title already or it is a knockoff crap. I would like to spend more on good games but I don't see much supply.

shmerl 12y ago
Somehow I don't have problems finding good games through the word of a mouth or by looking at some crowdfunding campaigns. And one can have some expectations. For example I'm waiting for Wasteland 2, Torment Tides of Numenera, Divinity Original Sin, Armikrog and some others. Out of recent which just came out and which are good is for example Tex Murphy - Tesla Effect.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  That reequires me to keep a good eye on campaigns. But I am in fact not a gaming enthusiast any more. I want to play some good games from time to time but I'm not going to be an early adopter. Different priorities.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Then your best bet would be to find someone who is a gaming enthusiast and ask for advice what to pick and what's new and worthwhile around :)
    - guard-of-terra 12y ago
      I don't have anyone. Some people only play poker, some play TES, most reverted to casual games.

benologist 12y ago

The indie bubble isn't popping. It's an amazing time to be an indie developer, with massive audiences sitting around just itching to create millionaires. The developers who are suffering are the ones who can't figure out how to get on top of markets, and especially the ones armed with obsolete "strategies" like being the only new game on Steam this month.

incision 12y ago

Odd article. It feels to me like the author is trying hard not to offend his community and ending up a ways off the point. There can't be 'too many' games any more than there can be 'too many' websites or whatever else. Too many is only relevant here because the indie segment has effectively been propped up on the good will of the community, not the quality of those games - with obvious exceptions. This is a charity pie being sliced thin, not one made of value. High-value products will always have a place in any market. Second rate games have been skating by with issues or omissions that would see any major label release crucified simply because they were sporting the indie armband of immunity. Expecting to turn a profit, much less get rich with anything less than "an utterly flawless, ground-breaking title and utterly blow everyone’s minds." is the problem. Forget the indie label and there's absolutely nothing new to see here.

SoftwareMaven 12y ago
I disagree, on multiple levels: First, you can have too many. It's just like going to the grocery store to get tooth paste: the frustration of trying to decide the right one with 5000 choices is real, and it increases the likelihood of buyers remorse. That reduces real dollars spent. Second, indie developers have not been charity cases. Over the past 30 years, there have been a lot of amazing indie games. There have also been a lot of crap games. Good games have made money because they were discoverable. It is likely that amazing games will continue to thrive. The ones that will face difficulties are the good-to-really-good games. Those won't have the inertia to break out above the fog of the developer masses. In other words, indie games are going exactly the same place App Store games did.
- pachydermic 12y ago
  And we all know how bad the tooth paste bubble was! So only the best games will rise to the top now... I fail to see how that is a burst bubble.
  - kevingadd 12y ago
    More supply does not automatically mean the best games rise to the top. The way storefronts like iOS and Steam work is there's really weak categorization and 'top seller' lists and maybe tagging and... that's it. There are no mechanisms in place to find the 'best games' and make them rise to the top; no heavy user rating rankings, no time played rankings, no rankings based on which games your friends play, etc. This is part of why he points out the huge increase in Steam launches. Back when Steam was curated, the front page changed infrequently and you could count on at least half the games up there being worth a glance (even if they weren't worth buying). Now there's basically no filter and half the games that go up are early access or perpetual betas or games from 2001. The best games aren't rising to the top. The games that rise to the top are rising to the top. Sometimes the best games are ALSO coincidentally the ones that rise to the top, but not always. If you want a tired example, look at Flappy Bird. It wasn't a terrible game, but it wasn't an amazing one either. It was just an adequate game, and it managed to get high enough in the charts that it stayed there, because the visibility ensured its success. Like it or not, but life is that way for many indies right now. (For reference, I've shipped titles on Steam and in the boxed AAA game market.)

mcherm 12y ago

Much of what Jeff has to say in this article is true. Especially the part about how the cold, hard-hearted hand of Adam Smith will ensure that when X dollars are divided among Y game developers and Y increases, that the developer income will decrease. That is why the only real hope of the developers is to change X. And that is possible. There are hundreds of thousands of 12-year-olds who are obsessed with Minecraft. (Seriously: last week when my son visited a new school wearing a Minecraft shirt, something like 60% of the male middleschoolers go out of their way to say something about it to him, and several teachers mentioned how obsessed they were.) That market didn't exist before Minecraft. In a similar vein, I spend a certain number of hours per week watching shows on Netflix, and I am certain that I could be persuaded to spend a big chunk of that time playing a game (for which I would gladly pay money). But it isn't one of my habits -- someone would need to find the sort of game I would enjoy and manage to let me know about it. Here are some hints: since I am not your normal market I don't own the latest console nor do I own a fancy controller (but I CAN run Steam). I am not that excited about first-person-shoot-em-ups (if I were then I would already have gotten involved), but I might be interested in something more strategic. I am not willing to pay much up-front (since I don't know for sure if I'll really be into doing this) but I would be willing to spend money once I know that I like it, so long as I don't feel like I am being cheated (mandatory in-game payments or play-to-win often leaves me feeling that way). And most important of all, I do not read the indy gaming press or attend indy gaming conferences (since I am a NOT the existing demographic), so you need to reach me some other way -- probably through my friends, using some form of viral marketing. The market for independent video games is small, but the market for entertainment is astonishingly large. (Plus, maybe your game can be something ELSE... educational perhaps?) The route to profit is to find a new (bigger) niche.

astrodust 12y ago
"The market for independent video games is small..." Says who? You? When I look at how many bands are out there slaving away to write new music, then touring, and/or making albums it doesn't seem nearly as out of proportion. How many bands with finished albums have you never heard of? Compare with how many finished, polished games you've never even seen on Steam. There might be a lot of games on Steam now compared to historical norms, but it's a tiny fraction of what you'd see with new books, new albums, or even new independent films. The market for game-type entertainment is huge, and if people have an astonishing level of choice when it comes to how to spend their time, so much the better. We don't need indie games to hit the $100MM mark to be considered successful. Many developers would be happy if their game pulled down $10K. We're used to games where you'd have to invest $50 and want dozens of hours of gameplay for it to be worthwhile. Now things are to the point where a $1 game only has to amuse you for a few hours and it's paid for itself. The biggest problem in the indie game space is not the number of developers, but discoverability. The structure of stores, the methods used to promote them, they're all relics of when there was a handful of games that would get released any given month. These need to change to support a broader, more rich environment where you might have hundreds of them.

pachydermic 12y ago

tl;dr the indie space is more competitive than it was a few years ago and it's hard to get noticed Well maybe that's not fair, but that's the impression I got from this. That is very different from a "bubble" popping. The problem of discoverability will be solved by someone - there's just too much money on the table for that to not happen. Whether it's Valve or not no-one knows (obviously they're the front runners now), but someone will get it done. Sure. It's probably a lot harder for the indie devs out there in a lot of ways (in terms of trying to stand out - or only getting a smaller and smaller slice of the market). On the other hand, there are tools like Kickstarter, Unity and now Unreal which make it much, much easier to make games - often for a wider array of platforms. Harder to stand out, but lower barrier to entry - that makes sense and does not mean that any bubble is about to burst. In fact, it probably means that games will just continue to get better!

KVFinn 12y ago
Yeah, the article isn't wrong on many points, but the characterization as a 'bubble' isn't right. The race to the button pricing is a concern. I worry about the day where every title has to be free-to-play to get made... Ugh.
kevingadd 12y ago
I'd like to agree with you that 'the problem of discoverability will be solved', but history doesn't bear that out. Discoverability has been utter horseshit for PC games, iOS games and Android games... forever. And it's not improved at all, and no new players are improving it, because Steam, the iOS App Store, and Play Store all have customers 99% locked in. You can't force those big players to innovate unless they find a good reason to do it, because there's no way you're ever going to steal those customers away from them just by offering a better search tool. They want the convenience and safety and integration they get from the big player's storefront app. The low barrier to entry for game development is actually not a new thing. The barrier has been low since the introduction of XBox Live Indie Games, perhaps even a couple years before then - that was just the visible point where a bunch of new developers started building and shipping games on a small budget. The huge glut of samey titles releasing and squeezing each other out of the market is a relatively new occurrence. The stats he provided for Steam releases are a very new trend and concerning to anyone who wants to find good games to play, or build good games to sell. I can say for a fact that the clickthrough rates and conversion rates for Steam front page placement are much worse than they have ever been, even for high-scoring, well-reviewed titles with PR buzz.

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pkamb 12y ago

> How many times last year did we see the article, "Another 100 Greenlight games OK'ed for publishing!"? Why are console games still being "OK'ed for publishing"? Why haven't any of the big names (Steam/Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo/Apple) released a true "app store" where anyone can get a game into the store for maybe $100 and after going through a light content review process?

smacktoward 12y ago
Microsoft did: the XBox Live Indie marketplace. A quick browse through its catalog (http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames) will reveal the problem with this approach, namely that it quickly turns into a giant swamp of Minecraft ripoffs and other such disposable crap.
- pkamb 12y ago
  Disposable crap is fine, so long as it's hidden by the good games that rise to the top. See: the iOS App Store. This XBLIG thing seems like a real second-class citizen on the Xbox. I've never even heard of it, after years of owning the system and Xbox Live. If all "good" indie games are released through a completely different platform/marketplace it's no surprise that Microsoft ignored XBLIG.
  - kevingadd 12y ago
    If you think that's how the iOS app store works you don't seem to know much about the iOS app store. For reference, XBLIG did work that way, and just like iOS, the top sellers were the ones that rose to the top and remained top sellers. IIRC, the #1 all time selling XBLIG game is some sort of 'minecraft with zombies' deal that hit the top of the chart by being a) cheap and b) checking the boxes. Some of the most successful XBLIG devs literally churn out a game every week or two, all with low production values, and make their money off the $1 impulse buys from people who are browsing the lists. 'Good stuff will rise to the top' is broken reasoning for storefronts like this. Purchasers have terribly flawed information and don't have the ability to actually evaluate quality; the only things that 'rise to the top' are things that have an upward force applied to them, like marketing, word-of-mouth, or pure luck (for the last one, see Flappy Bird, that ended up catching all its traction as a fluke when it rose enough on the charts to get noticed.)

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reedlaw 12y ago
781 million registered games sounds like this is the total number of purchased games.

jjjeffrey 12y ago

I've been thinking recently about what makes a good video game experience for me, and it's slightly relevant. I can place the games I've highly enjoyed into two basic categories: -Short and sweet, having one or more of 1. interesting play mechanics 2. great story/theme 3. interesting art direction. -Solid all around, with addictive elements (e.g. leveling, collecting things) that make repetitive tasks seem fun and extend the time I play the game to beyond a few evenings. Many indie games I've played fit into the former category, and most non-indie games fit into the latter. I've been realizing that these "short and sweet" games that I've been getting more and more of a chance to play have provided more lasting and fulfilling experiences than longer games. The feeling I get from sinking an evening into a short and sweet game is kind of similar to reading a good book or playing a good chess match. Likewise, the feeling I get from sinking an evening into a longer game is some artificial feeling of making progress. I'm overgeneralizing a little, but the point is I've started skipping AAA titles in favor of trying out lots of indie games. Most aren't great, but the cost of a few dollars or less and a half hour to find out isn't bad. For me, it's worth it to find the gems. And not having several-week-long addictions to games with low quality:time ratios is great too. I really hope there's no indie bubble.

KVFinn 12y ago
There's a third category that I would put most of the games I enjoy into: -Long and Deep: Games you can play for huge amounts of time but don't depend on an artificial sense of progress to do it. Strategy games, roguelikes, competitive games, etc. Games where you level up yourself by getting better, instead of the character in the game.
- jjjeffrey 12y ago
  That's a great point. I play Nethack now and then, and I like how I can play it for an evening and then walk away, satisfied that I'll never beat it.
Groxx 12y ago
I pretty much exactly agree on this. I've been buying far more games (both quantity and $ spent) since I got into the indie-er crowd, and have been enjoying them more. Also, I don't buy "X dollars / Y devs" and "X is fixed". If anything, the massive rise in casual (and mobile) gaming disproves it solidly. New markets exist, and you can eat from external markets too (I find more and more people watching (and wanting!) less TV - dropping cable gives you quite a large gaming budget).

hyperion2010 12y ago

I think others have mentioned this already, but this is a problem that faces almost every industry these days. How do you get your product noticed? Why is advertising the fuel of the web? Competition. There are 10 versions of exactly the thing the buyer is looking for and 10,000 other things that are almost what they are looking for. Those 10,010 different sellers are all trying to capture that sale. There are many different information channels that companies can try to use to get the word out. Without having done an actual study myself (though I'm sure someone has) I would guess that if you can trigger a word of mouth or viral campaign they end up being extremely effective. Furthermore if I had to guess if you can get the attention of one of the 'hubs' (a respected member of a community) in a social network to endorse or mention you, there is also a huge payoff. Search and algorithms is one way to approach the problem, probably 'the new way.' Maybe some day we will have AI agents that know us so well that they can search through the morass of content and products and find things that will actually enrich our lives, but for now we're still monkeys that respond strongly to social cues and our algorithms suck and are easily gamed (star ratings) or are extremely time consuming (reading tons of reviews). So we go find an expert or someone we trust.

BoppreH 12y ago

I think the model of X dollars / Y developers is wrong. When I see a good game being sold by a good price I buy it. I only stop myself if I've spent a large amount recently, which so far only happened during some Steam sales. This means my "gaming money pool" is not a pool at all because I may spend no money for months at a time, or spend a significant fraction of my salary in a week. If my behavior is as common as I believe it is, this completely invalidates the model of X dollars / Y developers and paints a much less bleaker picture of the future.

jaunkst 12y ago

The state of gaming blows. Today's platforms pigeonhole the consumer and developer to being unhappy. Casual gaming is flooded, but there is always money for core gamers to spend on a quality product especially original and innovative indie games.

drewcrawford 12y ago

I was doing some background research for another essay and this is as good a time as any to produce an actual journal article on point. There's a common talking point I've seen both in this comment thread and elsewhere that the number of entrants isn't the problem at all and the real problem is game developers aren't innovating, and if they just innovated more things would be fine. Kevin Boudreau [1] is one of the earliest researches on this scene, who concludes that "incremental increases in the number of application producers in this context led to a decrease in innovation incentives, on average, as measured by the rate at which new versions of existing titles were generated" and further that "the strength of descriptive patterns alone suggests that marginal entrants curtailed overall innovation". Kevin's research, while it has many limitations, suggests that innovation decline is actually a symptom of an overcrowded market, not an independent factor in its own right. If true, this could mean that the practical way to address an innovation crisis is to first solve the problem of the overcrowded market. The idea that market crowding depresses the innovation of individual independent developers is sort of a surprising result, but once accepted there are many possible feedback mechanisms that may explain the effect. For example, market crowding may drive innovators to go innovate somewhere else. Crowding may also limit available funding which may be disproportionately required by innovative titles rather than non-innovative titles which can be more cheaply manufactured. [1] preprint: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=%201826702 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=%20182670... jstor: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Diphone%2Bsoftware%2Bengineering%26amp%3Bprq%3Diphone%26amp%3Bhp%3D25%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bso%3Drel%26amp%3Bracc%3Doff&resultItemClick=true http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2F...

mxfh 12y ago

But still there are more new indie games than AAA titles out there I care about, it's not a tragedy if there only 2 to 6 outstanding games per year that reach me through the noise, mostly by direct recommendation. The best thing about Greenlight is that pre-2005 games get some new exposure and even patches, like in the case of Jets'n'Guns. So if you want to stretch the music industry analogy as others did, you currently not only competing with the ever increasing amount of new releases but also with back catalogs on the same platform. Another problem with an awful lot of indie games (especially those 40% unplayed fillers games from bundles, which are not even always strictly speaking Indie) is that you can see that there was little to no user testing, so they are just not fun or even impossible to play on specific not too exotic configurations. Just to name a few (each of these happened in at least two games): - no way to remap keys - no way to remap mouse buttons or game ignores windows swapped buttons - fixed resolutions - optimized for small resolution, resulting in insane mouse travel on today's native screen resolutions (just drop that retro stick if you just cant effort a proper artist please.) - no way to run a game windowed - touch optimized ports from Android don't even register windows touch events. - Content is cropped off screen with wider aspect radios with no way to change resolution.

kevingadd 12y ago
All those quality issues are a big deal. Sadly, the industry (and customers) as a whole reject quality checks and validation. Valve does less QA of steam releases than they used to (because this was a part of the reviled 'curation'), Microsoft and Sony have been forced to incrementally phase out certification checks (because developers complained constantly about the cost of those checks), etc. The end result is utterly broken games go up on Steam and have to get pulled, and patches roll out on consoles that corrupt saves and do other nasty stuff like that. It's a mess. On the bright side, this does increase access to storefronts, so the one or two marvelous games by people who can't afford cert or get the attention of Valve's curators are able to sell to their customers now. (Assuming they actually reach them, which hasn't actually gotten any better... that's gotten worse.)
- mxfh 12y ago
  Thanks again, if you did that Escape Goat port for Steam, is a stellar example of a properly tested release. Had much fun with it and works like a charm with the Xbox 360 Controller.

damian2000 12y ago

Totally unrelated, but how does this post rank so low on the HN front page? 84 points in 2 hours is huge ... but its at number 22 right now. Has something happened to the HN rank algorithm?

overgard 12y ago

You know, what really got me into indie games was that most of them had something unique and interesting to offer. They weren't all auteur works (although a lot of them were), but they generally felt like they weren't just made "to make a game", they were made because they had a reason to exist. There were definitely a lot of rough edges, but they were interesting. There wasn't the hegemony you'd see in AAA titles. But... you don't see that so much in the indie scene now. Many of those games feel like they just exist because someone thought "I should make a game". There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's somewhat counter to the spirit that made the scene interesting in the first place. I feel like a lot of indie games now capture the form but not the function. They look indie, but they don't really feel indie. I don't think there's an indie "bubble", I feel like the scene that had those values has moved somewhere else. Or if it hasn't, it will. We've always had a glut of mediocre games that didn't really make anyone much money (see: flash games in the mid oughts.) Same thing, its just the platform has expanded and the branding has changed.

jamie_ca 12y ago
Yeah. And as a guy with tastes that run awry from the "mainstream FPS" genres, I've been getting a lot of my gaming enjoyment from indies over the past few years. And the games with sticking power have always been the ones that are pushing the boundaries or trying something different. Braid: Platformer where you can (and must) rewind time. FTL: A roguelike where you command a ship instead of an RPG hero. Monaco: A heist movie, as a top-down game. Fez: Side-scrolling 2d platformer... in 3D! (where perspective changes are actually part of the platforming) On the other hand, the ones I've enjoyed the least have wound up being less innovation, and more derivation. At least, according to my Steam library.

xsmasher 12y ago

> X dollars, Y developers. That's all that matters. That assumes the indie market is a only feeding on its existing audience. Minecraft's money didn't come at the expense of indie developers; it came from EA and Sony and the other big publishers. I don't dispute the rest of his thesis, but that "X" is big enough for all "Y" of the indies to pay their rents for a long time if divided evenly. I think the quality problem, the discovery problem, and "alpha fatigue" from games that are never finished are bigger issues.

Taek 12y ago

Video games are joining the same ranks as books and music. The barrier to entry for creating a video game is dropping. Libraries are getting better and programming is getting more ubiquitous. Video games are on track to be as difficult to publish successfully as books and music (and perhaps movies). If you aren't a big budget, it's very rare that you'll enter mainstream. The expectation is going to stop being that video games are a vehicle for profit (just like being an author is not typically considered a vehicle for profit).

kevingadd 12y ago

This comment thread is filled to the brim with arguments that either demonstrate a lack of familiarity with video games (excusable, but...) or regular old weak thinking. A few variations on this core theme: "The cream will rise to the top" "Good games will find an audience" "Create something truly special and you will be successful" These lines of thinking are all COMPLETE AND UTTER NONSENSE. I would love to live in a world where those statements were true, but they are not. They have never been true in video games, even if they are perhaps true in other industries. Anyone with any experience observing games development, sales and marketing knows that these statements are false. The vast majority of successful game titles are successful as a result of a finely-tuned marketing and sales pipeline. The big studios have their own pipeline for this: Paying staff to contact the news outlets and YouTubers, paying to run television advertisements or put up billboards, doing co-promotional deals (like bundling the Battlefield 4 beta in with another game, etc), advertising their new games via popups in older games, buying installs to climb the app store rankings, etc. Smaller developers can't use the big studios' bag of tricks, so they use their own: Forming industry connections, so that developers and other people with big audiences promote the game to their audiences. Building name recognition and dedicated fanbases by shipping lots of games (Jeff Vogel is a textbook example of this - decades of releases!). Building dozens of cheap games and releasing them to try and find something that fans like. Cashing in on the latest trends and buzzwords in order to get good returns. Slaving away for no pay for months or years, killing yourself to make a 'masterpiece'. Note that many of the above tricks are not guaranteed to work. Some of the highest-profile 'indie successes' in the past few years have actually had poor sales or poor revenues, when you examine their budget. In some cases this is due to actively being undermined by the storefront. Microsoft has a track record of undermining big releases on XBLA by scheduling them at poor times, dropping them from the front page, and otherwise leaving them to die. Some of the other big publishers do this too - Electronic Arts sank a ton of money into Starbreeze's new Syndicate reboot, then spent nearly nothing marketing it and it languished in a pit along with all the other FPSes - even though it's actually a quite solid game from a studio with a great pedigree (reviewers agree). Here's the reality of building and selling video games: Building video games is expensive. It probably costs more time & money than you realistically have. Selling video games is difficult... and expensive. You often have to sink as much time/money into selling your game as you do in building it - lots of contract reviews/negotiation, along with lawyers' fees, time spent prepping builds for each storefront and building storefront/platform-exclusive content (steam workshop, achievements, etc). Making it possible for players to find your video game is difficult... and expensive. You sink tons of time/money (often over the whole duration of development) reaching out to journalists, youtubers, genre fans, previous customers, and random strangers. You spend money on booths at conventions like PAX, buy banner ads on game-focused websites, build a mailing list, etc. Even after all this, factors entirely outside your control will fuck you. Your game will get pirated, Steam's checkout flow will break during your launch week, a crippling bug found on launch day will undermine your sales, or market forces will simply shift and leave your game stranded in a market players aren't interested in anymore. Sometimes another developer literally swoops in under you, clones your game outright (based on all that marketing and outreach you've been doing), and steals a huge chunk of your market. This has happened to Vlambeer multiple times and has happened to other big-name indies (Spry Fox, for example). People interested in dropping some lazy truisms like 'just work hard and build something awesome' are doing themselves a disservice and lowering the level of discourse. There are hard problems here, and many of them are not actively being solved. Some of the problems are within the industry, and mean developers need to make better choices. Some of them are the industry's machinery, with storefronts providing inadequate discovery and unreliable sales pipelines. Some of them are playerbase issues, where players tend to chase after novelty and hot trends (I want a minecraft clone! I want a zombie game!) and don't have discerning tastes. Many of these problems aren't any one person's fault, they're just problems we have to fix. But nobody is going to fix anything if we keep plugging our ears and yelling "EVERYTHING IS FINE!"

islon 12y ago

I don’t think the problem is money vs games (the X and Y) the problem is time vs games. I have enough money to buy all the games I want and don’t want to play, most of them are very cheap in bundles and promotions, I just don’t have time to play all of them (I’m talking more about pc/console games, not mobile ones). There’s only so much games you can buy and not play before you start thinking about not buying anymore and focus on the ones you really want to play.