Much of what Jeff has to say in this article is true. Especially the part about how the cold, hard-hearted hand of Adam Smith will ensure that when X dollars are divided among Y game developers and Y increases, that the developer income will decrease.
That is why the only real hope of the developers is to change X. And that is possible. There are hundreds of thousands of 12-year-olds who are obsessed with Minecraft. (Seriously: last week when my son visited a new school wearing a Minecraft shirt, something like 60% of the male middleschoolers go out of their way to say something about it to him, and several teachers mentioned how obsessed they were.) That market didn't exist before Minecraft.
In a similar vein, I spend a certain number of hours per week watching shows on Netflix, and I am certain that I could be persuaded to spend a big chunk of that time playing a game (for which I would gladly pay money). But it isn't one of my habits -- someone would need to find the sort of game I would enjoy and manage to let me know about it.
Here are some hints: since I am not your normal market I don't own the latest console nor do I own a fancy controller (but I CAN run Steam). I am not that excited about first-person-shoot-em-ups (if I were then I would already have gotten involved), but I might be interested in something more strategic. I am not willing to pay much up-front (since I don't know for sure if I'll really be into doing this) but I would be willing to spend money once I know that I like it, so long as I don't feel like I am being cheated (mandatory in-game payments or play-to-win often leaves me feeling that way). And most important of all, I do not read the indy gaming press or attend indy gaming conferences (since I am a NOT the existing demographic), so you need to reach me some other way -- probably through my friends, using some form of viral marketing.
The market for independent video games is small, but the market for entertainment is astonishingly large. (Plus, maybe your game can be something ELSE... educational perhaps?) The route to profit is to find a new (bigger) niche.
"The market for independent video games is small..."
Says who? You?
When I look at how many bands are out there slaving away to write new music, then touring, and/or making albums it doesn't seem nearly as out of proportion. How many bands with finished albums have you never heard of? Compare with how many finished, polished games you've never even seen on Steam.
There might be a lot of games on Steam now compared to historical norms, but it's a tiny fraction of what you'd see with new books, new albums, or even new independent films.
The market for game-type entertainment is huge, and if people have an astonishing level of choice when it comes to how to spend their time, so much the better. We don't need indie games to hit the $100MM mark to be considered successful. Many developers would be happy if their game pulled down $10K.
We're used to games where you'd have to invest $50 and want dozens of hours of gameplay for it to be worthwhile. Now things are to the point where a $1 game only has to amuse you for a few hours and it's paid for itself.
The biggest problem in the indie game space is not the number of developers, but discoverability. The structure of stores, the methods used to promote them, they're all relics of when there was a handful of games that would get released any given month. These need to change to support a broader, more rich environment where you might have hundreds of them.
I'm not sure why he's focused on indies. Budgets for AAA titles are growing to the point that they can't survive even on moderate successes (e.g. Irrational Studios and Bioshock Infinite). I expect between the deep discounts offered now on PC sales and the glut of games, consumers are going to push back more on price. The kind of deals that exist on pc via steam sales and the like don't exist in the console market. I'm not sure the AAA will be able to demand the same price.
There have been a number of indie titles that were released while still in development and use continuing sales to fund development (e.g. Minecraft.) But I think the force behind steams early access will shortly come to an end. A couple titles recently cancelled development and I think in coming months more will quit. Consumers will be turned off to early access when some of their titles go dark while still riddled with bugs and half developed.
My two cents for how to be successful, make something fun to watch. With the growth of twitch streaming, more then ever, games are being judged by watching someone play, rather then reviews or trailers.
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.
But the same issue happens everywhere, we have issues discovering non popular web pages because probably the authors don't spend a lot of time figuring out the right keywords, forums, etc to promote their work.
I think the main problem is that competition is more at the distribution level (marketing/sales) than at the product level.
Somehow I don't have problems finding good games through the word of a mouth or by looking at some crowdfunding campaigns. And one can have some expectations. For example I'm waiting for Wasteland 2, Torment Tides of Numenera, Divinity Original Sin, Armikrog and some others. Out of recent which just came out and which are good is for example Tex Murphy - Tesla Effect.
The solution is to lurk gaming communities. Find a HoMM community, check in on it once a week, and I'm sure you'll find tons of games that you missed out on over the years, and that you'll be one of the first to know about any new games that fit that mold, long before they're even released.
If, as your other comments in the thread suggest, that seems like too much effort to you, then I'm sorry to be blunt, but I guess you don't really care that much. There's nothing wrong with that; no one can devote 100% of their energy to all of their hobbies. It's just that you can't be passionate about something while also expecting everything to find its way to you. Either put the effort in, or just admit it's not that important to you.
> I would at any time want more turn based strategies in the triangle HoMM-Disciples-MoM, but it seems there aren't any?
You don't even have to go as far as indies to find them -- I can recommend Age of Wonders 3 which just came out. And there are many more good ones in the last few years if you are willing to look a little more indie!
If you only game on iOS... well I stopped gaming there years ago because wading through the free-to-play stuff was so horrible. It's not exactly the same genre but FTL, a game mentioned in that article, is truly great and worth checking out. It's pausible real time at least.
This seems like a good place to plug an ios game relased last week that I've been a long-time tester for, and which could do with some more word-of-mouth (or keyboard as it may be).
It would be even more appropriate if was actually a turn-based strategy game like HoMM, but it might scratch your needs anyway.
Dream Quest (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id870227884?mt=8) is a roguelike-dungeon crawler/deckbuilder. (Think of a cross between Dominion or Ascension and the dungeons in Shandalar, if you've ever played the old microprose game.) The game is really deep, very challenging, and produced by one guy working in his spare time. You have to be willing to accept the graphics as what they are, but the game can be addicting.
I 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.
I have been playing Jeff Vogel's games since Exile 1 in 1995, and I'm still playing them today with the Avadon series. He's a fantastic author and fantasy world architect, however I strongly disagree with his opinions on the game industry.
This is a guy who was selling a 20+ yearold game as a downloadable installer from his ancient website for $30 while new indie authors were pumping out new games on sale for $10, $5, or less. Who was making more sales, and ultimately more profit from this? Evidence it wasn't him: http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-hal...
I think Jeff is a dinosaur, stuck in the 90s shareware era, and bitter that people can make more money by selling games for $3 than he can by selling games for $30.
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.
Later, when he actually dropped the prices to something that average people might feel like actually paying for games built on such retro foundations, he sold 33,000 bundles in one week (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vo...)... while misunderstanding the effects of lower pricing on his target audience enough that he thought he'd sell "less than a third of that".
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.
But still there are more new indie games than AAA titles out there I care about, it's not a tragedy if there only 2 to 6 outstanding games per year that reach me through the noise, mostly by direct recommendation.
The best thing about Greenlight is that pre-2005 games get some new exposure and even patches, like in the case of Jets'n'Guns. So if you want to stretch the music industry analogy as others did, you currently not only competing with the ever increasing amount of new releases but also with back catalogs on the same platform.
Another problem with an awful lot of indie games (especially those 40% unplayed fillers games from bundles, which are not even always strictly speaking Indie) is that you can see that there was little to no user testing, so they are just not fun or even impossible to play on specific not too exotic configurations.
Just to name a few (each of these happened in at least two games):
- no way to remap keys
- no way to remap mouse buttons or game ignores windows swapped buttons
- fixed resolutions
- optimized for small resolution,
resulting in insane mouse travel on today's native screen resolutions
(just drop that retro stick if you just cant effort a proper artist please.)
- no way to run a game windowed
- touch optimized ports from Android don't even register windows touch events.
- Content is cropped off screen
with wider aspect radios with no way to change resolution.
All those quality issues are a big deal. Sadly, the industry (and customers) as a whole reject quality checks and validation.
Valve does less QA of steam releases than they used to (because this was a part of the reviled 'curation'), Microsoft and Sony have been forced to incrementally phase out certification checks (because developers complained constantly about the cost of those checks), etc.
The end result is utterly broken games go up on Steam and have to get pulled, and patches roll out on consoles that corrupt saves and do other nasty stuff like that. It's a mess.
On the bright side, this does increase access to storefronts, so the one or two marvelous games by people who can't afford cert or get the attention of Valve's curators are able to sell to their customers now. (Assuming they actually reach them, which hasn't actually gotten any better... that's gotten worse.)
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 pretty much exactly agree on this. I've been buying far more games (both quantity and $ spent) since I got into the indie-er crowd, and have been enjoying them more.
Also, I don't buy "X dollars / Y devs" and "X is fixed". If anything, the massive rise in casual (and mobile) gaming disproves it solidly. New markets exist, and you can eat from external markets too (I find more and more people watching (and wanting!) less TV - dropping cable gives you quite a large gaming budget).
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.
The indie bubble isn't popping. It's an amazing time to be an indie developer, with massive audiences sitting around just itching to create millionaires.
The developers who are suffering are the ones who can't figure out how to get on top of markets, and especially the ones armed with obsolete "strategies" like being the only new game on Steam this month.
It feels to me like the author is trying hard not to offend his community and ending up a ways off the point.
There can't be 'too many' games any more than there can be 'too many' websites or whatever else.
Too many is only relevant here because the indie segment has effectively been propped up on the good will of the community, not the quality of those games - with obvious exceptions.
This is a charity pie being sliced thin, not one made of value.
High-value products will always have a place in any market.
Second rate games have been skating by with issues or omissions that would see any major label release crucified simply because they were sporting the indie armband of immunity. Expecting to turn a profit, much less get rich with anything less than "an utterly flawless, ground-breaking title and utterly blow everyone’s minds." is the problem.
Forget the indie label and there's absolutely nothing new to see here.
First, you can have too many. It's just like going to the grocery store to get tooth paste: the frustration of trying to decide the right one with 5000 choices is real, and it increases the likelihood of buyers remorse. That reduces real dollars spent.
Second, indie developers have not been charity cases. Over the past 30 years, there have been a lot of amazing indie games. There have also been a lot of crap games. Good games have made money because they were discoverable.
It is likely that amazing games will continue to thrive. The ones that will face difficulties are the good-to-really-good games. Those won't have the inertia to break out above the fog of the developer masses.
In other words, indie games are going exactly the same place App Store games did.
Expecting to turn a profit, much less get rich with anyhting less than "an utterly flawless, ground-breaking title and utterly blow everyone’s minds." is the problem.
Wait, you don't think anything less than 'state of the art' deserves to make any money?
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.
tl;dr the indie space is more competitive than it was a few years ago and it's hard to get noticed
Well maybe that's not fair, but that's the impression I got from this.
That is very different from a "bubble" popping. The problem of discoverability will be solved by someone - there's just too much money on the table for that to not happen. Whether it's Valve or not no-one knows (obviously they're the front runners now), but someone will get it done.
Sure. It's probably a lot harder for the indie devs out there in a lot of ways (in terms of trying to stand out - or only getting a smaller and smaller slice of the market). On the other hand, there are tools like Kickstarter, Unity and now Unreal which make it much, much easier to make games - often for a wider array of platforms.
Harder to stand out, but lower barrier to entry - that makes sense and does not mean that any bubble is about to burst. In fact, it probably means that games will just continue to get better!
I'd like to agree with you that 'the problem of discoverability will be solved', but history doesn't bear that out. Discoverability has been utter horseshit for PC games, iOS games and Android games... forever. And it's not improved at all, and no new players are improving it, because Steam, the iOS App Store, and Play Store all have customers 99% locked in. You can't force those big players to innovate unless they find a good reason to do it, because there's no way you're ever going to steal those customers away from them just by offering a better search tool. They want the convenience and safety and integration they get from the big player's storefront app.
The low barrier to entry for game development is actually not a new thing. The barrier has been low since the introduction of XBox Live Indie Games, perhaps even a couple years before then - that was just the visible point where a bunch of new developers started building and shipping games on a small budget.
The huge glut of samey titles releasing and squeezing each other out of the market is a relatively new occurrence. The stats he provided for Steam releases are a very new trend and concerning to anyone who wants to find good games to play, or build good games to sell. I can say for a fact that the clickthrough rates and conversion rates for Steam front page placement are much worse than they have ever been, even for high-scoring, well-reviewed titles with PR buzz.
You know, what really got me into indie games was that most of them had something unique and interesting to offer. They weren't all auteur works (although a lot of them were), but they generally felt like they weren't just made "to make a game", they were made because they had a reason to exist. There were definitely a lot of rough edges, but they were interesting. There wasn't the hegemony you'd see in AAA titles.
But... you don't see that so much in the indie scene now. Many of those games feel like they just exist because someone thought "I should make a game". There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's somewhat counter to the spirit that made the scene interesting in the first place.
I feel like a lot of indie games now capture the form but not the function. They look indie, but they don't really feel indie. I don't think there's an indie "bubble", I feel like the scene that had those values has moved somewhere else. Or if it hasn't, it will. We've always had a glut of mediocre games that didn't really make anyone much money (see: flash games in the mid oughts.) Same thing, its just the platform has expanded and the branding has changed.
Yeah. And as a guy with tastes that run awry from the "mainstream FPS" genres, I've been getting a lot of my gaming enjoyment from indies over the past few years. And the games with sticking power have always been the ones that are pushing the boundaries or trying something different.
Braid: Platformer where you can (and must) rewind time.
FTL: A roguelike where you command a ship instead of an RPG hero.
Monaco: A heist movie, as a top-down game.
Fez: Side-scrolling 2d platformer... in 3D! (where perspective changes are actually part of the platforming)
On the other hand, the ones I've enjoyed the least have wound up being less innovation, and more derivation. At least, according to my Steam library.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
A quick browse through its catalog (http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames) will reveal the problem with this approach, namely that it quickly turns into a giant swamp of Minecraft ripoffs and other such disposable crap.
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] mcherm|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] graylights|11 years ago|reply
There have been a number of indie titles that were released while still in development and use continuing sales to fund development (e.g. Minecraft.) But I think the force behind steams early access will shortly come to an end. A couple titles recently cancelled development and I think in coming months more will quit. Consumers will be turned off to early access when some of their titles go dark while still riddled with bugs and half developed.
My two cents for how to be successful, make something fun to watch. With the growth of twitch streaming, more then ever, games are being judged by watching someone play, rather then reviews or trailers.
[+] [-] eks|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpeo|11 years ago|reply
Adam Smith was a lovely fellow and a gentleman, you must be thinking of Thomas Malthus.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wslh|11 years ago|reply
I think the main problem is that competition is more at the distribution level (marketing/sales) than at the product level.
[+] [-] shmerl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ANTSANTS|11 years ago|reply
If, as your other comments in the thread suggest, that seems like too much effort to you, then I'm sorry to be blunt, but I guess you don't really care that much. There's nothing wrong with that; no one can devote 100% of their energy to all of their hobbies. It's just that you can't be passionate about something while also expecting everything to find its way to you. Either put the effort in, or just admit it's not that important to you.
[+] [-] KVFinn|11 years ago|reply
You don't even have to go as far as indies to find them -- I can recommend Age of Wonders 3 which just came out. And there are many more good ones in the last few years if you are willing to look a little more indie!
If you only game on iOS... well I stopped gaming there years ago because wading through the free-to-play stuff was so horrible. It's not exactly the same genre but FTL, a game mentioned in that article, is truly great and worth checking out. It's pausible real time at least.
[+] [-] thesteamboat|11 years ago|reply
Dream Quest (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id870227884?mt=8) is a roguelike-dungeon crawler/deckbuilder. (Think of a cross between Dominion or Ascension and the dungeons in Shandalar, if you've ever played the old microprose game.) The game is really deep, very challenging, and produced by one guy working in his spare time. You have to be willing to accept the graphics as what they are, but the game can be addicting.
It's starting to get a little bit of notice (see http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=228935 or http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/actually-dream-qu...) but it's all without any marketing budget, let alone art budget.
[+] [-] drewcrawford|11 years ago|reply
There's a common talking point I've seen both in this comment thread and elsewhere that the number of entrants isn't the problem at all and the real problem is game developers aren't innovating, and if they just innovated more things would be fine.
Kevin Boudreau [1] is one of the earliest researches on this scene, who concludes that "incremental increases in the number of application producers in this context led to a decrease in innovation incentives, on average, as measured by the rate at which new versions of existing titles were generated" and further that "the strength of descriptive patterns alone suggests that marginal entrants curtailed overall innovation".
Kevin's research, while it has many limitations, suggests that innovation decline is actually a symptom of an overcrowded market, not an independent factor in its own right. If true, this could mean that the practical way to address an innovation crisis is to first solve the problem of the overcrowded market.
The idea that market crowding depresses the innovation of individual independent developers is sort of a surprising result, but once accepted there are many possible feedback mechanisms that may explain the effect. For example, market crowding may drive innovators to go innovate somewhere else. Crowding may also limit available funding which may be disproportionately required by innovative titles rather than non-innovative titles which can be more cheaply manufactured.
[1] preprint: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=%20182670...
jstor: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23252315?searchUri=%2F...
[+] [-] suprjami|11 years ago|reply
This is a guy who was selling a 20+ yearold game as a downloadable installer from his ancient website for $30 while new indie authors were pumping out new games on sale for $10, $5, or less. Who was making more sales, and ultimately more profit from this? Evidence it wasn't him: http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-hal...
I think Jeff is a dinosaur, stuck in the 90s shareware era, and bitter that people can make more money by selling games for $3 than he can by selling games for $30.
[+] [-] duskwuff|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zyxley|11 years ago|reply
This is a guy whose total sales of games were low enough under his original model that one of them sold about 4,000 copies total since its release (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...).
Later, when he actually dropped the prices to something that average people might feel like actually paying for games built on such retro foundations, he sold 33,000 bundles in one week (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vo...)... while misunderstanding the effects of lower pricing on his target audience enough that he thought he'd sell "less than a third of that".
[+] [-] archagon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mxfh|11 years ago|reply
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):
[+] [-] kevingadd|11 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] jjjeffrey|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Groxx|11 years ago|reply
Also, I don't buy "X dollars / Y devs" and "X is fixed". If anything, the massive rise in casual (and mobile) gaming disproves it solidly. New markets exist, and you can eat from external markets too (I find more and more people watching (and wanting!) less TV - dropping cable gives you quite a large gaming budget).
[+] [-] KVFinn|11 years ago|reply
-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.
[+] [-] benologist|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|11 years ago|reply
Wait, you don't think anything less than 'state of the art' deserves to make any money?
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dfan|11 years ago|reply
Knowing Jeff, it is hard for me to imagine that he is trying not to offend.
[+] [-] shmerl|11 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] pachydermic|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] KVFinn|11 years ago|reply
The race to the button pricing is a concern. I worry about the day where every title has to be free-to-play to get made... Ugh.
[+] [-] overgard|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoppreH|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smacktoward|11 years ago|reply
A quick browse through its catalog (http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames) will reveal the problem with this approach, namely that it quickly turns into a giant swamp of Minecraft ripoffs and other such disposable crap.
[+] [-] Taek|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] islon|11 years ago|reply