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.
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.
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.
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".
Because we tried to look for them? I bought a gift card for my ipad and I have no idea how to spend it. Most games on it are bad (I'm tempted to say all of them, but I liked The Room). Same thing for PC indie games (which is why Jeff's point is absurd, more games doesn't mean more sale, and if Humble Bundles are of any indication, indie's quality are declining).
On the iPad in particular, you might try https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/10000000/id544385071?mt=8. It's a mission-based real-time puzzle game. The gameplay is pretty enjoyable and you can clear stuff while dramatically under-leveled so it doesn't become too easy when you get good at it.
You could also pick up a CAVE game, but it would be by no means indie...
On the PC front I am familiar with more options, but it really depends on what you like. I play mostly shmups, puzzle games, and platformers, which happen to be really easy genres to make indie games in. Over the last few years I've enjoyed Jamestown, Thomas Was Alone, Electronic Super Joy, Antichamber, Super Hexagon, and a lot of games that are distributed for free in places like http://www21.atwiki.jp/iwannabethewiki/pages/283.html
You're right, I obviously can't prove it, but here's one sample point. I subscribe to an RSS feed of iOS apps that have recently become free. Many of these are unsuccessful games that are trying to attract some attention. Some of them are interesting — maybe even good — but I don't think I've ever seen any as beautiful and polished as, say, Monument Valley or Dextris (just to name two of the current iOS darlings). On the other hand, occasionally I spot a game in the App Store new releases that looks really cool. If it captures my attention, chances are it'll soon get mentioned on TouchArcade or on Twitter.
>I'm still convinced the cream will rise to the top. Frankly, I've yet to see a truly stunning game pass me by, either in the indie space or on the App Store.
This is like saying, "If anyone was making great music it would be at the top of the Billboard charts and I'd hear it on the radio on the way to work." or "If anyone was writing good books, they'd be outselling Dan Brown and I'd see it in the supermarket isle, so I guess nobody is."
If you are into music you can find great music. Same with games. But you will have to do at least a little looking.
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.
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?
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.
I have to tell you that things are very different when you're on the production side. It's easy to be idealistic about his sort of thing as a consumer, but if you do as a producer then you will go broke. And while one shouldn't be too cynical (otherwise you might just as well take up accountancy or some other line of work), it's a fact that consumers are a fickle bunch - they like novelty but not always originality.
I came across some good advice last week (aimed at designers, but relevant here): being 20 years ahead of your audience is not a recipe for success - people will just think you are strange. Being 20 minutes ahead, however, can pay off big.
For all their faults, this is something publishers understand well, and historically they have done a fairly good job of curating the authors they publish so as to support the ones that are a little too far ahead of the curve. They also look after a great deal of stuff that artists are either not good at or don't like, like marketing, accountancy and so on - so artists get to focus on what they do well rather than having to deal with the business stuff.
It's nice to think about art as being above commercial considerations, but being an artist doesn't get you out of paying rent or buying food or whatever family obligations you may have (which is why a lot of artists have precarious domestic arrangements). Even determinedly un-commercial firms like ThatGameCompany struggle with this; Journey was supposed to take one year but took three, and they ran out of money and couldn't make payroll in the third year so they had to let some people go and make others wait months to get paid. You often can't ignore commercial considerations becuas if what you want to do needs money then either you raise it or the work doesn't get made. As I've pointed out in relation to film, the costs of making even a simple one are pretty substantial.
I agree that planning any project financially is important if it doesn't want to go bust in the middle, especially if it's big enough and isn't a "one man production". Still, more than often publishers simply reject something that doesn't fit the mass market mentality. Not because it's necessarily years ahead of time, and not because it can't be profitable. They just don't want to go to bigger length to achieve more, if they can profit with less.
A current example - inXile Entertainment (an independent gaming studio now) are still working on their major project Wasteland 2. It's already in beta access for a while, and they plan the release in the end of this summer. They said that what beta has now is only around 50% of the game (i.e. they'll add a lot more still). They took their time developing it and getting feedback and improving things (and they work in parallel on Torment - Tides of Numenera by the way). They said many times, that if their work would be managed by publishers, they'd never be able to develop Wasteland 2 so thoroughly and with their own pace as they do now. I.e. perfection is not something that publishers often appreciate (since it requires more resources). They prefer more projects in less time, than more better projects with more time.
Music industry is in crisis, and the reason for both is that junk records are marketed hard so people buy them, and this poisons further sales to the client because people stop trying new things.
And we're not talking about experimental crazy junk. We're talking abour safe-investment knockoff junk that markets as AAA but is really B or C.
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.
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-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.
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-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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This also requires me to hang around and that I would not do.
I would much prefer the list of hits where every game is a jewel; a list that doesn't get washed in the toilet like reddit does.
But app stores are a waste and there seems to be no independent (tablet) game review sites with any decent coverage (as in having every jewel on top; not as in reviewing every new piece of crap in one long blog)
> I would much prefer the list of hits where every game is a jewel; a list that doesn't get washed in the toilet like reddit does.
I don't think it's possible, because perception of art is often subjective. Surely, some titles are more universally liked than others. But there is no way to make a universal list like that which can satisfy everyone. That's why hearing several opinions can help to get more perspectives.
I don't do tablet gaming much really, since I don't find the vast majority of mobile games to be interesting. I'm playing most games on PC which allows more complex scenarios and richer user interfaces. Mobile is still quite limiting and it cripples most of the games there.
This is very much possible.
http://www.gog.com/games/strategy
This list consists by 2/3 of timeless objective jewels. The rest are nice games too. They were all released in 90s or early 00s.
Can we have a comparable list of games released in last ten years?
"I don't find the vast majority of mobile games to be interesting"
That's what I'm talking about! But, when you run heroes of mignt and magic or civilization on tablet in emulator, it is suddently interesting again!
It's not that tablets suck as a media, it's just almost every game for them is crap (or puzzle, I must add)
Well, I wanted to recommend GOG as a source of good games as well, but you mentioned it yourself :) GOG have new games too, and many of them are good. At least all the good ones which I expect appear there sooner or later.
Above I meant that it's not possible to make a list which everyone will view as perfect. Tastes vary after all. But GOG is a good approximation indeed.
> That's what I'm talking about! But, when you run heroes of mignt and magic or civilization on tablet in emulator, it is suddently interesting again!
Sure, I like playing Loom or Goblins 3 on a tablet in ScummVM for the fun of it :) But that's a rather non typical tablet gaming I suppose.
This seems like a good place to plug an ios game relased last week that I've been a long-time tester for, and which could do with some more word-of-mouth (or keyboard as it may be).
It would be even more appropriate if was actually a turn-based strategy game like HoMM, but it might scratch your needs anyway.
Dream Quest (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id870227884?mt=8) is a roguelike-dungeon crawler/deckbuilder. (Think of a cross between Dominion or Ascension and the dungeons in Shandalar, if you've ever played the old microprose game.) The game is really deep, very challenging, and produced by one guy working in his spare time. You have to be willing to accept the graphics as what they are, but the game can be addicting.
I don't think there's anything wrong with showing off projects on HN. We're all here to find interesting content. If the content is interesting and relevant, then creators should feel comfortable posting direct links for all to see.
But the same issue happens everywhere, we have issues discovering non popular web pages because probably the authors don't spend a lot of time figuring out the right keywords, forums, etc to promote their work.
I think the main problem is that competition is more at the distribution level (marketing/sales) than at the product level.
>Good games should become big hits. If they don't, we won't have good games.
When gaming was smaller this might have been more true but it's certainly not true in the present.
In any other industry would you expect this? That if any book is good, it would be outselling Dan Brown? Is the best music at the top of the billboard chart? Is the best movie the highest grossing of the summer?
I agree it would be a better world and a better market if the best stuff really was at the top, but since it's not true in any other industry, I think it's silly to expect it to be true in games and just hope you will happen across the best ones.
I don't think the Avatar example is appropriate. Avatar is competing on the top and few films have a budget like it. There are ten of thousands of films in the same year that can't move higher because they can't be distributed in a better way.
> I would at any time want more turn based strategies in the triangle HoMM-Disciples-MoM, but it seems there aren't any?
You don't even have to go as far as indies to find them -- I can recommend Age of Wonders 3 which just came out. And there are many more good ones in the last few years if you are willing to look a little more indie!
If you only game on iOS... well I stopped gaming there years ago because wading through the free-to-play stuff was so horrible. It's not exactly the same genre but FTL, a game mentioned in that article, is truly great and worth checking out. It's pausible real time at least.
The solution is to lurk gaming communities. Find a HoMM community, check in on it once a week, and I'm sure you'll find tons of games that you missed out on over the years, and that you'll be one of the first to know about any new games that fit that mold, long before they're even released.
If, as your other comments in the thread suggest, that seems like too much effort to you, then I'm sorry to be blunt, but I guess you don't really care that much. There's nothing wrong with that; no one can devote 100% of their energy to all of their hobbies. It's just that you can't be passionate about something while also expecting everything to find its way to you. Either put the effort in, or just admit it's not that important to you.
Maybe people want a smaller chance of earning $100000 rather than a bigger chance of earning $10000? Also TBS take more effort to develop than endless runners and match-threes.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
So if you're going to the store to buy toothpaste, and there's too many brands on offer, you're going to stop buying toothpaste and let your teeth rot? I'd file that under "unlikely". The paradox of choice means that you may be less happy about your eventual choice, but you're still going to make it.
Toothpaste is something you know you need to buy. Games are not. If a game purchase is an impulse buy (not all game purchases are, of course) and the impulse fades before you've found something to buy (because you're wandering aimlessly through a huge list of uninteresting titles on Steam), you may just wander off and not buy anything. I've certainly done that before.
Expecting to turn a profit, much less get rich with anyhting less than "an utterly flawless, ground-breaking title and utterly blow everyone’s minds." is the problem.
Wait, you don't think anything less than 'state of the art' deserves to make any money?
I didn't get the impression that there was a value judgment attached, as much as an expectation judgment. Seems to me they're just saying that if your title contains flaws, is formulaic, and just kind of decent, that you shouldn't expect to make enough money to turn a profit, if the title's competing with enough other titles that are better in those categories.
He did talk about value twice in the previous sentences, but maybe I read it wrong. I feel like being 'kind of decent' should be an adequate standard for making a profit, though not for getting rich. It's the 'winner take all' mentality I find troubling.
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.
"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.
Yeah, it's blatantly false. $10k these days is barely enough to fund a few months of development for one person. If you're just building it for fun and you're taking donations, $10k is a lot, but it's not going to fund a game with any level of polish or seriousness unless it's just some sort of bejeweled or triple town clone.
What I mean is there are some developers where if they make any money at all, it's a bonus. They're not in it for the money, and they're not doing it as a business.
For every developer that's serious and financially committed to making games there has to be at least a hundred that are far more casual.
Discoverability can't be solved to a certain extent. As a gamer, I have a limited amount of time to devote to reading about games, or discussing them with my friends. As the owner of a gaming website, I can only push so many games to my user base.
For example, let's say I own an indie gaming site, and my average user reads 2 reviews a week. 100 games are released each year. I can easily talk about them all on my site, and my users can consume that information and make informed choices. Now, if 1,000 games are released, we have a problem. My users only have time to read 100 reviews, and I can only display so many reviews on my homepage. Which ones do I choose? I pick the best 100 games to write about.
Everyone does this, Steam features games on their store, PCGamer has a limited amount of screen space above the fold, as does RockPaperShotgun. Only so many games hit the Reddit homepage, or get voted up on HN. Which games? The same 100 out of the 1,000 I mentioned earlier. 10% of the games, getting 100% of the media attention.
This isn't a problem you can solve. If I ask my friends what indie game I should buy this month, They'll recommend 2 or 3. It'll be the best ones. It doesn't matter if there are 10 games released, or 10,000 games released, I get 2 or 3 recommendations.
See the issue here? I have a limited amount of time, it doesn't scale up with the number of games released.
That is why the solution to discoverability is to use DIFFERENT channels. Steam, PCGamer, and RockPaperShotgun will all review the same 10% -- that's certainly true. The once-a-month conversation with your friends about what video games they recommend is also going to contain only 2 or 3 suggestions. But what about the conversation about the finale of Dancing with the Stars? Perhaps your dancing-themed game aimed at the general market can get mentioned there. And so on and so forth... the traditional market for video games is limited, but the market for entertainment is much larger.
I'm not sure why he's focused on indies. Budgets for AAA titles are growing to the point that they can't survive even on moderate successes (e.g. Irrational Studios and Bioshock Infinite). I expect between the deep discounts offered now on PC sales and the glut of games, consumers are going to push back more on price. The kind of deals that exist on pc via steam sales and the like don't exist in the console market. I'm not sure the AAA will be able to demand the same price.
There have been a number of indie titles that were released while still in development and use continuing sales to fund development (e.g. Minecraft.) But I think the force behind steams early access will shortly come to an end. A couple titles recently cancelled development and I think in coming months more will quit. Consumers will be turned off to early access when some of their titles go dark while still riddled with bugs and half developed.
My two cents for how to be successful, make something fun to watch. With the growth of twitch streaming, more then ever, games are being judged by watching someone play, rather then reviews or trailers.
Perhaps. I associate Adam Smith with the recognition of the supply/demand curve and its implications, but that may be inaccurate. "cold, hard-hearted" was colorful hyperbole used intentionally for humorous effect.
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!
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.
> 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?
A quick browse through its catalog (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.
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.
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.)
XBLIG seems to be filled mostly with low budget games, student projects, and abandonware. That's very different than the high-quality, supported, money-making games that top the iOS charts; Candy Crush and the like. You may not consider those games to be "good", but they are completely missing from XBLIG.
> Why haven't any of the big names released a true "app store" where anyone can get a game into the store for maybe $100...?
This seems like an interesting model. Charge developers a flat fee (FEE) up front. Take a cut of each sale (PER) as well, but only after (FEE/(COST*PER)) sales have been made. For example, using a fee of $100 and a percentage of 20%, the first 500 sales of a $1 game would see all of the money going to the developer. Thereafter, the store would take 20 cents for each sale.
This model seems like it would encourage developers to only submit games that they deem to be high quality. Players would have less shit to wade through, giving them more incentive to try out new games.
Perhaps $100 is not high enough to achieve this goal, but I bet there's an ideal number that discourages low quality submissions while leaving the door open for small-time developers.
I'll go with $1000. If you want to waste the time of millions of steam users, putting something in front of them and taking up precious space in the "new" queue, then you should have some minimal level of confidence in what you've built.
Same thing goes for the App Store. I don't bother browsing Steam or the App Store any more. It's all just crap. The first ten, the first hundred, the first thousand retro games might have been interesting, but no longer.
If Valve wants to turn Steam into the Dollar Store, I guess that's their business. Apple's App Store is already there.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadIf 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.
But I'd love to be proven wrong.
You could also pick up a CAVE game, but it would be by no means indie...
On the PC front I am familiar with more options, but it really depends on what you like. I play mostly shmups, puzzle games, and platformers, which happen to be really easy genres to make indie games in. Over the last few years I've enjoyed Jamestown, Thomas Was Alone, Electronic Super Joy, Antichamber, Super Hexagon, and a lot of games that are distributed for free in places like http://www21.atwiki.jp/iwannabethewiki/pages/283.html
This is like saying, "If anyone was making great music it would be at the top of the Billboard charts and I'd hear it on the radio on the way to work." or "If anyone was writing good books, they'd be outselling Dan Brown and I'd see it in the supermarket isle, so I guess nobody is."
If you are into music you can find great music. Same with games. But you will have to do at least a little looking.
> 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.
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?
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-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.
I came across some good advice last week (aimed at designers, but relevant here): being 20 years ahead of your audience is not a recipe for success - people will just think you are strange. Being 20 minutes ahead, however, can pay off big.
For all their faults, this is something publishers understand well, and historically they have done a fairly good job of curating the authors they publish so as to support the ones that are a little too far ahead of the curve. They also look after a great deal of stuff that artists are either not good at or don't like, like marketing, accountancy and so on - so artists get to focus on what they do well rather than having to deal with the business stuff.
It's nice to think about art as being above commercial considerations, but being an artist doesn't get you out of paying rent or buying food or whatever family obligations you may have (which is why a lot of artists have precarious domestic arrangements). Even determinedly un-commercial firms like ThatGameCompany struggle with this; Journey was supposed to take one year but took three, and they ran out of money and couldn't make payroll in the third year so they had to let some people go and make others wait months to get paid. You often can't ignore commercial considerations becuas if what you want to do needs money then either you raise it or the work doesn't get made. As I've pointed out in relation to film, the costs of making even a simple one are pretty substantial.
A current example - inXile Entertainment (an independent gaming studio now) are still working on their major project Wasteland 2. It's already in beta access for a while, and they plan the release in the end of this summer. They said that what beta has now is only around 50% of the game (i.e. they'll add a lot more still). They took their time developing it and getting feedback and improving things (and they work in parallel on Torment - Tides of Numenera by the way). They said many times, that if their work would be managed by publishers, they'd never be able to develop Wasteland 2 so thoroughly and with their own pace as they do now. I.e. perfection is not something that publishers often appreciate (since it requires more resources). They prefer more projects in less time, than more better projects with more time.
And we're not talking about experimental crazy junk. We're talking abour safe-investment knockoff junk that markets as AAA but is really B or C.
Everything we have today is either mass market junk or only appealing to a narrow demographic or an experimental kludge.
I listen to a lot of kludges and one-trick ponies these days, but I can see it's not how it was, and popularity (of music as whole) reflects that.
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-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.
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-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-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".
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.
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.
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.
Some examples (these reflect my preferences since I play on Linux):
* http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/
* http://gamingonlinux.com
There are many others of course.
I would much prefer the list of hits where every game is a jewel; a list that doesn't get washed in the toilet like reddit does.
But app stores are a waste and there seems to be no independent (tablet) game review sites with any decent coverage (as in having every jewel on top; not as in reviewing every new piece of crap in one long blog)
I don't think it's possible, because perception of art is often subjective. Surely, some titles are more universally liked than others. But there is no way to make a universal list like that which can satisfy everyone. That's why hearing several opinions can help to get more perspectives.
I don't do tablet gaming much really, since I don't find the vast majority of mobile games to be interesting. I'm playing most games on PC which allows more complex scenarios and richer user interfaces. Mobile is still quite limiting and it cripples most of the games there.
"I don't find the vast majority of mobile games to be interesting"
That's what I'm talking about! But, when you run heroes of mignt and magic or civilization on tablet in emulator, it is suddently interesting again!
It's not that tablets suck as a media, it's just almost every game for them is crap (or puzzle, I must add)
Above I meant that it's not possible to make a list which everyone will view as perfect. Tastes vary after all. But GOG is a good approximation indeed.
> That's what I'm talking about! But, when you run heroes of mignt and magic or civilization on tablet in emulator, it is suddently interesting again!
Sure, I like playing Loom or Goblins 3 on a tablet in ScummVM for the fun of it :) But that's a rather non typical tablet gaming I suppose.
Dream Quest (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id870227884?mt=8) is a roguelike-dungeon crawler/deckbuilder. (Think of a cross between Dominion or Ascension and the dungeons in Shandalar, if you've ever played the old microprose game.) The game is really deep, very challenging, and produced by one guy working in his spare time. You have to be willing to accept the graphics as what they are, but the game can be addicting.
It's starting to get a little bit of notice (see http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=228935 or http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/actually-dream-qu...) but it's all without any marketing budget, let alone art budget.
"I know the itch you're trying to scratch. Do you mind if I email you a link to the game I've been testing?"
A perfect example of the cause of the discoverability problem. Keep 'em coming, no need to strive for quality.
No art budget? Pretty obvious!
The low hanging fruit of the mobile game marketplace is all gone. If you want to compete you'll have to do a lot better than that.
I think the main problem is that competition is more at the distribution level (marketing/sales) than at the product level.
And they aren't; the market is too fragmented to support viral growth of good games. Especially true for smaller fragments like TBS.
When gaming was smaller this might have been more true but it's certainly not true in the present.
In any other industry would you expect this? That if any book is good, it would be outselling Dan Brown? Is the best music at the top of the billboard chart? Is the best movie the highest grossing of the summer?
Sadly, even the newest Hobbit is me-too for itself.
BTW, I think films like Russhmore (1998) and Festen (1998) are much better than Avatar. My complete ranking here: http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings?start=1&view=comp...
You don't even have to go as far as indies to find them -- I can recommend Age of Wonders 3 which just came out. And there are many more good ones in the last few years if you are willing to look a little more indie!
If you only game on iOS... well I stopped gaming there years ago because wading through the free-to-play stuff was so horrible. It's not exactly the same genre but FTL, a game mentioned in that article, is truly great and worth checking out. It's pausible real time at least.
If, as your other comments in the thread suggest, that seems like too much effort to you, then I'm sorry to be blunt, but I guess you don't really care that much. There's nothing wrong with that; no one can devote 100% of their energy to all of their hobbies. It's just that you can't be passionate about something while also expecting everything to find its way to you. Either put the effort in, or just admit it's not that important to you.
I honestly tried searching for tablet TBS both on internets and play store. Didn't find anything playable.
PS: did you check this?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tortugatea...
No, I didn't, definitely give it a try!
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.
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.
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.
So only the best games will rise to the top now... I fail to see how that is a burst bubble.
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.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice
I don't think this is true. Faced with a wall of indie games I will throw up my hands and go play Mario instead.
Wait, you don't think anything less than 'state of the art' deserves to make any money?
Knowing Jeff, it is hard for me to imagine that he is trying not to offend.
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.
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.
That seems unlikely.
Game jams like Ludum Dare (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/) show that there are a lot of people making games.
What I mean is there are some developers where if they make any money at all, it's a bonus. They're not in it for the money, and they're not doing it as a business.
For every developer that's serious and financially committed to making games there has to be at least a hundred that are far more casual.
For example, let's say I own an indie gaming site, and my average user reads 2 reviews a week. 100 games are released each year. I can easily talk about them all on my site, and my users can consume that information and make informed choices. Now, if 1,000 games are released, we have a problem. My users only have time to read 100 reviews, and I can only display so many reviews on my homepage. Which ones do I choose? I pick the best 100 games to write about.
Everyone does this, Steam features games on their store, PCGamer has a limited amount of screen space above the fold, as does RockPaperShotgun. Only so many games hit the Reddit homepage, or get voted up on HN. Which games? The same 100 out of the 1,000 I mentioned earlier. 10% of the games, getting 100% of the media attention.
This isn't a problem you can solve. If I ask my friends what indie game I should buy this month, They'll recommend 2 or 3. It'll be the best ones. It doesn't matter if there are 10 games released, or 10,000 games released, I get 2 or 3 recommendations.
See the issue here? I have a limited amount of time, it doesn't scale up with the number of games released.
There have been a number of indie titles that were released while still in development and use continuing sales to fund development (e.g. Minecraft.) But I think the force behind steams early access will shortly come to an end. A couple titles recently cancelled development and I think in coming months more will quit. Consumers will be turned off to early access when some of their titles go dark while still riddled with bugs and half developed.
My two cents for how to be successful, make something fun to watch. With the growth of twitch streaming, more then ever, games are being judged by watching someone play, rather then reviews or trailers.
Adam Smith was a lovely fellow and a gentleman, you must be thinking of Thomas Malthus.
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!
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.
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.
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?
A quick browse through its catalog (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.
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.)
This seems like an interesting model. Charge developers a flat fee (FEE) up front. Take a cut of each sale (PER) as well, but only after (FEE/(COST*PER)) sales have been made. For example, using a fee of $100 and a percentage of 20%, the first 500 sales of a $1 game would see all of the money going to the developer. Thereafter, the store would take 20 cents for each sale.
This model seems like it would encourage developers to only submit games that they deem to be high quality. Players would have less shit to wade through, giving them more incentive to try out new games.
Perhaps $100 is not high enough to achieve this goal, but I bet there's an ideal number that discourages low quality submissions while leaving the door open for small-time developers.
Same thing goes for the App Store. I don't bother browsing Steam or the App Store any more. It's all just crap. The first ten, the first hundred, the first thousand retro games might have been interesting, but no longer.
If Valve wants to turn Steam into the Dollar Store, I guess that's their business. Apple's App Store is already there.
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.
-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.
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).
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.
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.
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=%20182670...
jstor: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2F...
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):
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.)
Had much fun with it and works like a charm with the Xbox 360 Controller.
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.
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.
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.
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).