
Why Bundles and Steam Sales Aren't Good for Most Indies - ido
http://www.dinofarmgames.com/?p=561
======
patio11
One thing you can do is run an aggregator, since they benefit quite a bit by
commoditizing content. Another thing you could do is program for an audience
which is not crushingly oversupplied by geeks willing to work for nothing. If
you enjoy hobby game programming, you can subsidize it by making something
people want... to pay for.

Microecon 101: it teaches superpowers.

~~~
cageface
I don't think there are many people making _good_ indie games (or music apps,
my domain) that are willing to work for nothing. We're all just slowly coming
to the realization that venues like the App Store and Steam have eaten the
middle out of the market. If you're not one of the anointed ones you might as
well not bother. Things weren't nearly so lean before this.

The problem is that an "app" has now become a generic commodity, with an
expected value that has _zero_ correlation with the amount of work that went
into it or the size of the potential audience.

~~~
fennecfoxen
There are billions of possible projects out there whose expected value has
zero correlation with the amount of work that goes into them. This is why I'm
not spending a million man-hours building a ziggurat in my back yard.

Paying for an app based on effort going into making it is nonsense. An app
should be paid for based on the value it provides. If it could have provided
that same value with less effort, it probably should have.

Now, if you want to complain that it's hard to charge based on the value the
app will provide, I'd believe you! It's still very, very hard to provide users
with information which will let them evaluate your product and determine that
it is, in fact, a quality product worth paying lots of money for.

~~~
georgemcbay
App Stores (not just Apple's) have also served to erode the perception of
value any one app (or game) provides as well, IMO.

Fun fact -- I have never bought a single app on Amazon's Android App Store
even though I fire it up every day to see what I can get for free. Why buy an
app for $1-10 dollars (even if I may get that amount of enjoyment/practical
use out of it) when it MIGHT BE FREE tomorrow?

The same thing holds to a lesser extent on those giant Steam sales. I never
buy any games on Steam full price even if I want to play them badly because I
know if I wait a few months I'll be able to get them for pennies on the dollar
in some crazy sale or other.

As a consumer this is great for me. As a developer, not so much.

------
ggwicz
In any competitive environment, like game development, a tiny minority will
win. I don't understand why that then gets drawn to "bundle sales aren't good
for most...". I was never exposed to indie games _until_ the Humble Bundle,
for example.

Competition leaves a majority that does not win. This is true in capitalism,
nature, sports, you name it. Whether that is a good or bad thing is separate,
but I don't think it needs to be extrapolated to "bundles and Steam aren't
good for most". _Competition itself is not good for "most"._

------
babarock
Boo-hoo, prices have droped. Guess what? So have the costs of developing and
publishing your game!

I understand the price drop is not proportional to the cost decrease, but
that's not even important.

The people behind Steam or Humble Bundle are showing great creativity and
forward thinking, creating viable businesses (if we can call Humble Bundle a
business) by selling 1-2$ games.

What this rant is saying is basically that competition is better and cheaper,
it's so unfair.

Saying that indie games used to sell for 10-15$ does not make it better. It
was viable 5 years ago, it's not anymore. Period. Prices of blank DVDs have
dropped drastically in the past years. You don't hear DVD manufacturers
complain about the price-drop or make claims about the 'industry'.

I understand that the author is raising an otherwise rarely discussed issue. I
apologize for the harsh tone of my comment, but globally, the message is the
same: Stop nagging and do things differently. Your competitors understood that
and are moving on!

~~~
ido

        What this rant is saying is basically that 
        competition is better and cheaper, it's so unfair.
    

Nope. What I'm saying is that the race to the bottom hurts all of us except
the king-makers (and their few appointed kings) in the long run.

It's the same deal as wallmart moving into town and driving all the mom&pop
shops downtown out of business.

The result is the concentration of power - it is already _almost_ impossible
(baring a handful of outliers) to make a successful indie game without going
through steam (and giving valve their 30-40% cut).

~~~
maxharris
First, the customers are the actual king-makers. In the end, if something
isn't what lots of people want, lots of people won't buy it. In any given
moment, what people want is something that is out of anyone's control (and
this is true whether you're talking about a single developer or a giant group
of them banded together in a corporation).^ This is broader than just stuff
that you buy. Introspect for a moment, right now: could someone get you to
_want_ to listen to music you detest, without forcing you by planting
electrodes in your brain? Or to any music at all, if you aren't in the mood?
What about our romantic and sexual lives? You can't control who or what
someone else wants, nor should you.

Remember that games compete with a whole world of stuff out there that's not
on your phone or computer or game console. When people aren't playing video
games, it's because they're doing something else that they chose to do, such
as going to work, out to a restaurant, on a hike, for a drive, kayaking,
listening to a recorded lecture, making dinner at home, etc. For all of
recorded history, up until the last 35 years or so, people didn't play video
games. You're not up against a company that's trying to keep you down: you're
up against the actual desires of every single person that would never buy your
product, even if they were somehow made fully aware of its existence.

It might be hard for you to imagine that the game you work on will never be
important to a huge number of people, but you have to get over it. No one
_owes_ anyone else a living, no matter who they are, or how much they need it.
Anything less means enslaving at least one person, to some degree, to the will
of another.

^In the long term, what someone wants ultimately stems from ideas a person
_chooses_ to hold, which they apply in the course of dealing with the
environment around them.

~~~
babarock
And I'm still convinced that there is a market for 10-15$ games. It's just
that today's customer won't pay that much for the cute 2d physics game, or the
classic reproduction of Super Mario in Flash.

I believe there's a range in between the 0.99$ Pacman on Android and the 70$+
new Assasin's Creed. I believe that a dedicated team of indie developers could
pull-off a a modern game worth of that price range.

------
TheCapn
The sad fact of the matter is that "being successful" goes beyond making a
good product. A team/person can create a phenomenal indie game but if they
don't have the proper skills/hookups to market the product where people can
find them they're dead in the water. Others that build a worse product but are
able to get it out there will win. Apple has shown how marketing can be
greater than engineering in many regards.

It sounds like people want to blame bundle providers for picking some over the
others but how is that their fault? If the humble bundle crew finds a set of
excellent games (I've yet to be disappointed by their packs) who are we to
ridicule if their selections neglected other good games? I'm sorry but that's
life in competition.

A big part of this too is that there's boatloads of indie games out there. But
there's only a small dingy of good ones. Everything believes that their game
is worthy of the throne but very few are as developers often view their work
through rose tinted monitors.

Life is what life is: some win and some lose. There is no entitlement here
where hard work guarantees a reward; there is no 1:1 relationship like in the
games people are making.

Personally though? I feel that if bundles weren't to exist then even fewer
indie games would receive recognition than we have now. Out of the 5 indie
packs I've purchased I had only previously owned 3 of the games (So that's
about a 3/20 ratio give or take). I'll take our current system over the
alternative.

~~~
ido
I'm not blaming the bundle guys for their selection nor do i wish for an
alternative system where steam and bundles didn't exist.

I am merely saying there is also a long term downside to the industry in
reducing the expected value of games in general (one we can see even more
extremely in the app store).

------
nestlequ1k
As a consumer, I can confirm this phenomenon. I just don't pay more than 5
bucks on steam for anything anymore. I wait until the game I want is on sales
for 2 or 3 bucks.

~~~
matwood
Well I guess the question is if there were not any sales would you buy the
game at all?

I find myself buying many titles because of a good sale that I otherwise would
have skipped.

~~~
masklinn
Much likewise, I have two categories on steam:

* Stuff I buy on sale because it looks ok and at that price it's nice. That makes up 90% of my library

* Stuff I buy _right at release_ because I want it _now_ because it looks/feels/seems that awesome. Recent examples in that category are Binding of Isaac and Bastion, which I bought at release.

~~~
teamonkey
Binding of Isaac and Bastion had a fair bit of hype surrounding them at
launch; is it fair to say that this is the case for all indie games you bought
at launch?

~~~
masklinn
Yes and no, I obviously have to know about the game to buy it at launch. And I
have to be confident it's not a halfway chance of shooting myself in the foot.
This has improved since I started regularly reading RPS, but before that Steam
Sales were actually a _great_ way to discover small Indie games: they're often
featured pretty prominently, and /r/gaming and neogaf tend to have _massive_
reco threads around sales, that's how I discovered gems like Atom Zombie
Smasher.

But I tend to buy indie games at launch more often than "big name" $60 stuff.

------
WalterSear
The humble bundles and steam sales got me back into gaming, and moreover, into
buying instead of stealing. And into sending games as presents.

But, apparently, my attention and money is no good to indie game developers
because I'm not willing to shovel $50 bills at them.

~~~
nestlequ1k
It's not. Did you read the article? Only a small slice of the very small
amount of money goes back to the game developers, and then those developers
are the top 1%. The rest get very little.

I think his point has merit, that its limiting the amount of good games that
come out. It's just too risky of a proposition to develop an indie game.

It's all very interesting, but personally I don't care. It's games... these
efforts aren't terribly useful to society. They should live and be well, but
we don't need to be all that concerned about "saving the poor indie game
developers". These people could easily make tons of money developing other
things, but they choose to pursue their dream of game development. They don't
need to be coddled.

~~~
ido

        personally I don't care. It's games... 
        these efforts aren't terribly useful to society.
    

I disagree- unless you think movies, music, books and art also aren't terribly
useful to society?

------
budley
Selling your content for peanuts at predictable intervals isn't a viable long
run business model? Who would have guessed.

~~~
ido
Apparently not many, as I got quite a lot of resistance to the idea that it
might be harmful in the long term (in places other than HN).

I suspect that's mostly from players who like getting games for cheap.

------
acgourley
We're working on a pricing model at my startup (BitGym) which should route
around this problem and both pay or partner developers more than 1.99/game and
not make us kingmakers. It's different, but very fair and will earn developers
above the median of their releases on steam/app stores. This race to the
bottom in other spaces should only serve to help us find more developer
partners.

I realize that sounds like a plug.. I guess what I'm trying to say is read the
landscape and adapt!

------
rcfox
I was expecting an article about how the Humble Bundles discourage repeat
customers from paying more than the average, or how Indie Royale essentially
sets a hard limit to the amount of money they can possibly bring in.

~~~
ido
Not the case!

I would however love to read your thoughts on those matters if you'll blog
about them :)

------
shaggyfrog
I won't join into the chorus about marketing being the key (it really is), but
I did see this: "We're the creators of the critically-acclaimed iOS game, '100
Rogues'". I bought that game on sale for iOS -- after it had been updated a
few times -- and I'm not sure what "critically-acclaimed" means. It had bugs
out the _wazoo_ , barely any variety in items/monsters/levels, and its non-
standard UI had frustrating quirks.

If you have neither a polished product nor any real marketing, is it truly any
wonder you're not selling well?

------
darrenkopp
I've bought every humble bundle, but never played a single game. They wouldn't
have got that money from me otherwise, because I normally wouldn't purchase
the game.

------
cheald
Steam isn't producing a "race to the bottom". What it's done is increase
supply. Unless there's been a massive surge in demand (there hasn't; player
time is finite), prices have to drop accordingly to compete.

Years ago, I'd be willing to pay $20 for an indie game after playing the
Shareware trial and deciding that I liked it enough that I wanted to play the
whole thing. That situation likely existed because I wasn't spending my gaming
time playing some other title. These days, I have more games on my backlog
than I have time for, so your indie title could be priced at $0.50 and I
wouldn't care - if I don't have time to play it, it's worthless to me.

If I have to choose between spending my playtime on Assassin's Creed (which I
know is going to be an AAA title, but for which I pay $40-$60) and Indie
Button Masher (which may or may not be of dubious quality and/or play-length,
for which I pay $10-$20), which do you think I'm going to plunk down for?

There are more AAA titles than ever on the market - this fall alone has been
one of the biggest quarters for AAA titles in _video game history_ \- and it's
not that I'm Mr. Stingy Customer who doesn't want to pay for your games. It's
that I'm Mr. Spending My Gaming Time On AAA Titles, and if you want me to
spend that time on your game instead, it had better be ready to deliver
equivalent value-per-dollar.

Let's look at some of the indie games in my Steam list which I got on Steam
sales or in bundles.

    
    
      Super Laser Racer - 11 minutes played
      Steel Storm: Burning Retribution - 42 minutes played
      Sanctum - 4 hours played
      Machinarium - 32 minutes played
      HOARD - 77 minutes played
      Hammerfight - 21 minutes played
      Gish - 20 minutes played
      Crayon Physics Deluxe - 47 minutes played
      Bullet Candy - 36 minutes played
    

Now let's look at where I'm spending my time:

    
    
      Mass Effect 2 - 96 hours played
      Team Fortress 2 - 104 hours played
      Portal 2 - 27 hours played
      Deus Ex: Human Revolution - 29 hours played
    

And to be fair, there are some games like Minecraft (140h), Magicka (45h), and
Terraria (48h) that I have spent a LOT of time on. I also bought them for full
price on the recommendations of friends.

I don't have a vacuum of time that I'm trying to fill with more games. The
reason that Indie Button Masher isn't worth $15 to me anymore is because I
have so many other high-quality games to spend my time on. There are
occasional shining examples (like Magicka) are were well-worth the full $20 +
whatever else I spent on DLC for them, but I bought them because my friends
recommended them and assured me that they were worth my time and money, not
because it was on a Steam sale.

If there's a game I kinda want, I'll wait on a Steam sale for it, but not
because I'm being cheap, but because I have plenty of other games to play in
the meantime. If there's a title that I _really_ want, I'll buy it outright
for full price. DXHR, Arkham City, Skyward Sword, and Magicka all fall under
that heading, for example.

I spend more money than ever on games, thanks to Steam. Just because I'm not
spending it on _your_ games doesn't mean Steam is slowly killing the market.

------
rsanchez1
I think it just makes it more "difficult" - that is, developers have to make a
greater effort to stand out. I'll admit, I mostly buy games off Steam when
they're cheap, and I've bought every bundle because it's cheap. But, I will
buy a good indie game when I see it.

Most recently, I preordered Dungeon Defenders full price and ended up
satisfied. I won't go out and spend money because it's an indie game though.
Dungeon Defenders caught my eye and persuaded me to take the plunge.

In fact, it's probably because of the sales/bundles that I'm more open to
purchase indie games now. I also helped fund Lifeless Planet and the NASA MMO,
because the sales/bundles showed me the value of indie games. The "problem" is
that indie developers have to work harder to get my attention now, either with
an interesting premise (the Kickstarter games I mentioned) or interesting
gameplay (Dungeon Defender).

