When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out. The whole indie market thing was hot.
But at a certain point, thanks to the free availability of game engines and their overal quality, the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games and releasing top quality indie games.
It became a game of marketing. And sadly that's where we failed.
Steam says that there is no better or worse day of the week or month to plan your release... That should be your first red flag. There are about 30-35 quality titles being put out on steam alone, every day of the week, weekends included. Other markets are a bit of a joke, they hardly fly on the revenues radar, unless you have a special deal with them for increased visibility.
You see the title you've worked on for the last 6 months solid just fly off the list quicker than you can say woof.
I know for a fact (we talk) that most indies don't make a 10th of their budget back. It's a marketeting's game now. So you probably want a publisher to be in charge of that... and we're back to the old days of non-indies, or essentially small studios.
"True" Indie games are dead, by the law of numbers and algorithms. Even people that saw success in the past are now having a hard time pushing signal through noise.
Game development has turned into the same kind of nightmare that music is for anybody who wants to go into it. Unless you're really good at marketing/get really lucky, you're never going to make a living doing it because the market is insanely oversaturated and the gaming media focuses most of its attention on a handful of popular high budget games because that's what draws the traffic.
Another major problem is how long today's high budget games are. Not only the multiplayer "live service" casinos that are designed to addict their players and keep them playing in perpetuity but the modern single player open world RPGs that seemingly average around 100 hours of playtime. If somebody is playing 300 hours of that extremely bloated Assassin's Creed game about Vikings, they're not playing other games in that time and presumably have less interest in buying them. Likewise, stuff like GamePass and the new tiers of PS+ that offer access to an enormous number of games for a small subscription fee have to be cutting into game sales. And new games are also competing with 50 years worth of old games.
I wonder if many of the indie games, especially story driven games, might be better off as movies. Given how everybody carries a camera in their pocket these days, Hollywood movies are formulaic garbage and no actors are stars anymore, there's probably a market for innovative low budget movies shot in the woods on a single phone camera by a few friends and with little to no special effects. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than game development plus you'd get to be outside doing interesting things rather than just sitting at a computer for years working on a game that will most likely be played by a few dozen people.
I wonder if many of the low budget films, especially narrative focused films, might be better off as games. Given how everybody has a computer these days, AAA games are formulaic garbage and games aren't centered around a single developer any more, there's probably a market for innovative low budget games made in a basement on a single computer by a few friends and with little to no art assets. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than movie production, plus you'd get to spend time on the internet researching interesting technical problems rather than just sitting in a movie editor for years, working on a movie that will most likely be watched by a few dozen people.
tl;dr: I don't think a good movie is any easier to make than a good game.
Games market is rough but I'd take it any day of the week over the YouTube black hole.You're not finding your beloved indie film even if you type the name in verbatim.
Besides, even if you did make the next paranormal activity somehow and it got a billion views on YT, you're maybe seeing a few hundred thousand in revenue at most (I'm being very generous there). The way to make real money in movies is still controlled by getting a theater chain to give you the time of day.
You can only play so many small narrative focused games before you realize they're pretty boring. Especially if you're saying they have few art assets. People say these things are great, but part of that appreciation is for the novelty of a game being so stripped down and devoid of gameplay that it feels interesting.
> You can only play so many small narrative focused games before you realize they're pretty boring. [...] People say these things are great, but part of that appreciation is for the novelty of a game being so stripped down and devoid of gameplay that it feels interesting.
I honestly like this kind of games (and buy copies of them). But as far as I am aware (I read quite some articles about this topic) such games typically have a very small audience that is highly positive about such games. This means: such avant-garde games, if they are good, do have their niche of people who will buy and highly praise them, but outside of this group, which is quite separared from other types of gamers, hardly anybody is interested in such games. In other words: you will sell some copies and get great ratings if the game is good, but you won't sell very many copies.
I really like narrative games and don't think they're boring, but the ones I play have hundreds of thousands of words of dialogue paired with reasonable gameplay loops, e.g. Failbetter or Spiderweb Software rather than critically acclaimed walking sims.
those games are not small narrative games. they're fairly large. I've only played sunless sea, which, tbh, I thought was dreadfully boring. I would have liked just reading the narratives but the forced tedium of sailing combined with ease of death was awful
The issue is that filming in meatspace is still often less complicated than trying to make those graphics on a computer (assuming your low budget movie has little to no CG). And if you want voices, you still need labor.
If you want to make a game, it's never been easier! Download Unity, download a bunch of free sounds/textures/models/etc, and then write some simple code to your things around.
If you want to make a movie, it's never been easier! Grab your smartphone, write a script, grab some friends and have them read it, then post.
But from experience, actually making something passible (much less "good" or "great") takes years of dedicated practice, which is more accessible thanks to the above, but still doesn't really make the years any shorter.
It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.' And of course it did exceptionally well, because it's just a very good game.
In my opinion now is currently the absolute golden age for indie development of all sorts. But the catch is you actually need to make really good stuff. Just making a functioning game isn't really sufficient. There's even still a huge market for stuff that looks like it came from a 24 hour game-jam codeathon, but it needs to be fun. Check out Forager [3] for instance. As a warning, play that game for an hour - and you'll be playing it for 10 (or 100) because it's really just insanely fun.
And that's really all it is. The "problem" is that it's just become really (relatively) easy to make games. And so just making a functioning complete game is no longer any sort of real achievement. It needs to be fun. Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed.
> Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed
I.e. "make a fun game that has organic viral growth"
As if developers don't want to do that. You have not provided any information of value here.
Organic viral growth is extremely rare, and "fun" is a useless descriptor for someone trying to replicate "fun" in their own game. Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?
"build it and they will come" is almost always a lie, and the times it's not (I.e. organic viral growth) are not replicable.
If you're making something you have to solve for distribution. Just making the thing isn't enough for it to succeed.
> "Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?"
Cognitive dissonance and inertia, among other reasons. When asked if the game (which this topic is about) was fun, the author beat around the bush. Even the positive reviews on Steam make it clear people didn't often really want to play the game more than once. The top review on Steam [1] is some guy talking about, "Had a LONG night of playing this yesterday with my mates..." with less than 2 hours played, lifetime.
The developer clearly knew, deep down, that the game wasn't really fun, but he convinced himself it was. And that's reallyreally easy to do. This is one of the few things the mega-studios get right. They're more than happy to cancel big games they've already sunk millions into if they're just not working out right. As an indie developer you either have to have some crazy degree of introspection, or a few friends who understand that absolutely tearing down what you've spent thousands of hours on is the biggest favor they could ever do for you.
> Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?
Of course nobody wants to make a game that isn't fun. But I know just how easy it is to get caught up into the "hustle" mentality where all you're focused on is getting the features complete. Once you're in this mindset, it becomes very easy to realize that your own game isn't even fun to you. This simple reminder is huge, should be repeated often, and is great advice.
Make a game that you would enjoy playing for hours on end, and you'll likely gather an audience of people that also enjoy it. It really is amazing at how easy it is to forget this and end up building a game that even you, the creator, don't enjoy playing very much.
Likewise, it's very easy to focus on small slices of gameplay and ignore the cohesiveness of the entire game. If different mechanics are super fun, but aren't fun together, you will have created a game that isn't fun.
I've seen enough games I have enjoyed for hours that remain a small (talking triple digits, at best) undiscovered niche to know that this is simply no longer true. Maybe it was true in 2016 when this article is posted, but not anymore.
Many games aren't fun, but many games are fun enough or are marketed well enough. You won't stand a chance without going above and beyond in one of the two executions.
> Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?
I mean, why do people want to write buggy software? It's not on purpose, they're just not good enough to deliver quality in a timely fashion.
My experience with most indie games cannot deliver on a core gameplay loop that's satisfying, even when that loop is not the draw of the game in which case I'd expect them to ape something competent.
IMO an example of a studio that doesn't mess this up is Giant Games. I've liked some titles more or less but the core gameplay loop has always been competently designed.
Right, so what does saying "[the game] needs to be fun" achieve? Absolutely nothing, because people who get it translate that into something useful like "make a satisfying core gameplay loop" and people who don't get it are still wondering what the hell "fun" means.
I'm criticizing the shallowness and lack of information in the comment. Everyone knows games should be fun. Saying "[the game] needs to be fun" has literally 0 bits of information and is a lazy explanation for why games don't succeed.
Art is work, friend. I don't know if you've ever encountered an actual artist in your life, beyond someone making macaroni collages, but professionals in any craft can't afford to do what they do for love alone. Certainly not in game development, the most brutal, toxic and exploitative industry a creative can work in. Even Michaelangelo didn't paint the Sistene Chapel ceiling for free.
The big issue is that there is no consensus on "fun". You could make a "fun" platformer but you're not converting people who don't like paltformers (even if they make a few exceptions like Mario or Celeste. You're probably not making the next Mario, though). If the game is boring to that audience the solution shouldn't be to change genre. Not unless your goal is to attract a general audience.
So "the game isn't fun" needs a lot more context on who is saying it, and is useless otherwise. Do they like your genre? Are they miscommunicating what sounds like a game design issue when it could be an art/sound issue? Did they just grab your game in a bundle/gamepass and weren't really in the mood to play your game?
It's all speculation. And it's probably better to find better feedback than try to psycho-analyze every comment that way.
As someone who has been working as an indie game dev for the past 13 years, I think you’ve got a pretty unrealistic view of the situation.
You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales if released today.
Could you name a few? Not trying to challenge I’m actually really curious how the bar has shifted over time. (It also makes me curious if it means newbies have an increasingly high bar to clear and eventually pushes out young people?)
Among us and Fall Guys are the definition of games that just happened to be at the right place at the right (and completely unpredecent) time. Among us especially was one that was released for years before it became viral. Party games are a whole is a hard genre to crack (especially on console) but COVID had people stuck and seeking such content
For a AAA example, Lawbreakers is probably one of the more recent stories. It was a game made by a director behind the acclaimed Gears of War (Epic's biggest series until Fortnite) thst was like Overwatch, but released a year after. Of course the game wasn't made in a year. But had it released 2 years earlier it might have been able to reach a bigger crowd rather than slowly fade into a niche cult following.
Anecdotal, but Lawbreakers wasn't nearly as good of a game in any respect. Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition. Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.
> Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition.
It wouldn't have zero competition in 2015, and I'm not talking about it coming out a decade prior, before Team Fortress 2. two years isn't even half a generation (or a quarter, in gen 8's eyes). I think your metaphor is a bit slanted here.
Also, I'm not saying Overwatch wouldn't have overtaken it anyway; But a year of being around would be enough to establish an audience and keep the game around. For a live service game this is key.
-----
>Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.
Sure, and pong was successful because it came before brickbreaker. Well, brick breaker is Lawbreakers in this case, the difference between cultural phenomenon and "but you HAVE heard of me" (which is an increasingly harder bar to clear).
And as a tangent, this is also why I'm never a fan of naming games in conversations. I don't think Overwatch is nearly as good a game as people think, it just got all that viral fan art and (previous) goodwill from a company gamers (previously) trusted. But there's some just world fallacy going on mentally in that I am inherently "wrong" when bashing a successful game and also inherently "wrong" when I praise a non-successful game. Because surely if a game fails it must have been bad right?
our perceptions are influence not just by quality, but by the zeitgeist around the games. Especially when we can't truly define why those games are "fun" to begin with.
It probably is, but because games are such a new medium, the rate it’s advancing (not just in terms of tech, but also in design and audience expectations) is quite rapid. It means if you work on a single game for a few years, by the time you release it the demands of the market may have changed dramatically.
But do they really? It's not the '80s/'90s, genres are somewhat fossilized by now. Some things do change, but they tend to be refinements of well-established concepts.
In fact, I'd argue that, having managed to kill the assumption that "newer game == more lifelike graphics" (possibly still valid for AAA, but only there), has dramatically lowered audience expectations in recent years.
Tech is only a small part of what I’m talking about. I mean more that the standards have risen significantly as far as the quality of art style and polish, and the sophistication of gameplay and metagame depth.
You're describing survivorship bias. It's impossible for you to know about the great games that you haven't heard about. I'd suggest listening to the devs on this one. I can attest that 'the cream rises to the top' isn't remotely true in areas I know more about - short stories, movies, music. There is indeed lots of cream (in addition to lots more crap with money behind it) at the top. there's also lots of cream, vast gallons to stretch the metaphor, sinking always. Especially now perhaps, in our era of vastly greater content production and a well established arms race of advertising and marketing.
Which great games are pulling less than 1k steam sales? Or have just a handful of reviews? I've found some games I like with very low review count, but they're all clunky and whimsical, or extremely short, or can't be played without pestering the people you live with, or shoot themselves in the foot in other ways.
At some point the needle to hay ratio becomes untenable and searching the whole haystack is no longer possible for a single person. You can still randomly sample the stack, though, and rely on the opinions of others to find what you personally missed, and good games with mass appeal do tend to rise a little bit from random players stumbling across them; maybe not to blockbuster status or even profitability, but enough that a game with a marketing budget should get more than 21 Steam reviews if it's genuinely appealing. There's really not a lot of cream at the very bottom.
Why are 'you' (in the general sense, you're far from the only one doing this) implying this is an incomplete information game? Steam has absolutely excellent tools for content discovery, and the vast majority of people use them actively. And due to the effectively perpetual nature not only of Steam, but also even of console stores now a days - there really is no 'survivorship.' There are games released [literally] 30 years ago now being discovered by new users, and making new sales.
And that isn't just some sort of academic point I'm making. Seemingly the overwhelming majority of indie success stories are achieving long-tail success now a days. Increasing numbers of indie games released like a decade ago are having better play figures today than they did at launch. This includes both the extremely well known titles like Terraria [1], as well as those that are still relatively unknown like Kenshi [2].
Of course there are some successful indie games! But the only relevant thing is the probability that any one game will be successful. That chance is very small.
I don't see what the average would matter, because not all games are created equal. It's kind of like the Steven King / Richard Bachman experiment [1]. The question he was answering was not how likely a random author was to succeed, but how likely a good author was to succeed. So it seems that the important question is what are the odds of a genuinely good game going unrecognized, flopping completely? What are the odds of a Valheim failing? And I think that percent is extremely near zero.
I think the probability is quite high that even fairly good games will flop, because there are so many indie developers, and because the tools are so advanced. So only the best of the best will succeed, or those which satisfy some unique niche, or which somehow already have an established brand.
If you're correct, then this would mean there are countless genuinely great games on e.g. Steam going completely untouched that would otherwise be megahits if people simply knew about them. This sets up countless amazing commercial opportunities if you are correct, that are seemingly just going completely untapped. But for the more simplistic purposes of our discussion, can you think of any particularly compelling examples?
Basically I'm arguing that there is no black swan. It's not really hard to refute it, if I'm wrong, because all you need to do is point to one. I suppose the inevitable outcome might be we then hem and haw back and forth about whether something is "good", but well - at least it's a reasonable evidence based starting point, yeah?
Among Us was released in November 2018, saw regular and rapid gains in users for nearly every month that it was released, and then went to the moon (briefly) after it became a streaming fad. I just don't think this is even an appropriate example?
Keep in mind the way that word of mouth works, it's about the percentages - not the userbase size. Your active userbase growing 30% a month doesn't look impressive when that translates to 3 new people, but so long as that 30% is reflective of organic word of mouth spread, that's going from 10 users to 5500 in a couple of years. Their userbase had increased by orders of magnitude before streamers came, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't not have continued to grow rapidly.
And that's one of the great things about games. People love to talk about them, share what they're playing, and also of course seek out those hidden gems. Players do this for fun, others like publishers do it with a big profit motive. If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it.
If you look at the Twitch viewership on the chart you can see that it led player count significantly even before the massive blow up. There's a 26k viewer spike in 2019 then consistently 2k+ viewers in 2020 before it went vertical.
The whole article is a goldmine: “We stuck with Among Us a lot longer than we probably should have from a pure business standpoint,” said Willard. “We tried to quit and should have quit several times.”.
It's clear they got lucky here. This kind of organic growth doesn't happen often, even with very good games.
> If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it
The market being inefficient doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to exploit. A publisher is far better positioned than I am to "[make] a killing off of it".
I think you're taking about two different things: a game rising from a small number of players to a massive phenomenon, and a game getting that small number of players to begin with.
The HN analogy is a SaaS company struggling to become profitable vs struggling to find the first ten or hundred users. Profitability is very hard, finding a big enough niche is very hard, but...ten users?
Most indie devs would define "success" as "profitable". And those costs include personal labor. even if a single person made a fully open source video game, it's hard to ration that 10 people buying a $10 game made even over 6 months is "profitable". If only because Steam takes $100 to publish a game, and then 30% of revenue. You're down $30.
This is an overly literal exaggeration, but the example remains true even at a more realistic (and still pailtry) 100-200 sales. 1000 users is where it starts to maybe become a side hobby. Before then, You could be mowing lawns and make more revenue (without a 30% platform cut).
SteamCharts shows average online users playing a game, not sales. The multiplier to convert that to sales is going to vary [dramatically] by game, but it's going to be a very big number.
At 1000 users on SteamCharts you are making some very serious revenue, especially if you happen to be a solo dev.
I'd pick a different quote: "Each time an update landed, new players would try the game, and its overall player retention rate would tick ever upward. “That’s basically it,” said Willard. “We’re a slow-growing company. We snowball our way to the top instead of spike and tail like most Steam releases do."
I also think he may be being slightly coy there. Most games, especially indie, do spike and tail because they receive a bit of initial interest and new release type promotion, people try it, and move on. But what matters is not most games, but successful games. And there's an increasingly dramatic shift towards long-tail revenue. And there your games does spike, people try it, word of mouth happens, and then your real growth pattern starts. Reach a sufficient threshold and you get a big bump because you end up getting featured on Steam pages, and from there the sky's the limit.
If you pick the 10 largest apples out of 100 random apples, then those will, with high probability, be smaller than the 10 largest apples out of 1000 random apples. This should be dead obvious to anyone.
Valheim and such games are very much exceptions to this, for every successful indie game released, there is an ocean of unsuccessful games out there and that may be equally as good, or even better than Valheim.
Can you fuel your argument with some examples? I hear the argument in similar forms a lot, how a lot of good games failed because of bad marketing or just no luck. But I never see any examples. The response I get to my question is usually "I don't know of an example precisely because it never got popular", but I find it very fallacious - if there's thousands of good games out there, that failed to be popular, surely you would stumble into a few of them. A claim that a game either is popular and makes money, or is not popular and no one ever hears about it - is a false dichotomy.
Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, difficulty settings, runs like butter, and is all in all a super polished game. IMO this was GOTY shit and I don’t know why it didn’t take off.
I must admit it's a very good example, overwhelmingly positive on Steam with 1987 ratings, so it's hard to argue the game is bad.
If I compare Chicory, A Colorful Tale (A) to Stardew Valley B:
A: 97%/1987 B: 98%/483781 on Steam
A: 93.2%=2317 B: 97.33%=562`831 on Steam.db
I don't know where the disparity comes from, but those 4 % are significant. And here's something even more important:
A: 8 in game B: 36`293 in game
8/1987 = 0.4%, whereas 36`293/483781 = 7.5%! Stardew Valley, it seems, has 18.75× more replayability (which absolutely makes sense just based on genre).
Also price:
A: $14 to $20 B: $7.49 to $15
Shouldn't be surprising a game that is considerably cheaper, is more fun and provides that fun for an order of magnitude more time, sells better. It also was released earlier, so it got more sales from the "tail" sales, as well as it provided more value in the form of updates. In fact when I look now at the player count history, it's uneven, perhaps driven by updates, but the tendency is that it grows!
One more thought: maybe Stardew Valley makes for a better streaming content for some reason?
Perhaps Chicory deserves less sales than Stardew Valley, but still considerably more than it got? Maybe its good reviews come from the fact the game reaches the niche very well, it's clear what you do in the game (paint), but maybe this niche is just small?
I can admit I never heard about this game, despite its very high rating.
I wouldn’t compare Chicory with Stardew: for one, Stardew was genre-defining (as some people call things soulslikes, a whole heap of games are trying to capture Stardew). Replay ability of Stardew is part of its specific genre niche, where Chicory is again more like Zelda, in which replay ability isn’t a huge selling point to the game (although I find chicory just as fun as a Zelda to replay). Additionally stardew expanded multiple times throughout its development. I’m certain chicory’s devs would’ve done the same had it had it’s deserved attention at launch.
Now that I’m looking at my steam library I have some other games I think deserve more attention:
- Citizen Sleeper is not unlike Disco Elysium or a visual novel. But its mix of space opera and cyberpunk dystopia is extremely compelling. Excellent OST, and heartfelt characters. You get a real sense of the desperation and humanity of the impoverished, the undocumented, the refugee. The word building is deep and expansive (a sequel is coming, to not enough fanfare imo).
- Umarangi Generation is a photography game where you are playing as a propagandist during an ecologically-vibed apocalypse. You explore scenes of war, poverty, luxury, and terror, taking photographs all the while for the cause. The capacity to tell a deeply layered story with multiple political factions and economic groups merely through environment is stunning. The expansion is absolutely seething with anger.
Yes. As you probably also know, "Harvest Moon" the name is no longer "Harvest Moon" th inspiration behind Stardew and many other crafting games. The actual devs behind it lost the rights to the name while "Harvest Moon" the IP devolved into generic crafting game #1243. The devs continued on under the new name (in the West) of "Story of Seasons"
That branding cost a lot of noteriety in the West.
I have no hidden agenda here, so I compared, I admit, peaches to oranges, Chicory to Stardew, just because Stardew was the first popular indie game I found to compare with. Feel free to choose a successful indie game within the same genre as the Chicory, and then we can try to analyze the differences again.
> Stardew was genre-defining
What is the argument here, that it was very good? That's exactly my point, it was very successful because of how good it was (rather than lucky).
My point is merely to counterpoint the claim that no one can cite specific good games that simply fall through the cracks of popularity even though on its merits they are quite excellent quality. Chicory is arguably in that category and then I followed up with a few more. If I wanted to lower my standards to stuff that I found charming but not deeply moving, I could name a few more after that.
Good indie games are ignored all the time. I tend to seek out indie games explicitly because I don’t have a huge attraction to most “triple a” style games (I dislike fps, sports, 4x, mmo, puzzle, and sex appeal. So I’m mostly limited to not-Witcher open word rpg. Platformers, roguelikes, metroidvanias, horror survival etc. tend to be indie.) So basically I’m usually stuck with “why doesn’t anyone scream about this game more”. Rain World was like that until Downpour came out, finally some fucking attention to it!
The sales:reviews ratio on Steam varies pretty hard, but tends to be around 60:1. That would leave Chicory selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies, and likely performing upwards of the 90th percentile. That's not especially neglected.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that we're all snowflakes to some degree. And so it can feel unfair when a game that really hits our preferences just doesn't receive as much attention as we think it deserves, but that may not necessarily be because people are unaware of the game, but simply because our preferences are not necessarily widely shared.
It's kind of like how in writing a Dan Brown is always going to be vastly more popular than an e.g. Dostoyevsky. It's simply that one author has much more mass appeal than the other. It can feel like a shame for fans of the latter, but it's the way society has always been and probably always will be.
I don’t know what CGA means in this case, but you don’t have to match colors if you’re concerned about colorblind ness. Distinct art styles are a standout in many extremely popular indie games (Cassette Beasts just came out with a ton of fanfare and distinct style, Cult of the Lamb is also a new indie game with distinct style, Cuphead if you want to go back a few years…)
It is objectively a good game yes, but you're glossing over how it also released with _extremely fortuitous_ timing for the type of game it is: a casual small-group-multiplayer survival exploration builder that leans more toward a lighthearted experience as opposed to the sweaty/hardcore experience which is/was the norm for these types of games.
Valheim dropped early 2021, just into the 2nd year of real COVID measures including lockdowns and an overall social atmosphere of "stay hunkered down at home and don't go anywhere". It was absolutely perfect timing, and I am 100% convinced it would not have done _nearly_ as well if it released 1 year earlier or 1 year later.
It's hard to make a shitty game successful without a AAA marketing budget sure, but it's also hard to make a good game successful without either a AAA marketing budget, or great luck/timing.
I think games like that, where it's a small team and they grow to great success from essentially just word of mouth, are very much lightning in a bottle. It's not just a case of good game design, it's the right kind of game for the time, and well as a fair amount of luck that the snowball starts rolling at the start. It is true that the conditions have more or less never been better for it to happen (arguably it was easier before the market was as saturated as it is now), it's just very rare for it to happen to any given game, even with good execution.
Rimworld (and I'm sure Stardew will also be mentioned) came out years ago though; sure, the indie market was hopping back then too, but it's gotten worse since then.
Valheim is not an indie game, it is published by coffee stain studios. Now it is a small dev team, and they defiantly take the slow burn approach to development. Both common traits to independent developers. And good for coffee stain publishing to let them develop this way. But... I don't think I am being too pedantic in saying indie means independently published, and if you have a company publishing your title... you are not indie.
I think there's a blurry line that separates indie games to non-indie games. Sure stardew valley is an indie game and God of War is not. But those are the extremes of the spectrum.
Is Hades an indie game? It is developed and published by Supergiant Games, but at this point is really well known and funded.
I think that definitely language has shifted a bit, and terminology that used to mean "artist that is unable or does not want to get a publishing contract" now means "small limited resource artist". I mean for gods sake there are "indie" publishing companies now. Which I regard as this amazing contradiction in terminology.
But yes, my pedantic side insists that if a large well funded game(or movie or song) uses the same legal entity to fund the game as was used to build it. They are independent and may fairly use the term "indie". Steam is a weird kink in the rules, because they are technically publishing all these games. But I hand wave that away by claiming that they are a market not a publisher(the difference being that a publisher takes on risk by paying you before the work is done).
Indie is about whether some other company is controlling what you make. This means you can make an indie game even if it is published by another studio (like with Valheim).
> There are about 30-35 quality titles being put out on steam alone, every day of the week, weekends included.
Absolutely not. The vast majority of games released on Steam are not good. You can verify this yourself by looking at new releases. Maybe one or two out the ones released the 19th of June are _potentially_ interesting.
Quality, defined as well-produced games in unsaturated niches, is really the only thing that matters, but marketing can be a multiplier of that quality. I've seen many games that blame marketing for their failure, and I have seen many games that fail despite their marketing. Usually those games are not compelling, and reviews will confirm this. It's rare to see games fail despite their high quality.
That doesn't mean this is a massive opportunity to sell.
I mean if a handful of quality games are buried within tons of shitty games, what do people do? They buy a few random cheap games at first, then realized most of these cheap games are shitty and end up not looking at non AAA games after a number of deceptions. Instead they wait for AAA games to go on sales.
That is what at least what I did, instead of finding a gem among indies, I just wait for well reviewed AAA ones to lower in prices because I have other things to do than reading hundreds of reviews to make up my mind and find the gem among a huge pile of poo.
Additionally there are so many games entering the market that all of them cannot be reviewed so there is little chance your very nice indie game will be reviewed.
The market is saturated with remakes and games with nothing to say. This is the exact problem Norbet Weiner described in the 1950's book Human Use of Human Beings. Computers are characterized as a Spiritual Filter in that book and the aim is to get a message through the filter.
These games aren't selling, cause everyone can tell they've got nothing to say. The know-how that goes into making them is very good, but the content itself is hollow.
Steam's most played is plastered with games from 2015-2019 because nothing has knocked them off the throne yet. We all should be wary of making "a game" or "an game" or "a remake" and only make a game when we have something worth saying in a game format. The premise is so underrated lately.
We know what happens when the games market is saturated with hollow, empty games. 1983 video game market crash.
This might be harsh, and may be a crash isn't needed, but clearly if there's oversaturation, it is just natural that making "indie" games shouldn't make money. It is depressing perhaps for people who want to make games which clearly is a lot of people, but you're just upset at the economics of reality.
Huah? I'm not upset about the economics though. I'm just describing what I see. What upsets me is the drop in meaningful/just games to play. I really like playing and making games, and seeing a valuable thing be created.... It's not happening often any more in the Steam games space. It genuinely hurts to go from GTA V, RimWorld, Stardew, CS and HL (ect) to empty, hollow games.
It's okay with me if it crashes. My core ethos is that cream rises to the top. It should be hypothetically possible to make a video game that sells in the great depression or whatever economic nightmare. I wouldn't try to do that, because it's basically insane to try... but if you're going to make a game, don't half-ass it. Have something to say!
It has to be worth playing and buying even in hard times.. Just making "AN game" isn't enough. The Hollywood screenwriters would beat a premise to death before green-lighting it. I only say that to point out that the phenomena exists in other industries too.
So much this. This same theme repeats itself all over the place. Humans have an amazing BS filter. We can detect ingenuity even when we don't understand it. That's why I'm not too worried about AI.
With almost every aspect in life--just focus on being a real, genuine person and the rest will work itself out.
> With almost every aspect in life--just focus on being a real, genuine person and the rest will work itself out.
It won't, at least not in terms of money. Most people's indiosyncracies aren't conducive to making enough money to sustain oneself - that's why we have the job market, where people sell their time, and spend it doing stuff that other people actually want to pay for.
>These games aren't selling, cause everyone can tell they've got nothing to say.
On the contrary they are selling more than ever. RE4 remake isn't too old yet and is smashing records set by what was an evergreen title 20 years ago. What major blockbuster remake bombed in the last few years?
>Steam's most played is plastered with games from 2015-2019 because nothing has knocked them off the throne yet.
The most played games are very specific, multiplayer genres, designed to be played for years on end. I see Counterstrike (Fps), DOTA (RTS), Rust (survival),TF2 (Fps), Call of Duty (FPS, and a Remake to boot), GTA V (the 2nd highest selling game of all time, from 2011), etc.
If you don't value those 3 genres or have already played 3000 hours of GTA V and are done, I don't see how this list is of value.
> the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games
The line between indie game and zero budget side project/potential small business often gets skewed in these sorts of discussions. Anyone in the startup scene eventually learns the distinction between a startup legitimately chasing high growth and a small business caught up in a trend.
Sometimes you should just be a small business, not simply because you as a person are not capable of making something high growth, but because your own circumstances, team, effort, and product simply aren't much beyond a niche play.
There's nothing wrong with running a small business, plenty of people live fulfilling lives fully supported by one, but if you really want to be something more (like topping console charts absent a lottery viral win) it's going going to take plenty of chutzpah and commitment. Otherwise as a business model it's way more profitable and time saving to be realistic.
Feels a lot like what happens with electronic music producers. There is a bunch of highly taltented sound designers out there, putting their hard work on BandCamp or whatever platform is friendly enough to make some bucks on. But almost nobody can make a living off selling releases. Almost everyone has to tour and play live gigs to make some money. And I guess the biggest reason why it is so hard to make money with releases is the same as with indie games, too many people trying to get a piece of the same cake... Paying fans are rare.
Making games break even always was 90% marketing though, maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own, but that definitely wasn't the case for "non-indie" games since at least the late 90's (the way how game marketing is done has changed dramatically though).
> maybe the current indie scene had it's own little "happy time" period where it was enough to create a high quality game and put it up on Steam to sell on its own
That was never the case.
Just that some indie that made "good enough" or "great" game got lucky that they got picked by "right" streamer or youtuber that liked it and it got virally popular off it.
Like I doubt Minecraft would explode as it did if Yogscast didn't pick it up and made a popular YT series about it, which also made modders jump on the then-barren game, making it even more interesting.
> Like I doubt Minecraft would explode as it did if Yogscast didn't pick it up and made a popular YT series about it
Pretty sure before Yogscast there was already the rollercoaster minecart video released and on Kotaku (and other sites) that made Notch a millionaire overnight.
Yogscast may have helped shoot it into the moon, but Notch had already joined the mile high club by then.
Who is convinced by such argumentation I wonder? If there's a hypothesis, and there's multiple examples disproving the hypothesis, and not even a single example proving the hypothesis is provided - how can you be a fan of the hypothesis?
It may be a matter of marketing and luck to make money on a "good" game, but a brilliant game is destined to spread like wildfire, because the gaming community is enthusiastic enough to look for such gems and announce the findings.
Or by Valve and Steam itself. They were essentially king makers when they really curated the content. Then came Greenlight and later just opened flood gates. Justly I think. The curation was not optimal model.
For me the main problem with indie games is the amount of value you get for your money.
Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game.
However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is expected to sell 5M copies is going to have a much larger budget than a game that is expected to sell 10k copies. Add to that the lower price of indie games and there is a huge budget difference.
The end result of this is that as a gamer I can choose between a €20 indie game representing maybe €500k of development effort, or an €80 AAA game that represents €200M of development effort. The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.
> The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.
So what non-multiplayer AAA game you played 400 times as long than an 10 hour indie experience ? Or did you had 400x the fun playing it?
That's very MBA way to look at it. Game's budget is only vaguely correlated with how good it is as a game. Sure prettier blah blah blah, but we had plenty of big games coming out mediocre and just being bought coz of market inertia of average non-internet-scouring user buying next AAA title from big publisher and not even looking at the smaller ones or indies.
Like, if I look at the top amount of spent time in game (the "value" per spend money) it's some small dev management games (Factorio, Banished, Rimworld, X4), the type of game that most AAA developers just refuse to make in the first place. Most of "singleplayer story driven ones" I've played also fall out of AAA space because while 20 years ago industry was busy making games like Baldur's gate or Fallout, now anything similar only happens in sub-AAA space.
> if I look at the top amount of spent time in game (the "value" per spend money) it's some small dev management games (Factorio, Banished, Rimworld, X4)
I don’t care for those kinds of games at all. That’s the problem with most indie games: they rely solely on gameplay. Me, personally, I’m more into story driven games, and that additional budget buys you better writers, actors, mo-cap, etc.
> the type of game that most AAA developers just refuse to make in the first place. Most of "singleplayer story driven ones" I've played also fall out of AAA space
I’m mainly a PlayStation gamer and they release a lot of story driven single-player games. It’s the may reason I stick to PS. God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, TLoU, etc. are all amazing games and impossible to make on a small budget.
> God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, TLoU, etc. are all amazing games and impossible to make on a small budget.
You only list successes, but it's exactly this type of story-driven block buster games that can sink a development studio if just one thing goes wrong (and it doesn't even have to be the fault of anybody involved with the game).
Enjoy this type of game while it lasts, because this era is coming to an end, it's just not sustainable. Eventually each studio will produce an expensive flop, and it's much harder to build an AAA development team then to destroy one.
I'm not really that pessimistic about the future of "story driven blockbusters". Especially when they are relying on existing IP's to drive them some 80% of the time. Uncharted was probably the last really successful original IP of that moniker and it came out 2007, at time where games wanted to showcase the advent of what we now know as modern 3d graphics.
> Enjoy this type of game while it lasts, because this era is coming to an end, it's just not sustainable.
Do you also think blockbuster movies are not sustainable? Because AAA games have a very similar business model. Actually in some ways games are more attractive due to the possibilities with DLC.
I have yet to see a story as good as the Blackwell series. Perhaps you have made up your mind that indie games do not have good story lines, so you are not looking for them. I don't know.
I had a quick look and it looks really low-budget.
The thing is, I have limited time to play games, so I can be very selective what I spend that time on. This means I can limit myself to games that do everything right, not just one thing. That means story, but also production value. Good acting, good mo-cap, good graphic, a good sound track, etc.
Why would I spend the limited time I have for gaming on games that don't check all the boxes ? There may not be a lot of games that do, but there are enough for me to only play those kinds of games.
This in effect is why you're indirectly picking games with massive advertising budgets - they're far more likely to reach you than the average lower budget indie game.
It's fine that you like games with high production values, but don't just cast the lower production ones into this 'low-value' bucket and never look at them. AAA games might be diamonds, but you might just find other types of rare stones in the other buckets.
Just for another perspective, there is a limited space of games story- and gameplaywise that can get major funding. If you want something outside this, you have to go indie. You can be also satisfied with the AAA games. Just as there are great independent films and Hollywood classics. They should be able to coexist in the market.
But honestly I don't play AAA titles because they are expensive (don't feel worth it for me, so similar argument as yours), and are designed for long immersive sessions and not 20 mins here and there. There are secondary factors like Linux compatibility and disliking the companies. For story and visuals I prefer films. Second hand I hear that mainstream titles are either designed stupid easy, or in a small niche with spiteful level of difficulty, but this is probably exaggerated sentiment.
I like films, but the problem with them is that they have to cram a story into 2 hours, maybe 3. With games being 20-40 hours, there is much more room for in-depth storytelling and world building. Also, being in control of the main character makes a story hit differently from passively experiencing it.
You are making quite a few generalizations that I don't think are necessarily accurate these days. Indie games don't always "rely solely on gameplay". That's just not true.
In fact, I would say one of (if not the) greatest narrative games I have ever played, Disco Elysium, would absolutely be considered "indie" by just about every metric.
Outright play time isn't the right way to measure the value of a game (or any other piece of art or entertainment) unless your sole purpose is to spend time. I value Half Life 2 hundreds of times higher than skribbl.io even though I probably have more hours in the latter.
I have a different experience. I can't play most of the AAA games as their gameplay seems quite simple in a lot of cases and they often follow common structures. Indie games are radically different in a lot of cases as they usually take more risks and just the personality of the creator(s) shines through.
My most favoure genre is roguelikes/roguelites which is just not present in AAA titles.
Have you played Scavenger SV4? Might not quite be the kind of thing you're into but it is definitely something the developer put a lot of time into making interesting.
However you can look at the same logic from a different perspective: If you're playing an AAA game, you're playing a game made for everyone - and therefore for no one. This is why some people (including me) aren't fans of AAA games.
Imagine the world (future) where material costs of most things are insignificant and majority of the cost of your food will be paying the designers of this food. Would you want to eat the same, bland (can't be too spicy, can't have particular ingredients-allergens, has to be safe for children…) stuff everyone else eats? Or would you develop a taste for something more niche?
Due to high budgets, the companies also don't want to take risks, that's why indie games are innovative (and that's why indie games fail more often?).
To be honest it depends on the person. If you don't make food a large part of your life you will stick with the "easy" food. Maybe every now and then you dabble in some Gordon Ramsey, but it's just there as a means.
That's how modern gaming is. There's a lot of "free" stuff out there, but outside of Hogwarts Academy those players aren't looking for niche premium games. So you're no longer catching thst general audience, rather those seeking that certain design of game.
This is assuming that the more money is spent in development the more value you get out of the game. That is a big assumption, maybe true for very established game genres.
> The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.
I... guess? If your only calculation of value is how much money was spent making the latest edition of a cookie cutter experience like 90% of AAA games are (because execs aren't willing to risk budget coloring outside the lines). And frankly I find that pretty sad, but looking at sales numbers I guess that's the majority of the gaming market.
Your logic is 100% correct until you realize the only conclusion it drives to is: there is no small teams that make software, TV shows, comic books, anime, movies, books, and video games that can survive.
The fact is game taste is quite subjective and different people value different things.
> When the movie "Indie games" came out, this was the prime time to get indie games out.
> It's a marketeting's game now. So you probably want a publisher to be in charge of that...
Fact: Jonathan Blow, one of the devs featured in the movie "Indie Games", signed a contract with Microsoft way before Braid (one of the games featured in the movie) came out.
You want a publisher, or just someone else, to be in charge of something, if you're not very good at or interested in something. Big news, I know.
I don't think that's true. Not because I think an indie game can succeed without marketing, but the opposite. I think most indie games would still fail even with incredible marketing. They'd just lose more money because they'd have an additional cost. You can't always advertise your way to success in a completely saturated (or over-saturated) market, especially if your competitors are trying to do the same thing. You can either get lucky or fail.
Non-indie games too; think Daikatana, Anthem, Babylon's Fall, Duke Nukem Forever, Shenmue, etc; all high budget, high marketing budget titles but ultimately flops.
To be fair, now that we got a chance to play a leaked (and reconstructed) version of the Unreal DNF build... If this game came out in 2001 it would absolutely be a top tier legendary title. It's tragic that they didn't finish it when they should have. It had nothing to do with marketing. Just plain old fucking up.
I disagree. There are still "true" indie games out there. Just the masses of games produced that call themselves "indie games" are not. Often it seems to be used as an excuse for an unpolished, boring and in the end shitty game.
You are right that it became a marketing game. It was a hype and everyone started to call its product an indie game. The solution however is not more marketing. It will automatically solve itself. Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits.
> Games made by passionate small dev teams that really love what they are doing will still produce indie success hits.
If there's 5 indie games that fit that description, people can easily enjoy, & more importantly, remember them.
What happens when 20, 30, 50 games fit that description? There's no way no good games fall through the cracks. The amount of games developed in a year increases while people's retention remains constant.
Of course there might always be exceptions but I doubt that games like Stardew Valley or Papers, Please! could fall through the cracks.. but who knows.
I think there is a general saturation problem. I won't have the time to play 20, 30 or even 50 games a year. I don't need more games but better ones (in general.. there are of course great games).
That's the neat part of it all. They fall through and you don't know unless you spend a good amount of time digging yourself. Or finding a similarly aligned curator who dig for you.
In other words, all games you liked were good. But you haven't played all good games.
Well I actually do quite some digging myself. I like certain niches that are not really mainstream (e.g. roguelikes). However I never found a game where I thought this should be a bestseller and it wasn't (compared to the audience).
Now I sure still might have missed some.. however I am convinced that games that are truly exceptional will be successful. Because they are (still) rare. Good is not good enough. I stand by the fact that this is not a marketing issue. Of course you need some exposure.. if you never release a gem and never show it to anyone of course it won't find an audience.
>I am convinced that games that are truly exceptional will be successful.
To be cynical, I think the last "truly exceptional" indie I played was Disco Elysium, and before that Terraria and Minecraft. If that's the bar than there is basically zero way any game can be successful. "truly exceptional" for me are once in a decade experiences that either flip the industry on its head or make me consider my own life perspectives. Not many games do that (nor do they need to, especially on a price point of $0-20).
Thankfully I'm wrong and there's plenty of "good games with good success". and even "mediocre (IMO) games that went viral). But I've also seen plenty of "good games go unnoticed". But if your POV is "good isn't good enough", then we may be talking past each other, or have different scale. I think 'good' should deserve a few thousand sales and a few mumbling on social media. Not exactly a high bar these days, but one so many indies still can miss.
6 months is a very short development cycle. It's also very hard to build an audience in such a short time frame. Obviously if you repeat this cycle you are going to get very frustrated.
"True" indie games are far from dead, there are just different degrees of quality and success. Yeah, there is a lot of shovelware, but there are also tons of amazing indie games coming out on a regular basis.
But at a certain point, thanks to the free availability of game engines and their overal quality, the market got flooded with developers living on 5c a week and eating noodles, working on serial games and releasing top quality indie games.
It became a game of marketing. And sadly that's where we failed.
Steam says that there is no better or worse day of the week or month to plan your release... That should be your first red flag. There are about 30-35 quality titles being put out on steam alone, every day of the week, weekends included. Other markets are a bit of a joke, they hardly fly on the revenues radar, unless you have a special deal with them for increased visibility.
You see the title you've worked on for the last 6 months solid just fly off the list quicker than you can say woof.
I know for a fact (we talk) that most indies don't make a 10th of their budget back. It's a marketeting's game now. So you probably want a publisher to be in charge of that... and we're back to the old days of non-indies, or essentially small studios.
"True" Indie games are dead, by the law of numbers and algorithms. Even people that saw success in the past are now having a hard time pushing signal through noise.