
The Indie Bubble Is Popping - cjauvin
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-indie-bubble-is-popping.html
======
mcherm
Much of what Jeff has to say in this article is true. Especially the part
about how the cold, hard-hearted hand of Adam Smith will ensure that when X
dollars are divided among Y game developers and Y increases, that the
developer income will decrease.

That is why the only real hope of the developers is to change X. And that is
possible. There are hundreds of thousands of 12-year-olds who are obsessed
with Minecraft. (Seriously: last week when my son visited a new school wearing
a Minecraft shirt, something like 60% of the male middleschoolers go out of
their way to say something about it to him, and several teachers mentioned how
obsessed they were.) That market didn't exist before Minecraft.

In a similar vein, I spend a certain number of hours per week watching shows
on Netflix, and I am certain that I could be persuaded to spend a big chunk of
that time playing a game (for which I would gladly pay money). But it isn't
one of my habits -- someone would need to find the sort of game I would enjoy
and manage to let me know about it.

Here are some hints: since I am not your normal market I don't own the latest
console nor do I own a fancy controller (but I CAN run Steam). I am not that
excited about first-person-shoot-em-ups (if I were then I would already have
gotten involved), but I might be interested in something more strategic. I am
not willing to pay much up-front (since I don't know for sure if I'll really
be into doing this) but I would be willing to spend money once I know that I
like it, so long as I don't feel like I am being cheated (mandatory in-game
payments or play-to-win often leaves me feeling that way). And most important
of all, I do not read the indy gaming press or attend indy gaming conferences
(since I am a NOT the existing demographic), so you need to reach me some
other way -- probably through my friends, using some form of viral marketing.

The market for independent video games is small, but the market for
entertainment is astonishingly large. (Plus, maybe your game can be something
ELSE... educational perhaps?) The route to profit is to find a new (bigger)
niche.

~~~
astrodust
"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.

~~~
Eridrus
> Many developers would be happy if their game pulled down $10K.

That seems unlikely.

~~~
astrodust
Not every developer is trying to make a million dollar hit. Many have jobs
that make pursuing games as a full-time thing impractical.

Game jams like Ludum Dare
([http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/](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.

------
guard-of-terra
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.

~~~
thesteamboat
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](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](http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=228935)
or [http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/actually-dream-
qu...](http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/actually-dream-quest-looks-
like/)) but it's all without any marketing budget, let alone art budget.

~~~
dropit_sphere
So close. Better:

"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?"

~~~
sillysaurus3
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.

------
drewcrawford
I was doing some background research for another essay and this is as good a
time as any to produce an actual journal article on point.

There's a common talking point I've seen both in this comment thread and
elsewhere that the number of entrants isn't the problem at all and the _real_
problem is game developers aren't innovating, and if they just innovated more
things would be fine.

Kevin Boudreau [1] is one of the earliest researches on this scene, who
concludes that "incremental increases in the number of application producers
in this context led to a decrease in innovation incentives, on average, as
measured by the rate at which new versions of existing titles were generated"
and further that "the strength of descriptive patterns alone suggests that
marginal entrants curtailed overall innovation".

Kevin's research, while it has many limitations, suggests that innovation
decline is actually a symptom of an overcrowded market, not an independent
factor in its own right. If true, this could mean that the practical way to
address an innovation crisis is to first solve the problem of the overcrowded
market.

The idea that market crowding depresses the innovation of individual
independent developers is sort of a surprising result, but once accepted there
are many possible feedback mechanisms that may explain the effect. For
example, market crowding may drive innovators to go innovate somewhere else.
Crowding may also limit available funding which may be disproportionately
required by innovative titles rather than non-innovative titles which can be
more cheaply manufactured.

[1] preprint:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=%20182670...](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=%201826702)

jstor:
[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2F...](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Diphone%2Bsoftware%2Bengineering%26amp%3Bprq%3Diphone%26amp%3Bhp%3D25%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bso%3Drel%26amp%3Bracc%3Doff&resultItemClick=true)

------
suprjami
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...](http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-half)

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.

~~~
duskwuff
In Jeff's case, I suspect that the low audio/visual quality of the games that
he's been releasing since 2000 has been a significant factor in the weak
reception he's seen them receive. Reviewers have been consistently dinging his
games since _Geneforge_ in 2001, and he's still using the same game engine
(and a lot of the same graphical assets!) in his current releases. Plainly
put, his games look and feel dated.

Is graphical polish a make-or-break factor for games? Of course not. But that
isn't a license to ignore it, either. "Lo-fi" graphics can be attractive as an
intentional design choice, but that isn't what he's got, and I suspect it's
turning off a lot of potential players.

------
archagon
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.

~~~
glhaynes
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.

~~~
ama729
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_ ).

But I'd love to be proven wrong.

~~~
anonymoushn
On the iPad in particular, you might try
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/10000000/id544385071?mt=8](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](http://www21.atwiki.jp/iwannabethewiki/pages/283.html)

~~~
archagon
For anyone into CAVE-like games, please give Danmaku Unlimited 2 a try. One of
the best shmups on the platform, beautiful, made by one dude.

------
mxfh
But still there are more new indie games than AAA titles out there I care
about, it's not a tragedy if there only 2 to 6 outstanding games per year that
reach me through the noise, mostly by direct recommendation.

The best thing about Greenlight is that pre-2005 games get some new exposure
and even patches, like in the case of _Jets 'n'Guns_. So if you want to
stretch the music industry analogy as others did, you currently not only
competing with the ever increasing amount of new releases but also with back
catalogs on the same platform.

Another problem with an awful lot of indie games (especially those 40%
unplayed fillers games from bundles, which are not even always strictly
speaking Indie) is that you can see that there was little to no user testing,
so they are just not fun or even impossible to play on specific not too exotic
configurations.

Just to name a few (each of these happened in at least two games):

    
    
      - no way to remap keys
      - no way to remap mouse buttons or game ignores windows swapped buttons
      - fixed resolutions
      - optimized for small resolution,
        resulting in insane mouse travel on today's native screen resolutions
        (just drop that retro stick if you just cant effort a proper artist please.)
      - no way to run a game windowed
      - touch optimized ports from Android don't even register windows touch events.
      - Content is cropped off screen
        with wider aspect radios with no way to change resolution.

~~~
kevingadd
All those quality issues are a big deal. Sadly, the industry (and customers)
as a whole reject quality checks and validation.

Valve does less QA of steam releases than they used to (because this was a
part of the reviled 'curation'), Microsoft and Sony have been forced to
incrementally phase out certification checks (because developers complained
constantly about the cost of those checks), etc.

The end result is utterly broken games go up on Steam and have to get pulled,
and patches roll out on consoles that corrupt saves and do other nasty stuff
like that. It's a mess.

On the bright side, this does increase access to storefronts, so the one or
two marvelous games by people who can't afford cert or get the attention of
Valve's curators are able to sell to their customers now. (Assuming they
actually reach them, which hasn't actually gotten any better... that's gotten
worse.)

~~~
mxfh
Thanks again, if you did that _Escape Goat_ port for Steam, is a stellar
example of a properly tested release.

Had much fun with it and works like a charm with the Xbox 360 Controller.

------
jjjeffrey
I've been thinking recently about what makes a good video game experience for
me, and it's slightly relevant.

I can place the games I've highly enjoyed into two basic categories:

-Short and sweet, having one or more of 1. interesting play mechanics 2. great story/theme 3. interesting art direction.

-Solid all around, with addictive elements (e.g. leveling, collecting things) that make repetitive tasks seem fun and extend the time I play the game to beyond a few evenings.

Many indie games I've played fit into the former category, and most non-indie
games fit into the latter.

I've been realizing that these "short and sweet" games that I've been getting
more and more of a chance to play have provided more lasting and fulfilling
experiences than longer games. The feeling I get from sinking an evening into
a short and sweet game is kind of similar to reading a good book or playing a
good chess match. Likewise, the feeling I get from sinking an evening into a
longer game is some artificial feeling of making progress.

I'm overgeneralizing a little, but the point is I've started skipping AAA
titles in favor of trying out lots of indie games. Most aren't great, but the
cost of a few dollars or less and a half hour to find out isn't bad. For me,
it's worth it to find the gems. And not having several-week-long addictions to
games with low quality:time ratios is great too.

I really hope there's no indie bubble.

~~~
KVFinn
There's a third category that I would put most of the games I enjoy into:

-Long and Deep: Games you can play for huge amounts of time but don't depend on an artificial sense of progress to do it. Strategy games, roguelikes, competitive games, etc. Games where you level up yourself by getting better, instead of the character in the game.

~~~
jjjeffrey
That's a great point. I play Nethack now and then, and I like how I can play
it for an evening and then walk away, satisfied that I'll never beat it.

------
benologist
The indie bubble isn't popping. It's an amazing time to be an indie developer,
with massive audiences sitting around just itching to create millionaires.

The developers who are suffering are the ones who can't figure out how to get
on top of markets, and especially the ones armed with obsolete "strategies"
like being the only new game on Steam this month.

------
incision
Odd article.

It feels to me like the author is trying hard not to offend his community and
ending up a ways off the point.

There can't be 'too many' games any more than there can be 'too many' websites
or whatever else.

Too many is only relevant here because the indie segment has effectively been
propped up on the good will of the community, not the quality of those games -
with obvious exceptions.

This is a charity pie being sliced thin, not one made of value.

High-value products will always have a place in any market.

Second rate games have been skating by with issues or omissions that would see
any major label release crucified simply because they were sporting the indie
armband of immunity. Expecting to turn a profit, much less get rich with
anything less than _" an utterly flawless, ground-breaking title and utterly
blow everyone’s minds."_ is the problem.

Forget the indie label and there's absolutely nothing new to see here.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I disagree, on multiple levels:

First, you can have too many. It's just like going to the grocery store to get
tooth paste: the frustration of trying to decide the right one with 5000
choices is real, and it increases the likelihood of buyers remorse. That
reduces real dollars spent.

Second, indie developers have not been charity cases. Over the past 30 years,
there have been a lot of amazing indie games. There have also been a lot of
crap games. Good games have made money because they were discoverable.

It is likely that amazing games will continue to thrive. The ones that will
face difficulties are the good-to-really-good games. Those won't have the
inertia to break out above the fog of the developer masses.

In other words, indie games are going exactly the same place App Store games
did.

~~~
jpatokal
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice)

~~~
gradstudent
> The paradox of choice means that you may be less happy about your eventual
> choice, but you're still going to make it.

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.

------
shmerl
I disagree with the general sentiment.

 _> The problem is too many games._

That's not the problem. It's like saying that music industry is in crisis
because there are tons of junk records around. Good music is always a minority
and one has to sift through noise to get to it. Gaming isn't any different.
Good games are a form of art, and they are always a minority, whether we are
talking about indie and low budget or big budget / publisher funded games.
That's why Steam may be a bad example, because filtering games there isn't
easy. Services like GOG concentrate on _good_ games. That's of course
subjective (according to the distributor), but they do a lot of pre-filtering
for you.

 _> It's not sustainable._

It is, like any other art. Make something unique, make something good and
you'll find your audience. Crowdfunding also helps to increase visibility.

~~~
anigbrowl
There is absolutely no guarantee that you'll find your audience, and indeed
the odds against doing so are increasing. For example:
[http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/10/16/t...](http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/10/16/the-
most-important-thing-you-will-read-all-day/)

 _Services like GOG concentrate on good games. That 's of course subjective
(according to the distributor), but they do a lot of pre-filtering for you._

Which Steam did, a role which they have since abandoned. Why do you assume GOG
will be any different? The day GOG's accountant proves irrefutably that it's
more profitable to offer 20,000 shitty games than 200 good ones is the day
they'll start doing that. That might not be for a while; as long as GOG's
sales growth depends on differentiating it from other brands like Steam by
being more selective. But eventually that growth will hit a plateau, and
economics change.

 _It is, like any other art. Make something unique, make something good and
you 'll find your audience._

You might, but there's no guarantee that you won't get lost in the shuffle. As
Vogel points out, the problem is not so much for micro-producers with very low
overhead, for whom even small sales are profitable, as for mid-sized ventures
that have to invest $1 million+ to meet audience expectations and who will go
broke if they can't recoup their production budget.

I really find your advice a bit facile. What branch of the arts do you work
in?

~~~
shmerl
_> There is absolutely no guarantee that you'll find your audience,_

Well, of course, there is always risk. What I meant is that if the game is not
unique and not standing out, then the chances of success are way lower.

 _> Which Steam did, a role which they have since abandoned. Why do you assume
GOG will be any different?_

Because GOG insists they will be. So far they were honest:
[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-15-gog-on-early-
ac...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-15-gog-on-early-access-
definitely-not-every-game-should-be-permitted)

 _> 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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
shmerl
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.

------
pachydermic
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!

~~~
kevingadd
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.

------
overgard
You know, what really got me into indie games was that most of them had
something unique and interesting to offer. They weren't all auteur works
(although a lot of them were), but they generally felt like they weren't just
made "to make a game", they were made because they had a reason to exist.
There were definitely a lot of rough edges, but they were interesting. There
wasn't the hegemony you'd see in AAA titles.

But... you don't see that so much in the indie scene now. Many of those games
feel like they just exist because someone thought "I should make a game".
There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's somewhat counter to the
spirit that made the scene interesting in the first place.

I feel like a lot of indie games now capture the form but not the function.
They look indie, but they don't really feel indie. I don't think there's an
indie "bubble", I feel like the scene that had those values has moved
somewhere else. Or if it hasn't, it will. We've always had a glut of mediocre
games that didn't really make anyone much money (see: flash games in the mid
oughts.) Same thing, its just the platform has expanded and the branding has
changed.

~~~
jamie_ca
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.

------
mindstab
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.

------
BoppreH
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.

------
hyperion2010
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.

------
pkamb
> 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?

~~~
BrandonM
> _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.

~~~
rossjudson
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.

------
Taek
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).

------
xsmasher
> 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.

------
damian2000
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?

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

------
ps4fanboy
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.

------
jaunkst
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.

------
james33
The good news is that these things always go in cycles. The ones that can
weather the downturn will be the big winners on the other side.

------
kevingadd
This comment thread is filled to the brim with arguments that either
demonstrate a lack of familiarity with video games (excusable, but...) or
regular old weak thinking.

A few variations on this core theme:

"The cream will rise to the top"

"Good games will find an audience"

"Create something truly special and you will be successful"

These lines of thinking are all COMPLETE AND UTTER NONSENSE. I would love to
live in a world where those statements were true, but they are not. They have
_never_ been true in video games, even if they are perhaps true in other
industries. Anyone with any experience observing games development, sales and
marketing knows that these statements are false.

The vast majority of successful game titles are successful as a result of a
finely-tuned marketing and sales pipeline.

The big studios have their own pipeline for this: Paying staff to contact the
news outlets and YouTubers, paying to run television advertisements or put up
billboards, doing co-promotional deals (like bundling the Battlefield 4 beta
in with another game, etc), advertising their new games via popups in older
games, buying installs to climb the app store rankings, etc.

Smaller developers can't use the big studios' bag of tricks, so they use their
own: Forming industry connections, so that developers and other people with
big audiences promote the game to their audiences. Building name recognition
and dedicated fanbases by shipping lots of games (Jeff Vogel is a textbook
example of this - decades of releases!). Building dozens of cheap games and
releasing them to try and find something that fans like. Cashing in on the
latest trends and buzzwords in order to get good returns. Slaving away for no
pay for months or years, killing yourself to make a 'masterpiece'.

Note that many of the above tricks are _not_ guaranteed to work. Some of the
highest-profile 'indie successes' in the past few years have actually had poor
sales or poor revenues, when you examine their budget. In some cases this is
due to actively being undermined by the storefront. Microsoft has a track
record of undermining big releases on XBLA by scheduling them at poor times,
dropping them from the front page, and otherwise leaving them to die. Some of
the other big publishers do this too - Electronic Arts sank a ton of money
into Starbreeze's new Syndicate reboot, then spent nearly nothing marketing it
and it languished in a pit along with all the other FPSes - even though it's
actually a quite solid game from a studio with a great pedigree (reviewers
agree).

Here's the reality of building and selling video games:

Building video games is expensive. It probably costs more time & money than
you realistically have.

Selling video games is difficult... and expensive. You often have to sink as
much time/money into selling your game as you do in building it - lots of
contract reviews/negotiation, along with lawyers' fees, time spent prepping
builds for each storefront and building storefront/platform-exclusive content
(steam workshop, achievements, etc).

Making it possible for players to find your video game is difficult... and
expensive. You sink tons of time/money (often over the whole duration of
development) reaching out to journalists, youtubers, genre fans, previous
customers, and random strangers. You spend money on booths at conventions like
PAX, buy banner ads on game-focused websites, build a mailing list, etc.

Even after all this, factors entirely outside your control _will_ fuck you.
Your game will get pirated, Steam's checkout flow will break during your
launch week, a crippling bug found on launch day will undermine your sales, or
market forces will simply shift and leave your game stranded in a market
players aren't interested in anymore. Sometimes another developer literally
swoops in under you, clones your game outright (based on all that marketing
and outreach you've been doing), and steals a huge chunk of your market. This
has happened to Vlambeer _multiple times_ and has happened to other big-name
indies (Spry Fox, for example).

People interested in dropping some lazy truisms like 'just work hard and build
something awesome' are doing themselves a disservice and lowering the level of
discourse. There are hard problems here, and many of them are not actively
being solved. Some of the problems are _within_ the industry, and mean
developers need to make better choices. Some of them are the industry's
machinery, with storefronts providing inadequate discovery and unreliable
sales pipelines. Some of them are playerbase issues, where players tend to
chase after novelty and hot trends (I want a minecraft clone! I want a zombie
game!) and don't have discerning tastes.

Many of these problems aren't any one person's fault, they're just problems we
have to fix. But nobody is going to fix anything if we keep plugging our ears
and yelling "EVERYTHING IS FINE!"

~~~
shmerl
Counterexample: [http://papersplea.se](http://papersplea.se)

Quite a successful game in my view, developed by one person without some
insane marketing or anything the like. Very original and creative, which
helped it to find its audience.

Trailer:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=_QP5X6fcukM](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_QP5X6fcukM)

