The Indie Dream is Dead

Here is another excellent article I read this afternoon.

The Indie Dream is Dead

Although I am glad to see other people finally writing articles saying the same things I was posting over a year ago I do wonder what took them so long to see it. lol

Anyway, this is great news that over this past year popular websites have finally started realizing the reality or at least finally started writing about it. As more and more people come to this realization it will be a fantastic thing.

Realizing they won't be making a living (and probably won't be making any worthwhile amount of money either) from game development their goals and general view of this will change. They will think of better ways to spend their time. Perhaps still making games but truly doing it only because of the personal satisfaction and not expecting to make any money. Or perhaps realizing if money is their true priority it makes much more sense to come up with services and products to sell to all of the Indie Game Dev Dreamers.

The odds are just so high against making a living as a full-time indie game developer or even making any worthwhile money period yet those same odds can be flipped around in your favor by no longer making games and instead making things that help to make games. Shovels. Boots. There is a hell of a huge market and as of right now at least it appears to be far more lucrative than actually making games.

Anyway, give it a read if you like and feel free to share your view on the article or blast me for my own opinions, etc.

 

So we can finally answer:
Question: Is Game Development Art?
Answer: Yes, it pays the same.

 

Reads like a complaint that a bunch of people producing marginal content got marginalized and will need to work 9 - 5.

Indies, and sensibly one should now say hobbyists or amateurs, are required to make content that isn't so derivative of what the turn-key people can now do with the free game engines and assets stores or they will need to be celebrities ala PewDiePie.

For me treating this as a hobby has been the key to enjoying it and being realistic about goals and lack of earnings and restraining overspending. Will I still have the façade of a business? Yes, but that's for tax and privacy reasons, and because creating that façade is cheap.

 

On second thoughts what about the coming VR/AR age, a whole new set of new platforms?

 

"The Indie dream is dead"
Translation: "The indie scene is changing and I am unable to keep up or just don't like the way it's changing."

 

I will try personally to adapt games that are better suited for that anyway but it's still a hobby. It that happens for me, it will be in the right place at the right time and not a case of advertising expenditure.

 

Hey, as long as the hobbyist scene is still a thing I'm cool. Although if we could keep the indie dream alive for a few years longer that would be cool too. I'm quite enjoying making YouTube videos. And demand will drop off once people realise there is no money in game dev.

No one actually needs to make money, I just need the dream to hang around.

 

In short we've gone full circle.. Back a couple of decades ago, there was no Steam or direct publishing outlets. Fronting cost's for mass CD media was silly and Indie's had little or no chance of getting their foot through the door anywhere.

So err yeah, same problem, different cause.... Back to work!.

 

1st indie game I played was a shareware I was given on floppy disk called Wolfenstein 3D. Unbeknownst to me they were in Mesquite too and in an brown brick office building near I635, awful location but expensive, so maybe that exceeds some folks definition of Indie. To think I was driving 60 miles one way to Ft Worth everyday and when there was a SW company locally, ugh! id paid nothing for distribution for most of the people that eventually played Wolfenstein 3D but that's a bit longer than 20 years.

 

Speaking purely of one man development teams, the article fits quiet well. The flooding of the market requires distinguishing oneself either with a novel idea, which may or may not work at the risk of wasting significant resources depending on the amount of work required to implement said idea. Or to produce works of higher quality which is oriented towards larger teams and is physically impossible for a single person.

Usually the solution to such problems is the formation of larger teams to improve the odds and the competitiveness, and perhaps this sort of professional matchmaking service is lacking. Using the word 'Professional' because grouping of random unknown entities through forums rarely works.

 

Could you call wolfenstien indie? From my memory it was the state of the art tech at the time. It was developed by ID and published by Apogee. While neither of them are around any more, I wouldn't have classed either as indie.

I may be wrong, I didn't actually pay that much attention to the business side of games back as a kid. I just wanted to play.

 

Well that's the size and type operation many are calling indie now. I'd even call them smaller then that in 1991 when I moved to Mesquite after graduating.

Apogee was shoestring then too, for a business at least. They really were people that took their prior experience and then expanded on what they knew in their spare time and used that to found a business:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software

Their business succeeded by virtue of their game not by virtue of access to advertising dollars or knowing Ivy League or Sanford business leaders. I can't remember one other time a computer game was offered to me for free unsolicited and told that it was fun to play. I was actually given the floppy disk waiting in line at the bank. Arcades and games from big businesses yes, but they came recommended at a cost of lots of money by the business.

 

You might be able to claim that Id Software was an indie developer. Their only product prior to Wolfenstein was the Commander Keen series. Apogee though had developed sixteen games and published ten prior to publishing Wolfenstein so they weren't really an indie at that point.

By the way I believe Id Software is still in business, they're just owned by Zenimax Media.

 

Articles like that really bother me when they are filled with comments passed off as hard facts, when in reality they are simply ONE person's opinions. It's especially troubling when they are generally negative (and bitter) in nature, because to me, it always feels like the person behind that article is just trying to bring people down with their pessimism and often inaccurate, "world-weary" ideas. There is enough stress and worry to trying to make a success of yourself without allowing these doomsday thoughts to further shake your confidence.

Is it wise to throw away your day job and just jump into being a full-time indie developer? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends entirely on where your game development business is RIGHT NOW. Are you making money? Enough to sustain yourself? Then sure, maybe you should take a gamble and try switching to full-time. Are you a new developer working on your first game? Then no - it's probably not wise to put all your eggs in that basket until you really know what you're doing. It's all just very simple common sense - there's no great science to it.

My advice: ignore these types of articles and any of this negative kind of S*** that people put out there. You know yourself what you're capable of, you see the evidence - or lack of evidence - in the reviews and comments of your players, and in your bank account, and you make your decisions for your future based on that evidence. Do what's right for you and what's working for you. If things aren't working, re-evaluate and evolve. But don't change because of one person's ramblings in some random article.

 

Anyone who has any hope of making it as an indie can also make it as a freelancer. I hate doing freelance work, so I'm content to be poor until the time comes that I really need to make money, then I take a job. Now that I finally have proper tools for modern game development, I'm hoping to have to take less jobs. If not, it's fine because I'll have the tools to get better jobs, and better prove my worth.

So anyone who has any business trying to make it as an indie will probably be fine. The shovelware developers, probably not so much. But once they are culled off, the rest of us can get back to work. I see no impending disaster from an ability to earn a living standpoint. Only conditions that must be adapted to.

 

I.D.E.A. Men

International Drug Enforcement Agencies

Now if only I can find someone to make it for me.

 

I definitely welcome that, if articles like that scare those people away, who are only in for the money and producing S*** games each and every month.

 

Yeah, but is there a Wedding Crashers quote to support your argument?

 

From what I've seen Indie is only getting better. I predominantly play indie games now, AAA titles just don't seem as worth it from a cost vs playtime perspective. Why pay $80+ (I'm Australian) for a AAA title that I'll play for 40 hours when I can spend $20 and get a great indie game I'll play for 60-100+ hours.

In terms of the market being flooded with a lot of low quality titles...sure that's happening but I'm having no issues finding the gems among it all. Pretty much guaranteed that any good quality indie game that is being developed/released that's in a genre I'm interested in will be seen by me.

So from my viewpoint indie isn't going anywhere, if anything it's only going to continue to grow because the AAA titles just don't seem as worth it anymore (mostly, still some stand outs there that I'll buy).

Edit: This is for PC gaming I DON'T play mobile games

 

I have read plenty of articles this year about how indie game development is doomed. Some people quote things like average income per developer. Others focus on specific examples where a game did not sell as well as the developer thought it should. There is certainly a surplus of games, and that surplus is likely to continue to grow since there are no barriers to entry.

But the sky is not falling. The game industry is bringing in more money than ever before. Developers are making a living from their efforts. If you create a cool, unique game right now, then you will probably make money with that game.

The negativity about the industry is coming from the fact that millions of developers are making nothing. This is because 99% of the games being made are not fantastic. Keep in mind, I am not saying they are all bad. I am saying there are so many games available to the consumer that the consumer can be very picky about which games to purchase. The few games that actually are fantastic end up soaking up all of the gamer time and therefore all of the game revenues, while the other 99% get nothing or next to nothing.

None of this should shock anybody. It has happened over and over again throughout the past decades in many industries. This happened in desktop publishing, website design, music, photography, and many other industries in addition to game development. New markets form as tools become readily available. A few big success stories grab everybody's attention. Soon everybody is using those tools to try to dig for their own little pile of gold. Some people end up with a mountain of the gold while everybody else starves. Usually the most talented people with the absolute best market timing get nearly all of the gold.

This will not lead to a game market crash. If anything, the game market will likely continue to grow in all sorts of new and exciting ways. Regardless of how much surplus supply exists, there will always be money available to those developers who bring something awesome to the market. Additionally, I don't think we will ever see all of the other developers quit. Even if some developers do quit, millions more would take there place since there are no barriers to entry at this point.

 

I believe in making a product that stands out above the rest. The article's suggestion to create tons of small games in a short period of time and not work on anything large is sort of contributing to the entire problem. I refuse to make anything on that level.

 

When my character becomes the next Mario I'm going to make it a point to come back to this forum to post "Ha!"

 

i think people should moderate their thoughts about gamedev, just IMO.
gamedev has become a major art and a major art industry, and like in every industry or art, only the best of it goes through the filter.
Million people that downloaded free releases of cryengine, unreal or unity doesn't mean good content is not made.
the problem may be in the visibility of those good games in the middle of all that noise. that's a matter of distribution, not production.
games are just like music, nowadays, anyone with a puter can produce musical stuff, but few last in the long term.... new times, new thinking.

 

What? Really? And this is a worthwhile article somehow?

 

Almost all game engines are free. Tools to make games free. Peoples are desperate more to make money and not make games. Spam x 100. And that's the result. "Game industry" have less and less in common with hobby, passion, is just an industry now.

 

Its harder at the moment, but i think its bullshit to some extend.

It has been difficult for a long time to be a full time indie developer working on your own games. Everyone who has worked a bit in the industry knows that. Its only a few who has been able to do so with success even in the "past golden days".

I work full time in game development with my buddy, we are our own small two man team. We spend 90% of our time at the moment developing for other game companies to pay rent and save up some money and 10% of our time on our own projects at the moment. We are a pretty new team and hopefully we can get to work 50/50 on our own games. But thats probably years away. This is what indie means for most of the companies around us that actual succeed over a longer period of time, has been so for the past years, and is still very viable.
At some point some of them get success and get the privilege to work on their own projects, but its normally taken a while.

 

If this "death" gets people who make endless flappy and 2048 clones to go do something else instead, it's a good thing.

The market is overwhelmingly clogged with crap, with much of it just an attempt to soak up some of the revenue without actually providing any fun (the actual product people are looking for).

I do agree with the article's takeaway line, "Make games because you want to make games, not because you want it to be your job."

 

Why? I make games because i want to make games, and that makes me want it to be my job.
If you can let go of the dream of making your dream project 100% of the time and want to spend enough years getting good at it then thats a very viable way to go.

Of cause if you got into game development at a late age where you already got a family, education and a job, then maybe it is a pipe dream switching to full time game development.

 

I once met a database developer from Opentext who's life's passion was to be a fighter pilot. He was in his forties and it had totally passed him by but that was all he could dwell on. For a nearly two year project... My takeaway was I'd rather do what I love for a living. Been inching closer ever since been a long time ;(

 

Nothing's dead, it's just that time in the cycle of game dev, for example:

"OH NO! I cannot get rich with my one month turdville simulator with horrid production values"

...would sum up the present.

 

That's perfectly fine. The problem is not to sell your game, but developing it exclusively with money in mind.

The indie dream is not dead. These are just turbulent times for the market, supply and demand merely oscillate and orbit each other trying to find a balance, and at this moment supply is spiking.

This only means more vaporware wont just make low/zero profit, but it also creates noise for slightly better games who compete for attention. This translates to a lot of frustration, and the resulting spiteful articles.

It's all g00d guyz, the market is not dead, back to work!

 

It wasen't the developer company that was Indy, it was the gaming industry at that time. Any one remember Raven Cast? ShadowCaster ? really epice game for that time.

 

I think they should retitle this: "The Indie Goldrush is Dead"...

The dream is alive and well.

 

Now I'm a bit curious how big Electronic Arts was in the early 90s. An initial search didn't find anything that old though.

 

Its important to note that its not simply a matter of not making money, it would probably be tolerable for some if the risk was limited to that. But In fact you are more likely to lose money as you will certainly need to purchase assets in addition to any custom artwork that one would need to contract (Custom code if you are an artist). This is not cheap if one wishes to reach the baseline level of quality.

I suppose when viewed from this perspective keeping the dream alive is in unity's interest as they make money regardless, its also in the interest of shovel sellers as they are to benefit as well.

 

Well they were founded in 1982 and had Steve Wozniak on the board of directors by '83 so I'm guessing pretty darn big.

 

In the early 90s EA was a totally different company that produced great games. I used to actually look for their logo as a stamp of quality. They released like the original Wasteland, Bards Tale. They acquired Origin, which was a company that produced some of the other best games like the Ultima series.

In the early 90s, that EA logo meant you were gonna play a great game.

 

Gota love game industry nostalgia Ultima Underworld 2 what a game that was

 

And man oh man how things have changed. EA going from a beacon of quality and innovation to like the money grubbing demon of dlc.

 

That describes the global software industry lol. Office 365 anybody? Maya? Creative Cloud. No season pass? No service!

 

just a wild thought about indie world.......
there are lots of talented people there...... i just imagine easily what all these fellows could achieve IF they decided to work together on a solid concept.....
the good question would be "how to tie all these folks together ?"

 

Even looking at the games on that poster... Archon, Mule, hell even pinball construction set. All really great games. I even loved Hard Hat Mack..

 

A project hosted by Unity themselves similar to how Epic Games has their Unreal Tournament.

 

i was more thinking about a collaborative Platform where guys that share the same interest could meet and even collaborate.
Cryengine forums have a great feature that is "Projects database" where all projects get listed on a specific page.
each project has a page where the team or the project leader can showcase it with artwork, concept art etc etc.
Unity forum misses that feature.

 

I dunno, there are plenty of solutions to the collaboration question, it's still tough finding people you can work with that have complementary skills. Maybe that's just me though

 

The 'Project database' idea could work depending on implementation, a sort of 'Facebook' for collaboration projects allowing interested individuals to add their verified real information (with privacy controls). the projects history would be tracked, who joined for how long and at what role and contributed what, as well as who left and so on...

The idea is to protect the interests of the collaborators by having a permanent recorded history by a trusted 3rd party (like Unity), this would help collaborators identify opportunists through their history (and deter opportunists by the mere existence of such history tracking) and allow 'trusted' individuals to collaborate.

 

It's an interesting thing. On one hand I can see where just throwing out as many games as quickly as possible is a big part of the problem. Some would say it is the problem. On the other hand I can see the logic in producing as cheaply and quickly as possible basically the "failing faster" ideology.

Production speed is important to me at least. I think the markets would be cleaner if people just didn't publish their first game or two they ever created. Exceptions are there of course. Sometimes people actually spend years on their first game. Others it just seems like they download Unity, create a game in a month and as soon as it is "finished" off it goes to the market.

Maybe that is what brings such gems as Shower With My Dad and other hits. I kind of relate to the translation made by @drewradley in a way more so for the gaming market itself. I don't understand (other than maybe some 12 year olds who may find it funny) who would like something Shower With My Dad. Makes me think I am definitely out of touch with the modern gaming generations.

Something like that makes it seem like gamers will buy anything. Maybe the key is to make something that young kids find funny and they tell their friends download in mass and sites notice it and start covering it. Or maybe it just goes back to PewDiePie or whoever it was covering it again. Which is also crazy if people are all being led around like they have no brain of their own.